Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

WHY SOME PEOPLE HATE COPS (AN EX-CON EXPLAINS)

I doubt you will find a more illuminating, insightful talk anywhere on the subject of police conduct than this one by David Wood.   Wood grew up on the wrong side of the tracks with barely any family life, was convicted of various felonies, and several times wound up in prison.   His experience taught him that police and correction officers  fall into one of five categories.  The fifth category generates the hatred.  He knows it firsthand.   Some readers may recognize Wood as the man who roomed with  Nabeel Qureshi in college.  As a result of their dialogs, Qureshi wrote the book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus.    I urge you to take the time to listen.  It will be well worthwhile and you will discover that the minutes fly by!   (Wood's suggestions for needed reform begin at the 48:33 minute mark)

 

GREAT DAY! REP. STEVE SCALISE RETURNS TO CONGRESS!

The return of Rep. Steve Scalise to the U.S. Congress after being shot and hospitalized for 3 1/2 months makes for a fantastic "upper" for all Americans.  In his beautiful talk, Scalise expresses heartfelt thanks to many people and offers profound thanksgiving to God for answered prayer.  Watch and enjoy!

 

VIDEO: HILLSDALE COLLEGE SINGS AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

 

Ed Morrissey offers pertinent comments:

This particular verse seems relevant at the moment:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern impassion’d stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

Our body politic lacks plenty of self-control these days on all sides, but the last line is key. The only way to confirm liberty is to rely on the rule of law, not the rule of whim. When courts take it upon themselves to redefine the constitution based on the prevailing cultural whims rather than have legislatures address the law to conform to democratic self-government, we have begun marching down the latter road toward autocracy. When government officials levy ruinous fines over wedding cakes based on their own personal vindictiveness, we are walking back toward the “swarms of Officers [sent] to harass our people, and eat out their substance”noted in the Declaration of Independence. Our recourse is in the rule of law created by a self-governing free people, even though that does seem at times to be a nearly impossible goal.

That does not mean our best days are behind us. It just means that our hard work remains, as it always has, ahead of us. In the meantime, we’ll fly the banner of the free and remember why we sought independence from far-flung autocrats in the first place.

VIEWS OF AMERICA

From an e-mail.  Click here.   Sample:

THANKSGIVING

Thanksgiving Day!  What a wonderful day!  I hope you and yours can take time to contemplate all the blessings that are ours individually and collectively as a nation.   Of supreme value, we can thank God that He has made Himself known to the world in Christ, and that we can have Life in Him no matter what our current physical and material blessings (or challenges) may be.

My prayer is that God may bless all the readers of "Muddling Toward Maturity" with special joy and gratitude this day!

-- Norman Rockwell's famous painting:

Soldiers' thanksgiving (from Atlas Shrugs)

--  Rush Limbaugh tells the story of Thanksgiving, including"the rest of the story" usually omitted in school textbooks.

For Those Who Remember "Burma Shave" Highway Commercials . . .

and want a little stroll down memory lane, click here for a neat video.   - For a fascinating history of the Burma Shave company (complete with the cute rhymes), click here.

Happy Thanksgiving!- Mark Steyn Contrasts America with Europe

Steyn, as is his wont, has produced another unique article that probably no one else could write, at least certainly not so wittily and engagingly.  In the process he awakens readers to the exceptional nature of America in the course of world history.  Consider:

“The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

He goes on:

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west’”s nation states have been conspicuous failure at

Small Rural Churches are This Country's Backbone

Here's a column (by Nancy Williams) which you won't come across very often.  I found it exceptionally well-written. It offers a counter-focus to what usually occupies media attention.  Read it.  You'll enjoy it!

Youth Today: Nihilistic Universities vs. Purposeful, Dedicated Military

Hugh Hewitt and Victor Davis Hanson have a conversation.  It's literate.  It's insightful.  It's "right on".    The following segment deals with the military and the university.  It's VDH speaking:

. . . We have a crisis with our youth today, but they're not the youth in the military. They're the youth in the college campuses, and the professors that teach them, not the officers who teach our young enlisted men. If you go out on a carrier today, and I have, and you see 19 year olds, they eat together with all different races and religions, they're entrusted with $70 million dollar airplanes. You go to a college campus in the free speech area, you see segregation you haven't seen since the 1950's, and you see people who are listless, they don't know what they do, they absorb these rants and rages from the professor's class that is immune from scrutiny because of tenure in a way that officers are not. The problem we're having, really, is the university, and what emanates from it. But the military is one of the last bastions of Americanism that goes right to the founding fathers. It's the thing that keeps us going. It's the fountainhead for our values.

WAS THERE EVER A SIMPLER TIME? -- NO

In a wonderfully illuminating and down-to-earth public lecture given at Hillsdale College this past March, historian David McCullough talked about John Adams, second President of the United States, and his wife Abigail.    The lecture is available here.   I especially appreciated the following:

Something I always like to emphasize is that there never was a simpler past. We hear often, “Oh, that was a simpler time,” but it's always wrong. Imagine Abigail's life.   Up in the morning at about 5 to light the fireplace that served as the kitchen, call to the children to come down, cook the breakfast, tend the stock, try to keep the farm solvent during the whole war with her husband gone and with inflation and with shortages of everything. Schools were closed, so she had to educate the children at home.   Her day didn't end until 9 or 10 at night when the children would go upstairs to their bedrooms, where it could be so cold that the water in the bowls that they used to wash their faces was iced over.  And then she would sit down at the kitchen table with a single candle and write some of the greatest letters ever written by any American.

In one plaintive letter, she writes: “Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”  And we don't.  We don't know what they went through–epidemics of smallpox or dysentery, which could take the lives of hundreds of people just in the little town of Quincy, Massachusetts.  It was by no means a simpler time.  They had to worry about things that we don't even think about any more, and suffer discomforts and inconveniences of a kind that we never even imagine.  We have little idea of how tough they were.  Imagine John Adams setting off in the middle of winter to ride nearly 400 miles on horseback to get to Congress. T ry riding even 40 miles sometime. John and Abigail were separated, in all, more than ten years because of his service to the country.

PRESIDENT BUSH AMONG THE BRAVEST OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS? - SO SAYS MICHAEL NOVAK

Michael Novak has published the most stirling tribute to President  Bush I have read in recent days (or weeks and months).   He argues without equivocation that President Bush ranks among the bravest of American presidents.

What I do want to argue is that, after Washington and Lincoln, Bush is the bravest of our presidents.  He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years.  He has faced hostility over a longer time, in possibly the most dangerous period of international warfare in our national history.  He has remained constant, firm, decided, and generous (to a fault) with his opponents.

He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power.  Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.

On the number-one issue facing the nation—the war declared upon us by fascists who pretend to be religious—he has not wavered, he has not bent, he has stayed on course and true.

Novak goes on and on.  It is definitely worth a read.  You probably won't find any other article so contrary to the general run-of-the-mill critiques now current.  He concludes:

If you were in his shoes, would you not prefer the fame of 30 years from now to popularity in your own time?  Being popular is neither within one's own control nor, in the larger scheme, a goal worth pursuing.  Doing the right thing steadily, as best one can, is.

I like this guy. And I admire his guts, and his decency.

Bush has frustrated me of late.  Maybe I need to reconsider.   I respect Michael Novak hugely and so I take seriously this challenge to conventional thinking. 

AMERICA: THE LAST BEST HOPE - BILL BENNETT'S LATEST BOOK

Bill Bennett has a new book out today.  It is Vol. I of America:  The Last Best Hope.  From the Age of Discovery to a World at War.    From a Kathryn Jean Lopez interview:

Lopez: What was your approach to tackling a fairly vast body of American history?

William J. Bennett:  The first thing was to make it a ripping good story because this is the second greatest story and the best political story ever told.  American history is full of sound and color and character and blood and guts and gore and high principle.  And it’s all in here. . . .  I cut my teeth on the Greeks—Plato and Aristotle.  But I gotta tell you a few hundred square miles in rural Virginia produced philosophical, political, practical thought that rivals anything ever done in Athens.   As lawgivers, Solon, Pericles, Hammurabi stand behind Madison.

Bennett's enthusiasm about America is infectious.   It looks to be a timely and much needed book.

"GLADIATOR, AMERICAN STYLE" - GREAT VIDEO

For a powerful expression of what we owe our service men and women for "Operation Enduring Freedom" and "Operation Iraqi Freedom," see this remarkable short video:  "Gladiator, American Style."

DALAI LAMA OBSERVES AMERICAN ODDITIES

I have many theological disagreements with the Dalai Lama (to put it mildly), but he shows himself a shrewd observer of the West's ironies with the following comment.

It is fascinating.   In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families;  you have endless conveniences -- yet you never seem to have any time.  You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don't bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours," he said.

HT:  Drudge Report