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 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.

Amos's broom, or, a gift for Ella

I've spoken to you before about how superstitious me Grandpa Joe's friend Amos was, and that he was tight with a buck too. Well, if I recall correctly he had a girlfriend who was equally superstitious and equally Scottish. In fact, such qualities got my mother a nearly new broom.

Amos was moving one time and he enlisted me Pops and me Mom to help. As they had loaded just about everything into one of me Grandpa Joe's old welding delivery trucks, Amos's girlfriend (I believe her name was Eula) quietly took my mother over to the side.

"Here Ella," she said to Mom, "Take this broom home with you. I know it's wrong to move your broom when you move, but as this is a gift from me to you, it don't count."

You see, it's superstitious to move your broom when you move because it has within its fibers all the dust and bad things from your old home. All that you want to leave there, right? But as it was, Amos had only just bought the broom, and Eula couldn't stand the thought of leaving a perfectly good and virtually new item behind. Yet she knew Amos wouldn't stand hitch for having it moved. So she gifted it to Mom.

Who says superstition doesn't pay, at least for someone?

Simple economics in school

When I taught high school level economics I kept it very simple. I hoped to instill in students a sense of exactly what they might deal with in real life. One such lesson involved what sales meant.

One idea was that when an item was on sale for, say, 10% off, that they did not save ten percent but only spent ten percent less on it. That doesn't make a purchase bad of course. But unless they actually put that ten off in the bank, they hadn't saved anything. I in fact had gotten that idea from me Pops years earlier, when I was maybe, heh, heh, ten. A friend of his was showing the old man something and bragging about the ten off he saved. Dad merely asked, "So's where's the money you saved?"

Another concept was the old buy one get one free come on. You aren't getting either one free: you're spending half as much on each. Again, that doesn't mean it's a bad deal. But you are not getting a freebie. Free means all yours at no cost and with no strings attached, no demands on you as a consumer.

I don't know if these helped but it was what I taught.

That Time of Year

Is it spring or is it not? That's my question for April.

Friday I worked in a T-shirt and short pants and was perfectly comfortable. Saturday working at the Shop I was in my winter coat all over again. Today has the look and feel of being a gorgeous day. 

It wouldn't be so bad except that I was actively looking for a reason not to do yardwork, but still.

Kudos to A Subtle Armageddon

Dave Smith on Amazon offers one of the most impressive interpretations of my book A Subtle Armageddon: 

A Subtle Armageddon: Book 1 of the Infinity Series by Charles Martin Cosgriff was an interesting story about a man's discovery of personal freedom. Using the character "Man," he lays out an allegory of self-discovery in an atmosphere of strict control in a world where all is premeditated, prescribed, and predetermined to be the best path to follow.

While the storyline is compelling, following Man as he travels through his life, waging an internal battle with a "voice" that continues to make attempts to bring him back into line with the prescribed path, I found something even better.

In the beginning, Man had no concept of anything, not of his surroundings, not his purpose, and not of himself. So Cosgriff has the task of describing the most mundane things as Man, who is not even Man at this point, discovers them, takes note of them, and makes some kind of sense of them. I marveled at his skill in the writing craft when he applied language and writing mastery to do this, while keeping sophisticated readers interested, without losing them. Yes, it was a slow starter for sure. But I remained interested because of how Cosgriff did this. He was not able to use a common term like library or shadow, for example. He had to find a way to describe a shadow as it is discovered anew by Man. And he does it well, time after time. Taking the well-known and writing it as if it were unknown is an incredibly difficult undertaking.

There is certainly a political commentary within A Subtle Armageddon, hearkening to A Brave New World for sure, maybe a little bit of Atlas Shrugged. Based on the preview at the end of the story, that is what is in store for at least book 2 of the series.

I give A Subtle Armageddon: Book 1 of the Infinity Series by Charles Martin Cosgriff four stars because of his ability to describe familiar, well-known, mundane items in our world as if they had never been seen before. The book breaks into a brighter, more adventurous arc by the end of this Book. There is certainly hope that Book 2 will be as good.

I really like this analysis. See for yourself here to find out if Mr. Smith's thoughts are accurate.

Me? Yes, I think he says it well. I think he gets my self imposed starting point: the man in the story begins as a completely blank slate and grows from there. Nature is a great teacher.