Category Archives: Politics

Elder Eyring, President Uchtdorf, and Soldiering

November 2, 2010Hubris, National Guard, Politics, Social, Soldiering, Spiritual, War

As I grew up I was always sure that I wanted to be in the military. For a while I thought I wanted to be a full-time infantry officer. I enrolled in ROTC in college. I joined the 19th Special Forces Group (National Guard) as an enlisted counter-intelligence agent. I spent the 9 months of Initial Entry Training watching the active duty military lifestyle at work and play. It made me realize I wanted to stay a full time civilian. I also stayed enlisted, thank heavens.

From back then until now, 30 years in the LDS church, 4 years at Brigham Young University, 13 years in the national guard, 2 combat deployments; I always had the impression that service in the military was seen as an unwise choice for LDS men. Plenty of us served, but we were looked down upon just a little by the LDS culture.

It’s not objecively or doctrinally true. Like I said, it was simply the impression I had and it was due to several factors. Some people at BYU (it is an academic institution after all, grubbing after government grants with the best of them) actively look down on the military services, in lockstep with the extreme left. And taking a degree in English exposed me to many such. Also, I’ve lost count of the talks I’ve heard and the testimonies born by single-term servicemen about how the military turned them into sinners when in reality all it did was force them to step away from the apron strings. I also had a long string of sunday school teachers and fellow members who were less than encouraging to my martial leanings.

All this has combined to leave me feeling a little at sea, left to find my own soldier specific spiritual guidance in the scriptures. Fortunately, there’s plenty there. It’s looked at as odd and incomprehensible by much of the church’s membership who consider most of Alma to be … off, but it gives me joy to find it.

Imagine my glee when Elder Eyring gave me a huge blast of it over the modern pulpit at General Conference in April of 2009. In his talk entitled “Man Down!” he tells the story of the two delta operators who lost their lives saving a single helicopter pilot from being ripped apart by the howling ravening enemy mob in Mogadishu Somalia. To my memory that was the first time I ever heard soldiers performing a soldier’s mission held up as good examples by a general authority in my church. Thank you Elder Eyring. Someday I’d like to shake your hand for that.

Don’t get me wrong, soldiers have been held up as good examples many times, but always for things other than being a soldier. It’s always been for resisting temptation or being brave in difficult cirumstances, and so on, nothing really specific to soldiering. Elder Eyring’s address changed all that for me.

I got another blast of it last Sunday, October 31, 2010. President Uchtdorf gave a fireside specifically to members of the military and their spouses. I hope somebody recorded it because I’d like to hear and/or read it again. You might think that soldier specific teaching would be guaranteed at such a single purpose fireside. You’d be wrong though. President Uchtdord could easily, and profitably for us, given us an hour and a half of teaching starring soldiers but not specific to soldiers, like so many have before. He didn’t though. He went all out, designating the United States military, by name, as a force for good in the world. We were spiritually well fed, as soldiers, throughout.

One thing in particular stood out for me though.

It’s a small thing. Something I should have noticed before, but which I never put together and which he specifically emphasized. President Uchtdorf pointed out, with some satisfaction, that the individual chosen by God to stand atop our temples and announce the Savior when he returns is a soldier.

Elizabeth Moon and the Ground Zero Mosque

October 22, 2010Fantasy, Hubris, Politics, Scientifiction, Social, Terrorism, World

I know Mrs. Moon. Not particularly well. We’ve sat across from each other at dinners, talked while we walked around a con, and so forth. She’s a very nice lady. We differ on many political issues.

She wrote a blog post this year about the proposed mosque at ground zero. I thought it was well written, thoughtful, and I largely agreed with it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Elizabeth Moon was disinvited as Guest Of Honor from WisCon because of the contents of that post. She is being described as a bigot and a racist. In a shallow search of the internet the negative response to her post was vociferous and ill-informed. By that I mean that the vigor of those decrying her words seemed inversely proportional to how well they understood what she’d actually said in the post itself.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. For decades now ideologues have been preying on individuals who can’t be troubled to fully understand any given issue. If the soundbite doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy, like a kindly revolutionary, well, you must be against that. If the soundbite doesn’t resonate with your own fears, give you a sense of belonging to the in-group, well, you must be against that. Carry on, wave your placard, dump your trash on the ground for the workers to pick up.

Mrs. Moon’s post was largely a call to active citizenship, to responsibility, to personal accountability. A democratic republic cannot function properly if the citizens are worried only about themselves. The well-being of the group, the nation, the country, must figure largely into a good citizen’s responsibility equation. Mrs. Moon is well entitled to make that statement having served in the Marine Corps among a great many other things. Presumably she did at least a few good things that got her the Guest of Honor invitation to WisCon in the first place.

Part of being a good citizen here in the United States is a willingness to openly consider ideas that may be different from your own. Discuss them on their merits. Examine your own ideas in their light to see if, perhaps, you can learn something. It is the mark of intellectual cowardice and dishonesty to refuse to examine, refuse to discuss, refuse even to entertain, ideas that may be different from your own.

I’m looking at you WisCon.

Being a Loser

October 17, 2010Politics, Social, World

Just read an interesting article on bullying in the Christian Science Monitor (Thanks Stacy!). It talks about what does and doesn’t work when you’re the victim of bullying. Looks like good advice to me. Excellent advice even.

Two things jumped out at me. First, it links to another article with the following statement:

A decades’ long focus on self-esteem may have given some kids too much pride, making them more forceful with others. And psychologists suggest the focus on kids’ confidence may mean a subsequent lag in mediation and negotiation skills – knowledge that could defuse volatile situations.

The idea that too much pride makes kids more forceful with others and lacking in mediation skills is fascinating. I don’t think it’s true. Real, healthy pride or self-esteem does not lead a kid to bully others. It leads them to do what they think is right despite peer pressure, among many other positive things.

But we’re not talking about real, healthy pride or self-esteem. In the public school systems and many private ones were talking about false praise handed out to kids who haven’t earned it because educational group-think prescribes handfuls of it regardless of performance. The problem is and has been for years that the subjects of that false praise, the kids, know perfectly well that it’s false. And the kids who earn the real praise can’t tell the difference between it and the stuff you’re handing to the moron at the end of the row.

The message that effusive unearned praise sends is not the intended one. Instead of telling the kids that they’re worth something, we’ve been telling kids they’re not worth anything except false praise. In a situation where they get praised no matter what they do, there is no way for them to earn real praise. All they get is a constant repitition of the refrain “Here have some false praise, you’re not worth the real stuff.” And when you hand the same crap to those who excel as you hand to those who don’t, where’s the incentive to even try? As far as the kids can tell, trying isn’t worth squat.

I haven’t done and can’t do a real study of the matter but I would not be at all surprised if bullying was a direct result of a desperate search for a way to get ahead, excel, stand above one’s peers. To WIN. There have always been bullies. When I was a kid, they were usually the poor bastards who had real problems at home or in their personal lives. They were trying to lift themselves by pushing others down. The problem we’re running into now is that the false praise we’ve been handing out for that decade mentioned above doesn’t make troubled kids feel better about themselves, it makes all the kids feel worse, because it’s a lie. So they look for self-esteem in the hall.

Don’t get me wrong. Kids who fail don’t need to be ridiculed. They need to be praised too. But it has to be real praise, and sometimes it’s hard to find a way to hand that out. It’s never impossible though.

And it never hurt anyone to be told, “You failed at this because you didn’t try hard enough. Study more, practice longer and you’ll succeed.” Being a loser at something isn’t the end of the world.

And now we come to the second thing that stands out. What happens to the kids who fight back against the bullies?

Seriously, what happens to them? When bullying gets physical, the appropriate response is physical. If a big bully is trying to hurt you, stabbing him with your pencil is perfectly appropriate. Heck, your buddy stabbing him with his pencil is appropriate. Yet, in our culture today, the kid defending himself or another kid in that manner would be kicked out and sued. That’s another underlying problem in our society. We protect bullies by denying the victims, their friends, and any civic-minded bystanders the ability to respond appropriately.

Money as a Brainwashing Tool

October 11, 2010Hubris, Politics, Social, World

So, a lot of brouhaha in the news recently about where money that American organizations spend on American political campaigns comes from, foreign money being bad.

I’m not all that worked up about the issue. I’m a little leery at the idea of foreign interests meddling in our elections. They should mind their own business. But at the same time, that kind of crap works a lot better in the systems they’re used to, thinly veiled or open dictatorships, or rule by the elite; and not so well in an actual functioning democratic republic. Which is probably why we’ve had so much success meddling in other peoples elections over the years.

But in the end, in our country, an election is about the candidates and their ideas. If people are voting for someone because they’ve seen them in more TV spots, the fault lies not with the people who paid for those TV spots but with the morons making their decisions that way.

Money can have a huge effect on an election but the only legitimate gripe is if a candidate’s ideas are never heard by the electorate due to a lack of funds. In this, the information age, that’s less and less of a concern. A voter going to the polls while uninformed has only himself to blame today. Trying to shift that blame from the voter to the evil corporations or foreign investors who failed to inform him through TV is missing the point entirely and taking it as a given that the voters are mindless sheep.

The constitution was not written with mindless sheep in mind. Perhaps the voters ARE mindless sheep though. The fact remains that nobody forced them to be that way.

The fact that the candidate with the most money often wins is either a sad commentary on the ignorance of our citizens or a demonstration that those citizens voted with their pocketbooks before ever going to the polls. Since foreign interests can’t do the latter, their influence is limited entirely to those who are too stupid to think for themselves. Meh. We reap what we sow.

Bonus link

Not going to war

October 10, 2010Hubris, Humor, National Guard, Politics, Social, Soldiering, Terrorism, War

Not going to war, for most people, is a good thing. Not all.

What could I possibly mean by that, you may ask with a suspicious and horrified look? Who is this ‘all’ you speak of in the negative?

Surely, war is bad. Yes it is. There are still worse things.

Surely, no one sane would WANT their country to go to war. Absolutely true. No one sane wants their country to go to war. In the same way no one wants to have to shoot a burglar in their house.

Surely, no one sane wants, personally, to go to war. Meh, yes and no. I’m sure there are people who would very cogently and succinctly make the point that I am not sane. For I want to go to war.

Surely I have done my part, having already been to war. Surely I could now stay home, honor satisfied, and enjoy my family. Yes, I have, and yes I could. But the war is not over. In some ways it is just beginning. There are still parts to be played, and if not by me, then by who?

I’m thinking about this because of a good friend of mine, who also wants to go to war. The difference for him is that he has not yet been.

My unit is a good one. We have deployed companies to the war on terror three times and once an entire battalion. Collectively we have killed a whole grundle of bad men who desperately needed killing, and helped a whole bunch of other people who needed help. We have done well, collecting honors and accolades. We have yet to lose a man to the war.

The last deployment, though, was a few years ago and the next has been pushed back so far that many of the men in my unit despaired of ever going back and left, seeking other units who ARE deploying soon, or contracting jobs with the famed “military industrial complex.” (My unit doesn’t typically attract the sort who only join the military for the college benefits though most of us have used them to good effect)

My friend is considering attaching himself to a unit in another state that is deploying but finds itself critically short of men with our expertise. I’m considering going with him. It’s a hard sell for a man in my position, but can I let my friend go alone?

We would all prefer that there were no wars, no oppression, no murder, no crime. MacArthur was right when he said:

The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

Yet, if our country is at war, we want to go. It’s what drove us to join the military in the first place.

Bonus link

The Holy Mill of Murder

October 3, 2010Politics, Spiritual, War

Mankind as it is constituted, is a boil and a canker. Observe the specimens of any nation. Man is weak, greedy, craven, lustful, prey to every species of depravity and vice. He will lie, cheat, steal, murder, melt down the very statues of the gods and coin their gold as money for whores. This is man. This is his nature, as all the poets attest.
“Fortunately God in his mercy, has provided a counterpoise to our species’ innate depravity. That gift…, is war.
“War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable in man. It unites him with his brothers and binds them in selfless love, eradicating in the crucible of necessity, all which is base and ignoble. There in the holy mill of murder, the meanest of men may seek and find that part of himself, concealed beneath the corrupt, which shines forth brilliant and virtuous, worthy of honor before the gods. Do not despise war, nor delude yourself that mercy and compassion are superior virtues, to manly valor.”

Polynikes of Sparta – 480 B.C.

I haven’t traced the origin of this quote. I attribute it as I have above because it matches what I’ve heard over the years. If the attribution is wrong please correct me. And no, I don’t think Steven Pressfield was the first to say this.

EthanSkar

One word at a time.

Category Archives: Politics

The Holy Mill of Murder