A New Take on Newtown

Our societal hypocrisy has been laid bare in the Newtown, CT shooting.  These tragedies present great opportunities for folks to demonstrate their incredible depth of concern for children.  Let me be clear, some of this is genuine and particularly near the epicenter of this tragedy, much genuine pain and anguish is being felt.  But when people in Illinois or Oregon are posting on Facebook as if this happened next door to them that is a good indication something else is going on.

What much of our nation uses these things as opportunities for is to demonstrate, mainly for their own self-assurance, how much they care about children.  Yet the reality is, if our society did truly orientate itself around the birth, well-being, and raising of children, something like Newtown, CT might be more shocking.

Amid the seemingly instantaneous calls for more gun control, I read an article interviewing the shooter’s babysitter growing up.  It seems that when his parents separated when he was a very young child (age 5 I believe) it was quite hard on the boy.  It seems that he had a habit of throwing tantrums, not violent, but frequent severe tantrums and would never again be a well-adjusted child.  Apparently despite the separation, it would take his parents over a decade to formally divorce.  In essence, he and his brother were raised within a “family” structure that very much resembles where we are headed as a society.  

There has been much talk about the shooter’s “mental illness” which allows the casual reader to assume that he was somehow born with these issues.  It is much more likely that the separation of his parents as a young child created the conditions for mental illness to fester.  Divorce is traumatic for kids and ultimately changes their life trajectories in ways that we are unwilling to acknowledge.

I remember flipping through our school directory when I was in Middle School and noting even then that all of the “problem kids” in my class had only one parent listed.  We were shocked one day when one of my friends remembered attending the birthday party of one of the worst offenders in 3^rd grade.  He even produced a picture showing a well-dressed, well-adjusted child at the time.   At some point after that his parents had divorced and he became the stereotypical disaffected teenager.  Heavy metal band t-shirt, dark trench coat, penchant for smoking and drug use.  If a group of Middle Schoolers can figure out the pattern here, why not society?

The correct answer to last week’s tragedy is not gun control, a distraught, emotionally crippled 20-something wandering the streets, but absent a gun, is not a significant improvement.  I don’t know what kind of mental illness befalls liberals who view that as “utopia”.  No if there is a knee-jerk policy answer to last week’s shooting (and for the record I don’t really believe there is) it is to ban divorce, at a minimum in cases where there are children.  Should there be grounds for divorce (substance, physical, or emotional abuse) the children should be taken away immediately and placed in foster homes where they can have two stable adults who will love them and put the children first.

Sound crazy?  Of course it does, because we live in a society that is ordering itself around the perspective of what the individual wants.  If two individuals wish to be married, we consider that good enough.  In today’s increasingly secularized world that generally means that they go off to a nice beach, exchange a few words, and sign a piece of paper without really understanding what marriage is about.

But next thing you know, through the magic of two people who are “in love” hanging around each other, you have children.  Children used to be the driving force behind marriage, and we now treat them as a side effect.  

Today’s secular world views children as the property of those who are married.  Need to put them in daycare so you can work?  Fine.  Want to drug them up with prescription drugs for vague conditions?  Fine.  Marriage no longer working out and you need to shuttle the property back and forth?  Fine. 

We have moved away from a child centric society.  Children are only prized in our society in as much as they do something for the adults.  Their mere existence is no longer all that is required for them to be loved.  Doubt it?  See abortion and the 52 million children we’ve slaughtered over the last 40 years.

No children today must somehow please their parents through good behavior, excellence in sports, excellence in academics, etc.  The children are expected to deliver an almost immediate payback to their parents’ esteem in exchange for all those pesky things they want like shelter and food.  We make ourselves feel better about this by saying that it is good for the kids that they do these things like sports (Johnny can get a scholarship to college) and school (Jenny will go to a good college which you must do to be happy).  In the process, we fail to recognize that we are no longer loving our children simply because they are there and need to be loved.  

Children are not dumb, they pick up on this.  Why do kids keep playing sports almost year round long after it seeks to be fun?  Because they think their parents’ love depends on it.  Why in a suburb I live near was there a test cheating scandal involving honor students in AP classes?  Because for all they had achieved, they couldn’t risk even the slightest failure and losing the love of their parents.  

In a world where children are treated this way are we really surprised that one could grow up and go so far off course?  Last year, my wife and I had found a wonderful babysitter for our children.  She was a very responsible high school senior to be whom the children adored.  Her parents began divorce proceedings and she fell apart, even developing Bulimia.  It was her way, in the midst of adults thinking only of themselves, of trying to get their attention and remind them that she was going through this as well.

I heard a Catholic Priest say a few weeks ago that, “our society devours children because the Devil hates children” and he was right.  That isn’t to say that every divorce produces a possible school shooter.  By all accounts Mr. Lanza’s brother has adjusted well and has a good life.  But divorce is like a bomb going off and the damage is random and unpredictable.  

Guns are much the same way.  A gun can be sold to a law abiding hunter or a gun can be sold to mass murderer.  Yet that randomness isn’t stopping us from seeking the draconian solution of banning all guns.  By that logic, we should prohibit divorce or even better, restrict marriage to properly prepared adults (the Catholic Church already does this to a degree).  Because the risk of letting even one child grow up as Adam Lanza did is one we can’t take.

I will close with this.  Until we drop the hypocrisy, drop the notion that we love children above all else while murdering up to 1 million children in the womb a year, while subjecting our kids to a mindless violent and sexual culture, while ignoring them, while focusing more on what we want as adults than what we need, why would we expect to raise a generation of caring, empathetic, loving adults?   

What Post-Apocalyptic Stories Say About Us

It is not surprising that in a time of sustained global economic and political uncertainty that our storytellers would give us a steady diet of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic tales.  It is human nature that our storytelling would reflect the times of the storytellers.  Recent years have given rise to the “Hunger Games” books and films, as well as a host of TV shows like “Jericho”, “Falling Skies”, and this season’s breakout hit “Revolution” that have had something to say on the subject.   

I think it is worth pausing to consider what messages we are consuming and only in part because of what impact they might be having on us.  While that is a concern, I think the deeper concern is what these tales and their popularity tell us about how we view ourselves.  How do we define our humanity?  What is our relationship to God?  The challenge I think is that the more we ask these tough questions of our entertainment, the more and more concerned we should become about the answers.   

I want to mainly focus in on “Revolution”, the highest rated of the TV shows, and one that concluded its fall run last night.  “Revolution” is set 15 years post the apocalyptic event, in this case a global blackout that brought all machines (even those that are gas or battery powered) to a screeching halt.  With this premise the show has set itself up to be describing more than the panic and chaos that would come in the immediate aftermath of such an event.  The show is attempting to explore what society would look like after human beings have adjusted to this new reality.

The answer, according to the show, is that it is essentially a Darwinian type world where the ethos is the old law of the jungle, kill or be killed.  With very few exceptions in the episodes that have been aired we apparently are unable to procure food for ourselves without stealing or taking it from someone else (which often involves killing them).  To the extent any societies have formed, they are territories claimed by militias through bloody military campaigns.  Given there has been no discussion of acquiring necessary resources or righting wrongs, these campaigns appear to have been purely waged for the purpose of empire building, to serve the ego of whichever Napoleon is commanding that particular republic.

It has become extremely difficult to find any redeeming portrayal of humanity among the show’s core characters.  Even among the merry band of protagonists, we have seen the character of Rachel Matheson shoot a hungry man to keep him from taking food from her family and stab a former colleague and friend to protect her own family.  Miles Matheson is a supposed reformed sociopath who seems to keep having to kill people.  Aaron Pittman, the former tech billionaire rendered completely worthless (in more ways than one) when the power went out, wouldn’t hurt a fly, but it is constantly portrayed as a weakness.  

Indeed, the writers have taken pains to leave only the children, Danny and Charlie, as the two characters on the show who don’t want to take innocent life and in one episode the adults went to extremes to keep Charlie from having to take an innocent life.  While being children in the story they symbolize hope for the future, surrounded by a Darwinian construct it is completely inconceivable that they can maintain this posture and survive.

The show is completely devoid of any notion, discussion, or reflection by the characters that there are some things worth dying for.  Or better said, that there are things I am not willing to do in this world or tolerate in this world just to live for my place in the next world is much more important.  In essence, the show is missing the notion that this world is not all there is.  

The genre is really startlingly absent of any discussion of religion, spiritual crises that might arise from such situations, or any pondering of what the place of this world might be in the grand scheme of things.  This may be a key explanation as to why so many of these shows seem to reduce humans to mere animals.  To contemplate the spiritual realm, to contemplate the meaning of life, these are squarely human qualities.  A Zebra is incapable of wondering how the Earth was created.

I understand that networks don’t want to make religious shows or risk alienating any particular religious group as the battle for shrinking audiences.  But at the same time, they are wading into these heavy topics, they are making these stories.  It only seems logical that human beings, living in such circumstances, would at least have a passing thought or two about the theological implications of what is going on around them.  I credit “Falling Skies” for at least alluding periodically to a faith shaken by the alien invasion, despite having only a 10 episode season.  But for “Revolution” to ignore these things seems to imply that Christianity, religion, is just there for when things are going well.  Flip the lights off and we all become a bunch of heathens.

That of course is precisely the opposite of the human experience.  It is when times are tough that our faith is tested and while “Revolution” accurately depicts that some among us would use the chaos as a way to forge a new, material richer life for themselves (Captain Tom Neville harkens back to Heinrich Himmler, the chicken farmer who became head of Hitler’s SS), many would also choose to respond by continuing to live their faith.  This duality of responses to the same crisis is the essence of the struggle of humanity.  

We live in a fallen world and the forces of this world are constantly trying to drag us down to be less than we can be.  Satan wants to make God’s masterpiece into nothing more than the animals that we are surrounded by.  Except that this makes us less than animals.  Animals do not consciously choose their behavior, they have been preprogrammed, it is instinct.  Human beings would have to consciously choose to behave this way.

The question that all of this begs is how do we as a society feel about such a portrayal of humanity on a consistent basis?  Do we really believe that our civil society is that fragile that even the slightest wrinkle would set in motion the kind of behavior that would set human beings back a thousand years or more?  

I do not know what the answer is and I think we as a society do not have an answer.  I think these shows are reflective of writers who are reflective of a society that no longer reflects upon what it means to be human, what our relationship to God is, or how we reconcile our relationship with that God to this world.  The perfect example of that would be a new film about a “society” adrift and that is “Life of Pi”.

The book was, from beginning to end, about a boy’s spiritual journey.  As the boy is set adrift, with a tiger, it becomes a metaphor for our own spiritual journey.  Yet the film has apparently removed almost any notion of a spiritual quest making it, yes, just a movie about a boy floating with a tiger.  A film version of “Les Miserables” that came out about a decade ago was similarly secularized.  

The interesting lesson, that could be drawn from both cases, is that when remove God from the story, from the equation, it does not make the art better, the characters better, the stories more universal.  It has precisely the opposite effect.  It makes the art worse, the characters less appealing, and the stories harder to relate to.  It is a lesson that NBC’s “Revolution” would be wise to learn as the same thing happens when we attempt to remove God from life. 

  

Lessons from the GOP Primary

In the last two weeks of Monday morning quarterbacking going on over the GOP defeat in the general election, one critical component has been overlooked, as it always is, that is the primary season.  After all, if Romney was a flawed candidate, it is worth looking back at why and how he was nominated to avoid making the same mistake again.  

Number one, all of the moderate Republicans who said nominate Mitt Romney because he will win, he is the most electable, etc. owe the party an apology.  Not only did he fail to win, his milquetoast ways delivered a campaign that did little to stir any real national discussion on any substantive issues.  The Democrats abortion-palooza of a convention went unanswered, the unconstitutionality of the HHS mandate drew nary a whisper from the Romney camp, and the beauty of supply-side economics was dumbed down to mean nothing more than lower tax rates for corporations.  

While nobody wants to openly embrace a martyr candidacy, particularly in a year where the incumbent was so disliked, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign was a watershed moment for the Republican party.  While it did not immediately bear fruit as Nixon was a moderate, it ultimately led to the Reagan revolution and a generation of conservatives that if they haven’t seen the White House again has at least captured the U.S. House and most Governorships.  

Goldwater was a bold break from “I Like Ike”.  He ran a campaign of substance, based on ideas, and outlined a genuine choice between the two parties.  Richard Reeves, in his great biography of John F. Kennedy, also notes that had Kennedy not been assassinated, he would have faced a tough re-election fight.  In other words, Goldwater may well have been electable.  

The fundamental mistake Republicans made this time around was the same mistake the Democrats made in 2004.  They had worked themselves into such lather over the incumbent, they could no longer think straight.  They assumed it was enough to be “not Obama” in the same way those Democrats in 2004 assumed being, “not Bush” was enough.   Campaigns are won by attracting voters, that means being for something, not just against someone. 

Republicans, like Democrats in 2004, nominated a white guy from Massachusetts and selected their candidate based on a thin biographical sketch.  John Kerry was supposedly a war hero and Mitt Romney was supposedly a brilliant businessman.  One was swiftboated, the other “Bained” if I can coin a term.  If the candidate is not prepared to or cannot flesh out and defend said biographical sketch, their campaign will be rudderless from day 1.  

To that point, how many Republicans complained that the nominating fight was too nasty?  That the attacks on Romney’s business record were uncalled for and out of bounds?  It turns out they were great preparation for the general election had the Romney campaign bothered to figure out how to counter the blows.   That is another great lesson about primaries; they are actually about an election, not a coronation.

So let’s go back to the beginning to remind ourselves how things played out.  Romney effectively tied Rick Santorum in Iowa.  Not a bad result for a northeasterner who refused to campaign in the state because he was scared he would lose.  Although had he not played prevent defense in Iowa, he likely would have won.  Also, the fact that Santorum, who had no momentum until the last week, was able to attract so many voters should have been a wake-up call to Romney that he was not inevitable.  As we all know it wasn’t.

Romney won New Hampshire handily before getting trounced by Newt Gingrich in South Carolina.  At this point it was becoming painfully obvious that a good chunk of Republicans were looking for any alternative to Romney.  At the time, if you recall, the mantra was that it didn’t matter, after all, they would all come back to Romney in the general election, what choice did they have?  As it turns out, apparently they didn’t all come back as Romney got fewer votes than John McCain.  

As Gingrich’s momentum faded, Romney managed to win Florida and Nevada, seemingly picking up momentum that might finally make him the inevitable nominee.  But Romney was promptly routed by Santorum on February 7^th, losing all 3 states that day, including Colorado.  Ah yes, Colorado, remember Romney needed to win that one on election night?  Lesson learned, if you can’t win it in the primary, don’t expect to carry it in the general election.

To be fair to Romney, from that point on he won the next 5 states that voted up until Super Tuesday.  Of the 10 states that voted on Super Tuesday, Romney won 6 of them.  Granted one of them, Ohio, he won by only 12,000 votes out of over 1 million cast (more struggles in a swing state?).   From that point on, Romney more or less stumbled to the finish line.  In fairness to him, the awarding of proportional delegates defeated the purpose of the delegate system, which was to help conclusively decide a primary where the popular vote might be more fractured.  Romney didn’t have a fair chance to build the feeling of inevitability.

But there is something else.  Romney won 20 of his 38 primaries in states he would not carry in the general election.  This goes back to something I blogged about at the time I believe.  Romney’s primary map looked a lot like Obama’s general election map.  He was winning voters in large, metro areas, and in states that were going to go for Obama in the general election.  He was voted in by moderate Republicans and the base was not energized for the election.  

You only have the slate of candidates you have at the time.  I do not write any of this to suggest that Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul would have defeated Barack Obama.  But I would suggest that either Santorum or Gingrich might have campaigned on ideas and perhaps employed the kind of political consultants that Romney did not that would avoided some of the more egregious campaign missteps.  

More importantly, what to do in 2016?  The answer seems to be that Republicans need to go back to what they did so well at one time (or maybe just that one time in 1980), picking a candidate based on ideas.  It isn’t about whose turn it is (Bush ’88, Dole ’96, McCain ’08, Romney ’12) those are the campaigns that squandered the dividends of the Reagan revolution.  The Rockafeller Republicans are invited to the party, they can even dance, but it is time to quit letting them pick the music.  

This country is moving in the wrong direction because when Democrats lose, they run farther to the left believing they were not radical enough.  When Republicans lose, they ran further to the middle convinced they were too radical.  The country is now squarely on and moving rapidly down the wrong track.  One or two more election cycles like this one and we won’t even be able to look back and see where we should be. 

A House (or Church) Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

Coming out of the election of a couple weeks ago it is clear that America is, as it has been most of the past 12 years, is still a painfully divided nation.  Leaders in both parties say they would love to unite us of course, because that is a surefire path to a landslide (remember when we had to use that term?) election victory.

But there are two fundamentally different visions of how to unite us on the table and neither seems to get it right.  Let’s start with the fairly narrow vision Mitt Romney put forth that was a complete miss.  Romney’s vision was we should unite because of our common desire for more and better jobs.  White, black, Catholic, Protestant, stand shoulder to shoulder with Mitt for a good job.  It was inspirational as you would expect that to be.

But I also found in President Obama’s victory speech, an equally erroneous view of what unites as Americans.  He uttered lines like, “But despite all our differences, most of us share certain hopes for America’s future”.  The devil is in the details and while we all do share, “certain hopes”, they are increasingly different.

 

There are a lot of people in this country who hope government will continue to expand and provide more and more.  There are a sizeable number of people who hope that government will shrink and allow the private sector to grow as people are given more freedom to chart their own destinies.  So the notion that shared hopes will hold us together falls flat. 

 

What he finally concluded with was, “We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America,” and therein lies the rub.  

The tone of his speech, the language Democrats use when they try to talk about us uniting seems to always rest on the notion that well, we all live in the same land, the same geographic  proximity to each other, in the same sovereign state, we should unite.  The logic of this is simply non-existent.  We were, “The United States of America” when the first shot was fired on Ft. Sumter.  Yet we had a fundamental difference over one very specific core value that caused us to erupt into war.

 

What Obama’s words highlight, which should come as no shock given he won re-election through a campaign designed to divide us, is that fundamentally, Democrats don’t know what brings us together or why we should stay together.  This should scare the daylights out of us.  It may also speak to the deeper reality that government, a political party cannot unite us.  

We need to go back to 1776 and understand our roots, how we came together in the first place.  The answer is relatively simple, it was religious freedom.  The New World appealed to those individuals who could not freely practice their chosen religion within the realm of the Church of England.  Quakers, Catholics, Protestants of all forms came here to fundamentally be allowed to worship God in their own way, but make no mistake, it was a God, and more than that, it was always a Christian God.

So it really wasn’t a shock when, pushed too far by King George, this group of people, who all answered to a higher authority, pushed back and said we have certain God given rights as human beings that no government has the right to trample.

That was what united this country.  It wasn’t the desire to form a really big government, it wasn’t the desire to redefine marriage, it wasn’t legalized pot.  It was about a Christian God and organizing a nation that recognized that God as the ultimate authority.  We began as a nation of people who had their priorities in order.  As importantly, we kept them in order.  Even through a contentious Constitutional Convention and the Civil War.  We always knew what and who was the guiding principle for our nation because God was the guiding principle in the lives of our leaders.

The Civil War is perhaps most instructive.  It is, to my knowledge, the only time in history that a nation has gone through a civil war only to immediately and truly reunify immediately after.  Vietnam was divided for more than a decade after the end of that war, Korea is divided today, but the North and the South came back together immediately after the end of the war.  

We were a nation at that point founded on Judeo-Christian values.  We’ve spent the last 50 years now walking away from those values like Ben Affleck walking away from Fenway Park in the movie “The Town”.  Walking calmly at first, then briskly, and then breaking into a run.  

To an unprecedented degree, we cannot agree on whether there is a God or what he/she might want us to do - 20% of voters this time around reported no belief in God or no religious affiliation.  Among the 80% that believe in a God, we don’t even have a unifying Christian identity.  

Some allegedly Christian denominations believe homosexuals can marry and even be Bishops or Priests.  Many have no issues with birth control.  Most are eerily quiet on the issue of abortion.  Organizations like Pew have tried to use church attendance as a gauge of the level of piety in our nation, but that is a horribly outdated measure.  

Even within the Catholic Church, which has held steadfastly to the same positions for over 2,000 years now, I have been to mass with people who believe God is a woman, that women should be ordained, and one survey shows 38% of Catholics describing themselves as “pro-choice” – all things that are squarely at odds with Catholic teaching.  

The reality is we have never been more divided as a nation across more issues.  We are dangerously close to coming unanchored from our Judeo-Christian moorings as a nation.  Once that happens, where we go is anybody’s guess.  Germany was the first to try its own flavor of Christianity, led by Martin Luther, and a few centuries later they killed 6 million Jews.  G.K. Chesterton, among others, didn’t think that was a coincidence.

I have to let the President off the hook on this one, he cannot unite us.  When people in the same parish no longer share common values, then those in a community will not find common ground.  If we can’t find shared values at the community level, good luck doing it at the state or national level.  

No, we the people have to figure this one out for ourselves.  Do we believe in God, do we believe in Jesus Christ and what does that actually mean?  Does it really mean that two dudes can marry or that I can kill my unborn baby?  Does it mean that I have to hand my wealth and destiny over to a large government investing endlessly in infrastructure (King Herrod in Jesus’s time was also a builder)?  Do I believe I am in control of my life?  That government is in control of my life?  Heck, do we even know when life begins or when it should end?

We would do well as a nation and as a people to spend the next 4 years trying to figure out what our core values are (or were in 1776) and how we want to orientate our lives.  As I’ve told many people in the past year, we think we have political issues and the reality is we have a large, theological issue.  If we solve that, if we come to a common, Judeo-Christian understanding of life and the world again, then the political issues will practically solve themselves.  And if we can’t solve our pressing theological challenge, nothing else matters.