Why We Need Health Care (Part I)

In the hopes of contributing something to the debate over the direction our country should take in regards to Health Care and welfare programs in general I will be taking a few posts to attempt to discuss the assumptions and reasoning that underlie the belief in welfare in general. 
We begin with a basic problem, there is a vast disparity in wealth among Americans. While some have golden toilets, others have difficulty paying for their plumbing from month to month. While some charter private jets to fly from city to city, others cannot afford a car to drive to work. A portion of our society cannot afford the basics of life in modern America. This raises two questions.

1. Why are people deprived or lacking in basic necessities and comforts?
2. How do we go about fixing the problem.

The first question is perhaps most important but is often overlooked so we can talk about fixing the problem. Before we can determine a solution to the problem we first need to identify the cause. This points us toward one of the bottom level beliefs of liberalism that is so fundamental that it is rarely brought to the surface.

Man is basically good and is shaped by his environment. Thus when educated he can be enlightened and improved, but if left in poverty or surrounded by corruption then he will be almost unable to avoid damaging influence they will exert. 

Thus, an individual in poverty must be rescued from that state. He is nearly  powerless to remove himself from his environment because the environment itself is what shapes and motivates him. Thus, his existence in poverty cannot be his own fault. 

If it is not his own fault, then we must look around for what is creating the environment that is keeping people in poverty. The liberal usually falls back on the great socialist thinkers, the foremost of whom was Karl Marx,   and identifies Capitalism as the culprit. Capitalism is, fundamentally built on gaining wealth for oneself. The vast amounts of money that corporations and companies make must come from somewhere, and often that money comes from the private sector. For  example, take Wal-Mart. The company has built itself around selling base level goods at base level prices, and the majority of their income comes from low income people (like me!) who are unable or unwilling to pay more at other stores. Thus, when Walmart makes a billion dollars, that is a billion dollars that came from lower income families who cannot pay for medical or dental bills, for a car, or for insurance. And, to make it worse, when the CEO receives a 100,000 dollar bonus, that is a hundred thousand dollars in his bank account that came from people who make less than that in four years.

Thus, the culprit seems obvious, there is a lack of money in one area (the low income bracket), an abundance of wealth in another area (the CEO's bank account) and a clear path as to how the money got from one place to the other. The CEO is caught red handed.

Now that we know who caused the problem, we'll look at how to fix it next. 

Novelty Cannot Replace Quality

In my continuing quest to create a story that a few people might enjoy, I have spent not a little time reading books on how to write a book. Many of them have provided me with helpful insights, a few in particular have harped incessantly on the necessity of ‘surprising the reader’ and ‘being new’. So far this is all well and good, I enjoy being surprised by a clever plot twist, or a new type of character, but when the aforementioned books assert that without such, the book will not be read, I fear I must respectfully disagree.

A good work of art attracts attention either by its novelty or its quality. Novelty is easier to create than quality and has thus become, for many, the Holy Grail of art. So artists, writers, directors, etc. spend their time trying to outdo each other in novelty, usually by being ore and more grotesque, until grotesqueness ceases itself to be either novel or grotesque. Art today is a business, if you book, movie, or paintings don’t bring in money, then few people are interested in it, and when something becomes a business product, people try to find the way to produce something for as little as possible to sell it for as much as possible. An artist’s currency is time; novelty is quick and fast when compared to quality. Thus, quality has suffered. Novelty is just that, something new, and so when something ceases to be novel (when you’ve seen or read it), the essence of what made you enjoy the work of art is gone, then it has no pull on you. Novelty may create best sellers, but it cannot create classics by itself.

Well told stories, well made characters, however, do not grow old at nearly the same rate (Reading your favorite story, and nothing else for weeks on end will make you sick of it no matter how charming or fulfilling). Quality stories, quality characters are able to entertain for years on end, they have staying power. Part of what brought this to my mind was the number of movies that are remakes of stories and characters we already know: Iron Man (film adaptation of a comic series), Thor (film adaptation of a comic series) , Green Lantern (film adaptation of a comic series), The Green Hornet (film adaptation of a comic series), The A Team (Film adaptation of a TV Series), True Grit (Remake of a film adaptation of a book), The Eagle (Film adaptation of a book), I Am Number Four (Film adaption of a book). These films have done very well, and you cannot really argue that they succeeded because they pushed the envelope or were in some way vastly different from anything we had ever seen. In fact we already knew what most of them were going to be about.

A pursuit of novelty has contributed largely to the waste paper lining the Fantasy, Horror, and Sci-Fi sections at Barnes and Noble; it creates works that are fun to read once or twice but have no lasting value. Quality can overcome a lack of novelty and create a work that is fun to read and does not rely strictly on your desire to find out what happens next. A great work of course, includes both novelty and quality, but novelty must be servant, it makes a poor master.

Clearly!

Evolution is purely scientific, of course, nothing religious about it.

Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

This video really drives home the fact that evolution is a root of a larger philosophy that has something to say about everything. You can no more plug evolution into Christianity than you can plug theistic creation into atheism.

We Have Met the Enemy....And He is US!

In Pogo veritas est. What is art for if not to illuminate the plank residing within our optic organ. Today Tom Delay was sentenced to three years for money laundering. While it is true that there is much wrong with what the Democrats have been doing in the federal government for the last two years, it is to be expected that they will act the way they have. If we will follow our own moral code, the world will be far better off than if we spend our time screaming bloody murder when democrats in Washington spend like democrats (Drunken sailors, it has been pointed out, stop spending when they run out of money), when people in Hollywood make pornographic films, and when atheists write books that use atheistic logic.

If Republicans cut off pork barrel spending and ended Christmas tree bills just from their own party, that would have more effect on the deficit than any amount of yelling at Democrats. I am not equating Christianity with Republicanism, far from it. I am merely trying to point out that both Christians and Republicans have a tendency to spend too much time pointing fingers when there is plenty of work to be done in their own garden.

Beyond the obvious effect of making a number of almost clean gardens clean, fixing our own lives is part of being above reproach. Our calls for morality fall somewhat flat when people see how Christians behave toward each other. Machiavelli and the Medici could take a few tips from church politics today; I mean whatever happened to 'they shall know you by your love for one another'? Republicans have screamed and yelled about excess spending and immoral democrat practices and yet this past year multiple Republicans and Christians faced charges relating to improper use of money and improper sexual relations, charges that were not unfounded.

If we take care of ourselves, and exercise dominion over the resources that God has given to us, we will do more good for the world than any amount of finger wagging will do. People, strangely enough, are more effected by deeds than by words, yet it is words that most of us employ instead of actions.

Chivalry, Real and imagined.

I recently participated in a small discussion on whether or not chivalry was dead. As my former teacher Blake Moser would say, 'DEFINE!'. What do me mean by 'chivalry'. If we are referring to the code of conduct popularized by the Arthurian Romances written under Eleanor of Aquitaine, in which the knight is essentially the slave of all ladies he happens to come across, I would hesitantly agree that it is dead. I hesitate because I'm not sure if the thing was ever properly alive.

If on the other hand we refer to chivalry as simple good manners such as opening the door for a lady, giving up our seat on a crowded bus, paying when we go on a date, etc., then I think chivalry, while not in perfect health, is a ways from the grave. If I may be allowed to brag a bit, at Texas A&M, I see such acts on a regular basis.

But why would we even ask the question, why would we care about the health of chivalry? I believe that it is certainly ailing, and is under assault by many of the ideas and mindsets of today.

1. First, young men have to a degree, ceased to look at young women as equals who should be protected and valued for who they are. Sexual and emotional desires are the main reasons that young men pursue young women, and such desires leave no room for the selflessness that chivalrous behavior is an indicator of.
2. Second, many women have demanded that they be treated 'just like men'. That is about as reasonable as the Air Force demanding that they be treated like the Marines. Both services have vital missions, but to give the Air Force the kind of funding and equipment that the Corps lives on would seriously impair its ability to perform its mission, they need high tech equipment, millions of research dollars, and high flying planes. The Marines need rifles, bayonets, and some food every once in awhile. Men and women are equals, but they are not interchangeable.

Chivalry is a Christian institution. To Islam, a man opening a door for a woman is unthinkable. To naturalism a man opening a door for a woman is pointless unless the man is trying to get her into bed. Christianity gives both the man and the woman the inherent worth that makes such behavior honorable to both. Neither party is demeaned when chivalry takes place. The man is honored by his performance of it, and the woman is honored, for the man sees her as worth of such service.

Towers

If you decide to become a soldier in the war of ideals that has raged for all time, it is unfortunantly true that you will meet on the vast and varied landscape known as the human mind many people who are brilliant, but have erected towers of ignorance, powerful, imposing, and impervious to facts. In my own limited and short journeys have met several such towers, and no matter how much I hurled facts, figures, and witty quotations at them, they have continued to stand, tall and power, immune to all my arguments.

In a recent confrontation of this nature, I found myself wondering at thickness of the walls and the height of the tower that two gentlemen had erected, from which they poured abuse on an organization they next to nothing about and its failure to have any resemblance to a second organization which they knew nothing about either. Such towers are immensely infuriating to those they withstand, and I found myself devoting far too much time to constructing refutations of their utterances of nonsense. The problem with nonsensical utterances is that there are so many ways to refute them that you can often spend a great deal of time preparing attacks from every possible angle, when you will at most use one.

However, two separate thoughts came to me as I thought how best to bring down a tower impervious to anything I could do. First, assaulting such towers is often a waste of time. Granted, there are times when nonsense is broadcast so far and so loud that it must be contradicted, but it is often better to save our energy and time to discuss truth with those who are genuinely interested in discovering it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, as we survey such towers, we should take a moment to see if our vantage point is a result of our standing on a mountain of fact and reasoning, or if we are able to see so far because we have erected our own citadel of folly.

Priorities?

This Wednesday Mexico, and 10 other Latin American Countries presented amicus briefs against Arizona's new immigration law to the 9th circuit Court of Appeals. The 9th Circuit Court allowed them to submit the briefs, and Arizona Govenor Jan Brewer is understandably irritated. Before I comment on the precident of foreign nations sumitting legal documents to American Courts in American Cases, I would like to look at another issue that is developing at the same time.

On September 30th, David Hartley and his wife Tiffany were jet skiing on Falcon Lake, which sits on the American-Mexican Border, when they were attacked by members of the mexican Zeta drug cartel. David was shot in the back of the head, and fell into the lake. His wife tried to turn around and get him, but was driven off by gunfire from the cartel members. In the last few weeks, Mexican authorities have done little, and have denied the little help our government has offered. The few who have tried to help have suffered the consequences, such as Rolando Flores Villegas who took up the search for Hartley's body and was found beheaded on Tuesday. The State Department has remained for the most part silent on the issue.

If the Mexican government really cares about the welfare of the people of Mexico, they should spend more time and energy on stopping drug cartels and less time worrying about Arizonan's limiting illegal immigration. The drug cartels are doing more damage on the border than anything else. The Mexican government has no interest in slowing down illegal immigration, a decent amount of money comes into the country from jobs made possible by America.

If you take a second and think about it, what kind of precedent is set by a foreign nation submitting legal documents to a civil court dealing with a constitutional case? American Law lives on precedent (It's always easier to say 'they said it first' when you are critisised) and what is used today will be abused tomorrow. If mexico can submit amicus briefs in this case, then why should Canada not submit amicus briefs against gun rights, Pakistan against women's rights, any African nation against business ethics? Foreign nations have no jurisdiction in domestic maters of our nation. If anything, Mexico should be apologizing for the number of it's citizens who violate our law on a daily basis, and not just by crossing the border.

Priorities people, priorities. Get them in line, and your problems will begin to diminish.

Christianity v. Life

I have been looking at a lot of different books and blogs about and by atheists and christians, and I have to say that the amount of weight given to the study of plants and animals is far out of proportion to it's actual importance. Despite the fact that most of our construction of 'pre-history' is based on falicious assumptions and straight up guess work, it is still treated as the irrefutable refutation of theism in general and Christianity in particular. The fact is that such pre historical guestimating is far less important than what the world is doing now, or within the last two hundred years.

The fact is that Christianity fits reality better than any other belief system. You can say that we can have morality without God because we have no need of logic, that life is illogical and thus has no meaning (using logic to prove such), but the fact is that people living their lives know that logic and reason are basic pieces of how life works. No one has ever lived their life without logic and no one ever will.

You can say that Christianity is cruel and causes people guilt, but it also gives them redemtion, while aethism gives people dispaire and leave them in it. Christianity has a problem of evil only when you demand that God be accountable for everything and man for nothing, but when man becomes responsible for his actions, the problem vanishes. Evil is still there, it is still painful, but it is not a permanent part of the cosmos as it is in aethism or eastern philosophies. You can say, as Budhism does, that good and evil, peace and war, life and death, are all the same, but people do not live that way.

You can say that we are chance products of matter and that thoughts and emotions are simply chemical reactions in the brain, but again, people simply don't live that way. Some people may find it convenient to blame behavior on such chemical reactions, but the theory undercuts itself by denying man's ability to theorize.

You can say that what we do doesn't matter, that it will all vanish, but man cannot live that way, and those who have tried usually end up blowing out their brains. Life and man only make sense in Christianity. Why are we continually amazed by how fast or slow time moves? Why can we not simply accept murder and rape as good? Why are we sad when people die? Why are we consumed with love, burn with hate, sink in despair, or rise in joy? Why do our hearts leap at the sound of the horns of Rohan as the Witchking stands at the gate of Gondor? Why do tears start to our eyes as random people pay their respects as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl escorts the body of PFC Chance Phelps home from the Iraq War?

Before people bash Christianity for being "full of contradictions" (Which are usually idiotic readings of the scripture that a six year old can understand), they might want to look at the bleakness of their own beliefs, and look at the hundreds of ways that such beliefs simply do not fit reality.

Hurrah for Good Old Southern Manners (and guns)

In my Arthurian Literature class this week, we have been discussing Chivalry (how you act as a warrior) and Courtly Love (How you act as a lover) in the romances of Chretian de Troyes. Most of the young men in the class still open doors for ladies and give up their seats on the bus (To be fair, there were a good number of Corps people there). What was interesting was the small number of girls who would want their boyfriend to be a 'courtly lover', a grand total of zero. I think the reason was the impression that such a friend would be a push over. Maybe, maybe not, I have no experiance in that area so I can't talk much lest I set my foot firmly in my mouth.

What I can talk about a little, and was slightly disappointed we did not discuss, was Chivalry, a code of conduct for combat. If they have no code of conduct, are you still bound by one? Obviously there are boundaries, i.e. if they use human shields or launch missles from hospitals you can't do it either. However, the practice of taking prisoners is dependent to a large degree on the assumption that the prisoner will not suddenly blow up in your face or pull a knife when you turn your back.

Also, in combatives this morning we learned something very interesting. Who always wins an unarmed fight?

The guy who's buddy with a gun shows up first.