Christmas Eve, 2011

I had an interesting Christmas this year.  It was kind of like not having a Christmas at all.  My mother went into the hospital several days before Chrristmas and she nearly died.  The Lord spared her life, but she’s facing some difficult challenges ahead.  On Christmas Eve, we spent the day getting ready to bring her home from the hospital, about 100 miles away from our home.  It was inconvenient, but you know how it goes.  You have to do what you have to do.

I was also supposed to take my brown belt test in judo this week, but that was a wash because we ran out of time at practice.  Alma was going to be my partner for the kata demonstration, but he hurt his ankle at practice and we had to put everything off.  Later in the week, Sandee and Al were sick with colds.  It seems we always get colds or flu whenever we have some vacation time.  It’s like we’re so busy all the time that, when we have a few moments to rest, our bodies just say, “OK, I have time now to get sick.”  Thus, in addition to the other stuff going on, we had to put up with the discomforts and hindrances of a cold.  Nothing serious.  Just annoying.

I’ve been taking online classes, so amid all the stuff going on with my mother, the demands of Christmas, and having a cold, I also had to finish up a bunch of reading, discussion boards, and a 2000-word paper.  I finished that up on Christmas Eve afternoon around 4:30 or so.  Then I had to prepare a talk for Church on Christmas morning.

By the time I finished all that up, everyone else went to bed and I sat down to surf for a few minutes before going to bed.  Bad idea!  An old friend popped up on Facebook chat and wanted to talk.  Normally, I keep the Facebook chat disabled, but because my mother had been in the hospital, it was a quick way for Sandee to get in touch with me as new developments occurred while I was at work.

This old friend is dear to me, but he has become so politically militant that we really can’t talk anymore.  He’s bent on trying to reform the Republican party.  I long ago gave up on all political parties.  I vote, but I consider both parties so corrupt that there’s nothing good to be expected from either of them.  My friend is one of those guys who latched on to Ezra Taft Benson’s political rhetoric and expects every member of the Church to run to save the Constitution this very minute.

I have encountered these guys all my life.  I believe a lot of what they say about secret combinations trying to take over things.  That’s just typical corruption that exists in all political systems.  The bad guys always want power and money and they’ll do whatever it takes to get it.  In the end, the only way to stop them is to resort to bloodshed.  That’s how it was done by the Nephites in the Book of Mormon.  I expect that this will be in our future as well.  For now, I’m grateful for the peace that allows me to work on getting home teaching done and cajoling members to pay tithing and be worthy of a temple recommend.  I don’t need my home teachers distracted by a belief that the White Horse Prophecy is about to come true.  I think the Lord would tell the Prophet to give us more direct warnings if that was the case.  Instead, I read the most recent Ensign and I see calls to repent, to be worthy, to do one’s duty in the Church, and to serve others.

I’m a branch president in the Church.  I’m focused on seeing that members have their basic needs taken care of.  I try to help those who need it as much as I have resources to do.  I have people in my branch who live on $600 a month, which isn’t much at all.  Sometimes they need help with paying their electric bill or buying heating fuel.  I have elderly people, and disabled people, and just plain poor people in my branch.  They have real needs and the suffering that would result if they went unattended would also be very real.  I think most bishops are focused on those kinds of things.  My friend isn’t focused on them.  He’s trying to change the whole political system.  I just want to make sure an elderly widow makes it to the end of the month with heat and electricity or that the little kids whose father is incarcerated get some Christmas presents.

My friend expressed his disappointment with me and condemned me for being “just a blogger.”  Let’s see: I work 40 hours a week as the sole breadwinner in my family, I’m taking 18 upper-level  hours in college this semster, I do judo with my son (because we don’t have a youth program), I’m a branch president, plus I have a family to take care of and a sick mother in the hospital—and my friend wants to condemn me for being “just a blogger” because I don’t have time to join his latest project?  Geez!   Incidentally, my friend doesn’t have a job.  His wife supports him, which gives him free time to devote to his favorite projects.

Then today, I found this post on the Internet on a web site where politically-active LDS folks are sitting around ruminating as to whether the Second Coming is at hand, if Obama’s the Anti-Christ, or other such things:

I think many members of this forum and others as well wish there were more discussion in church about certain principles or doctrines that pertain to maintaining our liberty; discussion about our responsibility to the U.S. Constitution and its preservation, and discussion about our responsibility to be aware of a secret combination that seeks to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations and countries and is increasing its evil influence and control over America and the entire world.

I and a very few others I am aware of have brought these particular concerns to the attention of our ward and stake leaders with mixed results, mostly on the negative side. I have read past posts on this forum that suggest we should not make such suggestions to our bishop or stake president. A few posts and private emails I have received tell of efforts to bring these particular concerns to the attention of ward and stake leaders with positive results. And others tell of firesides and other presentations specifically for Church members given both in church buildings and in private homes and other facilities. I have attended presentations specifically for church members by church members like Jack Monnett, Hans V. Andersen, Jr., Glenn Kimber, Ken Bowers, Joel Skousen, Rick Dalton, Brian Turner, and at least one other whose name I forget. These guys are doing a great job, but they are not reaching as many as could and I think should be given these messages if there were more support from bishops and stake presidents. I sometimes feel like some of us are going around behind our church leaders to get the word out without incurring rebuke for promoting awareness of responsibilities the leaders do not want discussed.

There is this consensus among these John Bircher types that the called and sustained priesthood leaders of the Church are trying to block them from getting their message out in the Church.  In reality, the leaders of the Church are doing their best to encourage the rank-and-file to live the gospel, to keep the Word of Wisdom, to pay their tithes and offerings, and to keep away from pornography, fornication, and adultery.  It doesn’t matter who is in office if the saints are struggling just to keep the basic commandments.  The politicos can just go jump in the lake.

Like my friend, most of this political “class” in the Church don’t hold temple recommends and attend Church only when they feel  like getting offended by someone.  They criticize their leaders.  They “garnish the sepulchre” of Ezra Taft Benson but criticize the living prophet for not using the Conference Center pulpit to denounce the Democrats or whoever they don’t like this week.  Never mind that talk that Ezra Taft Benson gave with the 14 points for following the prophet!  If they want to quote Ezra Taft Benson to me, let them read that talk first and comply with the spirit of it.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie once said that there are saints who have “gospel hobbies” that become their major preoccupation and take over their spiritual lives.  Instead of living a balanced life, they become “cranks” as Elder McConkie called them.  They become intent on making anyone who doesn’t see things the same way miserable to be near them.  It doesn’t matter what their obsession is.  It might be the Word of Wisdom, or genealogy, or scouting.  When they get your ear, they won’t let it go until you either offend them or accept their position.

On Christmas Eve, I had hoped to ask my friend about his family and how they were doing.  I heard that his mother passed away a few months ago.  I’m not sure of the details and he never mentioned it.  He didn’t even give me the chance to mention it.  I didn’t get the chance to ask how his brothers and sisters are doing, or his children, or his new wife.  And he didn’t inquire about my family, my kids, my mother, or anyone else we mutually knew. Instead , he went right for the political jugular and began to spout off about the Republican rules committees and another project he’s been involved in.

I tried my best to keep from being dragged in.  When I evaded, he asked me if I had read Ezra Taft Benson.  Of course I have, and he knows it.  However, that’s the code for if you’re “one of them.”  It’s like asking, “Are you a political crank, too?”  I tried to throw a little jab to get him to back off, telling him that , though I respect President Benson, I preferred to focus on the living prophets.   His reply was something to the effect that “Monson’s all right, but Hinckley screwed up getting Salt Lake into the Olympics” or something like that.  I wanted to correct him.  People who have the Spirit of the Lord with them say “President Monson” and “President Hinckley.”  People who have the Spirit revere the office, not the man.  We use the title of respect because of the office the man holds.  It’s a small thing, but it tells me a lot.  I would no more call President Monson by his last name that I’d call him “Tom.”

My friend asked me if I thought these men were “infallible.”  Again, he knows better.  He was one of the ones who taught me as a new convert that prophets are not infallible, but that there is no error in the revelations.

On the evening where even the churches of men reverently celebrate the birth of the Christ child, my friend was haranging me about politics instead of feeling the beautiful peace that comes at Christmas.  After experiencing a draining, hectic week, full of cares and concerns, I was seeking peace that Christmas Eve.  When my friend had a chance to provide it, he didn’t step up.  I was glad to end the conversation, if that’s what one can call a one-sided diatribe about politics.  At the end, he told me something rather insulting like, “Goodnight, Ebenezer.  Maybe tonight you’ll dream about what I’ve told you.”  I give service to the Lord and his Church with an open heart, witholding nothing.  In the days leading up to this Christmas Eve, I had given all the strength and time that I had.  There was nothing left.  His calling me a “Scrooge” in those final words stung sharply.  I feel no bitterness or recriminations toward him.  I felt sorry for him, because he had missed the point.  I was disappointed because this individual who had helped me turn from darkness to glorious light many years ago has lost his way.  Maybe at some future time, I’ll be able to return the favor.  I still count him as a friend and always will.

Challenging days ahead

I’m a Mormon.  Most of you know that.  I have a profile on Mormon.org.  I have been one since 1978.  I’m a convert.  I served a mission.  I was sealed to my wife for time and all eternity in the Salt Lake Temple.  I have served in the Church in almost every calling in a ward council except for Primary President of Relief Society President. (Don’t laugh, I know a man who served as a Relief Society President when he was a missionary!)  I have been a member of a bishopric or branch presidency for the past 11 years and I’ve been a branch president for the past two years.

I don’t tell you these things to boast.  I just want the reader to know that I’m committed.  I know what I know from time, experience, service, and study.  I can tell you that God is real and that he works in the lives of everyone who will let him have some access.  I know that he loves us, his children.  I know he cares about us.  I have seen him perform miracles in the lives of people.  And on top of all of this, I first came to truly know him when he gave me an answer about the truth of the Book of Mormon–but I’ve written about that before.

Sometimes it is tough to be a Mormon.  I have lived most of my life on the fringes of the Church.  I’ve only visited Utah a couple of times. In a crowd, at work, or anywhere else, it’s usually a correct assumption that I’m the only latter-day saint present.  In one way, I kind of like that.  It keeps me on my toes.  I know that people are watching.  It makes me seek to do my best and not get lax about my discipleship.  I know people will make judgments about the Church from what they know about me.  I do my best to make that a good impression.

It never ceases to amaze me at the people who want to tell me what I believe.  They come with all sorts of misinformation they received from a pamphlet their pastor gave them, or something they found on an anti-Mormon web site.  They act as if they’re complete experts on the Church and that, after all the experience I listed above, I don’t know what I’m talking about.  Go figure.

In defending the Church, I have been personally attacked in the most vicious ways imaginable.  I’ve been the subject of defamatory discussion threads and even had lampooning caricatures made of me.  I even had  one anti-Mormon set up a blog called “Greg West is an Idiot” on Blogger.com.  (Blogger took it down after I complained that it was a terms-of-service violation).  The crazy thing is that I’m just a very average husband, dad, and grandfather.  There is nothing special about me that would make the world take notice of me.  I’m not rich or powerful or even famous.  But when I stand up for the Church, literally hundreds of people attack me.

I have developed a thick skin.  That started early in my Church experience.  When I was newly baptized, a neighbor lady who never even so much as said “hello” to me came and told my parents that I was joining a cult.  As a missionary, I was physically assaulted a few times–just because I was a Mormon.  I have been the target of harassment when I was in the military, because I didn’t follow along and join the “good ol’ boys” club.  I just take it in stride.

For the past few years, I’ve been running a social network called S.P.A.M.–The Society for the Prevention of Anti-Mormonism.  I started it up when I got frustrated with anti-Mormons attacking the Church when Mitt Romney’s chances for the GOP nomination became a real possibility.  This year looks like it might be Romney’s year, so the heat is being cranked up.  This week alone, hundreds of articles and blogs have been published over the remarks of one Baptist minister at a political event, where he called the Church a cult and said Romney wasn’t a Christian before introducing Romney’s opponent, Governor Tom Perry of Texas.

Newsweek, Time, Drudge Report, U.S. News, USA Today, The Blaze, WorldNetDaily, Politico, Redstate.com, the Huffington Post, and a hundred other media outlets have been all over this incident.  The rhetoric in the comments on these articles just gets worse and worse.  The unabashed level of intolerance is due in part to the assumed anonymity of the Internet.  People say hostile things they would never say in person–but they speak what is in their hearts.  It’s scary to see.

In the 19th century, the governor of Missouri put out an extermination order on latter-day saints.  Some of the comments I’ve seen are so vicious, I can easily imagine that–in the absence of civil restraint–these awful bigots would easily return to burning LDS churches, homes of members, even lynchings.  Right now,we are blessed to have a relatively calm state of civil order.  However, it may not remain that way.  A currency collapse, a severe financial crisis, or other breakdown of social order could cause the conditions for these kinds of things to occur once again.

For those of us who live out here among the “Gentiles,” that’s an unsettling notion.  Anti-Mormonism has replaced racism and anti-Semitism as the allowed prejudice of our time.  As the Romney campaign gets going, especially when the Democrats decide to go after him, it’s going to get bad.  I’ve already seen major news sites print some apostate’s twisted representations of our temple ordinances and claim that Mormons are trying to overthrow the government.  Imagine how much worse they can make it!

Despite all this, I don’t fear.  I rejoice in some measure, because Jesus said to.  He said to be glad when we would be persecuted, when people would say false things about us, or call us names or despitefully use us.  What does concern me is that some of my good friends or co-workers might actually believe some of the lies and accusations that will be hurled our way.  I would hate for my non-member co-workers to think that I was a bizarre cultist or that I had hopes of establishing a theocracy in Accomack County.  I would hate for my 12 year-old son to have to face ridicule at school for his religion from fellow students or discrimination from the teachers.  No matter.  We’ll keep on living the gospel and following the example of Jesus Christ.  Hopefully people will believe their eyes and not the crazy stuff others might tell them.

If there are challenging days ahead, it means that people are having to make a decision about Mormons and Mormonism.  It’s a day of decision and those decisions have consequences.  I just hope that my friends will have confidence in me and trust that I am honest when I tell them that Jesus Christ is the center of all that I have done in my life, ever since I was converted in 1978.  I wouldn’t do anything that would place any distance between the Lord and me.  I hope that desire shows in the things I do and the way I live.  If challenging times to come, I hope that the Lord’s light will shine from me so others can see it.

A walk down memory lane brings a stark realization

This afternoon, my son and I watched a documentary titled, “The Wonder of It All.”  Let me explain the wizardry of getting a 12-year old to sit down and watch a documentary on a Saturday afternoon without complaint.

I recently saw the trailer for the new movie “Apollo 18″ and I shared it on Facebook.  I played the trailer for Alma last night after I came home from work.  He started asking questions about the various Apollo moon conspiracies that are out there on the Internet–you know, the ones that say we didn’t actually land or that we sent secret, military missions to the moon.  It dawned on me that, since he has been in the world (and this is true for all my kids) all he has ever seen about space is the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.  No wonder kids don’t get jazzed about space exploration–we’re not going anywhere!

The shuttles only went to a maximum altitude of about 400 miles and they just went around the earth over and over and over.  I don’t mean to minimize the challenges of building a station in space or launching space shuttles, but if Columbus had only gone around in circles in the Atlantic Ocean, history would have been a lot different.

Anyhow, I decided to share with Alma some of the fascination that grabbed boys his age when I was young.  I pulled out some long-yellowed newspaper pages that look almost ancient now.  They had the headlines and the pictures of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface with the lunar module standing behind them.  I showed him a picture of a Saturn V rocket, which took the Apollo space capsule skyward.  I think he could hear the wonder in my voice.  The rocket was 365 feet tall–tall as a 36 story building.  It weighed over seven million pounds.  In the first 90 seconds of flight, it went from zero to 6,100 miles per hour.  To leave earth orbit, it had to reach an escape velocity of 24,500 miles per hour.  That’s almost seven miles per second!  That’s about eight times faster than a large-caliber bullet fired from a high-powered rifle.

This all led to watching the documentary, which is about the human part of the moon landings.  The documentary featured the astronauts who landed on the moon talking about their feelings and their memories. It wasn’t just about science.  It was about the sense of wonder and amazement that was behind it all.  It was a very stirring story.  Twelve men set foot on the moon.  In all of history, these twelve men saw things and experienced things that the rest of us can only dream of.  It was inspiring.

Then, as the documentary drew to a close, the astronauts talked somewhat of how they came to cope with life after such a peak experience.  Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon talked about a visit he hand his two fellow astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, made to a university as honored guests.  When they arrived, they were surrounded with protesters bearing signs and shouting at them with great hostility.  The students and protesters began pelting the astronauts with eggs.

Here’s where the stark realization hit me.  During the time of the great achievements of America in the Apollo program, we were still mired in Vietnam.  In 1968 was the Tet Offensive.  Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated.  Woodstock was going on during the moon landing.  The Kent State massacre would occur in less than a year.  The country seemed like it was on the edge of revolution.

As I thought, “How terrible!” about those students throwing eggs at the American heroes, it hit me.  Those same students–those same radicals–those same draft-dodging, draft-card burning, hippies–they are the people who are in charge right now.  All of Barack Obama’s underlings are from that milieu.  They were members of the Weather Underground.  They were members of Students for a Democratic Society.  They are the ones who now man the liberal and progressive policy factories like the Center for American Progress, the now-defunct-but-regrouping-under-another-name ACORN.  They dominate the teachers unions and they are the college professors that teach try to bully students out of their religion and the moral training they received from their parents.

As I heard Aldrin’s description of the shock at the violent reactions of these students, I realized that this is now the generation that has come to power.  They are the ones behind the wheel, gleefully driving America off a cliff, hoping that they may reshape the nation in their radical image.

From the wonderful and warm feelings I shared with my son, telling him about the noble achievements of the Americans who sent men to the moon, to the horrible realization that we have been tricked into handing the car keys to the insolent, spoiled, contemptuous, and deprave people who would throw eggs at America’s heroes–it was a sobering moment.  It explains a lot.

If I am to give my sons, daughters, and my grandchildren a future and a country that will be as noble and hopeful as the Apollo program, we have to take the car keys back now and put people in charge who cherish what was once honorable and decent about America.

Our trip to Palmyra

The Hill Cumorah

My wife, my son, and I took off this past week for an adventure to Palmyra, New York.  Our destination includes some important Mormon landmarks including, Joseph Smith’s home, the Hill Cumorah, the Grandin Press, the Palmyra Temple, and of course, the Sacred Grove.  If you’re not Mormon, just think of it as a pilgrimage of sorts, to the place where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sprang into existence.

Although this was a vacation for us, we approached the trip with some degree of trepidation.  Most people will discount such events as mere coincidence, but whenever the West family takes a child to the temple, it seems to bring on some tribulation.  The Adversary paints a bulls-eye on us and the fiery darts the apostle Paul spoke of start to fly.  In the past, forays to the temple were preceded by car trouble, sickness, even outbreaks of head lice.  We always manage to weather these disruptions, but it does make planning a trip to the temple akin to climbing up a flagpole in an electrical storm.

This time was to be no exception.  We had some car trouble the days before our departure and we had to get the brakes worked on.  With freshly serviced brakes, we set out to New York last Sunday, a few hours after church.  We drove several hours and stopped just north of Philly.  The next morning, I checked the oil and topped it off.  At the next break we stopped for, smoke was coming out from underneath the car–not a good sign.

At first, I thought maybe I had spilled a little bit of oil while topping it off and that it was burning off the back side of the engine or dripping onto the exhaust.  This was really concerning because we had a car fire last year and lost that car.  I found a water hose at the station and sprayed down the undercarriage, hoping to wash away the oil, hoping that there wasn’t anything more major wrong, like a blown head gasket or a blown main engine seal.

The Log Home

At the next stop, a couple of hours later, the smoking is even worse.  At this point, we’re just about to reach the New York state line, hundreds of miles from home.  I called a family council and we discussed our options.  Sandee and Al were in favor of pressing on, getting the car looked at once we reached our destination.  I agreed that this was a better plan that turning around and going back home.  We were about three hours away from Palmyra, assuming the car would hold up.

After a brief break, we loaded up into the car and, as I started to pull out of the rest stop, we had almost no brakes and the car would not go into reverse.  I jiggled around with stuff for a few minutes and we managed to get rolling.  We queried the GPS and found a nearby garage to get the car looked at.

Somewhere near Harmony, Pennsylvania, we sat there glumly in the dirty waiting room of the mechanic’s garage, hoping that the repairs would not cost us the rest of our trip.  After a couple of hours waiting for parts to be delivered, we were out the door with a patched up (not fully repaired) vehicle for less than a hundred bucks.  We had the same family council discussion and the decision was the same as before, so we set out once again for Palmyra.  I’m glad we stuck to our plan.

We arrived in Victor, New York near Palmyra around dinnertime on Monday, exhausted from stress and the long drive.  We found that our inexpensive hotel room was actually very nice and comfortable.  It was a more than pleasant surprise.  After dinner at Denny’s the world seemed to be a little brighter.

The 'Frame' House

On Tuesday morning, we called up the temple first thing.  We hoped to be able to squeeze in on a session to to some baptisms.  This was the first time for our youngest son to be able to attend the temple and we were hoping to be able to share that experience together as a family.  Our older kids all went to the temple with youth groups from our old ward.  Although I was one of the bishopric members who went along with those trips, my wife usually went in to do endowments.  This time we hung together to do baptisms. The temple was able to squeeze us in with a large EFY group.  For the uninitiated, EFY is a kind of youth conference for 14-18 year-olds.  We were lucky they were able to fit us in with such a large group.

Since our session was not until noon, we decided to visit the Joseph Smith home site.  It was really enjoyable going to visit the log home where the Smith family lived and where the angel Moroni appeared to Joseph and revealed the location of the gold plates which contained the Book of Mormon.  The missionary who led the tour testified of the reality of that event and the Spirit was very strong.  She asked us if anyone could share an experience about how their life had been impacted by the Book of Mormon.  Everyone kind of looked around at each other, being reluctant to speak.  There was a family from Utah who had several kids, a couple of non-members, and the three of us.  I felt like I should speak up, so I related how the Book of Mormon had come to me and that I gained a testimony of it before I ever set foot in a church building or attended a church meeting.  I had a testimony before I met any missionaries.  I knew by personal revelation that the Book of Mormon was true.  I testified how it had affected my life, leading me to serve a mission, to marry Sandee in the temple, and all the good things that came into my life up to the present day.

Grandin Press

We strolled up to the “frame house” that Alvin Smith had built for his parents and looked around some.  As time was getting short, we decided we would go to the Grandin press first and return to the Sacred Grove later. We enjoyed the tour at the building where the first copies of the Book of Mormon were published.  I especially enjoyed some of the paintings by C.C.A. Christiansen, a pioneer Mormon artist.  From Grandin’s we zipped back to the Temple for our baptismal sessions.

At the temple, we got to stick together and do the baptisms and confirmations as a family, even though we were with the EFY group.  It was a very spiritual experience, personally taking our son to the temple.  I couldn’t help but think of Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, and how they took him to the temple when he was 12.  That’s the way it’s supposed to be.  Parents should take their children to the temple.

In the Palmyra Temple, we had a remarkable experience before we left.  The temple workers took the three of us to a place down the hall from the temple entrance.  Unlike most temples, which don’t have any windows that you can look out of, this one has a window that overlooks the Sacred Grove.  I can’t begin to describe the profound spiritual feelings and the emotions it generated to stand in a holy place, looking at the place that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to the young prophet Joseph Smith in 1820.  It’s hard to describe, but it was wonderful.  The sense that heaven came down and touched the earth on that spot is very tangible in that environment.

During the rest of the day, we visited the Grandin press where the Book of Mormon was published and we enjoyed the presentation of the missionary sister that escorted us through the building.  We went to the Hill Cumorah in the afternoon and hiked up the hill.  It really is quite a hike.  The West family is a pretty fit bunch.  We all work out, run, lift weights, cycling, etc., and Alma and I do judo.  Even so, the walk up the hill is a pretty good workout.

The Sacred Grove

I can’t help but think, as I looked at the profile of the hill from the front and the side, that it doesn’t look like a natural structure.  The ancient peoples of the Americas, like those in Cahokia, were mound builders.  It made me wonder if the Hill Cumorah was “built” by the Nephites or their predecessors instead of being a natural formation.  There is a statue of Moroni at the top with some bas-relief sculptures about the testimonies of the Three and the Eight Witnesses.  It was a really special experience to share the details of those testimonies and the circumstances that surrounded them with my son–right there on the Hill Cumorah where the very plates those eleven witnesses saw laid for 1400 years.

In the evening, near sunset, we went to the Sacred Grove.  We had the place completely to ourselves.  The sun was low in the sky and beaming in through the trees.  It was silent, except for the sounds of nature, crickets, cicadas, etc.  The only thing that marred perfect enjoyment was a kamikaze mosquito who was intent on devouring us!

We left Palmyra the next day with wonderful memories and our hearts full of gratitude.  Our car functioned OK for the rest of the trip (because we had already gone to the temple!) and we went down to visit our oldest son’s family.  We had a great trip and it’s good to be home.  We loved the Palmyra area and it was such a blessing to visit the Church sites there.  We’ll look forward to going back again someday.

(Among the other problems we had, Sandee’s camera wouldn’t charge, so the pics above are from JosephSmith.net and LDSChurchTemples.com).

Technology in rural America

We live in the country.  It is an hour-and-a-half drive to the nearest mall.  The street we live in is not paved and, at night, it looks an awful lot like the moon.  There are deer browsing a few hundred yards from the house.  You can look up at the sky at night and see the Milky Way.  It’s scenic and pastoral.  However, living apart from “civilization” has its drawbacks.

Now, we don’t live like we’re in the 19th century here.  There are five computers in our house for three people.  We have satellite TV, TiVo, high-speed Internet, and cell phones.  Let me qualify that last statement.  We have these things.  They don’t always work the way they’re supposed to, but we have them.  At least I get a bill for them every month.

Let me also qualify, that I’m not technically backward.  Although I am over 50, I worked many years in gathering technical intelligence for our nation.  I have worked many years in the information technology field.  I make my living taking care of the servers, workstations, and networks for a system of health centers.  I’ve worked with every Windows operating system ever released as well as several Unix/Linux variants.  I am familar the alphabet soup of LANs/WANs/ISDN/T1/OC3/VPN/TCP/IP and whatever else you can string together.  In my spare time over the past decade and a half, I have used computers to record my music compositions, post them on the Internet, to make and market CDs, to publish books, as well as operating a couple of blogs and an active social network.  Technology isn’t a stranger to me.

Nevertheless, living out in the country like we do, the stuff just doesn’t work as designed.  That’s frustrating.  Two separate nights this week, we were trying to watch a television show and the satellite signal kept breaking up.  Of course, though satellites are not affected by terrestrial weather, the microwave signals they transmit do get scattered by heavy rains, etc.  However, it wasn’t raining at our house.  It was the “local” channels (meaning signals being uplinked from the local NBC, CBS, and ABC affiliates) that were getting jammed by weather.  All the other programming, like Fox News, ESPN, and other stations were just fine.  Why is it I pay for satellite TV just so I can get the same shows that are downlinked to the local affiliate stations retransmitted to me second-hand?  After all, the local affiliates get their programming by satellite!  The downlink signal from the satellite covers most of the United States.  The only reason for this that I can think of is that it allows me the “privilege” of watching local TV commercials.

When we first moved in six years ago, the satellite installer was pulling in all the channels on the unconfigured satellite decoder.  There were all the local channels we enjoyed when we lived in our prior home.  He asked me, “What’s your zip code here?”  I answered him and he entered the digits into an on-screen field.  Suddenly, all the local channels were gone!  When I asked what happened to them, he told me that subscribers in our county couldn’t get local channels.  However, if we lived in the neighboring county, just a few miles away, we could get them.  The signals are coming off the same satellite.  Why couldn’t we have them? If he had put the zip code in for the neighboring county, I would be able to see the local channels!  I eventually had to change satellite providers to get local channels.  All I can figure is that the powers-that-be in our county didn’t want us to be able to watch the local weather, because that would give us forewarning that approaching thunder would soon interrupt our Internet connection. More on that later.

If I can get a TV signal, then it is often the case that I want to record a show to watch later.  When I set the TiVo to record a show that comes on at 5 pm., I’ve learned to set it to start 5 minutes early.  I have had far too many instances of watching a recorded 2-hour movie only to find that TiVo stopped recording five minutes before the end.  That’s frustrating!  So now, I set the timer to record five minutes before and five minutes after.  Now, if I want to record an episode of “America’s Got Talent” on judo night, I occasionally come home to find that it has recorded an hour and ten minutes’ worth of Johnny Bravo or QVC programming instead.  What the heck?

Regardless of which carrier you have, about 60 percent of the area we live in has no cell phone coverage.  In my house, I have to sit by a particular window and hold the cell phone in my right hand to get a signal.  Anywhere else in the house, there’s nothing. No “bars” to be had.  If I switch hands, *poof* the call is dropped.  As I drive to work in the morning down a winding country road, I see old black ladies standing out at the end of their driveways wearing their bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, their hair all lopsided because they just woke up, talking on their cell phones.  The reason they’re standing outside in the bathrobes and slippers is because they can’t get a signal inside their houses.

The other day, I read an article where someone was protesting the NSA’s ability to collect geolocation data on American citizens using their cell phones.  That problem doesn’t alarm me much, because I can’t get a cell phone signal 90 percent of the time.  I might as well have a tin can without the string–the result is almost the same.  Landlines aren’t much better.  Every time it rains, the lines in the ground and various junction boxes along the way get filled with water and the lines go down.  At work, some of the fax lines become so crackly that the transmission of faxes is disrupted by the noise.  We call Verizon to complain and they wait two days to send some guy out when the weather is dry and the problem isn’t present.  We have yet to get Verizon to respond when it’s actually raining.

This is because the Verizon person who answers the phone, after keeping on hold for nearly 40 minutes, is in Washington, D.C.  She informs me that we are in the Potomac district for service calls.  I ask why that is the case, when we’re four hours away from he Potomac area.  She responds that “Everything east of Delaware is in the Potomac district.”  I reply that “Everything east of Delaware is in the Atlantic Ocean.”  She really doesn’t care.  But I digress–

I understand why satellite TV is disrupted by rain, high winds, etc.  What I can’t understand is why Verizon high-speed Internet is affected by thunder.  Yes, thunder!  When a storm is approaching our area, and the first rumbles of thunder are heard, our high-speed Internet goes offline.  I’m serious.  Rain and even lightning don’t seem to have an effect, but when it thunders, there goes the link.  I have speculated that the link to whatever DHCP and DNS servers that Verizon uses are across the Chesapeake Bay from us, and perhaps rely on a microwave link instead of a fiber optic line or something.  Perhaps, when I’m hearing thunder, there is unseen lightning in the clouds that are approaching over the Chesapeake Bay and the electromagnetic interference from the unseen lightning causes a lost link.  I just don’t know.  All I do know is that when it thunders, the 404 errors start to appear and no one in the house  can surf anymore–because of a sound!

Even mature technologies like radio have their problems here.  I live in radio hell.  The nearest large markets for radio are at least 60 miles away.  We live on the fringe of so many stations, it’s impossible to tune one in very well for very long.  My favorite station is a talk radio station in Salisbury, Maryland–about a 60 mile distance.  When I’m listening to it, if I drive more than a few miles south of my home on my way to work, another station on the same frequency begins to override it.  This station is a gospel music station.  As I drive south, Rush Limbaugh trades places with a fiery Evangelical preacher–about every five seconds or so.  Almost no AM stations come it at all during the day.  At night, its easier to get a station from Boston or Chicago than anything nearby.  I even pick up fuzzy French stations from Quebec!

There are three local stations.  One of them is about 65 miles away, so more than a mile from my house, that one drops out-of-range.  Another one is a Mexican station and I don’t understand any Spanish.  The last one is the venerable old station that has played the same records (yes, records) since the 1960s.  The station is the only one that comes in reliably enough to set your clock-radio to.  Unfortunately, they have a bad habit of flicking the wrong switch and transmitting dead air for up to ten minutes at a time.  They also have a popular local talk program called “Swap Shop” which is on opposite the fuzzy, distant, spotty Rush Limbaugh.  “Swap Shop” features a local guy with an Eastern Shore variant of a southern accent who takes calls from people who have things to sell.  Here’s a typical call between the host and a female caller, rendered phonetically:

Caller: Hey, __________. I gotta used Jah-un Dee-er lah-wun tractah fuh say-ul.
Host: Whu-at?  You gotta whu-at fuh say-ul?
Caller:  A tractah.  A rah-dun lah-wun tractah fuh say-ul.
Host:  Whu-at ki-und?
Caller:  A Jah-un Dee-er.
Host:  A Jah-un Dee-er?
Caller: Yeah-up.  A Jah-un Dee-er.  I wo-ant fi-hunnert fuh it.
Host: How much you wo-ant fuh it?
Caller: Fi-hunnert!
Host:  Fi-hunnert.
Caller: Yep.
Host:  Duz it run goo-ud?
Caller:  Whu-at?
Host:  Duz it run goo-ud?
Caller:  Duz it run goo-ud?  I’ll tell you whu-at!
Host:  Aw-raht!  Whu-atz yo-ah numbah?
Caller: My whu-at?
Host:  Yo-ah telly-phone numbah?
Caller: Oh, yea-uh.  It’s seh-ven-oh-nah-yun, ay-ut-three-foh-ah (click, followed by silence because the lady switched her phone to the left hand while standing out in the driveway in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, trying to get a signal on her cell phone).

So that kind of programming on goes on every day from twelve to three p.m.  Aside from that one station, there’s only one other station that comes in everywhere.  It’s the PBS station from the University of Maryland.  As far as I can tell, they play jazz bass solos 24 hours a day.  I’m serious.  If you randomly turn on the radio on that frequency at any hour of the day or night, the station is playing the upright bass solo from some straight-ahead jazz quartet in the 1950s.  I’m a big jazz fan, but the bass solo of most classic jazz tunes is where the drummer quiets down so the upper register of the bass can be heard and the pianist plinks a few oblique triads here and there so the audience knows that something is supposed to be happening during this interlude.  The station only has one deejay who hasn’t been outside of the station for six years.  He talks like he has a mouthful of gym socks. He mumbles through his soliloquies between the bass solos and I can occasionally make out a familiar name, like Charlie Parker or Thelonius Monk.  The rest is unintelligible.  Not only does he not enunciate his words, but he is close enough to the microphone that his lips make a smacking sound when he talks.

So in this 21st century, while the rest of the world is enjoying the luxury of modern technology, we out here in rural America are still wondering when the benefits of it will reach us.  Yes, we have cell phones, texting, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, TiVo, DirecTV, Dish Network, and everything else you have in your newfangled, big city.  However, when you’re trying to reach us on the phone or on the Internet, you have to give us some extra time.  We might be waiting for the Internet to come back after a distant rumble of thunder or we might still be trudging down to the end of the driveway with our ringing cell phone in hand before we can answer your call.

Is President Obama trying to start a revolution?

We’ve seen him on video, during the campaign.  Then-Senator Obama stated that he wanted to “fundamentally transform” the United States.  At the time, people thought it was just campaign rhetoric.  They thought the same when he said that, under his energy plan of “Cap and Trade,” electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket.”  Similarly, they assumed it was just more hyperbole when he said he wanted to establish a civilian security force that would be as well-armed and well-financed as the Department of Defense.

My sense of alarm was heightened at each of those statements.  Who in his right mind would vote for a president who wanted to change America’s fundamentals, jack up energy prices, and establish another department as expensive as the Pentagon?  Think about it.  America is a fundamentally free, capitalistic nation.  Change those fundamentals and what do you have?  An communistic slave state.  If your electric bill in this heat wave we’re experiencing this summer is already $300, do you want it to be $600?  Do you want gas to be $7 a gallon?  Considering the billions of dollars spent on fighting foreign wars and paying for $900 hammers and toilet seats, do we really want another department that spends money that way?

Since being in office, Obama has appointed several admitted tax cheats to his cabinet.  He brought in a bunch of “czars” to be advisers and policy makers who were never confirmed by Congress.  The background of many of them would preclude them ever getting a government security clearance.  They are known and professed Marxists, Maoists, and radicals.

Obama forced a government takeover of General Motors, forced Wall Street banks into silence over his policies, and made the CEO of General Electric his jobs czar.  Oh yes, and GE is cornering the market on the whole “green jobs” thing and turned a record profit and paid no taxes whatsoever on it.  In the GM deal, he forced shareholders to take a back seat to his union thug supporters, which violated contract law and the Constitution.

You recall that Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, dropped all the charges against two Black Panthers who stood outside polling places in Philadelphia (yes, the City of “Brotherly Love”) with military garb and brandishing nightsticks on election day in 2008.  Of course, this same Eric Holder is the one who brought suit against the Amish for selling raw milk.

The whole birther thing has been so mishandled by the White House that we can only assume that it’s intentional.  Everybody born in the US has a birth certificate.  You can’t enroll a kid in school or sign him up for Boy Scouts without a birth certificate.  The Obama Administration has simply prolonged the intrigue over this issue by releasing not one, but two bogus birth certificates, after nearly two years of saying it didn’t exist.  The last one released can be easily determined to be a fake by anyone with some Adobe software.  A scanned document doesn’t have layers that can be moved around at will.  We can only assume that they want the controversy to continue.

Then there are the vacations and the parties.  America has been steadily declining towards Depression-era conditions, but the Obamas take a vacation every time they turn around.  Michelle went on a lavish vacation in Spain only to go to Brazil to vacation with her husband to recover from the previous vacation.  This vacation took place; coincidentally, as the radiation from the Japanese earthquake-damaged reactors was going to drift over the East Coast.  The Obamas regularly throw fetes for the Hollywood elite and their supporters at the White House.  And of course there’s the golf.  Obama has already played more rounds of golf that G.W. Bush did in eight years!  It reminds me of King Noah in the Book of Mormon, who built lavish palaces and lived in indolent splendor, paid for by the burdensome taxation of his people.

Obama and his cronies shoved two stimulus bills down our throat, socialized medicine, and two rounds of the Fed’s “quantitative easing” (read: printing fiat money that diminishes the value of the dollar).  Stimulus money largely went to foreign banks and was selectively used as a Democratic party slush fund to finance various social programs, gay-education textbooks that cost $2000 apiece, and community organizer groups.

Now, we’ve got headlines about reaching the debt limit.  The USA can’t borrow any more money legally.  The Prez doesn’t have a plan.  He rejects bi-partisan plans from Congress because they don’t include a half-billion dollar tax increase on “the rich” (interpreted as people who make more than $30,000 a year).  Meanwhile, he pledged $30 billion to help bail out Greece, which is money we have to borrow to begin with!  As the August 2nd deadline looms, the markets are jittery and the US credit rating could be downgraded, sparking runaway inflation.  I’m talking Zimbabwe-like inflation.  Got your wheelbarrow ready to carry the cash necessary to by a loaf of bread? (That’s assuming there will be bread!)

Finally, the President told Latino supporters at a campaign rally the other day that it is “tempting” to just do things himself rather than deal with the representatives of the people in Congress.  He is tempted to exercise dictatorial powers?  Liberal newsmen and women, along with progressive members of his own party, are calling for him to just invoke the 14th amendment and order the raising of the debt limit without the consent of Congress.

Amidst all this, his popularity is at an all-time low.  Any unnamed Republican beats him in an “if the election were held today” poll.  His own supporters are not behind him anymore, although some of them feel he simply hasn’t moved fast enough to force socialism on us.  He is quickly becoming the most detested president since Jimmy Carter.  At least Nixon went to China and ended Vietnam.

Never has the US citizenry been so polarized, discontent, and irritable.  All it needs before it explodes is some “Reichstag Fire” moment.  What will that be?  Perhaps he’ll stall on the debt ceiling and cause the US to go into default, vetoing honest, bipartisan legislation to prevent that from occurring.  He and his minions have already planted the fear that Social Security and welfare checks won’t go out.  The first time that happens, Los Angeles, Oakland, Detroit, New York, Philly, Atlanta, and Baltimore will be in flames.  Perhaps then he’ll send out his army of well-armed, well-trained brownshirts from Homeland Security to start knocking heads.

The level of dismay and outrage is at the boiling point.  What will cause it to boil over?  I can’t say, but it could be any number of things.  I can only surmise, by his actions–because Obama is not a careless or thoughtless man–that this is his plan.  His quest to fundamentally change America involves driving it into revolution.  He and his radical comrades believe that this revolution, in a Hegelian manner, will result in a synthesis into a socialist or communist structure.

Mormon prophets and apostles in the 19th century foresaw and wrote about what would befall America.  Moses Thatcher said that a “secret band will sap the life of this nation.”  Orson Pratt saw and described in great detail “civil wars” that will cause the functions of civil society to fail.  Trade, industry, agricultural activity will cease when this happens.  The saints will be forced to flee to places of refuge.  For those who have rejected the warnings of the prophets, they will not fare very well at all.

I can’t help but to see that these things are at the doors.  May God bless and help us to stay true to his commandments and his Son, Jesus Christ.

Adventures in physical therapy

Several months ago, I broke my knee in judo class.  I say, “broke my knee,” because its less complicated than trying to explain exactly what happened to it.  What happened to it was roughly the same as what happens to a turkey drumstick when you try to wrench it off the bird’s roasted carcass.  It made exactly the same sound, too.

After spending about three months in a leg immobilizer, I welcomed the chance to start physical therapy.  My leg had atrophied quite a bit and I thought it would feel good to be able to just bend my leg again.  I was wrong.

Perhaps it was my mistake to tell them that it was my intention to return to judo.  Judo requires a certain amount of athleticism and strength beyond just having to walk to the freezer to get some ice cream.  Thus the exercises I do while I’m there seem to be a bit more strenuous than the exercises the other patients are doing.

The therapist’s treatment room is more like a medium-sized workout center.  There are stationary bikes, a treadmill, a universal gym, some hand weights, and a few odd instruments of torture.  I usually arrive around 8 o’clock for my therapy sessions and I’m usually escorted to a stationary bike where I spend the next ten minutes or so.  From there, I can survey the room and see what the other folks are doing with their therapists.At any given time, there are probably at least a half-dozen other patients in for treatment.  There are a few ladies in their seventies getting shoulder rubs for bursitis.  There’s a teenage girl recovering from a sprained ankle.  One lady I know was recently in a car accident and she gets treatments for her neck, shoulder, and back.  While these patients leisurely lie on padded tables getting their shoulders and necks massaged, my therapist calls me over to a table where he has me lie face down and tries to make the heel of my right leg touch the back of my head.

From there, it’s downhill for the rest of the next hour and a quarter.  While a Mexican man with a shoulder injury stands in a doorway raising a two-pound hand weight to the top corner of the door frame, I am sitting on a stool with about 80 pounds of weights strapped to my leg doing curls.  Then I have to sit on a rolling stool and pull myself around the room for two laps.  While the lady across from me is gently practicing standing on her toes, I am standing on one leg (the injured one) on a “shuttle balance.”  The “shuttle balance” is a flat board suspended from a metal frame on four corners by a series of ropes.  When you step on it, it shifts from side to side, front to back, at every possible angle.  With my bad leg, I am standing on one foot, knee bent, and told not to hang on to the sides–just balance on this multidirectional teeter-totter and not fall off it.  The lady doing toe-ups looks at me pitifully.

After some squats, lunges, and stepping up and down onto a wooden step-box, my therapist guides me to a little “mini-trampoline” where I have to do one-legged squats on the bouncy, unstable surface of the trampoline, touching a Nerf football to points on the trampoline equating to 12, 3, and 9 o’clock positions relative to my body position.  At this point, my right leg is almost exhausted.  It shakes and wobbles and it’s all I can do to stand on one foot.  The sweat pours off of me and I ask for a paper towel or a washcloth to wipe my face.  As the therapist goes to get a washcloth, the other patients getting their massages look at me warily, as if I was a troublesome prison inmate who pissed-off the warden.  I can see it in their eyes, like something out of an old movie, “You shouldn’t have done it, Greg.  Nobody escapes from the Rock.”

When you go the gym for an hour, you generally work out your whole body.  You lift weights, you run, you work the abs, the arms, the chest, the legs, and everything else.  For me, physical therapy is approximately 75 minutes devoted to one single set of muscles that support my knee.  After the first hour, I can hardly walk.  Nevertheless, my therapist takes me over to the treadmill and off I go at a good clip for the next 10 minutes, followed my another couple hundred one-legged squats on an inclined bench.

Finally, after I’m completely drenched with sweat and I hobble over to a table where they put my leg on ice for about five minutes.  The other patients are wearing the clothes they planned to wear to work that day.  I’m in shorts and a t-shirt thankfully, because I am soaked.  My hair is drenched and my clothes are soaked through.  I’m like one of those gross guys at the gym who forgets to wipe down the weight machine after “sliming” it with sweat during my turn on it.  The ice pack feels great to my leg.  I just wish they had one that would cover my whole body.

When I get home, I limp to the shower and clean up for work.  When I get to work, I hobble up the stairs to my office and someone asks, “What happened?  You’re limping again?”  I realize that, for the past week, since I recovered from my last therapy session, I wasn’t limping.  I’m sure this is all a necessary process, but it seems that there is a never-ending array of torments yet to be discovered at the hands of my therapists.  Next week, I’ll probably have to jump up and down on the mini tramp on one leg, with the other leg touching the back of my head and my nose touching my butt–while carrying hand weights and whistling “Dixie.”

I guess it’s the price I have to pay to get in condition for judo again.  I asked my therapist when it is that I cross the finish line and “graduate” back to normalcy.  He said there is a questionnaire that tells them where I am in my progress.  It was part of the process of registering as a patient.  They’ll compare the later one to the initial one to see how i’m doing.  All I know is that, when I get to fill out that paper again, I’m going to tell them that everything is working fine now.  Can I walk on an even surface without pain?  Check!  Can I run on an uneven surface without pain?  Check!  Can I bend over and touch the back of my head with my foot while jumping up and down on a stationary bicycle, on a mini trampoline on an uneven surface?  Check!   I don’t know for sure, but you never know when that might come in handy for judo. All I do know is that my insurance only pays for 20 physical therapy visits, so the end is near.  Deliverance is nigh!

Busted: Generation Jones

I read an article this morning with the headline “Medicare, Social Security Funds Expiring Sooner, U.S. Says.” Wonderful.  Just wonderful.

I’m 51, soon to be 52.  That’s a mere 13 years out from my turn to collect social security.  Experts have been telling us for years that the social security fund would go broke.  It’s a Ponzi scheme that will go bust just before folks my age start to collect.

Although it has been common to labely folks my age “baby boomers,” the term doesn’t really fit.  If you look at the various generations that demographers look at you’ll see a disparity:

Baby Boom generation – 1940-1964 (24 years)
Generation X – Mid-1960s through the mid-1970s (approximately 10 years)
Generation Y – Early 1980s-late 1990s (again, approximately 10 years)

Why is it that the boomers have a generation of 24 years and the others only comprise a narrow band of about a decade?  Did somebody get left out?  They sure did.  That would be my generation.

You see, I’m not a baby boomer.  That is my parents’ generation.  My mother was born in 1940 and my father was born in 1941.  So how is it that I’m in the same generation as them?  My parents grew up in the “Happy Days.” Remember Ritchie and the Fonz?  My dad had a green zoot suit and a pair of shoes with glow-in-the dark soles.  .  My mom recalls sock hops and dancing the jitterbug.  They loved Roy Orbison, the Platters, John Wayne, Doris Day, and My Mother the Car.  On Sunday Nights, we watched Ed Sullivan and Hee Haw.  Like the money in social security, none of that belonged to me.

I never felt like a baby boomer.  My parents were more like their parents.  They looked at the generation that came after theirs–the hippies–as a bunch of freaks.  My dad wore his hair military short and he had an “America love it or leave it” bumper sticker on the car.  He despised the draft-card-burning longhairs with the bell bottom pants and love beads.

Demographers stuck my generation in with that generation of hippies, but we really didn’t belong there.  During the Summer of Love in 1967, the Tet Offensive in 1968, and Woodstock in 1969, I was respectively 8, 9, and 10 years old.  I was too young to understand the social upheavals that were convulsing in America.  The closest I got to them was a field trip to Washington, D.C. in 1968 where we saw firsthand a riot where the National Guard arrived in helicopters and busted the heads of the hippies with their billy clubs.  Otherwise, I had a placid childhood in the lower middle-class watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating sandwiches made on Wonder Bread.

Sergeant Pepper, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix were before my time.  I learned about them later, after they had become history.  I always wondered why people said “Clapton is God.” I figured that out later.  My generation never had a cause that we got behind, that defined us.  We didn’t have to stop a war in Vietnam.  We didn’t have a civil rights movement.  Nixon was gone.  The environment was not our issue.  If anything, we grew up in idyllic ignorance.  If anything defined our generation, it was Gerald Ford–a guy who was kind of a place-holder.  That’s what we were.  Place-holders.

My brother-in-law is this great guy who was in on every hip trend.  By virtue of fate, his birth in 1951 placed him at the perfect age for every major trend that defined his generation.  He would have entered adulthood around 1967-1968 and had to have experienced angst over the draft.  He was probably deeply affected by the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  My wife said he had love beads in college.  He got married in a Bhuddhist ceremony (cool, huh?).  Later, he was fully into the jaded abandon of the disco era. He was into “We are the World,” Live-Aid, and Farm-Aid.  He was enmeshed in the heart of everything that defined his generation.

I have learned that demographers have only recently begun to identify a “Generation Jones.” That; apparently, is my generation, born between 1954 and 1965.  The name comes from the phrase “Keep up with the Joneses.” There’s also the aspect of yearning or craving–”jonesing” so to speak.  It implies that the folks in Generation Jones were raised to have huge expectations in our youth, only to face a different reality when we grew up.

I remember getting the Weekly Reader in elementary school.  It was a little newspaper for kids.  It always had pictures of amazing inventions that would exist in the 21st century.  There was a show on television, hosted by Walter Cronkite, called the 21st century.  Those two things planted the expectation of a future with cities on the moon, flying cars, personal jet packs, or televisions that would cover an entire wall.  Of course, they didn’t mention that a person with a lower middle-class income could never afford any of those things without going up to his eyeballs in debt.  They didn’t tell us that our parents’ generation–the Baby Boomers–would devour up all the resources like a swarm of locusts and not re-plant for the future.

Generation Jonesers were the responsible ones.  We were the demographic bump that put Reagan into office and Newt’s Contract with America over the top.  That’s because, when we turned 18, instead of the Tet Offensive, we were feeling Jimmy Carter’s “malaise.” Instead of hot rods like the Happy Days’ generation enjoyed, we had Ford Pintos and even-odd day gas rationing.  Whereas our parents could buy a new car for $2,000 and a nice home for $10,000, our cars and homes would cost $20,000 and $100,000.  Unfortunately, wages didn’t increase by a factor of ten and the taxes simply took a bigger chunk of our income through the bracket creep of inflation.

When I was in my early 20s, Jimmy Carter’s malaise collided with Reagan’s recession.  I joined the military to get a job because there were none to be found and college was too expensive.  Somehow, though I was married, they still wanted my parents’ income figures to factor in financial aid for college.  My parents made “too much” money for me to qualify, even though I was flat broke and working for $3.65 an hour.  In the military, they had just phased out the Vietnam Era GI Bill for education benefits and the Montgomery GI bill hadn’t come into existence yet.  In the interim, they had a pay-and-match education benefit that a married E-1 couldn’t afford, so I ended up in the gap with no GI Bill at all.  That’s another one of the timing problems associated with being a Generation Joneser.  It took me 10 years, doing it one course at a time, to get an Associate’s Degree while working, getting military training, traveling, and raising a family.  It took even longer for the Bachelor’s.

Of course, I’m not totally ungrateful.  Our generation did get cell phones and the Internet.  Of course, with my over-50 eyeballs, I can’t hardly see the buttons or touch screens on the newest phones, so they made one called the JitterBug for us.  The Internet has enabled humanity to do what it does best–quarrel–with hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously.  The technology still isn’t completely mature, which keeps me employed fixing the darn computers for doctors and nurses.  One of the Generation X doctors (the generation after me) complained that he lost 12 minutes waiting for me to fix his computer for him the other day.  When a 12-minute break-fix response isn’t good enough to suit a person, that’s really unfortunate.  After working on computers all day long, I come home and write, do homework, chat with my family, and annoy people on Facebook on a computer.  Thank goodness for my church duties and judo, which keep me somewhat sane–that is, until the computer at church breaks and I have to fix it for the clerks.  But, I digress.

Generation Jones is essentially split into two sub-generations.  Some of us were raised by conservative, patriotic, mom-and-apple pie Americans and the other half was raised by liberal, hippy types who burned their bras and their draft cards, who wallowed in the mud at Woodstock and loved every minute of it.  That divide is what splits our society now.  Some of us grew up in homes where we pledged allegiance to the flag and others who wanted to burn it.  Each of us feels entitled to a particular future, but those visions of the future clash.  It’s why we are so divided now.

America finally has its first Generation Jones president: Barack Obama.  He aptly represents everything about our generation that marks it as a lost, or phantom generation.  He doesn’t have a birth certificate–at least not one that doesn’t have several moveable layers when you look at it with Adobe Aftereffects.  In his case, he is a child of hippies, not the conservative variety.  His father was an African Marxist. His mother was a loose hippy chick. His stepfather was an Indonesian Muslim, He was raised by his “typical white person” grandparents, and mentored by communists.  Like our entire generation, he voted “present” more than he took a stand for anything.  He has great expectations, but not the means to realize them without breaking the bank.

As I return to the headline that started this train of thought–the looming bankruptcy of social security–I feel acutely the sense of America being busted, bankrupt, and broke.  The American dream of endless progress and prosperity is gone.  Later today, I’ll talk on the phone to my baby boomer mother, who is now 71.  She’ll tell me about the two or three doctor visits she made this week (paid for by Medicare).  She’ll complain about the $250 she spent on getting her dog’s grooming and teeth-cleaning (paid from her fixed income from social security and a survivor benefit from the Coast Guard).  She’ll complain about gas prices, food prices, and the $5,000 price tag of some work she had done to her expensive home.

Meanwhile, I work two jobs and still wonder how I’m going to be able to afford the increase in our health insurance costs that they announced at work this week.  My wife and I live very modestly, exercising extreme thrift.  There have been years at a time where I have worked for companies that didn’t offer health insurance at all and we couldn’t afford to buy it privately–so we just did without it.  We don’t take vacations, We drive old cars (a 1991 and a 1984!) We look for deals in thrift stores,  Our house payment is fully half of what my mother’s house payment is.  When the market tanked in 2007 the paltry value of our 401k dropped like a rock. That event, combined with the jump in health insurance premiums forced us to stop putting money into a retirement account that was going down every month.  I think the last statement showed that, when we reach retirement age, we’ll be able to withdraw something like $65 a month from it.  Now, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (the one who can’t figure out how to work TurboTax, but who is THE man to run an entire economy) tells us that social security will be bankrupt just a few years before I can expect to start drawing benefits.  Wonderful. Just wonderful.

It wasn’t that we didn’t work hard.  It wasn’t that we were slackers and expected the world to be handed to us.  We went out and worked, served, and did our best.  It’s just the fact that there is a finite amount of resources available to us and the Baby Boomers are still feasting at the table while the rest of us are waiting for the leftovers.  The big question is: will there be anything left when they’re done.  Perhaps I am just disillusioned to be in the first American generation that cannot count on having it better than our parents did.  It’s just that they are still consuming the resources without regard to the damage that they have done to the future–and they’re still at the table, ordering from the menu, knowing that the bill is never going to come due for them.  It is us who are paying their tab. When they finally finish, we’ll be washing dishes in the kitchen for a very long time to come.

A pair of red ‘Logger’s World’ suspenders

I wanted to take some time and record a memory before all the details fade.  This memory plays a large part of how I came to call Ketchikan, Alaska home, even though I was born, raised, and lived a good chunk of my life in Virginia.

I was 15 years old when the Coast Guard transferred my father to Ketchikan.  I was never more excited about anything in my young life.  Alaska just sounds like the greatest adventure a teenaged boy can imagine–and it was.  On a 10-day trip through many of the states (I had never been farther north or west than Cleveland) we saw Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, and other sights along the way.  We drove through Canada and took a huge ferry from Prince Rupert, B.C. in Canada to Ketchikan.  As we passed by the islands in the Inside Passage, Ketchikan rolled into view and I was sold instantly.

Because of our travels, I settled into school a couple of weeks late in September.  It was great making new friends and getting to know the town.  My parents gave me an unprecedented amount of freedom there because the town was small, there was virtually no crime, and the area was very safe.

A couple of months into my sophomore year, (it must have been 1974 or so) there was a buzz going on in school about some hearings.  Many of the students displayed some degree of anxiety over these hearings.  I knew very little about the economy of the town, but I soon learned that the town depended on Ketchikan Pulp Company, otherwise known as the pulp mill, for its economic survival.  Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided that they would have to either install some prohibitively expensive pollution controls or shut down their operation.  If that were to occur, many men would lose their jobs–not only those who worked at the mill, but also the loggers, businesses, storekeepers, teachers, and others who depended on the cashflow from the mill in the community.

I also learned that the federal government had sent a judge to Ketchikan to hold hearings about the impact the regulations would have on the town and its people.  Since the only place large enough to hold the hearings was the high school auditorium, three days were set aside for them.  During the school day, the teachers skipped the assignments and took us to the greatest civics lesson we could ever see.  All day long and into the evening hours, a black-robed judge sat at a table hearing testimony of ordinary citizens about how their business or their families would suffer from the impact if the government forced the mill to close.

It was a watershed moment to me.  Typical of the thinking of a 15 year-old, self-interest was my first concern.  I thought about how it would affect me and my family.  My father was in the Coast Guard, so his job wasn’t at risk.  I would still have food, clothing, shelter, etc.  If Ketchikan closed up as a town; however, I would be sorely disappointed.  I had come to love the place and the adventure it represented to me.  Going back to Virginia or some other “civilized” place would be really a disappointment.  When my father got the orders for Ketchikan, he had selected it from a list that included Governor’s Island, New York.  If we had been transferred there, I would have had to go to school in Manhattan.  I don’t think I would have survived.

As I listened to the hours of testimony, I came to have great empathy for these good people.  I also came to see the federal government as a regulatory monster, heartlessly willing to destroy lives and livelihoods without regard to the human cost.  One of the most moving moments to me was when when of the elders of the Native American clans came to testify.  He explained how his people had subsisted for years from salmon fishing.  He complained that the government had all but shut the salmon industry down because of almost immeasurable quantities of mercury in the ocean.  Then, he recounted that the government had lifted the mercury-related fishing ban, but now they wanted to shut down the mill for environmental reasons as well.  The elderly Indian asked, “Where did the mercury go?” The crowd in the packed auditorium rose to its feet and applauded.

During those three days of hearings, I came to care deeply about the place and the people there.  The situation touched a chord that rang out against injustice.  It left me a changed person.  On the final day, we all went down to hear the judge’s final statements before he adjourned the hearings.  He explained that he would be returning to Washington to finish his deliberations and that a final report would be issued in about 30 days.  You could feel a silent, collective groan being suppressed by everyone there.  The judge spoke of how moving the testimony had been from the townspeople, the fishermen, the loggers, the mill employees, businessmen, teachers, and even some of the students.  He explained that he had an obligation to be impartial and to not let his feelings interfere with his application of the law.  Then, almost coyly, as he explained these qualifiers, he arose from his ersatz bench and unzipped his black robe, revealing a pair of red “Logger’s World” suspenders.  I don’t remember–I don’t think anyone remembers–what else he said at that point, because the entire auditorium erupted in cheers.  I’m sure the transcript of the hearing doesn’t indicate that any premature decision was rendered, but we all knew what his verdict would be.  The people of Ketchikan had saved their town.  There were tears and hugs all around.  And in that moment, I became one of them.

The pulp mill didn’t close for another 10 or 15 years.  By then, Ketchikan managed to get tourism established as their mainstay.  I’m sure it was a tough transition.  Unfortunately I was not there to witness it.  I left town shortly after graduation and life has never taken me back any closer than Ketchikan.  I still dream of walking those streets, seeing the mountains, and smelling the salty, slightly fishy air.

It is a remarkable memory to me.  It taught me that people can prevail over bureaucrats and that government can be responsive and compassionate.  Over the years, the details have become quite fuzzy, but the emotions of the events are still quite clear.  It was a defining moment in my life and perhaps the lives of many of my friends who still live there today.

What I love about judo

My 12 year-old son is just starting judo and he recently earned his first promotion. It was great to see the pride in his eyes for his accomplishment when he received his yellow belt. I love that judo gives us a common bond of something we can enjoy together. I love that he will come to appreciate the value of learning principles like jita kyoei (mutual welfare and benefit). I like how he evaluates his performance in randori (free play) and asks me for suggestions to improve. The whole self-evaluation process and the reflection it brings will make him a better person.

I love it when we get to spend time quizzing each other on the Japanese terms. Sometimes we get laughing at our horrible pronunciation. We both cracked up trying to figure out why the term hiki wake means “a tie or draw match” and the word wake by itself means “armpit.”  What’s the connection there?   It’s always fun.

He also gets to see me deal with stiff joints, soreness, getting slammed to the mat and getting back up again, and even a current injury. It teaches him that determination, setting goals, overcoming opposition, and enduring discomfort is a part of life.

And the greatest of all are those moments like the other night, when he pulled off a perfect left-handed ukigoshi (floating hip throw) as a counter on a much larger opponent during randori. He had learned the throw a couple of weeks ago, but I taught him how to use it from the left side after an attack. After the match, he looked back over to me with that expression that says, “Did you see that, Dad?” Yes, I did see it. It was fantastic. That’s what I love about judo.