Kemp and Collins: a Personal Back Story Governor Brian Kemp probably doesn’t remember or really know me. But I know him. Although serving simultaneously in the General Assembly, we never met until 2010 when he was running for Secretary of State and I was running for state School Superintendent. Our path crossings were quite frequent but our conversations were always brief. After giving campaign talks at a DeKalb County GOP candidate forum, we both fared very poorly in the straw vote taken at the end of the forum. Like whipped puppies, we walked together to our cars, mumbled encouraging words to each other, and threw a few yard signs back into the trunks of our cars. There would be other forums and straw votes. There would be another chance. Despite this particularly discouraging evening, Kemp went on to achieve his political goal. I did not achieve mine. I admired then state Senator Kemp. I admire Governor Kemp now. He’s authentic, not at all a showman, and seems not to have an ounce of self-importance. His degree in agriculture (Georgia’s chief industry), his state senate experience, and his two terms as secretary of state have undoubtedly informed and conditioned him for the governorship of the state. U.S. Representative Doug Collins probably doesn’t remember or really know me either. But I know him. Quite well, in fact. Having had no more than half a dozen quick conversations with him, I’ve watched him literally and intentionally for 15 or so minutes at a time. Steady-footed like Kemp, though more affable, Collins also exudes no self-importance. If only more politicians were like these two men. When Collins came to the GA House I was no longer in office but was working for the Speaker as the House Messenger. My chief responsibility was to stand elbow to elbow with the Speaker when the House was in session and assist him with the hurry and scurry that seems to be characteristic of all lawmaking bodies (ordering bills, sticking to the agenda, corralling House members, pacifying House members, etc.). From the Speaker’s podium one can look down and see every movement that every member makes. Having observed Collins from that standpoint, I can testify that he moved and talked as fast then as he does now. A fellow Republican once “accused” him of being “from Connecticut or someplace like that.” Collins spent as much time chatting it up with Democrats as he did Republicans. A minister and former pastor with a seminary degree, a lawyer, and a chaplain and lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, Collins is if anything, versatile. The potential serious rift between these two good men, Kemp and Collins, is unfortunate. A governor’s appointees are no business of the nation’s president. Governor Kemp had every right to appoint Kelly Loeffler to the seat vacated by Johnny Isakson, but it’s fitting to point out that if President Trump had not so strongly endorsed Kemp late in his gubernatorial campaign, Kemp might not now be governor. Sadly, the Loeffler team is attacking Collins viciously. Loeffler’s anti-Collins ads are outrageous. Her campaign didn’t become negative and dirty. It started out negative and dirty. The shame of it all is that the Loeffler campaign is apparently hoping many Georgia voters are either uninformed or gullible enough to swallow the vicious treatment the Club for Growth has given Collins. Doubtless, they’re trying to make Georgia Republicans forget about Collins’ incredibly effective defense of President Trump during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment proceedings. Establishment Republicans can’t blame Collins if a split ticket leads to a Democratic victory. After all, Kemp has done what Democrats seldom if ever do and what Republicans always do: fall victim to paralysis of analysis after losing or nearly losing an election and then change course and go moderate. Fearful of the suburban and female vote and recalling that conservative Cobb County voted for Hillary, Kemp picked a wealthy, totally inexperienced female. Was it moo-la over orthodoxy? Loeffler’s mail-out ads are almost as big as a TV screen. I received one through the mail that was 12 X 15 inches. In a smaller ad she is pictured beside President Trump with text that implies he has endorsed her. He has not. Pictures of her teen years, clad in jeans and doing farm work, look a little fakey. Loeffler is talking the talk for sure, but how should Kemp’s base view her recent hobnobbing with progressives, even Stacy Abrams, and her past support of them? Despite his good qualities, by choosing Loeffler for the Senate seat Kemp was not dancing with who brung’im. When will Republicans learn? Roger Hines 3/4/20

                   Kemp and Collins: a Personal Back Story

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 3/8/20

            Governor Brian Kemp probably doesn’t remember or really know me. But I know him.  Although serving simultaneously in the General Assembly, we never met until 2010 when he    was running for Secretary of State and I was running for state School Superintendent.  Our path crossings were quite frequent but our conversations were always brief.

            After giving campaign talks at a DeKalb County GOP candidate forum, we both fared very poorly in the straw vote taken at the end of the forum.  Like whipped puppies, we walked together to our cars, mumbled encouraging words to each other, and threw a few yard signs back into the trunks of our cars.  There would be other forums and straw votes.  There would be another chance.  Despite this particularly discouraging evening, Kemp went on to achieve his political goal.  I did not achieve mine.

            I admired then state Senator Kemp.  I admire Governor Kemp now.  He’s authentic, not at all a showman, and seems not to have an ounce of self-importance.  His degree in agriculture (Georgia’s chief industry), his state senate experience, and his two terms as secretary of state have undoubtedly informed and conditioned him for the governorship of the state. 

            U.S. Representative Doug Collins probably doesn’t remember or really know me either.  But I know him.  Quite well, in fact.  Having had no more than half a dozen quick conversations with him, I’ve watched him literally and intentionally for 15 or so minutes at a time.  Steady-footed like Kemp, though more affable, Collins also exudes no self-importance. If only more politicians were like these two men.

            When Collins came to the GA House I was no longer in office but was working for the Speaker as the House Messenger.  My chief responsibility was to stand elbow to elbow with the Speaker when the House was in session and assist him with the hurry and scurry that seems to be  characteristic of all lawmaking bodies (ordering bills, sticking to the agenda, corralling House members, pacifying House members, etc.).

            From the Speaker’s podium one can look down and see every movement that every member makes.  Having observed Collins from that standpoint, I can testify that he moved and talked as fast then as he does now.  A fellow Republican once “accused” him of being “from Connecticut or someplace like that.”  Collins spent as much time chatting it up with Democrats as he did Republicans.  A minister and former pastor with a seminary degree, a lawyer, and a chaplain and lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, Collins is if anything, versatile.

            The potential serious rift between these two good men, Kemp and Collins, is unfortunate.  A governor’s appointees are no business of the nation’s president.  Governor Kemp had every right to appoint Kelly Loeffler to the seat vacated by Johnny Isakson, but it’s fitting to point out that if President Trump had not so strongly endorsed Kemp late in his gubernatorial campaign, Kemp might not now be governor.

            Sadly, the Loeffler team is attacking Collins viciously.  Loeffler’s anti-Collins ads are outrageous.  Her campaign didn’t become negative and dirty.  It started out negative and dirty.   The shame of it all is that the Loeffler campaign is apparently hoping many Georgia voters are either uninformed or gullible enough to swallow the vicious treatment the Club for Growth has given Collins.  Doubtless, they’re trying to make Georgia Republicans forget about Collins’ incredibly effective defense of President Trump during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment proceedings.

            Establishment Republicans can’t blame Collins if a split ticket leads to a Democratic victory.  After all, Kemp has done what Democrats seldom if ever do and what Republicans always do: fall victim to paralysis of analysis after losing or nearly losing an election and then change course and go moderate. Fearful of the suburban and female vote and recalling that conservative Cobb County voted for Hillary, Kemp picked a wealthy, totally inexperienced female.  Was it moo-la over orthodoxy?

            Loeffler’s mail-out ads are almost as big as a TV screen.  I received one through the mail that was 12 X 15 inches.  In a smaller ad she is pictured beside President Trump with text that implies he has endorsed her.  He has not.  Pictures of her teen years, clad in jeans and doing farm work, look a little fakey.

            Loeffler is talking the talk for sure, but how should Kemp’s base view her recent hobnobbing with progressives, even Stacy Abrams, and her past support of them?  Despite his good qualities, by choosing Loeffler for the Senate seat Kemp was not dancing with who brung’im. 

            When will Republicans learn?      

Roger Hines

3/4/20

Let’s Get Real with Education

                                      Let’s Get Real with Education

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/16/20

            When I heard the learned astronomer / When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me / When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them / When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room / How soon I became tired and sick / Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself in the mystical moist night air / And looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

             In other words, poet Walt Whitman just couldn’t take it anymore.  Acknowledging the value of astronomy, he still believed that looking up “in perfect silence at the stars” was more enlightening and inspiring than lectures on arcane academic knowledge.

   We appreciate teachers, scholars, and lecturers, but after a while we need to know the point of it all.  Learners need lessons and educational practices that keep them hinged to the real world, not wallowing forever in the abstract or the theoretical.  Visit the abstract and learn from it, but then get back to the valley of everyday life away from intellectual clouds.

            The field of education too often pitches its tent in the land of the abstract instead of the land of the living.  Instead of majoring on the tried and true (reading, writing, and arithmetic, anyone?), it more often than not chases the now and the new: the current educational fad, the ideas proposed by professors of education who haven’t taught children or teens for decades, or the “inclusion” topic of the month such as transgenderism.  Ignoring Cicero’s phrase, “the tyranny of the present,” modern education is quick to jump on a new trend and hold tightly.  The best example of this is the testing bandwagon onto which professors, editorial boards, and Department of Education bureaucrats latched themselves in 2002, though classroom teachers did not.

            The No Child Left Behind law – or NCLB – made standardized testing the main measure of school success.  Testing, of course, seems logical.  Teachers teach, then they test to see what was learned.  But testing per se wasn’t the problem.  It was the magnitude of it all.  The testing bandwagon was long. Perched upon it and waving jubilantly were elected officials and corporate CEO’s.  The testing movement had begun.  Its watchword was accountability.  Its strategy was “Test those boogers.”  Education finally had found its fix.  A business model it would be.

            Classroom teachers knew better.  But they kept on teaching, except they now had to deal with the time factor as well as the effect of all the testing.  Standardized testing took vast amounts of time from teaching, and the unfortunate effect was the impulse and often the necessity to teach toward the test, a killer of broad learning if there ever was one.

            NCLB had been preceded by the Clinton administration’s “Goals 2000” which provided the states with money to write their own academic standards, but President George W. Bush’s so-called Texas plan went further.  To stress accountability, schools would have to test more.  Bush’s strategy was to measure and then punish or reward.  Data became king and the states and individual school systems scurried to produce higher test scores.  Diane Ravitch, the respected education historian who first favored NCLB, stepped away from it saying that it was “all sticks and no carrots.”

            Thankfully, the testing craze has abated somewhat.  Locally, sensible voices like those of Cobb Superintendent Ragsdale and Marietta Superintendent Rivera are making a difference.  For the most part No Child Left Behind was left behind when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2017, a bill that retained most of the accountability requirements but meted out less punishment. The Trump administration has lifted even more accountability regulations.

            Our 18-year emphasis on testing points to two truths.  One is that over-regulation and over-testing kills the spirit, the joy, and the purpose of teaching and learning.  Teachers deal with human beings, not products or commodities.  NCLB fostered the idea that whatever can’t be measured doesn’t count.  What a horrid approach to such a human activity as teaching.

            Secondly, all of the history recounted above is proof that the 10^th amendment of the U.S. Constitution is being violated.   That amendment declares education to be a function of the states, yet for just over half a century the federal government has stomped its way into an activity that was intended for the states.

            Ask a veteran teacher why he or she teaches.  Their answer will put to scorn most of the educational fixes of the last half century.

Roger Hines

2/12/20

My Ten Years in Prison

                             My Ten Years in Prison

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/9/2020

            I’ve not told many people about my prison experience. I’m not hesitant to tell anybody.  It’s just that telling others about it affects me emotionally.

            It’s deeply saddening to think of the inmates whose backgrounds were quite unlike mine.   Many of them grew up poor as I did, but did not have the family stability I enjoyed.  Of my 16 brothers and sisters, only 9 were still at home while I was growing up.  The others were grown and even had families of their own.  All of us loved each other dearly, honored our parents, and laughed constantly while managing without running water and many other “conveniences.” 

            Most of the prison inmates I came to know were not so blessed.  Many never knew their fathers.  Many had to take care of themselves while they were children, enduring violence, neglect, loneliness, intellectual and spiritual emptiness, and emotional pain.  By the time they were teenagers, their paths were laid out.  Hopelessness reigned. 

Most of the inmates I talked with stated that, one way or another, their path to prison began with America’s pet drug, alcohol!  We call it whiskey, beer, wine, champagne and lots of other things but its destructiveness we refuse to acknowledge.  Americans simply keep sipping or gulping, building breweries, and looking down their noses at prisoners who couldn’t control alcohol. I wish every drinker of alcohol could have paid me a visit during my ten years.  They might have acknowledged alcohol’s power, but maybe not.

            Not all of the inmates I got to know in prison came from dire dysfunctionality.  A small minority was blessed with stable homes but had chosen lawlessness in spite of good parents.  During my ten years, I was in classes not only with inmates who had been down and out, but with lawyers, preachers, teachers, nurses, and successful manual laborers.

            Recently – in fact this past week – two things whirled my mind back to my ten years in prison and got me all emotional.  One was a news article in the Marietta Daily Journal; the other was, of all things, a Super Bowl commercial.

            The MDJ article told about Pastor 7.  Read the February 2 issue and you might weep unless you’re one who believes all prisoners are undeserving of a second chance.  Pastor 7, the director of a nondenominational Christian ministry in southeast Cobb, had a horrendous childhood and youth.  The MDJ article chronicles his path from age 10 when he ran away from home, to age 12 when he was first incarcerated, to age 16 by which time petty crime became a way of life, to four years in the Army, to further crime and federal imprisonment, and to the pages of a weathered King James Bible where his life began to change.  The MDJ article also describes Pastor 7’s transformed life and a recent serious challenge as well.

            The Super Bowl commercial that also got to me was about former convict Alice Johnson.   Johnson was freed from prison by the First Step Act, a bi-partisan bill that is part of the current administration’s criminal justice reform.  Having been sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent drug offense, and having completed 21 years of incarceration, the African American Johnson expressed gratitude to President Trump for her freedom.  The commercial, a Trump 2020 campaign ad, was brief, moving, and effective.

            Although ten years in prison haven’t diminished my belief in capital punishment, they have shown me in bold type letters that not every crime is committed by hardened souls out to do evil.  Pastor 7’s childhood and youth primed him for a path of uncertainty and crime.  Alice Johnson’s story illustrates that there is such a thing as bad, over-reactive law.  I wish that I could have had both of them in my college freshman English classes at the two state prisons where I was teaching.  I also wish I could convince some fellow conservatives that not everyone who lands in prison is irredeemable.

            Nine years of my time in prison were at a state men’s prison. The tenth year which ended in December of 2019 was at a state women’s prison.  I am the richer.  I now have 87 more brothers and 16 more sisters whom I wouldn’t have, had I not taken up prison teaching.  I learned that spouses and children of inmates usually fade away, never to be heard from again, but not so with parents.  Moms and dads keep on writing.

            I now have a renewed fervor for strengthening America’s families.  Far too many future Pastor 7s and Alice Johnsons are yearning for a loving mom and dad while the culture re-defines and slays the family.

Roger Hines

2/5/20

Rudyard Kipling was Wrong

                           Rudyard Kipling was Wrong

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/2/20

            Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.

             Kipling wrote these words in 1889 in his poem, “The Ballad of East and West.”  Born in India to distinguished British academics, Kipling was educated in England but returned to India to become a journalist.  Though a lover of Britain and a defender of the West, he considered himself an “Anglo-Indian.”

            Another Kipling poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” troubled many readers.  Was the poem a condescending justification of imperialistic European racism or a sincere call to Westerners to uplift the poverty-stricken, freedom-denied peoples of India and the entire East?

            A casual reading of Kipling’s classic children’s stories and incisive poems will show that Kipling was no racist.  He celebrated the lands of which he wrote; their people, that is, not their politics.  Winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kipling believed that the West held values that the East needed.  At the end of his life, however, Kipling was convinced that because of poverty and political tyranny, all efforts to bring the East and West together would come to naught.

            But that was then (Kipling died in 1936); this is now.  Today the East is coming to the West, the opposite of what Kipling hoped for.  This doesn’t mean “the twain” have met or made peace.  It means the West is allowing the quiet invasion of Eastern values and systems, particularly centralized government.

            Today one of the leading candidates for the Presidency is an avowed “democratic” socialist. Sen. Bernie Sanders frequently attempts to explain what a “democratic” socialist is.  He need not.  Socialism, whatever adjective you attach to it, is the enemy – yea, the end – of individual liberty.  It extols the nebulous “village” to the detriment of every non-nebulous, breathing individual villager.  It’s an –ism that has oozed from afar into America for decades and is now heralded by at least two serious presidential candidates.  Illegal immigration has fueled this –ism.

Along with competitor Elizabeth Warren, Sanders would bring to America the central planning of the East such as that of China and Saudi Arabia.  Central planning for such things as free higher education, Medicare for all, the death of private insurance, gun confiscation, etc., requires central government power.  These two Robin Hood candidates are enjoying strong support from college students and other young adults, indicating that the ways of the East have already established a considerable foothold.

No, no.  Sanders and Warren favor Swedish socialism, their supporters claim.  Sweden is approximately the size of California.  Practically any system can function in a small nation.  For a continental nation like America, China-like controls are necessary for the socialistic measures now proposed by the nation’s left.

            What precisely is the difference between the East and the West?  The Greeks were the first Westerners.  Their fledgling democracy and love for beauty, philosophy, and debate were handed off to Rome, then to early modern Europe, then to early America, with liberty increasing every mile of the way. Contrast this path to that of Eastern nations where exultant freedom simply never took root.  While Herodotus, Cicero, Blackstone, and Jefferson preached freedom and its attendant progress, nations great and small east of the Mediterranean continued to dwell in tyrannical darkness.  With few exceptions such as India, the East has never championed democracy as has the Western world.  This is particularly true of the Middle Eastern Islamic-dominated nations.

            In Europe, Western values are dying.  According to Jonathan Steele in “The New Migration,” Europe’s aging population is a present reality.  This population gap is being filled, says Roger Cohen of the New York Times, and is best illustrated by Germany where 7 million of its 80 million people are Eastern-born and unschooled in free markets and representative government.

            As this column has asked before, if multiculturalism works, why since 1990 have the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia splintered into 21 nations?  Why the ongoing secessionist movements in Spain, Italy, and alas, the U.K?  Why the strife-ridden situation in London’s Muslim-dominated borough of Tower Hamlets where I visited recently and learned that Muslims and non-Muslims are so often in conflict?

The introduction above is incomplete. Kipling’s next line is “Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s Great Judgment Seat.”  But that’s why he’s wrong.  We are ahead of Kipling’s schedule.  If easternized Europe is a dead man walking, how long will it take for America to see that invasions must be resisted, that commonality of some kind is every civilization’s glue, and that every American should honor the Western values that have kept us free and fed?

Socialism is not one of those values.

Roger Hines

1/29/20

           

Come, November, Come

                           Come, November, Come

               Published in Marietta (GA) Journal, 1/5/20

             America’s populist revolution is both similar and dissimilar to those in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and Canada.  Similar because, whether in the small countries of Europe or in a vast continental nation like America, localism runs deep in the hearts of those who want to be free and un-tethered to distant rule. 

            They are dissimilar in that in the countries named above, secession is the issue.  Scotland wishes to disunite from the U.K.  Catalonia prefers to separate from Spain.  Venice still rejects Italy as her Fatherland, and Quebec, Canada’s French-speaking province, is perennially chanting independence. 

In America, the issue is not secession, or not yet.  Here the issue is the rise of work-based, faith-driven ordinary Americans who seek – let’s say it together one more time – limited government, secure borders, a free market economy, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and yes, an end to murderous abortion.  Americans who favor this agenda are called nationalists, racists, bigots, and worse.  These firefighters, masons, plumbers, carpenters, teachers, cops, bakers, tailors, electricians, small business owners, farmers and such are fed up with Al Gore pomposity, Bernie Sanders socialism, CNN smugness, academia’s shift from free speech to controlled speech, the Go to College mantra, and Republican hesitancy.

Those who view these fed-up “commoners” as ignoramuses, namely the old networks, MSNBC and CNN, know little to nothing about what the “commoners” know, or what they cherish or struggle with.  How many television commentators or national (or local) columnists know anything at all about Bill Gaither, NASCAR, Vidalia onions, crop rotation, job lay-offs, a monkey wrench, evangelicals, depleted checking accounts, cows, pick-up trucks, small town life, the Grand Ole Opry, or even Rotary?  What they do know about is Democrat schmoozing, flights from biological reality (choose your gender), and flights from D.C. or New York to L.A. and back.  Never have they heard “America singing,” as poet Walt Whitman put it.  They don’t even know what America sings.

Incidentally, do we ever see “commoners”/ordinary folks protesting in the streets?  Not much if at all.  They’re at work.  It’s college kids who protest, as well as Hollywood’s big names who have time and money on their hands, and college professors who probably egged the students on.  Now we can add a handful of high schoolers who of course know everything and who have been propelled to fame because they were interviewed after a high school shooting.  Everything changes, we’re told, so it’s time to let the pot command the potter.  How stunningly amiss can the country get?

And what does all of this have to do with November?  November, I believe, will show the increased power of the deplorables.  Unlike England’s Peasant Revolt of 1381 which didn’t end well for the peasants, America’s deplorables are stationed to fare better.  Tea Party organizations may have shut down, but their spirit is alive and well. The deplorables’ leader, President Trump, isn’t one to tinker with government (stitch this, tweak that, pour money here, start another bureaucracy there).  He likes the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm,” and honors Calvin Coolidge’s adage, “The business of America is business.”  Nothing that has been thrown at the President so far has stuck and the Left is still livid and embarrassed.  They sense they’ve become tiring.

As for those evangelicals, little did the national media or many local columnists know that there has always been a small evangelical left and Christianity Today magazine began tilting toward it over a decade ago.  What’s an evangelical Christian to do if one candidate opposes the murder of innocent, defenseless, unborn babies and the other candidate doesn’t?  Or if one candidate defends your cultural beliefs and economic interests and the other doesn’t?

The leftist media is telling evangelicals how hypocritical they are even though the media certainly knew about but disregarded the sexual behavior of Jefferson, Harding, FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton, particularly JFK, their darling still.

And oh yes, Republican economic orthodoxy.  It too is what the middle class is rejecting.  Republican elites have subscribed to globalism as much as Democrats.  They got nervous hearing Trump’s “America First” slogan, but working folks said, “It’s about time!”  That’s why they hired a bull to enter the china shop.

As with the nations listed above, many American middle class voters feel ignored and disdained by their political leadership and left behind economically by globalization. Ironically,  Democrats are helping re-elect Trump. As Peggy Noonan wrote, “Crazy won’t beat Trump.”

November will come quickly. Working class voters will vote for nationalism and against socialism.  Old Adam Smith, Coolidge, and Reagan will be applauding from their graves.

Roger Hines

January 1, 2020

Ah, Christmas!

                                     Ah, Christmas!

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 12/22/19

            Christmas is a bundle of contradictions.  Peace on earth?  Where? Yet all around us and around the world there are many people in dire circumstances who truly do experience peace daily.  They are realists who are well aware of the condition of the world, yet they not only cope.  They thrive and are somehow able to keep the misfortunes of life from getting them down.  Many consider their misfortunes an opportunity to help bring to others the comfort and joy they themselves experience.

Superficially, Christmas is all about beauty and celebration.  Store managers and home dwellers can really do magical things with decorations.  But the draw that all of the superficiality produces is evidence that we all need and seek beauty and joy.   

Who but a Grinch could not find at least some kind of satisfaction in Christmas lights and the happy faces of children?  Who could seriously argue that the overall effect of Christmas is not positive?  Buried beneath the superficiality and commercialism, hope seems always to stir – hope that things will get better, that soured relationships will be restored, that more goodwill will prevail in the year ahead, and that darkness of all stripes will be dispelled.

 Christmas is big stuff.  In fact it’s lots of stuff, probably too much.  I’m persuaded that for those who are sad at Christmas, their sadness is not caused by seeing and envying others who are joyful, but by seeing and bemoaning the obvious void that all the stuff creates.  Trinkets, new clothes, money, and gift cards are all nice, but they typically have a short life span after which many are back in their slump.

That slump can be more easily dealt with if one considers how the Christmas story has affected three continents.  Ironically, the land where Christmas started is not primarily a Christian region.  Europe and the Americas are the lands that have cradled the Christian gospel and given it to the world, not just the babe in a manger account, but the schools, hospitals, and orphanages that have followed it.  Christmas when rightly understood and received has always changed hearts, sprouted legs, and sought out the needs of others.

Yes, Christmas is about a birth and how that birth affected the world.  One of our most popular Christmas carols contains the words, “Long lay the world in sin and error pining / ‘Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

Sin we understand.  It’s wrong to murder, to lie, to steal.  Error we sometimes miss.  It was error for ancient men of nobility to sincerely believe that certain people had no worth except to serve the nobility.  Perhaps the human soul began to feel its worth because of the humble origins of the One who claimed He was God come down.   It was error (and sin) for modern man to perpetuate the ancient world’s injustice and political tyranny, error to think that God indwelt idols, error to think that our five senses are the highest reality or to believe that matter and energy are the only realities.

Many psychiatrists have spoken of the loneliness experienced by so many at Christmas.  The good news is that, if the Christmas story is true, nobody is alone.  Christmas – Christmas beneath and beyond the superficialities – says that God put on an earth suit and dwelt among us.  The title Emmanuel means “God with us.”  We had better hope that the Christmas account is true.  The human race is in dire need of it.  We’re not controlling our selfishness too well.  We chase the wind.  We even let prosperity be our undoing.  We need an internal governor of sorts that sublimates our self-centeredness and shows us how to look out for our fellow man.  The Christmas message purports to do just that and has done it for millions.

Reviling the supernatural, an MDJ letter writer recently claimed that Thanksgiving was intended as a day to give thanks to “mothers and fathers, cooks and farmers, and kind relatives.” That’s not exactly what Lincoln and FDR had in mind.  Neither was such broad application what President Grant had in mind when in1870 he instituted Christmas Day as a holiday.  Grant rightly believed Christmas Day would help re-unite our torn nation.  It did help.

Those who will have an empty pantry or an empty chair at their table this year are just the ones that Christmas should drive our minds and legs to.  We still have a few days to seek such people out.  But if granted a New Year, we can ask along with Elvis, “Why can’t every day be like Christmas?”

To millions, every day is.  That’s the Ah! of Christmas.

Roger Hines

12/18/19

Thanksgiving to Whom?

                               Thanksgiving to Whom?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal,11/24/19

            It’s a bit puzzling that the so-called Christmas wars have gone on for several years while Thanksgiving Day has caused little or no stir.  Actually the Christmas wars have abated since the election of President Trump, probably in part because just before his first Christmas in office he declared, “At the White House we will be saying ‘Merry Christmas’.” 

            Maybe I should pay another visit to Target and find out how they are handling Thanksgiving.  Like all retailers, they are certainly taking advantage of Thanksgiving’s commercial benefits.  Readers might remember that when the bathroom wars were front page I reported that, in order to get first hand information, I visited the local Target (in Acworth) and asked a cashier if I were allowed to use the ladies’ restroom.  As the cashier began to answer, three other nearby female employees, seemingly managerial, rushed toward me as though disturbed by my question.

            Repeating my question, I could only elicit what sounded like a scripted answer: “You may go into the restroom you identify with.”

            “So any man could go inside the ladies’ restroom while my wife was inside it?” I replied.

            “Men may go into the restroom they identify with,” the second of the three female employees repeated.  It would have been silly, though playful and satisfying, to point out that their corporate script had used a preposition to end a sentence with.

            Did I say that this happened in Acworth, Georgia down in the Bible Belt?  I believe I did.  Wonder where Target’s corporate headquarters are.  The way things have changed, they could well be in Cobb County and not far off in, say, the Republic of California, or some other such area where things are getting crazy.

            I suppose the reason many retail stores began requiring their employees to say “Happy Holidays” in the first place is that the word Christmas has Christ in it.  That would make “Merry Christmas” religious and we can’t have that.  Of course “Happy Hanukah” is religious too.  Doggone it, the word “holiday” is religious as well because etymologically it is an embedded form of “holy day.”  Can we not see where our ultra-sensitivities have led us?  Well, not everybody’s sensitivities, but the sensitivities of those who wish to perform a religious lobotomy on America.

            And what about Thanksgiving?  I hate to bring it up for fear of giving ideas to the ACLU, the American Atheists organization, (and probably Target), but has anyone thought about to whom our thankfulness is directed when the nation takes off work and observes Thanksgiving Day?  Have the corporate elites, the secular provocateurs, and the Acworth Target manager ever thought, “Oh no. Thanksgiving is a religious word.  We stock Thanksgiving holiday merchandise, but we’ve gotta be pluralistic.  We can’t offend anyone by saying Happy Thanksgiving.”

            Yes, the forces that deny our religious roots are many.  Consider the faith of Columbus who has been smeared by academia for the last two decades.  Remember who was on the Mayflower and why.  Recount the fervor of John Winthrop who declared the new land would be a “city upon a hill,” meaning a beacon of religious freedom, and Patrick Henry who really did prefer death to tyranny of all stripes, religious tyranny included.

            Consider the position of other founders.  Unlike many of my fellow conservatives, I don’t believe Jefferson was a Christian.  He was a theist, more precisely a deist, and along with Washington, Adams, Madison, and all of the other founders, Jefferson embraced the belief that “rights” (freedom) are derived from God, not from the state or any head of state.

            Surely this foundational Judeo-Christian belief, unlike that of Muslim states, is what led to the famous D-Day radio prayer of FDR in which he sought the help and blessings of God for America.  That ethic is also the root system of the expressions, “In God We Trust,” “One nation under God,” and “So help me God.”

            The secularists who don’t like these expressions or “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Thanksgiving” deny that their position is a religious one.  However, if secular humanism or atheism isn’t a religious position, i.e., a position on theology, what is? Secularists try to get a free ride, declaring their views to be “free of religion”; therefore, their views should prevail.  However, the prayers and expressions of Jews and Christians should be squelched, whether at Rotary, high school ballgames, or the White House.

            This Thanksgiving millions of Americans will be giving thanks.  The receiver of that thanks will be the God Who, incidentally, is the God to Whom all of our presidents have at least paid lip service.

            Happy Thanksgiving!

Roger Hines

11/20/19