Lift Up Your Hearts!

I've already written (here and here), about some of the dangers of epidural anesthesia during childbirth.  Today's reports bring still more bad news to those who see epidurals as an important part of the birthing process: an apparent link between fentanyl (a component of the anesthesia) and subsequent problems with breastfeeding.

I do feel sorry for Lake Brantley High School's band. When our kids played in it, many of the members secretly (or not so secretly) wanted the football team to lose so they wouldn't extend the marching season by making the playoffs. (An understandable side effect of the unreasonable rule requiring students to play in the marching band if they wanted to be part of the concert band.)

Still, even the hardest-hearted (that would have been me, had I known) must have felt a thrill when Brantley became the first Seminole County football team to play in a State Championship game, which was held at Miami's Dolphin Stadium last night.

They lost the game to the powerhouse Miami Northwestern team. But they won more than they lost, according to Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Bianchi. Some excerpts from today's column:

Lake Brantley High didn't win the Class 6A state championship Saturday night, but it accomplished something even more admirable. None of the Patriots' players was arrested or paid off this past week.

Miami Northwestern's star running back was arrested last week on a felony charge of lewd and lascivious battery.... Any questions about whether [he] would be allowed to play against Lake Brantley on Saturday night were quickly answered when he was introduced before the game and received an ovation 10 times louder than any other player on the team.

If you wonder where college and professional athletes get their sense of privilege and pretension, look no further than the state's powerhouse high-school football programs. [Miami Northwestern isn't the only Florida high school football team with documented ethics violations.] Brantley's coaches and administrators obviously didn't get the memo: If you want to win the state championship, leave your conscience at home.

Get this: Lake Brantley actually has something called a "citizenship policy" that precludes athletes from participating in games not only for breaking major rules but for simple conduct violations. There have been instances when Patriots athletes have missed games for unexcused tardiness. "If one of our kids had been arrested, he wouldn't be playing in the state championship game," Lake Brantley Coach George Clayton said.

Lake Brantley may not have won the state championship Saturday night, but it did something even better in my book. The Patriots put the class back in Class 6A.

We went for a long walk around the neighborhood tonight, looking at the many inventive and beautiful Christmas light displays. But the very best light show of all occurred just as we reached home: the night liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Daytime launches are wonderful enough, but night launches are sublime.

In a moment of weakness, I brought home a Rubbermaid bin full of family books, papers, and photographs from my sister's house when we were there for Thanksgiving. It only made sense: I'm the genealogist in the family; I have many other boxes of family material already; these are things I need to sort through, analyze, and scan eventually; and my sister was cleaning out her basement.

On the other hand, what was I thinking?

My sister's house is MUCH bigger than ours, and I know I'm not going to get to these particular papers for a long time yet. I brought the bin into the house, and stared in some despair at the overstuffed closet in my office. Living in Florida, we have no basement, and neither the attic nor the garage can provide suitable storage for papers. So before the new box could go into my closet, a major makeover was required.

Not exactly what I wanted to do this month, but it's done, the closet looks wonderful (if still over-full), and I feel great. What's more, I had taken two empty Rubbermaid bins out of our garage to pack for our trip, brought home one full of papers to keep (now stored in my closet), and still managed to return THREE Rubbermaid bins to the garage this afternoon!

Whoo-hoo! Now I just have to deal with the rest of my office...and try to forget that each of the bins piled in my closet represents an enormous amount of work waiting to be done. As Janet said, my to-do list isn't long, it's high.

The Seminole Indians never surrendered to the U. S. Government; perhaps they knew that time and patience would be the keys to eventual success. Florida's Seminole Tribe has conquered the Hard Rock Empire. As far as I know, no blood was shed in the acquisition, but nearly a billion dollars changed hands.

(For those who care, I use the politically incorrect term, "Indians," because that's what the local Seminole folks said they preferred.)

The sad part of the story is that I remember when many of the Seminole leaders argued that they didn't want to become involved with casinos because that would be immoral. I can't really blame the Indians for taking advantage of any legal means to lift up their people, but it's sad.

I also fear for them, not only because sudden wealth often leads to disaster, but also because I doubt there is any situation in which large amounts of money can be made that does not attract the attentions of organized crime.

In the meantime, it is sweet revenge on the descendants of their conquerors—as if tobacco weren't enough.

I'm not holding a grudge, and have recently fallen in love with Japan and her people, but history, remembrance, and memorials are important, so it is sad to note that FDR's date which will live in infamy is mostly ignored.

Yet Ed Hayes came through, as did BC and Mallard.

Yesterday I tried to buy Porter some razor blades. It may be the biggest shopping season of the year, but some people are making it awfully difficult to spend my money.

It was bad enough last week when it took just short of a passport and my firstborn child to buy a small package of Sudafed. There was no extended paperwork nor photo ID requirement to buy razor blades, but the process was actually much more annoying.

I was at our local Albertsons grocery store and quickly found the brand of blades Porter had requested. But instead of slipping easily off the rack and into may cart, the package was stopped by a rude, red button that said, "See Sales Associate." Right. If there was one thing I couldn't see, it was a sales associate. Anywhere.

After standing in line at the pharmacy, I found a lady willing to page someone to help me. Back at Aisle 14, I waited. And waited. And investigated all the varieties of Curel hand lotion and several other products available in that aisle. Good ploy, perhaps, to get me to browse the shelves, but I was getting annoyed. So back to the pharmacy I went, not patient to stand in line this time, going right up to the counter and asking for a repeat page.

The page was duly repeated, but so was my experience. By this time Janet had returned from doing all the rest of the shopping, so she waited in Aisle 14 while I went to the service desk. No one there could help me, they said cheerfully, as only the store manager is entrusted with a key. (Maybe they should keep the razor blades in the safe.) I asked if I should just tell my husband to grow a beard. They paged the manager, and I retreated once more to what was becoming my least favorite aisle of the store. Janet and I had a nice chat. Alone.

Since it had now been about 20 minutes since I had begun my quest for the Elusive and Apparently Dangerous Razor Blades, I applied the three-strikes-and-you're-out rule. While Janet proceeded to the checkout line, I stopped one more time at the service desk to let them know I was giving up, and to ask for a complaint form. Thus spurred into action, the lady behind the desk rushed out and flagged down another employee. I don't know who he was, but he wasn't the manager, and had just come in from the loading dock. Whatever—he was my hero. With profuse apologies, he walked with me to Aisle 14, reached up to the display, and with a neat flick of his box cutter, liberated the package of razor blades. "They don't trust us with the key," he explained, "so we have to do this frequently."

I love a person who can quickly assess a problem and as quickly solve it, even if—or maybe especially if—the solution is a bit unorthodox. Whoever he was, he should go far, having shown more concern over the potential loss of a customer—and a $20 sale—than anyone else in the store, including the manager.

Jonathan, who just turned three, met me on the stairs with a blue cable in his hand. As I passed, I remarked, "That looks like a Cat 5 cable." "No it's not," he responded, "It's a USB cord." (He was right.)

Central Florida news teams were positioned to cover what they thought would be the big news of the night—the election—and had to scramble when the weather took center stage.

Have you ever stood in the ocean and had a wave suddenly break over your head? Now imagine that the wave doesn't recede, but continues to pour over you for half an hour, and you have a picture of yesterday's rainstorm. If there's been a heavier downpour in all our 20-some years here, I don't remember it.

I like weather, if I'm watching it from a safe position, and might have thoroughly enjoyed the experience if Janet had been home with me. Instead, I took the storm as a call to prayer, since she was out running errands. I'm sure I was almost as glad to hear the sound of the garage door opening as she was to be driving in. On the main highway, a truck (driving at all of maybe 35 mph) completely enveloped her little car with spray as it passed, blinding her for several seconds. Once in the neighborhood, the main street, even at the top of the hill, was flooded to the sidewalks, and visibility was nearly zero. Just after the storm passed over us, it turned vicious, spawning a tornado that divested some houses in Oviedo of their roofs.

I don't know what effect the storm might have had on the election, but I'm sure that many people driving home from work through the deluge decided not to bother to stop at the polls on the way. I had voted earlier in the day, my usual hodgepodge procedure of voting for whoever I like best, Republican or Democrat. I suppose you could say I "won," since the election went my way on about 2/3 of the issues. However, I'm not rejoicing, since I lost on the only issue I really cared about. Seminole County had the opportunity to authorize a very small ad valorem tax for the purpose of purchasing environmentally sensitive lands and developing recreational trails and pedestrian bridges, and it failed 51% to 49%. I'm guessing too many people voted reflexively anti-tax. Not that I blame them entirely, as that is my own tendency, but in this case the cost was small and the benefits enormous; we have lost a great opportunity.

To Whom It May Concern:

If you need to reach us, try the good ol' telephone, or leave a comment here. For some bizarre reason our e-mail is down, even though our general Internet service is working fine. I've only been able to get a few e-mails all day, and none at all in recent hours,

It appears to work for sending, though I don't really know that, either. I'll have to remember to check when it comes back up and see if what I sent was actually received.

"When it comes back up." Soon, I hope. But at present the technicians have no projected duration of the outage....

Last night we heard the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra play Pierre Jalbert's deeply moving In Aeternum, which he wrote as a memorial to his niece who died at birth. Naturally, my thoughts were about Isaac as I listened, running a gamut of emotions, including anger during an intense part of the work with a heartbeat motif running through it—that brought back memories of the doctor who interrupted the family's last moments together to tell them Isaac's heart rate was slowing down.

I had the privilege of speaking briefly with Jalbert afterwards and was able to tell him (though not fully express) how much the music meant to me. You can hear an exerpt of In Aeternum here.

(Some readers of this blog will be interested to know that Jalbert is a native son of Manchester, New Hampshire!)

Having been set up by last night's experience, I was not prepared to handle this morning's news from the United Kingdom: The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology is recommending active euthanasia for severely disabled newborns.

In these days of extreme medical care, the right and wrong of a situation is often a messy shade of grey. I fully support the right of a family to bring a loved one—young, old, or in between—home to die in friendly, familiar, natural surroundings, even if medical intervention would extend that person's life. This has nothing to do with actively, purposefully killing a helpless, innocent human being whose existence has become difficult or expensive, and the two issues should not be conflated. That respected doctors should hold such a position does nothing to bolster my already-waning trust in the medical profession.

I have no doubt that financial considerations weighed heavily in this recommendation, and I am saddened and angry for the new parents who—at the moment of their greatest grief and heartache—will face pressure from the UK's National Health Service to allow their babies to be cheaply killed rather than run up expensive medical bills. Nor do I have any illusions that the trend will stop with newborns.

John Harris, a member of the official Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University, welcomed the college's submission. "We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term, but cannot kill a newborn," he told The Sunday Times. "What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it OK to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not the other?"

If conception is not enough of a momentous occurrence to mark the beginning of a life worthy of protection...if viability outside the womb is not...if the moment of birth is not...then we are left with nothing at all.

Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee, 2001)
Captivating, by John and Stasi Eldredge (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee, 2005)

When a good friend lent me Wild at Heart, it took a long time for me to steel myself to read it, for I expected it to make me angry. I've had more than my fill of books, especially from Christian authors, telling men to be authoritative and women to wear makeup and Saran Wrap.

After the first few pages, I was sure I was right, and I was going to hate the book. But I kept reading—something I'm not sure was true of many of those who wrote the negative reviews I read—and became convinced it's a worthwhile book. Oh, there's plenty I found exasperating, a lot I disagree with, and much that's expressed poorly, but Eldredge is asking important questions and has a few good answers. Although it deals with much more than just the church, the book is worth reading if only because it dares reveal church as a place where, all too often, the men are bored and the women are tired—and offers a remedy. Captivating attempts to do for women what Wild at Heart does for men. It is not as good, but still valuable.

(I wonder why it is almost all of my reviews these days seem to boil down to, "This book has some good things to say even though it requires a lot of work to get past the way in which they are presented.")

If you're expecting a summary of the books, you'll be disappointed. I dislike summarizing books, even if I have time. Not only am I no good at it, but I believe that if a book is worth reading, it can't be effectively distilled; you must read it for yourself to get the truth it has to offer. "What's the bottom line?" is an inappropriate question for a good book. Herewith, then, not a review—because the library is sending me dunning notices; I am engrossed in a serious battle with Windows and Palm for the soul of my computer; and choir practice starts in two hours—but several random quotations (italicized) and points of commentary. [Correction: choir practice started and ended; the night passed into day; and I'm still not done. Could it really have taken longer to write a more formal review than just these bits and pieces? Well, yes, it could and would have.]

 

• Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce. But the soul refuses to be harnessed…. The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for life…. A man needs to feel the rhythms of the earth; he needs to have in hand something real—the tiller of a boat, a set of reins, the roughness of rope, or simply a shovel. The chief strength of Wild at Heart is its realization that modern society is trapping, taming, and enslaving us. The first sentence of this quotation could be said as much of the school as of the corporation, and it is applicable to women and girls as well as to men and boys. Although the author doesn't quote Wordsworth, I'm sure he would also say, "The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." The chief weakness of the book is its portrayal of both the problems and the solutions as special to the male sex. It is possible that men have been more afflicted than women, but that's no excuse for denying women both the recognition and the remedies. Eldredge has some wonderful suggestions for raising our sons; I'm saddened that some will read his book and not realize they are equally valid—and important—for our daughters.

• If the Eldredges would use words like "some" and "many" instead of "all," their pronouncements would be much more believable. Anyone who tells me that all girls love to wear "twirly" skirts and to preen in front of a mirror, and all women delight in painting their toenails and in wearing jewelry, immediately loses credibility because I know it's not true.

• I've noticed that so often our word to boys is don't. Don't climb on that, don't break anything, don't be so aggressive, don't be so noisy. But God's design—which he placed in boys as the picture of himself—is a resounding yes. Be fierce, be wild, be passionate. So true!—and at least as true of girls. Children, male and female, wither under a constant "no" and an artificial taming of their nature. Denied reasonable opportunities to take risks, test their strength, and satisfy their need for adventure, they will either weaken and retreat or seek their adventures in unreasonable, more dangerous ways.

• The Eldredges rightly emphasis the importance of fathers in the lives of both boys and girls, and pins on them the responsibility for delivering both the affirmations that lead us to true personhood and—sadly, more often—the wounds that cripple us.

• [Forgiveness] is not saying, "It didn't matter"; it is not saying, "I probably deserved part of it anyway." Forgiveness says, "It was wrong, it mattered, and I release you."

• Much of the criticism I've seen of Wild at Heart is similar to my original fears, decrying any attempt to return us to a society of chest-beating men and passive, women valued only for their appearance. A cursory reading of the book might support that fear, but Eldredge is clearly not saying that, even if it sounds like it in isolated passages. There is plenty of support here for men as musicians as well as mountain climbers, and for women with careers both within the home and without. There is much about his definitions of masculine and feminine I question, but I also concede the possibility that there is more to what he's getting at than my prejudices currently allow me to respond to.

• We are faking our way through life, sure we will be found out. Violence is a coverup for fear, so is hardworking achievement, so is passivity.

• When the Bible tells us that Christ came to "redeem mankind" it offers a whole lot more than forgiveness. To simply forgive a broken man is like telling someone running a marathon, "It's okay that you've broken your leg. I won't hold that against you. Now finish the race."

• The Big Lie in the church today is that you're nothing more than "a sinner saved by grace." You are a lot more than that. You are a new creation in Christ.

• [Eldredge quoting someone he does not name] Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

• Anyone who quotes George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton wins major points in my book. I can't wait to read more of the Chesterton essay from which Eldredge extracted this homage to a homemaker's job: To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.

• I think one reason I found Captivating weaker than Wild at Heart is that the Eldredges have three boys and no girls. They seem to understand boys a lot better than they do girls, though perhaps I feel that way because our children were girls and not boys. Another weakness in both books is that John and Stasi each grew up in fairly dysfunctional families, which helps them identify more with brokenness and healing, but leaves me wondering what they truly know of healthy life situations.

• [Eve] is the crescendo, the final, astonishing work of God. Woman. In one last flourish creation comes to a finish not with Adam, but with Eve. She is the Master's finishing touch.

• Eve is God's relational specialist given to the world to keep relationship a priority…. [B]ecause of the Trinity, relationship is the most important thing in the universe.

• Wild at Heart's descriptions of who men are, what they've lost, and how they might regain it reminds me very much of The Compleat Mother magazine, which comes from a totally different perspective. Yet its analysis of how modern attitudes toward pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding have stolen from women our birthright, our strength, and our heart is similar to Eldredge's view of society's emasculation of men. Although the authors touch briefly on the uniqueness of a woman's role in giving life, literally and metaphorically, I find their cursory treatment of the subject to be a glaring omission, a gaping hole in their philosophy. The maternal force that wells up in even tiny girls is far more significant and important than swirling skirts and painting toenails!

• This complaint is probably of little consequence to most, though I found it a significant impediment to understanding the books: in both the authors frequently make their points through references to movies and popular songs, which meant they were largely lost on me. What am I to make of a passage like this: "Think of Fran in Strictly Ballroom, or Tulah in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Remember Lottie in Enchanted April, Adrian in Rocky, or Danielle in Ever After." I can only respond, "Huh?" I have heard of Rocky, and even watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding, though it didn't help any because I have no memory of who Tulah was. More exasperating, however, are references to movies I know, because then it's clear that the analogies given are based solely on cinematic characters. When Eldredge talks about William Wallace, he's speaking of the character portrayed by Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, not the real, historical Scottish hero on whom the movie is loosely based. Examples from The Lord of the Rings reference scenes and dialogue that never appeared in the book, and which for all I know are quite contrary to J.R.R. Tolkien's intent. I'm not against fiction, which is the best medium for conveying some truths, and I certainly can be inspired by movies. But both the analogies and the frequent use of them in these books shout to me that the authors and I live in vastly different worlds, which leads me to wonder how applicable their conclusions can be to my life.

• We are in the late stages of the long and vicious war against the human heart…. I am not hawking fear at all; I am speaking honestly about the nature of what is unfolding around us…against us. And until we call the situation what it is, we will not know what to do about it. In fact, this is where many people feel abandoned or betrayed by God. They thought becoming a Christian would somehow end their troubles, or at least reduce them considerably. No one ever told them they were being moved to the front lines, and they seem genuinely shocked at the fact that they've been shot at.

• If you wanted to learn how to heal the blind and you thought that following Christ around and watching how he did it would make things clear, you'd wind up pretty frustrated. He never does it the same way twice. He spits on one guy; for another, he spits on the ground and makes mud and puts that on his eyes. To a third he simply speaks, a fourth he touches, and a fifth he kicks out a demon. There are no formulas with God.

The bottom line (not of the books, but of my reactions): Wild at Heart, and to a lesser extent Captivating, are much better books than a cursory glance could lead one to believe. There is error here, and much confusion, but there are also truths and ideas and revelations that we cannot afford to ignore.

Economists are accustomed to drawing conclusions from statistical studies and aggregations of data. It's hard to reduce economic behavior to controlled, double-blind studies, and laboratory rats aren't necessarily a good model for corporate rats. So it came as no surprise to me that some Cornell University economists thought they might get a handle on the elusive cause of childhood autism by studying rainfall and the availablity of cable television. Working from the assumption that children spend more hours watching television in households that have cable TV, and in locations where high rainfall keeps them indoors, and observing significantly higher rates of autism in communities with a confluence of those conditions, the researchers suggested early television viewing as a possible trigger for autism spectrum disorders.

When I first read about the study, I was reminded of a story Peter Drucker tells, in his marvelous, autobiographical, historical commentary, Adventures of a Bystander, about an outstanding statistics teacher at the University of Minnesota.

A little bald-headed bearded man, almost a dwarf, he ran a doctoral seminar in which he projected tables and graphs onto a screen without any legend or explanation. "Look at the figures," he'd say, "and tell me what they tell you." The students would point out this irregularity in a distribution or that periodicity, this pattern or that internal contradiction, and the little man would nod, smile, argue, and get across a great deal about numbers as a grammar without even belaboring the point. Then he'd flash on the screen two series of figures that obviously belonged together; they showed a close correlation, almost one to one, over long time periods. "Clearly," all the students said, "these two series are causally related." "That's what every statistician would say," the little man responded, "but perhaps you can tell me what the relationship could be. This series," pointing to the table on the left, "is the annual herring catch off Newfoundland; and that one," pointing to the right, "is the number of illegitimate children born the same year in North Dakota."

It may be that the Cornell professors' study has produced only a "correlation" of this type. However, the really interesting story is not the report, but the reaction to it. Television promoters and viewers are digusted; parents of autistic children are offended; and the study has been mocked, ridiculed, and satirized. It is not true because it cannot be true. Let someone report a study that indicates one race or sex might be inherently predisposed to excel another in some area, and he will find he has called the Furies down upon his head. Dare to suggest that day care might be harmful to children and your research will be attacked, because such a conclusion hits us in our most vulnerable place. The famed science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, showed no patience for those who base their beliefs on faith rather than on objective science; nonetheless, I heard him say that he believed the universe to be cyclical, ever expanding and contracting, rather than a single expansion after one Big Bang, solely because he did not want to believe that the universe would ever come to an end. Modern American society does not want to believe that television might be harmful; therefore any such suggestion must be laughed out of court.

With my own anti-television bias, I must be careful to resist the temptation not to recognize the limitations of such statistical research. I will, however, state that it should not be laughed at. No one else has come up with a convincing explanation for the alarming rise in autism cases, and the researchers' ideas deserve serious consideration—especially in light of their observation that the Amish, whose distinctives include not watching TV, have unusually low rates of childhood autism. This study does not prove that allowing young children to watch television for long hours increases their risk of developing autism. But it is a possibility worth further investigation.

So, Porter delves into the dark recesses of an accumulation of objects, lifts up an old keyboard, and shouts, "I see a mouse!"

Perfectly logical. Janet had discovered that not one but both of her computer's mice are malfunctioning, and I knew we had a spare one somewhere. Unfortunately, this was the wrong kind of mouse.

It was PS/2 instead of USB.

But at least we didn't have to figure out a way to trap it.

I try not to make this blog too personal unless I know the person doesn't mind, so the honoree shall remain nameless, but nonetheless I wish to say

Congratulations!

On attaining the lofty and venerable

Half-Century Point