The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/950460
B-10 Wednesday, March 7, 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 What can be said or written that hasn't already about Billy Gra- ham, a man who lived the mes- sage he preached? The few words that I write will undoubtedly be a collage of the many tributes that have been giv- en for a man of our era. If you listened to Graham's ser- mons, his reoccurring themes were always present: hope, an- other chance, grace, and empow- erment to live the life Christ sets before us. He was an evangelist who preached against sin, but nev- er condemned the sinner. The words were aimed at the evil and destructiveness within that push- es us away from God. Few people know that Billy Graham visited disgraced televangelist Jim Bak- ker in federal prison. He didn't go to condemn Bakker; he went to minister to Bakker's soul. Graham looked beyond Jim Bakker as a failure. He told Bak- ker that God loves him, and so did he. Those who followed his ministry said that he was out of synch with both liberal and con- servative Christiani- ty. Graham preached about having a rela- tionship with Christ the Savior; preach- ing about politics and social issues to him didn't save souls. Others opined that he wasn't tackling the tough political and social issues that were wracking America to its core; instead he preached a Christ of the Cross that changed lives. In a tribute to Billy Graham, columnists and blogger Joe Bob Briggs identified three areas of ministry that set Graham apart from his contemporaries. First, Billy Graham never built a church. He had the name recog- nition and following that many of his colleagues who began on the sawdust trail did. But he felt that he was called to be an evangelist and not a pastor. Matter-of-fact, he always stated that he had a local church and pastor. Second, Graham's style and presentation was not embraced by all of American Chris- tianity. He was an enigma because his liberal and conserva- tive Christian detrac- tors didn't get it. To the fundamentalist, he was "too soft" on the issues; to the liberals, he was a "fire breather." Briggs notes that Christianity can be a comfort and an affliction, depending upon your spiritual condition. That is why some never "got" Graham's style; it was about saving souls, not the mechanics of what one believes about politics or social issues. Gra- ham preached "the living Christ," which befuddled the post-Chris- tian Christian, and social funda- mentalist. Finally, Briggs summarized Minority View by Walter E. Williams The Weekly by Alden Heuring Another Liberal-created failure Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Where have they gone? William F. Buckley's legacy Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner It's been exactly a decade since William F. Buckley Jr. died. Yet, surveying the ideological land- scape, it feels more like a century. Watch an episode of his program "Firing Line," and you'll see what I mean. There, Mr. Buckley—in his uniquely aristocratic way—would debate guests on the issues of the day. Not try to shout each other down, or trot out a quick sound bite before three or four different people cross-talked over you, but actually debate. That may sound like a recipe for boredom, and perhaps by the cage- match mentality prevailing today, it was. But we're talking about a program that racked up more than 1,500 episodes over nearly 35 years. People were watching, listening and engaging in debates of their own across the country. Mr. Buckley, of course, was no mere host, but an intellect of the first order who preached undiluted conservatism. Author, publisher, commentator, he bucked the lib- eral order by revealing the empti- ness of its utopian promises. He got off to an early start, put- ting himself on the political map right out of college in 1951 with a best-seller called "God and Man at Yale." Only a few years later, he found- ed National Review. It's hard to over- estimate the impor- tance of National Re- view to the conserva- tive movement. Great thinkers on the right, such as F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk and James Burnham, were pro- ducing important books, but be- fore Mr. Buckley's magazine hit newsstands in 1955, no periodical was unapologetically applying con- servative principles to current af- fairs, especially in such an urbane and witty way. "Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are oth- er points of view," he wrote in "Up From Liberalism." Another clas- sic zinger: "Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peo- ple's money, except when it comes to questions of nation- al survival, when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and securi- ty." With good reason did his son Christo- pher describe his fa- ther as "the intellec- tual godfather" to the movement that gave us Ronald Reagan. "I'd be lost with- out National Review," the future president wrote to Mr. Buckley in 1962, two years before his famous "A Time for Choosing" speech for Barry Goldwater put him on the political map. Mr. Buckley was sui generis: master of the spoken and written word; founder of institutions that outlive him; unheralded support- er of many individuals and organi- zations; political trendsetter; and a congenital optimist who led the way for so many to follow, while re- A husband's guide to surviving the second pregnancy Places to visit Continued on page 11 Continued on page 11 Continued on page 11 Continued on page 11 Continued on page 11 In America, mass murder academy is always in session Lucid Moments by Bart Stinson Gun control partisans some- times claim that rampage shoot- ings are a uniquely American af- fliction, caused by our failure to imitate other countries' gun poli- cies. It's true that other countries have fewer school shootings than we have. But uninformed anti-gun Americans overstate their case. There have been massacres in Germany, Scotland, Canada, Bra- zil, the Soviet Union, China, Japan and South Korea. And the foreign countries do not rely exclusively on gun policy to prevent gun violence in their schools. For example, rating by the Min- istry of Justice is mandatory for all video games released in Brazil. As a result of that prospect of scruti- ny and accountability, online game stores do not sell their most violent and harmful games in the Brazil- ian market. The Brazilian government out- lawed Mortal Kombat, Postal, Car- mageddon, Requiem, Blood and other violent first-person shoot- er games in 1999 after a 24-year- old medical student killed several people at a cinema, re-enacting a bloody Duke Nukem video game scenario. Sega gained a com- petitive advantage over Nintendo in the U.S. market by allowing a bloodier, more brutal version of the Mortal Kombat game. But Se- ga canceled release of that most inhumane version in Spain, where the government was unlikely to tolerate it. South Korea and Australia banned the Mortal Kombat game altogether. Germans passed the Children and Young Persons Protection Act in response to the Erfurt Massa- cre of 2002, in which an expelled 19 -year-old student killed 16 at his high school. It was already illegal to pro- vide content on how to commit a crime, and to glorify or trivialize violence. But the new law creat- ed an age-based system for listing and restricting video games that are harmful to youth, whether due to violence or a dark and threaten- ing atmosphere. American game publishers and developers began to release edited ver- sions of their games in the German mar- ket in order to avoid a restrictive rating that would depress sales. Microsoft opted not to release its third- person shooter Gears of War game in the German market, and did not initially submit to the rat- ing system. Gears of War was nevertheless imported into Germany by travel- ers. The government then revised its system to presume that unrated imported video games deserve the most severe restrictions. The first two iterations of Gears of War were added to the restricted "index" of media harmful to youth. German prosecutors enforced the index, and youth welfare agen- cies brought violations to their at- tention. On the third phase, Micro- soft finally relented and submitted My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. A liberal-created failure that goes entirely ignored is the left's harmful agenda for society's most vulnerable people — the mentally ill. Eastern State Hospital, built in 1773 in Wil- liamsburg, Virginia, was the first public hospital in America for the care and treatment of the mental- ly ill. Many more followed. Much of the motivation to build more mental institutions was to provide a reme- dy for the maltreatment of mental- ly ill people in our prisons. Accord- ing to professor William Gronfein at Indiana University-Purdue Uni- versity Indianapolis, by 1955 there were nearly 560,000 patients housed in state mental institutions across the nation. By 1977, the population of mental institutions had dropped to about 160,000 patients. Starting in the 1970s, advocates for closing mental hospitals argued that because of the availability of new psychotropic drugs, people with mental illness could live among the rest of the population in an un- restrained natural setting. Accord- ing to a 2013 Wall Street Journal ar- ticle by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, titled "Fifty Years of Failing Amer- ica's Mentally Ill" (http://tinyurl. com/y9l8ujww), shutting down mental hospitals didn't turn out the way advocates promised. Several studies summarized by the Treat- ment Advocacy Center show that un- treated mentally ill are responsible for 10 percent of homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass kill- ings). They are 20 percent of jail and prison inmates and more than 30 percent of the homeless. We often encounter these severe- ly mentally ill individuals camped out in libraries, parks, hospital emergency rooms and train sta- tions and sleeping in cardboard boxes. They annoy passers-by with their sometimes intimidating pan- handling. The disgusting quality of life of many of the mentally ill makes a mockery of the lofty pre- dictions made by the advocates of shutting down mental institutions and transferring their function to community mental health centers, or CMHCs. Torrey writes: "The evi- dence is overwhelming that this fed- eral experiment has failed, as seen most recently in the mass shootings by mentally ill individuals in New- town, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and Tuc- son, Ariz. It is time for the federal government to get out of this busi- ness and return the responsibility, and funds, to the states." Getting the federal government out of the mental health business may be easier said than done. A 1999 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Olmstead v. L.C. held that under the Americans with Dis- abilities Act, individuals with men- tal disabilities have the right to live in an integrated community setting rather than in institutions. The U.S. Department of Justice defined an in- tegrated setting as one "that enables individuals with disabilities to in- teract with non-disabled persons to the fullest extent possible." Though some mentally ill people may have benefited from this ruling, many others were harmed — not to men- tion the public, which must put up with the behavior of the mentally ill. Torrey says it has now become politically correct to claim that this federal program failed because not enough centers were funded and not enough money was spent. But that's not true. Torrey says: "Altogether, the annual total public funds for the support and treatment of mentally ill individuals is now more than $140 billion. The equivalent expenditure in 1963 when President John F. Ken- nedy proposed the CMHC program was $1 billion, or about $10 billion in today's dollars. Even allowing for the increase in U.S. population, what we are getting for this 14-fold increase in spending is a disgrace." The dollar cost of this liberal vi- sion of deinstitutionalization of men- tally ill people is a relatively small part of the burden placed on society. Many innocent people have been as- saulted, robbed and murdered by mentally ill people. Businesspeo- ple and their customers have had to cope with the nuisance created by the mentally ill. The police response to misbehavior and crime commit- ted by the mentally ill is to arrest them. Thus, they are put in jeopardy of mistreatment by hardened crimi- nals in the nation's jails and prisons. Jill's second pregnancy is draw- ing to a close, and at this point, I feel that I have a fair bit of experi- ence dealing with a pregnant wife. This second pregnancy, of course, has been enhanced by also hav- ing a toddler around to "help" us get things done, and that changes things. However, I'd like to hum- bly submit a short list of things that I've learned over these recent months, in the hopes they might help other husbands stay ahead of the pregnancy game. So without further ado: • Caffeine-free soda. Buy in bulk, but only bring one carton out of hiding at a time. • BOGO deals on prenatal vita- mins; or, in lieu of that, a winning lottery ticket so you can afford pre- natal vitamins. • Extra-long phone charger cords for when she's too pregnant to get up. • Neck pillows for when she's too pregnant to lay down. • Disney's FastPlay (tm) for when you've lost the remote. • Takeout coupons for when it's your turn to cook. Might as well update your speed dial with all the nearby restaurants that deliv- er, too, and keep some extra petty cash for tipping all the poor, unfor- tunate servers that have to clean up after you on "family date night." • Tide Pods so you don't have to tell your wife that you don't know how laundry detergent works. • And finally, this is one I wish I'd thought of two trimesters ago: a man-purse containing diapers and wipes for your toddler, Tylenol for mom, little snack baggies for both of them, and a coffee thermos for yourself. Once you've made a kid or two, being seen carrying a purse drops well beneath the least of your worries, right next to keep- ing pink baby dolls and ponies in the backseat of your car. Oh, and make sure the purse has a strong shoulder strap, because you're definitely not going to have your hands free anytime soon. So there you have it. It's a sim- ple guide, but simple things can help save you effort when you're bushed, or save you mindspace for when you need to think of a yet another way to comfort your wife after she gets told seven times in yet another day "you're getting so big! " See you next week! Since traveling to faraway places has become rather challenging at this stage of our lives, I started to check out what places in my dream I would like to visit, or wished I had visited. So, I resorted to using my computer to view great programs via Netflix. I discovered that in the comfort of my armchair, I could visit great hotels, great sites, great beaches, great eating places, amazing archi- tectures and other historical plac- es. Some are beyond human un- derstanding, like the Pyramids of Egypt, the mysterious places like pyramids and altars in different countries- like in Mexico, Peru, Central and South America, mar- vels in Asia, especially China and many other places in the Far East. We do have our own amazing plac- es, too, here in North America, like the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and other historical sites and plac- es of natural beauty. There are also programs that in-