Religious Freedom, Round 2

                                           Religious Freedom, Round 2

                     Published in Marietta Daily Journal Jan. 1, 2017

Deplorables in Georgia will probably make some noise when the General Assembly convenes.  Deplorables, remember, are the unwashed who voted for Donald Trump.  Unwashed, uneducated, unthinking … all of these fit, of course.  

            The deplorable-elite divide has another context besides the Trump-Clinton presidential race.  That context is the religious freedom and transgender issue that still simmers across the heartland.  The 80% of evangelicals who voted for Trump are sure to be emailing and ringing up their state legislators in a matter of days.  They still believe it’s indecorous and dangerous for a man to enter a women’s restroom simply because he “identifies” as a woman.

            Watch and see where deplorables and elites stand when these issues are resurrected in state legislatures across the country.  Governor Nathan Deal already stands with the elites, in this case the corporations.  Some state-level leaders like Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick are standing firm with the deplorables.  “Transgender bathrooms are a public-safety issue,” Patrick says.  “It’s about common courtesy and privacy, particularly for women.”

The elites in the religious freedom and transgender debate are, among others, the Chamber of Commerce, corporate heads, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and The National Collegiate Athletic Association.  The deplorables are ordinary citizens who believe that pastors should not be punished for preaching what they believe Scripture teaches, that pastors, bakers, and florists shouldn’t be required to violate their religious convictions by participating in homosexual weddings, and that parents and husbands shouldn’t have to be fearful when their daughters or wives are in a public restroom.

            It appears that Senator Josh McKoon from Columbus will again front the religious freedom cause in the Georgia Senate.  Most likely he will be aided in the House by Rep. Sam Teasley from Marietta.  Both of these men are heroes to deplorables like me.  McKoon is a lawyer, Teasley a clear-headed thinker and businessman.

            Striding confidently toward these two good men and loaded with cash will be the groups named above.  Just how representative of regular folks, who have neither time nor money to lobby, do you suppose corporate CEOs and lobbyists are?  Regarding pastor protection legislation, just how out of touch is the Georgia Chamber with Georgians who carried the state for Trump?  How is it the NCAA considers itself the nation’s moral arbiter, having pulled all 2016-17 national championship events out of North Carolina because North Carolinians didn’t want men in women’s restrooms?

            There is evidence that the Democratic Party has learned a lesson about identity politics.  Not so the NCAA, the NFL, or the NBA.  These three economic powers are still pushing gender identity politics.  They will be ready for McKoon and Teasley, though I suspect McKoon, Teasley and their comrades will be fired up and prayed up as well.  Besides, no silver-tongued devil can convince me that a majority of Georgian men who love and watch sports are supportive of the aims of the LGBT lobby.  Real men don’t like being bullied by corporations and their sycophant politicians.

            The NCAA is a huge apparatus that draws its yearly multi-billion-dollar paycheck from the sweat and injuries of poor minority athletes, many of whom have trouble passing college courses.  Yet it moralizes on gender equality.  Google Father John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame, if you would like to see the NCAA properly chastised on this issue.

            Georgia’s corporations will be geared up for the legislative session, against pastor protection and for transgender rights.  No need to name them, but one is an airline, another a home improvement store.  Another delivers packages.  Like other corporations, they like to threaten governors and legislators with “Our way or we’re leaving the state.”  They bluff.

            Time is not on the side of those who oppose the legislature’s religious freedom bills.  Ordinary people are emboldened.  As in America, the populist movement is upending Britain, France, Germany, and most recently Italy.  Moral, fiscal, and immigration issues are all involved in the emerging populism.  Joe Lunch Box, Eli the electrician, and Paul the plumber are registering to vote across America and Europe.  They want common sense and freedom from the intelligentsia so long in power.

            The world order is in flux.  Across the industrialized world populist trends are moving.  Amazingly, America’s Rust Belt is now Republican gold.  Her Bible Belt is politically energized.

            Georgia legislators know this.  I predict they will stand with McKoon and Teasley and withstand the bullying corporations and sports titans.   If so, then bully for them.       

Roger Hines

12/28/16

A Tale of Two Christmases

                                            A Tale of Two Christmases

                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal Dec. 25, 2016

            The following is a re-print of a column published in 2012.  For myself, it still serves as a reminder of what Christmas means.

            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.  Actually, age 65 really was older then than it is now, especially for a country woman aged by Southern summer suns and 45 years or so 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 collection of the stones 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 the pain from the stones.

            Her death had not been sudden.  Shortly 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 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.  Because I knew my mother was so much older than the mothers of my classmates (they were the age of my older sisters), I was afraid my mother would die before I grew up.  The doctor’s visits to our house re-enforced 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 our mother willed her death.  Despite her characteristic strength and joy of life, there was no modern bravado of “I’m gonna conquer this.”  In fact, at the height of one of her worst illnesses, when my younger brother and I were the only children still at home, she looked up at us from her bed and with a forced smile spoke quietly, “I’ve always said if God will let me live until my baby boys get grown, I will be happy.”

            Her “baby boys” were now grown. With our eyes glued to her casket, I began complaining to God, raising those self-pitying “why” questions we’ve all felt, heard, or expressed.  Within moments, however, the God to whom I complained used two things to dispel my grief.

            The first thing was the cool December air.  As it patted my cheeks, it also seemed to whisper, “Life goes on and you can too.” 

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

            On another Christmas morning, this time in Georgia 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.

            Reagan came home in a Northside Hospital Christmas stocking to join his siblings Christy, Wendy, and Jeff, his countenance as fresh and happy as was his grandmother’s right up to the week of her dying in 1965.  Reagan made this Christmas a Thanksgiving as well.

            Since even Herod the Great couldn’t stop Christmas, I pray that 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.  Irrefutably, wherever this message has gone, schools, hospitals, and orphanages have followed.  In other words, enlightenment, healing, and compassion.

            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 every day can be.

            Merry Christmas!

Roger Hines

12/19/12

Women Who Hold Their Own Are Fine Role Models

             Women Who Hold Their Own Are Fine Role Models

                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal December 18, 2016

            Woman without her man is lost.

            Punctuate the sentence above to fit your own, uh, perceptions.  In the interest of harmony, husbands and wives should neither work together on this nor share their answers.

In my immediate family, I’ve had lots of women in my life: my mother, ten sisters, six sisters-in-law, one wife, two daughters, six granddaughters, and two daughters-in-law.  Add several scores of female colleagues in the teaching profession.  If I don’t know very much about women, I should.

  One thing I do know is that nobody should fear the “feminization” of education just because women outnumber men in public schools.  The women with whom I’ve taught, though quite feminine, have not been weak.  In fact, I’ve seen the most petite of women put the toughest of 17-year-old boys in their place, with words of course, and those effective, pointing fingers.

            More than once I’ve paused or slowed down my walk in the hall because I saw a female teacher dealing with a tall, strapping boy at the door of her classroom.  Thinking she might need a man around, I would approach gently, only to discover that I was superfluous.  Believe it, female teachers can be tough and are not to be pitied.

            If I’m already sounding sexist, I just don’t care.  If I believe a lady is in need, I’m going to run to her, no matter what changes are going on in today’s crazy world regarding gender and gender reference.  Any man who wouldn’t, well …

            Actually, I’m glad there are so many women in education.  The guys need them.  They need them so that they can learn about women.  And girls need male teachers so that they can learn about men.  I know, I know.  This train of thought goes against the utterly senseless gender neutrality squawk that we’re all supposed to be swallowing.  We’re no longer male and female, you know.  We are the world; we are the people.  No differences, please.  Differences would make us unequal.

            It’s been fun all these decades watching male coaches interact with high school girls.  I love coaches.  Parents of non-athletes may not realize what an important part coaches play in the development of their youths.  Most coaches also teach academic courses, so they influence more than just their athletes.  Usually they are well known by the entire student body, head coaches and assistants both.

            Speaking of almost 100% of the male coaches I’ve taught with, I can say that they are an indispensable part of the development of young people whom they teach or coach.  Coaches are a symbol of masculinity (pardon another ugly sexist word).  Coaches are typically fun and are good teachers.  Taking their coaching skills into the classroom, they know how to demonstrate, not just tell.  What I’ve most admired them for, however, is their modeling for the guys how to view and treat the girls.

            My ten sisters have shaped my life as much as anyone I know.  Mentally I clump them according to age.  Ida, Jewel, and Authula are the oldest.  Children of the 1920’s, they have always epitomized beauty and character.  Margueritte and Minnie are ‘30’s girls, although Margueritte was born in 1928.  Almedia, Ruby, and Janelle were born in the ‘30’s but came of age in the ‘40’s.  Carolyn and Tressie are ‘50’s girls, the first to grow up in America’s new youth culture.  They survived and thrived.

            I have long wished that every friend I have could meet these intelligent, interesting women.  Their birthdays range from 1922 to 1942.  They all have the same parents whom they have honored all of their lives. Their love and respect for each other is endless.  They have raised their children well.  Quiet strength is their forte, humility their path, laughter their constant companion.  Cotton fields never marred their beauty.  Life’s struggles never diminished their faith.  I wish I were their equal.

            My mind always goes to these sisters and to my six brothers every time I read or hear about the fuss over gender.  Even Princeton University joined the foolishness last fall, imploring their students not to speak or write in “gender-based” words so as not to show disrespect of others who are “transgender, gender queer, or gender nonconforming.”

            Gender nonconforming?  Since when have we had a choice?  Look, my sisters are outstanding W-O-M-E-N. That’s females.  And my brothers are exemplary M-E-N; males, that is.  The joy of my life has been to be a little brother to all of them, except my kid brother who is “the baby.”  I’m not his equal either.

Roger Hines

12/14/16

The Status of Christmas: Are We Denying our Own Culture?

  The Status of Christmas: Are We Denying our Own Culture?

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal Dec. 11, 2016

             Christmas is here!  Not Christmas Day just yet, but Christmas season.  Is there anything that elicits more joy in America than Christmas?  Anything that more quickly turns our thoughts to goodwill, children, the needy, and to giving? 

            We’re all aware of the commercialization of the Christmas season, of how easily seduced we are to think of things rather than people.   Yet, Christmas still seems to bring out the best in us.  Individuals, families, and organizations look around for people who need help at Christmas.  We want everybody to have “a good Christmas.”

            Since for over two centuries the total impact of Christmas has been positive, why and how did we get to the point where the word “Christmas” is to be shunned?   What trail of events led President-elect Trump to exclaim boldly, “We will say ‘Christmas’ again”?

            The answer is that for two decades or more many schools and businesses have been gun shy about even using the word, much less allowing its celebration.  We celebrate vague “holidays” instead, ignoring the fact that “holiday” is but a variant spelling of “holy day.”  

 Many school systems insist on the term “Winter Holidays,” which is purely druidic, the Druids being the 200 BC (oops, I mean BCE) Celts of the British Isles who were devout worshippers of nature.  Schools have actually only substituted one religious term for another.  The Star of Bethlehem is out.  The Winter Solstice is in.  Presumably, students are to turn their thoughts to the tilt of the earth, and away from its creator. 

It is difficult to deny the reality of religious beliefs and roots.  We cannot escape transcendent terminology. Every culture has a set of beliefs and principles that inform and shape it.  How foolish, how ignorant it is, to deny this fact.

Of course, America’s religious and cultural roots lie deep not only in Druidic thought, but in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam.  Buddhism is the reason Americans believe in and seek karma.  Hinduism is why Americans believe in thousands of gods.  Islam is the reason Americans believe the word of God must be read in Arabic. Right?

Not really.  America’s ethos springs from none of these belief systems.  These systems have informed Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East.  America’s foundational religious, legal, and social ideas and ideals have their roots in the richness of the Judeo-Christian ethic and tradition.   Who with any amount of historical or cultural knowledge would deny this?

Yet we are not supposed to say it.  A false and stupid sensitivity has led us to deny historical truth and be tippy-toe about who we are.  Do Buddhist, Hindu, or Islamic countries deny what has shaped their cultures?  They certainly don’t.  Why then should Americans deny that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are the basis of our ethics and morality?  What has fashioned America more, the Dhamma, the Vedas, the Koran, or the Bible?

Don’t answer that.  Misled college kids will bristle with hostility and protest in your front yard.

Whether they are afraid of lawsuits or simply personally opposed to Christmas, school officials are denying that Christmas is a part of the American psyche.  This fact about our ethical roots doesn’t mean that everyone has to celebrate Christmas or believe in the Christ of Christmas.  Not everybody in Indonesia, the world’s most Islamic nation, is Islamic, but Indonesia certainly doesn’t deny her Islamic culture because of it.           

            We must be pluralistic and multicultural, we’re told.  Frankly, the entire West is about to pluralize and multi-culturalize itself out of an identity.  Unlike the East, Western civilization has become unsure of itself.  Witness the ongoing transformation of Europe.  In many pockets of America, self-loathing is the order of the day.  This is particularly true on college campuses where students are taught to respect the beliefs of others, but not dare have any of their own.  Acknowledge the cultures of other lands, but don’t embrace your own too tightly; otherwise you are “nationalistic” or “nativistic.”

            Just as public schools must now say “Winter Holidays” instead of Christmas, colleges require students to use BCE rather than BC.  BC is a reference to Christ, so none of that.  Of course BCE refers to the “Common Era” which means the Christian era, but at least for extreme multiculturalists the word Christ is gone.

            It is such anti mindset that now encircles Christmas. The Grinch that is still trying to steal Christmas is not the mighty dollar.  It’s the deniers of historical facts who just don’t like the facts.

            Christmas lovers, unite!  And spread the love, particularly to those who don’t love Christmas. And give, give, give!  That’s what the Christ of Christmas taught us to do.

Roger Hines

12/6/16  

Tyranny and Tyrants and How to Avoid Them

            Tyranny and Tyrants and How to Avoid Them

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal Dec. 4, 2016

            Of the French Revolution, de Tocqueville wrote, “The evils which are endured with patience as long as they are inevitable, become intolerable as soon as hope can be entertained of escaping them.”

            In other words, the hope of better things incites people to act.  So was it in the presidential election.  New voters, formerly cynical about politics and government, came out of the woodwork.  So is it also in regard to the recent death of Fidel Castro, one of the world’s longest ruling tyrants.

            Castro’s death brings to mind de Tocqueville’s ruminations.  It also inspires questions about tyranny and tyrants.  Why would anyone want to be a tyrant or an absolute monarch, lording it over people?   Why would anyone want to either lead or send out vast armies in order to build an empire over which to rule?  How do we explain an Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or Castro?  Why has the world had to endure them?

            Castro’s entire adult life was spent living out the very definition of tyrant. In 1959 at age 33, Castro and his rebels seized control of Cuba.  The New York Times applauded him, and so did the good ole Reader’s Digest and most Americans.  After all, the object of Castro’s rage was dictator Fulgencio Batista.  Let’s just say Batista was one of the world’s worst men.  He needed to be toppled.

            But only to be replaced by an equally power-hungry tyrant?  Castro moved fast.  Only 18 months after seizing power, he nationalized U.S. owned oil refineries.  Relations between Cuba and the U.S. from that point to today are well known.            

 The failed Bay of Pigs invasion, actually staged by Cuban exiles, and supported by President Kennedy, embarrassed America.  Our prestige was restored a year and a half later when our blockade of Cuba forced the Soviet Union to remove her nuclear missiles lodged 90 miles from Miami.

            Thirty-six days shy of 58 years, the sneering, cigar-chomping Castro sat atop his little island empire, having taken over almost all private businesses (but, of course; he declared Cuba a socialist state 2 years after seizing power), executing hundreds of his opponents, sentencing dissidents to prison, and hobnobbing with the world’s most notable tyrant thugs. 

            So why did Barbara Walters interview Castro so adoringly?  Why are so many American liberals and college students (I repeat myself) praising him so effusively now?

            More importantly, what gives rise to a Castro and other tyrants like him who dot the trail of world history?  Whether petty tyrants or emperors, their evil minds have led to more human misery than have natural disasters.  What drives them? Why must they conquer and control?

            I’m guessing that each of them has a void within.  They are needy.  We know that Alexander and Napoleon were.  Their towering ambition, according to biographers, masked a need to be known, seen, and affirmed.  What most of us perceive as a supersized ego is actually a supersized hole, an emptiness that cries, “At some level of my existence, I am nobody. I need to be somebody.”

            So is it true of many a manager, a department head, a principal, a CEO, an employer of any stripe, or even a religious leader.  Running the show assuages their need.

            This analysis doesn’t fit everyone who leads or seeks leadership.  Compare the tyrants named above to Cincinnatus, Lincoln, Reagan, Rome’s “good emperors,” or even Mike Pence.  Ambition has taken no toll on these men.  The world has been blessed with many leaders whose motives are genuinely altruistic.

            Even so, we foolishly disregard history if we think the time will never come when a charismatic figure could lead America from a representative republic to an autocracy.  Hard times and prolonged disenfranchisement have more than once led law-abiding citizens to act uncharacteristically. 

Ironically, those who burn flags and put down the freest country in the world are fanning the flames of tyranny.  In stretching freedom so far, they tempt others to restrict it.

No one has a better opportunity for improving the human condition, for alleviating hardship, all the while expecting excellence, than do those in positions of leadership.  This is true not just of political leaders but of the boss of only four employees down at the body shop.

“He that ruleth over men must be just.”  Tyrants are neither leaders nor just.  They are drivers.  They crush men’s souls. We avoid their evil only with Jefferson’s “eternal vigilance.”

Good leaders successfully woo and inspire.  We have never needed them more than now.

             

Roger Hines

11/30/16

All I Want for Christmas …

             All I Want for Christmas …

              Published in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 27, 2016

            Sometimes it’s hard and not even right to be conciliatory.  When American colleges remove the American flag from their campuses, asserting that the flag is “a symbol of ostracism,” it isn’t the time to be conciliatory.

            Similarly, moral relativism is a viewpoint that should be opposed and defeated.  Sometimes there is a hill on which to die, a battle to be fought and won.  At times there should be no calls for unity, only victory.

            Today there are many differences among Americans, however, that aren’t this stark.  When they aren’t, we should and must give serious thought to unity.

            For the sake of unity, one thing I want for Christmas is for every city, town, and hamlet in the nation to hold a dance up and down Main Street early in the New Year.  No showing off, just fellow citizens engaging in two or three hours of pure joy, the joy of community and national unity.

Billed as a unity or friendship dance, it should be akin to a polka, a square dance, line dancing, or any kind that’s not sensual.  As if I know what those three types of dance really are.  In the home I grew up in, all kinds of dancing except square dancing were frowned upon.  We joked that the reason we Baptists opposed drinking and gambling was that they might lead to dancing. 

I say the dance should be on the same day throughout the nation and should be sponsored by the nation’s mayors.  The dancing itself should be led by people who love people, love dancing, and love crowds.

We should be encouraged to bring with us a friend of a political persuasion different from our own, but especially a friend or neighbor of a different race.

Now you see where I’m headed.  From Little House on the Prairie days, on into the 1950’s, Americans were united by a common struggle, eking out a living.  There was far more racial unity than most people today could imagine, in spite of segregation.  Stubborn soil, a depression, and two world wars had an equalizing effect.  We were poor together.

But urbanization and technology are doing us in.  Our houses have become our enclaves.  After a day’s work, we close our doors and watch television, thus entering into the darkest of wastelands.  There we get a warped picture of the world we live in, from television drama as well as from so called news.  There we see racial tension everywhere even though we have worked happily all day with colleagues and friends of a different race.   Twenty-four-hours-a-day news, of course, isn’t news.  It is stress-inducing re-hash that desensitizes all of us. That’s why we must have a nation-wide dance.

  I won’t be dancing, because I can’t.  But I can clap and holler as I watch fellow citizens set aside their differences for a few hours.  I’ll also do any of the dirty work a mayor or any other organizer asks me to do.

So let’s dance.

Another thing I want for Christmas is for churches in every community in America to plan at least three inter-racial worship services, one per quarter, in 2017.  Imagine what it would be like – the exhilaration, the emotion, the fun – for whites, blacks, and browns, to worship God in spirit and in truth, knowing that that old albatross called race is being transcended. 

Interracial friendships would be built and business relationships forged.  If the family that prays together stays together, why wouldn’t it be true of a community?  Every weekend, 40% of Americans go to churches and synagogues, enough to bring peace to chaos if that 40% has unity on their minds.  America needs more integration.  

So let’s worship – together.

I’m willing to take the following action.  I will email my new friend and philosophical polar opposite, author and columnist Kevin Foley, and schedule another coffee time.  I’ll even cave on the demand I gave him when we last talked.  I demanded that since our first meeting was at Starbucks, our next one would have to be at Chick-fil-A.

Believe me, dear reader.  If Mr. Foley and I can be civil with each other, world peace is a distinct possibility.

Public schools are no longer the leveler of our differences or the glue of our culture.  So what is the glue?  It should be freedom and our Constitution that fosters freedom.

Not any more. Because unity takes more than a document.  Neighborly love doesn’t come from a vacuum, but from a context.  That context must be built.  That’s why we had better find some ways to unify.  A nation can’t last too long when its people cannot talk, laugh, dance, and worship – together.

Roger Hines

11/23/16.

Too Many Trophies, Too Many Smiley Faces, and a Changed Nation

                   Too Many Trophies, Too Many Smiley Faces, 

                               and a Changed Nation

                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 20, 2016

            Who among us doesn’t need affirmation?  Affirmation?  The very question reveals how far we have come in our need for praise.

            Consider the following names and ask yourself if these leaders/changers needed affirmation: Lincoln, Mark Twain, FDR, George Patton, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Steve Jobs …

            The list is endless.  Do we seriously think that people who have changed the world worried about whether or not they would be affirmed?  OK, Elvis did ask his mother at one point early in his career, “Mama, do you think I’m obscene?”  Apparently, the criticism of his much swiveling – so new to the entertainment scene – reached him, but it didn’t stop his altering style.  He kept swiveling, but also blessed us with “How Great Thou Art” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

            Lincoln could be melancholy, though not from lack of affirmation, but from the weight of his office.  That weight led him to remark, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”  That’s how millions of Americans feel about abortion.

            Mark Twain was considered a literary renegade because he spelled words the way people pronounced them.  Unfazed by the rules of English, he brightened the lives of readers on at least three continents.  FDR and Reagan?  Those two cheery men were going to be happy, affirmed or not.  Mother Teresa, Thatcher, Billy Graham, and Steve Jobs?  Focused people like these aren’t thinking about affirmation. 

            Patton and Churchill?  These two didn’t need anybody’s trophies or smiley faces either.

            But today’s children, teens, and college students do need them.  Why?  Because that’s what we’ve handed them for decades.  We have trained them well to seek and to need affirmation.  Not all of them, but enough to fill the streets with “protestors” who need “safe space,” who can’t seem to grow up or to understand that “free” means somebody besides them pays for it.  Who don’t know that peaceful transfer of power after an election is one of the chief distinctives of democratic America.

            Unearned affirmation and self-esteem emphasis have produced bad fruit.  That fruit is one nation under therapy, a nation of people who are not as tough as our parents and grandparents were.  No wonder.  We’ve swallowed all the books that push affirmation instead of accomplishment.  That’s why we award “participation.”

            Everything has a history, and the Great Age of Coddling in which we find ourselves is no different.  I sensed this age easing in as far back as 1970.  Just five years into teaching, and at a well respected high school, I could tell that educational priorities were shifting.  A social-psychological agenda was displacing the time honored knowledge-based agenda.  At faculty meetings, conferences, and in educational literature it was clear a new day was dawning, a day in which learning was taking a back seat to “the learner.”

            Some things in the shift, such as more help for slow learners, were good, but learning decreased and “the learner,” with all his “needs,” became education’s central purpose.  Even so, in every class I’ve ever taught it’s knowledge that excites students.  Introspection depresses.  Students need far less affirmation than knowledge and character development.  Knowledge and character point students upward and outward.  Excessive affirmation points inward to the self.  

One mark of the Great Age of Coddling is the demise of substance.  Recently on a popular Christian radio station, I suffered through a song with 12 “Wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s” before anything of fact or argument was given.  Mid-song, there were 2 “wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s,” and at the end of the song, 10 “wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s” as the song mercifully faded away.  Little content, but affirming sounds and feelings, I reckon.

            Just as so much contemporary music is low on words and high on rhythm, so are the actions of anti-Trump protestors void of idea.  Despite a national election that turned politics-as-usual on its head, college students are merely chanting vulgarities and personal attacks.  No lucid expression of their purpose; just “Adolf Trump,” “Racist Trump,” and a refusal to acknowledge the unambiguous results of a stunning election. 

            Inauguration Day may not be pretty.  Pretty or not, it will be the beginning of a four-year conflict between President Trump and his protestors who will enjoy the support of the media.  For eight years President Reagan endured the same.  For eight years President Obama, the media’s darling, had smooth sailing.

            Pampered college youths have made it clear that they want satisfaction and that they deserve it.  They’re special.  Don’t you know that?

           

Roger Hines

11/16/16