The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1056545
C-8 Wednesday, November 28, 2018 The Press-Dispatch 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 A flood of 'marketing' My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. This past few weeks, I attended several dinners in the homes of family and friends. Naturally dur- ing dinner, the topics discussed are varied and interesting. Fortu- nately, there were no discussions about politics or religion. Mostly they were about what's going on with the children and grandchildren. There were also a lot of discussions about comput- ers, cell phones and also about un- solicited phone calls. Pretty much everybody raised frustration and concern about the volume of phone calls everyone has been receiving from telemarketers and scam art- ists. The level of sophistication and intensity have become tricky and creative to a point it is so frustrat- ing to deal with this miserable phe- nomenon. I'm sure everyone agrees that it is hard to know if some important phone calls have to be answered. Now the phone numbers appear- ing before you answer are show- ing local calls but when you an- swer the call, it is a pitch to buy something or that you have been awarded something. On the sec- tion of messages on cell phones, advertisements just keep popping up despite doing the unsubscribe prompt. It seems as well when you try to read up on any interesting arti- cle, the ads keep popping up to a point I think 50 percent of the con- tents of any interesting article you are reading are advertisements. While I do know companies in or- der to thrive and survive have to have customers who will purchase Recently, the Patriarch of Con- stantinople, Bartholomew I, rec- ognized the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as being autonomous or separated from its Patriarchate "mother church," The Russian Or- thodox Church. This has brought a considerable amount of distress worldwide among the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church because of geographic location [Greece, Eastern Europe and Asia] did not figure in the time of the Ref- ormation that saw the Catholic Church split off a Protestant sect, so the typical person has little un- derstanding of Orthodox Church structure and practices The Orthodox Church is a com- munity of 15 separate autonomous churches that recognize each oth- er as "canonical" Orthodox Chris- tian churches [i.e. Greek Ortho- dox, Russian Orthodox…]. Each church is autocephalous [indepen- dent] and as such does not have a central authority or a single Bish- op. On October 11th, the Constantinople Patriarchate, who is viewed as the center of the Orthodox faith, publically recognized the independence of the Ukrainian Ortho- dox Church from the Moscow Patriarch- ate. Exacerbating the move is the fact that the Ukrainian church had been led by anathematized [defrocked] Pa- triarch Filaret. The controversy with Filaret goes back, according to TASS, to "November 1991, when Filaret, who was then heading the Ukrai- nian Orthodox Church of the Mos- cow Patriarchate, called for grant- ing the Ukrainian Church auto- cephalous status. In May 1992, he was demoted from his post as head of the local church. However, Fil- aret failed to comply with the de- cision of the Russian Orthodox Church and, with sup- port of Ukrainian offi- cials, announced the creation of the Ukrai- nian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarch- ate. In February 1997, he was excommuni- cated and anathema- tized for sectarian ac- tivities by the decision of the Russian Ortho- dox Church's Assembly of the Hi- erarchs." By Constantinople's decision to back the independence of the Ukrainian Church, it appears the Patriarch went against the very foundations of the Orthodox faith. As noted, the Orthodox Church is a conciliar church which tries to make decisions by consensus; here, we see a unilateral [one sid- ed] decision being made. Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Politics has bitten the orthodox church Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 The Weekly by Alden Heuring It begins Minority View by Walter E. Williams Fruits of college indoctrination Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Much of today's incivility and contempt for personal liberty has its roots on college cam- puses, and most of the unciv- il and contemptuous are peo- ple with college backgrounds. Let's look at a few highly publi- cized recent examples of incivil- ity and attacks on free speech. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Trans- portation Secretary Elaine Chao, were accosted and ha- rassed by a deranged left-wing mob as they were leaving a din- ner at Georgetown University. Sen. McConnell was harassed by protesters at Reagan Nation- al Airport, as well as at sever- al venues in Kentucky. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife were ha- rassed at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. A fterward, a group called Smash Racism DC wrote: "No — you can't eat in peace — your politics are an attack on all of us. You're (sic) votes are a death wish. Your votes are hate crimes." Other members of Con- gress — such as Andy Harris, Susan Collins and Rand Paul — have been physically attacked or harassed by leftists. Most recent is the case of Fox News political commentator Tuck- er Carlson. A leftist group showed up at his house at night, damaging his front door and chanting, "Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night! " "Racist scum- bag, leave town! " Mayhem against people with different points of view is ex- cused as just deserts for what is seen as hate speech. Enter- prise Institute scholar Charles Murray discovered this when he was shouted down at Middle- bury College and the professor escorting him was sent to the hospital with injuries. Students at the University of California, Berkeley shut down a contro- versial speaker and caused riot damage estimated at $100,000. Protesters at both UCL A and Claremont McKenna College disrupted scheduled lectures by Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Don- ald. The Founda- tion for Individual Rights in Education has discovered so- called bias response teams on hundreds of American college campuses. Bias re- sponse teams re- port to campus offi- cials — and sometimes to law enforcement officers — speech that may cause "alarm, anger, or fear" or that might otherwise of- fend. Drawing pictures or car- toons that belittle people be- cause of their beliefs or politi- cal affiliation can be reported as hate speech. Universities ex- pressly set their sights on pro- hibiting constitutionally pro- tected speech (http://tinyurl. com/y7jo75dg). As FIRE re- ported in 2017, hundreds of uni- versities nationwide now main- tain Orwellian systems that ask Why the US must withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson Thanksgiving and Americanism Thanksgiving has evolved in my lifetime. It was an occasion of large extended-family gather- ings in my childhood. These have shrunk as centrifugal forces have scattered us across the continent and beyond. As children grow up and marry far-flung mates, it gets more difficult to celebrate Thanks- giving with both families. Grown children are less con- cerned with renewing family con- nections than with inviting new friends to their table, or impress- ing their own partner and chil- dren with their feasting talents and imagination. Deference to tra- dition is not a strong or highly val- ued impulse in our culture. And so a brisk, remorseless disintegration is at work. Thanksgiving was also linked to patriotism when I was a child. I felt gratitude that, of all the na- tions in the world, I was born into America, an heir of Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. I went to el- ementary school in the early 60s, when we observed the centennials of various Civil War events and the Emancipation Proclamation. I'm a native Hoosier, and we were acute- ly conscious of the role our ances- tors played in winning that war, and that emancipation. It seemed to us that emanci- pation, in general, was inevita- ble. As Martin Luther King said at the time, "the arc of the mor- al universe is long, but it bends to- ward justice." But we never hoped for emancipation from our national identity, which we cherished. Bear in mind that this was dur- ing the Kennedy administration, when even the Liberals were pa- triots. My, how the country has changed. Now, when the president de- scribes himself as a nationalist, the liberal New York Times calls it a "dog whistle" of approval for racists and anti-Semites. An an- ti-Trump USA Today editorial declared that nationalism "[un- leashed] the pointless and tragic World War I, which ended a centu- ry ago, and then [was] embraced by the 'National Socialist' (Nazi) party in Germany." This is absurd on several levels. Start with the fact that the presi- dent's daughter married a Jew and converted to Judaism. Trump has Jewish grandchildren, and is very close to his Jewish son-in-law. He alone, among U.S. presidents, has been willing to expend the polit- ical capital to move the U.S. em- bassy to Jerusalem. His public ap- proval ratings are higher in Israel than in the U.S. or Europe. What a dumb accusation. It's also ahistorical. The war- ring, ambitious empires on both sides of World War I were multi- national. If the imperialists had acknowledged the legitimacy and sovereignty of the nations they swallowed up, there would have been no World War I. Despite the name of his (Na- tional Socialist) political party, Hitler was a racist, not a national- ist. He wasn't even German-born, but an immigrant from Austria. He claimed brotherhood with so- called Aryans regardless of nation- ality, including the British. If Hitler were a nationalist, he would have honored the 100,000 German Jewish veterans of World War I, or at least the 12,000 Ger- man Jews killed in that war. He would have marveled at the 18,000 Jews who received the Iron Cross, the German military's highest dec- oration for bravery. But he didn't, because he was no nationalist. If the Hutu of Rwanda were na- tionalists, they wouldn't have tak- en machetes to 70 percent of their Tutsi neighbors and 30 percent of their pygmy Batwa neighbors over a 100 -day period in 1994. But they did, because their loyalties were to tribe rather than nation. The most prominent nationalist of the past century was Mahatma Gandhi. He became leader of the Indian National Congress in 1921. It was a nationalist umbrella in In- dia, transcending race, caste, reli- gion, language and regional iden- tity. Without nationalism, India could never have cast off British colonialism. If you'd been at the Mark Hellinger Theater in New York on Feb. 18, 1987, you'd have heard the head of Compaq introduce the company's latest personal comput- er. The Compaq Portable III start- ed at $5,000, weighed 18 pounds, had very little memory and com- puting power, and came with no battery. Today, many laptops cost only a fraction of that, weigh perhaps a couple of pounds, have far more memory and computing power, and can work unplugged for hours. In short, although we're still us- ing computers, a lot has changed in 31 years. And not just when it comes to computers. Take the INF Treaty. The Intermediate-range Nucle- ar Forces Treaty was signed in De- cember 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Sec- retary Mikhail Gorbachev. It pro- hibited the U.S. and Soviet Union from possessing, testing and de- ploying ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles with a range between 300 and 3,400 miles. Not just in Europe, mind you, but anywhere in the world. The im- portance of that point will become clear very shortly here. Fast-forward to to- day. Although we're still in something of an adversarial rela- tionship with Russia, a lot has changed. The Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall came down. And just as you wouldn't select a Compaq Portable III for your com- puting needs today, we shouldn't rely on the INF Treaty to protect us and our allies. Of course, that's not what we hear from some of the treaty's pro- ponents. Withdrawing from it, as President Trump has suggested doing, "would be dangerous, de- stabilizing and potentially coun- terproductive," John McLaugh- lin, deputy director of the CIA from 2000 to 2004, wrote recent- ly in The Washington Post. His main objection is that with- drawal would only encourage Rus- sia and the United States to build more nukes. But that's already occurring on the Rus- sian side — and has been for a while now. As The New York Times reported on Ju- ly 28, 2014: "The Unit- ed States has conclud- ed that Russia violated a landmark arms con- trol treaty by testing a prohibited ground- launched cruise mis- sile, according to senior Ameri- can officials, a finding that was conveyed by President Obama to President Vladimir V. Putin of Rus- sia in a letter on Monday." This despite Mr. Obama's fabled "reset" with Russia and the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) he signed with Moscow in 2010. The administration com- plained about the missile test, but nothing changed. In fact, by last year the Russians have reportedly deployed at least one operational SSC-8 military unit, foreign policy expert Peter Brookes notes. This coming week, we head into Advent once again, a time to wipe the slate clean, a time to be gen- erous, a time to eat lots of yummy Christmas cookies. Every year, the Church switch- es to one of three liturgical cycles, with each one focusing on a differ- ent portion of the Bible through- out the year, and a different tell- ing of the Gospel during Advent. This year's cycle is C, which focus- es on both my wife's and Charlie Brown's favorite Gospel, Luke. Luke, who of course wrote The Gospel of Luke, was likely a Greek physician who lived in Antioch, Syria in the first century AD; that is to say, he was born about the same year as Jesus. He joined up with the Apostles some time after the Ascension and was likely con- verted by Paul. The Gospel of Luke is addressed to "Theophilus," a name which means "lover of God." Theophi- lus could certainly be a specific person in history, and could al- so be taken to address any "lover of God" who happens to be read- ing it. Luke's Gospel is the one from which probably most people have heard the Nativity story, and it ends more or less right where the Acts of the Apostles, by the same author, picks up — the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven. It is a "narra- tive" by its own claim, a story from start to finish of what happened to Jesus and Mary, and Peter and all the rest. So, if you are looking to "get in- to" the Bible or the Gospels, or al- ready studying and looking to go deeper, I would recommend start- ing this Advent with Cycle C and the Gospel of Luke. For every- thing else it certainly is, the story of Jesus is in fact a story, a grand, rollicking story, and Luke tells it well and tells it thoroughly in a way that's easy (relatively speaking) to pick up and understand. Hope you enjoy this Advent, and have a great week!