-
Belt Your Old Man in the Mouth
The whole “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement–and some comments from family who are closer to the event than I–have reminded me of something I heard a while back and have meant to post but haven’t. Hopefully timing will be everything and some will find this strange story helpful.
My old family business marketed some of its products through a network of specialised distributors. One of the more interesting stores was our distributor for the Washington, DC, area. The branch manager was quite a character and made doing business interesting, to say the least. One day he related a story about one of his employees who complained about the fact that the family who owned the business, for some mysterious reason, always ended up taking what he felt was a “disproportionate” share of the revenue and exercising the privileges of ownership every now and then. The complaints were endless; finally, the branch manager stopped the whining long enough to make a point.
“You know what you ought to do about all this?” the branch manager asked.
“What?” the employee replied.
“Go home and belt your old man in the mouth,” the branch manager shot back. That was a conversation stopper; the employee was almost speechless. The branch manager went on to explain the strange rationale behind his idea. The basic problem was that the guy’s father hadn’t started a business or had some other kind of successful career, which forced his son to have to work in a place where grease and outdoor work were the order of the day. The guy needed to quit blaming the owning family and put the liability where it “needed to be.” The suggestion was obviously absurd (well, hopefully obvious) but the point was made.
I never figured out the animus people who work in a family owned business (generally, I thought, by choice) sometimes develop towards the family. One of the more memorable moments in my negotiations with the trade union was the committee chairman’s remark that the one event that got him into trade unionism was when he worked at another family business and the ownership had the temerity to hire a relative. He thought that was unfair and it inspired him to join and support the union, which basically takes away both employment at will and the employer’s right to promote in the sequence they see fit. Family businesses can rise and fall on the relatives they hire, but to say it’s unfair (it is a family business, after all) is a stretch.
Make no mistake about it: our economy and financial system has many faults. It allocates credit badly; it’s too much of a mandarinate to allow people of merit (such as dearly departed Steve Jobs) to rise to the top the way they used to; the regulatory system is too cumbersome and expensive; the tax code is too complex and contradictory for most taxpayers (to say nothing of the IRS) to know what it means. But those who are attempting to occupy Wall Street won’t touch any of these problems. Their idea is ultimately to redistribute wealth, which will supposedly make everyone happy. Ultimately the underlying assumption is that everything that is wrong with our economy is someone else’s fault, like the underlying assumption of the griping employee near Washington (esprit de corps?)
But there are two sides to this issue. Those who are on the “wrong end” of the economic system, before they starting pinning the blame, need to ask themselves a question: what can I do to make things better for myself while waiting for the system to figure it out? Are my wasteful ways just feeding the people I hate? Can I change the management of my own assets to make them go further? Can I try to get off of credit, which lines the pockets of those at the top faster than anything else? Can I change my work habits or even what I can do to broaden my income generating possibilities? That process is a lot easier when we have churches which encourage their members to fill the God-shaped void in their lives with the Son rather than stuff, but I guess that’s one reason why those who profit off of profligacy don’t like churches like that any more.
There’s no evidence in history that purely collectivistic solutions lead anywhere but either a) universal poverty or b) the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the “vanguard” of the poor. And it’s interesting to note that many of the woes of our economic system are created by the condition of our political one, where’s it’s really easy to basically bribe your way to the top.
It’s easy to think that protest movements such as this one will make a difference, but the difference they make may not be the one they think it will. It may only transfer ownership of the society from one small group to another, while those who blamed one group of people merely shift their disdain to the new masters without thinking how they got there. It’s a recipe for failure, and it makes no more sense than for those in the streets to go home and belt their old man (if they can find him) in the mouth.
-
Choose Life, Choose Death, Choose Surrender
If the pro-life movement has a “theme” or “banner” scripture, it’s this one:
Consider that I have set before thee this day life and good, and on the other hand death and evil: That thou mayst love the Lord thy God, and walk in his ways, and keep his commandments and ceremonies and judgements, and bless thee in the land, which thou shalt go in to possess. But if thy heart be turned away, so that thou wilt not hear, and being deceived with error thou adore strange gods, and serve them: I foretell thee this day that thou shalt perish, and shalt remain but a short time in the land, to which thou shalt pass over the Jordan, and shalt go in to possess it. I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life, that both thou and thy seed may live: And that thou mayst love the Lord thy God, and obey his voice, and adhere to him (for he is thy life, and the length of thy days,) that thou mayst dwell in the land, for which the Lord swore to thy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would give it them. (Deuteronomy 30:15-20)
It’s one pro-life people use frequently. It even turns up on albums such as this one from the School Sisters of Notre Dame (the title track, based on the passage above, is here.) It’s unlikely that the Sisters didn’t have this application in mind when they put this out.
Nevertheless it’s equally unlikely that an anti-abortion statement is the principal meaning of this declaration, the horror of sacrificing children to Moloch and other pagan gods notwithstanding. The Israelites were about to enter the land that God had promised them; their first duty was to adhere to the worship of Yahweh their God and to keep the entire law that he had given them in the wilderness.
This charge was pronounced at the start of their time in the land; at the end of the first phase, the prophet Jeremiah recalled it as follows:
And to this people thou shalt say: Thus saith the Lord: Behold I set before you the way of life, and the way of death. He that shall abide in this city, shall die by the sword, and by the famine, and by the pestilence: but he that shall go out and flee over to the Chaldeans, that besiege you, shall live, and his life shall be to him as a spoil. For I have set my face against this city for evil, and not for good, saith the Lord: it shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire. And to the house of the king of Juda: Hear ye the word of the Lord, O house of David, thus saith the Lord: Judge ye judgement in the morning, and deliver him that is oppressed by violence out of the hand of the oppressor: lest my indignation go forth like a fire, and be kindled, and there be none to quench it, because of the evil of your ways. Behold I come to thee that dwellest in a valley upon a rock above a plain, saith the Lord: and you say: Who shall strike us and who shall enter into our houses? But I will visit upon you according to the fruit of your doings, saith the Lord: and I will kindle a fire in the forest thereof: and it shall devour all things round about it. (Jeremiah 21:8-14)
In the face of the oncoming Chaldean onslaught, his message was simple: it’s time to surrender and go into exile, and by doing so preserve our life and the life of our nation. Needless to say, that wasn’t what his contemporaries wanted to hear, and they weren’t shy about letting him know that too.
We’d like to think that, since we know now that Jeremiah was right and his prophecies are part of the canon of Scripture, we’d agree with his message if it were given today. But, as Jesus pointed out to his contemporaries, that isn’t the way it works with prophets, past or present. About the only passages of Jeremiah, whose “gloom and doom” prophecies used to be proverbial, that get quoted these days are the flashes of hope that pierce the general darkness of his message.
To put it more plainly, Jeremiah’s message to his contemporaries is not only too negative for our sensibilities, it’s downright unAmerican. He’s advocating surrender to a culture where winners never quit and quitters never win. Even in our post-Biblical elite culture, how many times does one see “perseverance” as a cardinal virtue? How many times do we talk up those who keep “pursing their dream,” even when they might be better off doing something else? How enormous are the resources we pour into efforts that play to our sensibilities but really doesn’t accomplish anything?
I don’t think that the Bible endorses the opposite idea either, i.e., throw up our hands at the first sign of resistance. But, as Kenny Rogers immortalised in The Gambler, the key is to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em, and in Jeremiah’s day the latter was in order. Israel had strayed from the covenant and the worship that God had set before them, either for craven reasons (as was the case with Manasseh) or to keep up with the Joneses of the era (as was the case with Ahab and Jezebel, who was one of the Joneses). Israel had also sanctioned the social injustices that went along with absolute monarchy, the centralisation of power and wealth which led to the marginalisation of everyone else. (I’ll leave it to you to decide whether we should have a Tea Party rally or a Jim Wallis event in response to what’s going on these days). After a few centuries of this, it was time for God to pull the plug, and Jeremiah was God’s reluctant proclaimer of that message.
Today we’re conditioned to plough on no matter what in just about any circumstance. We’re also conditioned to discount the moments when God pulls the plug on us, be they individual or collective. But that doesn’t change reality that sometimes the choice of life involves the choice of surrender, surrender in some cases to those who are not to our taste. But the complete understanding of the Scriptures involves grasping the hard truths along with the easy ones, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
-
Pat Robertson Isn't Correct on Divorce and Alzheimers
Pat Robertson advised a viewer of yesterday’s 700 Club to avoid putting a “guilt trip” on those who want to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer’s. During the show’s advice segment, a viewer asked Robertson how she should address a friend who was dating another woman “because his wife as he knows her is gone.” Robertson said he would not fault anyone for doing this. He then went further by saying it would be understandable to divorce a spouse with the disease.
The promises Christians make when they married are enshrined in the 1662 (and subsequent) Book of Common Prayer:
…to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part…
Jesus’ foundation for Christian marriage went back to the Creation, not just to the law of Moses, which is why divorce at will went out, to say nothing of this. Alzheimer’s is surely a living death (and it’s odd that we can extend life the way we have and still not beat this thing) but it’s still living.
Although most Protestants wouldn’t make the analogy, this kind of pronouncement reminds me of the casuistry and the morale accomodante of the reverends pères Jesuites that Blaise Pascal so hilariously attacked in his Provincial Letters. The Jesuits were attempting to meet the mores of their time (such as allowing people to kill for their honour in a duel) and thus make the faith more “relevant” to their times. But it didn’t work than and it won’t work now.
Will it, Episcopalians?
As an aside, I read the Provincial Letters in the late 1980’s. That, and the whole business of how the Jesuits, the Crown and ultimately the Church colluded in the suppression of the Jansenists, put paid to any desire to return to Roman Catholicism.
-
Even Those at the Top Know We Have a Poverty Problem
Well, in Palm Beach, at least:
Wander along Worth Avenue, Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue and you’d be hard-pressed to even think America has a soaring poverty rate. But it does.
Whether high-enders want to acknowledge it or not our poverty rate has been climbing for the past few years, according to the Census Bureau. Figures just published show that in 2010 the poverty rate hit 15.1 percent. That’s the highest rate since 1993 and up from 14.3 percent a year earlier (2009). Since 2007, the rate has moved from 12.5 percent to the most recent 2010 figures.
That 2010 rate of 15.1 percentage means 46.2 million people are living in poverty and represents the largest number of people since the rate began being published 52 years ago.
And the reason?
If I were a blaming person and wanted to point my figure at only one group to blame our growing poverty rate and stagnant wage levels on, I’d have to begin with corporate America. Typically guys and gals at the upper-middle and top levels haven’t had to deal with stagnant wages.
I’ll throw in something else for consideration: all of the left whines about the Tea Party. But the corporate types, by and large, don’t make up the Tea Party. Small business people do, as do working stiffs. It is in reality a revolution without the collectivistic vanguardism (how about that to hurl at the academic deconstructors) the left likes to see.
I’ll be the first one to admit that much of my worldview was heavily influenced by my years in Palm Beach. But getting out to see “how the other half lives” (especially in my years in the Church of God) has been an eye-opener. It’s one I wish some of my fellow elitist snobs could experience, our country would be a better place.
-
A Gator Fan Comes Back From the Dead
About three years ago, I featured a video from my church about the healing of Meredith Vining Parker, one of the most amazing miracles I have ever known about, certainly relating to someone my wife and I know very well.
Now it’s featured on the 700 Club:
http://dl2.cbn.com/cbnplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?s=/mp4/AS76v2_WS
One side note: Meredith and her sisters are three of the most die-hard Florida Gator fans I have ever known (or fans of any team for that matter.) I always kid Meredith that, after her own return from death, the Gators won the National Championship in football.
Or is it just amusing…Tim Tebow isn’t the only miracle connected with the University of Florida. God is good. This testimony is awesome.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 