Author Archives: The Night Writer

10 years ago, and 10 years on

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by the Night Writer

Ten years ago I wasn’t blogging, but I was writing. On Sunday, September 16 I published the first essay below –  “When the Towers Fall” – in the monthly handout I prepared for our men’s ministry at church. It was based on my observations of the past few days and the role of faith and biblical understanding in those circumstances. A month later I followed up with a second essay, taking off from the words of a certain televangelist to examine the nature and purpose of judgment. I share these two essays below for a picture of that time. Later this week I’ll come back and share how I think things have – or haven’ t – changed for me and my nation in the intervening years.

When the Towers Fall

Ultimately, America’s secular façade crumbled even before its material symbols collapsed. I first turned on my radio – and heard the first words regarding Tuesday’s disaster – moments before the second tower was struck. The voices of the national news team were already urging Americans to pray for the safety of those involved. It sounded almost glib at first, but as the unreal became real and the horror increased by the minute, the references became more heartfelt, even desperate.

As our true helplessness and vulnerability became apparent, the call to pray was in every report and every story. And pray we did: alone, with our families, and in special services and vigils that themselves became news. All of this flying in the face of a culture and media that has said for years that faith and divine intervention are, at best, inappropriate if not impossible. It must have been like discovering that the kooky old aunt you’ve been keeping in the attic is the only one who knows where the family silver is buried.

But which is the true picture of America? Are we a secular society that merely pays lip service to faith when a crisis looms, or are we a nation of quiet faithful who allow ourselves to be cowed by society until circumstances give us a chance to break out? I know how our attackers would describe us.

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I am….Batman?

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By the Night Writer

Biblically speaking, the eagle and the bat don’t have much in common, other than you’re not supposed to eat either one (check out Leviticus and Dueteronomy). Aside from that the bat receives no mention while the eagle is referred to 25 times in the KJV, though not always positively. Yet culturally and spiritually we view the eagle as a regal and majestic bird, one that can set its wings and fly above the storm. Bats, if you think about them at all, are kind of icky.

I started thinking about this the other day when our pastor said that there are five areas that make up our life and they are, in order of importance: Spirit, Soul (our mind, will and emotions), Body, Social and Financial. The world’s wisdom, however, reverses this order. The basis of this understanding is the main part of a teaching I’ve done at Red Wing, but not the point of this post. Instead, my pastor said you have to look at the world’s priorities upside down as if you were a bat. As he said it, I suddenly got several bat-related pictures in my head.

First it occurred to me that bats really can’t see much at all so they don’t really “look at” anything. Instead, they navigate by sound. That is, they send a noise out ahead of them and steer according to the sound that returns to them, trusting they won’t crash into anything and that they’ll find food. Immediately I remembered that the Bible tells us we are to walk by faith (“the evidence of things not seen”), not sight. Secondly, i remembered that “faith comes by hearing”.

If we set our course by sight we can be led astray by shiny things that may not be good for us, like bugs drawn to a backyard zapper. If, however, we spoke the word of God out of our mouths and ordered our lives by what we heard, we’d be on the path to getting those five priorities in the proper order.

Of course, scripture also quotes Jesus as saying, “I do what I see my Father doing.” That implies sight, but – since God changes not – isn’t it easier to see what God is doing by looking at what He has done, using the word that is in our hearts, in our mouths, and ultimately in our ears?

Finally, the majestic eagle is an apex predator, which means it is mainly on the “look out” for it’s next meal. Many of those we would look at and admire – actors, athletes, politicians – and try to emulate are all in it for themselves. A bat’s next meal, however, is likely be a mess of mosquitos – something that actually helps us.

Hanging upside down is something the world thinks is weird or abnormal, yet it’s perfectly “normal” for a bat, just as I want those five priorities in their proper order to be the norm in my life. Yes, it’s tempting to want to soar like an eagle, but as for me — to the bat cave!

Elections in the steroid era

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by the Night Writer

Baseball may be America’s pastime, but America’s game is politics, and it’s played for keeps.

It was all very exciting when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were in a tight race to break Babe Ruth’s single-season homerun record, and when Barry Bonds sledge-hammered his way toward Hank Aaron’s career record. Many people cheered as the dramatic numbers climbed higher and if anyone scratched his head and wondered outloud at the unusual displays of power and hat-size they were repeatedly assured that the game was clean and these were merely exceptional athletes plying their trade at the highest levels. After all, we were told repeatedly that Sosa, McGwire, Bonds and other sluggers of the era had never tested positive for steroids. Of course, that spotless record was likely the result that they had never been effectively tested for steroids. In fact, for a number of years Performance Enhancing Drugs weren’t even specifically against the rules in a game that has long winked at “gamesmanship”

Similarly, cheating in politics is as American as apple pie. Recently we’ve seen a series of extremely close political elections with enough curious counts and results that you’d of had to have botox injections to keep from raising an eyebrow. And as the Minnesota legislature debates a voter-ID bill requiring a state-authorized photo ID in order to vote, we again have those who claim the process is clean and that large-scale fraud has never been proven. As was the case with baseball, though, there has barely been an effort made to try to prevent it.

“Well, that’s just baseball,” you might say. “That doesn’t mean politics is like that.” Of course not. Baseball players might be willing to cheat in order to gain fame, glory and riches, but politicians are above such tawdry motivations and designs. Baseball players cheat because a slugger can pull down $20 million a year or more, but that amount is bush league when you consider the amount of money that can be gained in furthering an agenda, feathering a nest and favoring your friends. Influence is much more valuable than an MVP.

If you doubt that, look at the amount of money generated just to gain the influence in the first place. The recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election – a race that would normally be reported in box-score agate type – generated some $3.6 million in outside political contributions. In baseball, $3.6 million barely gets you an average outfielder, or a good lefty set-up man. In politics, a good lefty set-up men may arguably be an even more valuable commodity to some.

Testing for steroids, and verifying voters, won’t eliminate the desire to gain an advantage, but it does make it easier for those scoring at home to have faith in the results. Major League Baseball dragged its feet on drug-testing because neither the owners or the players really wanted to look too closely at the situation. The owners liked the high ratings and interest that homerun races generated and the players liked the rewards that came with age and gravity-defying feats. It was the fans’ distaste and sense of injustice – and potential alienation – that forced action. Major League Politics drags its feet because neither party wants to change a system they’ve used to their advantage in the past.

Just as in baseball, though, the blatant hypocrisy and questionable results risk alienating the “fans”. The steroid era has cast doubt on the records and statistics of a generation of players, calling into question the validity of many records and tainting even those who played clean and diminishes the game overall. The same thing is happening with our election process. It is up to us fans to keep the pressure on if we want to see integrity in America’s pastime and America’s game.

Take the Highway to Hell and make a left at the Road to Serfdom

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by the Night Writer

The inane political bickering over spending cuts that do about as much good as an ice-scraper on the side of the iceberg that hit the Titanic, a debt-to-GDP-ratios of around 140% and yesterday’s S&P downgrade of the country’s bond rating made me think of an analogy that I shared on Mr. D’s blog the other day:

A car is barreling down the highway as the driver fiddles with the seat heater while balancing a Big Mac, fries and large Coke in his lap and staring at the GPS screen instead of at the road ahead. Meanwhile everyone else in the car is arguing loudly over what music to play through the high-tech, 12-speaker sound system and whether it’s too hot or too cold in the compartment, and who gets to drive next.

Suddenly they realize there’s a brick wall ahead. What to do? Hitting the brakes hard will toss people about, make them spill their drinks, bump their heads and hurt their feelings. Or you can just hit the wall. Either way, the car is going to come to a stop.

One option gives you chance to perhaps survive and eventually drive around the obstruction. The other results in a litte white marker beside the road, commemorating what once had been.

The choice is between the unacceptable and the unthinkable. And some just say, “Go faster.”

Don’t put all the blame on the current driver, though. The car turned down this road a long, long time ago and no one paid attention to the Dead End sign. There have been several drivers since then, and some have had more of a lead foot than others but no one’s ever seriously tried to change direction, though we have veered from the ditch occasionally.

It really is an old story, so old that few alive today can even remember it being any other way. How old? Check out the cartoon below I just saw today and that comes from a 1934 issue of the Chicago Tribune and it’s depiction of “young pinkos from Columbia and Harvard”, what looks like two versions of Stalin (the Road to Serfdom was thought to lead to Communism, not Socialism then) and the “Plan of Action for the U.S.: Spend! Spend! Spend under the guise of recovery – bust the government – blame the capitalists for the failure – junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship.”

1934 cartoon blog

A trip back in time that made my future

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by the Night Writer

The reports last week were that President Obama and his family will be vacationing in historic Colonial Williamsburg, a village that has been preserved as a living museum recognizing the era of our Founding Fathers. Whether any of these Founding Fathers would recognize what their government has become is an open debate. Nevertheless, the mention of Williamsburg in the news caused me to at first casually, and then significantly, remember my own visit there in February of 1980.

I was working at my first job out of college then and my company sent me there for a week long training program. It was a trip back in time, and like time travel itself, seemed almost impossible. To get to Williamsburg from Phoenix I had to catch a 12:30 a.m. red-eye flight out of Sky Harbor, bound for D.C. Of course, it’s almost impossible to traverse the midwest without being sucked into O’Hare in Chicago, were I spent an hour and a half layover. Even D.C. wasn’t the final leg in my air odyssey: I then boarded a small, twin-prop puddle-jumper transport that looked like a pregnant guppy for the hop to Newport News. I remember that the entire backside of the aircraft opened like a drawbridge in order to load and unload luggage, and that when I took my window seat it appeared as if the wing propeller was spinning just 6″ away from my window.

After the “flight” (which felt more like driving the Baja 1000 in a buckboard) I had a final bus ride to get to Williamsburg, arriving at my hotel — one of the restored colonial inns — about 2 p.m. EST, only to find that my room wouldn’t be ready until 3:00 p.m. Whereupon I collapsed onto an overstuffed sofa in front of a large, blazing fireplace which, combined with my fatigue, soon had me stupefied.

Even with such a benumbing start, the week turned out to be very interesting and stimulating and the team I was thrown in with wound up winning honors for the week on our multi-phase communications strategy and presentation. One of my teammates would later that year offer me a position on her staff, a job that required me to move from Phoenix, Arizona to Minneapolis, MN (actually, my first apartment was in Eagan, roughly a mile from where my future wife was living at the time, though we wouldn’t meet for another six years). In the intervening years it had never occurred to me just how significant my trip to Williamsburg turned out to be. In those days I pictured myself moving around every couple of years to different jobs in different cities to find the place where I would eventually settle. I had mental lists of working in places such as Denver and Boston — lists where Minneapolis and St. Paul never appeared. Yet there I was in Williamsburg and as a result of that trip I found myself, in June of ’80, dodging tornadoes on Hwy. 90 through South Dakota and southern Minnesota, heading toward Mary-Tyler-Moore-land and my destiny.

I had no idea that my wife, children and ministry were waiting up ahead for me. Certainly none of those three were high on my list of priorities at the time. It apparently was on Someone’s mind, however, and that Someone was probably laughing at me grumping my way through that red-eye flight, the Chicago lay-over and the queasy puddle-jumper. I may have been asking myself, “Why do I have to go through all of this?”

I certainly wasn’t paying attention when the loving response came: “Because.”

And now I wouldn’t change a thing.

A beard, a club and a desperate attempt to survive St. Patrick’s Day

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by the Night Writer

What’s a little regurgitation on St. Patrick’s Day? Here’s a favorite piece describing the adventures – and misadventures – of my first St. Patrick’s Day in college.

I don’t think there will ever be a St. Patrick’s Day when I don’t think about my first semester of college when I enrolled in the Spring term at the University of Missouri-Rolla campus. UMR is mainly an engineering college but it was close to where I lived at the time and a convenient way for me to knock out some general liberal arts credits before transferring to the main Mizzou campus in Columbia.

St. Patrick’s “Day” was actually a 10-day party at UMR. The campus was about 90% male then, almost all in grueling engineering classes that seemed to require binge drinking in order to cope. The reason St. Pat is such a big deal at UMR is because he is deemed to be the patron saint of engineers for having driven the snakes from Ireland and thereby creating the first worm drive (engineering humor). The rites and festivities of the season were under the auspices of the St. Pat’s Board: upper-classmen (some I think were in their 30s) elected by their fraternities, eating clubs and campus organizations. For most of the year their duties seemed to be based around regular “meetings” marked by drinking and carousing. Come March, however, they were especially prominent in their filthy green coats (part of their semi-secret initiation rites) as they enforced the rules and protocols of the holiday (for those familiar with the St. Paul Winter Carnival – especially in the older days – think green Vulcans).

Part of the tradition was that all freshmen males were to have beards in the week or so leading up to St. Pat’s, and were to carry shillelaghs (an Irish cudgel). Most people think of shillelaghs as being a bit like walking sticks, but at UMR there were specific requirements: the shillelagh had to be at least two-thirds the height of the student and at least one-third his weight, and it had to be cut from a whole tree with at least some of the roots showing. The punishment for being caught beardless by a Board Member (and they usually traveled in packs of two or more) was to have your face painted green. The penalty for being without your shillelagh was to be thrown into Frisco Pond. Frisco Pond was actually the town’s sewage lagoon, but was called Frisco Pond because the St. Pat’s Board of 1927 rerouted the Frisco railroad into the pond after one of their meetings. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea to them at the time.

Fortunately I was able to cultivate my first beard, red and wispy as it was, and I cut myself a suitable cudgel. Carrying books and a shillelagh of the stated dimensions was a challenge, and even more so when certain professors wouldn’t allow them into class, meaning they had to be stacked in the hallways and guarded because Board members liked nothing better than to snatch unattended shillelaghs and then wait for their rightful owners to appear — followed by a honking procession to Frisco Pond. (I did mention the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, right? During St. Pat’s week the campus looked like No Name City from “Paint Your Wagon.”)

The reason we carried cudgels was in case a Board member approached you with a rubber snake and demanded that you “kill” it. This generally meant pounding on the snake with your cudgel until the Board member (not you) got tired. I weighed about 170 then; you do the math as to what my shillelagh weighed, minimum. I was fortunate to go largely unnoticed (as unnoticed as a guy carrying a tree can be) through most of this period. This was especially remarkable given that one of my friends from my hometown was on the Board. Toward the end of the week, however, he came up to me in the dining hall. “Red,” (for my beard) he said, “I think I see a snake.” With chants of “snake! snake! snake!” I was led outside and my “friend” tossed said snake on the ground. It landed, however, in a flower bed. “Freshman! Kill!” was the command. Hoisting my club over my head (and somehow not tipping over backwards) I brought it crashing down onto the hapless rubber creature — and even more hapless plants in the soft earth.

“Hit it again, it’s not dead,” was the order. I looked down once, then again. “Oh, it’s dead, alright,” I said. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, “Missing, presumed dead” because the rubber snake was nowhere to be found in the newly-created crater. Rather than wait around for CSI, or the gardener, the small group repaired to the dining hall to toast the success of the mission and I survived the week, the highlight of which was the St. Pat’s Parade.

In those days the St. Pat’s Board would be out early in the morning with mops and barrels of green paint, painting Pine Street in advance of the parade. High school bands from around the area would march, car dealers would drive demo models with pretty girls in them and various and sundry other parade standards would be present. In particular, however, I remember the Precision Pony Team: a group of students scooting along on empty pony kegs strapped to skateboards with rudimentary heads and yarn tails attached to the kegs. They wove patterns and formations down the street, stopping periodically to lift the tails of their “mounts” and drop handfuls of malted milk balls.

Much like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the event culminated in St. Pat (not St. Nick) appearing on the route, riding a manure spreader and attended by his Guard. The duties of the Guard were largely to keep St. Pat vertical (he’d probably been drinking for four days straight) and to bring any fetching lasses from the crowd to St. Pat for a good luck kiss. (I did say the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, didn’t I?).

After this particular St. Patrick’s Day all the other ones I’ve experienced have just kind of faded from my memory.

Note: the annual UMR St. Pat’s parade and related festivities still go on, but in a much more muted manner. A couple of alchohol-poisoning deaths were a factor (sad and true) to be sure, but I also think it was because some of those Board members finally graduated.

The five dumbest things you can do if you have too much debt

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by the Night Writer

I noticed one of those ads next to an on-line article I was reading this morning. No, not one of those talking about Obama wanting mothers to go back to school or terrorists to go back to Guantanamo or whatever is being promoted this week. This ad appeared to speak directly to a significant issue: The Five Dumbest Things You Can Do if You Have Too Much Debt.

A better title, though, may have been “Obama doesn’t want you to read this.”

Following the link, I discovered that the ad really did list the five things you shouldn’t do, rather than just starting you on a trail of multiple clicks to suck you into a scam. Reading them I thought the advice was as relevant to a country as they are to a family. Here’s the list, with my observations:

The five strategies you may want to avoid:

The first piece of advice from experts in the financial field is to be sure you don’t make your situation worse by making common mistakes. In particular, try to avoid:

1. Paying only the minimum payment on your debt, as this will result in the amount you owe actually growing, and your problems will only become worse.

This is especially true if you only pay the minimum on your existing debt and continue to take on new debt at the same time.

2. Relying on friends and family, as this can damage relationships with the most important people in your life.

Do we consider China a friend? Can we count future generations as “friends and family”?

3. Unscrupulous credit counselors that demand cash upfront or high fees for help they promise, but don’t deliver.

Ben Bernanke, I’m looking at you.

4. Using new, high-interest loans to pay off lower interest rate loans. While it may be easier to just have one payment, it will actually increase the amount you have to pay back.

Isn’t this what Quantitative Easing is all about?

5. Declaring bankruptcy–this can have permanent and severe consequences on your financial future. Avoid it if you can, especially when debt settlement may work for you.

Declaring bankruptcy is a good thing to avoid. But what if other countries declare it for you by removing the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency?

As it turns out, the advertisement wasn’t completely altruistic. It eventually made a pitch for working with a Debt Settlement company to develop and execute a plan to get your finances back in order. Unfortunately, you can’t hire a debt settlement group for an entire country.

You can, however, elect them.

Now the TSA wants to reach into your wallet

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by the Night Writer

Janet Napolitano is claiming that because the airlines have started charging bag fees, air travelers are carrying on more baggage, which is somehow costing the TSA extra money; so much so that she thinks her agency needs another $600 million or so. While inspecting more bags may take time away from the TSA’s preferred activities of ogling naked scans and crotch-groping, it isn’t clear to me how the carry-on situation is increasing the TSA’s costs.

1. Passengers are still limited, typcially, to one carry-on or one carry-on and a “personal item”. They are not suddenly bringing extra bags.

2. These bags may be more densely packed but there are still size limitations; there really is only so much you can jam in there.

3. Are the TSA agents charging by the bag, or are they paid hourly? If you work a shift aren’t you paid the same whether you check one bag or 100?

Methinks this is rent-seeking, pure and simple. I know, it’s hard to believe a government agency could do such a thing, but so far Frau Napolitano’s argument simply doesn’t scan.

I also had the opportunity to take a couple of flights this past week. Returning via Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, I shuffled through a narrow corridor to the x-ray machines at Security. A couple of guys about my age were in front of me and one asked the other if he knew whether this airport had the body scanners. The other guy didn’t, but asked his companion if he’d go through one or not. The first guy didn’t know.

I interjected, “I’m not going to go through a body scanner. The government can treat me like a criminal, but I’m not going to let them treat me like a guinea pig.” When the guys looked at me a little askance, I said “There’s no way they’ve had enough time to actually test out the health affects of those machines.”

“They’re supposed to be safe to use,” one of the guys said, a bit nervously.

“That’s what they said about Thalidomide, too,” I replied.

We shuffled on. There were no body scanners waiting at the end of the chute.

Lan astaslem

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by the Night Writer

Pakastani Minister of Minority Affairs Shahbazz Bhatti was assassinated this week by radical Islamists over his opposition to the blasphemy laws. It was the second assassination in two months of a leading opponent of the blasphemy laws.

A Catholic, Bhatti’s life had been threatened many times since he accepted his office in 2008. He was undaunted in the face of these threats, honoring his faith and openly citing his desire to live up to the example of Jesus Christ. “Jesus is the nucleus of my life,” Bhatti said in 2008, after accepting the Minority Affairs portfolio, “and I want to be his true follower through my actions by sharing the love of God with poor, oppressed, victimized, needy and suffering people of Pakistan.”

In an interview with the freedom of expression group First Step Forum four months ago (and broadcast here, I believe, by Al Jazeera), he spoke of the ultimate sacrifice Jesus Christ made for the oppressed and that he understood “the meaning of the cross.” He vowed not to give in to the “dark forces” of extremism and said he was ready to lay down his own life for the sake of his fellow Christians and all other oppressed minorities in Pakistan.

Naturally, he was too dangerous to be allowed to live.

By the time I get to Phoenix

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by the Night Writer

So, last July I started the planning for my company’s semi-annual conference for our key clients. We were in the middle of the heat of summer, and our minds were full of sun and sand as we selected a resort in the desert near Scottsdale, AZ for our February conference. I didn’t imagine that I’d have to escape a blizzard in order to get there, though.

Right from the beginning there’s a lot that goes into preparing for an event of this magnitude (our guests represent about a third of our total annualized premium) and the pace gets even faster as you get near the actual date. The last couple of weeks I’ve had several late nights at work as we counted down to yesterday’s departure. I was so wrapped up in it all that I scarcely noticed the Minneapolis weather forecast until Friday. Here we had several days in a row of temps in the 40s and NOW they want to tell me that 18 inches of snow are heading our way, with the thick of it hitting at almost the same time as my departure flight Sunday afternoon.

Sunday morning dawned gray and cold, but dry. By the time we went to church, though, the snow was coming down in those tiny little flakes that typically presage a major dumping. After church I checked on my flight status; it had been moved back from 4:15 to 4:45 but was still expected to take off. The airline in question, Sun Country, doesn’t cancel fllights unless the airport itself closes, unlike the other “hometown” airline. They merely keep pushing them back until they can take off.

It looked like whiteout conditions outside the big windows in the Humphrey terminal but our white jet eventually nosed up to the jetway like a glacier sneaking up on Minnesota, but it wasn’t ready to board until 5:20. Nevertheless, we were soon in motion shortly thereafter and I began to think we were actually going to get-away. We taxied for awhile as the engines wound up, and then were stopped because the runway needed to be plowed. After the runway was plowed, we needed another de-icing. Then we taxied some more and stopped while the runway was plowed again. Then we were told that we were finally all set to go — except that one of the airport’s ground vehicles had gotten itself stuck on the side of the runway and needed to be towed. Finally, about 7:30, we were at last airborne.

The delays were bad enough, but inside the jet it was also getting warm and muggy. Yeah, it’s a nice contrast to what’s going on outside, but not what you want as visions of jets being stranded on the tarmac for 14 hours dance through your head. Additionally, even though I had paid for the full use of my aisle seat, I was only getting about 80% of it because the large guy in the center seat next to me was spilling into my space. Now, being a kind of beefy guy myself, I tried to stay mellow about it, but being a beefy guy I really need 100% of my space and wouldn’t dream of taking 120%.

The arrangement was causing me to hangd out a bit into the aisle, which was also a problem because it was only about 18″ wide itself. Once we finally got into the air after the long delay and the seatbelt sign was turned off, half the passengers got up to get in line for the bathroom, and about half of them bumped into me on their way. Later, when I tightroped down the aisle myself to the bathroom I had to do a series of reverse-lambada moves with people heading the other direction because the aisle wasn’t big enough for two people to pass without getting more intimate than you’d typically care to do (perhaps this is where the TSA got the idea).

Earlier in the day we had prayed earnestly for favor in getting out of Minneapolis and to this conference; since I’m running it, it would be bad to miss it. The picture in my mind was the weather holding off, or opening up, so that we could get away cleanly. That wasn’t looking like the case, but I had put myself into a more laid-back frame of mind and decided not to let the situation ruin my day, and place my confidence in God that things would work out. I stayed mellow throughout, even as I literally made allowances for my seat-mate who certainly wasn’t deliberately trying to be huge. Once we got airborn we suddenly picked up a huge tailwind that knocked our flying time down to 2:23 instead of the usual 3 hours and 15 minutes. As I waited at the baggage carousel with a woman from our flight she told me that she’d just received a text from her friend saying that our flight was the last one to get out before they closed the runways last night.

God is good!