Humor In Uniform

This past weekend, as I established yesterday, I played in a curling bonspiel. One of our opponents was skipped by a very nice man named Greg Major.

Seeking to break the ice with him I made a small, indeed very small, joke. "So I take it you've been promoted from captain?"

He was kind enough to laugh at the quip, then responded, "I was never in the military myself. But my father was. He was a Sergeant Major in the British Army. So my family has a Sergeant Major Major in its history!"

Well, touche. 

An Economics Lesson, or, What Comes Around

I played in a curling tournament this past weekend. It was kind of cool: I never curled in May before, as the curling season typical ends by the middle of April. Since I paid the fee when I registered the team, each other guy owed me $110 bucks.

Dallas showed up and paid me, part of which were two five dollar bills. Jeff, another team member, then approached me. "There's a team 50/50 raffle, and I put us in. So it's ten bucks if you want in too, Marty." I said sure, and gave him the two fives Dallas had just given me.

Jeff caught Dallas a minute later while I still happened to be standing nearby.  Dallas said, "I'm in if you can change a twenty." Handing it to Jeff, Jeff gave Dallas the two fives which I had given him, which I had just gotten from Dallas a few minutes before.

There's an economics lessen there, eh? The money's gotta keep on movin'. And somehow it manages to do just that, even in close quarters.

Emergency Stepson

One day when me Pops was about 35 years old he noticed an older woman, he guessed she was 80 or so, standing nervously in the foyer of the bank where he had just made a business deposit. Just waiting for someone, he thought. And she was. She was waiting for him.

As Dad was opening the outer door he felt her arm slip under his elbow. "So nice to run into you here!" she told him pleasantly. "We can talk as we go to my car."

Pops sensed something, not bad, but enough that he went along with it. She talked about her day and how wonderful the weather had been. Dad nodded and affirmed a thought or two as the older woman spoke. He allowed her to lead, not knowing which car in the bank lot was hers.

She released his arm as they approached the vehicle, drawing the keys from her purse. "Thank you, young man," she explained, "Maybe I'm worrying too much, but I simply didn't like the looks of the two men hanging around near the bank door." 

At that, Dad did recall a couple of shady characters on the street corner as they left. "You're welcome," he replied. He didn't mind at all being an emergency stepson.

Enough is Enough

Me Pops had this old friend, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who apparently did not have the best marriage.

A couple of years after Cloyce lost his wife, the woman's sister's husband passed away. Awhile after the funeral, Cloyce got a call from his former in-law. She suggested that, with their respected spouses gone, perhaps they could get together.

"What did you say?" Pops asked on being told the story.

"I told her no," Cloyce responded. "I said I spent 40 years with your sister, and that was enough."

"Ouch," Dad said. "That even hurt me."

A Thought for Today

A post on Facebook yesterday caught my eye. Yeah, I know, earth shattering. It's never happened before.

Mild and poor humor aside, the post claimed that diversity breeds tolerance; diversity is our strength. I immediately thought, it does? Followed by, it is?

We've had diversity for all of human existence and I see little evidence of tolerance bred by it. I actually see a great deal of intolerance from folks who preach diversity. Now I hear that diversity is our strength? I'm not sold.

On the other hand, when people on all sides are reasonably open minded (in short, reasonable) we've had a decent amount of peace and solidarity. But it isn't because we're diverse. It's because on those far too few occasions, we've been unified. We don't emphasize our differences. We rejoice in our similarities.

Guns and America

I will begin by saying that this is a political blog. I will follow up by saying that I fully and completely support the Second Amendment. I say that unequivocally because many of my friends and relatives who support gun rights will now think I don't believe in them. And all because I do not think that individual rights in America revolve around gun ownership.

Do you think our guns won the Revolution? They did not. French guns, Dutch money and, perhaps more importantly, the grace of God won the Revolution. Without that our guns meant little: it's that simple. We would be more British than American today without the outside help which, I must add at least with regard to the French and Dutch, didn't really care about our gun ownership anyway.

But to the point: our rights do not revolve around gun ownership. Our rights are about the ideas which support them, namely life, liberty, and property (I wish Jefferson had said property and not pursuit of happiness, but that's an idea for another time). Quite bluntly then, there are more, and I will argue more important, issues than gun rights. What's more important is encouraging the belief that rights are based on our overall obligation to do our part to create and manage a just society.

We need to convince people that our rights, all of them, come from God. We need to emphasize that if our rights, all of them, are not protected as a whole then each individual one means less. If we don't believe in free speech or freedom of religion, our insistence on gun rights is superfluous, and even shallow and unworthy of us, because guns can protect and promote even evil, as history clearly shows. Gun ownership and gun use by themselves are moral neutrals.

So then, as a practical matter it is not our guns which keep us free. It is our attitude towards freedom, our patriotism and more importantly our belief in a just God which keep us free. Lose that attitude, or worse, allow the nation as a whole to lose that attitude, and your right to have a gun means zilch. That right will be squashed alongside every other right.

Right Up My Alley

I almost always still get a Sunday paper, and when I do I always try my hand at the New York Times crossword, which is in the Detroit Free Press every week for some reason. Go figure.

While I only completely finish the thing about three times a year (hey, it's a challenging crossword) last week's offering was right in my wheelhouse, a great big fat pitch down the middle of the plate. The main clues were about logical fallacies. Logic is a subset of philosophy.

I nailed each answer without more prompts than the clues themselves. I even got, on the first pass, the Latin one: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Roughly translated for those of you not familiar with the language of ancient Rome, it means, after, therefore because of. It's the argument that since A occurred before B, A caused B. Here's a solid example: Marty was born in 1960, and civil war broke out in Angola in 1961. Therefore, Marty caused the Angolan Civil War. That's obviously untrue. I think. I mean, I was a year old in 1961. I don't remember doing much of anything.

Anyway, I got them all correct, each and every error of logic, even the No True Scotsman. I knew one day that that minor in philosophy from the University of Detroit would pay off.