The Thomas Chronicles

An acquaintance of mine asked me yesterday if there is any good news going on in the world. I rattled my brain for a bit to see if any good news dropped out, and strangely, I couldn’t think of any. Indeed, all forecasts on the immediate horizon seem to be either bad or worse.

The more optimistic predictions by people with, no doubt, more sunny dispositions that myself attempt to allay fears by pointing out that we haven’t yet seen a precipitous fall and that although our economy is slowing down, there are indications that we are seeing some leveling off.

That, however, isn’t optimistically suggesting that these fears are unfounded and are part of hysterical “fear-mongering”. They aren’t saying that we are hitting a dry patch and we’ll soon return to the sunny uplands, ascending to infinity and beyond. Even their optimism acknowledges the fact that we’re riding a downward incline.

So, why this bleak outlook of the world? We’re seeing a confluence of many different factors all happening at the same time, and the fear is that a synergy would occur between them and produce a catastrophe the likes of which we’ve never seen. The factors are to multitudinous to be enumerated here but they are there– all over, in fact– if you want to search them.

This brings me to the old question: Is the cup half full or half empty?

I think that to dodge the question and say that there’s a whole pitcher of lemonade somewhere on the kitchen counter would be to ignore the facts.

If one is to focus strictly on this proverbial cup, is it half empty or half full? Firstly, we have to acknowledge that a) there is a cup; it exists and b) that there is water in it. Secondly, one must acknowledge the fact that there is a finite supply of water.

The difference between a man seeing the cup as half full or half empty is the difference of whether or not he is grateful for what is, in fact, there. He cannot close his eyes and say that the cup is actually full when it is not; he cannot play make-believe since reality is incapable of playing along.

No, the key is gratitude; being thankful for what was given. Gratitude sees the cup as half full; ingratitude see the cup and say that what’s there is not nearly enough.

Well, I try to see things as half full and savor all the many blessings I’ve received. Being drenched in ill tidings around the world, to see things as half full is a contrary action for me and I’m sure it is true for most people as well. We cannot give in to despair nor give in to our fears. But we cannot shirk away from what we see transpiring either.

So, I have a question for people reading these words.

Have you encountered genuine pieces of good news out there for our future?

For myself, the best news I can think of is the certain and absolute knowledge that my Lord Jesus Christ will return, that despite how things appear now, I know we’re winning and I know we’ll win. More souls will be saved in this time than the rest of time combined.

Here’s what Peggy Noonan wrote today in the Wall Street Journal in an Op-ed piece, Brave New World?:

But 2008 will also prove in part to be a decisive political contest between the Old America and the New America. Between the thing we were, and the thing we have been becoming for 40 years or so. (I’m not referring here to age. Some young Americans have Old America heads and souls; some old people are all for the New.)

Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New.

* * *

Roughly, broadly:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It’s one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn’t decide, it decided. Now it’s all on you. Old America, when life didn’t work out: “Luck of the draw!” New America when life doesn’t work: “I made bad choices!” Old America: “I had faith, and trust.” New America: “You had limited autonomy!”

Old America: “We’ve been here three generations.” New America: “You’re still here?”

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.

The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. The New: I’ll sue.

While I think her description is accurate to some degree of the Old and the New America, I think she’s presented an inaccurate dichotomy. Indeed, we are looking down at a fork in the road, but it is not simply a matter of change in modalities.

You don’t simply change from the Old America to the New America. You have to actively reject the Old America, send it crashing down for the New America to exist. Perhaps “crashing down” is too dramatic a phrase. Gradual legislation and young indoctrination is more accurate. And it’s been a progressive slide for more than 40 years.

I am an immigrant to America, and I most definitely fall on the side of the “Old America”.

“Old America.”

The term suggests that the ideals that created and molded America are somehow antiquated in a modern technological environment. These ideals, however, DO NOT CHANGE in the so-called “New America” she present here. The “New America” exists, such as it were, only as an anti-”Old America”. That is, the “New America’s” beliefs and values are adversarial to the values of the “Old America”.

Should they succeed in toppling the America that created all the wealth and freedom and prosperity of this entire country, the “New America” will not be America at all; certainly not the one I fell in love with. Instead, it will be a sub-sovereign entity, answerable to the world at large, perhaps the U.N. or Europe, and not to its own people.

She wrote that the “New America” prizes “sacrifice”? What she described is not sacrifice; it is cold, calculated ambition and greed, for you can’t manipulate events for your own personal gain and aspiration and call it “sacrifice”. I think it is an accurate description of the “New America” values, and it’s even accurate that they would even call naked greed personal sacrifice.

Such is the effrontery of this brave new world that they would call grasping after power noble.

I watched a piece of a documentary the other week and was flabbergasted to hear John Adams bemoan the same deficiency I’ve voiced on the state of our beloved country.

He asked, apparently desperate, where are all the great leaders? Where are those giants on the scene that could stand and rise to face the new crisis emerging from the world?

He feared that they were not up to the task of Independence. No colony in the annals of history have broken from their mother country to create a new nation. Those who’ve tried were hung on trees as rebels and traitors…

I think there are definite parallels between the time of John Adams and the Founding Fathers and the time we now inhabit.

One parallel a friend of mine pointed out by asking, What are blogs but partisan pamphlets? Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was written on one such pamphlet.

As to the parallel in danger and outrage we face, What are these Green Environmental legislations but the indirect taxations of the world upon America? (It seems that the most of the people who believe in the Green agenda are American Leftists. Barely anyone outside these borders believe. Does anyone sincerely believe that India and China will curb their CO2 emissions for the supposed betterment of the environment?)

Not content to indirectly tax America and discourage her industries as Britain once did, the United Nations is now proposing a direct tax. Read into that the divesting of American wealth.

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.’s “Millennium Project,” says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends.

This rings of the British taxes on the American colonies, doesn’t it?

In any case, the question remains. Is this generation of Americans up to the task of defending American liberty and freedom?

Patrick Henry puts it best and I say this to the pacifistic as well as to the conservative businessmen whose property owns them more than they own their property:

It is vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Part 1 of 2

There was a memorable scene in Dead Poet’s Society when Robin William’s character asked his impressionable young students to walk around an open cobblestone courtyard in whatever manner suited them. After one or two brief roundabouts, he exclaimed, “There it is!” Naturally, without thinking, a group of his students started walking together, and then almost immediately thereafter, they began taking steps in unison. Arms, legs and feet swung and thudded against the cobblestones in lock step.

What was Robin William’s character, Mr. Keating, point in this quirky exercise? Conformity. It’s an old, well-trodden topic, but it’s one not many people are talking about lately.

What sparked this topic was a conversation I had the other day. In that conversation, a friend of mine said that the reason for all the tantrums at and around us since the dawn of the millennium is for the simple reason that we don’t conform. We don’t fit into pre-defined categories and modes of behavior and beliefs that are acceptable to the “collective”.

In my social and work environment, there is a certain amount of pressure to move along with the flow. Go along to get along, as the saying goes. One can be different as long as that difference is only topical, only surface deep. You can be “different” with the application or insertion of adventurous piercings, tattoos and have metal stainless-steel spikes coming out of your earlobes. But believe the wrong thing, state the obvious, or refuse to engage in the belittling slam dance that passes for conversation nowadays and you can find yourself in a puddle of kim-chi.

If modern social interaction were as simple as identifying concrete “do’s” and “don’ts” in any given setting, much like what was once known as social etiquette, it would be a rather simple matter of memorizing these lists of rules and adjust yourself accordingly. Then contemporary social interplay would be cake, right?

… ah, no. Not cake. Unfortunately, it ain’t even frosting.

The dynamic of many groups– social, business or otherwise– is that it is a free-floating consensus. Not quite like a beehive mentality, but darn close. It’s kind of like having a schizophrenic parent with an imperial ego asking you to push peas around the living room with the tip of your nose. Not satisfied with that approach, the schizoid parent then asks you to push walnuts, and then maybe apricots, and then– wait a minute, why push things at all? Pulling a tether with the apricot attached at one end and you on the other and with a piece of thread between your clenched teeth is much more appealing… Anyway, you get the idea.

In all these machinations, the wit and wisdom of the group must never be questioned. Unfortunately for me and others of my ilk, I like to go left when others want to go right. Part of it, I suppose, is me being a contrarian (i.e. doing it out of sheer bloodymindedness), but the larger part of it, I think (and I hope), is that I couldn’t conform even if I wanted to. And when I was younger, boy howdy, did I want to. A natural born orange in a basket full of apples, you might say, is not very pleasant at times.

When people see that I, and others like myself, don’t conform and have no intention of conforming to the beliefs of the group, there are tantrums. I’ve had it happen on the whole Global Warming shtick. I’ve had it happen on my position favoring gay marriage and gay rights. These tantrums take on many forms, but one of the more frequent reactions I receive is where they would accuse me of being a) arrogant and unwilling to listen b) uncompassionate and c) plain stupid. All this tend to be delivered in acerbic sarcasm and mockery.

I am, of course, not suggesting that people huff and puff whenever they interact with me all the time. I’m simply illustrating a pattern of behavior toward those who do not conform to the shifting beliefs of the collective group. One can be a “Winner” one minute, and a “Loser” in the next. In favor one day, out of favor the next, and there is no seeming rhyme or reason for it. The group just somehow decides it will forevermore have tea rather than coffee in the morning, and all the lemmings run out to have an English Breakfast tea with a dash of honey.

For those still having coffee, well, they just can’t quite keep up, can they? Didn’t you know that today Oceania is the enemy?

Read further in Part II

see Part I

If being chastised for not slavishly follow one particular ideology isn’t enough– liberalism, conservativism, feminism, environmentalism, whatever-ism– you can also find yourself ostracized from the group collective. At work, sometimes when someone falls out of favor with the collective, suddenly they find themselves isolated. Co-workers suddenly don’t feel like socializing with you. Your job might even be in jeopardy.

I’ve observed this time and again. So, when I ran across this article on Foxnews yesterday, I could only nod my head.

These days everyone is so enthusiastic about the evolution of the Web, with its free content, interesting blogs, citizen journalism and the rest of it.

Not me. The big problem, as I see it, is the decline in general perspective, which is due to the decline in the popularity of newspapers and magazines.

By perspective, I mean generalized or common knowledge.

When you pick up The New York Times and look at the front page, you get a general perspective on world events. As you page through the newspaper, you see all sorts of interesting articles that you might not have read if you were merely surfing the Net for news.

Over time, this sort of happenstance approach to information gives a reader perspective on things. You have a sense as to what the economy is doing. You know if some international disaster has occurred. You are more tuned in.

This is going away.

…

… Kids under 21 don’t read newspapers. Many adults have stopped subscribing. The newspapers themselves are cheapening their product.

The New York Times recently laid off a bunch of reporters, who were replaced by bloggers and kids who just got out of journalism school. Probably all functionally good writers, they bring no life experience perspective to the table, and they probably lack world view perspective, too. And they are the ones doling out information to the masses.

…

Meanwhile, the public continues to read about what they already know. And they hang out only with like-minded people. There are huge cadres of people who are practically duplicates of each other. They all think alike, dress alike, and go to the same group-approved places.

With the slow death of newspapers, this beehive-like behavior is only going to get worse. And schools are not helping; they tend to have a political agenda and seem to limit, not enhance, world perspective. This is worsened by a de-emphasis on actual learning and an over-emphasis on personal self-esteem.

The self-esteem movement in education has fostered underachievers who are now out in the world of business, taking on jobs as clerks and cashiers. They can’t add. They can’t spell. They have no idea where Chicago is located on a map. They can’t read a map, in fact. They are seemingly stupid and mostly incompetent.

But hey, they think they are winners just because they’ve been told they are winners. It was drummed into them.

These people eat up information from the Internet and they believe everything they read. They pass along gossip as fact. They fall for every hoax under the sun (especially the very old ones).

[Emphasis is mine.]

There is a no more partisan place, no more contentious and ideologically polarizing place on planet earth than in cyberspace. Cloned ideas for like-minded people, who often congratulate each other for the rightness of their opinions.

If you’re looking for a place where there is a basic uniformity of opinion, various internet sites and pit stops inside the blogosphere should provide you with what you’re looking for. There are a very few notable exceptions, but in most blogs and other opinion sites, absolute conformity of ideas is darn near absolute. And should one stray from the particular ideology of the blog in the “Comments” sections, other commenters would be quick to berate, belittle and even curse the errant individual into either submission or silence.

On both the liberal and conservative end, there is this peculiar litany of characteristics and position, which, according to each respective political group, one must believe in order to be liberal or conservative. To be a “liberal”, you must believe in such and such, and to be a “conservative”, you must believe in this laundry list of convictions. If you’re a liberal, you have to hate Bush, believe in environmentalism, hate the war, and hand American foreign policy over to international organizations (i.e. lose our sovereignty). If you’re a conservative, you have to hate or agree to dispossess gays, support the war, and let market forces determine everything.

This, I believe, is childish; and what is more, this kind of thinking polarizes people and increases antagonism toward those with whom you would disagree. When both conservative and liberal blogs forcefully try to correct each other into the “pure” conservatism and “pure” liberalism, you end up with extremes. And just because lots of people force each other through the pressure of conformity to believe the same thing does not make it true.

An incredible instance of this is when the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006. Talkshow hosts and bloggers blamed it on the Republicans not being “true” enough to their “conservative values”.

This is an incredible assertion when the party of “competence” bungled Katrina; when they were caught in scandals on the Hill; when they’ve dismissed the American people’s worries over the border; when they’ve treated the American people as their servants rather than the other way around; and they’ve done all this while waving the flag in America’s face and chanting their bigotry that gays don’t have a right to exist. Purity of ideology, I’m afraid, had little to do with it.

This is antithetical to a position arrived at through objectively reasoning the facts.

Society, communities and people are not neat tidy things that could be solved with a few tossed off platitudes. People are often contradictory in their beliefs and behaviors. People can do amazingly virtuous deeds on the one hand, like face down lynch mobs and tend to the sick in cancer wards, and then they can come home and do despicable things on the other hand, like beat their children and run down their spouse through constantly undermining and belittling.

We humans are NOT neat and tidy things– that’s just reality– and I am very skeptical of cure-all solutions or some idea that if we all get together and believe the same thing we can somehow transcend the seeds of corruption that is in us all.

No. We can’t.

What we need are working solutions that look to this reality, not utopias.

I think the liberal attitude of “Do as I say, when and how I want it done, because I know best” and the conservative attitude of “Take care of it yourself because I don’t want to spend the time and money on you” would both be calamities if they each get their way.

I suspect the solution is somewhere in between, and I also suspect it would be found in the least likely of places.

Read from the beginning in Part I

* Bookworm wrote a long-ish post on a related topic.

*Neo-neocon on the related subject of uniformity in academia.

A great man and a great actor has past away today. Most people would remember Charlton Heston as the charismatic Judah Ben Hur in the epic Ben Hur. He was outspoken with in his advocacy of civil rights and marched alongside Blacks and other minorities. But the thing that most distinguishes him in my book is he’s so quintessentially American.

God bless his soul.

Here is a statement released by his family:

“To his loving friends, colleagues and fans, we appreciate your heartfelt prayers and support. Charlton Heston was seen by the world as larger than life. He was known for his chiseled jaw, broad shoulders and resonating voice, and, of course, for the roles he played. Indeed, he committed himself to every role with passion, and pursued every cause with unmatched enthusiasm and integrity.

We knew him as an adoring husband, a kind and devoted father, and a gentle grandfather, with an infectious sense of humor. He served these far greater roles with tremendous faith, courage and dignity. He loved deeply, and he was deeply loved.

No one could ask for a fuller life than his. No man could have given more to his family, to his profession, and to his country. In his own words, “I have lived such a wonderful life! I’ve lived enough for two people.”

Here’s the word of the day. A friend emailed me this definition today and I thought it would be useful, if not insightful, to see how prevalent you think this word is in our society.

Crimestop

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.

This definition is from George Orwell’s famous book 1984, which, by the way, isn’t taught in many Southern California schools anymore.

It’s kind of fitting, isn’t it?

For more definitions and information on the world of Orwell’s 1984, see The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.

Who’s Emmanuel Goldstein you ask? He’s actually a character in the novel.