Category Archives: Greatest Generation, Boomers, Millennials, Alphabets

American Idol Politics

 

Americans tend to judge their leaders like they judge contestants on American Idol—spur of the moment. I thought about this when I read an article in Parade Magazine (November 2, 2013) about former President Jimmy Carter.

Carter left office in disgrace, haunted in the last year of his Presidency by Islamist students’ seizure of the U.S. embassy in Iran and the taking of hostages. Forgotten was his work with Egypt and Israel, leading to Egypt’s diplomatic recognition of Israel, the first by an Arab nation.

Today, Carter is one of the most respected of living presidents. According to the interview, Carter is enjoying the longest post-presidency in history and one of the most productive.

He began the Carter Center, which “wages peace” through various initiatives, many of them dealing with the eradication of diseases that so plague poorer nations. He won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He is often called on by world leaders for his opinion. He teaches once a month at Emory University in Atlanta. He writes books. His wife, Rosalynn, is involved in mental health issues. Their marriage has lasted sixty-seven years.

You can do worse than that. May all our presidents be this successful.

 

WikiLeaks and the 24-hour News Cycle in the Digital Age

 

In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, certain records remained sealed for years. Researchers are only now combing them for insight into the tragedy. It’s hard to imagine the information remaining unavailable for that long today. No doubt Julian Assange would have released it the next day on Wikileaks if he and the Internet were around then.

Formerly, a memoir at the end of one’s life or the discovery of letters after a death allowed time for passions to cool and a more balanced view of an event to emerge before background revelations. Today, what is whispered between two people is shouted from the housetops on the next hour’s newscast. Classified emails, texts, and top secret communications become entertainment on our tablets or phones as we munch breakfast.

News of thousands killed in a storm passes off the radar like a dream on awakening. A terrorist incident is old news the next day, eclipsed by the latest celebrity scandal.

We have gigabytes of information but a scarcity of wisdom. Wisdom requires time for reflection.

Innocence Lost? November 22, 1963

The day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, November 23, 1963, may be the day America lost her innocence.

True, the nation experienced horrible tragedies before Kennedy’s murder: Lincoln’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, the beginning of the Great Depression. This one, however, involved young children—Caroline and John-John, barely six and three years old. Pictures of innocence.

Before that day, we were on a roll as the unassailable victor of World War II, our nation physically undamaged by the carnage that had devastated Europe, free to lead the industrialized world. The Cold War was at its height, but Kennedy had stood firm during the Cuban missile crisis. The young and personable president was much more popular with the world’s peoples than the aging, dour Kremlin leaders.

Surely, the nation would conquer all. We would win in any encounter with the Soviets. We would buy our homes and enjoy rising middle class prosperity. Our children would go to college, find great jobs. We would enjoy sitcoms and sports events as the television age blossomed.

And then Lee Harvey Oswald killed the President, for what reason we are still not sure. In a bizarre anticlimax, he was killed by Jack Ruby two days later. Ruby died in 1967 of cancer. Speculation has boiled ever since.

Of course, even in Kennedy’s presidency, things weren’t as sanguine as they appeared. The baby boomers, beginning to grow up, would transform every demographic bulge they passed through. Something called “the pill” would challenge moral certainties. And U.S. advisors already were entering the little Asian country of South Vietnam.

Social Security Versus Education?

 

In a column for The Seattle Times, Danny Westneat, 48, reminisced about his college days. It was possible in his college years, he said, to actually earn a year’s tuition to college with a summer job.

According to the columnist, in 1981, a year of tuition at the University of Washington was $687. Today, it’s $12,500. Part of the difference is that the government paid ninety percent of the tab in 1981. Today? Thirty percent. Westneat’s opinion is that his generation milked the system, but, having prospered from their education, aren’t interested in doing the same for the current generation.

Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, in their book That Used To Be Us, How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, question resources transferred from the nation’s youth to seniors since Social Security was established in the 1930’s. The authors state: “The national interest depends on everyone, including seniors, making some sacrifice so that the country can make the investments it needs in America’s future.”

We might also consider the money spent on the wars we have fought in the last few years. They have taken money that might have been used to better fund our pension system as well as pay more for education for our youth. Our military adventures that sent our young to war also robbed them of educational resources.

Why Rachel Left The Church and Why She Came Back

 

A millennial explains why she left the church. In a nutshell: “We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.”

Then Rachel explains the reasons why she came back. They include: baptism, confession, healing, communion, confirmation, union with Christ.

Serious practitioners of Christianity have become a minority group in the United States. Searching Christians are driven away by the lack of sacrifice in a gospel that emphasizes material success for following Jesus. They are equally repelled by the lack of love evidenced in legalistic congregations.

Those Christians who have returned to the church after a departure may lead the church into a community more kin to its vibrant beginnings. This Christianity celebrates covenant community based on Christ’s love and discipleship. A minority community of committed “subversives” within the broader culture works likes yeast within dough.

Syria Who?

 

Now with an agreement between the U.S. and Russia over the Syrian impasse on chemical weapons, we appear to have dodged the bullet, temporarily at least.

What a relief. Now we can return to what’s really important: Miley Cyrus, football, Justin Beiber, and the vendor who was fired for hating ketchup. As well as the personal tragedies (mostly American) served up to us on our news feeds as entertainment.

Automobile Age Dirge

 

Automobiles became more than a plaything for eccentrics when Henry Ford mass produced his Fords beginning with the Model T in 1908. Motorized vehicles were sold at prices that the average American family could afford. The automobile age began.

In 1956 President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act (FAHA). Controlled access “Interstates” soon covered the landscape. American families moved out to suburbs and the malls. The 1950’s and 60’s were the apex of the automobile age. Americans who came of age during the first decades after World War II abandoned walking, mass transit, and the shops and houses of Main Street.

Changes crept in, hardly a ripple at first. A few, mostly younger people, turned their backs on the suburban lifestyle and returned to the cities. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, their numbers increased. Access to walking and mass transit became assets for selling homes. Some workers even commuted by bicycle. The housing in newer suburbs became denser and included sidewalks and community parks.

Instead of freedom, automobiles now conjure visions of traffic jams, painful gas prices, and the use of scarce financial resources for car payments. Meanwhile, Americans who came of age during the automobile era face adjustment. Many never developed habits of physical exercise and are uneasy with walking or taking mass transit. Yet, poor eyesight and other health problems lead to inability to drive their beloved cars.

Neal Peirce in a Washington Post column suggested “multigenerational cities.” The Atlanta Regional Commission (where I used to work) promotes the concept. It encourages lifetime communities of mixed housing (including larger houses with “mother-in-law” apartments), safe walking, and access to mass transit.

Is the automobile, darling of several generations, relinquishing the throne? Perhaps the computer age and the home-office have usurped its crown.

 

Getting Away Has Almost Gone Away

 

We used to “get away” in days when phones did not go with us, and we couldn’t plug in our iPads at Starbuck’s and motels and highway rest stops. Today, getting away requires discipline and planning. My husband and I sometimes take time off the grid. We go to the side of a mountain we know about which has no digital access. I am happy to report that we not only survive these digitless days but actually enjoy face-to-face conversations with each other.

Another discipline of mine is digitless Sundays. Okay, I cheat and play Free Cell and check news and my email once in the evening. But the relaxing day of ignorance is blissful, a time to get it together in slow motion. My husband I converse and sometimes take a walk. I read, think, and note ideas in long hand on my steno pad.

Current research suggests a harmful effect to the brain with too much use of digital media. I can understand, watching my stress level build while I wait impatiently for the latest weather report to come up or the email to delete so I can check the next one.

Consider roughing it on your next getaway. Leave the electronic stuff behind, or at least limit your access to it.

Rescuing Evangelical

 

I can remember growing up in the South during the Civil Rights movement. Some white churches thought that the mixing of the races was a sin. They said they didn’t believe in mistreating blacks, but that God meant for the races to be separate like he had created them.

Most members of those churches considered themselves “evangelicals.” One of the legacies of that time is the narrow view of evangelicals by the media and general public which endures to this day. Evangelicals often are considered bigoted individuals. News analyses during the last presidential election constantly examined the “evangelical” vote and attempted to tie it to the Republican party.

In fact, evangelicals voted for both parties. We might consider a new definition of evangelical that excludes a political designation.

Jim Wallis, editor-in-chief of Sojourners, suggests that many of those voting for Obama were, in fact, evangelicals. Just not white evangelicals. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Obama, but many in these groups consider themselves evangelical.

Evangelical, he says, is not a political term, as we have tried to make it. It’s a theological commitment that places Christ at its center.

Maybe those of us who designate ourselves evangelicals should question whether we have been serving Caesar rather than Christ.

NEETS: Not in Employment, Education, or Training

 

According to a recent article in The Economist, a quarter of 15-to-24-year-old young people in the world are NEETS, not working or preparing for work. Other youth not counted as NEETS are underemployed or working in low level jobs where they learn few skills.

Perhaps fifteen percent of this age group in the more developed countries are NEETS, their numbers increased by the recession. Particularly in southern Europe, where growth has all but stopped, the jobless rate of NEETS is much higher than fifteen percent.

Studies in the United States indicate that joblessness among youth adversely affects their careers all their lives. They earn less, are more subject to intermittent unemployment, and develop fewer skills. They are less able to save for old age. The longer the joblessness, the more traumatic the results and the more likely these results are to harm the next generation.

Yet, in some surveys, more than half of companies surveyed in the developed world say they cannot find enough skilled workers for their entry-level jobs. Many commentators have warned that our economy will be permanently scarred and will suffer permanent decline if we do not invest more in the education and training of our youth.

 

Cyber Hate: Wrongs With No Faces

 

My computer picked up a virus even though I have anti-virus protection. I took it to our local techie to clean it up. Some of today’s powerful viruses, she said, can make it through normal anti-virus software.

One who wishes to cause harm can now perpetuate wrong against nameless, faceless victims in record numbers. Was the person who caused the infection to my computer angry at a wrong done to him or her? Were they in rebellion against society or the government? Simply a hacker who does these things for the fun of it? Safe to say that they did not know me, had never met me.

The damage to my computer data was minimal and quickly repaired. But people’s lives can be threatened if power outages happen in more serious circumstances: to electric grids or hospitals.

The news is full of the new combat, cyberwar. Enemies fight through the ether, striving to destroy vital networks.

Perhaps in a society where we increasingly communicate through devices instead of face-to-face, such developments are inevitable. Human nuances and vulnerabilities are filtered out.

What can alleviate our detachment from others? We need more than ever the small face-to-face groups. Families, faith nurturing, and communities are as essential to survival, surely, as the digital grids we depend on.

Secular and Religious: A Certain Nervousness

 

A secular professional of the Christian persuasion is careful not to push his views on his colleagues. Yet he senses unease about religion in any form, he says.

Many in our society know little about religion, including Christianity. They are not so much antagonistic toward faith as uneasy. They view religious people somewhat like they view a nice salesperson who loves his product but which the nonreligious person could care less about. To others, all religion seems extreme, full of adherents who are angry and judgmental and want to force the uncommitted  to follow their way, as in the days of the Spanish Inquisition.

To the religious, religion seems natural. To the nonreligious, religion seems irrelevant.

Religion to the non-religious isn’t about hope and healing for the hurt and wounded. It’s the hatreds that spawned 9/ll. It isn’t about submission to eternal truths but about women being forced to endure physical abuse because God wills women to be subservient. It isn’t linking to truths about purpose and meaning but ignoring closed minds and name-calling.

A disconnect exists like two ships passing in the night. A suggestion for connection: What happens if those with faith live so that the nonreligious envy what they see?

We Have No Walls Around Our Cities—Except For Gated Communities

 

Fortified walls surrounded towns of any size throughout history until recent times. Some early towns in the United States began as stockades or forts. Most of us in the United States, however, with our suburban-surrounded cities, never think about walls. We have no ruined walls, no gates to pass through, as do cities in older civilizations as a reminder that bandits and enemies were a constant threat in earlier times.

Central authority in those days was nonexistent or too weak to provide adequate safeguards against wrong-doers. Barons and warlords provided what protection there was. (Today we see the same sort of “protection” by weapons-ruled warlords in countries like Somalia.)

As populations grew in Europe and elsewhere, law-abiding citizens came together to provide, not only publicly supported military and police, but also schools and hospitals and fire halls.

Lately, some note a trend toward the establishment of private good over public good for those who can afford it: gated communities, expensive private schools, nannies for stay-at-home childcare. Even the all-volunteer army might be seen as a way to pay others to do our fighting (usually the less well off) instead of requiring every citizen to serve in the military or perform service work before beginning family and career.

Those with money buy computers and tablets in a world that divides the digitally adept from the digitally challenged, establishing a kind of electronic barrier. We digitally adept join electronic communities in which we never talk over coffee or walk together, listening to the silence as well as each other.

T.S. Eliot died before the age of computers, but his poem “The Rock” is strangely prophetic:

Where is the life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Work/Life Balance: Which Side Does the Scale Tip Toward?

 

Hillary Clinton, who recently stepped down as Secretary of the U.S. State Department, spoke in October to a gathering that explored work/life balance. She talked of the time her child was born in 1980, and she demanded and received a four-month leave to be with her new daughter.

During her tenure as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton advocated worldwide rights for women at the same time she mandated family-friendly policies for the State Department.

Current articles often cite the percentage of women in particular roles, such as CEO’s, or the percentage of women choosing certain courses of study, like the much-publicized STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

Women have long been stereotyped. We now understand that women’s talents are needed as much as men’s, but does that mean the days of the “full-time” wife and mother are over?

If some women choose not to enter the paid labor force (provided they can afford to opt out), their actions will skew the numbers to less than fifty percent of women in it. Is that a tragedy? Should we provide day care so that a mother has no excuse not to work outside the home even if she’d rather stay there with her young child?

Will the choice of staying “at home” lead to frustrated empty nesters later in life, as they, perhaps, search for a career they can no longer have because they are beginning too late? Or is there such a person who enjoys taking care of others, not only children but also the hungry who come to food kitchens, the disadvantaged who need tutoring, and so on. Do some men gravitate toward this calling?

Many of our programs, like one that nurtures at-risk mothers for the first two years of her child’s life, are necessary because we lack natural “nurturers.” Nurturing, it seems, is needed as much as engineering and computer networking.

How shall we work out this dilemma? Where will our nurturers come from?

Send/Receive/Delete

 

A recent survey found that fewer people use email now. The survey didn’t say, but presumably we use cell phones to text or leave messages more than we send emails.

How long has the general population used email? A little over a decade? And already it’s passé.

We ceased writing letters long ago. For some of us, letters seem on a par with medieval manuscripts. Now email is equated with the old snail mail, as texting takes over.

From both email and texts, we delete much of what we receive, and much of what we send to others is deleted. We live in a send/receive/delete world

We form and delete relationships as well. Americans have always been on the move, changing houses and jobs. Now we pass from one relationship to another with little thought.

Perhaps this generation should be called the Delete Generation.

Yet a yearning seeps from our millions of electronic words—for permanence, for “a city not made with hands.” We seek lasting community

Ritual and Relevance

 

“While many congregations modify their music, order of worship, and sermon topics in an attempt to make church ‘relevant’ for newer generations, I am more interested in figuring out how I fit into the rich and complicated tradition of Christianity than in asking how Christianity can be molded to meet my needs. My desire to receive Communion . . .wasn’t about the individual act of taking bread and wine. It was about a deep need to connect with God and others beyond myself.” (Anne Marie Roderick, from “‘Relevance’ Is Not Enough,” Soujourners, February, 2013, Anne Marie Roderick and Joshua Witchger)

Recent articles evidence a desire to return to the ancient rituals and disciplines of the Christian church. Perhaps the yearning stems from an age that has stressed individualism to the extreme. Self-discipline has appeared an anathema to this age, hardly mentioned in fact.

The lack of sexual discipline is often remarked on, but perhaps the increased numbers of obese Americans at the same time is not a coincidence. Both obesity and sexual license became part of the mainstream soon after the mall age began. Our culture of sex, food, and shopping slipped upon us hand in hand.

The antidote may lie less in condemnation of lust, gluttony, and greed as by a call, once again, to a disciplined life.

With that in mind, I am rereading Celebration of Discipline, by Richard J. Foster. Discipline is something to be celebrated. The world waits for it, Foster says.

 

Celebrating Celibacy on Valentine’s Day

 

Our culture encourages the young to find a “partner” as soon as they hit puberty. If parents try to persuade their children to practice patience, they may encourage them with the idea that they will be showered with blissful happiness in later unions if they only “wait.”

A study quoted in The Economist indicated that “waiting” may indeed bring added satisfaction in several areas of married life. However, some will never marry because they will never find what used to be called “the right one.” Others will not find in marriage all they were looking for. Some will divorce. Some will enjoy wonderful marriages, but one of the spouses will die early or suffer serious illness.

A few years ago on my mother’s death at 97, we sorted through her papers and found letters she and my father had written to each other. They blazed with passion. My mother and father, I believe, loved each other in every way it is possible for a husband and wife to love. However, at the age of 53, my father died of a heart attack. My mother lived longer as a widow than she had as a married woman. She lived those years to the fullest, enjoying friends, travel, parties, celebrations, and for much of it, a job she loved.

Perhaps we should consider a new standard: that we are called to celibacy until and unless we are called to marriage. Yes, unintended pregnancy and disease are reasons for celibacy, but not the chief reason. Young people need a solitary time to discover themselves, their callings, and their purposes in this life. And for some, celibacy is a life-long calling, a time to devote themselves whole-heartedly to a vocation they may better fulfil without a partner.

Be Fruitful and Multiply and Fill the Earth

 

So reads the book of Genesis. Some, pointing to resources strained by growing populations, would say we’ve already been fruitful enough. One woman apparently struck a chord when she said she’d considered and deliberately decided not to have children. Apparently, other women felt as though she’d helped them come out of the closet. They said her column liberated them to express their reasons for opting out of motherhood.

We line up on one side or the other, suggesting reasons for or against having children. It’s certainly possible to be fulfilled without motherhood—or fatherhood, for that matter.

Children the FutureThe thought struck me from out of nowhere, however, that as I grow older and understand that I’m going to die—in the next hour, the next year, thirty years from now, whenever, that I’m glad I’ve left children for the world. It has nothing to do with support or companionship in declining years. It has to do with my children as gift, with the hope that they will become useful citizens and give something to the world that makes it a better place.

We leave legacies. The legacies may or may not pan out as we wish. Career goals may be met, met partially, or not at all. The point is that, if we reach mature understanding, we live not just for ourselves, who will pass away in a short time, but to serve the greater good.

Motherhood is a career with legacies also. Perhaps our hope in raising children is that they will continue to serve this greater good when we no longer can. We want them to bring love, joy, peace, and other such fruit to a dysfunctional world. Surely we would welcome this kind of fruit and hope that it might fill the earth.

 

Fiction and the Believer in the Post-Christian Era

 

“Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.”

–Paul Elie, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith,” The New York Times, December 23, 2012.

Mr. Elie has written such books as Reinventing Bach and  The Life You Save May be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage . In its review of his writing on Bach, The Economist stated:”Mr Elie deploys considerable scholarship (the more notable since his previous book, about four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God, had nothing to do with music), and he writes beautifully.”

Mr. Elie says in his article:  “. . . if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called ‘Christian convictions,’ their would-be successors are thin on the ground.”

So should this lack suggest despair?

“People of faith,” Elie states, “see decline and fall. Their detractors see a people threatening a rear-guard political action, or a people left behind.” Elie, however, seems excited by the new place Christian writers find themselves. “This development places the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure; . . . ”

We Christians, whether writers or not, can avoid acting as though our feelings are hurt because Christian culture no longer occupies the dominant position in our society. An old adage illustrates the times we live in: Some see crisis as danger; to others, it is an opportunity.

Best Blogs for 2012

 

In celebration of 2013, I’ve picked ten of my blogs that I’ve chosen to define 2012.

Plus, I am giving away three copies of my latest book, A Sense of Mission. See details below.

The ten are:

Advent and Arc Lines

Nones and the Rest

Our Right To Say Outrageous Things

An Extreme Makeover of Christendom

To Appreciate Our Right To Vote, Live In A Country That Doesn’t Have It

“Even the Good Parts of It.”

Clock Time and the Other Time

When Religion Is A Pawn

Protests or Bridges?

From Bach to Hitler

 

 

Which blog do you like best? Send an email to islandfiction@hotmail.com with your choice of the best blog and your reasons why.

After two weeks (January 16), I’ll enter all email addresses in a drawing. I’ll email the first three that I draw for an address to send a copy of my newest book, A Sense of Mission.

No names, addresses, or email addresses will be made public or used in any other way. I would like to use your thoughts only in future blogs.