The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1020416
The Press-Dispatch Wednesday, August 29, 2018 B-7 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 We are approaching the 55th anniversary of Dr. Martin Lu- ther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered Aug. 28, 1963, in Washington, D.C. Reading through the speech, it's hard not to be in awe, like those who stood and heard King then, by the greatness and truth of his words. He captured with precision what America is about, what was wrong then, and what needed to be done. And because timeless truth is what made that speech great, it is still relevant to today's consider- able challenges. This was not the speech of a po- litical activist. This was a sermon of a pastor, enlightened and in- spired by his God, to fix what was broken in America and lead us all to better world. I see three great messages from King's speech that are important to grasp and apply today. First, King said that they were in Washington that day to cash in and "demand the riches of free- dom and the security of justice." Second, he communicated that freedom and justice are of divine origin, as he quoted from the prophet Isaiah. And third, of particular rele- vance and importance today, was King's appeal to not drink "from the cup of bitterness and hatred" and to "conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and dis- cipline." I doubt that there is anyone that would not recognize the wide- spread failure in today's Ameri- ca to honor this last appeal for ci- At the center of the Christian faith stands the cross; a church without a cross seems farfetched, doesn't it? Not quite. Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco was in decline in the mid-1960s. The con- gregation was shrinking, and the future of the church was question- able. Reverend Cecil Williams was ap- pointed to Glide in 1964 and began to reach out to the diverse com- munity living in the San Francis- co Tenderloin District. He was in tune with the 60s and espoused so- cial activism as a key part to minis- try and reviving the local church. Williams had the cross removed from the sanctuary in 1967, "ex- horting the congregation in- stead to celebrate life and living; 'We must all be the cross.'" Over time, he also removed the altar and the hymnals. Glide, under Williams' leader- ship, became a trailblazer in what is described as "social and spiritu- al change;" it became known as a refuge for the counter-culture and a comfort to the disenfranchised. Today, the church has over ten thousand members, and during Sunday worship, the church is packed with people of many other faiths, and some with no faith. At the heart of the church is the Glide Foundation which oversees ministries in healthcare, the home- less, the unemployed, and the afflicted. It has an annual budget in excess of 18 million dollars. The church has been engaged in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco for more than 50 years and has been lauded for its efforts by the beautiful people of Califor- nia and the politically connected. But it is a church without a cross. In the spring of 2018, Glide was told by Bishop Minerva G. Carcaño that the United Methodist Church will not be appointing a new pas- tor and will remove all UMC affili- ated personnel. Furthermore, the denomination will be in discussion with Glide over its future. This is the result of a strug- gle for denominational/pastoral leadership of the church. Glide has a complex administrative sys- tem which shuts the pastor out of the Glide Foundation's ministeri- al work. In practice, the Foundation's head [which is Williams], is the pastor. But it runs deeper. Glide is a church with- out a cross. A press release from the California- Nevada Conference of the UMC from Bishop Carcaño summarizes the spiritual condition of Glide: "While there is a remnant of those who claim to be United Methodist and thus Christian, the great ma- jority of the participants at Glide's Sunday Celebrations claim other faiths, such as Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Wiccan. Atheists and Agnostics comprise another segment of the Glide community. Leaders from these constituencies are quick to publicly state that they do not want the Celebrations, or the church, to be United Method- ist or Christian in any form." "Sunday Celebrations are up- lifting concerts, but lack the fun- damentals of Christian worship. Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner King's dream still relevant today Taxpayers nationwide will save money Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Church without a Cross, Part II Carrying stress My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. A friend of mine always sends good materials via email. Here's one I'd like to share. I'm sure many of you may have seen this but I will go ahead and share this anyway. I think it's worth your time… "A professor in college walked around the room with a raised glass of wa- ter while leading a seminar and explaining stress management to the audience. Everyone knew he would ask the ultimate ques- tion, "Half empty or half full? " He fooled them all. "How heavy is this glass of water? " he inquired with a smile. Answers called out from 8 oz to 20 oz weight of fluid. He re- plied, "The absolute weight does not matter. It depends on how long you hold it. If I hold it for a min- ute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call the ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it be- comes." He continued. "And that's the way it is with stress. If we car- ry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes in- creasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on." He pauses and contin- ues on, "As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden - hold- ing stress longer and better each time. So, as early in the evening as you can, put all your burdens down. Don't carry through the eve- ning and into the night. Pick them up again tomorrow if you must." • • • Continued on page 8 Continued on page 8 Continued on page 8 The Weekly by Alden Heuring Potty talk Minority View by Walter E. Williams Bad men, good presidents Continued on page 8 Continued on page 8 With the continuing hysteria about Donald Trump's presiden- cy, a few questions come to mind. The first: Can a bad man become a good president? The second: Does one's being a good man guarantee he'll be a good president? Third: Does having a good president re- quire a good man? Is there any ev- idence of Lord Acton's argument that "great men are almost always bad men"? I think former President Jimmy Carter was a good man who be- came a weak and bad president, both in domestic matters and in foreign affairs. President Bill Clin- ton was a bad man who became a reasonably good president in do- mestic and foreign matters. But then there was that impeachment issue that greatly tarnished his presidency. What about our current pres- ident? I think Trump's person- al behavior prior to his presiden- cy is not something we'd call high character. We might put him down as a bad man, but what about his presidency? I think that he'd qual- ify for this description: a bad man but good president. The aver- age reader might ask, "Williams, what's your evidence? " In a re- cent letter to me, Stephen Moore, a George Mason University grad- uate and a distinguished visiting fellow for the Project for Econom- ic Growth at The Heritage Founda- tion, put together a list of President Trump's achievements. I rec- ognize the possibil- ity that they will be seen as horrible, may- be treasonous, by the nation's leftists. Trump has appoint- ed Neil Gorsuch and nominated Brett Ka- vanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Both men have stellar judicial qualifications and a deep respect for the U.S. Constitu- tion. In addition, Trump has nom- inated more than two dozen lower court judges who have similar re- spect for our Constitution and are not likely to make laws from the bench. Trump has shepherded through Congress the largest personal and corporate tax cuts since the Rea- gan administration. His adminis- tration has created a 35 percent re- duction in regulations. Those re- ductions, including the rollback of costly Environmental Protec- tion Agency regulations, have led to the biggest energy boom in his- tory, making the U.S. the world's No. 1 energy producer and thus ending our dependence on Mid- dle Eastern oil producers. The Trump administration has ended the Obamacare mandate and reformed the very costly Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protec- tion Act. Helping with these economic mat- ters is free marketer Larry Kudlow, whom Trump appointed as director of the Nation- al Economic Council. As a result of the gross domestic product's growth spurt, caused by tax cuts and deregula- tion, unemployment is less than 4 percent. Black unemployment is hovering around the all-time low at 6.6 percent. In fact, it's estimat- ed that there are 6 million more jobs than workers. Also on the do- mestic front, the Trump adminis- tration is trying to push through sweeping prison and sentencing reforms. President Trump has also made important gains in international af- fairs. He's gotten us out of the Par- is climate accord. Aside from the fact that the agreement imposed costs and special disadvantag- es on the U.S., the Paris agree- ment should have been present- ed as a treaty to the U.S. Senate. Trump also got us out of the Joint Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Like a half-starved buzzard de- scending on a fresh corpse under a yellow desert sky, the weekend for potty-training Flannery came out of nowhere and pecked me up- side the head. And what a week- end it was! We've known for a while that our toddler was more or less "ready" to start using the potty, and so Jill found a good book on how to ac- complish potty training over the course of a three-day weekend, read it, eventually forced me to read it, and as soon as I turned the last page, it was time to begin. I got most of a good night's sleep last Friday, and woke up Saturday ready to get my hands dirty. And that was the hardest part of the whole thing, really: waiting for the first potty accident. I knew she would need to go sooner or later. I knew what I needed to do when she started going. I just didn't know when. So I waited, coffee mug in one hand, fin- gers drumming on the other, waiting for my kid to pee. The method we used was very simple. I won't give away the author's bread and but- ter for free, but essen- tially you just throw out the diapers, put a pair of big girl britches on your kid, and tell them to tell you when they need to go potty. Over and over and over... my wife said if we had a penny for every time we said "potty" this past weekend, we could redo our upstairs, or at least get a fancy "smart potty" for all the times we felt stupid for saying "pot- ty" so often. We learned a lot this weekend. We learned that pee wipes up out of the carpet much more easi- ly than we expected. We learned it takes our daughter approxi- mately 2 hours and 15 minutes to convert a cup of milk into a pud- dle on the floor. And to be honest, Flannery learned how to use the potty quick and easy. The book laid out a 3-day intensive pot- ty training program with a 10 -day lead time for considering your kid potty trained. By the end of day 2, Flannery was already grabbing us by the hand and saying "let's go potty! " so that she could get her piece of candy. It was quite the weekend, but I'm glad I got to be there for it. I can't wait to see what Flannery learns next. Last December's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act didn't come wrapped in shiny paper and a bow, but it might as well have. It's like a Christmas gift that keeps on giving. First came the raises and bonus- es that followed in the immediate wake of the tax cut. More recently, I highlighted a new Heritage Foun- dation report that documents a welcome fact — taxpayers nation- wide will save money this year and the next several years. Using IRS data, Kevin Dayarat- na, Parker Sheppard and Adam Michel found that in 2018 taxpay- ers will save an average of $1,400. Married couples with two chil- dren will save more than twice that: $2,917. And the benefits are truly wide- spread. In fact, their report shows that every U.S. congressional dis- trict will enjoy these tax benefits. You can see for yourself. That's what I wanted to point out today — that you can go to taxesandjobs. com and go to your state and dis- trict and get the numbers. A fter all, though every congres- sional district benefits in some measure, it's not all by the amount. Changes in take-home pay vary from just above $14,000 in Mis- sissippi to just under $ 30,000 for Washington, D.C., for all tax filers. Say you live in California's 28th congressional district. Adam Schiff is your representative. So you go to taxesandjobs.com, see the U.S. map, and click on Califor- nia. A state map comes up, color- coded to show which districts are getting a higher amount than oth- ers. Below it, you see four large fig- ures: The average tax cut for 2018 ($1,397), the average federal in- come tax decrease for 2018 (10.6 percent), the increase in take- home pay over the next 10 years ($24,376) and the increase in take- home pay over 10 years for a fam- ily of four ($42,517). But that's for the state. You nat- urally want to know what your dis- trict will get. So you scroll the list of districts until you get to the 28th and click on it. There you see the same four categories, but now for your dis- trict: the average tax cut for 2018 ($1,454), the average income tax decrease for 2018 (10.3 per- cent), the increase in take-home pay over 10 years ($25,584) and the increase in take-home pay over 10 years for a family of four ($46,990). You can do exactly the same thing for the nation's other 434 congressional districts. Some, as I noted, are higher than other oth- ers, but there isn't one district that fails to come out ahead. This must seem baffling if you've been listening to tax-cut opponents. It's all for rich fat cats, right? A boon for corporations? A windfall for the wealthy? Far from it. Naturally, those who pay the most in taxes experience a larger cut in dollars. It could hard- ly be otherwise. But not district's average taxpayer is seeing their taxes go up (another false talk- ing point). It's just a matter of how much you stand to save, frankly. Some critics carp that it adds up to "crumbs," but tell that to Amer- icans getting what amounts to a nice raise. That extra income is enough to help pay down a mort- gage, cover daycare expenses, or increase college savings. And it's not only taxpayers who can be grateful. Everyone is bet- ter off. That's because lower rates do more than simply reduce the amount that Americans pay in tax- es. They enable companies to do what they've already started do- ing: invest more, hire more, and pay their employees more. The end result is a stronger economy. And everyone benefits from that. It could be even better, though. The tax cut expires in 2025, so the Heritage experts had to roll that in- to their calculations. They also had to assume Washington will contin- ue running large and unsustain-