Good Words, Bad Words … Whatever

                              Good Words, Bad Words … Whatever

                                                                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal April 24, 2016

            Words are the vehicles on which our thoughts ride.  When the vehicles are well-oiled, or more importantly, when they are first well-chosen, they usually reach their intended destination.

            Words can change history.  Oops!  The words in that sentence weren’t well-chosen.  Neither words nor anything else can change history, but words can most definitely change the direction in which history is headed.  Does anyone doubt that Churchill’s words, “We shall fight on the beaches and on the landing grounds; we shall fight on the fields and in the streets,” re-ignited Brits, Americans, and Frenchmen, thereby hastening the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan?

            Who is not inspired by the words of Nathan Hale, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country”?  Although Soviet leader Gorbachev was already disposed to remove the barrier separating East and West Berlin, surely the firm words of President Reagan, who was standing beside that barrier, influenced him: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

            On a lighter note, I often find truth (and personal application) in the words of the cartoon character, Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  The dry wit and words of Will Rogers and Mark Twain have lent us wisdom and levity.  My Rogers favorite: “I’m not really a movie star.  I’ve still got the wife I started out with 28 years ago.”

            Yes, words can change things.  They can lift us up, equipping us almost instantly for high purpose or they can dash us to the floor.  There is no better tool than words for changing minds, emotions, and alas, public policy.

            Sometimes – no, often – words are altered, manipulated, or created by policy makers.  Consider the expression “life-style.”  This fairly new creation (1939 as a noun; 1976 as an adjective) implies that there are many acceptable ways to live.  Just pick the one you want.  To use Bill Clinton’s favorite word, “Whatever!”  For homosexuals and the supposedly transgendered, “life-style” is a godsend.  I can think of no word that has changed American culture more.

            “Life-style” is now covering some absolute craziness, the most egregious being the clamor of the supposedly transgendered to use the bathroom they wish.  And we’re all supposed to cower and accept it.  Elected officials could stop this foolishness in its tracks if enough of them had the guts to make some noise.  No silver-tongued devil will ever convince me that parents of school children or teenage daughters favor this “liberating innovation.”  I am now a one-issue voter: “Tell me where you stand on supposedly transgender, non-gender, and any other gender beside male and female bathrooms.  Forget the economy.  Answer my question.”

In the past, certain “life-styles” have been considered aberrations.  Now they are “rights.”  Oppose them and you’re a throwback.  I say we’re desperate for some throwbacks.

            Even marriage is fast becoming “just another chosen way of life.”  Historically the bedrock of civilization and a safe harbor for children, marriage is now viewed as one of many “tastes.”  No amount of “societal evolution” can erase human history and the centrality of that little but wondrous unit of government called the family.  Good grief!  Even the animal kingdom still functions in family units.  Animals blow to smithereens the present nonsense about “same-sex marriage” and “diversity of sexual expression.”

            Another word being hijacked by contemporary culture is “open-minded.”  Oh, don’t we love it.  Open expression, open borders, open minds.  Open expression has led to the filthiest of language in movies, some of which will be produced in Georgia now that Governor Deal has vetoed those religious freedom fanatics and welcomed movie makers here to do their thing, bad words and all.  Functionally open borders have led to an underclass with which the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and our great corporations are just hunky-dory.  The Chamber likes cheap labor. 

“Open minds” are precisely and exactly what has birthed moral relativism.  You know, “Your truth, my truth, whose truth?”

            Atlanta-based Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias addresses open minds this way: “An open mind is like an open mouth.  Sooner or later it must close on something or else it accepts everything, rejects nothing, and becomes an open sewer.”

            That should settle it, but the less-finessed words of a good high school coach also ring in my ears: “If you leave your mind open all the time, your brain will fall out.”

            Yes, “revenue enhancements” are taxes, “economic equality” is socialism, and he who is fooled by such verbal shenanigans is not wise.

            Just a few words to the wise.

           

Roger Hines

4/20/16

American Decadence 2

                                           American Decadence 2

                                                     Published in Marietta Daily Journal April 17, 2016

            This column is so titled because it is a follow-up to the Monday, April 11 Marietta Daily Journal column of Kennesaw State University professor, Dr. Melvyn Fein.  I only hope it’s not presumptuous to “follow-up” on anything Dr. Fein would write, so esteemed is he in my estimation.

            I met the gentleman a few years ago after he spoke at the Madison Forum, though I doubt  he could remember.  The line of admirers wanting to meet him was long, but I waited it out, wishing to express appreciation to such a rare bird.

            Make that bird an eagle because Professor Fein has always soared high above academia’s orthodoxy, better to peer down into it, examine its preoccupations, and challenge its presuppositions.

            Anyone who has had any connection at all with universities will understand why Fein is an anomaly.  It’s because he is a conservative sociology professor at a sizable state university.  I’m careful with the word “conservative.”  I don’t know if the gentleman applies that word to himself or not.  Thanks to current presidential politics, the liberal-conservative spectrum, long used for labeling political views, isn’t so certain anymore. Fein thinks for himself, no matter how a spectrum is worded.  With few exceptions, the professor’s writings have elicited strong hallelujahs from this scribe.

            What is it about higher education (George Will is still asking, “Higher than what?”) that draws progressives/liberals/leftists to college teaching?  I don’t use those three terms derogatorily, but descriptively.  Some of my best friends truly are left of center.  And, oh, do they love educational institutions!

            Are liberals drawn to college teaching because they’re smarter than conservatives?  Well, was historian Woodrow Wilson smarter than Jefferson?   Or law professor Obama smarter than Truman?  No, smart is not the issue.  For certain, liberals feel more.  Do they think less?  They are without doubt more evangelistic.  Maybe conservatives are less evangelistic, less activist, because they’re at work and just can’t attend all the protests.

            No, liberals know where young minds are and how to influence them.  Thank heaven for the Feins of the world who also seek to instruct them.

            At any rate, Fein is in academia but not of academia.   He works and thrives in the university setting, serving as a bright light of dissent, daring to question academia’s ideology.  His April 11 column, which analyzed the college scene, touched every base.

            For instance, his comparison of America and Rome raised the following question in my mind: are there any significant differences between Rome’s decline and our own recent steps toward the precipice?  Fein correctly compares President Obama’s deal with Iran to Rome who in her latter days tried to buy off her enemies.  He refers to profligate spending which America, like ancient Rome, has fallen into.  Pax Romana and Pax Americana are different in many ways but their decisive retreat from world influence is quite similar.

              Fein correctly asserts that education’s self-esteem emphasis has led to “a fool’s paradise.”  I’ve observed this at both high school and college levels. Fein mentions the trophies that we now give to all participants rather than just to winners.  I would add the grief brigades (counselors) that we parachute into the high schools whenever a tragedy of any kind occurs, a practice that is turning us into one nation under therapy.  I would also add the tenderness that now runs amuck on college campuses because college presidents wish to protect college kids from “harmful viewpoints.”

Novelist Saul Bellow said it this way: “I never viewed the university as a sanctuary or shelter from the outer world.”  For at least a decade, however, we have treated college students like babes and are now scratching our heads at the number of just-old-enough-to-vote youths who are flocking to a free-stuff, socialist candidate’s rallies.

Academia’s embrace of modern psychology’s “Esteem thyself” has birthed children.  None of those children have flawed character, of course.  They are victims of “disorders.”   They’ve been told to “seize the day” because they are special.  And they’re voting.

Fein is in good company.  Twenty-five year ago another respected university personality, Columbia University’s Dean, Jacques Barzun, opined that “self-esteem comes from work done,” and that universities “barely weave intellect into socialization, entertainment, and political activism.”  Barzun, too, wrote of the decadence that so often has its roots in academia.

 To see what college students should be learning, join yours truly and Constitutional scholar Jim Jess in “A Reading of the Constitution” at 7 PM on April 19 at Kennesaw First Baptist Church.  Decadence can only be reversed by life-giving ideals and principles.  Our Constitution provides just that.  It’s an antidote to what ails the university.

Roger Hines

4/13/16

A President, a War Bride and a Teacher

                          A President, a War Bride and a Teacher

                                                                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal April 10, 2016

            If truth be known, more precisely if truth be acknowledged, we all owe much to so many.  We owe the parents who raised us, friends who have befriended us, and communities that  shaped us.

            There is probably no rarer combination of creditors, or influencers, than that of a president, a war bride, and a high school teacher, but that combination is exactly what most fed my thought-world during my youth and touches my heart to the present day.  Believe it or not, that combination of people was intertwined by world events, that is, by history.

            This particular president, while still an active Army general, made his mark during World War II.   A future sister-in-law, still in Europe at the time, lived through it, and an astute history teacher absorbed it all and taught it. 

            When 11^th grade American history came along, I was ready - at least for the 20^th century chapters.  Believe me, I had been schooled on the Depression and World War II.  Though enrolled in a public school, my brothers, sisters and I were homeschooled - informally/conversationally, that is - before homeschooling was widespread.  Breakfast, dinner, and supper (our terms at that time) seldom went by without some mention of the goings-on around the world.

            In our home, Dwight D. Eisenhower was a presence.  Having gone from general to president, he smiled down on the nation. In a fashion, his was an era of good feeling. He wasn’t a Democrat, but for right now, that was ok because our brothers Paul and Pete, who fought bravely in World War II, admired him.  They had no interest in a Solid South, Democratic or otherwise.  They cared only that Eisenhower, Patton, and McArthur had saved the world from Hitler’s and Japan’s scourge.

            It was Paul who brought an Italian girl into the picture.  He met and married her in Trieste, Italy and brought her to the states the year Eisenhower was elected.  Antonia (but allow me her affectionate Italian nickname, Pupi) infected our lives with knowledge and vistas we could never have gotten from textbooks.  Imagine the brightness brought to the lives of a provincial, southern farm family by one who knew and loved the Adriatic world and enjoyed talking about it. 

Finding southern heat almost insufferable and inconsistent English pronunciations inexplicable (tough, through, bough; tuff, thruff, buff?), Pupi endured.  She, too, loved Eisenhower and America. Her family had lived under Mussolini’s fascist thugs since 1922 and under stern Germany before Italy annexed Trieste.  For all its beauty as an Adriatic harbor city, Trieste suffered direly from Nazism and Fascism, and Pupi could recount for us virtually every detail of Trieste history and of the effect of WWII on that storied city.

            Margaret Richardson may not have been an aristocrat, but she held to aristocratic values in the finest of ways.  A “town lady,” her goal was to instill in us small town and country urchins the nation’s history.  This she did with nothing but a textbook, a few maps and a strong belief that knowledge of history was tethered to freedom itself.

            Mrs. Richardson spurned the phrase “current history.” (“There’s no such thing. It’s current events.”)  So every Friday was current events.  Nothing she said and nothing form the U.S. history book differed from what Pupi had described.  A true blue Dixiecrat, she still liked Republican Eisenhower.   She disliked his phrase, “the military-industrial complex,” claiming he was belittling the military that made him great, but appreciated his call for other NATO nations to do more to defend themselves.  Did I beam when she said, “Roger, didn’t you have two brothers in World War II?  You might agree with me.” (I only smiled timidly, not yet having fully grasped what NATO was.)

            When Mrs. Richardson learned about Pupi, she insisted I bring her to school and have her talk to the class, but Pupi was not confident with her English just yet.  Sad, because the two of them would have enjoyed talking about Eisenhower.

            Yes, history is the thread that binds eras and individuals.  The intertwining of that thread touches and connects unlikely people in unimaginable ways.  We neglect its study at our peril. 

            When Napoleon marched his troops into Egypt, he told them that forty centuries of history would be watching them from the pyramids.  Having been instructed already by Napoleon on “the eyes of history,” French troops wiped out almost the entire Egyptian army. Napoleon’s “history lessons” had inspired them.

            Three of my chief creditors – a general, a peasant girl, an astute teacher - are as disparate as were Napoleon and his uneducated troops.  But like Napoleon’s troops, I learned and was inspired because history brought them together.

           

Roger Hines

4/7/16

The Growing Republican Governors' Hall of Shame

                                    The Growing Republican Governors’ Hall of Shame

              

                                                                     Published in Marietta Daily Journal April 3, 2016

            Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, and now from Georgia, the reddest of red states, add Governor Nathan Deal.  This past week Gov. Deal announced he would veto House Bill 757, a measure that would guard the religious liberties of Georgia’s pastors, churches, and religious organizations.

            Say it ain’t so, Governor. I grew mighty fond of you in 2010 when we both were running for state wide office and rubbing shoulders at many a candidate forum.  In Hart County it was just you and me.  No other candidates showed up.  That meant that we both got to talk longer to our audience, but we also got to talk more to each other.  Privately you listened to my ideas about education and I listened to your ideas about the state at large.  You struck me as a total social conservative.

            Well, if the governor is still a social conservative, he isn’t acting like it.  After a two-year legislative debate on religious liberties, a bill has been carefully honed and passed by both houses of the General Assembly.  In vetoing it, Mr. Deal sides with the corporate bullies and the homosexual lobby, those who gave us same-sex marriage.

            Why do you suppose the General Assembly wasn’t hesitant to pass the bill during an election year?  It’s because they wanted to stand with the folks.  In passing the bill just four months before their next election, both the House and the Senate obviously felt they were correctly representing their constituents.

            I, for one, am getting tired of corporation big shots, the Chamber of Commerce, and the homosexual lobby running the show in Georgia.  Just how many people are we talking about when we say “the LGBT community”?  Do lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered souls constitute the majority of voters in Georgia?  Do they drink more Coke than the rest of us?  Buy more Home Depot lumber? Spend more on ballgames?

            To whom does the Georgia Chamber of Commerce think it owes the most thanks for the business its members get?  But, oh, if HB 757 becomes law, the state will fall apart, the Chamber argues.  Does anyone think Coke will leave Atlanta?  Home Depot?  Delta?  No, they are all bullies, issuing their threats and showing no gratitude for their countless customers who favor HB 757.  Viewing the world through dollar signs, they believe that man can live by bread alone. 

For a sorry dollar, the Chamber of Commerce which used to care about the community at large, thinks it must run with the zealots of the New Sexuality.  You know: those who are now clamoring for non-gender bathrooms even in public schools.  Those who have successfully re-defined marriage, who defy biology and physiology, and who create a new victimology every time they turn around.  Those who next week will be clamoring for some other type of sexual aberration we’ve never heard of, plus special laws to force it on the rest of us.

            HB 757 grants ministers the right to refuse to officiate weddings that are inconsistent with their religious beliefs.  It does not block gay marriages.  It also allows religious organizations to refuse employment of someone who opposes their beliefs.

            The lengths to which the corporate lions are going in order to bully the rest of us are outrageous.  As for the movie industry in Georgia, have the governor and his corporate buddies given thought to the values most Hollywood products are spreading these days? Do they read movie reviews or view movie trailers on the internet?  Doubtful.  If Hollywood is bringing in dollars, values don’t matter.

            If the beliefs of the LGBT are deeply held, so are those of Christians whose sacred Scripture forbids homosexuality.  Of course, because Christians believe what they believe, they are haters.

            The list of corporations that are embarrassed by traditionalist Georgians is endless.  That doesn’t bother Cobb County state representatives Sam Teasley and Ed Setzler.  Both of these good men – who hate nobody – have been fearless in defending religious liberties against the corporate/ homosexual lobby’s juggernaut.

            Rep. Setzler recently stated, “If Disney claims to be upset by anything Georgia is doing, I’d assume they’d close Walt Disney World in Florida because Florida has stronger religious freedom protections than Georgia.  Objecting to Georgia’s is the height of hypocrisy.”

            The Trump phenomenon has been fed by such actions as the governor’s.  But the fight isn’t over; it will continue.  Meanwhile, I’m changing soft drinks, myself; as well as where I get my house and garden stuff.

            For rejecting the religion of the New Sexuality, I and many others are now the new heretics.

            Say it ain’t so, Nathan.  Say it ain’t so.

Roger Hines

3/31/16

            

The Resurrection...a Leveler of Men

                                       The Resurrection … a Leveler of Men

                                   

                                                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal March 27, 2916

Charles “Chuck” Colson was a distinguished lawyer.  Anyone who remembers the Watergate scandal of the 1970’s will recall that Colson was President Richard Nixon’s Special Counsel who went to prison for his part in the Watergate cover up.

            The much younger Lee Strobel is a former Chicago Tribune investigative reporter and legal editor.  An avowed atheist, he held disdain for all people of faith.  He was particularly scornful of creationists.

Lit Ursry was neither educated nor at the height of a profession as were Colson and Strobel.  He was a small cotton farmer, always struggling to make ends meet.  His godly wife and two small children seldom missed church.  But somebody usually gave them a ride because Lit was too drunk to drive on weekends.

            Easter is a good time to ponder how different these men were and how the Resurrection message changed their lives, rendering them far more alike than one could ever imagine.

            I’ve never met Colson or Strobel, but I knew Ursry and his small family.  From their very public lives and the books they have written, I learned that both Colson and Strobel experienced a life transformation that was undeniably real and continues to produce good fruit that affirms its authenticity.  Because I was there when it happened, I can affirm that Lit Ursry experienced a life change also, one for which Colson and Strobel would rejoice.

            In 1972 the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building kept Americans glued to their newspapers and television.  The break-in was eventually linked to Nixon’s re-election committee.  Nixon resigned and several members of his administration were jailed.

            Colson was the first member of Nixon’s administration to go to jail, having pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.  He was considered Nixon’s “hatchet man” and was admittedly the keeper of Nixon’s infamous enemies’ list.

            Just before he was arrested, Colson joined a Washington, D.C. prayer group.  Because of the influence of men in the group and the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, Colson became a Christian.  Referring to the Apostles and the effect of Christ’s resurrection on them, Colson declared that no 12 men anywhere would give their lives for a hoax, but 12 men would and did give their lives for one whom they saw alive, dead, and alive again.  Time would tell whether Colson was genuine or was having a pre-prison conversion.

            Lee Strobel’s belief in the resurrection resulted from two things: the transformed life of his wife who became a Christian (“She changed; she became more loving, caring and authentic”) and the strong belief of some West Virginia Christian fundamentalists who were protesting science textbooks.

            The same year that Colson was jailed, Strobel was sent by the Chicago Tribune to cover the textbook battle in Campbell Creek, West Virginia.  Expecting to find reporter-hating hillbillies, Strobel was surprised when he was welcomed to one of their protest gatherings.  Though he banged out his newspaper article with as much disdain for anti-evolutionists as ever, he was struck by one comment from a local businessman: “If Darwin’s right, then we’re all just sophisticated monkeys.”

            In time, after incessant reading and discussions with his wife, Strobel abandoned his atheism, embraced the resurrection and penned many books including the New York Times bestseller, The Case for Creation.

            Lit wasn’t Lit Ursry’s real name.  His real name was Holder.  He was called Lit, though indecorously, because he was more often drunk than not.   He knew his wife’s church family didn’t look down on him.  They prayed for him and often took food and clothes to his family.

            It was the resurrection message that changed Lit.  Delivered by a young “preacher boy” from a nearby Christian college on Easter Sunday, the sermon led Lit to later remark, “I just had to believe it.  I don’t want no god that can’t overcome death.”

Far from being a “poser” trying to influence his prison sentence, Colson became one of America’s most well-known Christian writers and apologists.  After his release from prison, he founded Prison Fellowship which supports families of the imprisoned.  Lee Strobel, no longer trapped in the purely material, changed from a smarty atheist and evolutionist to a prolific Christian writer, teacher and speaker.  Within months of that Easter Sunday, Lit Ursry’s nickname began to fade.  His drinking ceased and everyone started calling him Holder.

That’s what the resurrection did for these three quite different men who now have a great deal in common.  They are now Christian brothers.  In a sense all three of them got a new name.  All because of an empty grave.

Roger Hines

3/23/16

Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones but Words...Can Kill or Enliven

              Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones but Words … Can Kill or Enliven

                                                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal March 20, 2016

            Words matter.  When I was 14, spring time found my father and me dealing with barbed wire.  We weren’t building a fence; we were “sticking beans.”   

 My father, a good man who said little unless the topics were faith, crops, or politics, was a neat-nick.  Newspapers, once read, had to be placed back in order, and magazines - Progressive Farmer, Farm Journal, and U.S. News and World Report - had to be stacked neatly.  His diaries, in which he faithfully wrote nightly from January of 1943 to only a few months before his death in 1979, were kept at the end of the mantel.  We never touched them except when he was away from the house.  Occasionally we would peep into the diaries to settle arguments about dates.   Those diaries didn’t lie.

My father made up words.  On the morning that we gathered up a mall, oak posts, barbed wire, staples, crowbar, and hammer for the bean sticking, he cautioned me that the job was going to be a “worriation.”  A lover of words, I knew he didn’t get that one from Noah Webster.  The closest word to “worriation” that I could find in the dictionary was “worriment” which to this day I have still never seen or heard used.

Anyhow, on to that spring day of our worriation. When you stick beans “southernly,” (honestly, I’ve heard him say that one too), you don’t just stick a spindly sweet gum sapling in the ground beside the bean plant, hoping the runner will run up the sapling.  Oh, no. Even a mild wind would level such a piddly effort as that.  “Piddly” is in honor of my father.  Mr. Webster lists it, but refers you to “piddling.”  I’m with my father on this one. “Piddling” is too citified, if not … British.

Of course to do anything “southernly” really meant to do it the “W.E. Hines” way.  But that way always worked and always made things look pretty, too.  People didn’t drive from town late in the afternoon to pass by and look at his fields and gardens for nothing.

Ok, here’s “southernly.”   First you drive posts down at the 2 ends of each row and at every 6 yards in between.  Next you unroll and stretch barbed wire from one end post to the other and hammer staples over the wire and onto the every-six-yards posts.  With barbed wire stretched taut and stapled down, you can then “stick” a trimmed sapling beside each bean plant, tie it to the secured wire, and in time, train the bean vine to grow up the sapling.

With gloved hands I began to unroll the wire.  Halfway down the row I lost control of the heavy roll, causing it to whirl swiftly back toward my father at the other end of the row.  One of the barbs plowed deep into his ungloved hand and drew blood.  Shaking his hand and scattering blood, he yelled, “Son, you can’t do anything right.”

For a few years I believed him.  The words didn’t exactly hurt; they stung and numbed.  They initiated a long period of self-doubt.  But even their negative import could not diminish my respect for my intelligent, hardworking, tenant farmer father who nobly bore his responsibilities and raised 17 children to adulthood.

Eight years later on a spring Sunday morning I asked him if he still planned to go with me that afternoon 90 miles away to my college graduation.  The recent death of my mother had turned him into a sad, non-communicative man.  At age 72 he still worked hard.  His answer made me realize that for eight years I had wrongly and foolishly internalized his words, allowing them to stymie me, even though they were spoken quickly out of physical pain, not out of thought or belief.

“Son, I don’t believe I can make that trip, but I want you to know I love you and I’m proud of you,” he said.  Instantly my mind flashed back to that “worriation” of sticking beans and the words spoken on that day.

“Some say a word is dead once it is said / I say it just begins to live that day,” wrote the poet.  True, but words can also cancel previously spoken ones when the latter ones are spoken sincerely.  My father spoke sincerely.

Words are the vehicles on which our thoughts ride.  Ill-chosen, those vehicles can hit the ditch and do damage.  Luckily my self-imposed damage was reversed.  Many are those whose damage is not.

Roger Hines

3/16/16

America Has a Man Problem

            America Has a Man Problem

                                                                 Published in Marietta Daily Journal March 13, 2016

            When Terrelle stood to give his talk, his fellow inmates listened intently.  Terrelle was thirty-eight, handsome, intelligent, and much loved by all his classmates.  He was the type of guy who makes you wonder how he could ever have done anything that led to a state prison.

             Terrelle’s English course required students to give one talk.  He chose to talk about growing up in the ‘hood.  Among other heartbreaking but revealing details, Terrelle stated he had never seen his father.  Of his mother he said, “She pretty much pushed me off on my grandmother, and my grandmother left every day for work so I had to take care of my younger brother.”

            These details were wrought with emotion, but were quite familiar.  Familiarity can breed a ho-hum attitude toward a situation that needs anything but.  I had heard stories like Terrelle’s not just from other inmates but from quite a few high school and college students outside of prison.  However, toward the end of his talk, Terrelle added something that made his story different: “My family wuz my street buddies, but as far as my real family was concerned, I just about didn’t know who I wuz.”

            Those words rang in my ears for the remainder of the day.  To me, they were profound,  revealing that fatherless homes can lead to an identity crisis even in the mind of a small child.  They can also rob a child of his or her childhood, forcing children to function as parents of younger brothers and sisters.

            Yes, America has a man problem.  Perhaps that’s the reason forty percent of American children will go to bed tonight without fathers.  Today we care more about defending same-sex marriage than we do fixing our man problem.  School systems in several major cities, instead of standing for common sense, are grappling with the issue of “correct restrooms” and how to deal with transgenderism, as though there weren’t enough societal problems without the silly ones brought on by sexual chaos.

            Statistics are cold things.  If they reveal information that saddens or frightens, we shake our heads in despair and go on.  But the statistics stubbornly remain.  They indicate that before our nation’s children reach the age of eighteen, more than half of them will have spent a significant portion of their childhood apart from their fathers.

            But our male prison population isn’t the only indicator.  The general population is trending in directions that show we are becoming a nation of “men without chests.”  As C.S. Lewis further put it, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.”

            There are two foundational questions that pertain directly to our man problem.  One of them is “What is first in nature?”   One doesn’t have to believe the Genesis account of creation (“Male and female created He them”) to know that life is sexually transmitted.  Yet in our tinkering with human sexuality (transgenderism, homosexuality, same-sex marriage) we are consequently killing off masculinity and femininity.  The collateral damage is the denigration of fatherhood.  Does anyone remember the highly touted book for children titled “Heather Has Two Mommies”?  It didn’t exactly elevate fatherhood.

            Something else that is first in nature is that beautiful little unit of government called the family. “Male and female” does often lead to children.   As the writer John Allen puts it, humans are “a species of homebodies.”  Marriage, family, and home are not just the American psyche but the human inclination. (You know – a mom, a dad, and some kids.)  But if you believe in this time-honored arrangement today, you are “on the wrong side of history,” a nonsensical phrase if there ever was one.

            The other foundational question is “Who am I?”  We should readily see how fatherlessness leads to this question.  Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic in America today.  But not all of it is caused by sorry men who flee from responsibility.  The culture itself is either questioning or denigrating fatherhood.  Television comedy presents fathers who are doofuses.  Masculinity itself is suspect and viewed with hostility.  It doesn’t fit modern androgyny.

            Anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that the supreme test of any civilization is whether or not it can “socialize its men” by teaching them to be fathers and to willingly nurture their offspring.  As far as social stability or law and order are concerned, no issue has higher stakes than fatherlessness.

            “ … I just about didn’t know who I wuz,” Terrelle said.  And so it will continue to be as long as governmental policies weaken the family and as long as religious values are driven from the public square.

           

Roger Hines

3/9/16