THE UNWATCHED PARADE

Black Civil War soldiers in Washington DC; (Not the 54th)

The desecration of the statue honoring the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common by Antifa puppets is typical of a Globalist mindset which believes the way to resolve our differences is through destruction. Such resolve is as futile as attempting to turn humanity into identical clones with identical fingerprints; even if such a stark utopia was forced upon humanity, the clones could not all stand in the same place at the same time, and therefore their brains would not hold identical data, and no amount of dogma could prevent the spread of creeping individuality. Differences cannot be destroyed.

Actually such destruction is an affront to the Creator, for He is the one who made us so marvelously different. If you have a problem with the fact we are not all the same, take it up with Him. Not that you will stop talking long enough to listen. For thousands of years He has been telling us that the answer to the problems created by our differences is not destruction, but Love. Yet who has listened?

The chief problem is divisiveness, which draws a distinction between “them” and “us”. Weak minds cannot see beyond such distinctions, and fall prey to a mindset of murder; IE: The way to resolve a difference is to remove the person who differs. Such murder does not need to be physical; it may be as subtle as shunning. But it is not Love.

The problem is not discrimination. We all discriminate. How else are we to judge what is good from what is evil? Martin Luther King asked us to discriminate, but to base our discrimination upon the quality of character and not the color of skin.

This is easy to say but hard to do. It is not easy to understand why people behave the way they do, when we do not share the same background. If you grew up in a trailer full of empty beer-cans you might better understand the mindset of people called “white trash” by the unsympathetic people some call “the elite”. However you didn’t grow up that way. Even if you share the same skin color misunderstandings may arise.

The path past misunderstanding is through respect, rather than tearing others down. This is not to say you can’t fight in self-defense, but that you shouldn’t start a fight based merely on the fact others are not the same. At the start of the Civil War the so called “Abolitionists” didn’t want to abolish individuality, but rather slavery. They drew a distinction and employed discernment, which the mob desecrating the statue to the 54th seemed to fail to do.

If the mob thought at all, they likely disliked the fact the statue portrays a white man up on a horse as the black foot soldiers are on foot. However this is historically accurate. Robert Gould Shaw did ride a horse, and may well have died with his troops, shot from a horse. On the other hand he may have died after dismounting to fight by their side.

But die he did.

At this point full disclosure demands I state my last name is Shaw. Robert Gould Shaw cannot be anyone’s ancestor because he died as a young man, without children. War is the opposite of Darwin’s Theory; those most fit to live are often the ones sacrificed. However I do count him among my ancestors.

I cannot be free of bias, because my own family is involved, but I can pass along some insights that have been passed down to me, that you will not find in Wikipedia.

The Civil War was far more complex than two groups of men dressing in blue and gray and squaring off, and the rivalry between Boston and New York predates baseball’s Red Sox and Yankees. Some of Boston’s elite and many of New York’s actually sided with the Confederacy, for reasons having to do with profit more than anything spiritual. For example, some did not desire to see the price of cotton go up.

For a young idealist like Robert Gould Shaw, who grew up benefiting from inherited wealth he didn’t have to get dirty fighting for, such grubby materialistic concerns were incomprehensible. Therefore his letters confess the “them” against “us” attitude of a young Abolitionist. He definitely was not perfect. If you want to find imperfections to excuse your desire to tear the Boston statue down, look to his letters.

If you want to find evidence of “racism”, look towards his inability to comprehend the Irish. Few could, for few had been through the hell the Irish had endured.

During the Great Famine of 1844-1849 the population of Ireland declined by roughly 20% through starvation, and around a million children died, as, rather than sending help, the English “elite” exported food from Ireland for profit. This heartlessness did not make the Irish expect much from the non-Irish. They expected little in the way of love from their fellow man. If they didn’t put themselves first, no one else would. They left Ireland in droves, penniless and with little but sweat to offer, and were not welcomed arrivals in many lands, unless you were a member of the “elite” and eager to exploit cheap labor.

In the American south the Irish were used for dangerous work that might kill a man. A slave cost the modern equivalent of several thousand dollars, and, if a slave died, it represented a sizable loss, whereas if an Irishman died it cost nothing.

In the north the Irish did receive pay, where southern slaves received none, but southern slaves had to be fed, clothed and sheltered, whereas the Irish had to fend for themselves, living in squalid tenements we can hardly imagine, yet calling themselves better off than in Ireland. They did not like the idea of slaves being freed, for they feared the slaves would come north and take their jobs.

All Robert Gould Shaw saw was the tip of the iceberg, and he had a hard time comprehending why the Irish behaved the way they did. In the privacy of his letters he expressed frustrations which he likely would not speak to an Irishman, face to face, (or would not speak without employing the care of a diplomat.)

In like manner, even as an Abolitionist, Robert’s letters express frustrations he felt about the African Americans who lived in the north as freed slaves, or in some cases as men who had been born free and were well educated, and were themselves exasperated by illiterate Irishmen.

(As an aside I should mention that when I was Robert Gould Shaw’s age, 110 years later, some “elite” quasi-genius (more dense than a half-wit) decided it was wrong for the Irish to have one neighborhood and the African-Americans to have another, in Boston, and the answer was “busing”, which in a sense was to forcibly rip children from safe environments and place them in unsafe areas. It went over like a lead balloon, and I recall experiencing great anguish as a witness, because I liked both neighborhoods and both peoples, yet saw the worst being fomented. I may have written some things at the time I would now rue having published, for frustration creates a fume that does not smell nice, and I basically became angry at three sides: African Americans, Irish, and also the leadership which was banging the two side’s skulls together.)

If you really feel it is a good thing to speak badly of the dead, and crave some evidence they were not perfect, look to old letters, or diaries they kept when they were young, or some traceable record of emails they wrote when drunk but deleted the next morning without ever sending. If you want to find some proof Rembrandt was not a good artist, find some work he did when he was five-years-old, and use that as an excuse to burn his masterpieces. All you are doing is proving you are an absolute snob, incapable of true understanding, true sympathy, and true Love.

The tale of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment is told in the movie, “Glory”, and is well worth retelling, though perhaps not by me. To put things in context, the battle of Gettysburg was July 1-3, the New York City Draft Riots were July 13-16, the Battle of Grimball’s Landing occurred on July 18, and the ferocious Second Battle of Fort Wagner was fought later the same day. Even Wikipedia will fill in the details, if you desire a broader view.

I bring up the Draft Riots to accent the complexity, and also the irony, involved. The riots occurred because the Irish were told they would be drafted to go fight and die to free slaves who would then later take their jobs, and they didn’t like the prospects, especially as rich people could escape the draft (for roughly $6200 in current dollars) and black people were exempt. In the sweltering heat of pre-airconditioning New York City the “peaceful demonstration” turned ugly, (sound familiar?) and the Irish turned their wrath onto the African Americans of New York City, brutally killing over ten, as over a hundred Irish died when troops, that had to be diverted from pursuing the retreating Confederate Army, were used to”restore order”. The irony is that this riot helped the Confederate Army escape, and therefore prolonged the very draft that was being protested, and also, even as the Irish protested that blacks were not going to be drafted, the 54th was marching south, many to their deaths, led by a white man who was only 25 years old.

At this point I’ll just add some family lore.

First, Robert did not initially want the job. He’d been fighting since the start of the war, had seen the bloodiest battles and twice was wounded, and did not want to desert his comrades. There was some doubt about the ability of black soldiers to face withering gunfire, and he feared he and his troops would be relegated to some behind-the-lines duty. The fact he was chosen was not so much a case of him stepping forward as it was of others stepping back. (It should be added that once he took the job, whatever racist preconceptions he had he shed, doing things such as demanding equal pay for his troops.)

Second, it was not merely in the North that there was doubt that black soldiers could withstand military discipline. In the south it was felt that, at the first bang of a gun, former-slave’s eyes would get very big, round and white, and they’d bolt. The 54th disproved this belief. Even before the first battle they created a sensation marching through southern streets in close order, radiating discipline, their uniforms impeccable and their buttons gleaming. The African American onlookers were especially impressed, (which the southern aristocrats felt set a bad example). Then in battle they fought without fear, basically rescuing the 10th Connecticut from envelopment early in the day, and gaining the ramparts of Fort Wagner in the afternoon. Although the higher command chose not to send further troops in to exploit this gain, instead ordering a withdrawal, there could be no doubt as to the skill and bravery of the 54th. But the reaction of the rebel troops was not admiration, but rather hatred and loathing, especially towards the commander who led them. Where the body of every other Union officer was returned to the Union side after the battle, the body of Robert Gould Shaw was stripped naked and dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave with his troops.

After the war there was an idea floated that his body might be exhumed and buried in some cemetery with honor, but the Shaw family stated he was proud to have served with his men and would likely be equally proud to be buried with them.

No long afterwards the mass graves were exhumed and the all the decomposing bodies were lain in neat rows with gravestones reading “Unknown”, but the Shaw family only wanted his sword back. Somehow they got it, and it was hauled out to be sentimentally displayed on occasion, until the blade gradually was forgotten and gathered dust in some attic until it wound up in a museum. However the surviving black troops didn’t forget, and were behind the erection of the memorial to the 54th, which was took decades to see brought to fruition; the statue itself was begun in 1884 and unveiled in 1897, and in 2020 took mere moments to desecrate with graffiti.

I often have wondered about the complete contempt displayed by the rebels toward the 54th and Robert Gould Shaw, for there is a contrary logic seen among soldiers wherein they must hate their foe to fight them, yet also feel admiration for the courage they witness in the men they maim and kill. What happened to the admiration in this case? I imagine what happened was that, despite the fact the rebels had defended their fort and won the battle, the 54th whom they had fought was a living proof the South had lost the intellectual war. Why? Because hand in hand with the concept of slavery is a concept like a caste system, which clashes with the idea that all men are created equal. The 54th had proven they were equal.

This leads me to a final anecdote from family lore, involving a similar caste-hierarchy in Boston, and the 54th marching off to war and passing the front of a prestigious club on Becon Street where the Boston Brahman were wont to gather.

By the summer of 1863 it had sunk in that, through the troops sung, “When Johnie Comes Marching Home Again”, many would not be marching home. The death toll was well on its way up to 600,000, which is basically a number the same as how many Americans have died in all other wars added together. Every older graveyard in New England has a crumbling monument to men buried far away, standing as mute testimony to the carnage which a Civil War involves. Therefore a poignancy was involved in the cheering, as the 54th marched by, with people putting on a brave face, and some holding back tears, until the troops marched in front of the club full of Brahmans. Their response? They pulled down the shades in the windows of their prestigious club.

Even 157 years later their snooty, self-imposed blindness is, upon this page, angrily remembered. It demonstrates that even in my own family bitterness is difficult to drop.

Not all memorials are raised to people’s most noble side; bitterness is a stone statue in our hearts, making hearts heavy, burdened. God urges us to love and forgive, but we prefer a poison which we ingest thinking it will harm others, when it harms ourselves and our children, just as the feud between Montegues and Capulets in the end killed Romeo and Juliet.

“The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.”

My great-grandfather was born in 1850, and that makes me the “fourth generation” since the horrors of the Civil War. I like to think my children are freed from the bitterness, for they are the fifth generation. However to achieve such freedom we must pull down statues, but not those erected externally, but rather the inner ones in our stony hearts.

Pulling down external statues is like pulling down the shades. There is something we do not want to see. But if we do not look at history and learn from it we are doomed to repeat it, as are our children.

‘The fathers eat the sour grapes,
But the children’s teeth are set on edge’

If we only see the error of the past, we accent error and fail to see the glory which, if God is everywhere, is in every situation.

For, when you think of it, if your forefathers were completely bad, and all they did was bad, then you should start by pulling down yourself, for you are their creation. However, if you think your forefathers were good to create you, and it is only other forefathers who deserve destruction, then you are on the road to a Brahman racism all your own.

I actually have learned to like the image of the Boston Brahman pulling the blinds as the 54th marched by. It has great poetic value as a symbol. For the fact is this: A parade is marching in front of all of us, and we can either pull the blinds, or see the glory.

To those who can see no noble parade marching by, I say look beyond the blinds. Often what modern technology brings to the forefront is an ugliness in the way of beauty, but the beauty is still there, parading by behind it.

. UNWATCHED PARADE SONNET

I paused my weeding, ceased my looking down
And gazed across the pasture to the trees
That wavered green; looked up from dirt’s brown
Hearing and seeing an invisible breeze
Part summer’s locks with a sigh that’s unheard
With the radio on. Every green leaf stirred.
Every green branch swayed. Far too short a word
Is five-lettered “trees”, and it seems quite absurd
Such marvelous wind invisibly passes
Unseen and unheard, like an unwatched parade,
When I fret about news of rioting masses
And make myself deaf to music God’s made.
God knows how we ache and sends us His balm.
Turn off the radio. Heed, and be calm.

BAD LOSERS

 

It is not merely the physical science behind Global Warming Alarmism that is rotten; the social science is equally rotten. The fiasco involves both the Sciences and the Arts. You cannot stick merely to facts, and avoid the topic of morality. Therefore this examination of the mutated ethics behind Global Warming Alarmism must begin with a very long digression, involving sportsmanship.

I have always admired good losers, because I am not one. For years I have made a New Year’s Resolution to become a better sport, but can’t keep the resolution. It only took me forty years to quit cigarettes, but quitting bad sportsmanship will take me longer.

Perhaps the roots are genetic, and boil down to owning an inherently bad temper, which my older brothers thought was amusing, when I was small. I was easy to disarm, so they would enrage me on purpose, just to see me dash off to the kitchen and come back at them with a carving knife. Then I grew as big as they, and my temper was no longer so amusing. The larger brother became more cautious when he teased, and the smaller one took a course in karate.

It wasn’t fun being a bad sport. I couldn’t lose a game of checkers without my rage uplifting me and sending me stomping about the room, wildly thrashing and accusing the other person of cheating. The only one who would play checkers with me was a special sort of person who was able to say, “You’re right. I cheated. You win. Want to play again?” (He did this so he could beat me again.)

When I grew to be a teenager I found it hard to keep a girlfriend, as most girls don’t particularly like childish displays of temper. But I do remember one diminutive girl who sort of liked beating me at tennis, despite my poor sportsmanship. I relied on brute strength, and towered above her, but she’d been to several tennis camps, owned something called “skill”, and I never could beat her.

The games always began with me saying I didn’t want to play, but she’d guilt me into playing by saying exercise was good for me and tennis was fun and something we could do together (when I was only interested in something else we could do together), so I’d wind up playing, and getting beaten. Sometimes the games began close, because I was much stronger and smashed the ball so hard she could barely see it, but as I tired my inaccuracy increased, and soon I’d be drenched in sweat while she looked cool as a cucumber, and my shots would start to stray and be “out”, and I’d get really mad, which always caused her to try very hard not to smile. That made me really, REALLY mad, so my next shot would be clear over the fence, which might be good in baseball, but in tennis it meant that once again a midget had beaten me.

I tried to explain to women that the reason I raved was because I was “sensitive”, and an artist, and not because I was a really bad sport. Amazingly, this sometimes worked, but not for all that long.

Another excuse for stomping about and raving was that I owned a “healthy competitive instinct”. This worked with the football coach, but not very well with women. Come to think of it, it didn’t work very well with my fellow artists, either, for back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s being competitive was not “hip”. It wasn’t “mellow”, “layed-back”, (and other words no one uses any more). In fact among artists having a “healthy competitive spirit” meant you were aggressive, a militant “hawk”, and a loser.

This exposed me to a perplexing ambiguity, for artists tended to be a collection of losers to begin with. They tended to flunk all their classes and never went out for sports. The only way they could see themselves as winners was to totally redefine everything, and to call winners “losers”, and to call losers like themselves “winners”. (Do not ask, “What about the production of actual art?” Being an artist back then was more a matter of who you hung out with, and where you hung out, and how you wore your beatnik beret, and, increasingly, what drugs you took.)

A shocking number of these friends of mine died young, either due to drugs or to AIDS, which would tend to suggest that when you are a loser you do lose, were it not for the fact that the survivors of this morally twisted collection of winners-are-losers nitwits are now running our nation, which is why my experience among losers is valuable, even though I myself was not very good at being a loser, and in fact was a bad loser.

Initially I had the required attributes of being a loser: I got poor grades and did badly on the teams I bothered to go out for. However I was a very bad sport about it. Then, as I gravitated towards artists, I discovered I was a loser even among the losers. I was a very bad sport about that as well.

It made me realize I was after something that the winners were not after, and the losers were not after. I needed to do some redefining of my own. Just as my fellow artists had redefined themselves as winners, despite being losers, I needed (simply to muster the self-esteem necessary for my egotistical survival), to redefine myself as a winner, despite the fact I was bad at winning and bad at losing.

Such a redefinition is no small matter. It has taken me half a century. Therefore you will have to forgive me if I digress yet again and take up a little less than a half-century of your time.

The pride and shame of New England is that we seemingly have a habit of redefinition. Sometimes the redefinition is a shining advance, and sometimes we fix something that wasn’t broken, and sometimes it is both. Both good and bad ideas have unintended consequences.

It continued long after the Boston Tea Party sparked a Revolutionary War, where the good idea of Liberty cost the young nation 1% of its population. A half-century later Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded doctors wash their hands (a decade before Louis Pasteur got the credit for discovering germs), and inadvertently this caused a crisis in the Church at a time when New England was the “Bible Belt,” (because germs were an invisible power other than God.) Not long after that other redefiners pushed the radical idea that slavery should be abolished in all places, which rather than mere paper legislation inadvertently led to the horrible slaughter of the Civil War, which cost nearly as many American lives as all the nation’s other wars combined.

And so it has continued, on and on, into my boyhood, where Timothy Leary advanced ideas about Liberty involving sex and LSD, inadvertently involving tragic consequences that many of us have seen play out with our own eyes, involving people we cared (and care) for deeply.

In conclusion, redefinition is no laughing matter, and nothing to take lightly. You can’t blithely reform things like the Ten Commandments or the American Constitution, without facing reverberations of a magnitude that is far from blithe.

To return to the topic of sports, as a boy I noticed New Englanders tend to be less athletic than the rest of the nation, perhaps due long winters stuck indoors, and perhaps due to an overdose of colleges and universities. New Englanders tend to be intellectual, rather than physical. Back in the last century the idea was that the only way New England could have a good sporting team was to invent a new sport. And this was proven by the fact that, during my boyhood, New England had among the nation’s worst baseball, football, and hockey teams, however we invented basketball, and had the best team for a while, before the rest of the nation figured out how to play better than our star Bob Cousy (who was ambidextrous and could amazingly (for that time) ball-handle with both hands!!!) (Nearly every player does that now.)

Considering I was a bad loser, it was rough to grow up last century, and be a boy supporting the last-place Red Sox, last-place Bruins, and last-place Patriots. You might think that, since I had so much experience supporting last-place teams, I would have become a better loser, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead it fed an intense craving within me to win.

I think this is how the psyche works. When we experience loss we replay it in our minds. The psychologists may call it “Post Traumatic Stress”, but we are replaying the films of the past game, noting the mistakes, and planning to play better in the next game. We own a craving to improve.

I often see this manifest the morning after the Patriots have lost a close football game. When I open our Farm-childcare, I get to see the state young parents are in, in the dusk before dawn, and after a Patriots loss many look haggard as they drop off their kids. They have suffered insomnia, as their mind kept replaying crucial plays, and they agonized over the details. Usually it is the young men who care about football, but the young wives suffered as well, for they had to sleep with the thrashing, kicking, sighing, muttering insomniacs. And of course I am able to empathize and commiserate, for I am the worst loser of them all.

This agony of defeat does not seem to be truly slaked by the thrill of victory. This century has seen New England win more than its fair share of championships, and an entire generation has grown up without a clue of what it was like to be a New Englander last century, but if anything championships have only increased the craving for victory, and made the agony of defeat worse. What’s more, if you win too often you become despised.

Just as I used to stomp around raving and accuse friends of cheating when I lost at checkers, New England fans have discovered winning means you get accused of cheating. 

It is interesting to stand back from all the emotion inherent in the agony of defeat, and see what actual improvements come from the pains of Post Traumatic Stress. One thing that becomes swiftly apparent is the importance of the rules. As one devises new and improved trick plays, one must constantly refer to the rulebook, to make sure the adjustments are legal. For example, one option that springs into my mind, during the agony of defeat, is to shoot the opponents. There is nothing in the NFL rulebook prohibiting this (I checked) however that isn’t the only rulebook we need to refer to.

And here’s where it gets interesting. It turns out that the rules we actually write down in the rulebook, for any particular sport, are but a dim reflection of higher and greater laws, which are “self evident”. These laws can be divided into two basic types. There are physical laws, such as the law of gravity, and then there are spiritual laws, which people tend to be a little squeamish about discussing.

In the case of football the physical laws come up because the amazing athletes push their physical limits. The spiritual laws come up when we attempt to keep them from hurting themselves too badly, and because we should care for these amazing men after they have sacrificed their bodies (and sometimes brains) and are crippled.

In the case of politics, and especially the politics of Global Warming, the exact same factors come into play, though some might protest politics is not a sport. But politics does involve winners and losers, and a rulebook called our laws, and the temptation to “amend” the laws, and to “redefine” how the game is played, and even what constitutes “winning”. It requires we be civil, if we are to call ourselves “civilized”, and that we follow certain set procedures we call “civil procedures”. And here again we see two basic types of laws that restrain man within certain limits: Physical laws and spiritual laws.

The physical laws are easier to deal with, because they are more obvious, though not always clear to a layman. They involve science and engineering, and require scientists and engineers to explain some of their less obvious details. For example, I once had a friend who wanted to install a huge hot tub up in her bedroom; despite the fact her plumber worried about the pressure this put on the drains. She learned to listen, after a major flood downstairs. Physical laws represent Truths that will not be mocked.

Spiritual laws are harder to deal with, because they often run counter to more selfish laws that politicians deal with, that are tantamount to a sort of Law Of The Jungle. For example, a politician needs to curry favor among constituents, and this sometimes tempts them to hand out money and jobs inappropriately, with the money diverted from the people and the job it was earmarked for. In the case of the levees of New Orleans, very little of the money Washington sent to improve the levees was actually spent on the levees, while a lot went to various sorts of “inspectors”, and to lawyers involved in endless environmental lawsuits. The result of this was that, when Katrina arrived, the levees were not ready to hold back the flood. It did not matter that the Law Of The Jungle had been obeyed, when The Law Of Nature arrived.

Politicians always claim they need more money, but money is useless if corruption misappropriates it. Few projects have involved cost overruns as insanely huge as Boston’s “Big Dig”, but the vast expense couldn’t change the result when substandard materials were used, resulting in a dangerously leaky tunnel that has already killed a driver with a roof collapse. Bostonians were happy when there were lots of jobs and Federal funds were being flung about, but they will be less amused when a tunnel-collapse cuts their city in half.

The Law Of The Jungle seems smart in the short term, but in the long term Truth will not be mocked. It is for this reason the Navy conducts trials. They will not trust a ship given to them by bureaucrats. The last high-speed troop carrier delivered to the Navy had its bow cave in, the first time it was tested in heavy seas. You don’t want to discover a shortcoming like that in the middle of a war.

It is hard to have such a trial when you are building a bridge, and it is embarrassing to all concerned when a brand new bridge has a structural failure, as occurred recently with the Nipigon Bridge in Canada. Glitches like that are suppose to be seen and ironed out when things are still in the planning phases, and not after a bridge is already built.

The sad fact of the matter is that we are likely to see more of these costly mistakes, not fewer, as long as we allow the political Law Of The Jungle to rule science and engineering. The sooner we erect some sort of barrier between politics and science the better off we will be.

This seems unlikely to occur until people recognize they can’t take the money and run. There seems to instead be the attitude that it doesn’t matter if levees fail in New Orleans, tunnels collapse in Boston, and bridges close in Canada, as long as one can retire safely to Florida. People think they can escape the consequences.

However this implies there are consequences, and some are not even willing to admit that. They assume they are the winner in a situation that causes others loss, and that others are the losers. They think that if there is karma to face or hell to pay, others will face it, as they sit back, eat cherries, and laugh last.

This is not how the Law Of The Jungle works. The king of the jungle doesn’t get to retire to Florida. The moment he shows any sign of weakness, he faces the jungle-consequences of weakness, of aging. Only a civil society cares for their elderly, or even allows the elderly to become philanthropists. In the jungle, as soon as you weaken, all your wealth is taken. That is just the way it works, when you abandon civil procedures and ignore spiritual laws.

Because of this some adopt a splendid hypocrisy, wherein they ignore civil procedures while amassing their fortune, but as soon as they have their hoarded pile they become very, very interested in the very same civil procedures they once so blithely ignored. Few onlookers buy this double standard, (though some will nod and put on an agreeable face, if paid a high enough salary). Gradually the hypocrite experiences a dawning, painful to behold, wherein they move from calling others suckers to realizing who the sucker actually was.

It turns out civil society is based on spiritual laws involving fairly simple concepts, such as being a good neighbor, and that it is better-to-give-than-receive. Some lawyers might scrutinize the scriptures of various lands and say it is only better-to-give-than-receive ten percent of the time (because “tithe” means “ten percent”), but nearly all religions include the concept of “charity”. However it is when examining the concept of “charity” that the most horrendous hypocrisy and most stupendous violations of spiritual law are seen.

The simple fact of the matter is that you are not supposed to get richer if you give. If you have a hundred credits and give ten percent, you are suppose to only have ninety credits left. Therefore you should be highly suspicious if you notice the giver winds up with three hundred credits. That money is coming from somewhere, and more often than not it is stolen from the very poor the charity was suppose to be helping in the first place.

I will not belabor you with countless examples of people who claim they are spiritual, and helping the widows and orphans, the sick, the oppressed, and those in prison, yet who wind up wealthier, even as those they claimed they would help wind up worse off. I’m certain you can think up examples of this gross hypocrisy on your own. What I would like to propose is that such behavior is actually the antithesis of charity, and a major violation of spiritual law.

It seems to me that, just as an engineer cannot mock physical Truths, people who work outside the sciences cannot mock spiritual Truths. In both cases the mocker will face a day of reckoning. Brown stuff will hit the fan. In the case of do-gooders, fewer and fewer will be persuaded by the altruistic arguments of the ones who claim they do-good. People disbelieve that glib altruism, when the speaker resembles a fat tick bloating off the lifeblood of a nation.

Rather than depressing you with examples of people involved in Global Warming discussions who resemble fat ticks, I think it would be less depressing to revert to contemplating young artists, and their losers-are-winners attitude.

When you come right down to it, art is very rarely a way to get rich. For 99.99% of all artists, giving the gift they were given is a form of charity, for the artists does not see much material gain. Even if they get some money thrown into their guitar case, as they play on a sidewalk, they could likely be making far more money hammering nails at a construction site. And many others do not play, or paint, or compose, or write, in public at all. They sing for their family, or friends, or in a church choir. They give for the joy of giving. That may be why poets are defined, in Sufi humor, as “proud beggars”.

This underscores the fact that the benefit of art, and all gift-giving, and all charity, is not a thing measured in dollars. Unfortunately, a very few artists, perhaps .01%, are so amazingly good that they do make piles of dollars. In my generation the example of this was the Beatles. By being successful they inadvertently gave the other 99.99% the false hope that they too might someday be millionaires, and “winners”. However the Beatles made their money by being more honest than most, and one truth they dared to sing was that that they were not the winners they appeared to be.

I sure wish I got paid millions for publicly confessing I’m a loser, but it hasn’t worked out that way for me, or for the other 99.99% of all artists. The real “pay” for art is in the joy of giving. This is why we speak of “playing” a guitar rather than “working” a guitar. The funny thing is that when you inform many young artists that they will not get paid as much as the Beatles for playing, they say, “Then the heck with it,” in which case they were not really artists. They were in it for the money, which makes them con artists. (Other artists get a Real Job to make money, but continue their art for joy, which is described by saying they have a “vocation” and an “avocation”).

The fact of the matter is that there is a distinction that needs to be made between the Arts and Sciences, but many of my generation failed to make it. Somehow they got it into their heads that giving should make you materially rich, and that charity should be profitable. What is more, they took steps to make charity lucrative, even though that violates spiritual law and is strangely grotesque, like a nursing mother with coin-slots on her breasts.

One .01% artist was Bono of “U2”, who became rich and famous enough to be asked to give the commencement address at a major American university, and he told our youth, “Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.”

I think that future generations will look back at Baby Boomers, and will be stunned by our delusion that giving should gain the giver material wealth. It doesn’t. The wealth gained through giving is measured in joy. However so insistent are some that money must come from charity that they will ignore all the evidence so freely given by Reality, when one foolishly ignores physical and spiritual Truths. Truth will not be mocked, but when faced with the complete bankruptcy of their beliefs, some will just print more money.

“Just print more money.” Isn’t that the sign of a counterfeiter? To me it is also the sign of a bad loser, who can’t even admit that he or she lost the game with Truth.

(I could give countless examples from the history of Global Warming Alarmism of how individuals have lost the game, both in terms of physical laws and spiritual laws, but as this essay is already too long, I’ll leave the giving of specific examples to others.)

(Anthony Watts graciously posted this essay on his site:  http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/07/a-note-about-bad-losers-and-global-warming-on-super-bowl-sunday/ )

CHRISTMAS LIGHT IN DARKNESS

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow saw his share of darkness during his time on earth, as we all do, and had to fight the battles we all fight to light candles in the darkness. Especially sad was the loss of his first wife, while he was touring Europe with her, when they were still in the blush of first love. He recovered from that to find a second love, and for a time enjoyed a happy marriage with six children, five of whom survived, before tragedy again struck him.

His wife was sealing up a letter with sealing wax, as was usual in 1861, when her dress caught fire, and despite her husband’s desperate efforts she was so badly burned she died the next day.

That was such a blow that Longfellow had not the heart to write any more poetry. A great darkness decended upon his life, made worse by the onset of the civil war. Then into that darkness came news that his eldest son, seventeen-years-old, had run off to join the army.

The son, Charles Appleton Longfellow,  was severely wounded in the battle of New Hope Church (irony), with a bullet passing so close to his spine paralysis seemed likely. Longfellow hurried south to see his son, who clung to life despite all the problems with infection in those days before antibiotics, and Longfellow brought the teenager north to try to nurse him back to life.

Perhaps it was having to fight for a son’s life that revived the old man’s poetic powers, but, while facing the darkness of December and a Christmas made black by the ugliness of war, Longfellow produced this poem:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

The defiance of despair in the face of cruel fate, which manifests in this poem, is one of the most beautiful qualities of the human spirit, and in my humble opinion is proof there is something good in mankind, despite our amazing capacity to make misery when we could make peace.

(The son did survive and walk again, though he did not recover enough to rejoin the army, which he wanted to do.)

This is my favorite version of Longfellow’s poem put to music: