The Kudzu Files

The Christian Left left?

A comment in response to a post on Dean's World brought me back to this subject. Here's the comment:

" I keep thinking the old-guard Christian Dems- Catholics and Baptists come to mind- and wonder what they think of their party now."

This is something I've often thought about. The Republican/conservative/religious right believes you don't solve a problem by throwing money at it. They believe the Federal government isn't capable of being an effective solution. But what do you call the hundreds of billions of dollars the US spends on defense each year? I'm certainly not opposed to defense spending, but defense is simply another Federal program. When a military base is kept open because it's closure would have a negative effect on the local economy (and don't kid yourself; the local demonstrations we see when the Base Closure Committee visits are orchestrated as surely as any protests), that's welfare, not defense. We have no need for hundreds of military bases scattered around the country, but we keep them open anyway. The churches should take care of the poor? Sure, I agree, but the reason the government got involved is because the churches failed to do this. And they still fail. Look at your local church budget. I fought this battle in a church I once attended. The money spent to build and maintain our temples of holiness far, far, far exceeds moneys spent to help even the local poor. Do we need church buildings? Yes. Do we need them as fancy as we build them? I think not.

However - however - I don't really blame the "religious right" for moves such as this. They certainly have the right to push their ideas for solutions to our problems. You read your Bible, you contemplate the light God has given you. I do the same. We come up with different solutions, based on the same source of information. God made us all different. Where I place the blame is on people like me who try to live as Christians, and who tend to believe in "liberal" solutions - i.e., a strong Federal role in environmental protection, because we are stewards of God's world; who see that the government of a country as
rich and blessed as the United States, a government of, by, and for the people, could and should ensure that children have a solid roof over their heads and a decent diet. Quite honestly, I couldn't care less about people who refuse to work, who want to exist on public dollars without contributing anything to society. But I haven't seen a solution that punishes them without also punishing the children that live with them. "Right to life" implies more to me than just picketing clinics and screaming slogans - a child that is born is a child that
must be clothed and fed and housed. And if the parent won't, or can't, provide for that child, *we must*! The Federal government is admittedly a poor channel as presently constituted, but it's the only game in town if we want a consistent response throught our nation. So in my mind, to "feed my sheep" as Christ commanded, we must have a strong Federal role. But, (returning to where my point was originally going) Christian liberals have failed to speak up, and offer alternatives to a system that has obviously failed to produce the desired results. Many "Christian" liberals have wasted energy and testimony by chasing issues that appeal to many liberal agendas but cannot be defended as Christian issues, to the point that they are scarcely recognizable as Christian. *These* are the people I blame - where once they defended civil rights from a
scriptural basis, they now defend it from what seems to be humanist principles. Where once they proclaimed "This is my Father's world", they now proclaim Gaia. And we shouldn't stand idly by while the Democratic Party is threatened by a humanist agenda that is too often actively hostile to Christians.

If you could read my mind

If you could, you'd know that, in my opinion, not that many songs have been written the past 35 years that were better than Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind". And "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" isn't all that far behind.

Emerson the Stargazer

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

Excerpted from “Nature“, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

More blog/mysql maintenance

Another spamstorm tonight, about 30 spam comments in a 10-15 minute time frame. Rather than delete them one at a time, it's easier to just run mysql delete queries:

DELETE FROM `mt_comment` WHERE comment_author = 'online casino';

An Open Letter To John Kerry

Dear Mr. Kerry:

As you prepare for the upcoming Democratic Convention, I'm sure you're wondering what you can do to enhance your chances for election in November. I'm sure you've been meeting with all sorts of traditional Democratic power players over the past few weeks, and no doubt you'll continue to do so in the coming weeks. I'm sure their input will be a significant part of the platform-building process. You didn't ask me what I thought, so I'm taking this opportunity to offer some ideas.

1) Take everything they say and toss it. I've just finished skimming the Democratic platofrms of 1996 and 2000. To a good liberal voter like me, these platforms say: Nothing. They're feel-good laundry lists of political theorists. Good for printers, useless for people seeking a reason to support you.

2) Avoid like the plague words and phrases like "empower", "invest in people", and "valuing". Nobody knows what these mean, but they sound squishy, not tangible. People relate to tangible things.

3) Don't talk about "rolling back the Bush tax cuts". That's a loser from the get-go. Even the people who didn't get much of a tax cut at all think they got one. So they think you're going to raise their taxes. If your plan will result in people making over $200,000 paying more taxes, then say so.

4) Don't try to cover every interest in the party with a platform plank all it's own. That plays right into the hands of those who say the Democratic Party is captive to special interest groups. Concentrate on the big issues. Paint in broad strokes. Make the platform look like a Grand Plan, not a punch-list for liberals.

5) Make the platform relevant to people individually. That's the way they'll vote. Blocs don't vote. People do. It's that tangible thing again. The Grand Plan has to be a Personally Relevant Grand Plan.

6) This is maybe the most important thing: don't be afraid to kick butt. There was a time when, regardless of whether the President was liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, other countries knew that the United States was not afraid to exert military force. At the core of both sets of political beliefs was an understanding that there are just some things worth fighting against, and some things worth fighting for. There are many in the United States today who aren't sure Democrats still hold to that. Those are the people you need to reach. But before you try, make sure you've figured out for yourself what's worth fighting against, and worth fighting for. And here's a hint: put that at the top of the platform, not the bottom.

Sincerely,
Harry

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

Camping again

Kudzu Files is gone camping for a few days.

Logging The Bushes

You have to hand it to the Bush Administration - they're masters at doing unpopular things and shifting the blame to somebody else. Now it's the National Forests. Under the guise of giving the states more authority, Bush is actually putting the forests in the hands of logging companies. Here's why:

- the Roadless Area Conservation Rule was put in place in the final days of the Clinton Administration (following more than 2 million official public comments, 95% favoring the proposed rule), which forbid the construction of raods in previously roadless parts of the national forests except in very specific and rare circumstances

- on July 12, the Bush Administration eliminated this rule, ostensibly to allow cutting of damaged and dead trees to prevent wildfires. But who will determine if a tree is damaged or dead?

- these areas would be automatically opened to road-building and logging unless the governor of the state petitions the Forest Service to continue the prohibition.

-but the Forest Service official who will rule on these petitions is Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment Mark Rey, who for 20 years before joiing the administration was a lobbyist for groups like the National Forest Products Association, American Forest Resources Alliance and the American Forest And Paper Association.

So what we have is a shifting of the blame - if the governor petitions successfully to prevent roadbuilding and logging, his next election opponent has a built-in campaign issue, along with a wealthy group of contributors waiting to throw cash his or her way. And the President has neatly allowed the Forest Service to abdicate it's responsibility to manage the national forests. After all, what good is a tree if you can't cut it down?

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

Return of the possum

Real Live Preacher had raccoons. Some people would think raccoons are cute, although RLP's experience, and our experiences camping around raccoons would lower their cute factor. RLP has a good series of stories about them, for what it's worth. Possums, on the other hand, are ugly, nasty creatures that nobody except possibly another possum would find at all cute. And possums are what life has chosen to throw my way.

It started lasy year. I'm sure the construction of several new subdivisions nearby had something to do with it. But I don't understand why the possums pass up houses all around me, yards they have to cross, to end up in my yard, inside my fence. Biltmore goes absolutely berserk when he finds one. He's only 14 pounds, not much bigger if at all, but he's a vengeful beast when his yard is violated by a cat, or a possum. It happened four times last summer and fall, then stopped. I figured maybe the invasion was over. But I got suspicious a couple of weeks ago when my daughter said Biltmore had killed a big rat - but she couldn't produce a body. Biltmore only knows one way to attack. I've seen him get rats - he'll work them and work them, dashing in from behind and the side until he gets a shot at the back of the neck. When he does, he grabs the neck and snaps it, killing the rat pretty much instantly. It's actually pretty fascinating. But when you try this on a 10-pound possum, it's not so successful, since he generally can't snap them around the way he does a rat. So we end up with a battle royal for a while, until he gets enough of a grip to trigger the possum's one defense mechanism, the famous "play dead" maneuver. On Biltmore, this works perfectly, because once he thinks his foe is dead, he's finished with it. No playing with the corpse like a cat or a lab would do. He just walks off. Then I move in with a shovel and garbage can, scooping the possum and driving it down the road.

As I said, I thought maybe the invasion was over. Until tonight, when I realized that the furious barking I heard outside was coming from my back yard. I went out to find, indeed, another possum, with 14 pounds of fury darting all around it. It kept up for another 10 minutes before the possum went limp. So at 10:00, I was scooping a possum into a garbage can and going for a ride. Not my idea of Friday night excitement.

(Submitted for Beltway Traffic Jam)

Space Stuff

We left more than an American flag behind on the Moon.... nothing really surprising, but there's more there than you might expect.

While all the attention is focused on Saturn, those little Mars rovers just keep on chugging along.

And in the category of really forgotten space things, Voyager I is now 8,330,000,000 miles from Earth, or about 90 Astronomical Units (the AU is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun). Pioneer 10 has been traveling in space longer than Voyager I, but Voyager is traveling faster, and exceeded Pioner 10 in distance a few years ago. We are still in contact with Voyager, barely, but Pioneer went out of contact in April of 2002. Still, 30 years of transmitting back to Earth wasn't a bad feat.

Local government stupidity, continued

I've written before about the treehouse saga in Clinton, MS. To recap, a Clinton family built a really nice treehouse, not just for their kids but for the entire neighborhood. Clinton has always proclaimed itself as a family-oriented bedroom suburb of Jackson, the state capitol. But the city of Clinton declared this an accessory building and demanded that it be removed. A judge ruled against the city, but that hasn't stopped them. As ridiculous as it seems, Clinton is still fighting this. They're appealing it to the state Supreme Court. Go here to read about it.

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

"Nothing of importance happened today"

So wrote King George III of Great Britain, July 4, 1776. He was wrong, of course. But in the current atmosphere of bitter partisanship, elections decided more by the amount of money spent than by the issues of the candidates or the beliefs of the voters, an Administration that seems to be either deceptive, incompetent, or willfully ignorant, it's a little harder to dispute KG III's words than it was 228 years ago, or 100 years ago, or even 25 years ago. The idealism comes and goes, however. Certainly in the early 1950s, many felt that McCarthyism was in stark violation of the dream expressed by teh Declaration of Independence. But just a decade later, the United States had embarked on the greatest concrete expression of that dream in a century. So we should view the USA of 2004 not as a betrayal, but as a challenge to once again examine the beliefs that brought about this nation, and determine how to implement this present union in the light of a document written two centuries ago. As George Mason wrote a few weeks before the signing of the Declaration of Independence: "No free government, or the blessing of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

A few more Petit Jean pictures

This is Cedar Creek Falls, which fall down into a large open gorge. Note the people just to the right of the falls. It's several hundred feet down.

My favorite part of the park. Rock House Cave is actually just a huge overhang, but it's deep enough and high enough for perhaps 150 people to have taken shelter. It's south exposure meant that in the winter, the sun would have brough a welcome warmth, while the rock walls would have given shelter from the wind and elements. There are some drawings by Native Americans at the back of the cave. I'll put some pictures of them in another entry.

These were called Turtle Rocks, located just about Rock House Cave. The picture doesn't do the formation justice - standing just below them, it was easy to feel like you were watching a group of giant tortoises.

This little guy held still just long enough for me to get the picture

Pictures from Petit Jean SP

I spent a good bit of my time at Petit Jean hiking trails, although I never took the trail to the base of the falls. But I did take some pictures along the way:

We hiked down this trail to get to the bottom of the gorge. The steps were cut into the rocks by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s.

A fairly typical outcrop along the trail...

It always amazes me the way nature arranges things...

This was a small cave along the north wall of the canyon, big enough for a group of 5-6 people to shelter in.

Eyes on the prize

It was a very different time. And even though I drive over the same streets, and see the same buildings, it's hard to believe it was the same place. Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 simply wasn't a good place to be black. I was only 10, but there were things I didn't understand. Not that I questioned them at that time, but it registered that something wasn't quite right. The water fountains at the zoo were labeled "White" and "Black" (maybe "Colored" - I can't remember). The bus station had separate waiting areas for whites and blacks. Those restaurants that admitted blacks had a separate room for them, and the accomodations were certainly not equal. And there were incidents - grown men squirting mustard and ketchup on a black boy simply because he sat at a lunch counter. Humiliating him. Fire hoses and police dogs. Policemen beating unarmed people to the ground with billy clubs. And then there were the three people in Philadelphia. Philadelphia wasn't far from the towns where my grandparents lived. What had happened to those three men? As a white child in Mississippi, you only saw fragments of these things, and the inclination was to somehow just make them fit into a way of living that was just the way things were.

But somehow, in the face of what I now know were incredible dangers, in the face of a society that was prepared to kill to make sure black people accepted their status as second- or third-class citizens - not citizens, really, inhabitants - somehow, there were men and women who reached deep down, overcame their fears, and stood up to challenge that society. They did this knowing that they weren't just endangering themselves. They were placing their friends, their neighbors, their children, in mortal danger. For many whites believed that the law would never challenge them for things they did to suppress the blacks who did stand up, to knock them back down in a way that would send the message to other blacks - "Don't do that again!". And for so long, they were correct. Yet in the face of this, there were blacks (and whites) who did challenge the Way Of Life. I'm not sure, today, that we can truly understand just how amazingly brave these people had to be, the deep-seated, blinding terror that they had to stifle time after time. I just know that we owe them a debt that can never be repaid.

(Beltway Traffic Jam)