And Ye Will Not Have A Mind to Injure One Another . . .

"And ye will not have a mind to injure one another, but to live peaceably, and to render to every man according to that which is his due.

"And ye will not suffer your children that they go hungry, or naked; neither will ye suffer that they transgress the laws of God, and fight and quarrel one with another, and serve the devil, who is the master of sin, or who is the evil spirit which hath been spoken of by our fathers, he being an enemy to all righteousness.

"But ye will teach them to walk in the ways of truth and soberness; ye will teach them to love one another, and to serve one another.

"And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish."

Mosiah, Chapter Four.

Or, you know, ship them off with lies just so you can stick it to the Libs.

From the article:

"When we landed [in Martha's Vineyard] no one was waiting for us," he said. "No one knew we were coming. We realized they had lied to us. But, thankfully, we came upon kindhearted people who have supported us with everything we need."

(Son of an immigrant is posting this. I won't tolerate crap in the comments.)

Yes, immigration is broken in this country. What we need is bipartisan cooperation to make things better. This kind of thing is just a political stunt that does nothing to fix the problem. But we don't want to fix the problem anymore, we just want to own the X, whomever the X may be.

“People Should Get Beat Up for Stating Their Beliefs”

So. If people saw a Muslim ranting against Christians and Christianity on public transportation, should vigilantes use social media to track the person down and beat him up on a public street?

What if it were a Nazi, ranting against blacks?

You say I’m creating a false equivalency?

Look at that first scenario again.

I’ll bet you’re more likely to want to track down and beat up the Christians, right?

This isn’t an apology for Nazism. Nor is it to be added to the ball of “The Persecuted Christian.”
What it is, is this: Should people get beat up for stating their beliefs? Even if said stating is meant to intimidate and harass? Or do we just believe that free speech applies only to speech we agree with and that the best answer to hatred is more hatred?

I’m reminded, of all things, of a scene from the 1980 film Popeye, where Olive Oyl and J. Wellington Wimpy recognize the baby Swee’Pea has a gift for picking winning horses at the betting parlor.

Popeye happens to be against gambling. But the Oyls are in dire straits, having lost everything to the Commodore.

Popeye: What are you doing, there? No childs 'o mine will be exploiticated for ill-gotten gains. [to Swee'Pea] Yeah, that's true. You're gonna be president one day.

Olive Oyl: It is not ill-gotten, it's good-gotten gains. These races will clothe us, and feed us, and save us.

Popeye: Wrong is wrong, even when it helps ya.

J. Wellington Wimpy: The horses are at the gates.

Olive Oyl: I think family is more important than dumb morality, hmm?



What would I do if I saw a Nazi on public transportation harassing black people?

I’d speak up about it. On the bus. In the face of that Nazi. And hope others in the same car or on the same bus did the same. I might contact the local police if the situation escalated.

I would not track the dude on social media and then cheer when he got the shit beat out of him.
Because in that victory, you’re adding to the paranoia. He is persecuted. He is being held down by whomever. He’s got the bruises to prove it.

And that smug feeling of superiority you get watching “justice” be done? That comes from using fascist tactics against the fascists. Maybe you think using force is right. It’s not. Because the person who uses fascist tactics is a fascist themselves.

I’d love to have this conversation with my father. He saw real Nazis in action during World War II as a civilian in The Netherlands. Maybe he’d think I’m wrong. Maybe he’d want us to punch any Nazi we saw. But I doubt it. Because as much as he hated Nazis, he also loved Tevye’s line from “Fiddler on the Roof”:

Villager: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

Tevye: Very good. That way the whole world will be blind and toothless.

Wrong is wrong, even when it helps ya. I learned that from Popeye.

But I’m just a quiet voice in a world where this is becoming the anthem.

Watches

I do not wear a watch.

I own two of them. Both sit in my sock drawer upstairs, waiting for new batteries. That’s not likely to happen. Because I don’t need a watch.

I’m tough on watches. Those I wear on my wrist I inevitably bash on something and crack the glass – well, plastic. The pocket watches I have – the two in my drawer – went there and stayed there when their batteries died.

The last wristwatch I owned was a Swatch. This was in high school. I stopped wearing it because the watch’s plastic band lent itself liberally to cases of Swatch Sweat, and I tired of my wrist feeling damp all the time.

Dad, now he wore a watch. The watch changed from time to time, but he always had the watch on. Years of outdoor work as a bricklayer darkened his skin except where the watch rested. So when the watch was gone, he had a ghost of a watch on his wrist.

I have other timepieces. An iPod Touch. A pager I have to carry around one week out of the month. There’s a clock in my truck. Clocks on the wall. Clocks in the computer. And, frankly, the only magic hours that need marking are 4:05 AM, when the alarm goes off, 5:03 AM, when I get out of the truck at the bus stop, 5:13 PM, when I’m back on the bus heading home, and roughly 9 PM, when it’s time to put the kids to bed.

So it doesn’t surprise me to read that the watch is going out of fashion, or at least out of necessity. According to the UK’s Daily Mail, only 28 percent of those aged 25 or younger have watches, compared to 86 percent of those polled, no matter their age.

I kind of wander through time like Jim Henson in “Time Piece,” anyway.

Oh, NASA, Say it Ain't So

 Space Exploration: So 1969.

 
We just lost Mars.

When the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says that perhaps foremost his agency’s mission is “to engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering, you know the mission to Mars – vague as it is – has gone out the window.

But that’s apparently what NASA chief Charles Bolden said this weekend as he spoke at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.


So let’s not bother to reach out to nations who want to go into space, who are contributing or could contribute to space programs or astronomical research. In that I agree with Bolden, as he said: “We’re not going to go anywhere beyond low Earth orbit as a single entity.” But do we just focus on making people feel good about what’s already been done?

I don’t argue that, as Ahmed Zewail, an Obama-appointed science envoy to the Middle East said, using “the soft power of science in the service of diplomacy,” is a bad thing. We ought to be cultivating and encouraging science and collaboration and science education as much as we can. But a big part of me says that NASA’s foremost mission ought to be sending guys with nicknames like “Deke” and “Buzz” into, you know, outer space. What’s worse – having NASA become an arm of the military, or a soft, non-space-faring appendage of the State Department?

Maybe the admiration that’s seen in the Muslim world for American accomplishments in space and science come from the fact that someone actually said, “Hey, we ought to send people to the Moon and return them safely before the decade is out,” and actually did it, rather than dithering about how to make people feel good or to say we can’t do it alone, we need help. Maybe they admire the leadership, the attitude, the forging on and getting it done, as well as what was accomplished in the first place? We don’t need a multicultural approach to long division – we need to find people wherever they are to work with to get back into space because, truly, everyone involved believes in the mission, has clear goals in sight, and wants to get the work done because they believe in the work, not because it’s being approached in a multicultural way that makes everybody feel good. We didn’t exactly do it alone the first time, the second time, or whatever. We just found people of any background who had the smarts and the guts to do what was necessary to get things done. Can the United States still have that attractant power if there are no clear goals, no leadership and a commitment to well-meant but fuzzy futures, and not to, say, landing on the Moon again, building a base there, or going on to Mars? I don’t think so.

Delays, Delays . . .

Some of you may remember this blog entry, in which I brag up my entry in Slate.com's "Significant Objects" contest. Well, what was supposed to be announced today will now come "early next week," even though they've narrowed things down to the final 12, or so they say.

I think it's a clever ploy to get people to come back to the Significant Objects website. It's dastardly enough it just might work.

As with all of my writing, I look back on my submission now and think, "What a stinkeroo." And it's true. I can see its many flaws. That's part of writing, I suppose.

We'll Miss You, Aunt Jell-o

As we stood in the cold wind beneath the grey scudding clouds galloping in the sky above the Ammon Cemetery, I thought a lot about Jell-o.

Aunt Yvonne brought Jell-o to practically every family dinner, so we called her Aunt Jell-o. She took the teasing well. She took a lot of teasing well. From being reminded of saying things like "Boy, there sure are a lot of dead people in the world," as we drove past the cemetery in Laketown, Utah, where Grandma and Grandpa Speirs are buried. She endured the telling and re-telling of the time she wore a pair of underwear stuck by static cling to the back of her coat on a day of shopping in Idaho Falls, ignorant of the fact until an embarrassed shopper showed it to her. She never seemed to tire of being the butt of family jokes, and even told a few on herself. Every day, a new story. Today, I heard how she complained, in her trademark mangled English, about a driver who had been driving "erotically" down 17th Street.

Parties at her house, the best Christmas parties. In the basement, all of us fighting for turns at the pool table, then exchanging gag gifts, laughing, laughing, laughing. Telling stories on each other, with the dog, Teko, sitting in the window well, banished from the house for the evening, but not wanting to miss out on the fun. Nobody wanted to miss out on the fun at Aunt Jell-o's house.

I rarely at the Jell-o. Being half-Dutch, I suppose, made me wonder why it was such an interesting dish. But Aunt Jell-o's dishes at family parties were as expected as my own mother forgetting the yams until the feast was over.

On the hillside today, under the clouds, with cattle bellowing in the distance, the cities of Idaho Falls and Ammon spread out at the base of the hills, we told Aunt Jell-o goodbye. She battled cancer for nearly three years, asking that her "go-go juice" at the chemotherapy sessions be good. I knew she was ill. I did not know the cancer, diagnosed so long ago, was terminal.

Families drift apart. The fuzzy childhood memories are about all I have. And that's a shame. We drift apart, because it's easy, I suppose. But not recommended.

Uncle Doug said he spoke with her a few days before she died, about the family gatherings. He urged me, standing on that hill, holding back the tears, to stay close. "Those were the fun times," he said. "And that's what we remember. Make sure you do that with your siblings."

Okay.

Thanks, Aunt Jell-o. We'll miss you.