DOWNSTATE

Tuesday morning and this Old Fella sits down to write a few lines…to reconnect with our site.
It is a commonplace that when one does not write…it becomes difficult to write.
It is true.
As the school teacher-turned-prostitute said to her less-than-successful client, “We will do it over and over ‘till we get it right.”

Sorry.

We are depressed at how little writing we have been doing.

As we used to tell our students, we have been suffering from literary constipation.

But the thoughts are still there….

And  liberating them is always so much easier when doing so has been a habit, not a rarity.

Our routine lately has been that of verbal rather than written communication.

At any rate, we are now back from our trip South and our most recent trip North…and the summer season, with whatever it holds, stretches before us.

We hope and pray that we will now be able and willing to put our words where our mouth is and share a thought or two or even more.

To paraphrase Dr. Samuel Johnson, “He who is tired of […family, community, national, and world affairs] is tired of life.”

We are not tired of life.

EXCITING TIMES...

Friday morning, early May…

We are back from Savannah, Georgia….

So many things to think and write about after this long interval of hereing and thereing (I know, not really words)….

We flew and drove and carriaged and walked and talked and dined and viewed and ooed and awed (again, not really words) and immersed ourselves in cities and lands 16 hours away by car….but just a short distance in time by air.

Dear Wife has wanted to take us to Savannah for years….
And now we are back with a host of new memories and experiences.

It is a truism that Life is what happens while we make our plans…

But we look forward to a busy summer anyway….
To paraphrase Willy Wonka (sp?)....So much to do, so little time.....especially with my efficiency rating.

For so many years I taught thousands of students about US History w/o ever having been to the South….
First-hand experience is soooooo important…….
We had been to the West and to the East....but never to the South....

Big mistake.

The fall elections are looming ever closer....and the political scene is so full of promise and worry.....

News junkies can gorge themselves at will ....  

And so  many family doings......

May the Good Lord give us strength and health to do as He would have us do....

We all and our nation are entering upon most exciting times.....

A VOTE FOR b.o.

A vote for b.o. in 2012 is a vote for massive subsidies for green power…ie., the Chevvy Volt; wind and solar; et alii., and a vote against the two black golds: OIL and COAL.


A vote for b.o. is a vote against the Canadian pipeline and greater exploration and drilling for oil and gas onshore and offshore.

A vote for b.o. is a vote therefore, w/o a doubt, for higher gas prices…indeed, for higher prices on anything that has anything to do with oil.

And that is a lot of things.
An vote for b.o. is not a vote for a cleaner environment.
Rather, it is a vote for shifting pollution and energy production to foreign regions which will be at least as dirty as any production anywhere near the US…and ultimately on a larger, dirtier scale.

One has to wonder if a quietly spoken agenda here by the b.o. admin is to increase the price of gas to prohibitive levels…thereby to guarantee the success of  green interests of the nation and world.
Not to mention the green base supporting b.o.

THINK ABOUT IT

Suppose for a moment or two that the government controlled the salaries and benefits of most of the employees in the country.

And then suppose that most of those employees became dissatisfied with their salaries and benefits and decided to strike.

Whom would they be striking against? Individual companies? The government?
Think about it.

When the government controls salaries and benefits of most workers, dissatisfied workers must deal with and perhaps strike not individual greedy capitalists, but rather all powerful, greedy government officials.

Which would you rather deal with?

And then think a bit about Greece and France and even Spain these days.
Think about rioting and national bailouts and national economic hardship and collapse.

Yeah, we really have it rough here where the government can order bailouts for companies it chooses, regardless of the collateral costs to greedy capitalists.

Students and employees in religious hospitals and universities, dissatisfied with the policies of their workplaces and study places, take their complaints to the national government, seeking government intervention on legalistic although questionable constitutional grounds.

More and more, the government of the US is seeking to morph previously worked-for self-improvements [bad phrasing] into some kinds of rights belonging to all citizens, even non-citizens, regardless of whether they earn them or not.

And the workers who usually have really earned those same enhancements, often at great sacrifice, get to pay for the freebies to the newbies.

I am beginning to fear that we are watching the [gasp] inevitable erosion of a fact of life, that lots of good things in life are not free; that when they become free they will cease to endure.

PERSISTENT, SUSTAINED, AND GROWING

There was an acronym I used in my teaching many years ago:

PERSIA.
The letters stood for political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and artistic realities of any society we were studying.
Each general area was further subdivided for purposes of study.

It was a helpful way to learn about how people were doing in whatever period we were studying.

This morning, after a few coffees and toast and fruit and the like, I started to apply this old template to what is apparent about the current realities of our nation and the world in this year of 2012.

Dear Wife is away on her annual trip to family in Florida.
The house was quiet and Sophie did not mind if I spent some extra time with the computer and the piles of books and papers.
When Herself’s away, the mice will play, as it were.

I listed and subdivided and ate lunch and brewed tea and consumed tobacco and wrote and thought and wrote some more….

And the result was a list of concerns which would challenge the optimism of a very optimistic old gentleman, let alone this author who is often less than optimistic.

The descriptive terms that come most to mind as I write this brief account are erosion; degradation; irrelevance; ignorance; and other such terms and phrases.

A balanced approach, of course, would require a consideration of compensating factors, hopes for revitalization and renewal and so on.

And they too exist.
But my goodness, the assaults on the persia categories are significant, sustained, and growing.

Would that the remedies were also significant, sustained, and growing.

REASON TO HOPE

Let’s see if we can put it coherently.


iran, the nuclear wannabe, has but one ally in the Middle East, syria.

US directed regime change in syria would weaken iran, thus strengthening an already significant US presence in the region.
russia and china oppose anything that will enhance the US position, hence their support for syria and iran.

Israel does not trust b.o. and has its own perspective on nuclear matters in iran.

iran has repeatedly called for the annihilation of Israel.

Israeli and US military cooperation is significant. Publicly and probably, the leaders of the two nations do not trust or like each other.
Israel cannot wait to degrade iranian nuclear abilities as long as b.o. thinks he can wait, the result of the differing force capabilities of Israel and the US.

Should Israel strike iran, the US will be under immense pressure to support the effort…pressure hard, even impossible, for even a b.o. to resist, for the military/diplomatic necessities of supporting Israel will trump even b.o.’s peculiar view of US interests.

b.o. has made it difficult to avoid such a scenario by his handling of the incursion into Libya. His soft power nonsense compromised by a bungling of hard power in Libya has guaranteed the uselessness of any subtlety in undermining the Syrian regime, making the necessity of a military strike against iran probably inevitable.

We have every reason to hope that it will be made clear to b.o. and his regime that domestic US politics and misguided understanding of the real world of international affairs must give way to rational, necessary actions to successfully deal with very real threats to the welfare of the United States.

JUST RIGHT

There is something very satisfying about this article.
It presses a lot of the right buttons.

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2012/01/23/st-james-the-smallest-parish-in-the-diocese-of-west-texas/