It Matters

I've been reading/listening on and off to the Gosnell trial and the Benghazi testimony. Both stories are hard to listen to for prolonged periods without suffering from both despair and fury.  Both stories are the triumph of political fealty over the reality.

I understand why the Gosnell trial is not being covered. It is icky and it goes against the political winds of the day that authorize every insurance to pay for abortions and the new policy by the FDA to allow any 15 year old to pop a RU486 faster than a tic tac.  There is no news about the shameful conditions of the Gosnell clinic. There is no story about the woman who died or the infants born alive who were then ruthlessly killed.  There is no story.  Why?  Because there is no story if it disrupts those who favor abortion. There is no story if it portrays those seeking to be reelected in a less than perfect light.  As Hillary said, "What's the big deal?" or more currently, as Jay Carney said, "That's old news." 

But there are dead people as a result of decisions in both cases.  There are families destroyed because people were allowed to go on pretending that what was happening, was not happening.  The Gosnell trial is the manifestation of the logical/rational outcome of believing in abortion on demand. If a person is not a person until thinking and willing makes it so, then geography and size become irrelevant.  If the mother wants the child dead and she goes to this man, he will make it so. 

One can only deaden one's soul so much before the sin of committing murder starts to feed itself.   If you want to know how a clinic like Dr. Gosnell's could exist, it is because the society as a whole allowed it, sanctioned it, refused to see it as what it was, a place that preyed upon the desperate, despairing, the fearful and the selfish and the poor, for money.   It put forth the lie that if the child were destroyed, life would be better.  People paid for that lie to be whispered in their ears, and children wound up in the freezer and in the toilet, and chopped up.  The ugly truth is abortion is the fruit born of a lack of charity in the hearts of all involved save the baby, and lack of charity leads to deadened eyes and deadened hearts.   We become blind to what is evil and call it good.


Willful blindness abounds in the Gosnell trial. 

It is also the hallmark of the dust up over Benghazi.  Truth keeps running into the various trial balloon possibilities that have failed to gain traction in the months since the attack. The assault on our embassy was not because of a video on Youtube. Though I remember how the administration indicated this film posted in July was the reason for the spontaneous decision on September 11th, 2012 to throw maltov cocktails and drag Ambassador Stevens through the streets.  I remember them speaking about this over and over again, at the UN, at the coffins of the four men, that they would get the people responsible.  But we had assets there who were told to stand down.  We had calls to indicate proper people knew, we have knowledge that people defied the orders to stand down to help those in the embassy, and thus lost their own lives.

Has the man who made that stupid film been released?  No.  He the Stan Shunpike of our current Ministry of Magic;  A symbolic arrest touted as proof of doing something about the death eaters that killed four Americans including our diplomat to Libya.    That arrest and the subsequent fallout has vanished from the news narrative. So Nakoula sits in jail even though there has been plenty of evidence that the film had nothing at all to do with the terrorist attack.  Releasing him would verify that reality so he sits in jail to save the face of our government.  It is an inconvenient story.  

The people testifying that Hillary knew it wasn't a video, that the order to stand down when help could have been given and had been called for, could only have been given from someone at the very top, are being smeared as GOP tools, as part of the vast right wing conspiracy.  Apparently the collective press is suffering from a dearth of curiosity with respect to anything that might indicated the "incident" in Benghazi was the result of systemic incompetence, indifference or shallow calculations that before it happened, it still didn't matter and afterwards, even moreso. 

 That the talking points were rewritten to varnish history as it happened to pretend there was no error, there was nothing that could have been done, and that there is no cover up, nothing

to see, nothing to be upset about, matter.  It is not old news. It is an active story.  Our government failed in its first responsibility, to safeguard the life, liberty, laws and values of our nation.  There should be an investigation, there should be consequences.  People who made the call made the call wrongly. People who made the call, lied afterwards to cover up  their errors and pretend there was no moral culpability or political fallout.  People who cover such things for a living, covered it up by not covering it.  

Again, narratives that are icky to the ideology, are not covered.  The 4th estate now no longer covers anything save what reinforces its own sensibilities.  Truth is not the objective.  The objective is to preserve the power we deem worthy, and to discredit, disown and destroy any objections to the recasting of reality to suit the agenda.   Truth is deemed unknowable and thus never pursued unless it suits the political interests of the day. 

But truth matters even if no one believes it. Truth matters even if it is not popular.  Truth is reality, unvarnished by politics or ideology, and sometimes, it is inescapable because it resonates beyond what spin and manipulation can manage.   (The reporter changing his mind about abortion while covering the Gosnell trial is a perfect example).  Truth can break through.

Why? 

Because it is real. Truth matters.   It matters that our nation pretends killing children is not killing children. So also, it matters that our nation ignores its own mandates, its own laws and gets away with it if those gifted with the charge of watch dogging our government deem the story to go against their own world views.   So when our leaders ask quite directly, "What difference does it make?"  I have an answer.

It makes a difference. It matters.  What is the difference?  Only the difference between good and evil, life and death, freedom and fear, a world that isn't simply run by the rule of force and a world that will allow anything to happen as long as it doesn't happen to them.   Yesterday a story broke about three women being freed from ten years of imprisonment by men who used them as sexual things.  They were free because one man heard crying out and acted on it, his little actions while sitting at home eating brought about an end of a ten year evil.  He could have looked the other way.  He didn't.  Why?  Because when you see evil, if you ignore it, you enable it.  If you hear evil, and you do not stop it, you embolden it.  If you refuse to recognize evil, you will become blind to the pain and suffering you could stop.  So it matters.  It always matters.  So what difference does it make?

All the difference in the world.  

Creating a Culture of Truth

The news about Notre Dame's Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend (a scheme that strung along the ND senior including her death of all things) should not surprise anyone who understands the great blinder that the internet is to genuine community.  Here, one can be anonymous, one can become a whole other person with an avatar to match.  One also can create an identity anew.  The problem with the internet world is ultimately just that, it is not real. Lennay Kekua was not real. 

We may never know the why of such a calculated and cruel deception, for the purveyors of this hoax behaved in a way that can also only be described as unreal.   It doesn't make sense to the natural laws in our hearts, to lie over and over again this way to someone about something as important, as lovely, as vital as love.

The only one who is real in this story, is Manti, as he felt real feelings including infatuation, grief and possibly great shame at being duped. Even his complicity if there is any is real.  He may have known and not spoken in an attempt to recover from what would be and now is, a public shaming for falling prey to people with evil intent.  He will have to live with the public memory of being either part of a scam, or being the victim of a scam.  If the first, he will have the hard road of remorse and recovery and the reality that some will never trust him again.  If the later, then he will have the hard road of recovery with the reality that some will never believe him in the first place. Either way, it is a hard road. 

Lance Armstrong also faces the road, a road known to be of his own making.  Was any of his triumph story real?  Did he win the first Tour de France without doping?  Would we believe it?  What is the proper response to such a protracted, calculated, destructive lying pattern?  For a society? He now joins all those baseball greats eligible for the Hall of Fame that no one wants to vote for, because we don't know how much of what was accomplished was real, and how much was chemically enhanced. 

We have before us two choices, life and death.  If we learn nothing else from these famous figures falling in the lime light, it is that truth always matters.  Truth even as unbearable as it might seem --I was scammed, I can't win it, is understandable in  a way that a lie, even a reasonable one, (to protect self, to protect prospects, to protect whatever), is not.  We can understand the reality of being fooled, of not being able to accomplish something and the heart break of both much better than the decision to rig the game.  

So what can we do to create a Culture of Truth?

1) Pray for all of these men, because they will really need grace to get through this, this is a tough storm to be stuck in the middle of, whether of their own designs or not. 

2) Take away what is good, discard the rest.  Live Strong isn't a bad lesson.  It is carpe diem so to speak for the modern age, but know what strength is. Strength is truth and strength is work.  Strength requires trust that life is not all about our own orchestration of the events, but about our choices and reactions to things we did not control, and about knowing when we should not control outcomes. 

3) Fasting. We are a culture addicted to approval and acknowledgement, so desperate for recognition, we've invented twitter so we may highlight to the world our every passing thought no matter how banal.   Fasting from the spotlight, whether it is National television or the pre-school parking lot, we will step away from the addictive narcotic Narcissism that is so easy to inhale in today's world. 

4) Do something real for someone else, something that takes thought, effort, energy and time.  We live in a gift card world of email ease, write a real letter, cook a meal, set flowers on the table, cultivate beauty through the gift of your own creativity, rather than the flash of a credit card. 

5) Practice something you stink at, allow failure to be ignored.  (My guitar and piano sit lonely most of the time), so I'm making myself suffer through the process for twenty minutes a day. It is not pretty but there is an appreciation in the moment when I hear a section of it "getting better." Play a game you don't normally win, without cheat codes or extra lives.  Learn to accept that all of this is a process and not a performance or a quest for perfection, it s a perpetual quest to become more real.

6) Engage in charity, both in deed and thought.  It doesn't matter if it doesn't make the news, it shouldn't. Being a giver to others is the antidote to the smoke of narcissism that can lead to big and little lies, can lead to preferring the non real world to that which matters most. Make gratitude and generosity the norm in your family's life by constantly cultivating it in yourself.  Let the Holy Spirit do the rest of the directing. 

7)  To grow deeper in love, we must be life long strugglers. If we would be life long learners and lovers of others, we don't ever finish or reach the pinnacle, there is no finish line.

Ultimately, the end result of all of this, will not stop everyone from being seduced by glory or their 15 minutes of fame, but it will help make the world a bit lighter than all the false glow of fake victories. 

Virtual Reality

As followers of this blog know, I now have a Wii fit. I've been asked if it's good, and to give a review.

I will say, it is fun, it has promoted exercise in my family and according to it, I've jogged in place roughly 30 miles since last week.  Given that before last week, I had not run mile one in about three years, you'ld think the pounds would be melting away.

Alas the virtual miles do not make the actual pounds disappear. I've gained two! My Wii Mii is flabby in the middle like me.  Speaking from the tiny part of me that is completely vain, I'd like a little less realistic reality in my virtual avatar. 

Then there's the Wii Mii age. The machine gives you your physical age based on a series of tests.  I've been 63, 54, 49, 33, and 25.  It's very demoralizing when your kids tell you, "Hey Mom...it says you're old and overweight.  The Wii said so." 

The Wii also says I'm running 12.6 miles in an hour. I've NEVER done that, I don't think it's physically possible given my airway issues.  So the skeptic in me has awakened.  How is it possible I'm jogging nearly the equivalent of a half a marathon a day in an hour? How is it I am morphing into Supergirl when I run in the Wii world and staying slug flabby Mii both on the screen and in real life?  Is the Wii lying to me in my activity, telling me what I want to hear in one area but not the other? If the machine is going to lie to me, I wish it would tell me I'm thinner for all these miles.

Here's what I do know...reality is always harder than virtual; rockband is easier than practicing a guitar, blogging is easier than writing for a publication, and Facebook is no substitute for time spent with friends.

Sigh...Nothing good or great or worthwhile is easy. Nothing of value does not require commitment.
I'm reminded of the quote, "Of course it's hard. If it was easy then everybody would do it. Its the hard that makes it great."--from A League of Their Own. 

Wii Fit is the exercise equivalent of diet food dessert.  It almost works, but not quite because we know what the real cheesecake tastes like.    It is real enough, I'm working out and that's a start.   I still like the Wii, but tomorrow, I'm going to try running outside and see what happens...I'll let you know how far I get in those sixty minutes outside of the Wii world.  Hopefully actual exercise in the real world will yield better results than the Wii world has.  I'll let you know.