The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/985526
B-10 Wednesday, May 23, 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 is life? The psalmist wrote that it is short and full of trouble: "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength en- dures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quick- ly pass, and we fly away. The apostle James writes, "…or what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away." The question then arises, "Does life have purpose and meaning? " The opening and closing chap- ters of the Bible provide an an- swer, and that answer is to fellow- ship with life's Creator and enjoy the expanse of creation. Humanism and its secular ten- ants have stripped away the spir- itual meaning of life and has re- placed it with consumerism, con- sumption, and self-indulgence. If a song could capture the self- centeredness of this era, it would be "My Way," and Bill Sardi's latest column "Life Cut Short at 104" tells the story of modern man's success in charting a life without any spiri- tual purpose and hope beyond the tangible. Sardi writes of David Goodall, an author and evolutionary bota- nist and ecologist who decided to end his life in a Swiss death clinic a few weeks ago. Goodall's obituary is impres- sive: "He was influential in the early development of statistical methods in plant communities. He worked as researcher and pro- fessor in England, Australia, Gha- na, and the United States. He was editor-in-chief of the 30 -volume Ecosys- tems of the World Se- ries, and author of more than 100 publica- tions. Still active past the age of 100, he was known as Australia's oldest working scien- tist and was an advo- cate of voluntary eu- thanasia legislation." Nonetheless, he lived an emp- ty and wretched life, and by his own admission remarked before his death that he "hasn't got any- thing to live for." Goodall regretted reaching old age: "One should be free to choose the death, when death is at an ap- propriate time. My abilities have been in decline over the past year or two, my eyesight over the past six years. I no longer want to con- tinue life." Toward the end of Sardi's dis- cussion of the triumphs of Good- all's academic life and his struggle with declining health, is he {Good- all] concluded life lacks purpose. Sardi writes, that Goodall "got to the end and found no purpose to life; He just filled the time. He had the freedom and time and in- tellect that many others don't have to search for meaning in life. He chose the mundane. Not even Goodall's writings will live on past him and will likely gather dust in libraries. Goodall painted himself into a corner through his ac- ademic career which meshed with his belief system. He embraced evolutionary biology, which offers no hope of life beyond the few years spent here on earth. As an evolutionary biologist, his quest for knowledge of life took him away from the Creator and hope beyond the sufferings of life, toward embracing mankind as just another animal amongst animals, an evolutionary step from the pri- mordial soup, Secular humanism is morally bankrupt because it has no spir- itual underpinnings. Secularism has no purpose other than "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." Many give no thought of the big picture of "why are we here," and "what is life? " There- fore, life becomes finding activi- ties or events to pass the time in between fulfilling evolutionary destiny, which is to "make babies and marry the kids off and then die." Interesting, Sardi writes, "Good- all's last words were comprised of singing a few bars of "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th Symphony… maybe Goodall longed for some- thing good and a Creator he nev- Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Public restrooms should really be private Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond The Weekly by Alden Heuring Minority View by Walter E. Williams Life has meaning Winnie-the-Pooh crosses the sea Kanye and Democrats Storing those tomatoes Continued on page 11 Continued on page 12 My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Twenty one years ago, an 18 -year-old man entered a wom- en's restroom at a business where I worked. If I had seen him enter the ladies' room, I would have been ex- pected to confront him and drive him out. Nowadays, in certain jurisdic- tions, he could sue me and my employer for expelling him from a room where women and girls pull their panties down. He might be able to recruit government prose- cutors to punish us, without hiring a lawyer of his own. And the policy of several faddish corporations is to leave such men to choose which- ever restroom they prefer, no ques- tions asked. That man's name is Jeremy Strohmeyer, and there is no rea- sonable prospect of him suing me in the future, because he is cur- rently serving life without pa- role in a state penitentiary for the crimes he committed in that rest- room on May 25, 1997. He was preceded in the ladies' room by seven-year-old Sherrice "Sherry" Iverson. She was mis- chievous and unsupervised, a handful. Her nearby father and teenage brother had no interest in following her around to pro- tect her. Neither did anybody else. Strohmeyer was interested enough to follow her into the rest- room, but not to protect her. He raped her, strangled her in a stall and, when she nevertheless showed some signs of life, went back and snapped her neck. He stuffed her tiny body between the commode and the wall, and left her there for my co-worker to discover in the morning. She would have been 28 this year, perhaps a young mother in the prime of life. Instead, there is no trace of her. Her father died within a few years of her murder. When a big-city newspaper pub- lished an article on the 20th an- niversary of her killing, report- ers couldn't find her mother, and couldn't find anybody who knew what became of her. She was sur- rounded by community organizers for a few years, stood in front of a few television cameras, then dis- appeared from the South Central Los Angeles ghetto in which she raised Sherry for seven years. And so there is nobody left to speak for Sherry, or about her. Security personnel reconstruct- ed the sequence of the crime later, based on video recorded by a sur- veillance camera mounted outside the ladies' room. But there was an eyewitness inside, too. Strohm- eyer's traveling companion Da- vid Cash followed him into the la- dies' room and peered over a par- tition into the stall where Stroh- meyer was muscling Sherry and stifling her screams by clenching her mouth. When Strohmeyer seemed too preoccupied to engage in chitchat with Cash, he (Cash) left the rest- room without intervening. He nev- er notified security or police of the assault in progress. A fter Strohm- eyer came out of the restroom and rejoined Cash, he told Cash he had killed the little girl. Cash never re- ported his friend to police. Strohmeyer is spending the rest of his life in prison, but Cash nev- er suffered any legal penalty for his indifference to the victimiza- tion of Sherry Iverson. Prosecu- tors said there was no law against what Cash failed to do. That has changed, but too late to prosecute him. Cash is apparently having a great life. He was accepted in- to Berkeley's nuclear engineer- ing program, graduated, and has had some very nice jobs in his na- tive California, mostly in the public sector. He'll be 40 next year. There was considerable public outrage about the impunity of a man who casually shrugged off the horrific rape and murder of a child he could and should have protect- ed. But how different are corporate executives and government offi- cials who empower the potential Strohmeyers of 2018 enter wom- en's public restrooms at will? Like David Cash, they act on extrava- gant personal loyalty to friends I was privileged to attend the dedication of the new American embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018 — an event of enormous im- port that will remain with me for- ever. I am deeply grateful to Ambas- sador David Friedman and his wife, Tammy, for inviting me to this historic event. The United States recogniz- ing Jerusalem as Israel's capital is important not just for the United States and Israel but also for the entire world. We might start thinking about this by considering the unique relationship between these two countries. Regardless of how some choose to think about the United States to- day, the country's founding gen- eration was largely Christian men and women. Alexis de Tocqueville, author of "Democracy in America," widely deemed to be the most insightful book ever written about the Unit- ed States, wrote in 1835, "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a great- er influence over the souls of men than in America." Perhaps there is no better exam- ple demonstrating this truth, and the deep roots of Christian Amer- icans in the Hebrew Bible, than the inscription on the Liberty Bell from the Book of Leviticus: "Pro- claim liberty throughout all the land unto all inhabitants thereof." The United States and Israel are different from other nations in that both are defined by a creed and by principles. I would go so far to say that the extraordinary success of both countries springs from these prin- I was browsing through some items on the internet and came across some tips on how to store to- matoes. Over at Somebody's Place, we received a whole bunch of toma- to plants, I mean a whole bunch, from the generosity of Joe Sutton. A lot of the clients at Somebody's Place really appreciated these to- mato and other vegetable plants. So, it caught my attention when I read some advice on tomatoes. Let me share some of the tips. First- keep unripe green toma- toes stem side up on a paper bag or in a cardboard box in a single layer. Place in a cool area till they are red in color. Perfectly ripe to- matoes should be kept at room tem- perature on the counter and keep them away from sunlight. Make sure they are in a single layer, not touching one another, and stem side up. Consume within a couple of days. Over ripe tomatoes soft to touch with very red flesh are best kept in the fridge. The cold air will keep the tomatoes from ripening more, and they should last for another three days. Before eating refriger- ated tomatoes, take them out of the fridge and let them come to room temperature. This will allow the fruit to develop some of the flavor it has lost during the refrigeration. I'm pretty sure a lot of you, who for a long time have dealt with toma- toes know these tips. While researching on preserv- ing fruits and vegetables, I found out there is a huge amount of good information on this subject, and I would refer the reader to do your own search. Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Continued on page 11 Continued on page 12 Trump and the Israel test In the aftermath of the Kanye West dust-up, my heart goes out to the white people who control the Democratic Party. My pity stems from the hip-hop megastar's No- vember announcement to his packed concert audience that he did not vote in the presidential elec- tion but if he had, he would have voted for Donald Trump. Then, on April 21, West took to his Twitter account, which has 28 million fol- lowers, to announce, "I love the way Candace Owens thinks." Ow- ens is Turning Point USA's direc- tor of urban engagement and has said that former President Barack Obama caused "damage" to race relations in the United States dur- ing his two terms in office. West's support for Trump, along with his criticism of the "planta- tion" mentality of the Democrat- ic Party, has been met with vi- cious backlash from the left. In one song, West raps, "See, that's the prob- lem with this damn nation. All blacks got- ta be Democrats. Man, we ain't made it off the plantation." Rep. Max- ine Waters said West "talks out of turn" and advised, "He should think twice about pol- itics — and maybe not have so much to say." The bottom- line sin that West has commit- ted is questioning the hegemony of the Democratic Party among black Americans. The backlash has been so bad that West had to hire personal security to protect him against threats made against his life. Fortunately, the police are investigating those threats. Kanye West is not saying any- thing different from what Dr. Thomas Sow- ell, Larry Elder, Jason Riley, I and other black libertarians/conserva- tives have been saying for decades. In fact, West has tweeted quo- tations from Sowell, such as "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it" and "The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best." Tweet- ing those Sowell quotations repre- sents the highest order of blasphe- my in the eyes of leftists. The big difference between It's been said that the United States and United Kingdom are separated by a common language. A fter a few dozen watch-throughs of the beloved children's classic The Many Adventures of Winnie- the-Pooh, an adaptation of a series of British books, I've realized that the movie is a striking example of how things can change when they're brought to a new country. Probably the funniest example of this is the scene in which Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit's front door. This is the introduction of the char- acter Gopher, whose catchphrase is "I'm not in the book, but I'm at your service! " Gopher is, in fact, not in the books by A.A. Milne, but was added to the Disney shorts as a specifically American character in the midst of the otherwise-very- British cast of stuffed animals. Gopher is an excavator by trade (get it? A gopher?), and when he meets Pooh, he offers to blast him out of his predicament with dyna- mite. Eventually Owl shows up, and the two spend a long and hilarious ex- change haggling over the price Gopher would charge to extricate Pooh's backside from Rabbit's front door. In this conversation, much is said, but noth- ing is understood, as the two parties consis- tently take the wrong meaning from what the other is saying. For example: Owl: "Oh, blast it all! " Gopher: "Great idea! We'll dyna- mite, saves time." Owl: "What's the charge? " Gopher: "The charge? About seven sticks of dynamite." Owl: "No no no! The cost! The charge in money! " Gopher: "Oh, no charge ac- counts! I work strictly cash." And so on. This conversation sets the tone for Gopher's relation- ship with the other characters through- out the movie: he constantly misunder- stands and is misun- derstood, but yet he and the other animals in the Hundred-Acre Wood help each other along anyhow. Life is often like that. Even between close friends, circumstances will arise that are impossible to fully understand if you're not the one liv- ing through them. It's easy to sit back and give pithy advice, or even to withdraw from the relationship, when a friend is going through hard times or making poor deci- sions. We want to solve the prob- lem, or avoid the problem, or at least be able to say "I told you so,"