Category Archives: May You Live In Interesting Times

Alexei Navalny’s Death

The death was widely reported and commented on:

“Alexei Navalny, leader of Russia’s opposition, was killed in jail by the regime on February 16th, aged 47.” (“Obituary Alexei Navalny: Better Russia, where are you?” The Economist, February 14th 2024)

Russell Moore, “What a Murdered Russian Dissident Can Teach Us About Moral Courage,” Christianity Today, February 21, 2024.

Moore, in his column, tied Navalny’s death to the death of other Christian martyrs. “Before the world forgets the corpse of Alexei Navalny in the subzero environs of an Arctic penal colony, we ought to look at him—especially those of us who follow Jesus Christ—to see what moral courage actually is.”

Interesting that Navalny’s courage and comfort and purpose was increased by his Christian faith. Safe to say that many, perhaps most of the dissidents against Putin’s Russia, are not Christians.

Also, Putin and many of his supporters say they are Christians, too. Indeed, some of them oversee Christian churches.

One of the temptations we Christians experience is the temptation to betray our calling by the need to belong. Why do regimes like Putin’s put people in solitary places like Siberia? Often in solitary confinement?

Perhaps those who most suffer for Christ are those who suffer alone. Take a Christian away, not only from family but from Christian community, and they become increasingly vulnerable.

Yet the bedrock of Christian belief is based on Christ carrying out his marvelous work of suffering and redemption when alone—after the disciples had fled.

Christian community, from the beginning, has comforted and grown us in our Christian faith. It is a bedrock of Christian growth. Yet, ultimately, it isn’t the most important piece of our Christian faith. The most important is the indefinable friendship with Christ our brother.

Unity In a Divided Time

A long time ago my parents were suddenly awakened one Sunday morning by a neighbor’s phone call. “Turn on the radio,” the neighbor pled with my father, apparently herself awakened by bad news.

My parents did, of course, and learned of the attack on U.S. naval forces in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Though Europe had been at war since 1939, many Americans hoped to stay out of this latest European confrontation. Europeans had been fighting for centuries, many figured, and it needn’t concern us. Now it did. Americans are rightly skittish about committing their young men and women to battlefields, but not when their own country is bombed.

One of the few other times I remember such unity was after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Virginia. Another plane crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers fought a fourth group of hijackers. I watched the newscasts that day on a TV screen at a U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia, wondering how we would handle this awful challenge. Whether we correctly handled these attacks in the long run may be open to question, but for a long while, we were definitely united. Americans bought flags and gathered in patriotic groups and supported rescue groups and firefighters in New York City.

But how do we react to wrongs when they involve few of our own citizens, like the attacks in Israel and Gaza and Ukraine?

How do we remain united in working out these and other problems when we have such vastly different opinions about many issues, like abortion, aid for Israel, and immigrants?

Our country’s government is over 230 years old. We have almost foundered on different ideas, directions, and yes, sins, more than once, but we are still here. If we can learn one thing, it’s that we can continue only as we respect differences and continue to work together. We need each other, because none of us has all the answers.

Living By Ourselves

One of the greatest threats to our societies today is our growing lack of community.

The normal family for most of recorded history has seen family members either living with each other in a single household or close by. Whether living in the same house or merely a short walk away, however, children usually grew up knowing their grandparents and other kin.

Major changes began a century or two ago. Some of it happened to immigrants leaving native countries to settle in places with better opportunities, an understandable choice.

However, the coming of suburbs to developed countries led to a great sifting out. The more well-off parents and their children moved to newly built suburban houses while other family members stayed in the old neighborhood. As time passed, the suburbs increased and grew further from the city center. Fathers and then mothers spent more of their time commuting. More separation increased the distance between these families and those with less opportunities and talents.

In the past few decades, separation has increased due to many factors. More young adults went away to college or to distant jobs and stayed away. Most recently, the ability to work hundreds of miles from the big city where the jobs traditionally were located was increased by both computers and the Covid pandemic.

Alienation has increased and no doubt contributed to our epidemic of harmful drug use. Surely our decreasing human contact and caring have fed alienation and a feeling of purposelessness.

Lately, some worry about artificial intelligence leading to less and less need for human input.

Regardless, for the first time, a record number of people live alone. Any community must be sought out: Vocational? Political? Religious? Leisure?

The new arrangements often have nothing to do with families. Singles may marry or establish relationships, but they tend to produce fewer children, often none at all.

Interestingly, immigration, which is feared by many, has been a blessing to those societies who tend more and more to not reproduce themselves.

Has our striving for ultimate independence finally reached the breaking point? How do we come back together?

Rainy Day Soldier

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” (Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 1776)

Thomas Paine wrote these words in a pamphlet after the American army under George Washington had suffered serious defeats by the British at the beginning of the American war for independence. Though the war had barely begun and other hard times like Valley Forge lay ahead, Paine’s words may have made the difference between an early defeat of the colonists and eventual independence.

We can find parallels today in choosing to slog along and not give up. Ukraine’s war for independence from Russian leader Vladimir Putin is an example.

Other examples of holding on during a bleak time are less clear cut. For all of my life, the Middle East has experienced one crisis after another. Indeed, even long ago, soon after the time of Jesus’ life on earth, the Jewish people attempted to rebel against the Roman Empire and were completely defeated. Most have continued to live in other countries ever since, but a remnant has always sought to return. After the trauma of Hitler’s attempted murder of all Jews, the historic trickle of Jews returning to their ancient land became a flood.

Of course, other people live there, too, as indeed they always have. Today we are called to a harder but much more necessary task: to work for a just peace between all who call the Middle East their home.

Today’s rainy day soldier is not one who fights but one who is a peacemaker. The lines are not clear cut, as is usual in a physical war. Winning is not physical conquest but working so that every man, woman, and child in that historic place has a chance to peaceably make a life.

 

Exiting Gaza

“After decades of failed international engagement in Gaza, we owe it this time to the Palestinians, Israelis and Egyptians—and to ourselves—to get this right.” (Yair Lapid, speech to Israeli Knesset, October 16, 2023, as reported in “A Positive Exit Strategy From Gaza,” The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, by Robert Silverman, October 2023.)

In his speech, Mr. Lapid outlines steps for achieving a real victory. “The real victory comes not from defeating our enemy but from achieving a better place for Israel and our Palestinian neighbors.”

Further, “Instead of taking the easy way out of town by dumping Gaza on some set of beguiling expatriates, the multinational governance team should be prepared to work with the local Gazans to build governance capacity—over the course of years.”

Mr. Lapid calls for withdrawing the Israeli Defense Forces as soon as possible. They would be replaced by a multinational force “with two separate missions . . . under a single head.”

One mission would be a multinational force “to maintain order and begin training a new Gazan police force . . .”

The other mission would be “a multinational civilian governance to help the Gazans rebuild economically and begin the process of governing themselves politically.”

Israeli-Palestinian issues became a tangled web due to the interests of numerous groups, nations, and historic events over centuries.

Mr. Lapid’s suggestions would seem a fair start toward a practical solution.

Timeout

Israel/Palestine; Republicans/Democrats; labor/management; Russia/Ukraine—and so on.

Perhaps it’s time to sit back and breathe deeply. Time to stow the rhetoric. Time to watch an eclipse and marvel at our solar system and our universe. Time to take a walk with family/friends. Time to read a book for fun.

Obviously, solving problems requires engaging with them, but sometimes we become so involved that we think the universe can’t succeed without us.

Best to understand that we’re part of the process, not the whole answer. We have choices as to how we engage. Perhaps we can develop a bit of modesty—we’re all of value but none of us has a perfect solution.

Best to listen before we spout off. We might ask divine guidance once in a while, perhaps even for the gift of loving our enemies.

The Parenting Dilemma

A survey finds that the more formal education a mother has, the more likely she is to opt out of the work force, or to work part time. This finding seems intuitive. Women with more education are more likely to marry better educated men. Their husbands are likely to have higher salaries and can support wives who don’t wish, at least at certain times in their lives, to work in a full-time career, or perhaps some prefer non-salaried work for a charitable group.

These women, however, have a greater choice of careers, if they want one, and of better paying ones. Their salaries would more likely pay for top notch child care. Why do some of them opt out?

Would more mothers of small children prefer to spend increased time with them if they could afford to do so?

We fear a return to the days when women were relegated to suburbia and made to feel guilty if they wanted to follow careers. Yet, if a mother wants to spend time with a child in the child’s early years, isn’t this worthwhile work?

Studies have shown the value of mothering in early childhood. What policies, both corporate and government, might encourage this kind of work for any mother who desires it?

But even here we are missing the truer picture. What about fathers who want more time with their children? Maybe a lessening of career as end all and be all for them, too, would allow them more time to father.

Perhaps in our emphasis on mothering, we’re in danger of losing the bigger need for parenting. Judging by our lowering birthrates, we certainly appear in need of this essential skill.

Abolishing Retirement and Taking Sabbaticals

The average age of retirement from the work force in 1910 was seventy-four. Now it’s more likely to be around sixty-two, even though we live longer.

In generations past, the majority of Americans worked on farms or in small businesses for their entire lives. The farms and businesses tended to be run by families and passed down to the next generation. As work became less personalized and more repetitive for many, the idea of a rest in the last years of one’s life gained in popularity.

What if, instead, we required a slightly bigger chunk of current salary to fund a system available for us to draw on at different periods of our lives, not just a set amount at a set age? Some already accept less payment to retire at sixty-two. These early retirees sometimes reenter the labor force in new careers, perhaps with lower salary, but doing work they enjoy.

Obviously, payments at an earlier age for what could best be called a sabbatical would be much lower at forty-two than at sixty-two.

Perhaps we need a more flexible pension system that would operate more like annuities. What if we had the option of dropping out for a year or so during our early and middle years, using small “pension” payments based on what we had already paid into the system? Some professions already include a sabbatical within their careers.

Pension systems could be tweaked to allow one to drop out at, say, thirty to raise children. Or at forty to finish a college degree. Or at fifty to work on an invention or direct a non-profit.

One would take a much smaller pension, of course, at a younger age, to reflect the lesser amount put into the system. A younger person, however, could work at a part time job while drawing a small pension and taking college courses or writing a novel or raising children. Or just exploring and searching for a clearer purpose for one’s life.

Retirement would become a graduated process. Retirement would cease being “retirement” and become another opportunity for change.

Mistaking America for God

Jon Ward concludes his book Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation with a testimony of his own calling: “My faith has been sparked by seeing that the real Jesus beckons me to follow him into a life of vulnerability that threatens the false gods of comfort and ease. Like many others, I’m trying to figure out how to walk that path. It’s daunting and scary, and most days I don’t feel like I’m doing a very good job. But it does at least have the ring of truth.”

This is not the tale of a man who left a conservative evangelical way of life but rather one who redeemed it, finding a more loving evangelical way of life, and is still going forward.

The message he was raised with is one known by many of us: God loves the world and has worked through Jesus to reach all of us with that love. The message can be powerful and life-changing, speaking of love and care and nurture.

The problem is not the message but some of the messengers. Unfortunately, some Christian leaders have been unspeakably corrupt as they used their leadership positions to glorify themselves and in a few cases used power for corrupt practices.

More often, some evangelicals have worshiped America more than God and turned the church into a “make America great again” pep rally. Some used church for spiritual highs, leaving out the calling of service to the world.

Their emphasis was not on Jesus’s call to serve him in meeting spiritual and physical needs of the world but on glorifying America. Completely absent was any call for repentance for slavery and a century of segregation.

It shouldn’t be hard for a Christian to reflect on Jesus’ example when he said that he himself, the Son of God, “ did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

 

Evacuation

During my orientation to the U.S. Foreign Service, one of the presenters confidently told us that, for sure, given a normal diplomatic career, we’d all be evacuated, due to war or civil turmoil, at least once from the U.S. embassy or consulate where we were assigned.

Actually, I was evacuated twice, upping the odds. Before you have visions of my being airlifted to safety by a U.S. military helicopter, however, I must confess that both were blessedly uneventful.

In Algeria, my tour was curtailed early because of ongoing strife in the country and increasing threats against diplomats and other foreign nationals. I left on a crowded Air Algérie flight to Paris where I enjoyed an afternoon and evening before flying out to Washington the next day.

In Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, terrorist attacks against Americans led to another embassy draw down of embassy personnel. This time I flew out on a crowded flight to Amsterdam and enjoyed an evening in another pleasant European city.

I was quite fortunate. Recent evacuations are more likely to mirror the kind recently carried out in Afghanistan and Sudan. In Sudan, the more recent, American embassy staff were brought to safety by helicopter, as chaos descended on the country.

The evacuations in Sudan followed dangerous battles between two strongmen, each wanting power and apparently too selfish to care about what they were inflicting on the citizens of their country.

Yes, U.S. diplomats are sometimes killed. Their names are inscribed on walls in a lobby of the U.S. State Department in Washington. Fortunately, however, most American and other foreign diplomats usually make it out. Left behind are ordinary men, women, and children facing civil war, including not only physical attacks but also starvation as basic goods run out and cannot be replaced.

The diplomatic world is perhaps chastened again by its helplessness, as its members leave carnage and perhaps memories of local friends and acquaintances who have no U.S. helicopters to bring them to safety.

 

Where Are the People?

Increasing internet use combined with Covid-19 has devastated our time with each other.

Restaurants closed as people ate at home. Workers met on Zoom. Shoppers avoided stores to buy over the internet. Town halls and religious groups experimented with hybrid meetings. Today, schools struggle to cope with returning students after two years of attempts at remote learning.

Covid led us through separations resembling a time of war. We are struggling to adjust. A lifestyle already dictated by automobiles and suburbs was upended further by the pandemic.

How do we relearn our people skills? How do we learn to meet together again? How do we come out from our home burrows?

How do we integrate singles back into society again? How do we help those caught in the drug epidemic to find restoring community? How do we overcome the easy use of guns to interrupt peaceful gatherings?

We are in search of community, of people gathering safely to share lives. We are in search of those willing to commit to each other and to care for one other.

As we confront our changed society, may we have the dedication, patience, and discipline to persevere and overcome the currents that would tear us apart.

May we grow the communities we so need.

Unhooking Illegal Drugs

That illegal drugs are a problem in the United States is obvious to many Americans. Finding ways to deal with the problem, however, is something of a problem in itself.

Alexander Ward listed in Politico some suggested solutions by various members of the U.S. congress, including at least one suggestion to bomb Mexico. (“GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl,” April 10, 2023)

Targeted strikes against drug lords, labeling drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and other ideas have been suggested by members of congress.

I’m hardly qualified to suggest ways to defeat drug cartels. However, I suggest that one way of battling illegal use might be to examine why so many Americans fall into the illegal drug trap in the first place.

After all, if Mexican cartels disappear tomorrow, other cartels in other countries will step into the market. If the market is there, sellers will rise to meet the demand. All sorts of different ways exist to overcome U.S. efforts against drug sellers.

What can we do to unhook Americans off drugs?

We could begin by exploring the question from a different angle: Why do some Americans, especially young Americans, avoid drugs?

I would think that families and care givers who love and support their children are the most important factor in raising drug free children. That is not to say that such families will never have children who become drug users. It would be of no help to parents who dearly love and support their children when a tough world finds a way to warp their children’s lives.

It is merely to say that parents who are able to love and support and spend time with their children are the best defense against habits that might destroy those children.

What can we do to encourage parents to be parents?

Begin with the basics: no child should go hungry or not have a secure place to sleep at night. As some cities try to help the homeless, provide special care to families and to parents.

This includes safe spaces to eat and sleep, but it also can include support to parents who might have a problem with drugs themselves to stay drug free. It can support as well any programs to help parents find jobs and learn useful skills.

The goal is a society which rids itself of harmful drug use by becoming a productive society and one less likely to seek harmful drugs.

People Versus Machines?

“Machines are not better at personal care, machines are not better cooks, and machines will not necessarily be better than people at driving trucks.”

Lant Pritchett, the author of these words, is a research director at the University of Oxford and a former Wold Bank economist. Pritchett makes the case for immigration over automation in “People Over Robots,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2023.

He points out that some automation replaces the work of a laborer with the work of a customer, as when a customer must use a self-checkout machine. Pritchett doesn’t mention it, but I suspect some of us may miss the human interaction with a live cashier as well.

The dramatically lower birth  rates in developed countries, as well as the increasingly higher education levels, have led to a shortage of workers for “manual, nonroutine tasks,” Pritchett writes. We are, it seems, in need of workers while less developed countries have a surplus of potential workers. Pritchett sees as a waste of time and resources the efforts to develop machines for work better done by humans.

A lack of agricultural workers may result in less than beneficial results, Pritchett writes. Farmers relying on machines may prefer genetically modified products that can be better harvested by machines such as thicker-skinned tomatoes. Automation may tend to eliminate foods that can’t easily be harvested by machines, such as asparagus and strawberries.

As Pritchett points out, the movement of labor happens with or without legality. The problem with illegal movements is their tendency to exploitation and abuse.

It seems a waste of both people and nature not to provide for people-oriented immigration policies.

Stepping Out

The Pan American Boeing 747 taxied down a runway of the JFK airport around 9 p.m. on December 4, 1990, and lifted off. I watched the New York City metropolitan area spreading out in a vast sea of lights. It was the first international plane trip of my life. I was beginning my first assignment as a U.S. Foreign Service officer.

The takeoff began my trip to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a change of planes in Frankfurt, Germany, then to Riyadh. In Riyadh, I was to change planes again for a final short flight to Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jeddah.

Looking back, I have to laugh at all the mistakes a hyped up newbie Foreign Service officer could make. I had packed my suitcase too full, and it was obvious, once I landed in New York City for consultations, that it wasn’t going to last out the trip.

Fortunately, a kind officer in the New York office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service took me to a luggage store for a better suitcase.

Of course, the new suitcase was possibly the reason I identified the wrong one when I, seriously jet lagged, changed planes in Riyadh. Eventually, the luggage was sent back to the right person in Riyadh, and mine returned to me in a day or so.

However, due to the fact that I had no luggage for my first evening in Jeddah, I had to attend a welcoming reception wearing the travel-stained outfit I’d worn for several days. I also developed a blister on my foot from walking around in my travel shoes.

My first assignment began a few weeks before the the start of the First Gulf War. It pitted Iraq against Saudi Arabia, with the United States and other allies supporting Saudi Arabia.

Due to new assignments and training, the former officer had been transferred to another job before I arrived, so I missed training with the one I was replacing. I fell into my visa services job with no overlap as the war began.

After daytime duties in the visa section (overflowing with foreign nationals seeking visas to leave the country now coveted by Saddam Hussein), I worked in the control room in the evenings. This operation was a command center overseeing American wartime activities, including supervising high level U.S. officials coming to confer with Saudi Arabian officials on the war efforts.

I not only survived but treasured that first foreign assignment as a time of comradery with fellow Americans seeking to serve our country in a time of crisis.

I had joined the Foreign Service with the hope of living in other countries and enjoying an exciting and meaningful vocation. I was not disappointed.

We Have Met the Enemy

For several years after the end of the Cold War in the 1990’s, we assumed that democratic traditions would take over the world. However, we discovered that democracy was more fragile than we thought. Indeed, democracy requires continued care from the nations who endorse it.

Previous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine early in 2022, the United States attempted to decrease global involvement in democracy. The country’s failures in Afghanistan and its less than stellar performance in the Middle East soured the country on commitments abroad.

Europe, however, was another story, even though Americans weren’t keen on involvement even there until the Russian attempt to take over Ukraine. The obvious desire of most citizens of that country to resist what was obviously an invasion of a sovereign European nation changed American ideas about resistance.

Robert Kagan, of the Brookings Institution, in an article about our change, wrote: “Russia’s invasion has changed Americans’ views not only of Ukraine but also of the world in general and the United States’ role in it. (“A Free World, If You and Keep It,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023)

This change mirrors the past history of the county. Americans were not keen to become involved in the two world wars of the twentieth century until it became evident that what was happening in Europe and Asia concerned us as well.

Writing about U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, Kagan said that his “interventionist policies from 1937 on were not a response to an increasing threat to American security. What worried Roosevelt was the potential destruction of the broader liberal world beyond American shores.”

Kagan traces the path of the United States as it grew from this reluctant involvement in affairs beyond our shores to a perhaps belated understanding that if the U.S. doesn’t defend a democratic world order, no one will.

Indeed, Kagan believes that the absence of American involvement in world affairs will in itself encourage dictatorship and great power conflict.

He does not mention one obstacle hindering our acceptance of the continued role we can play toward a more democratic world order. This is the danger of refusing to allow one of our own elections to stand as proved and certified.

As Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo said “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Commuter Rebellion

One thing we learned from the Covid period: American workers dislike the commute. Office workers freed to work at home by the pandemic discovered how much they enjoyed the new found casualness. They also enjoyed the extra time gained by skipping that long ride into the office.

We long ago separated home and office. Now we wonder why workers, having found the possibility of working from home, don’t want to deal with lost time in commutes and other restrictions involved with their office jobs.

Maybe we should question why the long commute happened in the first place. Why did we allow this distance between work and home?

Suburbs were birthed by a rebellion against city life: everything from often less adequate schools in the city to perceived higher crime rates. Suburbs were the answer: mothers and children in a safe environment, while fathers earned the money to make possible the newer, safer life.

However, some women found the safe life also a boring life. They were safe from the supposed evils of the city but also away from its liveliness and excitement, not to mention career opportunities.

The advantages of suburbia faded as more women desired entry into the work force. The idea of dad going off to work in the distant city while mom stayed with the children also has changed with the need for two incomes for many families.

Of course, these are the fortunate families with two parents. Single parent households face the hardships of trying to raise a family on one income, including the often impossibility of affording a suburban home.

Cities, however, are more than job centers. They also are centers for creation: music and drama and often for learning found in city colleges and universities.

The abandonment of the city by many of the middle class certainly increased the problems of homelessness and drugs and mental illness for those left behind . These unfortunates need our compassion and help, but our beleaguered cities need more than that. They also need safe, affordable neighborhoods for workers as well.

 

Did Women Follow the Wrong Example?

The entry of women into the modern workforce did not in itself change our era. What changed was the kind of model they chose. They tended to follow the male model of the past few centuries.

Women have been part of the work force since the beginning of time. Women have worked on farms and in home-based shops for millennia. Regardless of discrimination, they formed an active part of a society’s economic life.

In addition, women did what men could not do but was essential to the survival of the human race. Though men were essential to the act of procreation, they had nothing to do with carrying a child or birthing it. Until the past century or so, the child’s very existence depended on feeding from the mother for its first few months or year of life.

On the other hand, in times past, fathers were less separated from their children in their growing-up years. Even when the men worked, the children were close by for whatever lessons their fathers wanted to give.

Though gender differences were acute, with men having privileged roles, they were at least present while their children grew up.

With the rise of the modern city and its division into city and suburb, women became less a part of economic life, and men became less involved with their children.

In the suburbs, out of the stream of economic activity, some women rebelled against what seemed to them a wasteland, a prison of sorts.

The advent of birth control, safer pregnancies and births, and bottle feeding, meant less attention to the childbearing and rearing role. All women, whether mothers or not, could find purpose beyond traditional roles.

But women still remain essential for continued life, in a way men do not.

Men can more easily leave their role of fatherhood and in some cases never even consider it. Physically, they are not tied to children as the mother is in pregnancy and birthing.

In the sixties, battles were fought over a woman’s worth to society and her right to a place in the job force, equal opportunity in management roles, and breaking the glass ceiling.

The word “house husband” was bandied around. Some men have indeed assumed a larger role in the family.

However, we gave little consideration to the modern separation of jobs and homes. The choice to have children or not to have children is quite proper. But for those who make a responsible decision to have children, the career deck is, more often than not, stacked against them.

Yes, child care can be made more affordable and available. But what about when a child is sick? Has special needs?

Or when a pandemic means the child cannot be in school or child care?

Ultimately, the parents are responsible, career or not.

Perhaps we should question the great separation of the past century or so between work and home.

Some separation is necessary, of course. We don’t wish a family living in a coal mining community to live in a coal mine. Nevertheless, the advent of the office job meant that many jobs were not in dangerous locations. Yet, we emptied families out of our cities for the suburbs and built super highways and faster cars and neglected mass transit.

Perhaps we should consider what happens when cities become childless.

Societies die without children. With children, but without responsible child rearing, societies crumble.

A society cannot function without responsible child rearing. For a vibrant society, children must be taken care of:  loved and listened to and provided proper food, health care, schooling, and housing. Society damages itself when it does not invest in the children and the parents who make its continued existence possible.

“Take as Many Pills as You Need . . .”

Several years ago I had surgery from which I fortunately recovered quickly. While I was in the hospital following the surgery, a nurse brought me pills to guard against any pain I might be feeling. She said I could take them whenever I needed to, as they apparently weren’t habit forming.

Fortunately, I don’t remember feeling much pain. I recovered quickly and soon stopped taking any pills.

Later we learned about the efforts of some in the pharmaceutical industry to push as many pain pills as possible in order to make as much money as possible. Apparently the medication was pushed whether the pills were needed or not or whether they might be dangerously addictive. (As we found in frightening ways, some indeed were.)

Sam Quinones, in his book, The Least of Us (True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth) tells a horrifying story of this shameful part of our past, when addiction was ignored so drug makers could make more money.

The story reveals how we too often see illness or injury as a part of the consumer culture: a way to make money, not as a need for healing.

I champion capitalism as long as it pertains to buying and selling the normal goods of a society and as long as capitalists pay their fair share of taxes.

However, any caring society, it seems to me, will do better if all people have access to safe and basic medical care, whether they are rich, working/middle class, or poor. Children, especially, should not have to depend on the income of their parents to grow in a healthy, safe environment.

That means, for me, seeing certain activities like the healing and treatment of illness as a public good, closely regulated to encourage good health, not to feed our normal capitalist system.

Lessons From Puddleglum and Wulfstan

In C.S. Lewis’ Narnia tale, The Silver Chair, one of the characters, Puddleglum, along with two children, are trapped underground by a wicked witch. She tells them that the good things in the world above, the world of the children’s protector Aslan, are all made up fantasies. Puddleglum, as pessimistic as his name implies, nevertheless leads the children to victory over the witch and her contention that the good things the children believe in are only made up.

Puddleglum answers the wicked witch: “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.”

Times of crisis and danger require real life Puddleglums to lead us. Such a time happened in the British Isles around 1014 A.D. In “The Sermon of the Wolf,” (Plough, Summer 2022), Eleanor Parker tells of the English Anglo-Saxons when they were being overwhelmed by the Vikings. Christianity had reached England by that time, and the archbishop of York, Wulfstan, gave a sermon. For him and those around him, it may very well have seemed the end of the world. He did not pretend that the Vikings might not conquer. His aim in the sermon, however, was to call for personal integrity and repentance.

Indeed, the Vikings did conquer. However, Wulfstan continued to work with them also, seeking reconciliation and just laws. Parker writes: “. . . the laws they made formed the basis for many later codes, ties that still sought to hold English society together centuries after Wulfstan was dead.”

Perilous times are nothing new. Bad things will happen. We can choose to give up or perhaps lose ourselves in frivolous pursuits.

Or, as Parker says in telling us of Wulfstan: “Whatever the darkness of the times we live in, some good can yet be done by every turn toward the truth.”

A Small Dog in Ukraine

A small Jack Russell terrier named Patron (the word means “ammo” in Ukrainian) has been trained to sniff out explosives in Ukraine left by Russian forces to maim and kill. Patron is credited with detecting over 200 devices for effective neutralization by bomb squads.

Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, dressed in his casual wartime attire, recently presented Patron and his owner with a presidential medal for their heroism.

“A dog who helps clean our land from the traces of the occupiers, and who also helps teach children mine safety,” he said. “Due to the Russian invaders, this is now one of the most urgent tasks — to teach children to recognize and avoid explosive objects.”

Zelinsky talks frequently to his people with nightly news addresses, but he also walks among them, having refused evacuation when the war began.

Contrast this with the instigator of the war, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, sitting at a huge banquet table, several feet and sometimes more apart from the people he is talking to.

Or consider one of Putin’s earlier meetings with Andrea Merkel when he brought along his Labrador. Merkel, because of an attack by a dog earlier in her life, is extremely uncomfortable around them. Putin later denied that he had brought along his dog to discomfort Merkel.

At any rate, here is this short guy in work clothes giving a medal to a little dog who saves people’s lives by sniffing out explosives so they can be safely detonated.

I have a hard time imagining Vladimir Putin taking time to come out from his big table to present an award to a small dog.