The Press-Dispatch
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The Press-Dispatch Wednesday, October 18, 2017 D-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 Humans are political in every- thing they do. From government to negotiating chores at home, to office cliques, and to church com- mittees, power is politics, and pol- itics is about power. A few examples from the New Testament: We find political maneuvering right up to the Last Supper; the mother of James and John asked of Jesus, "In your Kingdom, please let my two sons sit in places of hon- or next to you, one on your right and the other on your left." John in his third epistle men- tions Diotrephes, who had formed a clique within the local church. It doesn't get much worse than this. The Kingdom of God has no in- terest whether you identify as a Re- publican, Democrat, Libertarian, Socialists, or nothingness. But still the church is beset with the wran- gling of what the Republicans and Trump will do to your X YZ [place favorite social program here]. To be fair, the others are fearful what the Democrats will expand or en- act an EF&G [place most feared social action here]. The church is badgered by the demands of the social justice war- riors to become relevant; apolo- gize and do penance for all the sins of the fathers including slavery, ho- mophobia, misogyny, ethnic clean- ing, patriarchalism, imperialism, and whiteness [the list grows lon- ger daily. Sadly, the orga- nized church's actions seems to act more as champions for social justice and communi- ty work than to fur- ther the gospel of re- pentance and grace. But religious-polit- ical bickering should not deter the faithful from a life of witness and sancti- fication. Most Christians are aware of the Great Commission, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the na- tions," but skim over the admoni- tion found in the book of Hebrew, "Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord:" The teachings of Christ call for the disciple to be a witness of faith; this is not negotiable. Jesus is not asking the faithful to think a good thought or have a good profession. He is asking each of us to live the faith which sometimes means we wrestle with our desires, goals, and lusts against the Spirit. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ." Many of our churches are mes- merized by politically connected people, and politics themselves. Pastors and denom- inations daily rip off memos or tweets when they disagree with the President or the leaders of Con- gress. I suspect that is per- missible, but the dis- engagement from the Good News is a symp- tom of their embrace of the social gospel; we will cre- ate the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth [which means using gov- ernment fiats and coercion]. Christ came not to set up an earthly kingdom. All government that has ever been had flaws and failed. That is not to imply to ig- nore the rule of law; but to rec- ognize power and customs shift across time. Jesus alluded to this fact: "but the worries of this life, the deceit- fulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful." Humans are mesmerized by power, fame, and wealth. This ad- oration and pull is like a rope or ca- ble that pulls a person to savor or mimic every word or action of oth- ers [ever heard of the Kardashi- Continued on page 8 Continued on page 8 Minority View by Walter E. Williams The Weekly by Alden Heuring Broken moral compasses Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Life beyond politics Some massacres are preventable Lucid Moments by Bart Stinson U.S. military dangerously underfunded Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner If you were asked to rate the readiness levels of the U.S. mili- tary, what would you say? For this exercise, assume you have a scale with five choices: very weak, weak, marginal, strong and very strong. Think about each branch of the military. Where would it fall? Perhaps you're thinking, "I'm not an expert, so I can't say for sure." So let me refer you to the latest report from the Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense. The authors are, in fact, experts — and their conclusions are sobering. I'm referring to the 2018 Index of U.S. Military Strength. The edi- tors take a hard, detailed look at all the facts, and using the scale men- tioned above, rate the Navy and the Air Force as "marginal" and the Army and Marines as "weak." How is this possible, you may ask? It's simple. For years now, we've been asking our military to do more with less. They've taken on more work and more missions, all while enduring budget cuts that eat into their ability to modernize and equip themselves properly. Do that long enough, and even the best military in the world will start to feel the effects. It's not a question of dedication or determination. Our troops are doing the best they can, and we should be proud of their professionalism. But if we don't meet them halfway with the money they need to do all the work they're being asked to do, should we be surprised when we find them run- ning on fumes? "The common theme across the services," the index editors write, "is one of force degradation result- ing from many years of underin- vestment, poor execution of mod- ernization programs, and the neg- ative effects of budget sequestra- tion (cuts in funding) on readiness and ca- pacity." So how does one best judge the right size, strength and ca- pability of our armed forces? The index edi- tors use a formula long embraced by succes- sive presidential ad- ministrations, Con- gresses and Department of De- fense staffs: the ability to handle two major wars at the same time. This is why readiness issues rarely become apparent to the pub- lic — until it's too late. It's like a household living paycheck to pay- check with no savings or line of credit. Everything seems OK until an emergency comes along. And as the index also demon- strates, such an emergency is As George Orwell said, "some ideas are so stupid that only intel- lectuals believe them." Many stupid ideas originate with academics on college campuses. If they remained there and didn't infect the rest of so- ciety, they might be a source of en- tertainment, much in the way a cir- cus is. Let's look at a few stupid ideas peddled by intellectuals. During the Cold War, academ- ic leftists made a moral equivalen- cy between communist totalitarian- ism and democracy. Worse is the fact that they exempted communist lead- ers from the type of harsh criticism directed toward Adolf Hitler, even though communist crimes against humanity made Hitler's slaughter of 11 million noncombatants appear al- most amateurish. According to Pro- fessor R.J. Rummel's research in "Death by Government," from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citi- zens. From 1949 to 1976, Commu- nist China's Mao Zedong regime was responsible for the death of as ma- ny as 78 million of its own citizens. On college campuses, the same sort of equivalency is made between capitalism and communism, but if one looks at the real world, there's a stark difference. Just ask yourself: In which societies is the average citi- zen richer – societies toward the cap- italist end of the economic spectrum or those toward the communist end? In which societies do ordinary citi- zens have their human rights pro- tected the most – those toward the capitalist end or those toward the communist end? Finally, which so- cieties do people around the world flee from – capitalist or communist? And where do they flee to – capital- ist or communist societies? More recent nonsense taught on college campuses, under the name of multiculturalism, is that one cul- ture is as good as another. Identi- ty worship, diversity and multicul- turalism are currency and cause for celebration at just about any col- lege. If one is black, brown, yellow or white, the prevailing thought is that he should take pride and celebrate that fact even though he had noth- ing to do with it. The multicultural- ist and diversity crowd seems to sug- gest that race or sex is an achieve- ment. That's just plain nonsense. In my book, race or sex might be an achievement, worthy of consider- able celebration, if a person were born a white male and through his effort and diligence became a black female. Then there's white privilege. Col- leges have courses and seminars on "whiteness." One college even has a course titled "Abolition of White- ness." According to academic in- tellectuals, whites enjoy advantag- es that nonwhites do not. They earn higher income and reside in better housing, and their children go to bet- ter schools and achieve more. Based upon those socio-economic statis- tics, Japanese-Americans have more white privilege than white people. And, on a personal note, my daugh- ter has experienced more white privilege than probably 95 percent of white Americans. She's attend- ed private schools, had ballet and music lessons, traveled the world, and lived in upper-income commu- nities. Leftists should get rid of the concept of white privilege and just call it achievement. Then there's the issue of campus rape and sexual assault. Before ad- dressing that, let me ask you a ques- tion. Do I have a right to place my wallet on the roof of my car, go into my house, have lunch, take a nap and return to my car and find my wal- let just where I placed it? I think I have every right to do so, but the re- al question is whether it would be a wise decision. Some college wom- en get stoned, use foul language and dance suggestively. I think they have a right to behave that way and not be raped or sexually assaulted. But just as in the example of my placing my wallet on the roof of my car, I'd ask whether it is wise behavior. Many of our problems, both at our institutions of higher learning and in the nation at large, stem from the fact that we've lost our moral com- passes and there's not a lot of inter- est in reclaiming them. As a matter of fact, most people don't see our ma- jor problems as having anything to do with morality. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason Uni- versity. Socks it to me Continued on page 8 My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. As I continue my journey of re- tirement, I have been through a series of looking back at the sev- en decades of my life for which I have been blessed. For some rea- son, flashbacks of my elementary, high school, undergraduate and postgraduate schooling keeps pre- senting itself like a movie. I also have been organizing pic- tures that fortunately are in my possession, from the time I was baptized as an infant, to the time of this era. It is a weird feeling to see my picture as a baby, then pic- tures of my growing up, pictures of my schooling, pictures of my wed- ding, pictures of my children and grandchildren. Pictures of travels in many places I've been fortunate to visit. It took me days to organize and put them in an album. With the new technology avail- able for taking pictures using SD cards, I had a lot of fun going though them using my battered lap top and labeling them. I'm not sure now how to preserve them for posterity. There's just so many of them. I know there are programs A small world indeed, part III Continued on page 8 The cold may have finally set in for winter, and with the tem- peratures going down, it's time to drag our winter clothes up from the basement. First and foremost among them—warm socks! We've cultivated quite a collec- tion of warm socks over the years. I brought a few pairs of grey wool- en ski socks into the marriage, and Jill has some pairs of long striped wool socks that fit a little more loosely. We picked up a pair of knitted socks with little bum- pers on the bottom, some grip- per socks from the hospital when Flannery was born, and a bunch of $1 pairs of "cozy socks" from the Walgreens I used to work at. They're soft and fuzzy, and come in all kinds of fun colors. The crown jewel of our collec- tion was a gift, like all truly good things always are: a pair of red and white polka dotted fuzzy socks with silver lining around the top, and aloe vera woven into the fab- ric. Putting them on is like taking a deep breath with your feet, and they fit under shoes, too—assum- ing you have plans other than sit- ting in the easy chair and sipping cocoa. The older I get, the more I like winter. Summer is a young man's season—swimming, road trips, ice cream—all of these things are well and good. But more and more, I find myself looking forward to co- zy winter nights with my family. We have Christmas specials to watch, books to read, chili soup and cookies to make this winter to- gether. No matter how cold it gets outside, we'll have plenty of hot drinks and warm socks to help us stay cozy. I hope you all find some good ways to while away the cold nights this winter, too. Have a great week! STUFF OF THE WEEK Read: Lately, I've been living in the past a bit with some short choose-your-own-adventure style reading, taking a little break from A Tale of Two Cities. I get the feel- ing the second act of the book is going to be depressing. Listen: The Pillows are a blast of a rock-and-roll band from the turn of the millennium. Eat: Vegetable breads! Pump- kin bread! Zucchini bread! ...I don't know any others. Haiku: I pull out my gray hairs, and under my pillow— a cricket. -Basho A standard script has evolved for the aftermath of American shoot- ing massacres. I don't want to be flippant about soul-crushing trage- dy by listing the familiar, banal de- tails, but you could probably com- pose that list yourself. I'll just point out that the script never includes serious accountability for the or- ganizations and individuals who failed to provide the security they owed to the victims. In Las Vegas, police say they don't know what else they could have done. Hundreds of law en- forcement officials have convened seven well-funded, reimbursable expense-accounted "active shoot- er" conferences in Nevada recent- ly, five of those in Las Vegas itself. And it's true that police, let alone SWAT teams, can't be everywhere at once. But the fact that top law en- forcement officials don't know how to protect against these attacks suggests a blind spot. There are, in fact, men among us who could have prevented or mitigated what happened in Las Vegas. Expert marksmen, some of them are qualified snipers. They have an acute awareness of an- gles of attack and de- fensible terrain. They have held high securi- ty clearances, and have been screened for men- tal stability. Very few of them are police of- ficers. In fact, they are resented by some ci- vilian police officers as know-it-alls who aren't properly respectful of civil- ian SWAT tactics. But discharged veterans of the Army Rangers and Delta Force know that they were trained to a much higher standard, in their specialty, than any civilian police organization could afford to train. A typical Ranger returns from one enlistment in the War on Terror with several hundred "hot" mis- sions under his belt. It's not un- usual for career-status Rangers to amass more than a thousand raids. When Rangers return to their stateside base between deploy- ments, the home station training is so intense many re- port they'd rather be in the war zone. Their approach is system- atic, not instinctive. Their tactics are in- formed by rigorous social science and af- ter-action analysis. Their technology is state-of-the-art. A fter 15 years at war in Iraq and A fghanistan, the older among them are the most experienced sol- diers in American history. Thousands of these men were discharged when the Obama ad- ministration downsized the Ar- my. They comprised an enormous potential "peace dividend" for the communities to which they re- turned. How did we make use of their unique talents and demon- strated commitment? Well, for the most part, we didn't. Most of them are working