A Tale of Two Christmases

                              A Tale of Two Christmases

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 12/24/17

            On Christmas morning of 1965 my father, my younger brother and I followed my mother’s casket out of a small church in rural Mississippi.  The crisp, Christmas Day air was a welcome relief to our tear-streaked, hot cheeks.

            I was 21, my brother Carlton, 18.  Our mother was 65.  We both thought she was so old.  Age 65 actually was older then than it is now, especially for a country woman aged by Southern summer suns and 45 years of childbearing and childrearing.  It wasn’t children and hard work that did her in, however.  It was kidney stones.

            For years they had plagued her.  Her pill bottle collections would have scared a medical student.  Several times a year Dr. Baker Austin would come from town with his gawky medical bag and administer a shot to ease her pain.

            Her death had not been sudden.  Just after Thanksgiving, the urologist at St. Dominic’s Hospital in Jackson had told us her kidneys were embedded with stones and that the resulting uremia was quite advanced.  The closer we got to Christmas, the more hopeless her situation became.  It was one of those long good-byes.

            I arrived home from college to be with her at the hospital the week before Christmas.  All of my older 15 brothers and sisters had families of their own, but those living nearby had been able to take care of her.

            Death is one thing; dying is another.  The week of her dying, my mind raced back repeatedly to my childhood.  As a small child I was a big worrier. Knowing my mother was so much older than the mothers of my classmates, I was afraid she would die before I grew up.  The doctor’s visits fed my fear.  Although this anxiety subsided by the time I was a teen, occasional thoughts of losing my mother drove me to the vast Bienville National Forest behind our house to cry alone.

            Please understand, but at some level, I think my mother willed her death.  Despite her characteristic strength and joy of life, there was no modern bravado of “I’m gonna conquer this.”  Rather, at the height of one of her worst “spells,” when Carlton and I were the only kids still at home, she looked up at us with a forced smile and whispered, “If God will let me live until my baby boys get grown, I’ll be happy.”

            Her “baby boys” were now grown.  With our eyes glued to her casket, I began complaining to God with those “why” questions we’ve all felt, heard, or expressed.  Within moments, however, two things happened that, instead of alleviating my grief, completely obliterated it.

            The first thing was the cool Christmas Day air that patted my cheeks and seemed to say, “Life goes on, and you can too.”

            The second thing was the Christmas Day noon meal (“dinner”) our family shared.  The laughter and storytelling, so common to our gatherings, was not abated by the mid-morning burial of our mother.  Our joy amidst the sorrow was no indication of anybody’s super-spirituality; rather, it was a testimony to the power of all that our parents had taught us.  In this case, the teaching had been “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory.”

            On another Christmas morning in 1981, I drove from my home in Kennesaw to Northside Hospital, not because of a death but because of a birth.  Our new, second son and last child, Reagan, had been born on Christmas Eve.  Driving south on I-75 and atop I-285 I saw only four vehicles.  Ah, Christmas does slow us down, I mused.

            Reagan came home in a Northside Hospital Christmas stocking, his countenance as fresh and happy as was his grandmother’s right up to her dying in 1965.  Reagan made this Christmas a Thanksgiving as well.

            Since even Herod the Great couldn’t stop Christmas, I pray no reader of these musings will ever allow life’s setbacks or man’s evil to stop it either.  The Christmas message is still the same: God came down.  “Mild He laid his glory by,” wrote Charles Wesley.  Irrefutably, wherever this message has gone, schools, hospitals, and orphanages have followed.

            As it turned out, my own two favorite Christmases weren’t too different; they both ended in peace.  Ever wondered, perhaps along with Elvis Presley, “Why can’t every day be like Christmas?”  We know that every day should be.  The Christmas message says it can be.

            Merry Christmas!

Roger Hines

12/20/17  

A Self-Interrogation on the Joys and Ills of This Age

              A Self-Interrogation on the Joys and Ills of This Age

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal.12/17/17

Q:  Hines, do you actually believe there are “eternal verities,” that is, eternal truths that never change and cannot be changed?

A: Yes.  Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.  Though I won’t be surprised if, before the end of 2018, somebody will argue that fish can live out of water – given a few trillion years.  Some are already arguing that there is a third human gender.  Such an idea expresses a weird wish, not a scientific possibility.  We are male and female.  I do pity (sincerely, not condescendingly) those who want to be something other than what they are.  Transgenderism is mutilation, pure and simple. Human sexuality, our maleness and femaleness, is one of those absolutes.

Q: Are there any other “verities”?

A: Tons of them.  Human nature is one.  The human race is plagued by evils that have always plagued us.  The oldest history and oldest stories show men fighting and killing to rule over others.  The insecurities of those who would rule over us are illustrated by today’s politics.  Human nature hasn’t changed.  We all still want what our great grandparents wanted:  affirmation, self-worth, something to eat, and a house on the hill.  Of course super-evolutionists say that humans will one day be … something different from what we are now.  You know …  from apes to us now, to some ugly looking creature in a movie.  If so, I betcha these “beings”  will have the same problems we have today.

Q: You’re touching evolution.

A:  Yes.  Evolutionary theory is a million miles wide and a quarter inch deep.  Not all smart people are evolutionists. Many scientists embrace cause and effect.  Every effect (a wrist watch, a building, the universe) has a cause, and the cause is bigger than the effect.  I’ve observed geological evolution in my back yard, but wait and see if “human evolution” ever changes us. (If you can wait a trillion years, that is.  Undecipherable, unimaginable amounts of time are what super-evolutionists stand on for support, you know.)

Q: You’re refuting Darwin.  I suspect you would also refute Freud.

A: Marx, too.  But  Freud is just wrong.  Sex is not the strongest, most fundamental drive in humans.  Love is.  I’m talking about love that would drive a man to risk his life to save the lives of his wife and children, or the woman who would keep her cancer secret because she has a loving husband and children to care for, or the soldier who truly loves his homeland and is willing to die for it.  Territory probably is next.  Read Robert Ardrey’s “Territorial Imperative” in which he argues that the drive to have a place in the sun is far more powerful than the sex drive.  Hollywood, libertines, and advertising are the entities that have elevated sex to the throne it now perches on.  We have not always been as sexualized as we are now, and it seems to me some things are coming home to roost.  Seen the news lately?

Q: You keep saying “probably.”

A: Well, because I don’t know everything.  But I know what I believe.  And I do have two eyes,  two ears, and at least half a brain.  I also had precious, common sense parents who knew right and wrong and taught it.

Q: What is the biggest problem facing our nation now?

A: It is what one of my intellectual heroes, Melvyn Fein, has called “the disloyal opposition.”   In the past, losers of an election accepted defeat, worked with the winners when they could, while anticipating victory in the next election.  Consequently they were called the “loyal opposition;” opposed, but still loyal to the nation.  Today, losers of the last presidential election are working day and night to overturn the last presidential election.  Their actions forebode street fighting and bloodshed which certainly can happen in America, turning our politics into a third world brawl and abandoning our historic example to the world of peaceful transfer of power.  Those who lose an election should accept it and work to win the voters’ favor during the next election.

Q: Where is the joy in all of this?

A: There’s joy in knowing that in spite of a negative press, the jobs picture is looking good, the stock market is soaring, working people are voting, my liberal friends and I still love each other, my two atheist friends and I talk regularly, and Christmas is just around the corner.

Roger Hines

12/13/17

  

A Self-Interrogation on the Joys and Ills of This Age

              A Self-Interrogation on the Joys and Ills of This Age

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 12/17/17

Q:  Hines, do you actually believe there are “eternal verities,” that is, eternal truths that never change and cannot be changed?

A: Yes.  Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.  Though I won’t be surprised if, before the end of 2018, somebody will argue that fish can live out of water – given a few trillion years.  Some are already arguing that there is a third human gender.  Such an idea expresses a weird wish, not a scientific possibility.  We are male and female.  I do pity (sincerely, not condescendingly) those who want to be something other than what they are.  Transgenderism is mutilation, pure and simple. Human sexuality, our maleness and femaleness, is one of those absolutes.

Q: Are there any other “verities”?

A: Tons of them.  Human nature is one.  The human race is plagued by evils that have always plagued us.  The oldest history and oldest stories show men fighting and killing to rule over others.  The insecurities of those who would rule over us are illustrated by today’s politics.  Human nature hasn’t changed.  We all still want what our great grandparents wanted:  affirmation, self-worth, something to eat, and a house on the hill.  Of course super-evolutionists say that humans will one day be … something different from what we are now.  You know …  from apes to us now, to some ugly looking creature in a movie.  If so, I betcha these “beings”  will have the same problems we have today.

Q: You’re touching evolution.

A:  Yes.  Evolutionary theory is a million miles wide and a quarter inch deep.  Not all smart people are evolutionists. Many scientists embrace cause and effect.  Every effect (a wrist watch, a building, the universe) has a cause, and the cause is bigger than the effect.  I’ve observed geological evolution in my back yard, but wait and see if “human evolution” ever changes us. (If you can wait a trillion years, that is.  Undecipherable, unimaginable amounts of time are what super-evolutionists stand on for support, you know.)

Q: You’re refuting Darwin.  I suspect you would also refute Freud.

A: Marx, too.  But  Freud is just wrong.  Sex is not the strongest, most fundamental drive in humans.  Love is.  I’m talking about love that would drive a man to risk his life to save the lives of his wife and children, or the woman who would keep her cancer secret because she has a loving husband and children to care for, or the soldier who truly loves his homeland and is willing to die for it.  Territory probably is next.  Read Robert Ardrey’s “Territorial Imperative” in which he argues that the drive to have a place in the sun is far more powerful than the sex drive.  Hollywood, libertines, and advertising are the entities that have elevated sex to the throne it now perches on.  We have not always been as sexualized as we are now, and it seems to me some things are coming home to roost.  Seen the news lately?

Q: You keep saying “probably.”

A: Well, because I don’t know everything.  But I know what I believe.  And I do have two eyes,  two ears, and at least half a brain.  I also had precious, common sense parents who knew right and wrong and taught it.

Q: What is the biggest problem facing our nation now?

A: It is what one of my intellectual heroes, Melvyn Fein, has called “the disloyal opposition.”   In the past, losers of an election accepted defeat, worked with the winners when they could, while anticipating victory in the next election.  Consequently they were called the “loyal opposition;” opposed, but still loyal to the nation.  Today, losers of the last presidential election are working day and night to overturn the last presidential election.  Their actions forebode street fighting and bloodshed which certainly can happen in America, turning our politics into a third world brawl and abandoning our historic example to the world of peaceful transfer of power.  Those who lose an election should accept it and work to win the voters’ favor during the next election.

Q: Where is the joy in all of this?

A: There’s joy in knowing that in spite of a negative press, the jobs picture is looking good, the stock market is soaring, working people are voting, my liberal friends and I still love each other, my two atheist friends and I talk regularly, and Christmas is just around the corner.

Roger Hines

12/13/17

  

Teaching: Learning Twice, Laughing Much, and Fighting the Culture

Teaching: Learning Twice, Laughing Much, and Fighting the                                                 Culture

               Published in Marietta(GA) Daily Journal, 12/10/17

          

            Several years ago on the first day of the semester, I walked into a college English classroom to find everyone sitting quietly, waiting to see what their teacher looked like.

            Detecting their nervousness, I decided to have some fun playing a role I had played often.  Closing the door behind me, and trying to channel General George Patton, I surveyed the room without comment, looking left and right, attempting to show displeasure.  Within seconds, I barked, “RULE Number 1: BE AFRAID!”

            It worked.  Again.  Fear shrouded the faces of the entire class, even the older, “non-traditional” students who were entering college for the first time as full blown adults.  Since I’m no George Patton and knew that the class would be held in their fearful state for only a few minutes more, I prepared to sound forth Rule Number 2.

            However, before I could trumpet “RULE Number 2: Be VERY Afraid!” a young lady on the front row caught on to me, smiled, and hid her face.  There I stood, wanting so much to continue the fun with yet another “rule,” but I was totally thwarted by the savvy young lady who had found me out.  Seeing that the front row young lady was heaving in quiet laughter, the entire class began to laugh also, relieved that I was not a classroom George Patton.  I gave up, broke character, laughed with the class, and got down to business.

Such joy is one of the reasons I wish every adult could experience teaching.  Specifically, I’m referring to 16 to 19 year olds, or high school juniors to college sophomores.  I’ve no doubt that teaching children and younger teens is rewarding, but since my own experience has been with older high school and younger college students, that is the only age group about which I have anything to say.

To teach is to learn twice.  If you think you know something well, teach it and you will know it better.  Teaching can become your teacher. 

But neither the joy nor the twice learning is the chief reason all adults could benefit from teaching.  The chief reason is that teaching can fast anchor one to reality.  It allows (forces actually) one to get a good grip on the pulse of the times all because you spend your days with youths.

Oh, the faces of innocence and need into which teachers peer daily.  Need brought about not just by the lack of basic knowledge that students should already have, but by the conditioning that has shaped youth and created a blur that blinds them to the adult world. 

The blur is a generational cataract.  It was created by the emergence of teen culture which in turn created a chasm between teens and adults.  It prevents teens from seeing and understanding what it means to be an adult, to be self-directed.   It prevents an understanding of adult responsibility and what it entails.

The causes of this blur pre-date the current Age of Snowflakes (soft, easily offended youths) for which our universities are largely responsible.  Today’s universities are coddling their students, shielding them from opposing points of view and creating a culture that is perpetually adolescent.

The word “teenager” first appeared in 1941 in Popular Science magazine.  It was grabbed by marketers and advertisers who saw its potential and commenced to create “the teenager” in their own image.  World War II stymied the new teen culture’s advancement, but the rock and roll of the 50’s and the protest spirit of the 60’s pushed it to its present reality.

For 6 decades the teenage mystique has ruled.  Adults have acquiesced to it, adopting its language, dress, music, and tastes. Shabby dress and general casualness are the result.   The blur, the distance between youth and adulthood, is of our own making.  Recognizing this distance, younger teachers are prone to believe they must “reach” teenagers before they can teach them.  “Reaching” often means trying to be a pal instead of an adult leader.

Action is needed to loosen teen culture’s grip.  Re-instating the military draft would help.  An-18-year-old male needs something hanging over his head.  In a positive, beneficial way, the draft would serve this purpose. 

            Teenagers face a crazy, uncertain world.  That’s why they need some joy and encouragement as surely as they need discipline and focus.

            So check out teaching.  You’ll feel the love and the vigor of youth, and you might be able to fix some problems that plague the nation.

Roger Hines

12/6/17

How Conservatives Learned to Fight

                     How Conservatives Learned to Fight

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal 12/3/17

            There is one primary reason for the political divide that characterizes America today.  It isn’t President Trump or his tweets, nor our two political parties, per se; nor race, religion, or regionalism.

            The primary reason for the constant heated arguing is that both sides now have a platform from which to speak their piece.  This was not the case before cable television and Rush Limbaugh marched onto the stage of our political consciousness and firmly planted their flags.

            By both sides, I mean liberals and conservatives, though it’s clear these two labels are fading due to the rising populism/nationalism made manifest by Donald Trump’s election.  Before cable, Limbaugh, Fox News, and conservative talk radio, there was little fighting, essentially because there was no debate stage for conservatives to stand on to engage in philosophical battle.  Conservatives had no megaphone.

            ABC, CBS, and NBC reigned supreme. When these three big networks ruled the airwaves, practically all of their news anchors and reporters were FDR/JFK/LBJ/Clinton water boys.  Walter Cronkite, Ted Koppel, and Tom Brokaw weren’t exactly closet conservatives.  Their allegiances were just as obvious as are those of Wolfe Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and Rachel Maddow today.   

During the decades of liberal media dominance, there were conservative voices, but they were muted.  William F. Buckley was an unrelenting undercurrent of conservative thought, but  despite his intellect and his stellar National Review magazine, he and his readers remained strangers in a strange land.

            Just as Barry Goldwater birthed Ronald Reagan, so did Buckley birth Rush Limbaugh.  In 1988 a liberal friend asked me if I had heard “that Limbaugh guy”.  I had not.

            “You’ll like him,” she added.  “He’s pro-life.”

            Hearing Limbaugh for the first time, I was surprised by joy.  Never on radio or television had I heard anyone challenge – and cheerfully, at that – the default philosophy of the media and higher education.  Although Reagan was in office in 1988, many Republicans were still merely Democrat lite, sadly resigned to the hold liberals had on the culture.

            Not that William Buckley wasn’t still trying.  But his greatest strength, his erudition, was also his greatest weakness.  Like his protégé, George Will (whose recent fall from grace would render the now deceased Buckley heartbroken), Buckley simply used too many big words.  Limbaugh used big words too, but he knew when his audience needed them broken down.

            By 1994 when Republicans gained control of the U.S. House for the first time since 1952, conservative voices were everywhere.  Goldwater’s stern face had yielded Reagan’s smile.  Buckley’s intellectualism had yielded Limbaugh’s common touch.  Newt Gingrich was offering hope by teaching conservatives how to fight.  What Buckley, Limbaugh, and Gingrich sowed, Donald Trump reaped. 

            The voice that really broke free conservative expression and started all the yelling between pundits of different persuasions was John McLaughlin and his PBS show, “The McLaughlin Group.”  Since then, we’ve been yelling.  At least television personalities have been.

             Friends have asked me if I am not bothered by Donald Trump’s past and his overly quick responses.  My answer is “Yes, but…”  George W. Bush, a man of class and dignity, suffered the slings and arrows of the media without saying much. So did Mitt Romney.  I always wished they would fight back as Trump does now.  Did they not see that the media engages in advocacy?

            Statesmanship doesn’t mean that an elected official should take everything that’s thrown at him or her.  Frankly, I enjoy seeing the media stars turned into pretzels by the President.  The first amendment grants to the media neither priesthood nor freedom from criticism, and President Trump is the first president I know of who has told them so. 

As the saying goes, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who have one.”  With technology in the palm of our hands, all of us now have free press, so why not use it?   FDR did just that with his radio “fireside chats,” bypassing and angering the press as well.

  Critics want Trump to be “proper” and “dignified,” yet, since the ‘60s the White House press corps has been everything but “proper” or “dignified.” 

Children and grandchildren of the ‘60s, having re-defined marriage, made abortion legal, and even created a new “gender” for us, may be gasping their last political breath.  If Mr. Trump can continue to frustrate them, I’m with him. 

Conservatives would best view Trump as their clear and present hope and acknowledge that sometimes you just have to fight.

Roger Hines

11/29/17