What a shock to read of this after decades of being told how wonderful yet another modern thread woven into the magic carpet ride of Progress was:
Women who give birth after IVF treatment are up to five times as likely to suffer from serious complications, researchers have found.
The most comprehensive study of its kind concluded that babies born as a result of fertility treatment are more likely to be severely underweight, stillborn, born prematurely or die only a few weeks after birth.
Scientists analysed records from more than 300,000 births that took place in Australia between 1986 and 2002.
This latest and exhaustive study reflects what we are just beginning to learn about this practice. The findings are not encouraging:
An article just published in the highly respected journal Fertility and Sterility ought to give anyone thinking about using “test tube” baby technology pause. A review of 124,000 children born through two very common infertility treatments -- in vitro fertilization, creating embryos in a dish and transferring them to a womb and ICSI, in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg -- showed large increase in the risk of having a child with a birth defect. The risk was 37 percent higher than that seen in children made the old fashioned way. That is a huge number.
Yet we have to endure mindless, emotionally overwrought lectures from the contemporary sheep who have fallen for all of the comforting modernist lies. They hammer away at us with the old saw that the Roman Catholic Church is so cruel, so heartless, so backwards in its thinking because it frowns on unnatural acts (for that is what this is -- an act willingly done by human beings) such as IVF.
Just as with the emotionally-hysterical homosexuals, once again we have people so wrapped up in their immediate quest for what they want at the moment that they adamantly refuse to consider that there may be unhappy consequences to themselves and others as a result of their unnatural acts.
What can possibly be more cruel than bringing a sickly, under-developed baby into this world just because you "want one"?
Oh yeah, I forgot, they can always be aborted if it looks like the little possession isn't gonna turn out exactly like we want it.
Bet that sadistic Catholic Church frowns on refusing delivery of damaged parcels too!
The mainstream newspapers are not even worried about blowback anymore. They just assume that they have so thoroughly won the culture war that they don't even have to hide the condescending loathing for the formerly dominant Christian religion:
Bishop Gerald Dino led the prayers and dedication, asking for their deity to “bless and sanctify this house.” He led a procession through the building, blessing each classroom, before going on the balcony and blessing the parish and the congregation.
"Their deity." Mythical-Place-of-Eternal-Happiness forbid the Las Vegas Review-Journal uses the word "God" to describe the focus of Catholic prayers.
Just another small hint of what the traditional Christian American should by now be very well aware of: These people are opposed to your very existence. They despise what you hold sacred and they do not see fit to offer even the tiniest sliver of respect for the things you cherish.
It's another milestone on the "tolerance" highway. Last stop: outright hostility. As this milemarker shows, we are getting closer and closer to reaching our destination.
Just caught a summer repeat of this 60 Minutes feature on a Massachusetts state cop and Iraq war veteran's "brilliant" idea to police the city of Springfield just as his military unit policed hostile cities in occupied Iraq:
Our intrepid CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl breathlessly reported this wonderful new police enforcement concept in a manner that unflinchingly portrayed the police as white knights coming to the rescue. There is brief mention made of concerns about using military tactics in domestic policing but the oversized elephant in the room is never mentioned: We have gotten to the point now where an American city is being treated in the same way that our military treats foreign-occupied territory. The gangs and other associated criminals in the story were compared to Iraqi insurgents but the sad reality of what causes police officers to go into the third-largest city in the state of Massachusetts with the same wariness and tactical concerns that an army unit has when entering a war-torn foreign village was never touched upon.
The state cop who came up with the Counterinsurgency-in-Mayberry plan openly compares Springfield to Mogadishu and Kandahar City, yet of course there will never be a real effort by CBS to explain just how an American city that is located over 2,000 miles from the Mexican border had become so overrun by hostiles forces.
This did not just happen overnight. It was the result of a deliberate attempt to destabilize and balkanize a cohesive nation of citizens bound by a common culture through neighborhood breaking and massive non-European immigration.
I personally witnessed a key moment in the destruction of Springfield, Massachusetts. You see, I lived there for a time as a small child, from 1972-75, and have vivid memories of the takeover of the working-class Irish neighborhood where we resided.
It all started with a wave of Puerto Rican immigrants into the city in the late '60s and early '70s who arrived in the immediate wake of Ted Kennedy's disastrous Immigration Act of 1965, which specifically mandated a national preference for Third World immigrants instead of the more assimilable Europeans in our immigration policy. This undoubtedly created an encouraging environment for the massive and nonstop influx of Puerto Ricans, whose rights to move to continental America were of course not dependent on the 1965 law, into cities such as Springfield:
Hartford, Connecticut and Springfield, Massachusetts have both a large Puerto Rican population and an extremely high proportion of Puerto Rican among the Hispanics, making these metro areas valuable for study of the distinctive impact of Puerto Rican presence. Between 1990 and 2000, non-Hispanic Whites in these metropolitan areas were moving away from towns and cities where Hispanics were concentrated and growing. Such population separation may in part be attributable to the relatively high-poverty level among Hispanics. Multivariate analysis applied to data for 38 metro areas with varying levels of Puerto Rican predominance among Hispanics shows, however, that ethnic group segregation was influenced by Puerto Rican presence even when controlling for the economic status of Hispanics. The “Puerto Rican effect” may stem from the greater racialization of Puerto Ricans. By contrast other Hispanic groups may have benefitted from an immigrant identity that has now become more of a liability.
Even as a 6-year-old, I could see the effect this had on one neighborhood in Springfield. The Hungry Hill section was a longstanding Irish enclave. We lived on the bottom of the hill on our street, with old Mrs. Shea next door and a childhood friend whose last name was Murphy all the way at the top. Every day my brother, sister and I would run up the hill to play with our pal, whose dad was a Springfield cop.
Like so many white families in the face of the Puerto Rican invasion, we moved out to the suburbs as soon as we could. Our parents saw which way the wind was blowing. But we came back to visit our friend only a year or two later and I recall him pointing out the houses on the street that we had run past so many times on our way up and down the hill. "Oh, that one's a drug dealer. Oh, the cops raided that place the other day." Etc. etc. Our childhood friend was all of 8 years old as he gave us this rundown. My memory of my reaction to that experience was hoping the Murphy family would be able to escape too before it was too late.
That it was all an intentional effort to destroy white city neighborhoods surely escaped our young minds at the time. But the evidence is out there today for those who care to look back, and massive immigration was not the only weapon used.
"The Six-District Plan - Integration of The Springfield, Mass. Elementary Schools," an official 1976 report from the Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, spotlights the use of busing as one way to destroy the old neighborhoods. This whole paper reads like a Soviet plan to transfer native Ukrainians to Siberia and replace them with some bizarre minority from the steppes of Asia.
The strong-arm tactics and eager desire to use force are not even disguised. Homogenous neighborhoods are seen as a threat. All local concerns are dismissed out of hand.
This quote on the top of page 24 from Dr. John E. Deady, Springfield's superintendent of schools, is downright Orwellian:
"I sympathize with the man who wants his neighborhood school. However, I believe that the majority must sacrifice that neighborhood school in order to create the integrated society which in the long run will benefit us all. In Springfield, busing became unavoidable."
Also note how the churches, with the Catholic archdiocese squarely at the fore, enthusiastically volunteered to help force The Plan down residents' throats (page 34):
At the request of the council of churches and the Catholic Diocese, many ministers of all denominations and priests talked about the Six-District Plan and the importance of integration from the pulpit the Sunday before the opening of school and urged their parishioners to obey the law.
People see the pedophilia scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in recent decades and think that is the only damage these treacherous shepherds were inflicting on their naive flocks at the time. Little mentioned is how these same corrupt clerics were actively conspiring in the destruction of their very own parishes.
I vividly recall the Catholic education I received in the 1970s and '80s, first in the suburbs and then back in Springfield itself for high school. The Catholic duty to support open and widespread Third World immigration was constantly pushed on us from an early age, along with the usual wooden and overblown Civil Rights movement badgerings that portrayed white males as the great evil of the 20th century.
Even as kids and early teens, one could sense that we were being manipulated. I remember our class being forced to watch a pro-Sanctuary Movement PBS propaganda film that featured a memorable scene where two brown-skinned kids trying to sneak into America are attacked in a sewage tunnel by a pack of rats:
101:45 mark:
We were supposed to be horrified by this and confused and angry at our government for making poor unfortunates like this have to undergo such trauma when they were only trying to improve their lives. But kids know better. Kids have an inherent sense of right and wrong that they don't need to learn from their elders. When a group of kids is playing with the ball you brought along and somebody runs off with your ball and won't give it back, you don't need an adult to tell you you've been wronged. And that is how I remember feeling watching that scene. Remembering that Irish neighborhood that had literally gone to Hell, the instinctive response I had to this scene was that these people were trying to take something that was mine. I didn't need to have a political orientation to instinctively see the rats as a last line of defense and cheer them on as they attempted to thwart the intruders who were trying to take something away from me. Sounds cruel, and as an adult I wouldn't be as immature and callous, but it was a basic honesty that comes with childhood that told me that I was being played here by those who were trying to use my own emotions against me. They were trying to brainwash me against my own home and hearth, and I wasn't buying it. Go Rats!
Six-district plans, bald-faced propaganda at parochial school and at Sunday Mass, what did it all lead to? The conclusion could not be more pronounced yet nobody seems to want to tot up the score and mark accounts. It is an unavoidable fact that the result of all that pious preening and white guilt trips is a smaller Detroit on the Connecticut River... an uninhabitable, crumbling ghetto of a city marked by violence, racial strife and squalor to such an extent that the police openly regard it as another Mogadishu or Kandahar City.
The non-assimilable immigration, the forced "integration" of the neighborhood schools... the whole effort is a total and complete failure if you accept the notion that these 1970s multicultural progressives were really attempting to do good. Of course, that is not what they were attempting to do at all.
The common threads have been broken. Neighborhoods have been destroyed. The once-dominant citizenry is rootless and isolated. And the era of progressive collectivism on a total scale is one giant step closer.
I believe that at its heart "Auto Focus", the 2002 Paul Schrader film on the murder of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, is a very Catholic film. If you can separate the gratuitous nudity and strong sexual content from the overall story what you get is a devastatingly spot-on morality tale about the dangers of casually drifting into a life of error, or, as Catholics would call it, sin.
Crane, played remarkably well by Greg Kinnear, is above all a nice guy. Early in the film he winningly chirps, "Eddie Cantor once told me likeability is 90 percent of the battle. And we was right!"
Note he is not talking about being a good guy. He is talking about being a likeable guy. Big difference.
Crane's "likeability" opened the door to temptation as he slowly but surely threw himself into the near occasion of sin. "Auto Focus" unflinchingly documents this process and its consequences.
It's a fine film and I recommend it highly to those who can get past the sexual vulgarity. This description seems particularly spot-on:
This is a remarkable, delicate and disturbing film.
With its depictions of 60's and 70's lifestyles and
fashions and its brilliantly disquieting atmospheric
shift between the decades, the film is unquestionably
one of the most well thought-out period pieces to be
seen. But this is just the brilliant visuals of the
film. They underscore a far more interesting and
darkened theme. As an essay on man's descent into his
own personal hell of sexual addiction and societal
abnormality, "Auto Focus" perhaps stands alone. There
is a layer here, a seemingly nearly translucent one,
that is peeled back to expose something that lurks not
deep within us, but just beneath the polite exteriors
of our public personas. Given fame and money and a
partner in crime, Bob Crane wallows in his addiction
to sex, pornography and women.
The way the director contrasts the bright polyester leisure suit decor with the tired, dirty soul of America in the 1970s is nothing short of brilliant. The last half-hour is a visceral descent into personal darkness as revealed by the main character himself and the scenery that surrounds him.
As Crane is enveloped in this secular squalor, he seems to dwell on where he's ended up and how he got there. And he makes a rather cryptic statement about the meaning of the word orange.
This has always struck me as a comment of some importance.
As this interview with director Schrader reveals, the dialogue did in fact come from the real Bob Crane himself:
There’s a very interesting conversation that Crane has with his son towards the end about the word “orange.”
That came from Bob Jr., who overheard his father having that conversation with another man late into his life, when [he] didn’t quite understand what had happened. But Bob Jr. took it to mean that his father was at a point where he was trying to figure out some real basic sorts of things. That things had hidden meanings. So I used it there.
Here's the quote from the film:
The color orange. But what is it, really?
The color?
Yeah. But that's it. Just tell me, what is orange?
I don't know.
That's my point. You take it for granted. You don't think about stuff like that.
I believe I understand what Crane was getting at, and I'll tell you why.
Let's start by referring to one of my favorite scenes in literary fiction. It is from Walker Percy's 1977 novel "Lancelot". The book is set in corruption-plagued Louisiana and at one point Percy gives the best description of the very moment a childhood ends that I've ever read:
I can only compare it to the time I discovered my father was a crook. It was a long time ago. I was a child. My mother was going shopping and had sent me up to swipe some of his pocket money from his sock drawer. For a couple of years he had had a political appointment with the insurance commission with a "reform" administration. He had been accused of being in charge of parceling out the state's insurance business and taking kickbacks from local agencies. Of course we knew that could not be true. We were an honorable family. We had nothing to do with the Longs. We may have lost our money, Belle Isle was half in ruins, but we were an honorable family with an honorable name. Much talk of dirty politics. The honor of the family won out and even the opposition gave up. So I opened up the sock drawer and found not ten dollars but ten thousand dollars stuck carelessly under some argyle socks.
[. . .]
At the sight of the money, a new world opened up for me. The old world fell to pieces - not necessarily a bad thing. Ah, then, things are not so nice, I said to myself. But you see, that was an important discovery. For if there is one thing harder to bear than dishonor, it is honor, being brought up in a family where everything is so nice, perfect in fact, except of course oneself.
OK, so his dad was a crook and most of us can't relate to that, but what a riveting way to describe that moment in a child's life when he leaves one world and enters another. I remember my Ah! moment myself and I can still feel today how total the change in my perception was. It was the first out-of-the-norm bad thing to happen in our family, something all children unavoidably experience one way or the other, be it through the death of a relative or whatever. I distinctly recall feeling before the traumatic event that the world was specifically created just for me. Grass was green just so I could run through the green grass. The branches of the trees in our backyard were shaped as they were just so I could climb them. And so on. And then this thing happened. And in an instant the feeling that the world was made just for me and my personal enjoyment was gone, never to return. I didn't lose anything real or tangible, rather I lost an illusion. A pleasant, innocent illusion to be sure, but one I had to lose eventually.
Now imagine losing your world as an adult. Not just an illusion, but your very world itself.
Which brings us back to Bob Crane. Locked into a personal prison of sexual excess and compulsion, I believe Crane had an adult Ah! moment and it is reflected in his thoughts on the word "orange." Just as small children have a strong sense of the proper order of things, so too does a man. And here is a man who found himself so trapped in error that he had seen everything in his life fall out of place. He wants his world to have the natural order we all take for granted with the word "orange". His loss is no illusion. It's tangible. It's real. And it is caused by his own actions.
This is what sin does to us. When we sin things fall out of place. If we seek repentance and vow to amend our ways, we can restore our world and its natural sense of order once again.
But the incorrigble sinner will discover to his horror that after a while his whole world will spiral away from him. I recall times when my friends and I would hear about the perpetrator of some particularly heinous crime - a child molester, rapist, murderer, etc. - and wonder how he could do it. Not the crime itself, as we all know that human beings are capable of the most depraved behavior imaginable. No, what we wondered was how he could wake up the next day and tie his shoes, comb his hair, brush his teeth. You know... how could he do all those normal little things that regular folks do every day?
Well, Bob Crane answered that question. He can't. Not like he did before. The same applies to any kind of persistent grave sinner. The man who becomes consumed by his sins finds his world so knocked off its axis that he loses the simple certainty in life that can be found in the word "orange." You can't just take such things in life for granted. They don't just fall into place. That's all gone.
This is how completely destructive unrepentant serious sin is to a human life. This is how fully it warps the sinner's very existence. This is how utterly lost the man steeped in sin is.
Orange.
It's really a very profound and quite shattering observation.
Got a new article published on the Crisis Magazine website this week. As it shows, it's summertime and I've got movies on my mind. So without further ado, here are a few moments from films that richly embody Catholic values. These are not the usual suspects, i.e., "A Man For All Seasons," "The Song of Bernadette", etc. but either films that sadly lack the attention they deserve or are not the kind of movies you would expect to appear on a list like this. So here we go:
1. The Hustler - Brick-laying Can Be Great If a Guy Knows
A shining moment in a wonderful film, Eddie Felson's description of how his pool skills felt to him when he was really on is a brilliant exposition on appreciating the talents God gives us. Sure, it was just shooting pool, but Felson, memorably played by Paul Newman, reveals in this scene grateful enjoyment of his talent for what it is, not just for what it can do for him or what he can get from it. Doing something and doing it well can truly be its own reward. How far removed we are these days from such sentiments. Imagine how much better the world would be today if employers and employees alike held such a proper and respectful regard for the talents human beings have to offer.
Unfortunately, could not find a video clip but the dialogue can be found here.
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Heaven Forgive Me
Oscar Wilde's classic novel made for an outstanding 1945 Catholic film, starring Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders and Donna Reed. The innocence of young Gray is corrupted by an idle lord, played unforgettably by Sanders, and the grisly end of the film reveals the results of his terrible influence on the younger man. The true horror and repentance evidenced by the carelessly scandalous character makes for a powerful display of the grave danger to be found in casual words and example.
Spoiler alert: If you haven't seen the movie, don't watch this:
3. Ballad of a Soldier - Entire Film
I've always been a fan of war films from earliest childhood and, going back as far as I can remember, I always hoped to see a representation of the true cost of war, of all that untapped potential of all those young lives extinguished before they could really make their mark on the world. It is the essence of Catholicism to prize the individual human being, and the carnage of modern warfare is the most brutally obvious way in which our industrialized world fails to cherish this prize. I always wanted to see that portrayed on film in an honest, non-cloying way. So it shocked me beyond words to discover that such a movie was out there all along, and that it was made in all places in the Soviet Union. This film has such a beautiful soul and gives such a vivid picture of the potential and promise of one young soldier that it is simply amazing that it came out of the same country that literally forced young unarmed conscripts to link arms and charge German machine guns in open field during World War II.
Surely one of the best war films of all time, and one of the most human, and therefore Catholic, in its celebration of individual life, the entire film can be viewed here.
4. Anne of The Thousand Days - I Shall Be Excommunicated
The fact that this film did not become as popular as the equally outstanding "A Man For All Seasons" can be entirely explained by the social changes that overcame (read: destroyed) The West in the 1960s. When "A Man For All Seasons" won multiple Oscars for 1966 there was still an appreciation for traditional theatrical productions. By the 1969 Awards, the edgy, rebel (read: scum) "new" filmmakers were in vogue, and Hollywood laughably made "Midnight Cowboy" the best film of the year ahead of "Anne of the Thousand Days." Just try to watch the horribly dated and flat-out awful "Midnight Cowboy" today; the word "excrement" does not even begin to describe it. Meanwhile, the far superior and lasting film snuck under the radar as the years went by. A great pity, for this film crackles with witty dialogue and strong acting performances, from Richard Burton in the lead to John Colicos as a better Cromwell than the worthy Leo McKern was in "A Man For All Seasons" to Anthony Quayle as a far superior Wolsey than the bloated Orson Welles in "AMFAS". Burton's speech in which Henry VIII truly contemplates the consequences of his move to split from Rome is an all-time classic Catholic moment in film, one that is tragically overlooked today because of the whims of a trend-chasing Hollywood in the late '60s.
Find the film if you can, but you can view an actually quite excellent homage to this gem of a scene here.
5. Ferris Beuller's Day Off - A Man With Priorities So Out of Whack
OK, here's a lighter one for you, but I find this to be one of the best quotes to describe Protestants and the materialistic culture they have inflicted on us today. Saw a bit of this movie the other day. LOVE this scene. What makes it is he's stroking and admiring the car as he delivers that perfect line.
Theologically, one of the all-time great Catholic lines in cinematic history! No joke.
That's the worst thing about it: Protestants (and far too many Catholics today) admire material things to such an extent that they don't even understand the actual purpose of the things themselves and thus they end up ruining these very things that they inordinately love. Unfortunately, they ruin it for us all in the process as well because their actions DO have a profound effect on our society.
6. Auto Focus - Bob Crane and the Color Orange. Gonna post a larger essay on this in the next couple of days. Truly a great contemplation of the high personal cost of grave and persistent sin.
7. Goodbye, Lenin - Entire film. Another movie with a beautiful soul, this 2003 German film is funny, smart and poignant as it portrays a son's love for his mother and the lengths he will go to make her happy. In doing so, we can see how happy it makes him. A touching film on familial bonds and the simple goodness of a son who cares for his mother. Highly recommended.
**Bonus category:
The Single Most Evil Film I Have Ever Watched:
1. Strangers When We Meet (1960)
In contrast to movies that have beautiful souls, this film has the dirtiest soul of any movie I have ever seen. Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak "star" in a disgusting glorification of adultery so heavyset, so long-winded and so "adult" that words fail me in describing how offensive it was. The timing of the film also adds to the outrage, as the divorce culture that is so commonplace to us today was in its very fragile infancy in 1960 and star vehicles such as this no doubt helped nurture it to full malignancy. The most unpleasant, depressing and flat-out demonic film I have had the misfortune to experience.
The 20th century saw the overthrow of the traditional Christian view of existence in the Western World. This phenomenon was best personified in the generation known as the Baby Boomers, who embraced the materialism and selfism of their time more than any generation before or since, but can also be seen by older "children" of the 20th century, even at absurd ages of 80 and above.
It is no surprise that modern Americans are not aging gracefully. The desperation and emptiness of their worldliness comes more and more in focus with every step they take closer to the grave.
An 80-year-old woman on a tandem skydive slipped from her instructor’s harness then held on for life while rocketing toward Earth. An Alabama man busted his ankles trying to ride a bull. A Missouri man smashed his body – and his new motorcycle – minutes after buying the bike.
All were attempting items on their “bucket lists,” those rare experiences that people – particularly Baby Boomers (folks 49 years old and up) – ache to taste before kicking the bucket. But as injuries and close calls from these sacred agendas mount, some emergency workers want the bucket-listers to tone down their chosen adventures – or at least better prepare for such feats.
The startling lack of dignity seems to be lost on these folks, who believe experiencing perceived thrills they have "missed out on" up to this point will somehow make their lives complete:
To celebrate her 80th birthday and notch her bucket list, Laverne Everett went tandem skydivingtwo years ago above Lodi, Calif. After she paused in fear while perched in the plane’s hatch, she went airborne but partially slipped out of her partner’s harness. A fellow jumper filmed the plunge and the video went viral.
“I had watched watched people jump, and it looked like such fun, just sailing in real smooth, you know? It didn’t work out that way,” Everett, 82, said in a phone interview Thursday. “[My partner] kept telling me: ‘Hold on! Hold on!’ That’s where my mind was, just holding on. He was just holding me. I was just barely holding on with my legs.
“I couldn’t see anything. My clothes were rolled up over my face. There was pinhole of light, that’s all I had. So I didn’t know what was what. I’m very thankful I didn’t know,” added Everett, who suffered some “doozy bruises” and a scraped knee when she landed otherwise intact after their chute opened.
It's a warped sense of the purpose of living, almost as if life itself was a can of soda, something sugary and sweet to be downed with a flourish and the can crushed and thrown away. All the usual signs of our Western decline are in evidence here: self-absorption, identity tourism and a lack of consideration for how individual actions will affect others:
“A lot of people identify with the concept of: Geez, I haven’t done this in my life and I’m willing to take the risk. That’s really the guts of this thing. If you look at the movie which the term came from, it gets at: I’m close enough to the end and I’m making the active choice,” Carl Foster, director of the human performance laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, Lacrosse, said.
“By the same token, the people who have to take care of them, who have to bail them out of bad situations, probably wish they prepared or had thought better of it.”
Those who would see something life-affirming in reckless and inappropriate behavior such as this might not understand how such a mindset goes hand-in-hand with this:
It has long held true that elderly people have higher suicide rates than the overall population. But numbers released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show a dramatic spike in suicides among middle-aged people, with the highest increases among men in their 50s, whose rate went up by nearly 50 per cent to 30 per 100,000; and women in their early 60s, whose rate rose by nearly 60 per cent (though it is still relatively low compared with men, at 7 in 100,000).
When you define your life by the fun quotient of your "experiences" you will eventually do the math and realize that your ability to have such "experiences" inevitably declines with age. So, for those no longer able to work on that "bucket list" anymore, there is only one thing left to do: kick that bucket and be done with it.
There are no large-scale studies yet fleshing out the reasons behind the increase in boomer suicides. Part of it is likely tied to the recent economic downturn — financial recessions are in general associated with an uptick in suicides.
But the trend started a decade before the 2008 recession, and psychologists and academics say it likely stems from a complex matrix of issues particular to a generation that vowed not to trust anyone older than 30 and who rocked out to lyrics such as, “I hope I die before I get old.”
“We’ve been a pretty youth-oriented generation,” said Bob Knight, professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California, who is also a baby boomer. “We haven’t idealized growing up and getting mature in the same way that other cohorts have.”
We have a significantly large generation of older Americans approaching its elderly years which has never "idealized growing up and getting mature" and the results are not going to be pretty.
But when your whole sense of personal meaning comes from the ability to engage in earthly endeavors, this type of attitude is inevitable. We have the generation that mocked traditional religious faith nearing the end and finding nothing at the finishing line. If only our aging modern Americans had not tried so hard to squeeze out all that life-defining "experience" and opened themselves up to something greater than the self-limiting pursuit of individual happiness.
For there's been far too much of this in our culture for the past 100 years or so:
Among the 65 monasteries of fellow cloistered Carmelites around the country, the Brooklyn nuns are sometimes regarded as relics or worse because of their stubborn resistance to change. While reluctant to criticize on the record, several Carmelites interviewed recently said they believed such seclusion and self-denial is unhealthy and unnecessary to keep up a life of prayer. "Some of us say that this 20th century has enough of its own kinds of hairshirts," said Mother Joseph, prioress of a convent in Terre Haute, Ind., that has a fax and a station wagon.
... and not enough of this:
But the nuns' supporters believe prayer is being forgotten in the Catholic Church, and the way to restore its importance and rejuvenate shrinking religious orders is to return to the old ways. "People give me arguments about this, say those nuns are in there wasting their time, but I say that they're in there working," said Pete Brennan, a retired banker who is part of an association of former neighborhood residents who raise money for the monastery. "Prayer is hard work."
Echoing Monsignor Guy J. Puglisi -- [the priest who visits the nuns six days a week] who is fond of saying, "People don't know how powerful a place that monastery is" -- a priest from nearby St. Teresa's Church wrote of the nuns in the summer of 1942: "That which saves society is not that which can be seen upon the surface of things. It is not the power of industry, of war, of genius, of letters or arts. It is what touches its depths in a silence called the silence of good things."
Those who were mocked for "wasting their lives" are approaching the finish line with a dignity and serenity completely lacking in those who were so busy seeking out all that "fulfillment" in their precious worldly "experiences." Perhaps a pursuit of such serenity would be the very best thing to put on a "bucket list" after all. It's never too late to search for and the personal journey one must undertake to find it can be a powerful human experience in and of itself.
Nearly 50 years after leaving the University of Pennsylvania for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Mortimer Lenane O'Connor will receive a posthumous Ph.D. today in a ceremony honoring academic achievement and sacrifice on the field of battle.
My father, who set aside his dissertation to lead soldiers in war, will be included in the Class of 1968, the year he would most likely have completed his doctorate had fate not intervened.
Indeed, Lt. Col. O'Connor seemed the epitome of the warrior as the complete man:
In 1958, my dad was sent to Penn to study English in preparation for teaching at West Point. In his year at Penn, the young officer set aside the Cold War for Chaucer and refined his taste for poetry and prose.
After that teaching assignment and a year in Korea, my dad returned to Penn - living in Willingboro with Betsy and the six kids, teaching at Temple, and plodding through Ph.D. course work and research.
He studied German vocabulary flash cards late into the night, long after reading Dickens to us on the living room couch. My mother typed up his papers on a battered Smith-Corona.
He took some of the boys on summer bivouac with ROTC troops to Indiantown Gap. Quoting T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," he would intone, "This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends," as we hand-loaded rounds into mortar tubes and watched them arc into the summer sky.
An earnest regard for the arts and a grounded sense of history marked this man:
By the time ground troops were committed to Vietnam, my father's dissertation on "The Siege of Constantinople," a Henry Nevil Payne allegory of intrigue in the quasi-Catholic court of Charles II, was near completion. At its heart, the heroic tragedy was about doomed royal brothers fending off political and religious enemies. The parallel between 15th-century Byzantium and 17th-century England also eerily mirrored developments in Vietnam, where, as my father began his thesis, a Catholic regime run by brothers faced a Buddhist insurgency and treachery in the ranks.
He fell in battle, but his keen intellect would not be forgotten:
The dissertation sat unread in a battered briefcase for more than 40 years, set aside like so much of the past. Disinterred at last, it was sent to Penn, where the graduate English faculty recommended that the warrior be crowned a scholar.
No degree can change the lost years of a father's absence. But in literature, as in life, it can bring an unfinished story to a graceful conclusion. Ask Dr. O'Connor as he passes by in the Penn procession - the ghost with a sheepskin scroll and an M-16.
This man had a large and thriving family, a fertile mind valued by an Ivy League university and an endlessly bright future and he sacrificed it all for his country. We must always remember men like Dr. O'Connor as we face this generation's battle to preserve our freedom, which is threatened from forces within our very gates.
A heartfelt thank you to son O'Connor for reminding us of the Price of Liberty.
ESPN.com is running a typically long-winded "news article" filled with nothing but pure speculation and total conjecture in an effort to make devout Catholic and NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi a patron saint of the homosexual movement:
Actually, Vincent Thomas Lombardi treated his Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins as anything but [dogs]. No, winning wasn't everything, or the only thing. In Lombardi's playbook, winning placed a distant second to simple human decency.
In 1969, the year before his death, the only year he coached the Redskins, Lombardi worked with at least five gay men -- three players and two front-office executives, including David Slattery, who would come out in 1993. In his defining biography, "When Pride Still Mattered," author David Maraniss described the scene of Lombardi charging an assistant to work with one of the gay players, a struggling back named Ray McDonald. "And if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood," Lombardi is quoted as saying, "you'll be out of here before your ass hits the ground."
Of course the homosexuals have a rich history of "outing" long-dead celebrities and historical figures, including Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln and James Dean. So this is standard operating procedure. It's much easier to assert the "fact" that somebody is just like you or unequivocally agrees with your personal views when that person is no long around to correct you on the matter.
I suppose the fact that Lombardi famously emphasized a man's sense of responsibility to his God, his family and his football team, in that order, does nothing to dissuade these molders of our new cultural reality.
I recall reading a book about Lombardi's Packers and the notoriously tough coach is running a practice or a training camp exercise or something and he walks up to a glassy-eyed Marv Fleming, the starting tight end, gets right in his face and accusingly asks, "Have you been masturbating mister?"
It's a comical anecdote that highlights Lombardi's ultra-serious approach to football. I took it to mean he thought something was off about poor Marv. Turns out ole Vince was extremely supportive of his lifestyle choice and wanted to give him a hug. Who knew?
Self-described "devout Catholic" Paul Ryan now says he supports homosexuals adopting children, disavowing his previous voting record on the issue:
RYAN: Adoption, I’d vote differently these days. That was I think a vote I took in my first term, 1999 or 2000. I do believe that if there are children who are orphans who do not have a loving person or couple I think if a person wants to love and raise a child they ought to be able to do that. Period. I would vote that way.
Gotta love the "period" part. Like he's taking a strong stand on something instead of just blowing in the wind.
It's bad enough that we have the most corrupt politicians of all time. But do they have to be so awkward and flat-out bad at concealing their corruption?
EVEN though Good Friday remains one of the few blanks in the British racing calendar, the nation's biggest bookmaking chains are set to open the doors to the majority of their betting shops tomorrow for the first time in a controversial move which looks set to have major repercussions among staff and also will be met with consternation by the Church of England and other faith groups.
Most shops will be open for business as usual tomorrow after changes in the law mean that for the first time since betting shops were legalised over 40 years ago, cash betting can now take place on Good Friday. Previously, under the Betting, Gaming and Lotteries Act 1963, it was illegal for licensed betting offices to open, or for betting at racecourses to take place on both Good Friday and Christmas Day. However, when the Gambling Act 2005 came into effect in September last year, prohibitions relating to Good Friday were abolished.
SYDNEY - Tabcorp says its punters want to bet on Good Friday, but its outlets will only operate if staff are willing to work.
The decision to open TABs on Good Friday for the first time ever has drawn widespread condemnation from politicians, anti-gambling groups and religious organisations.
Rob Nason, managing director of Tabcorp, told Macquarie Radio they were "last to the market" because gambling was already occurring on Good Friday in pubs, clubs and the casino.
A Limerick judge ruled that the city's 110 pubs can open April 2, because the city is hosting a major Irish rugby match attracting tens of thousands of visitors.
Such a judgment would have been unthinkable in the Ireland of old, where the Catholic Church enjoyed unquestioned authority from the public and deference from the government.
Commentators were quick to suggest that the judgment represented a watershed in the shifting relations between church and state in this country.
"This could be the beginning of the end of Good Friday, because now legislation will have to be changed," said a jubilant David Hickey, one of the Limerick pub owners who successfully sued the state for the right to do business like any other Friday. "The option should be given to let publicans open if they want to and close if they want to. Today was a huge decision in that direction."
With the move, the [Baltimore] Ravens will now become the first defending champion to open on the road since Tampa Bay opened at Philadelphia in 2003. The NFL opener has been held on Thursday night in each season since 2004, except for last season when it was held on Wednesday to avoid conflict with President Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.
The NFL had previously ruled out moving the game to Wednesday night this season because it conflicts with Rosh Hashanah.
Nine Catholic schools played NCAA Tournament basketball games on Good Friday in 2008. Four Sweet Sixteen games were played this year with not even a ripple of controversy, despite the NCAA Tourney now having reached such a level that it is competing with the Super Bowl as the biggest gambling event in sports.
Four countries that seem to be making a deliberate effort to distract their Christian citizens from solemn observations of the most somber day on the Christian calendar. Meanwhile, the NFL will not even consider playing a game on a religious holiday celebrated by a statistically insignificant portion of American citizens.
One cannot fail to observe how big-time sports is being used to destroy one particular faith and the Western cultures that traditionally embraced it.
Gotta LOVE the stereotypical white Boston liberal, still alive and kicking after all these years:
For the students of color in the group, the selection of the first Latin American Pope was cause for optimism that the church is getting its act together, reaching out to ethnic groups who may have felt disenfranchised in the past. And all the kids we spoke with expressed hope that new leadership might find ways to bridge the generation gap.
Forget for a moment that "the first Latin American Pope" is of Italian heritage. It's a commonly-known fact that the Church is experiencing its biggest growth in Africa and yet here is our fearless New Frontier pioneer whining about perceived slights he likely stumbled upon in some scarcely-attended aging hippie parish in Waltham. For in his mind, ostracized angelic little black Catholic kids in neat, spotless, wrinkle-free school uniforms are still being forced to drink from the segregated bubbler at Our Lady of Judgmental Severity Elementary.
Being hopelessly out of date deters him not. Reality, after all, was never the Massachusetts Liberal's strength.
A few more thoughts on Pascal and our dying West... The highlight of my university days was European Intellectual History class. Of the dozen or so philosophers and scientists we read up on during the course of the semester, three stood out and the reactions each induced in me remain stark in my memory to this day: Descartes - Ice-cold robot. Instinctively hated him with a passion. Made a god of Reason and Science. Voltaire - Rutting animal, bitchy little critic. If he were alive today he'd be one of those fruity guys on TMZ. Pascal - Sticks of dynamite going off in my brain! Heart and soul, fire, a man who adamantly refused to hide from the unpleasant facts about the human condition. He's painted as this ultra-pessimist but I immediately embraced the warmth of his convictions. A hard truth is a million times more enjoyable to ponder than an effete, self-indulgent lie or some damn "I think therefore I am" machine-like BS. Pascal was so much more brilliant and so much more human than anyone else we learned about in that class. And it wasn't even close. Unfortunately, the world went in the direction of the robots and the perverts. Gee, it's all turned out so well, hasn't it?
The Jesuits were the intellectual vanguard of the Church at the time after the Reformation. They covered themselves in glory for centuries fighting the Protestant heretics and converting the savages of the New World, especially in South America. If you want to read about true heroism read about the English Jesuits who volunteered to leave the safe harbor of Continental Europe and go back to Protestant Elizabethan England and were tortured horribly and executed for being Catholic priests:
Then they produced a warrant for putting me to torture. They had it ready by them and handed it to me to read. (In this prison a special warrant is required for torture.)
I saw that the warrant was properly prepared and signed, and then I answered, 'With God's help I shall never do anything that is unjust or act against my conscience or the Catholic faith. You have me in your power. You can do with me what God allows you to do - more you cannot do.'
The confidence that comes with a reply like that -- totally missing in the Western man of today. All gone.
Being intellectuals, however, they fell for the Modernist heresy at the turn of the 20th century more than any other Catholic order and went from being the Pope's most trusted footsoldiers to being a nest of revolutionary subversives.
All that orthodox Catholics despise they pushed in the Church and society throughout the 20th century. Multiculturalism, feminism, homosexuality, communism, contraception and abortion, the whole rotten ball of wax. The decline of the major U.S. Catholic colleges into complete apostasy is largely their doing. The brilliant French philosopher Blaise Pascal had their number as far back as the 17th century. Even when they were still very good Catholics, their belief in and promotion of casuistry was seen by Pascal as a destructive system of thought that would eventually end in laxity and corruption.
Casuistry is basically situation ethics, I don't care how many theologians say it isn't, that is exactly what it is. The Jesuits would teach that you could commit an evil to serve a greater good as long as you didn't intend to commit the evil you knew you were committing. They didn't say it that way but that is exactly what they stood for. It's a very important theological point that has been lost in the honorless world we inhabit today:
Pascal properly foresaw that someone who could lie to promote a greater good AND convince himself he wasn't really lying at all was capable of doing and justifying any kind of behavior, including grave evil.
Thus, for Pascal, and I agree with him, the betrayal of the Jesuit order centuries later was preordained by their lax moral code.
No surprise that another large multi-national corporation is accused of cheating its customers:
“Our information comes from former employees at Anheuser-Busch, who have informed us that as a matter of corporate practice, all of their products [mentioned in the lawsuit] are watered down,” [attorney Josh] Boxer said, according to the Associated Press. “It's a simple cost-saving measure, and it's very significant.”
The excess water is added just before bottling and cuts the stated alcohol content by 3% to 8%, he said.
Now when I think of watered-down beer I immediately think of one brand: Miller Lite. How anyone could drink a bottle of that liquid nothingness was always beyond me and I'm one of the great lightweights of all time. The fact is, Lite tastes like a glass of water with a slight hint of beer. Hell, Aquafina holds more of a kick.
And so THAT got me to thinking about the whole Lite Beer from Miller ad campaign, going back to the '70s and '80s, when they used ultra-macho pro sports athletes:
to talk skeptical American males into believing that they weren't the following if they drank light beer:
Of course, the notion that drinking light beer can make you feminine is long gone in our modern American society. So far gone that contemporary Lite beer campaigns make drinking their dainty swill a test of manhood in and of itself:
The ridiculousness of that last ad isn't just in the claim that drinking Lite beer makes you more manly. It's in the very fact that they are bragging about the so-called "triple-hops brewed" quality of their beer. What makes that so outrageous is the simple fact that hops is estrogenic, so adding "triple hops" to the process means they are giving you manly macho men THREE TIMES the estrogen you would normally be consuming.
Triple the estrogen makes you more of a man! Only in our modern American corporate wasteland could something like that fly.
Prior to the German Beer Purity Act of 1516, beer almost never contained hops. In fact, more than one hundred different plants were used in brewing beer for at least ten thousand years prior to the introduction of hops in the middle ages. For the last thousand years of that period, the most dominant form of “beer” was called gruit, which contained a mixture of yarrow, bog myrtle, and marsh rosemary. These herbs, especially in beer, are sexually and mentally stimulating. (It is rare to become sleepy when drinking un-hopped beers.)
The Catholic Church had a monopoly on the production of gruit, but competing merchants and the Protestants worked together to break their monopoly and force the removal of all sexually stimulating herbs from beer. They replaced them with an herb that puts the drinker to sleep and dulls sexual drive in the male. The legislative arguments of the day all hinged on the issue of the stimulating effects of other herbs that were used in beer. A pilsner, for example, was originally a henbane beer (pilsen means “henbane”), which is an incredibly strong, psychoactive beer, used earlier in history by German berserkers before battle. The German Beer Purity Act was, in effect, the first drug control law ever enacted.
And then THAT got me to thinking about the extra research I did into this fascinating topic:
One of the arguments of the Protestants against the Catholic clergy (and indeed of Catholicism) was Catholic self-indulgence: in food, drink, and lavish life style. And it was this Protestant outrage that was the genesis of the temperance movement. (It would not stop, of course, with the assault on gruit ales but would continue on to include ale itself and any kind of psychotropic or inebriating plants and drinks by the twentieth century.)
The Protestant reformists were joined by merchants and competing royals desiring to break the brewing monopoly of the church. The result was, ultimately, the end of a many-thousand-year tradition of herbal beer making in Europe and the narrowing of beer and ale into one limited expression of beer production, that of hopped ales or what we today call beer.
The fact of the matter is, the potency of your beer had been weakened immensely a long time before Anheuser-Busch got bought by a soulless Belgian multinational. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Protestant Reformation - the original buzzkill.
