Lift Up Your Hearts!

On the eve of Election Day, as I await the results with some trepidation, I ponder the question, "Are you sorry you voted for Trump?"

Many who voted for him in 2024 are disappointed in what President Trump has accomplished in the first two years of this term. But after much consideration, I can say, "Absolutely I do not regret my vote. I am happy that Donald Trump is our president." Of course he has disappointed me in some areas, but no more than any other president and a lot less than many. The state America was in when he took office was dire, and still is. The problems have been building for a long time, under administrations of both political parties, and accelerated markedly under President Biden—or whoever was holding the reins of power at that time. Critical situations that have developed over several decades will not be fixed in a couple of years, and not without pain.

Does that mean I approve of President Trump's behavior? Often not. But after more than seven decades, I've realized that the people you need most in some situations are not always the most polished.

More than two years ago, shortly before the last presidential election, I clipped something that Jordan Peterson had to say about Donald Trump's flaws in a conversation with Elon Musk, and I finally have occasion to use it:

He's a complicated person, and I've been trying to figure him out, because some of the things that look like flaws might be advantages in disguise. He seems to me to be pretty good at standing up to psychopathic bullies, for example, and that's a useful skill, and it's not easy. You have to be a bit of a monster to manage that. And it isn't obvious to me how many of even the divisive idiosyncrasies of Trump are the mirror image of his capacity to stand up to bullies, and that's a tough call.

When I look at what President Trump has actually accomplished, I am more impressed than I have been with any president since Ronald Reagan—who was himself a rough character I came to appreciate slowly.

On border security Trump has done remarkably well: reducing new illegal immigration and encouraging the departure of those who are already in the country without permission—through financial incentives when possible, force of law when not. Unfortunately, a president with a different attitude toward wide-open borders could wreak havoc again, but that's another issue.

Many people are bitterly disappointed because of our involvement in new foreign wars, and I don't blame them. America has been notoriously bad at overseas military involvement: stepping into hornets' nests and leaving after accomplishing little more than stirring them up. But I also realize that our national security is in bad shape on many levels and that sometimes war is necessary. At least Trump recognizes the danger that faces us on many fronts and is trying to address it. 

He has been hindered by the many court battles dogging his steps. The right to challenge policies in court is essential in a democracy, but it's hard to be effective when your actions keep getting put on hold. Even if you win in the end, delay is costly in battle. The process may be necessary, but I don't hold it against President Trump when others keep undercutting his efforts.

What pleases me most about this administration is that I, along with a great many others, finally feel heard. At last someone in power is considering some of the concerns I've had for decades. RFK Jr. hasn't done nearly as much in his position as I had hoped, but nonetheless he has successfully shone a spotlight on issues that many of us feel need addressing, especially in the areas of nutrition and health.

Overall, I am encouraged by what President Trump has accomplished. Am I satisfied? No. But I will hold to the path that still seems best.

My sister-in-law lives in coastal Connecticut. When your home is dominated by the ebb and flow of the waters, paying attention to what the tides are doing is an important life skill. Hence this tide clock, which has pride of place on her wall.

As part of her semi-annual clock-changing ritual this morning, she stepped from clock to clock, meticulously setting each one back an hour. When she came to the tide clock, she picked it up ... then smiled and returned it to its place.

Time and Tide, Sun and Moon have their own natural logic, no matter what man in his hubris may attempt.

I'm off to change the clocks!

Standard Time giveth and Daylight Time taketh away.

Blessed be Noon in its proper place!

I don't much like early voting, or vote-by-mail except for situations of absence or infirmity. There's something almost sacred about the act of voting at one's polling place on Election Day.

That said, we've voted all three ways in recent years, and today we used the Early Voting option. The political situation has become so dire, and election results so critical, that I'd rather vote early and know it's done than risk having an illness or an emergency make it impossible to get to the polls on the day itself.

I will not say, as some do, "Vote! It doesn't matter how you vote; what counts is that you participate." That's almost as ridiculous as the participation trophies so readily handed out to kids. What counts is learning the facts, considering the issues, and voting your conscience. If you and I disagree on candidates and ballot issues, I absolutely wish you'd stay home. But that's not my call. What your conscience tells you is between you and God—far above my pay grade.

I watched us lose the abortion war, and it's happening again.

In my late teens it became inevitable that America would broaden the situations in which abortions could be legally performed, and at that critical juncture the pro-life side made a wrong turn. Many Americans wanted the restrictions loosened a bit, but still recognized the terrible consequences of taking an innocent human life.  Even the pro-choice side wanted abortions to be "safe, legal, and rare" (emphasis mine). Many who would have supported laws that eased restrictions on early-term abortions and extreme situations (such as where the baby would die soon after being born) still opposed abortion for sex selection, for the elimination of children with medical challenges, or as backup birth control.  And they were horrified by the idea of late-term abortion.

But we made a fatal mistake: we refused to compromise. Politics is the art of compromise, and we were naïve. To be fair, if you believe that abortion is the deliberate choice to destroy a human life, it's hard to accept it at all. But I'm certain that if we had not been so absolutist at that point, we would ultimately have saved many millions of lives with the restrictions that then could have been put in place. Instead, we facilitated the culture of abortion in which we now live. You can't always get what you want.

I tell this story because I see the same thing happening today. Many people who voted for President Trump are so disappointed by what he has not been able to accomplish that they plan to turn their backs on this election and not vote. This is a serious mistake. America is in a precarious situation and we need to take a larger view. Now is not the time to give up just because we can't get all we'd hoped for. We've slipped into this peril slowly, and hoping to get out of it quickly is like expecting that the pounds we gained over the past 20 years can be lost in a month.

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
Well, you just might find
You get what you need

LUYH or IO?

I posted this back in May, but it's time for a reprise.

President Trump is trying to make Daylight Saving Time permanent!  If you're against him and everything he believes in, then I'm counting on you.  I'm COUNTING ON YOU to rise up against this affront to nature.  Tell your senators, tell your representatives, tell your state and local leaders.  (Don't tell Trump himself; that might have the opposite effect.)

IT'S TIME to take a stand against this unnatural practice!

(And if you're not against President Trump, I'm counting on YOU, too.)

If you're a very regular reader here, you may have noticed that the blog has been unavailable for a couple of days.  It is up again now, so if you come here more rarely you might not have noticed, but major changes have been made "under the hood."

A big Internet hacking threat has emerged, necessitating a major security update, one that completely broke the blog software we have been using for more than 20 years.  I guess it was due for an upgrade anyway, and am looking forward to what might be new and improved.

In the meantime, Lime Daley, our intrepid webhost, blog software manager, and general fix-what's-broken provider, is steadily correcting whatever is "new and not improved" or "old and broken." 

So things will look a little different here for a while, but we hope it will be acceptable and eventually even better.  Thanks for your patience!

Facebook's record for showing me items of value is dismal—but there are still enough gems to keep me on the platform.  Whatever is neither a good idea nor genuinely funny I prefer to ignore, because to write about bad things gives them publicity.  I've never forgotten one newspaper columnist who wrote, "I don't care if you love me or hate me, as long as you read my columns."

However, some ideas are so bad they require warnings, and a post I saw in my feed the other day needs to be called out.

It was a list, written as if from a mental health professional, of things people say that may sound helpful but are actually put-downs.  "When they say X, they're actually being disrespectful and insulting; you should answer their intentions rather than their words by responding Y."

If this were a one-off it might best be ignored, but I see a growing trend.

• 10 Signals that Your Partner Is Trying to Control You
• 15 Childrearing Practices that Are Actually Abuse (followed by a list of strategies whose primary fault appears to be that they do not conform to the writer's personal view of ideal parenthood)
• 6 Body Language Signs that Tell You When Someone Is Lying

And similar exhortations to worst-first thinking:  assuming that what a person says is not what he means, attributing to him the desire to do you harm, and never giving him the benefit of the doubt.

What's interpreted as malevolence may simply reflect cultural differences, stress, or perhaps physical problems.  (Memo to the body language expert who insists that frequent blinking is a sign that a person is lying:  It's much more likely that he is suffering from dry eyes, or has been staring at a screen too long, or finds the sunlight too bright.)

Unreasonable suspicion may at times be a survival tool, but it's the mark of an unhealthy society.  You cannot live well if you're always looking for hidden meanings, assuming the worst, and checking for monsters under your bed.  I know people who choose their seats in a restaurant based on these fears, but can you truly enjoy a meal if you're constantly scanning for villains who might burst through the door at any time, guns blazing?

Naïveté makes a person vulnerable, and willful ignorance invites trouble, but suspicion throws sulfuric acid on relationships.

Noah took me for a spin in a Cessna Skylane recently.

This is not our plane.

This is an F-22 Raptor, here from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia for a local air show. We taxied past it on our way to the runway. Fun fact: That plane is from the same unit that shot down the Chinese balloon a few years ago. Was it the same plane? We'll never know, but it's fun to imagine. According to Wikipedia, "On February 4, 2023, an F-22 Raptor took off from the base and shot down a Chinese balloon, marking the jet's first-ever combat air kill."

Our Skylane flight was not without its own excitement. Noah was performing maneuvers and at one point he cut the power and practiced landing as if the engine had failed. It was perfectly safe—he didn't turn the engine off, just put it into idle—but it was still thrilling to think that we were making the approach and landing without power.

Having never personally gotten over the Uniform Monday Holiday atrocity that changed our holiday calendar back in 1971, I am very pleased that this year I can wish you all a very

Happy Columbus Day!

on the "correct" day of October 12^th.

I still haven't gotten over the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, nor the use of CE and BCE instead of AD and BC, nor the movement that changed "Good Christian Men, Rejoice" into "Good Christian Friends, Rejoice." None of you will be surprised at my annoyance with celebrating Columbus Day on a day that honors not the landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas but Americans' desire to have a long weekend.

But this year they are one and the same, and if Columbus had not made that historic landing, there's a good chance I wouldn't be here. I consider that worth a celbration!

This is not the first time God has decided that his plans are better than mine; nor shall it be the last.

After a long year of depending on supply priests to lead our Sunday services, and on non-ordained staff and congregational volunteers to provide for the needs of our people, our church has called a new rector. It will be good to get someone who will belong to us, who will be the "Father" a priest is supposed to be for his flock.

But there's a problem. After all those months of praying for "a man after your own heart, who will lead us in right thinking, right belief, right action, right worship, wisdom, and love," God's answer to that prayer was ... a woman.

I'm all for women, and for women using their gifts, skills, and talents in church. After many years in a denomination that limited church leadership to men only, I know how narrow and hard-hearted a church without feminine influence can become.

I'm also okay with women pastors and priests, at least on a theoretical level. As far as practical experience goes, however, I find their record less than stellar: some good ones, some okay, and a few truly awful. Of course that is true of male pastors as well, but on the whole I feel men do a better job, or at least are better prepared for it. I'd rather hear a man preach than a woman. Furthermore, I don't believe women should be bishops, or even rectors. I'm a big fan of mothers, but especially in a denomination that calls its priests "Father," I believe the church should be led by someone who could actually be a father. Whether a priest should have that title at all is another issue, which I'll not deal with now—but "Mother" just doesn't cut it. "Mother Church" is not an individual person, and anyone titled "Mother So-and-so" sounds like a superior sort of nun. If I must call our new rector "Mother Lo," I'll probably have to resort to "hey, you." (No disrespect meant, but it reminds me of how I interacted with my mother-in-law. She didn't want to be called "Mrs. Wightman," and I couldn't make myself call her "Alice." So we generally managed to get along without names.) A mother is not a father, and vice versa. A church, like a family, needs a father to lead it.

But hey—I've endured pastors who were out-and-out heretical, pastors whose sermons were always three times as long as they should have been, leaders who made me think they cut all the seminary classes where they were supposed to have learned people skills, and preachers whose sermons never got past the very beginnings of the Christian life. However, every one of them also had strong points, and some were fantastic. I long ago stopped hoping to find a church that would be everything I wanted, or needed.

Church life is a family dinner, not a restaurant meal.

Our choir director assures me that I will love Rev. Lo, and he's a pretty good judge of such things, so that's encouraging. I'm looking forward to seeing how God demonstrates that his disappointing answer to my prayer was the best outcome for our church—even if I only get the answer Job received to his questions: I know what I'm doing, and you do not.

Would you like to live in Connecticut?  Check out this gorgeous home in Salem.  No, we're not selling it, though we do know the owners.  And we don't want to buy it.  The bulk of our immigrant ancestors did call Connecticut home, but at this point our roots run deep in Florida's sand.  But I can't deny that the Zillow listing is very attractive.  Here's a front view, and my favorite of the inside photos

If you are interesting in learning more about the recent FlyDubai hijacking, may I again recommend MentourPilot for straightforward, knowledgeable commentary with minimal speculation. Here you can click on his latest short posts for a taste. He's still collecting authoritative data and working on a long form post, which should be fascinating when it comes.

You won't get the lastest news and gossip, but you will get what appears to be reasonable and accurate data.