The Press-Dispatch
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The Press-Dispatch Wednesday, August 8, 2018 C-11 OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Love is a four letter word that is thrown around carelessly in our culture. Billboards, bumper stickers, and everyday items proclaim love for this or that. It is a given the word love has shades of intimacy and desire; still the word is used carelessly and without intense meaning daily. Cupid and romance comes to mind when the word love is used in casual conversation, but it car- ries a deeper meaning. A brief word study is needed to understand the meaning of the word love in the New Testament. For you etymologists, the word love traces its origins from Latin, German, and Old English. This is important because the lingua fran- ca or common language of the time of the Romans was Greek, thus the language is used by the New Testament authors. The most beloved Bible translation for Protestants is the Re- vised King James Ver- sion of 1885, which is based on the 1611 King James Transla- tion. The task of the translators was what word in the English language can be used to translate the Greek words agápe, philía, and storg which are words that share a common root mean- ing: desire. Storg is not used in the New Testament but its opposite is as- torg, which means "lack of affec- tion." Note the link to the words agápe, and philia. The word philia is the root for Philadel- phia, brotherly love, which Paul uses to describe the need for love among the saints. Agápe, as used by the apostle John is translated love, as in the passage "God is Love." The word agápe, used in the New Testament took on the mean- ing of "divine favor, faithfulness, commitment, affection without limit or condition." In short, divine Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson How 23rd chromosome destined a Pike County teen for Battle of the Bulge The Trump, GOP economic recovery Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Love: The heart of the disciple School's in from summer My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Where did summer vacation go? Now, we head into the next phase of life — the start of school year. I hear my children discuss amongst themselves about sched- ules for school openings, briefings in their respective schools about things needed for supplies, uni- forms, outfits, schedules of school activities and many other require- ments. Brings back memories of what we as parents have done year after year to prepare for the educa- tion of our own children. Now, it's our kids' turn. Exciting times, but also very busy and challenging times. Rath- er interesting, human beings are the only species who take a very long time to prepare the next gen- eration for a life of independence. Consider, it takes about a mini- mum of 12 years or so to finish el- ementary and high school educa- tion, and then for those who wish to pursue higher learning, be it in the technical or academic fields, more years are invested before an adult can truly declare to have a capable, independent and produc- tive life. Sometimes when I encoun- ter some kids who happen to be around, I am rather surprised when they say school is boring or "it's OK," when I ask if they are ex- cited about going back to school. Then I make a comment some- thing like this - " You should love school because many kids in dif- ferent parts of the world do not have the opportunities you en- joy. So, love school and be excit- ed." Sometimes I add a comment - Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 The Weekly by Alden Heuring The Jungle VIP Minority View by Walter E. Williams Some ideas to think about Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Poverty is no mystery, and it's easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairly simple. Here's the road map: Com- plete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abid- ing citizen. How about some numbers? A single person taking a minimum wage job would earn an annual in- come of $15,080. A married couple would earn $ 30,160. By the way, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 4 percent of hourly workers in 2016 were paid the minimum wage. That means that over 96 percent of work- ers earned more than the minimum wage. Not surprising is the fact that among both black and white mar- ried couples, the pov- erty rate is in the sin- gle digits. Most pover- ty is in female-headed households. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign garnered considerable appeal from millen- nials. These young people see so- cialism as superior to free market capitalism. Capitalism doesn't do well in popularity polls, despite the fact that it has elim- inated many of man- kind's worst problems, such as pestilence and gross hunger and pov- erty. One of the rea- sons is that capital- ism is always evaluat- ed against the nonex- istent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared with a utopia, will not fare well. In- deed, socialism sounds good but, when practiced, leads to disaster. Those disasters have been experi- 'Your raise,' courtesy of the Trump tax cut Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner Imagine getting a raise, and you didn't even have to ask the boss for it. That's what taxpayers na- tionwide can anticipate. In fact, many are already seeing more money. Tax experts at The Heritage Foundation used IRS da- ta to calculate the effects of last December's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and found that in 2018 taxpayers will save an average of $1,400. Married couples with two children will save more than twice that: $2,917. And when I say "nationwide," I mean it. A new report by Heri- tage's Kevin Dayaratna, Parker Sheppard and Adam Michel shows that every U.S. congressional dis- trict will enjoy these tax benefits. Some will see more than others, of course. According to the report: "There is a significant range in the size of the average tax cut among all filers across the 435 con- gressional districts, ranging from an average of slight- ly above $ 395 (New York's 15th district) to $ 3,332 (Califor- nia's 18th district). For families of four, the comparable range is from $ 625 (NY15) to $5,682 (CA18)." But the main take- away is this: Not a sin- gle district will fail to see a tax benefit of some kind, thanks to the TCJA And the gains only grow over time: Over the next decade, thanks to a larger economy, the typical American could wind up with an added $26,000 more in take-home pay, or $44,697 for a family of four. That's because lower rates do more than simply reduce the amount Americans pay in tax- es. They enable companies to do what they've already started doing: invest more, hire more, and pay their employees more. Changes in take- home pay vary from slightly more than $14,000 for the state of Mississippi all the way up to just under $ 30,000 for Washing- ton, D.C., for all tax filers. Some critics have dismissed tax-cut gains as insignificant — House Minority Leader Nancy Pe- losi called them "crumbs" — but that's ridiculous. It really shows how out of touch they are. As the Heritage experts note, this addi- tional income is enough to pay Like most Americans, my grandfather was outraged that De- cember Sunday when the Japanese Navy launched its attack against our fleet at dockside in Pearl Har- bor. Thaddeus Preston Potter was a father of four, already 34 and not getting any younger, and a couple of years later, the draft board still hadn't come knocking. If he was going to get in the fight, he had to make his own move. He want- ed to join the Navy, but he wasn't sure he could get in. He was color blind, and he heard that was dis- qualifying. Ironically, the test Americans used to detect color blindness was invented a century ago by a Japa- nese doctor in the Imperial Army. Shinobu Ishihara retired about a year before Pearl Harbor. But he'd had a remarkable side hustle dur- ing his Army career. He painted dotted patterns of simplified Japanese syllabary characters (hiragana and kataka- na) by watercolor, and the result- ing plates were used to print lith- ographs that could diagnose the existence and severity of color- blindness. If you recognized the characters, you had normal col- or vision. If you couldn't see the pattern, you were color blind or, as we say nowadays, "color vision deficient." When Dr. Ishihara first de- signed the plates in 1916, they were reserved for the exclusive use of the Imperial Army. But he soon recognized their commercial potential, both in the Japanese ci- vilian market and overseas. In 1917 he began to reconfigure an inter- national version with Arabic nu- merals that the rest of the world would recognize. The export edi- tion consisted of 16 plates with in- structions in English. He couldn't find a publisher for his International Edition, so he self-published a run of 600 in late 1917. Sales were disappointing. In 1921, Ishihara doubled down by sending free copies of the In- ternational Edition of his test to overseas universities and foreign opthalmologists. Eventually for- eign sales ignited. Great Britain and the United States began using his test to screen railroad workers and merchant seamen, then avia- tors and Navy applicants. It was Ishihara versus Potter. Only one could prevail. But Pres- ton Potter, too, was a clever man. He and Ernest "Ernie" Hume, then a senior at Winslow High School, hatched a plan to go to the Na- vy testing office together and en- list on the same day. Ernie would go in first, and Preston would be right behind him. Ernie would call out the answers to the Ishiha- ra test loudly enough that Preston could hear him. Preston had confi- dence in his memory, certain that he could memorize the numbers that Ernie would call out, in the right sequence. But it was not to be. Ernie, alas, turned out to be just as color blind as Preston. Ishihara made short work of both Pike County men, and my grandfather always re- membered the five-word dismiss- al he got from the Navy chief: "you go to the Army." The chief must have said the same thing to Ernie, because he missed Winslow com- mencement that Spring to report to Army basic training, and ended up at Bastogne, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart at the Bat- tle of the Bulge, less than a year out of high school. Even the Army didn't want my grandfather, due to some ugly skel- etal trauma. So he finished out the war commuting to the Evansville shipyard where I trust he found meaningful and monochromatic work. Actually, color blindness didn't consign him to a world without col- or. He didn't walk around seeing X-ray negatives. He just couldn't When I read that the economy is growing strongly, it makes me happy. But in politics, good news is not enough. You have to decide who gets credit for it. President Ronald Reagan, no ordinary politician, kept a plaque on his desk that said, "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit." Nevertheless, a good deal of the discussion surrounding the news that the economy grew hugely in the second quarter this year — 4.1 percent — has been about how much credit President Don- ald Trump deserves. Paul Krugman, the very left- wing Nobel prize-winning econ- omist, for whom there is nothing Trump can do that is good for the American people, dismissed this great economic news in his New York Times column, calling it a "nothingburger." I think it's more than a "nothing- burger" to the many finding their way back into the workforce be- cause of a brisk economy growing at a pace we haven't seen in years. The Wall Street Journal now reports that "Americans looking to land a first job or break into a dream career face their best odds of success in years." According to the report, compa- nies trying to hire in a labor mar- ket that is now very tight are loos- ening the requirements that they once sought in job applicants. Thirty percent of job postings now require, at minimum, a col- lege degree. This is down from 34 percent from 2012. Now, 23 per- Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker When it comes to Disney mov- ies, my daughter, Flannery, is not much on any of the princesses, ex- cept maybe Tiana, but she is per- haps the world's biggest fan of a little orphan boy named Mowghli. So today, I'm going to review the original Disney's Jungle Book; af- ter watching it against my will as many times as I have, who could be more qualified? Let's start with the big draw of almost any Disney movie: the music. Now in this area, the Jun- gle Book is an outstanding entry in musical cinema history. You've got "I Wanna Be Like You," perhaps the most memorable Disney song EVER, "The Bear Necessities," the elephant's marching song, and, of course, the vulture's hom- age to the Beatles. One interest- ing note, which makes the Jungle Book a rare deviation from the Disney for- mula: the primary an- tagonist, Shere Khan, does not have his own song, and only sings one line from the vul- ture song, "that's what friends are for," to make his introduction to Mowghli. While his lack of a musical num- ber fits Shere Khan's sneaky char- acter, it's an absolute shame that George Sanders, who voices the tiger, didn't get to belt out a fabu- lous villain number in this movie. Moving on from music, some- thing that honestly shocked me when I read the real Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling is how brutal the world and characters of the book are com- pared to their silver- screen counterparts. It's quite a feat, in my opinion, that Disney was able to adapt this set of gory jungle sto- ries into something that was both rated G and an enduring clas- sic of cinema in its own right. For example, in a story set after the events of the movie, a teenage Mowghli becomes disillu- sioned with the politics and injus- tices of the man village he's been living in, and the villagers in turn