Over at Blog on the Run there was a little spat in the comments for one of Lex’s posts about the whole Bush administration spying thing, and one commenter described himself as being in a "state of offpissment." Maybe I’ve had my head in the sand, but that’s a new one for me and it has joined "constant state of perturbation" as the only two accurate descriptions of my emotional state since becoming a father of almost-teenagers.
Okay, no cheating. Here’s a pop quiz about the US Constitution.
I could make it easy and give you the answers, but instead check out this page that has the text of the Constitution in its entirety.
Use the comments to tell me how you did. BTW, I failed miserably.
The whole silly "war on Christmas" thing that’s been going on so some guy (John Gibson) could sell his book and Fox News could jack up its ratings has had an unexpected, but pleasant effect on me. I’ve read more in the last two weeks about the history of celebrating Christmas in America than I’ve ever read before, even in my religious education classes at Capital Lutheran High School West in Arlington, VA. I was reading this Slate article when I came across this paragraph:
Observance of Christmas, or the lack thereof, was one way to differentiate among the Christian sects of Colonial and 19th-century
America. Anglicans, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Lutherans, to name
just a few, did; Quakers, Puritans, Separatists, Baptists, and some
Presbyterians did not. An 1855 New York Times
report on Christmas services in the city noted that Baptist and
Methodist churches were closed because they "do not accept the day as a
holy one," while Episcopal and Catholic churches were open and "decked
with evergreens." New England Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward
Beecher remembered decorative greenery as an exotic touch that one
could see only in Episcopal churches, "a Romish institution kept up by
the Romish church." (Emphasis on Moravians mine).
You’ll notice that the Moravians were one of the Christian sects that celebrated Christmas all along. Winston-Salem is located in what was originally a 100,000 acre Moravian settlement called Wachovia, and is currently home to historic Old Salem. Anyone who’s lived here for at least one Christmas can attest to the fact that the Moravians have been practicing the art of celebrating Christmas for a long time.
For evidence you only need to attend a Moravian Christmas Candlelight Lovefeast to get a sense for what I’m talking about. I could try to describe it, but it is beyond my capabilities as a writer. Just take my word for it and if you’re ever near a Moravian church on Christmas Eve make sure you attend. What I can say is that you get the feeling that this is what Christmas is all about.
Chalk that up as one more reason that living in Winston-Salem is great.
Down in Florida (where else) there’s a guy spending millions of dollars to build a camp for Christian nudists. As described in a London Times article the 200-acre resort, named Natura, will feature 50 houses built around a non-denominational church (services will be clothing-optional), a hotel, a campsite and a children’s water park.
The founder of Natura is a 67-year-old Quaker named Bill Martin who made his money building retirement homes in Washington. He’s managed to tick off the religious fundamentalists and other nudists which has to be some sort of record. He also owns and runs the Naturist Christians website, which supposedly has 19,000 registered users and averages 35,000 hits a day. Quite frankly this just boggles my mind.
Personally I have no qualms about a bunch of adults cavorting around in their birthday suits, but I can’t see having kids involved. To be clear here, there seems to be a lot of family oriented naturalist sites out there, so these guys are breaking any new nudist grounds on that front. Apparently the big deal isn’t running around naked with kids, the big deal is going to church naked with or without kids.
As for sitting in church naked I would hope that they have bottles of Lysol at the end of each pew, for obvious reasons. And doesn’t this whole scenario sound like one of those bad dreams like wearing your pajamas to school, but way worse? And I don’t know about you, but I find listening to the average sermon hard enough without other, uh, distractions.
And here I thought people playing guitars and bongos in church was a radical concept.
I was going to write something about the whole NSA wire-tapping thing, but I don’t need to. Michelle Malkin wrote a little ditty about it and Lex Alexander takes her on here. I think Lex’s counter-argument piece offers as good an overview as you’re going to find.
The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission has a website that features a report they’ve published about the epononymous event (thanks to Ed Cone for the link). It is still exciting to me that I can get this kind of information without leaving the confines of my own office and the thought it sparked is how wonderful it must be for teachers in this day and age to have these resources available to them. My next thought wasn’t so pleasant: do teachers even use sites like this as a resource, or more accurately, given the atmosphere of "teaching to the test" that they work in today do they have the flexibility to incorporate this kind of resource into their curricula? Unfortunately I suspect the answer to the latter is a negative.
I know for a fact that my kids use the internet to do their own research (with a lot of guidance from their parents seeing as they might be tempted to quote Runescape as a historical reference), but I can’t think of any recent occurrences of a teacher pointing them to a web-based resource. Is it because the teachers don’t want to use the web in this way or is it because they can’t?
When we moved here to the North Carolina Piedmont we were warned to expect ice storms on a fairly regular basis. We lucked out last winter and didn’t get any, but this year we had our first bout of ice fun. Last week we lost power from Thursday afternoon through late Friday morning so by dawn on Friday morning we were living in a refrigerator, which meant we didn’t sleep particularly well and then at about 6 a.m. Celeste and I were shot out of bed by the sound of a large pine falling across our neighbors fence and squishing their kids’ plastic play set.
I couldn’t go back to sleep so I went outside and started snapping pics all around our property. Here’s a link to a photo gallery of some of those pics (I was bored so you can believe I took a bunch).
In a stunning outbreak of nuance the National Journal has an article that explores the ramifications of the impending "retirement" of the baby-boom generation. I’m not sure if I found the article interesting because of the subject matter or because it does a good job at looking at the issue from multiple angles, or to put it more succinctly, because the article is nuanced. Either way it’s fascinating and a good read.
Oh, and to be totally accurate I don’t think my parents technically qualify as boomers since they were born during WWII and not after. I just missed the boomer designation since I was born in 1966 and apparently the boom ended in 1964. Still, I’d rather blame them than myself for any impending doom as that’s truly the American way. Anyone know a good psychiatrist that can reaffirm that none of us are responsible for our own failures/inadequacies since it’s all our parents’ fault? Of course any success we have is due only to our own actions…but I digress.
There’s a site, commoncensus.org that tracks how people identify themselves geographically and where they live. For example you can look at a map and see how many people in North Carolina most identify themselves as Southern Americans or simply as Americans.
Even more interesting to me is the breakdown of sports team affiliations by geography that you can find at the CommonCensus Sports Map Project. Right now I can tell you that within a 50 mile radius of me there are 27 Carolina Panthers fans and 8 Washington Redskins fans (there are also 2 Cowboys fans who should be deported) who have contributed to the project. The project depends on people filling out the questionnaire on their website to build their data so I encourage all of you (except Cowboys fans) to go and participate. The same is true for the regular census page as well.
We Americans can be one silly bunch of wackos. Only in America could we make a greeting into a political discussion. This whole "Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday" thing is just absurd and if anyone believes that it came about for any reason other than someone making political hay has been living with their head up their rear for far too long.
This issue "jumped the shark" when some doofus who was debating the issue on CNN invoked the Nazis’ banned children from saying Merry Christmas as a viable comparison to what’s going on now. You can see the whole video here. (Thanks to Ed Cone for the lead.)
I have to say that anyone who feels oppressed or threatened and is a member of the kind of majority that the Christmas-celebrating-Christians represent in this country must have never felt the sting of true oppression. They should stop and think about people with real problems. You know people who:
So spare me the faux-angst of holiday greetings. There are people with real problems in this world and we need not be distracted by this idiocy. Just be happy you can shop at Wal-Mart or Target or anywhere you choose, no matter how they greet you.
Befuddled 