The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/901024
D-8 Wednesday, November 15, 2017 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 In the last month as a pastor I have had the privilege to minister and support two families that had end-of-life decisions thrust upon them. Though the circumstances were different the result was the same. Over the years I have minis- tered to several families who had to make end-of-life decisions but these two deaths occurred so close together that it gave me pause. Nei- ther family had reason to initially fear the worst, but it came. It is no easy task for a family to struggle with the news from the doctors' that hope for a good out- come is unlikely. The question always arises "what do I do;" then later the doubt sets in with "did I do the right thing or make the right decision? " Advancement in medicine and medical technology is stunning and almost miraculous. However, with these advancements comes moral ambiguity in what is viable life? The beginning of life, viability outside the womb has advanced to a chance of survivability at 23 weeks. Likewise reaching retirement and collecting Social Security does not mean it is prudent to pre-plan a funeral as it did 50 years ago. But what frustrates the faithful is when does death occur? What criteria do we use to determine is there life still there? Do we base the de- cision of quantity or quality of life? The questions are endless and challenge our under- standing of the interworking of faith and life. It gives all of us reason to pause and reflect what is important in my life? The words of James ring loud "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." Many are familiar with the words of the Psalmist, "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years." However, the psalmist does not promise longevity of life. A wise pastor years ago mentoring me mentioned this very fact with the words "you need to walk through the cemetery and look at the ag- es. Death does not play favorites." At issue is not what I said to comfort the be- reaved, but what I say to those who remain. The answer 'siege the day! " This gives hope to the faithful, yet is a warning to the secular that self-gratification is spiritually hollow. A life given to secu- lar pursuits can be me- morialized, treasured, and hon- ored. But the grave has swallowed up the dead and he/she belongs to the ages. The faithful have a different out- look and hope because of the Res- urrection of Christ. Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth "We are con- fident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord." The simple interpretation of this passage is wherever Jesus is; those in the faith are with him. There- fore, what is death to me? The moral, every day with Jesus is a Good Day! Live and have a Good Day! Think about it! Continued on page 9 Minority View by Walter E. Williams The Weekly by Alden Heuring Ignorance vs. stupidity Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond It's a good day Communism marks a century of devastation Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner President Franklin D. Roos- evelt called Dec. 7, 1941 "a day that will live in infamy," and with good reason. The date that Tojo's Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Har- bor heralded America's entrance into the bloody fighting of World War II. But there are other dates that live in infamy, and many of them aren't nearly as well known. But they deserve to be. Take Nov. 7, 1917. Anything come to mind? One hundred years ago this month, Bolsheviks under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian government and estab- lished a communist dictatorship. "The world has never been the same since," writes foreign policy expert Kim Holmes in a recent ar- ticle for the Richmond Times-Dis- patch. How many perished in the wake of this "revolution"? It depends on which historian you ask. Accord- ing to Richard Pipes, it was 9 mil- lion. Robert Conquest says at least 20 mil- lion, and likely as ma- ny as 30 million, died in the "Great Terror." If you include "un- natural deaths," the number who died could be as high as 50 million. For perspec- tive, consider that more than 60 million died in World War II — roughly 3 percent of the world's population at the time. In short, when looked at in terms of human carnage — of lives lost — the Russian Revolution was essentially another world war. So why isn't Nov. 7, 1917 as notorious as Dec. 7, 1941? This discrepancy becomes even more blatant when one considers the wider cost of communism. The Russian experience, after all, in- spired other "revolutions," and its record of mass genocide "is ex- ceeded only by anoth- er communist dicta- torship, Maoist Chi- na, which destroyed between 44.5 to 72 million lives (accord- ing to Stephane Cour- tois). And let's not for- get the 'killing fields' of Cambodia in the 1970s." Why isn't this his- tory better known? "[Soviet lead- er Joseph] Stalin kept most media out, so few Americans knew that millions were starving," writes John Stossel in a recent column. And he had help. "Even as the Rus- sian regime killed millions, some journalists and intellectuals cov- ered up the crimes." But it isn't just the loss of life that stains the history of communism. Its legacy is also one of grinding One of the most challenging and important jobs for an economics professor is to teach students how little we know and can possibly know. My longtime friend and col- league Dr. Thomas Sowell says, "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ig- norance." Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek admonished, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." The fact that we have gross ignorance about how the world operates is ignored by the know-it-all elites who seek to control our lives. Let's look at a few examples of the world's com- plexity. According to some estimates, there are roughly 100 million traf- fic signals in the U.S. How many of us would like the U.S. Congress, in the name of public health and safety, to be in charge of their ac- tual operation? Congress or a com- mittee it authorizes would deter- mine the length of time traffic lights stay red, yellow and green and what hours of the day and at what intersections lights flash red or yellow. One can only imagine the mess Congress would create in the 40,000 cities, towns and oth- er incorporated places in the U.S. But managing traffic lights — and getting good results — is a far less complex task than managing the nation's health care system and getting good results, which Con- gress tries to do. Here's another task I'd ask whether you would like Con- gress to control. The average well-stocked supermarket carries 60,000 to 65,000 different items. Walmart carries about 120,000 different items. Let's suppose Con- gress puts you in total control of getting just one item to a supermar- ket — say apples. Let's not make it easy by having the help of apple wholesalers. Thus, you would have to figure out all of the inputs neces- sary to get apples to your local su- permarket. Let's look at just a few. You need crates to ship the apples. Count all the inputs necessary to produce crates. There's wood, but you need saws to cut down trees. The saws are made of steel, so iron ore must be mined, and mining equipment is needed. The workers must have shoes. The complete list of inputs to get apples to the mar- ket comes to a very large, possi- bly an unknowable, number. For- getting any one of them, such as spark plugs, would probably mean no apples at your supermarket. The beauty of market allocation of goods and services, compared with government fiat, is no one per- son needs to know all that's neces- sary to get apples to your super- market. Free markets, accompa- nied by free trade, including inter- national free trade, make us richer by economizing on the amount of knowledge or information needed to produce things. Think about this morning's breakfast. Let's suppose you and your spouse each had four slices of bacon and two eggs. You had cof- fee, and your spouse had cocoa. The breakfast might have cost you $22. But what might it have cost you if instead of being dependent upon others, you were independent and produced your own breakfast? What do you know about raising pigs and their subsequent slaugh- ter? Do you know how to cure pork to make bacon? Then there are the eggs, which require knowledge about the care of chickens. What about getting pig and chicken feed? You'd have a big problem with the coffee and cocoa. I doubt wheth- er you could simulate the growing conditions in Brazil and West A f- rica. One thing that's guaranteed is that your breakfast would be far costlier than in the case where you depended upon the benefits of skills of others that emerge from the division of labor and trade. The bottom line is that each of us is grossly ignorant about the world in which we live. Nothing's wrong with that ignorance, but we are stu- pid if we believe that a politician can produce a better life than that which is obtained through peace- able, voluntary exchange with our fellow man anywhere on earth. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason Uni- versity. Dream journalist Continued on page 9 My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Now that I have more time to reflect back on the health care I was blessed to devote my life to, I started focusing on the aspect of nutrition. Pretty soon we are heading to the one of the biggest holidays we celebrate-Thanksgiving. I'm pret- ty sure a lot of us will be thinking of turkeys and hams. And those wonderful desserts. So in my quest to enlighten myself about nutrition, I started watching pro- grams on Netflix. I was kind of surprised about the amount of re- search about eating meats and eating plant based foods, and eat- ing processed foods. So out of curiosity I watched the follow- ing documentaries: Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead; Forks over Knives; Food Choices; What the Health; Nutrition and health Continued on page 9 An autumn morning. The house is chilly, and we're sitting around the front room eating breakfast. "Last night, I had this crazy dream..." You could say my wife is a dreamer. She's got a crazy dream to share, and sometimes two or three crazy dreams to share, ev- ery morning over breakfast, or in bed while we're still getting up, or in the bathroom while I'm trying to pee. She just has to make sure she tells me before all her crazy dreams fade back into her subcon- scious. Every day it's this: "So last night, I was cantoring at St. James—which I've never do- ne by myself before, but I was in the choir there in grade school— they had picked out all the songs for me ahead of time, and I didn't know any of them, and it was last minute so I didn't have any time to practice. "Let's see... Mass started, and I couldn't read the board that the song numbers were posted on, so I kept announcing the wrong song, and while I'm bumbling through my announcement I'm searching through the songs, but all the num- bers were out of order, so then I finally read the board correctly, read the right page, and we get started. "But out of nowhere there's a choir singing behind me that I didn't know about, and they're singing a different part than me, and I can't follow along with what they're singing to be able to sing my part, and eventually the priest, who I think was actually Bishop Thompson, comes upstairs and asks if I want to start over. And he said one of the choir members told him I was stupid. Not even that I was bad at singing, just that I was stupid. "Oh yeah! Okay, and so then we get through that song or what- ever, and it gets to that song, and I—what's the appropriate word I'm looking for, not bullcrap, but—I fake my way through the first cou- ple verses and then I realize the rest of the verses have been re- placed by wingdings. And no one can sing anymore. Anyway, what's for breakfast? " So that's my life with my wife. Like the legendary Scheherazade, she's got a new story for me every day. I always pretend to be an- noyed, but in reality, it's perfect. You can't just go out and throw bricks in the street and expect to hit a spouse who tells you stories every morning. She's truly a ra- re sort of woman... But I'll have to make fun of her in the next column so this one doesn't go to her head. Look forward to it next week! Leftists: Tolerant of everything but the truth Lucid Moments by Bart Stinson If you've driven to the Mari- on Veterans Medical Center, you probably passed through Harris- burg, Illinois. Its population was 9,017 at last Census, way down from its 20th-Century heyday. In 1948, Harrisburg was the hub of a thriving coal and agriculture economy with a busy railroad de- pot. The area was sufficiently vote- rich that incumbent President Harry Truman scheduled a cam- paign stop and a speech. It was here that a supporter famously interrupted the presi- dent's speech to shout "give 'em hell, Harry! " Truman, under some pressure from wife Bess to clean up his language, demurred that "I don't give them hell; I just tell the truth and they think it's hell." Almost 70 years later, a lot of people are still appalled by truth- telling. Legendary feminist Germaine Greer has been driven out of ac- ademic feminism by snowflakes who nearly feinted when she stat- ed the obvious: surgical mutilation of sex organs cannot make a wom- an out of a man. Two universities promptly reneged on their plans to confer honorary doctorates on her. But nutty faculties are entitled to confer their honor- ary doctorates as they please. That's why they call them honorary– they're not earned, and nobody has an enforce- able right to them. They're conferred be- cause universities have a right (and a Kinko's account) to give them out, not because any- body can meet transparent crite- ria that would entitle them to one. Besides, no celebrity would show up to collect the diploma if they called it a "fake doctorate." Withholding adulation is one thing. Suppressing the free ex- pression and publication of con- trary opinions is a much more se- rious matter. Say what you will about New York City, it has long valued di- versity, not only of speakers, but of speech itself. In its earlier, more principled phase, the New York-based American Civil Liber- ties Union went to bat for speakers whose ideas it deplored, including American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. Whether it was Nat Hen- toff, Alan Dershow- itz or Antonin Scal- ia, New Yorkers of all political stripes were often the most stub- born defenders of di- verse opinion, unre- stricted publication and the ability to or- ganize. These ideas were enshrined by all 13 original states, of course, as the Constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association. But the earth has shifted since the advent of digital civics. Print and broadcast empires are in eclipse, and New York is no longer the intellectual capital of Ameri- ca. Laissez faire New York values no longer predominate here. We have fallen under the authoritari- an shadow of Northern California. San Francisco values govern. Sili- con Valley digital barons may not have the final word on what you may say, but they do have the final