As the year ends

It's the traditional time to take a look back, but not just at 2008. This excellent article by Rich Lowry at National Review takes a long look back at our history. Read it and take comfort. Times might be tough right now, but we've seen terrible times before and managed to come through them alright. Here's a sample:

1837: In a real-estate bubble, people borrowed paper money to speculate in Western land. According to John Steele Gordon’s book An Empire of Wealth, land sales by the federal government were $2.5 million in 1832 and $25 million by 1836. President Andrew Jackson determined to prick the bubble by accepting only gold or silver as payment and succeeded all too well. Banks failed, Wall Street crashed, the price of cotton fell by half and 90 percent of the country’s factories closed. “The country suffered,” Gordon writes, “the longest economic depression in the nation’s history. It didn’t reach bottom until February 1843, fully seventy-two months after it began.”

I'm pretty sure we're going to go through some terrible times of our own, far worse than what we're experiencing right now. I pray we'll come out on the far side as we have in the past: free, united, strong, prosperous.

God bless this country.

Random thoughts

1) No bailouts. GM will never be able to get itself out of financial trouble as long as they have 6 retirees to every 1 worker, for which they must pay pension and medical insurance. It's a broken system. Bailouts won't help.

2) As GM goes, so goes the nation. We will be facing the same bankruptcy in a few years when baby boomers start to retire en masse. We will not be able to pay the Social Security and Medicare bills that are about to come due. Who's going to bail out the U.S.?

3) I predicted that this summer would be colder than usual and that I wouldn't get many tomatoes (a hot-weather crop). Well, I didn't get many that ripened on the vine, as predicted, but we did have enough green tomatoes to put a single layer in the bottom of three paper grocery bags. They slowly ripened, a few each day, and just two days ago we enjoyed the last delicious homegrown tomato.

4) Snow is beautiful. Snow is a huge pain to drive in. Is it spring yet?

5) One of my favorite things in the world is when all six of us are at home -- and in the same room! It just floats my boat. Could be one of the kids' bedrooms for a late-night chat, could be the family room for pizza and movie night. Could be our room for a "music party", where Tom is playing new music downloaded from iTunes so the whole family can gives thumbs up or down (or dance to it). Doesn't matter where it is, I just love it. The kids all know it, so sometimes one of them will say, "Hey Moooooom, look! It's your favorite thing!" I just smile.

6) Another favorite thing: when dinner is planned and cooked early in the day so that the last few hours before dinner are calm and relaxed. Take right now, for instance: I have time to sit and write this post while chili simmers on the stove. (Don't tell my husband; he's out snowblowing right now....)

7) This is terrible, but I admit to some schadenfreude about Gov. Blagojevich's arrest today. It's kind of fun to see a Democrat take a big, huge tumble. (OK, sorry, I know it's not very nice of me.) We've been following the story for a long time in the Chicago Tribune, wondering when the smoldering Rezko fuse would lead to a big explosion in the Illinois Governor's office. I like Jonathan Goldberg's take on it: Good old-fashioned corrupt politics-as-usual. Nothing kinky, nothing perverted. Just regular old criminal behavior in Cook County. And it's nice to know there are still good guys out to get the bad guys.

UPDATE: I'd forgotten that Blagojevich has young children. I'm very sad for them; as always, they are the innocents caught in the crossfire. Looks like that's already happened to them:

In 2006, the governors daughter ended up in the middle of an intense back-and-forth with reporters during the opening day of the Illinois State Fair.

As reporters grilled him about accusations that his administration gave preferential treatment to clout-backed job applicants, he picked up his then 3-year-old daughter Annie, who burst into tears.

Blagojevich and his wife later said the press acted out-of-line while the toddler was present. But Judy Baar Topinka, his Republican challenger at the time, said the governor should not have allowed his daughter to get caught in the scrum.

What a great (true) story! Score: Good guy, 1, Bad guy, 0

Oldest daughter came home today from her job as a Tae Kwon Do instructor with this amazing story, told by one of the students when he arrived at class this evening:

At about 4:30 this afternoon, the student was leaving the bank where he works (Bluemound and Calhoun area). As he walked toward his car he noticed a man get out of another car nearby and start to walk toward him.

Before he could reach his car, however, the man approached him, demanded, "Give me your money!", and pulled a knife out of his pocket.

"I don't want any trouble", said the TKD student, "so I'm going to reach in my pocket and get my money, OK?"

"Just give me your money!" said the robber.

The student pulled out his money clip and threw it on the ground. The robber reached down to get it, keeping his eyes on the student, and when his head was down about knee height, the student gave him a good heavy boot in the chin with a well-placed front kick.

The attacker groaned and grabbed his chin, at which point the student executed a perfect axe kick on the back of his neck.

That sent the robber sprawling to the ground; the student grabbed him by the arm, twisting it up behind his back, and then put his foot on the attacker's upper back.

By this time, people in the bank had seen what was going on and called the police.

The police showed up and, honest to goodness, said, "Thanks, we'll take it from here."

And get this: That Tae Kwon Do student, who defeated the bad guy and single-handedly brought him to justice, is 66 years old.

To the visitor from Orland Park (or thereabouts), Illinois:

I'm wondering if we know each other. I've noticed some repeat visits, and see that you're searching for me by name, so it can't be a random visit here.

We have some relatives in the Tinley Park area, and the IP address could be showing up as Orland Park which is right next door.

So, whether we know each other or not, I'd love it if you would leave a comment to introduce yourself. Or drop me an email: meswart at sbcglobal dot net. You don't have to, of course! Just sayin'.

It's always kind of interesting to browse through the Sitemeter stats. I also wonder who's been emailing a link to my "Public Schools: Part Four" post. I'm sure I'll never know.

But it's still interesting.

Timely Reagan quote

In an email from my dear aunt:

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it" - Ronald Reagan

Catholic Bishops will fight FOCA

The bishops have said they'd rather close the Catholic hospitals than be forced into doing abortions, should Obama sign the Freedom of Choice Act as he said he would.

One has said he'd tell his hospitals to simply ignore FOCA, and be willing to be thrown into jail for it.

Bishop Paul Loverde of the Diocese of Arlington says he wouldn't go as far as other bishops who suggested closing Catholic hospitals but he would refuse to allow them to comply with the FOCA's abortion requirement.

Loverde doesn't have any Catholic hospitals under his purview, but he commented on what he would do if he did.

I would say, ‘Yeah, I'm not going to close the hospital, you're going to arrest me, go right ahead. You'll have to drag me out, go right ahead. I'm not closing this hospital, we will not perform abortions,and you can go take a flying leap,'" he said, according to a CNS News report.

I would hope all bishops would take this same approach. Make it a showdown; let Obama know the terrible consequences should he actually keep his diabolical promise to sign FOCA as his first presidential act.

More:

Both Pope Benedict and the late Pope John Paul II have not only decried abortion as state-sanctioned infanticide, but explicitly - and repeatedly - said it must be outlawed: There can be no compromise with such monstrous barbarism. Abortion is akin to the Jewish question in Europe during the 1930s: Should an entire class of people be denied their essential humanity?

Catholic supporters of Mr. Obama insist it is sufficient to reduce the number of abortions. They say it's time to put the polarizing debate over Roe v. Wade in the past, accept legalized abortion as a reality, and work toward compromise solutions such as promoting adoption.

This is like saying Western democracies should have come to terms with the Aryan racial laws of Nazi Germany, and sought to minimize the number of Jews sent to the gas ovens. The argument is morally repugnant and politically naïve. Ultimately, accommodation with evil never works. We learned that with Nazi Germany and with slavery in this country.

Read the whole article here.

Planned Parenthood: Doing evil with our tax dollars

Planned Parenthood - the organization to which Obama made a solemn promise he'd sign the Freedom of Choice Act as soon as he was in office - is willing to help a "13-year old girl"cross state lines to get an abortion so she can go right back to her "31 year old" boyfriend statutory rapist. All in violation of the law, using our tax dollars to do it.


Indiana Planned Parenthood Covers Up Sexual Abuse of 13-year Old - The most amazing videos are a click away

Yes, it was an undercover operation, so there wasn't a real 13 year old and a real 31 year old.

This time.

Public Schools: Part Four

Victor Davis Hanson on the public schools:

The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

He's absolutely right. During a discussion immediately after 9/11, my college students weren't able to articulate how we were any different from the Islamic terrorists. Another student couldn't distinguish between the rights of humans and the "rights" of animals. A little girl recently told my teen daughter that "Christopher Columbus was a very bad man", and another little boy was overheard saying, "The earth is ugly and getting uglier!!!" Just a few off-the-cuff examples; I'm sure you can provide many more of your own.

Another paragraph from the same article on what would help save the public schools:

Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education. In particular, such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos). After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek, Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women studies—indeed, anything “studies”— were perhaps the fruits of some evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor minority students in the public schools and universities were offered only a third-rate education. [Emphasis added.]

I agree. Virtually all of the homeschoolers I know teach their children Latin. It's a touchstone to the past, to the foundations of our civilization. Besides that, it's the language of our Church.

So, again: It's not the teachers who are the problem in public schools (with the exception of the lousy ones, but you find that in all professions). It's the curriculum.

Previous posts on this topic:

11/05: "Today" (initial comments)

11/19: "Public Schools: 'Take your kids out immediately'"

11/19: "Public Schools: Part II"

11/23: "Public Schools: Part III"