Lift Up Your Hearts!

[F]ailing to read in one's native language sends a negative message:  that the language and culture of native-language speakers are second-class, unworthy of widespread use. ... Learning to read and then to write in one's mother tongue sends the opposite message.  It reinforces the teaching that all people—and all languages—reflect the image of God. ... When people grow up learning to read first in a language they don't yet speak, they often miss the concept that reading is supposed to be a meaningful activity....  They can learn to decode, but they have no idea what they are learning.

These quotations are from a recent Christianity Today article on the advisability of teaching children to read in their native, "mother-tongue" language before introducing the complexities of a language that is foreign, even if it may be the country's official language.  In the Philippines,

Children in Lubuagan ... speak Lubuagan at home but learn a national language and an international language, in this case Filipino and English, at school.  (In case, like me, you were wondering what happened to Tagalog, which I always thought was the official language of the Philippines, according to the CIA World Factbook, the language is based on Tagalog but called Filipino.) ... In school, they learn to read in a language they don't really understand....  That makes it difficult for them to understand what they are learning.

The Philippines is one of many countries where emphasis is now being placed on first becoming literate in one's own language.  On the one hand, it's a much-needed change from a system in which children were punished for using their own language (much as Native Americans once were in school).

On the other hand, this approach misses the fact (as does the article) that learning in a foreign language is probably not the most important factor in low literacy rates.  Because the Swiss do it all the time, and Switzerland has a 99% literacy rate.

If you're a Swiss baby growing up in what is called German-speaking Switzerland, your native language is not High German—what we call simply "German"—but Swiss German (in one of many dialects).  But when you go to school, you learn in High German.  You learn to read in High German, because that's the official written language.

True, the Swiss have advantages that the Filipinos don't.  Swiss German and High German may have significant differences, but they're probably closer than many native and national languages.  Swiss children grow up surrounded by people who are literate and who read to them from books written in High German.  How they reconcile the differences between the language of speaking and the language of reading I don't know, but children are wonderfully adaptable.  Our grandson is equally fluent (at a two-year-old level) in English with Mommy and in Swiss German with Bappe.  For the moment he has found his own solution to the written vs. spoken problem:  When he "reads," following along with his finger, he moves his hand left-to-right when speaking English, and right-to-left when speaking Swiss German.

Nobody worries about the Swiss.

Even Wycliffe Bible Translators, dedicated for 70 years to the belief that "every man, woman and child should be able to read God’s Word in their own language" does not seem to care.  The Swiss missionaries I met had spent their lives translating the Bible into an African language—yet they laughed when I asked why Swiss German was left out of the vision.

Children are wonderful learners.  Whatever the problems are that lead to illiteracy amongst those whose native language differs from the national language, it's not from an innate difficulty in language-learning.  There are African and Indian communities in which it's common for people to speak at least three languages, often many more than that.  If, as the article states, children are "not learning to read until late in elementary school," decreasing their foreign language exposure can only be a stop-gap measure.

Good Friday.

Remembering the day all the sorrows of the world (and then some) were in some incomprehensible way taken on by the only one who (as fully both divine and human) could effectively bear them—albeit with unimaginable suffering.

I trust it is in keeping with the holiness of the day, and not in any way disrespectful or unmindful of its significance, to consider that as we, in the West at least, pay less and less attention to the significance of Good Friday, we find ourselves taking all the sorrows of the world on ourselves—and being crushed by them.

Consider the lives of our ancestors throughout almost all of history:  Most of them were born, died, and lived their entire lives in the same small community.  Even when they migrated, were taken captive, were exiled, or went to war, for all but a handful, their circle of experience remained small and local.

Our ancestors suffered greatly.  The unbearable sorrow of losing a child was not uncommon.  There was no easy divorce to sever marriages and blend families—but death played the same role.  The lack of sanitation, antibiotics, immunizations, and even a simple aspirin tablet made for disease, pain, and death on a scale most of us can’t imagine.  Starvation was often only a bad harvest away.  Slavery and slave-like conditions were taken for granted for most of history.  I’m not here to minimize the sufferings of the past.

But there is a very important however to their story.  Their pain was on a scale that was local and human.  They suffered, their families suffered, and their neighbors suffered.  Travellers might bring back tales of tragedy far away, but that was a secondary, filtered experience.

And today?  The suffering in our close, personal circles may indeed be less.  But our vicarious suffering is off the charts.  Whether it’s a murder across town, a kidnapping across the country, or a natural disaster halfway around the world, we hear about it.  In graphic, gory detail.  Over and over we hear the wailing and see the shattered bodies.  Full color, high definition, surround sound.

If that were not enough, our television shows and movies flood us daily, repeatedly, with simulated violence and horror, deliberately fashioned to be more realistic than life, so that, for example, we become less the observers of a murder than the victim—or the murderer himself.  (Not to let books off the hook, especially the more graphic and horrific ones, but their effect is somewhat limited by the imagination of the reader.)

No one imagines that the death of a stranger half a world away, much less in a scene we know is fictional, is as traumatic as a death "close and personal."  But a few hundred years of such vicarious suffering is not enough to reprogram the primitive parts of our brains not to kick into high gear with horror, anguish, and above all, fear.  Our bodies are flooded with stress hormones, and our minds tricked into believing danger and disaster are much more common than they are.  We repeatedly make bad personal and national decisions based on events, such as school shootings and kidnappings by strangers, that are statistically so rare that the perpetrators cannot be profiled.  We hear a mother wailing for her lost child, and our soul imagines it is our own child who has died.  We watch film footage of an earthquake and shudder when a tractor-trailer rolls by.  Did anyone see Hitchcock’s Psycho and enter the shower the next morning without a second thought?

Worse still, for these sorrows and dangers we can’t even have the satisfaction of a physical response.  We can’t fight, we can’t fly, we can’t hug a grieving widow; no matter how loudly we shout, Janet Leigh doesn’t hear us when we warn her not to step into the shower.  Writing a check to a relief organization may be a good thing, but it doesn’t fool brain systems that have been around a whole lot longer than checks.  Or relief organizations.

I don’t have a solution to what seems to be an intractable problem, although a good deal less media exposure would be a great place to start.  

The human body, mind, and spirit are not capable of bearing all the griefs that now assault us.  We are not God.

Upfront admission:  This is a First World problem, and I know there are millions in the Third World who would love to have it.  But we are First World people, and it is a problem.

Janet, our (almost) Swiss daughter, has a refrigerator about half the size of the one I had in my college dorm.  It is, understandably, uncomfortably full.  Heather, our New Hampshire daughter, and I each have what I'd call a normal-sized refrigerator.  Each is uncomfortably full.  My sister has a large refrigerator.  You guessed it:  her refrigerator is also uncomfortably full.  (Maybe that's only because I usually see it at Thanksgiving.  But I doubt it.)

Janet has a small cubicle in their apartment basement for storage, stuffed full.  Heather has a good-sized basement, and the only reason it's not yet stuffed full is that they just removed the large furnace and chimney that were taking up a good deal of the space.  My sister's basement is wonderfully large, but it has the same problem.  We don't have a basement, but I know what it would be like if we did.

Janet doesn't have a garage.  Heather has a one-car garage that is crammed with stuff.  We have a two-car garage, ditto.  My sister's three-car garage is in similar shape.

Janet's apartment is very small, with no closets and little cupboard space:  it's overcrowded.  Our four-bedroom house has decent cupboard and closet space:  it's overcrowded.  Heather just moved into a large Victorian monstrosity of a house, and their newly-renovated kitchen alone has awesome cupboard space.  But even after making allowances for temporary construction equipment and materials, it's clear that the house is well on its way to filling up.  Thanks to a taste for clean lines and an eye for beauty, my sister's very large house doesn't feel crowded (except at Thanksgiving), but her closets and cupboards are as full as the rest of ours.

I could go on:  Attics.  Bookcases.  Drawers.  Filing cabinets.  Even boxes.  I'm seeing a pattern here, and it's not good.

No matter how much or how little space we have, our possessions expand to fill it to the point of discomfort.  I wouldn't want to limit the food I have in our refrigerator to what would fit in Janet's.  But if she can manage, why can't I keep ours at the point where there's still wiggle room?  Why do our bookshelves hold books behind books, and books on top of books?  If we had fewer bookshelves we would have the same problem—but with a quantity of books that would fit comfortably on the shelves we do have.

I've come to believe that the problem is actually a mental miscalculation, similar to the one that results in my having almost-but-not-quite enough time to meet any deadline.  If I could have 30 more minutes before guests come for dinner, I would be relaxed and well-prepared.  If I could have one more day to prepare for our vacation, I would step onto the plane well-rested and confident.  If I had left home ten minutes earlier, I wouldn't be fretting about traffic and red lights.  What I want to do always fills up the time available—plus a little bit more.  Likewise, what I want to store always fills up the space available, plus a little bit more.

Solving this problem has become one of my Foundations 2013 goals.  Inspired by Janet's organizational and deluttering efforts, encouraged by some modest successes of my own, and cheered on by friends and family who are tackling similar projects, I hope to recalibrate my mental vision, or at least figure out how to compensate for its known errors.

Forgive me for not remembering where I got this link, and check out Dan Gilbert's TED talk on why paraplegics and lottery winners are equally happy a year after the event, why fixed choices lead to greater happiness than having the ability to back out of a decision (and the implications for marriages), and why Adam Smith was right in saying,

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.

A quick bit of inspiration, shared on Facebook by a long-time friend:

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey.

He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement he quieted down.

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up.

As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping stone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up.

Most of those who know me also know that I don’t like the government being involved in our health care, for too many reasons than I can go into now.  More than once I’ve asked, “Do you really want to trust your health to the same folks who are mangling public education?” 

Important note:  I support the public school system, much as I find fault with it.  There are many teachers among our family and friends.  Our own children attended the local schools for a number of years.  We pay school taxes, and have voted in favor of most requested tax increases, including last year’s. Everyone in the family has put countless hours into (public) school volunteer work.

Another important note:  I agree that our health care system is in a big mess, and big messes invite government interference whether we like it or not.  Personal experience of family and friends has shown me that public health care can work very well (France, Switzerland) and very badly (UK, Canada).  (I know there are readers of this blog who are happy with Canada’s health care, but I’m going by the experiences of those I know personally, which, alas, are negative.)  I don’t like the way in which our government is approaching health care reform, but that’s not the point here.

The point is consistency.

In the battle over health care, the faction I will loosely designate as “pro-government-social-program” (PSGP) wins for consistency:  The same people who are pushing national health insurance are ardent advocates of public education.  Viewing education as a fundamental, essential right of every child, they make it not only available but compulsory, and not only for the poor but for everyone, and expect everyone to participate.  They frequently oppose anything (private schools, home education, vouchers) that would allow students to opt out of monopoly government schooling.

Having concluded that the cost of a (possibly large) uneducated segment of the population is greater than the cost of providing “free” education to all, they are consistent in applying the same logic to health care.

I, on the other hand, am not consistent, and neither, it seems, are many with better conservative credentials than mine.  How can I support public education for all and not health care?  Why is it considered acceptable, even admirable, for everyone—including the rich—to take government assistance in the form of public education, but lower-class, even shameful to be on Medicaid, accept Food Stamps, or live in public housing?  What makes education so much more important than health care, food, or housing?

And maybe the PGSP’s are not as consistent as I thought, because I don’t see them pushing for compulsory soup-kitchen and housing project attendance.

Although … when our kids were in school, the school breakfast/lunch program, which served a useful purpose for poor children who otherwise would not eat, was pushed on everyone.  It wasn’t exactly mandatory, but the schools used plenty of promotions and advertisers’ tricks to get children to pressure their parents to send money for their lunches rather than pack them better food from home.  In the case of breakfast, they actually kept the other students trapped on the school bus until the breakfast-eaters were finished.  So who knows what's next in the minds of the PSGP's?

I don’t know where we’re going and what we’re in for with all this, and I don’t know how I’m going to rethink my attitude in regard to public education and/or health care.  But it certainly was a revelation to discover my own inconsistency.

Half the Sky:  Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

Inspired by the PBS documentary and the recommendation of a friend, I put myself on the library waiting list for Half the Sky.  As usually happens, it became available at an inconvenient time, and I had to return it to the library in a hurry.  That was back in October, so I'm trying to craft this review from my hastily-scribbled (typed) notes and quotes.

The book is better than the television show, if only because it features fewer American pop-culture icons and more real people.  It also, of course, gives more detail, though there is something to be said for the visceral effects of seeing and hearing the people behind the words.  Both left me with two distinct reactions, neither of which is probably what the authors had in mind.

When reading (or watching) these stories of unbelieveable brutality and oppression of women, the first, and no doubt intended, reaction is, "What are we doing to our women and girls, to the majority of the population of the world, to half of the very image of God?"  Particularly since the authors relate all these horrors while barely touching on the problem of sex-selective abortion.  And yet my lasting impression followed almost immediately:  What have we done to our men and boys?  Not everyone will agree, but I say that there is something even worse than the atrocities committed upon these women, and that is being the kind of person who commits such acts.  Ultimately, no solution to the problem of violence against women will succeed unless the rehabilitation of men is also addressed.

Not that women, as a sex, are innocent:

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains.  But it's not true.  Granted, men are often brutal to women.  Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters' genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take thieir sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.  One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war.

But by and large, men have the power, and they use that power in ways that hurt women, even their own wives and daughters.

Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending—by men.  it is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito net and then find the child's father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. ... Roughly 7 percent of the total spending of the poorest people in Indias's Maharashtra State went to sugar. ... [I]n much of the world even some of the poorest young men, both single and married, spend considerable sums on prostitutes. ... [A]t least in Udaipur, the malnutrition could in most cases be eliminated if families bought less sugar and tobacco. ... If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do in beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries.  Girls ... would be the biggest beneficiaries.

Or, as my son-in-law succinctly put it, "Men can't be trusted to bring home the bacon rather than eating it on the way home."

Why not?  Why is it that when women in poor countries get jobs, they use the money to feed and educate their children, but men spend their incomes (and their wives', if the money isn't hidden from them) on beer, cigarettes, and prostitutes?  It was (is) not always thus:  men used to be proud to support their families, and many still are.  Perhaps in this country one can cast some blame on feminism, which robbed men of the assurance that their own sacrifices were essential to their families' survival.  But in many poor countries little of the bread ever made it to the children's mouths until their mothers began earning it.  Here's one theory:

[Quoting David Landes, the eminent Harvard historian] The economic implications of gender discriminaion are most serious.  To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men.  One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment.

(On a side note, while I applaud the movement in some Christian circles to encourage boys and men in chivalry, graciousness, and love, I cringe when I see how often this is taught through the idea that boys are superior to girls—sometimes even to the extent of being stronger and wiser than their mothers!  As Landes said, this is not only harmful to their mothers and sisters, and future wives and daughters, but to the boys themselves.  Here's an article I ran into recently that addresses a related problem, and has the lovely title, Why You Should Stop Treating Your Husband Like a Toddler, and ACTUALLY Respect Him.)

On the bright side, as men see the economic potential and power of their wives, they often come to respect them more, and then see the value in educating their daughters.  On the other hand, there's a clear risk that they will only see the economic value, and women will find themselves further enslaved, working at a job, running the household as usual, and funding their husbands' bad habits as well.

Half the Sky rightly celebrates the efforts of women worldwide to address the problem of their own oppression, but it will take both men and women, working together, to address the heart of the tragedy.

I'll leave my second, and quite different, take-away from Half the Sky for another post.  I was going to add some more quotes, but as they, too, are on a different subject, so that will make a third post—a record for one book review, I think.

A friend made this comment about the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision:  While some of us commemorate this sad anniversary, others actually celebrate it.  Naturally, that set me thinking.  It's the celebration, not merely of the right to abortion, but of abortion itself, that makes this issue so weird, and so inflammatory.

I could so, so easily support leaving all difficult medical decisions to the family.  Having experienced painful, personal, life-or-death medical decisions myself, I know I don't want the government making them for me.  Because, like it or not, in this fallen world there are times when the better (not to say good) choice is to end life rather than to prolong it, to take a life rather than to save it.

But in our society there are many people who glorify, not just the legality of abortion, but the procedure itself, and that's where they lose me.  If we cheer when a criminal is executed, if the homeowner gets a thrill out of shooting the housebreaker, if the wholesale destruction of an enemy town causes rejoicing, if "pulling the plug" on an invalid is an easy decision, if we can end a child's life without grieving deeply and without seeing the action as anything other than a last, desperate resort ... then we know that no matter how necessary the choice may sometimes be, our consciences have been compromised and cannot be trusted.  And therefore we sometimes, however reluctantly, let the government in—to set the boundaries we refuse to set for ourselves.

A scene from a couple of weeks ago:

My husband, his sister, and our nephew are playing a game.  They have repeatedly assured me that they are having fun, and I must believe them, because as soon as they have completed this game they will move on to another—probably a two-person game so said nephew can return to the Lord of the Rings tome that has absorbed much of his free time this week.  (Despite repeated pleas for game-playing, he has managed to complete two of the six books thus far.  And win most of the games as well, which as you can imagine frustrates the dedicated game-players no end.)

However, an observer of the yells, groans, grimaces, and (mostly) muffled curses might be justified in imagining the participants engaged in arduous forced labor.  If this is fun, count me out.  Which they do;  my sister-in-law and I now have an agreement:  She doesn't ask me to play games with her and I don't ask her to ride roller coasters with me.  (Even though I couldn't resist sharing that Manta is the Best Roller Coaster Ever.)

It got me to thinking.  I was a reasonably normal child, and our family enjoyed playing games together; why, then, do I usually find the idea of scrubbing the kitchen floor more attractive than playing games?

I've come up with a few reasons, none of which is completely convincing in itself.

Time (specifically, the lack thereof) is certainly a big factor.  With a Bucket List^* heavy enough to make Giles Corey plead, I'm not inclined to spend hours on an activity that is neither my duty nor particularly enjoyable.  But that just begs the question:  Why do I no longer find games enjoyable?

My lastest inspiration is that not all game players are alike.  There are those who play to play, and there are those (the majority, apparently) who play to win.  I believe I am in the first category.  It's not that I don't like winning, but it makes me very uncomfortable if any of the other players is made unhappy in the process.  Perhaps it comes from being seven or more years older than my siblings; that kind of age difference precludes developing a cuthroat approach to games.  The day my young brother freaked out over being "attacked" in a game of Flinch was the day I lost interest in playing the game.  I also remember an incident when one of my childhood friends and I were playing Monopoly:  she was losing, and became upset, whereupon I shifted strategies so that she won (without, I hope, noticing that I was throwing the game), and afterwards contrived to avoid playing games with her whenever possible.

Then again, it may be my attention span.  I generally am not fond of watching movies—the thought of committing 2 - 3 hours to a movie makes me feel claustrophobic; I'm trapped.  On the other hand, I do enjoy watching several 40-minute episodes of a good mystery television series one after another.  I may end up spending three hours staring at the screen, but there are several built-in escape hatches should I wish to bail out.  Games are the same way:  The games I enjoy playing are short, and though I may play several in a row, I'm not stuck with a long-term commitment.

Or it may be a dislike of regulations and complex rules, the same attitude that turned me off completely to organized sports.  In elementary school I loved sports.  I loved soccer, and baseball, and volleyball, and every other competitive sport we played, both in gym class and at recess.  On summer nights the kids in our neighborhood almost always convened for kickball or another game until it was too dark to see.  But these were wild-and-wooly, free-for-all games, even in gym class.  We followed the basic rules about scoring, but with none of the strategy.  In soccer there were no rules about who could chase the ball, and most of the game was spent tearing up and down the field as everyone tried to get the ball into the goal.  (Needless to say our passing game was not very intelligent.)  Volleyball was a friendly game, with the main object being to get the ball over the net; there were no nasty spikes, no need to stay in your assigned position.  And the play was generally supportive, with teams encouraging one another.  It wasn't about winning, although winning was fun; it was about the sheer joy of physical activity and growing strength, endurance, agility, and skill. 

Along about middle school, however, everything changed.  Suddenly, winning mattered more than playing; ability and strategy mattered; and rules multiplied.  Sports simply were no fun anymore, and I retreated from being an eager, active player to one who did no more than the minimum required by gym class.  I vividly remember my first and last volleyball game at an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship camp in college:  I'd been told it was important for camp fellowship, and was a friendly game.  My siblings, avid volleyball players themselves, would have found it friendly and relatively non-competitive, I'm sure, but the intensity and the yelling and the insistence on hitting the ball "right" (rather than just getting it over the net) completely spoiled the game for me.  Fellowship or no fellowhip, I wasn't at that conference to be screamed at and then made to feel guilty for not enjoying the misery.  As C. S. Lewis said, "Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure."

Those are the ideas I've come up with so far.  I don't think they completely explain my attitude, but it was an interesting meditiation and I've probably unearthed some significant factors.

Do you have any other suggestions?  What kind of game-player are you? 

^*I'm told I use the term Bucket List incorrectly, that it's supposed to be for things like riding in a hot air balloon, travelling to New Zealand, or climbing Mt. Everest.  But can I help it if the things I want to accomplish before I die are more mundane?  Not that "get all our photos scanned, organized, and put into albums" doesn't seem an awful lot like climbing Mt. Everest.

I should be working on a more profound post, such as my New Year's resolutions, but going through my neglected inbox provoked a quick post for your bemusement.  It's always important to read the instructions for a new appliance, right?  So before tossing the single sheet that came with the electric lift/recliner chair we bought in honor of my father-in-law's visit, I felt obliged to look it over.  (Never mind that we've been using the chair for a month....)

Really, I do usually read instructions, and I certainly keep them for anything important.  However, the single "instruction" was a very large image of a controller with two buttons, one labelled "Down" and the other labelled "Up."  I'm pretty sure I can remember that.

The reverse of the page is more interesting.  The Important Safety Instructions there include:

• Do not reach for a product that has fallen into water.  Unplug immediately.
• Do not use while bathing or in a shower.

Did I mention that this is a recliner chair?  A large, heavy, recliner chair?  It's theoretically possible that a tornado could deposit it in our swimming pool (conveniently unplugging it as well), but by no stretch of the imagination can I conceive of installing it in the shower, even if it would fit.

We laughed when the safety instructions started telling us not to use our hair dryers in the shower.  This is beyond laughter into head-shaking grief at the state of society.  Who needs a Fiscal Cliff?  We've already jumped off a more dangerous precipice.

The Holiday Season.

It's a descriptive name, covering an increasingly wide expanse of holidays that began simply as Christmas and now includes all possible holidays of any faith (religious or secular) from Hallowe'en to New Year's Day—as long as they can be contorted to include a ritual of spending lots of money.

But it's an awkward moniker, and offensive to Christians, who are understandably miffed at having the Christmas (literally, "Christ's mass") season (technically, December 25 - January 5, unless you're Orthodox) steamrollered by beliefs, attitudes, and practices that are decidedly un-Christian in nature.  Thus the season of "peace on earth, goodwill towards men" and "tidings of comfort and joy"—taken completely out of context, of course—is also beset with the annual (and impossible) admonition to "keep Christ in (secular) Christmas," along with fighting over whether "Happy Holidays" is an acceptable greeting, and where and how Nativity scenes may be displayed.

Therefore I'm going to put forth a modest proposal:

• That Christians should freely accept that we are strangers in a strange land, and following God's instructions to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, "seek the peace and prosperity" of our country without expecting lip service to our faith from those who don't even remember, let alone follow it.  If I choose not to patronize an institution, it will be for a better reason than that an over-worked sales clerk wished me "Happy Holidays."
• That the secular world should freely acknowledge that Christmas belongs to Christians, and choose a name for the Holiday Season that more accurately reflects the meaning, purpose, and deity of this time of year in a decidedly secular and materialistic society.^*  Acknowledging both the Ancient Roman holiday of mid-to-late December, the name of which is now synonymous with excess, self-indulgence, and licentiousness, and the patron-demon of hyper-consumption, I propose that this new American holidy be called,

Mammonalia

I know better than to think that I'm the first to coin this word, but a Google search pulls up surprisingly few references, so I can safely say, you read it here first.

I don't read a lot of post-election analysis any more than I paid attention to most of the pre-election rhetoric.  But every once in a while a gem comes my way, and when that happens I want to share it.

Today's hopeful commentary comes from a Canadian professor, John Stackhouse.  The whole post is short, but here's the heart of it.

[I]n his article “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (collected in “The Weight of Glory” and Other Essays), [C. S.] Lewis says some hopeful words about pretty large matters to encourage us in the wake of the American election, with its global implications, and in anticipation of…well, the rest of today, and every day following:

I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis [Lewis is not thinking small, here!], not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.

I have had a dentist stop a particularly violent toothache: an abscess that kept me up all night in quite acute pain. He is now a Friend for Life. He has not eradicated toothache; he can’t even prevent the next one from happening to me, despite his best efforts (and those of his relentlessly cheerful and insistent dental hygienist). But he did his job when I needed him to do it, and while Humanity was not benefited, I in particular surely was. And that certainly means a lot to me.

So: most of us can’t work wholesale, but retail. And even those who do work wholesale are wise to take Lewis’s words to heart, as the rest of us ought to, also. Work away at “what your hand finds to do” in the providence of God, and you’ll make an actual difference.

This year's Vetrans Day tribute is to all the U.S. (and pre-U.S.) veterans among our direct ancestors.

Pequot War, 1634-1638:  Thomas Barnes, Jonathan Brewster, Thomas Bull

King Philip's War, 1675-1678:  John Curtiss, Isaac Davis, Isaac Johnson

Queen Anne's War (part of the War of the Spanish Succession), 1702-1713:  Giles Doud

French and Indian War (part of the Seven Years' War), 1754-1763:  Samuel Chapman, Moses Whitney

Revolutionary War, 1775-1983: Jonathan Burr, Erastus Chapman, Agur Curtiss, Nathaniel Fox, Nehemiah Gillett, Christopher Johnson, Stephen Kelsey, Seth Langdon, James Pennington, Oliver Scott, Joseph Scovil, Henry Shepard, Elihu Tinker, Benjamin Welles, Moses Whitney

Civil War, 1861-1865:  Phillip Barb, Anson Bradbury, Robert Bristol, David Rice, Nathan Smith

World War I, 1914-1918:  Howard Langdon, George Smith

World War II, 1939-1945:  Alice Porter (Wightman), Bill Wightman

(If you notice a significant lack of any veterans from the Korean conflict to the present, you might guess my age if you didn't already know it.)

I'm sure there were more whose names I don't know.  There must be someone from the War of 1812, but I haven't found him yet.  I'm sure they weren't all always completely honorable, because they were ordinary people.  They didn't even always fight on the same side.  But one thing, for certain, they all had in common:  They gave their bodies, their lives, their health, and their futures to stand "between their loved home and the war's desolation."  For that I thank and honor them, and those who still make that sacrifice today.

At first, I thought I was reading about an incredible medical breakthrough, instead of the evacuation of a hospital in New York City.  No, that's not true.  At first, I passed over the numbers, as I often do.  So, I suspect, do most people.  (Okay, not Joseph.  But most people.)

New mom Jo-An Tremblay-Shepherd said, "The power went off completely, and all of the monitors, you're seeing all these monitors here, and there's a lot of buzzing and whatnot and everything just went."

Tremblay-Shepherd's son, Jackson, born 27 weeks prematurely, was carried in the dark by a nurse who also held his oxygen tank.

But the back of my mind wouldn't let it go.  Born 27 weeks prematurely?  So I stopped to calculate.  Normal gestation is 40 weeks, 40 minus 27 is ... 13?  Thirteen weeks?  The quintuplets I pray for were born at more than twice that age, just shy of 28 weeks, which is 12 weeks prematurely, and although they are doing well for their age, life has not been easy for any of them.

So I turned to Google, and learned that the youngest premature baby to survive was born at 21 weeks, five days.  At 13 weeks, the baby is but three to three-and-a-half inches long.

So, obviously, the CBS News article was wrong.  The baby was no doubt born at 27 weeks gestation, not 27 weeks prematurely.  Not much more than a typo.  But it set me thinking:  How many of the numbers that assail us in news articles and broadcasts do we absorb without thought, let alone fact-checking?  How much information that is just plain wrong has become part of our national consciousness?  What inaccuracies, mistakes, and downright lies do we propagate unthinkingly?

Scary.

We watched the first half of the PBS documentary Half the Sky last night.  (Quarter the Sky?)  The conclusion is tonight.  I highly recommend it, but not for grandchildren.  Here's the trailer.

The shows will be available for one week at PBS video (maybe not in Europe, sorry).  Here is the link for Part 1.  I'll update with Part 2 when it is released, which should be tomorrow.  And here's Part 2.

Note on flu shots:  This year they're pushing the intradermal shot.  Personally, I think it's because they can use a lower dose, and therefore make the supply go farther.  But they're hyping it as less painful ("90% smaller needle").  No matter how many times I told him needles don't bother me ("I gave blood yesterday!"), the nurse practitioner who administered the shot kept emphasizing the small needle and consequent reduced pain.

Based on a sample size of two, I'm here to say that that is bunk.  Both Porter and I agreed that the intradermal shot hurt more than a regular injection, not less.  I hope our grandkids appreciate the sacrifice.  :)

 Last Saturday was the opening concert for the Orlando Philharmonic's 20th Anniversary season.  Pausing only briefly to wonder how the "new kid on the block" can be twenty years old already—I've done that several times already, the latest being only last month, with the first of our nephews to leave the teenage years behind—I'll just say that Maestro Christopher Wilkins once again began the season with a blockbuster program guaranteed to fill the house.  One work:  Mahler's Third Symphony.  No intermission.  Nearly 110 minutes long.  The first movement alone is longer than the entirety of Beethoven's Fifth.  The orchestra did a great job, but I have to say that they were upstaged by the members of the Florida Opera Theatre Youth Program.  Some of those kids were as young as seven, they were highly visible on a platform well above the orchestra, the part that they had to sing was brief and late in the symphony, and they did not fidget.  They sat still, they kept their hand in their laps most of the time, and they at least appeared attentive.  In short, they did better than me.

I was not familiar with Mahler's Third; it's not programmed often, and I can see why:  the orchestra is much larger than that required for most performances, and there's a large chorus as well.  E-X-P-E-N-S-I-V-E.  I'm glad the OPO took the plunge to offer it.  I do have to say, however, that—unlike Mahler's First, which was love at first hearing for me—this one may take a little more exposure for me to appreciate.  I found most of the movements reasonably enjoyable, but the sixth and last was interminable.  I don't think that had to do with the fact that we'd been sitting for so long as that to my ears it didn't seem to get anywhere.  Slowly.

Still, it was a good experience, quite possibly once-in-a-lifetime.  We don't even have a copy of Mahler's Third in our extensive music library, though that of course could be remedied.