A Road Not Traveled

                                               A Road Not Traveled

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/1/17

In August of 1969 my wife, our 6-month old daughter and I, were backing out of our driveway in Meridian, Mississippi.  My wife was teary, though still showing her typical steady resolve.

             I felt numb and a bit fearful, but accepted the fact that our lives were about to change.  A two-week-old letter from the Selective Service Board had determined what this day would be like.  I had a fair knowledge of world events.  I knew that if you reported for your physical and were deemed fit, you most likely landed in the jungles of Vietnam.

            All of my growing up years I heard talk about war and the military life.  Two older brothers had made the military a career and had fought in World War II.  Paul was an avid conversationalist and described the war experience in horrific details.  Pete, a quieter man, was slow to talk about the horrors of war.   

            My stalwart mother gave birth to me in 1944 while these two brothers were in Germany and Belgium.  The only time I ever saw her cry was late one Sunday afternoon while we were getting ready for church.  The radio was on and a bluegrass group was singing “Come One, Come All to the Family Reunion.”

            When my mother walked into the living room and heard the singing, she leaned against the wall and uncharacteristically began to weep.  “Please cut that off,” she pleaded.  “It reminds me too much of Paul and Pete and the war.”  I was 13.  The war had been over only 12 years.

            This scenario and all the memories of my two dear brothers flooded my mind as I backed out of the driveway.  The Selective Service letter had said I should report to Jackson for my physical.  I was doing so and would willingly go to war as my brothers had done.

            My father, an incurable news junkie, had followed the Vietnam War closely.  “Why won’t they go on and win the thing?” he groused when the death of John Kennedy dumped the war into the lap of Lyndon Johnson.  “That’s what Truman did.”

            I knew of the controversy surrounding the war which I most likely was about to enter.  Two things had set my mind on ready, two memories that also bombarded my mind as I backed my car further.  One was the noble example of my brothers.  The other was the maddening transformation that occurred on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi while I was a student there. 

            My junior year at Southern Miss the campus was astir with patriotism.  Excitedly, students lined up to give blood for our Vietnam troops, hoping to win a contest with Ole Miss and Mississippi State.

            My senior year was different.  Anti-war fever struck.  Sit-ins occurred.  There were no clashes, but Peter, Paul and Mary and the Peace Movement were taking hold.  Ironically 58,200 American troops went to their graves so that college students could remain free to sing and protest against the very troops who were dying for them.

            Campus and war images danced in my head as my car reached the street.  Stopping the car, I took the mail from our mailbox to take it with us.  In the mail was a letter from the Selective Service.  Curious, I opened it instantly.  In typical government jargon, a lengthy single sentence told me not to report for my physical.  At the bottom of the page in blue ink were the words, “Mr. Hines, you should have told us earlier about the birth of your daughter.”

            I had been deferred so far, perhaps partially because I was a teacher in a time of severe teacher shortage.  I had no idea that the birth of a child was cause for deferment. 

            As I pulled back into our driveway, a mixture of anger and guilt fell over me.  Anger at the protesting students at Southern Miss, guilt for not having already enlisted for service as my brothers had done.  The road before me would not be what I expected after all.  

            As the war rolled on, hundreds of Americans died each and every week.  My college roommate was injured. 

            And now, “oppressed” multi-millionaire athlete-entertainers are refusing to honor the flag that those 58,200 soldiers died for.  Those athletes are ingrates.  They are pitiful, whining opposites of my brothers and their younger 58,200 fallen comrades.  They can take a knee all they want.  I’m taking a remote and punching anything other than an NFL ballgame.

Roger Hines

9/27/17 

The “Nashville Statement”: Clarity and Controversy from the Baptist Vatican

The “Nashville Statement”: Clarity and Controversy from the Baptist Vatican

            Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal on 9/1017

            For decades many Southerners have jokingly referred to Nashville, Tennessee as the Baptist Vatican.  That’s because Nashville is the location of the publishing house and other operations of the Southern Baptist Convention.

            Of the numbering of different Baptist groups, there is no end.  The largest Baptist group and the largest protestant denomination in America is Southern Baptists with 47,000 churches across the country.  

            It wasn’t Baptists alone, however, who produced the clarifying and controversial “Nashville Statement” on August 29 in Nashville.  In fact, the document’s 150 signers are evangelical leaders of many denominations.  One signer, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is a Nazarene.  Francis Chan, the popular San Francisco pastor, is a Charismatic.  Methodists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans, among others, also signed the document.  The document is clarifying because it reminds evangelicals of orthodox Christianity’s historical stand on sexuality.  It is controversial because some Americans don’t like Christianity’s historical stand on sexuality, particularly the LGBT lobby.

            The statement’s signers were convened by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, an organization founded in 1987 by evangelical leaders of different denominations.  These leaders were concerned about the spread of ideas regarding human sexuality which they believed were scientifically wrong (transgenderism) and socially harmful (homosexual marriage).  Its board members come from states stretching from Florida to Washington state, and from California to Ohio.

            The “Nashville Statement” is a list of 14 articles or statements of belief.  It is nothing new.  Actually it is a re-statement, a listing of 14 theological positions held by Christians for, let us say, 2000 years.  One statement is given below, but first some background.

            Who could deny that there has been an upheaval of Western sexual mores during the last five decades?  The “free love” of the ‘60s has turned out to be costly, radical feminism has rendered women less feminine and men less masculine, and homosexual marriage (an oxymoron) has turned the definition of marriage on its head.  Porn is rampant, nudity and near-nudity are ho-hum, and sex is, well, nothing especially beautiful and sacred, just a pleasurable activity between two people of any sex.

            This is where we have arrived since “free love,” “sexual freedom,” and the “pleasure principle” started us on the journey.  Children and teens are swamped by it, presuming it is the acceptable norm.

            Concern about this upheaval is held by far more people than the 150 initial signers of the “Nashville Statement.”  Regarding the trendy endeavor of transgenderism, Dr. Paul McHugh, retired chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, recently wrote, “Sex change is biologically impossible.  People who undergo sex-reassignment do not change from men to women or vice versa.  Rather, they become feminized men or masculized women.” (And our military sanctions it?)  It was McHugh who put a stop to transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins.  McHugh still believes in chromosomes even though Scientific American magazine doesn’t.  It now allows for human “hybrids.”

             Each of the statement’s 14 articles contains an affirmation of belief and a denial.  For instance, Article 1 reads (in part), “We affirm that God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman as husband and wife … We deny that God has designed marriage to be a homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous relationship.  We also deny that marriage is a mere human contract …”   

            The document goes on to address, in the above format, today’s sexual chaos and its resulting moral standards or lack thereof.  It is a call to hold steady and hold forth against the spirit of the age.  Culturally and politically it indicates that, for evangelicals, the matter is a hill on which to die.  

            Predictably, critics’ claws have already come out.  It is a document of hate, claims the LGBT lobby.  I challenge anyone to talk for just 5 minutes with Woodstock, Georgia pastor Johnny Hunt, one of the signers, and then tell me he’s a hater.

            America’s teens are being sexualized like never before.  They are being drawn away from what many of them have been taught at home and at church about sexuality.  Teach school for a month or so if you doubt this.

            Signers of the document have just as much right to express their views as do the LGBT lobby and its big corporation sympathizers.  The Nashville Statement indicates that evangelical leaders are back and are willing to assert what they believe.  Theirs is an issue that particularly affects our children who are being fed fake sexual science and are being bombarded with dangerous sexual messages.

            I say hoo-ray for the document’s signers.

Roger Hines

9/1-17

           

           

             

Would You Hire Shakespeare?

                          Would You Hire Shakespeare?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/3/17

            Here are a few questions to ponder as educational technology gallops forward while literature and the other humanities stand still.

            Does “the pursuit of happiness” refer only to jobs and decent compensation?  Is happiness quantifiable?  Can the sciences and other job-producing studies help us understand and appreciate the mysteries of love, suffering and death?  Should education include the study of ideas (Jefferson, Madison, Aristotle, Martin Luther King) or is its main purpose to point us toward employment? 

            I know, I know.  If money can’t make you happy, it can still buy you a boat.  But can boats help you understand and appreciate the mysteries of love, suffering and death, especially when, say, fire or flood have taken them from you?

            Today in schools and in many of the nation’s oldest and most storied universities, the humanities are getting short shrift.  Technology is becoming the centerpiece of all things educational.  There’s no doubt that technology has increased students’ access to knowledge, but so did encyclopedias. Like the old encyclopedias, technology is merely a tool.  It brings knowledge to the classroom, but it doesn’t process it or teach students to analyze, integrate, or discard it when it isn’t relevant.

            Basically a conduit, technology cannot do what teachers do, which is to aid students in the analyzing, integrating, and discarding.  As tempting and alluring as online learning is – we’re drawn to its immediacy and its convenience, two characteristics that don’t foster true learning – it still cannot provide what an eyeball to eyeball communication with another human being can provide.  I’m speaking not of technology generally, but of its use in teaching, particularly the humanities.

            Recently I experienced firsthand the extremes to which we’ve taken the use of technology.  A college student approached me for help with writing a speech for her speech class.  When I asked how many were in her class, she replied that she didn’t know because it was an online course.  Stunned, I attempted humor.  “Then to whom do you deliver your speech, your dog?”

            “No, we video ourselves and email the video to our teacher.”  Well, so much for real life experience in public speaking, and for nuance, audience contact, and other such human elements that enter into learning it!

            Such is the thoughtless use of technology.  Teaching speechmaking via video may be convenient, but convenience, like casualness, is the enemy of excellence.  Learning often requires mental stillness, a condition that constantly moving screen images don’t allow.

            Technology has definitely diminished literature. Literature, from which students can learn values, requires mental stillness.  It requires classrooms that are sanctuaries of focus and that allow discussion of those values.

            To illustrate the waning of literature, who knows or cares that July 12 was the 200^th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, the 19^th century American writer who “went to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms”?

             Americans can probably recite several facts about England’s Shakespeare, but few if any about Thoreau, the Concord, Massachusetts gadfly who annoyed his contemporaries with statements about what comprises the good life.  Like Shakespeare, Thoreau taught that man cannot live by good jobs alone.  Man needs to learn to think and to give thought to wisdom.

            Perhaps this line of thought is what led London Business School, the University of San Diego’s School of Business Administration, and other business schools in Europe and the U.S. to try teaching philosophy and literature to M.B.A. students.  Eschewing technology, students and professors read and discuss the classics.  They learn to think beyond the bottom line, to study human nature, and “ponder business in a broader context,” as one London University student put it.

            It was my country boy background that drew me to literature and to Thoreau, the nature lover.  As for Thoreau, “he ain’t country,” but was actually a city boy who moved to the woods and composed his famous “Walden” in which he argued that we are wasting our lives when we try to be like others, and that self-reliance should be every citizen’s goal.  Thoreau bemoaned what he called “the curse of trade” (educating for employment only), and argued that education was for broad knowledge, not marketability.

            Shakespeare believed all of that, too.  That’s why I would hire both of them.  I’d also be inclined to hire the student who has seriously studied them.  Such a student is far more likely to think things through and to realize that smart phones aren’t smart after all. 

Unlike Shakespeare and Thoreau, smart phones don’t teach us to pause and ponder.  They foster scatteredness which is the opposite of what learners need.

Roger Hines

8/30/17