Get it right for the kids

I was driving along those country roads with my radio blasting when my least favorite commercial came on: Kars4Kids.  I dislike this commercial on two levels. First, it is such a catchy tune that it sticks in my brain for hours.  Of course that makes it a commercial success. The second reason I don’t like it stems from my years as an English teacher: it misspells car.

Hillary Clinton told us it takes a village to raise a kid, and I can remember those times I got home and somebody had already called my parents to report some misbehavior.  However, the village can also damage kids when it messes with the language.

Children come to school with a language structure already in place. They don’t come to school with a history or math structure in place. The English teacher works to correct and polish that language structure. When advertisers purposely misspell words as in kars for cars, kidz for kids, lite for light or nite for night, etc., because it is kind of cutesy, they are a part of the village that damages the kids.

Another way we mess up language for kids is to use it inaccurately.  My favorite example of this actually took place each year where I taught. The National Guard would print red ribbons every year as part of an anti-drug abuse campaign and distribute them to all school children throughout the state. Emblazoned on the ribbons was “I am drug free.” Students who were drug free were encouraged to proudly wear the ribbons during “Red Ribbon Week,” and 99 percent did.

Yet, one principle told me that at least 50 percent of the students in her school were on some kind of prescription drug, which was not unique to her school. Were they drug free? I pointed out this inaccuracy to the principal, who also happened to be a former English teacher, and she agreed, but unfortunately the ribbons were not printed by the school.

I know what the ribbon meant. It meant I am drug abuse free, but that is not what it said. To complicate this issue further, we continue culturally to use the term drug free and hold it up as a virtue.  Meanwhile, you cannot turn on the television without being assaulted by commercials promoting drugs, and it becomes obvious we are not drug free nor want to be, but we can be drug abuse free.

I remember reading a column several years ago where the writer suggested if we want to make headway in the war against drugs, we need to ban all drug related commercials as a starting point. That probably won’t happen, but we could at least be accurate in our use of language.  The village can help raise a kid, but it can also damage the same.

 

Don't believe in sasquatch?

Sasquatch and God

 

We were sitting around the campfire discussing sasquatch when one camper said emphatically, “I don’t believe in sasquatch.”  I’m sure he is just one of many who make that statement.

For centuries philosophers have tried to solve the problem of how we know what we think we know, with little progress, let alone solving how we know what we don’t know.

Assuming we feel comfortable moving on without solving the apparently unsolvable problem of how we know, how can you know something doesn’t exist? We know the world is a globe rather than a disk because we have physical evidence. We know dinosaurs once existed because we have physical evidence. We know hairy mammoths once roamed in the Arctic because we have the physical evidence.

Where is the physical evidence that sasquatch don’t exist? We can’t know they don’t exist. We can only know we don’t have evidence that they do exist, but someday we might. (I kind of hope they do exist, as I included a couple of stories about them in my collection of short stories “Dak and His Great Motorcycle Adventures,” available as an e-book on Amazon.com for 99 cents or individually on this blog for free.)

So I asked the camper how much of total knowledge he possessed.

He said he didn’t know, but for the sake of discussion, he would claim 1 per cent, though admitted that would be a bit egotistical.

“So, don’t you think in that 99 per cent of knowledge you don’t possess, sasquatch might exist?” I asked.

Yes, that set up is not original with me. I heard it on a tape years ago where the speaker was discussing the existence of God with an atheist, which is where I am going with this tale.

How is it we come to know the things we know? We have physical or experiential evidence, we get there through a process of reasoning, or we receive some kind of revelation, which is where many religious claims originate.

Since we have no physical evidence God exists, the first step in arriving at some understanding is probably some kind of reasoning.

There is nothing like doubt to lead a person to an understanding of truth, because honest doubters tend to search. It was at a time of doubt that I asked myself what I would need in a religion if I were to start one.

It seemed to me the first thing a religion would have to postulate is the existence of a God. Why? It seems to me there are only two ways all that we know and see could have gotten here: it could all have happened as a product of time and chance and an evolutionary process. The other way is that it happened as a creative act, which also could have involved a process of evolution, but with a design and a designer.

Which of these two stretches credulity the furthest? Put simply, it is easier for me to believe in a creative force than in time and chance (In fact. it is impossible for me to even begin to wrap my brain around time and chance as the explanation.). Also, if all is the result of design, there is a greater possibility that life has purpose, that I am a creature of destiny.

The second element a religion would have to have is recognition that human nature is in some way seriously flawed.  The several thousand years of written history and many more thousands of years of archeological history bear that out. The empirical evidence that something is wrong with human nature is overwhelming. We live in a world where children have to be taught to be moral. The natural thing is to lie, steal, cheat, covet, kill and maim.  Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, depicted a microcosm of our world at large. In its original publication, it carried the sub-title A World Without Adults.  It described a world without a superior intelligence.

Again, to argue against this idea, that is to say that man is innately good, is to stretch my credulity further than it can stretch in view of the evidenced.

Then, the third element a religion would have to have is some solution to the human condition.

The fourth element necessary would be that any solution would have to be based on grace, as personal experience tells me I lack the capacity to mend my personal flaws, try as I might. Just admitting to them is struggle enough.

Looking at these four elements, I realized I didn’t need to come up with a religion of my own. The one I grew up with, Christianity, makes allowance for these four things, though it needs to shed much of its baggage gathered over time. Maybe as one writer put it, Christianity hasn’t been tried and found wanting, it has just so seldom been tried.

Though I can reason my way to a belief in God, there is still the idea of revelation. Christianity sees God revealed in two ways, through His creation and through the Bible. Both can speak to us of His nature, His purposes and His expectations. Someday, we might also have physical proof.

 

 

 

 

let them marry

Gay marriage

 

With the Supreme Court taking on the issue of gay marriage, there has been much discussion about the issue in the media in recent months and there will be more, once the court issues its ruling. I have listened to the discussion with interest, but have yet to hear anyone raise what I consider to be the central question: what business does the government have being involved in marriage in the first place.

Marriage is a religious matter, and its parameters should be set by the various religious groups who want to practice it for their own members. When I was a Baptist pastor and also chairman of the Alaska Libertarian Party, I was asked at times if I would perform a ceremony for a couple that did not have a marriage license. Of course I would, as long as they understood I was performing a religious service and they were Christians. Otherwise, I was just acting as an agent of the state and they would need a license. As far as I am concerned, the wedding ceremony is a religious service in which the participants want to make a vow before God, with their friends as witnesses.

If they obtained a legal document from the government and wanted me to sign it for legal reasons, that was fine, but as far as I was concerned, it was a religious issue. I have been married to my wife for 50 years, not because of some legal action I took June 7, 1963, but because I made a promise to her, with God and many friends as witnesses, that I would stay with her through good times and bad, until death took one or the other of us.

So how did the government get involved in this issue?  I’m no historian, especially on the issue of marriage, but I will make some logical guesses. In Western cultures, it probably started when the church and the state were one and the same, as was the case in many of the European countries from which our dominate culture springs.   So we also codified it as we developed our own laws here, largely from our religious impulses and a perceived need to protect marriage as an institution.

Well-meaning politicians codified it further with laws relating to tax benefits and laws of inheritance. They granted favors on the basis of marriage, which only made those who didn’t qualify for them, want the same benefits. Getting the government involved in marriage through laws and favors hasn’t done much to preserve it, so we now have half of all marriages ending in divorce and people rightfully pushing for an expansion of the definition of marriage.

The government wrongly forced the Mormons to abandon their practice of polygamy, wrongly denies gays the right to marry, and wrongly codifies something that is primarily a religious concern. Whether homosexual, heterosexual, polygamous or monogamous, all the legal issues now protecting marriage can be dealt with contractually by those who want legal protection over one issue or another. As to any favors granted to the married by law, do away with them because they obviously have not done much to protect the institution anyway.

 

One life saved

 

I heard the President say recently, as he has at times in the past, “if it saves one life, it is worth it.” In this case, he was talking about some form of gun control.

I’m not going to join the argument about gun control at this point. It has been well argued in public discourse, and I have nothing to add that has not already been said many times.

I want to argue instead about the statement, if it saves one life, it is worth it. Aside from gun control, that statement gets made about things mandated for our safety in many areas: traffic, automobile construction, home construction, school construction, job safety, etc.

The statement sounds so compassionate and so logical.  How can anyone put a value on human life? What is a life worth? Of course, that would depend on whether we are talking about my life or yours, my money or yours.

To begin with, you don’t know whether your efforts have saved a life until you have saved one. All we can really know is how many lives were lost. We can’t really know whether our effort was what made a difference for those who did not die.

The real question is how much money should we spend on a bet that it will save a life? Obviously, we are willing to bet some. I wouldn’t buy a new car that didn’t have seatbelts and airbags. I will spend the money on the bet that I may need them and hence, they might just save my life. But how far will I go on the grounds that it just might save any life? There was a fellow I used to see driving around Anchorage who had welded an entire roll cage around the outside of his car. I won’t go that far.

You can spend too much money, and the government can spend too much, or mandate that you spend too much, on the basis that it might just save one life.

 

The second fallacy is that no matter what action you take, you will not save a life. No life is saved. Even those Jesus is reported to have raised people from the dead, are no longer with us. What you saved was a few days, weeks, months or years. Life is a terminal illness, not to be saved.

 

So the question is not what is a life worth, but what is it worth to save a few additional days, weeks, months or years? If it is your money, I guess the answer is it is your business. But when it is public money it becomes my business.

 

During the election, the Republicans were making a fuss over the fact that with government health care, there would be panels deciding whether grandpa (that would be me) would get a particular medical procedure or not. Since public money is being used, I would hope some responsible person was there to determine if the cost of the procedure was worth the days, weeks, months or years it would add to a life.

 

The bottom line is this, don’t give into a politician whose best argument is that “if it saves one life, it will have been worth it.” There is no limit to the number of ideas people can come up with when they get to spend other people’s money.

 

Fitting in

This editorial appeared in the Issaquah Press. The story about Nome was modified for a family paper in case you heard it another way.

 

Being new to the community, I wonder how to blend in and be thought an old timer or at least a regular. I have discovered that how one does this varies among geographic areas of the country.

In Alaska, you were either a chechako (newcomer)or a sourdough (old timer). How you made the transition depended on who you asked. Most of the explanations are rooted in old Alaska before the advent of modern roads and air travel. Some say you had to have missed the last boat out at least once, which meant you had been there through at least one winter. Others say you had to have relieved yourself in the Yukon River.

And then there was the fellow who walked into a bar in Nome, located in treeless, tundra and asked how to become a sourdough. He was told he had to drink a fifth of whisky, hug a tree and kill a polar bear.

He unwisely drank the fifth of whisky first and headed out the door. He stumbled back into the bar a couple of hours later all bloody and torn up and asked, “now where is that tree I’m supposed to shoot?”

I related this story to an old timer in Mt. View, Arkansas, which is so deep in the Ozarks they don’t get Grand Ole Opry until Wednesday night.  We were listening to mountain music in the courthouse square. Every evening, the hill folk come to town with their guitars, auto harps, bass fiddles, mandolins, or dulcimers, form little musical groups around the square and entertain the folks. I asked the old timer how I could become the Ozark equivalent of a sourdough.

“Well,” he drawled, “you could live here 80 years and you’d still be an outsider, though it might help a little if you were a 33^rd degree Mason.”

So, what does it take to become the Issaquah equivalent of a sourdough?

You might be an Issaquah old timer if you can order at Starbucks without the barista saying “what!”

You might be an Issaquah old timer if you have renewed your Costco card at least once.

You might be an Issaquah old timer if you no longer use an umbrella.

You might be an Issaquah old timer if you prefer roundabouts to four-way stops.

You might be an Issaquah old timer if you no longer stop before entering a roundabout.

You might be an Issaquah old timer if you leave your GPS at home.

You might be an Issaquah old timer if you go on more than six hikes a year.

You are an Issaquah old timer if you went to school with Rob Pickering.

Raod less travelled

This editorial was published in the Issaquah Press

 

 

I wonder where that road goes? With that question, I am off on another of Robert Frost’s roads less taken, as I explore Issaquah, my new home. With the scarcity of streets laid out in grids, discovery is the best way to learn my way around, especially being map challenged.

Sometimes, I leave the house on my motorcycle with my only intent being to take the next right turn or the next left turn.  The most amazing find on these serendipitous trips has been the frequency with which roads lead to a trailhead or series of trailheads.

Too many years too late, I realize I am in a hiker’s paradise.

Shall I park the bike and see where that trail goes? There is a pull to do it, but having had both legs run over by a car a few years back and an aging hip declaring it is time for a replacement, I turn the bike around and look for new roads to explore.

While I ride, I think. I see Issaquah as the antidote to a serious issue raised by the naturalist and author Richard Louv in his book “Last Child in the Woods.” Louv coins a phrase he calls “nature deficit disorder.”  He claims that in a high tech environment, kids need exposure to nature if they are going to develop normally.

When I think about this, I think about the many boyhood hours I whiled away playing in the woods of Roslyn.  Our house was on the edge of town, and it was out the back door, across and alley, and into the woods. It was my brothers’ and my unrestricted playground. I followed it with 30 years of Alaskan out-of-doors and 20 years of Arkansas, the self-proclaimed “natural state.”

At the age of 70, I still like to pitch a tent in the woods around Salmon La Sac, sit in a chair, watch the night sky chase the daylight away and marvel at the “starry, starry sky.” In early morning, I brew a cup of coffee, heat up a Cup-O-Noodles for breakfast and watch the daylight now dispatch the darkness. It is an experience every child should have occasionally, as it is a terrific balance to the touch screen existence they live.

You may not be able to take the kids on an overnighter, but many trails around Issaquah provide a great way to let the kids experience the work of a Creator rather than always the work of the creature. So, pack a lunch, load the kids in the car, find a trailhead, and don’t forget the Discover Pass, a real bargain at $30.

Go for the gun

 

     The policy of the National Rifle Association to oppose all gun legislation, even legislation that seems to just be common sense, such as a restriction on the number of bullets a clip can hold, baffles some people and makes the NRA appear unreasonably recalcitrant.

    I am not an NRA member or a big gun enthusiast, though I do own a single shot 20 gauge shot gun and an antique, pump action .22 rifle, neither of which I have shot in years.

I think the key to understanding the NRA’s policy is found in the ancient fable of the camel’s nose under the tent. Google it and you will find several versions of the story. It is one I often read to my son when he was a little boy.

    It seems Abdul was crossing the dessert, had pitched his tent and was settled in for the night, Abdul in his tent and the camel outside.

    Soon he heard the camel complain of the chilly night wind and ask if he couldn’t just stick his nose in the tent. Permission was granted, and soon the camel complained that the wind was blowing sand in his eyes and couldn’t he just stick his whole head in the tent.

    By the time the night had passed, the whole camel was in the tent and Abdul was outside shivering in the chilly wind.

    The NRA is afraid the antigun lobby has an agenda that will lead to outlawing private gun ownership, and the way they intend to get there is incrementally, one small piece of legislation at a time, just as the camel got into the tent.

    The truth of this was born out in a recent piece of antigun legislation introduce in the current session of the Washington State legislature. A part of the legislation would allow law enforcement officers to come into every house once a year without a warrant to ensure that all guns were properly secured.

    When this came to light, the three legislators who had introduced the bill claimed they had no idea that that element was there. It appears their claim was probably true. Apparently, many bills are written by lobbyists and think tanks and sent to legislators as boiler plate bills which they in turn submit because they favor the subject of the bill. That doesn’t mean they have read the details.

    This bill was written by an antigun lobby and they, like the camel, were asking for more than just putting a head into the tent. By including the part about law enforcement entering a private residence annually without a warrant, they revealed more of their ultimate intentions than they should have this early in the game. Since this is boilerplate material going to politicians across the nation, it could be coming to your state legislature too.

    The NRA is justified in their policy to oppose any gun legislation, especially since there is no evidence that any antigun legislation has ever had any real effect in reducing gun violence. Such legislation simply allows politicians to appear like they are doing something and makes some of their constituents feel good because “something” is being done. And it allows the antigun crowd to incrementally move toward their ultimate goal of outlawing private ownership of guns.