Recently Sen. Barack Obama has been facing a lot of heat based on comments by his pastor about 9/11. In August 2005, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said:
"In the 21st Century, white America got a wake up call after 9/11/01. White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just "disappeared" as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns."
In a sermon on September 16, 2001, he said:
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. American's chickens are coming home to roost."
While Rev. Wright has gotten a lot of attention recently because of his prominent parishioner, he is hardly the only clergyman to blame America for 9/11 or to cast the tragedy in terms of religious judgment.
On September 17, 2001, the Rev. Jerry Falwell appeared on Pat Robertson's program, the 700 Club. In the space of a few minutes, Rev. Falwell made a number of pointed comments. First, he stated that the effects of 9/11 would appear "miniscule if, in fact God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." He then went on to blame the ACLU, pagans, abortionists, gays, lesbians and feminists for trying to secularize America and said, "I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"
In response, the Rev. Pat Robertson said, "Well, I totally concur . . . ." In a press release, Rev. Robertson stated:
"We have insulted God at the highest level of our government. Then, we say, 'Why does this happen?' It is happening because God Almight is lifting His protection from us. Once that protection is gone, we are vulnerable because we live in a free society."
The Rev. Steve Wilkins, a pastor in Monroe, Louisiana said that, "We have had a horrible judgment visited upon us this week." After listing sinful practices in America, such as abortion and fornication, he said, "We have loved things and been worshippers of mannon. . . . It was no accident that the terrorists chose to target the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
However, Fred Phelps, the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas made the most outrageous statements. His church's website proclaims, "Thank God for September 11! The towers fell as punishment for your sins, America!" Rev. Phelps also claimed that "The rod of God has smitten (gay) America!" and that "The multitudes slain Sept. 11, 2001, are in Hell--forever!"
Davidson Loehr, a Unitarian pastor from Austin, Texas preached a sermon on February 12, 2006 in which he blamed the Bush administration for orchestrating 9/11.
What can we conclude from this recitation of unbalanced rhetoric? While Rev. Wright's comments are disturbing and lack a certain logical consistency, he is hardly alone. Many of his ministerial colleagues have made comments which are far more incendiary. The same "blame America" rhetoric can also be seen across a wide range of secular America as well.
It seems that 9/11 has become like a mirror for many Americans, reflecting back and magnifyng their preconceived notions. If a person is concerned with treatment of African Americans, 9/11 is seen as a judgment on that account. For persons concerned with sexual morality and the secularization of American society, 9/11 reflects God's judgment for immorality. The problem with this approach is that the speaker is imposing their view of the world on an event rather than trying to understand it and learn from it.
What is the antidote to all of this crazy preaching? First, in this Easter season, Christians would do well to remember John 3:17, "For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved." Second, anyone interested in the real causes of 9/11 would do well to read Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Mr. Wright does an excellent job of getting inside Al Qaeda's head and explaining why the attacks occurred.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Inspiring Soccer Movie Captures Truths Without Being Completely True
Gracie is the story of a girl who tries out for her high school soccer team in 1978 after her the death of her soccer star brother. The movie aspires to be an American Bend It Like Beckham, but is grittier, harder-edged and more realistic. Ironically, the movie's one flaw is that it oversells the "true" nature of the story.
Gracie is loosely based on the life of the Shue family. The character of Gracie is based on Elizabeth Shue (who starred in such movies as Adventures in Babysitting and Leaving Las Vegas) and plays a character based on her mother in the film. The parts that are accurate are that she played soccer on boys' teams (at ages 9-13) and that she had a brother who was a soccer star who died tragically. However, the actual story is fiction.
The movie plays it coy about just how autobiographical it is, including an epilogue which says that thanks to Title IX and Gracie, five million American girls play soccer today and the U.S. women's team won the World Cup. This inspirational statement loses some of its force when you realize that Gracie is a fictional character and that the events in the movie didn't actually happen. However, if you can forgive the overly clever distinction between inspired by true events and true, it is a good movie. (One warning: This movie is a hard PG-13. The language is coarse and there are some uncomfortable adult situations).
In the story, the family is devastated when the soccer-star older brother is killed in a car accident. The father, whose own soccer career had been cut short by a knee injury, shuts down and gives up on life. However, 15-year-old Gracie, who has never played soccer before, announces that she is going to try out for the high school team the following year. Her announcement is met with derision by her family. When she insists, her father gives her a "tryout" against her brothers, which she fails.
In a typical sports movie-cliche, she decides to show everyone by working hard and training herself. In a break from the usual storyline, when she continues to encounter resistance, she gives up and acts out. Gracie stops trying in school, drinks, takes the family car without permission and has a close call with a college boy she seduced.
Her father finally realizes that he will lose his daughter if he doesn't help her. To make up for lost time, he quits his job in order to train his daughter to try out for the team and requires that she go to summer school in the morning to make up the classes she failed. From there, the movie follows a familiar arc where she works hard, wins the right to try out for the team, survives a grueling tryout but only makes the J.V. team and finally gets to enter the big game as a substitute.
The movie is realistic in a lot of respects. Although the character Gracie has natural talent, she still has to work hard to develop that talent. Even after she has trained hard, her first attempt to play street soccer with the boys is disasterous. After she makes the team, she is not as tough as the guys and spends a lot of time getting knocked down and missing shots. When she gets knocked down, she hurts and sometime she cries. It is painful to watch as this slender blonde gets pounded time after time and continue to get up and try again. It seems like most of the games are played in the rain and the mud. (One of the great scenes at the beginning of the film features the father telling his son that in baseball, they would rolling out the tarp and the players would be going home; in football, they have a play and then take a break; but that in soccer, they play nonstop regardless of the conditions).
The movie also manages to capture the sexism of an era without being preachy. From the hard-core sexism of competitive boys who laugh at and try to humiliate an upstart girl to to the red card fouls ignored by the referee to the casual sexist banter at the dinner table, the movie illustrates a harsh environment for girls. Hopefully, the movie depicts a time and place that we have moved on from.
Gracie is loosely based on the life of the Shue family. The character of Gracie is based on Elizabeth Shue (who starred in such movies as Adventures in Babysitting and Leaving Las Vegas) and plays a character based on her mother in the film. The parts that are accurate are that she played soccer on boys' teams (at ages 9-13) and that she had a brother who was a soccer star who died tragically. However, the actual story is fiction.
The movie plays it coy about just how autobiographical it is, including an epilogue which says that thanks to Title IX and Gracie, five million American girls play soccer today and the U.S. women's team won the World Cup. This inspirational statement loses some of its force when you realize that Gracie is a fictional character and that the events in the movie didn't actually happen. However, if you can forgive the overly clever distinction between inspired by true events and true, it is a good movie. (One warning: This movie is a hard PG-13. The language is coarse and there are some uncomfortable adult situations).
In the story, the family is devastated when the soccer-star older brother is killed in a car accident. The father, whose own soccer career had been cut short by a knee injury, shuts down and gives up on life. However, 15-year-old Gracie, who has never played soccer before, announces that she is going to try out for the high school team the following year. Her announcement is met with derision by her family. When she insists, her father gives her a "tryout" against her brothers, which she fails.
In a typical sports movie-cliche, she decides to show everyone by working hard and training herself. In a break from the usual storyline, when she continues to encounter resistance, she gives up and acts out. Gracie stops trying in school, drinks, takes the family car without permission and has a close call with a college boy she seduced.
Her father finally realizes that he will lose his daughter if he doesn't help her. To make up for lost time, he quits his job in order to train his daughter to try out for the team and requires that she go to summer school in the morning to make up the classes she failed. From there, the movie follows a familiar arc where she works hard, wins the right to try out for the team, survives a grueling tryout but only makes the J.V. team and finally gets to enter the big game as a substitute.
The movie is realistic in a lot of respects. Although the character Gracie has natural talent, she still has to work hard to develop that talent. Even after she has trained hard, her first attempt to play street soccer with the boys is disasterous. After she makes the team, she is not as tough as the guys and spends a lot of time getting knocked down and missing shots. When she gets knocked down, she hurts and sometime she cries. It is painful to watch as this slender blonde gets pounded time after time and continue to get up and try again. It seems like most of the games are played in the rain and the mud. (One of the great scenes at the beginning of the film features the father telling his son that in baseball, they would rolling out the tarp and the players would be going home; in football, they have a play and then take a break; but that in soccer, they play nonstop regardless of the conditions).
The movie also manages to capture the sexism of an era without being preachy. From the hard-core sexism of competitive boys who laugh at and try to humiliate an upstart girl to to the red card fouls ignored by the referee to the casual sexist banter at the dinner table, the movie illustrates a harsh environment for girls. Hopefully, the movie depicts a time and place that we have moved on from.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Social Insecurity
I recently received my Social Security Statement from the government and it shows why government programs that are supposed to be good for you don't always work out so well in practice.
I got my first job in 1978. Ever since then, 6.2% of my wages have been deducted and paid to the government. My employer has to match this amount. This is really the same thing as having to pay it myself, since an employer is going to look at the total cost to hire an employee when setting wages. All of those payments add up. If you do a simple calculation, if 12.4% of your wages are paid into social security, that means that for every eight years that you work, one entire years' worth of wages are paid into social security.
According to my recent statement, if I continue to work to age 67, I will receive a payment of $2,300 per month. Is this a good deal? Based on what my employers and I have paid in to date and assuming that I continue to earn the same amount that I have made the last five years, it will take me 14 years 8 months to receive back what has been paid in on my account without interest. That means that I would have to live to almost 82 just to get my money back. Will I live to be 82? According to the IRS (which publishes tables to determine the taxable value of annuities), someone who is 47 years old today can expect to live another 35.9 years. That means that my life expectancy at this point is about 83. Thus, I could expect to receive back $36,800 more than I paid in. Of course, the IRS uses unisex tables and men don't live as long as women, so maybe I wouldn't live long enough to break even after all.
Social security offers some other options for those who want to retire earlier or later, but they work out to about the same. If I retire at age 62, I would receive $1,611 per month. Based on my calculations, at this rate, it would take 18 years, 2 months or until age 80 years 2 months.
Finally, if I work to 70, I would receive about $2,852 per month. If I take this option, it would take me 12 years 8 months to get back to even, or until age 82 years 8 months. As you can see, the longer you choose to work and pay into the system, the longer it takes you to get your money back even if the amount of the payments goes up.
The analysis is further clouded by the fact that the government can change the deal at any time. For many years, the age to receive full retirement benefits was 65. It is now 67. There is talk about raising it to 70. In 1992, you only had to pay social security on earnings up to $53,400. Today the cap has nearly doubled to $102,000. Thus, all of the calculations that I have made above can and probably will change for the worse.
Can you imagine what would happen to a company in the private sector which offered an investment which required you to make payments for 50 years in order to receive a stream of income representing a net rate of return close to 0%?
To make it worse, the money that I am paying into social security is not being set aside for my retirement. Instead, it is being used to pay for my parents' retirement (just as their contributions paid for their parents' retirement). Thus, the only way that I can get my payments is if my children and their children continue to pay into the system. In the private sector, an investment scheme which relies on an influx of new investors in order to repay the contributions of old investors is known as a Ponzi Scheme and is illegal. When the government does it, it is known as Social Security.
I got my first job in 1978. Ever since then, 6.2% of my wages have been deducted and paid to the government. My employer has to match this amount. This is really the same thing as having to pay it myself, since an employer is going to look at the total cost to hire an employee when setting wages. All of those payments add up. If you do a simple calculation, if 12.4% of your wages are paid into social security, that means that for every eight years that you work, one entire years' worth of wages are paid into social security.
According to my recent statement, if I continue to work to age 67, I will receive a payment of $2,300 per month. Is this a good deal? Based on what my employers and I have paid in to date and assuming that I continue to earn the same amount that I have made the last five years, it will take me 14 years 8 months to receive back what has been paid in on my account without interest. That means that I would have to live to almost 82 just to get my money back. Will I live to be 82? According to the IRS (which publishes tables to determine the taxable value of annuities), someone who is 47 years old today can expect to live another 35.9 years. That means that my life expectancy at this point is about 83. Thus, I could expect to receive back $36,800 more than I paid in. Of course, the IRS uses unisex tables and men don't live as long as women, so maybe I wouldn't live long enough to break even after all.
Social security offers some other options for those who want to retire earlier or later, but they work out to about the same. If I retire at age 62, I would receive $1,611 per month. Based on my calculations, at this rate, it would take 18 years, 2 months or until age 80 years 2 months.
Finally, if I work to 70, I would receive about $2,852 per month. If I take this option, it would take me 12 years 8 months to get back to even, or until age 82 years 8 months. As you can see, the longer you choose to work and pay into the system, the longer it takes you to get your money back even if the amount of the payments goes up.
The analysis is further clouded by the fact that the government can change the deal at any time. For many years, the age to receive full retirement benefits was 65. It is now 67. There is talk about raising it to 70. In 1992, you only had to pay social security on earnings up to $53,400. Today the cap has nearly doubled to $102,000. Thus, all of the calculations that I have made above can and probably will change for the worse.
Can you imagine what would happen to a company in the private sector which offered an investment which required you to make payments for 50 years in order to receive a stream of income representing a net rate of return close to 0%?
To make it worse, the money that I am paying into social security is not being set aside for my retirement. Instead, it is being used to pay for my parents' retirement (just as their contributions paid for their parents' retirement). Thus, the only way that I can get my payments is if my children and their children continue to pay into the system. In the private sector, an investment scheme which relies on an influx of new investors in order to repay the contributions of old investors is known as a Ponzi Scheme and is illegal. When the government does it, it is known as Social Security.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Anti-Immigration Candidates Deported From Primaries
What a difference a few months makes. Last fall, Republican candidates were lining up to see who could be the most hostile to immigrants, the Spanish language and foreign culture. Representatives Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter both made nativist fervor the cornerstone of their campaigns, while Rudy Giuiliani and Mitt Romney both lashed out at the other for being lax on illegals (remember the silliness about Giuliani running a "sanctuary mansion" because some illegal workers did landscaping there?). Gov. Mike Huckabee was forced to make an about face after expressing compassion for the children of immigrants, while the campaign of pro-immigrant Sen. John McCain appeared to be going down in flames. Now, the anti-immigrant candidates have all fallen by the wayside. Sens. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all committed to some form of immigration reform and have rejected the notion that 20 million undocumented workers could be rounded up and sent packing.
What accounts for this change? A cynical view would be that in a close election cycle neither party wants to write off an important voter bloc. However, a more generous view may be that we are being true to our own nature as a nation of immigrants and more realistic about the issue.
For much of our history, almost anyone could become an American just by showing up. The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that,"any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States." The first anti-immigration legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. However, the current limits on immigration did not become law until the 20th Century. A series of laws passed between 1917-1924 and 1952 established a quota system where only a limited number of people from each country would be allowed to immigrate per year. Unfortunately, the quotas had nothing to do with the actual demand for immigration so that potential immigrants from some countries were automatically admitted, while others had no chance of legal immigration.
The current system is broken. Whenever government tries to place artificial limits on anything, the result is evasion of the limits. We saw this with both Prohibition and the wage and price controls of the 1970s. As a result of artificial limits on immigration, we now have millions of undocumented workers in this country. While some people ask what part of illegal don't you understand, no government is able to overcome the laws of supply and demand. As long as there is a demand for hard-working, low-wage workers in this country and a supply of workers who would benefit from those low-wage jobs just across the border, there will be migration to this country. The choice is whether to accept reality and try to regulate it or to ignore reality and believe that immigration can be stopped.
The biggest objections that are raised to immigration are that the current immigration from Mexico and Latin America is different from prior immigration to this country and that immigration is a threat to our security. I think that both arguments are flawed.
On one level, it is true that the current Hispanic immmigration is "different" from prior immigrations in our history. However, different is not necessarily bad. The mass immigrations from Ireland, Italy and Poland during the 19th and 20th centuries were different from the prior immigrations from England, France,Scotland, Holland and Germany. While this was considered to be a threat at the time, these immigrants are now part of the fabric of our country. The immigrations from Cuba in the 1960s and Vietnam in the 1970s were also "different" from prior immigration and certainly changed the face of the country, but once again, change was not harmful.
There is the argument that today's immigrants refuse to assimilate. To a certain extent, this is true of all immigrant groups. My father-in-law did not learn to speak English until he started public school. However, his native language was German, not Spanish. This was true despite the fact that the German immigration to Texas had occurred nearly 90 years earlier. You can still hear Czech spoken in Zabcikille, Texas and Norwegian in Clifton, Texas. Of course, we find these expressions from the old country quaint and they are used by the Chamber of Commerce to promote tourism. However, we feel threatened when we hear Spanish being spoken in our country. While parts of El Paso or San Antonio may feel like they belong on the other side of the border, the evidence shows that first generation immigrants who come here as children pick up English easily, second generation immigrants are fluent in both English and Spanish and third generation immigrants are usually fluent in English only.
There is also the wide-spread belief that Latin immigrants come to this country so that they can sponge off of welfare without paying taxes. One hint that this might not be true is the fact that Mexico's third largest source of income is money saved by expatriates working in the United States and sent back to their families in Mexico. It is hard to see the threat to this country from immigrants who are willing to work hard, save their money and try to make a better life for their families. Most immigrants don't earn enough money to pay federal income tax (nearly half of all Americans don't pay any federal taxes), but they do pay sales tax, gasoline taxes and property tax merely by virtue of buying things and living somewhere.
The border security issue actually cuts in favor of liberalized immigration laws. Currently, there are so many people crossing over such a large border that it is physically impossible to stop them all. The border fence won't change that. However, if we adopted a guest worker program and gave papers to people willing to work in this country, we could re-direct much of the border traffic into legal channels. If the Border Patrol did not have to direct its resources to keeping millions of would-be workers from crossing the border, it could focus on keeping out drug traffickers and potential terrorists and actually secure the border.
I don't know enough Spanish to sum this up in that language, so let me conclude with one of the languages of my heritage: "Ich bin ein Einwanderer."
What accounts for this change? A cynical view would be that in a close election cycle neither party wants to write off an important voter bloc. However, a more generous view may be that we are being true to our own nature as a nation of immigrants and more realistic about the issue.
For much of our history, almost anyone could become an American just by showing up. The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that,"any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States." The first anti-immigration legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. However, the current limits on immigration did not become law until the 20th Century. A series of laws passed between 1917-1924 and 1952 established a quota system where only a limited number of people from each country would be allowed to immigrate per year. Unfortunately, the quotas had nothing to do with the actual demand for immigration so that potential immigrants from some countries were automatically admitted, while others had no chance of legal immigration.
The current system is broken. Whenever government tries to place artificial limits on anything, the result is evasion of the limits. We saw this with both Prohibition and the wage and price controls of the 1970s. As a result of artificial limits on immigration, we now have millions of undocumented workers in this country. While some people ask what part of illegal don't you understand, no government is able to overcome the laws of supply and demand. As long as there is a demand for hard-working, low-wage workers in this country and a supply of workers who would benefit from those low-wage jobs just across the border, there will be migration to this country. The choice is whether to accept reality and try to regulate it or to ignore reality and believe that immigration can be stopped.
The biggest objections that are raised to immigration are that the current immigration from Mexico and Latin America is different from prior immigration to this country and that immigration is a threat to our security. I think that both arguments are flawed.
On one level, it is true that the current Hispanic immmigration is "different" from prior immigrations in our history. However, different is not necessarily bad. The mass immigrations from Ireland, Italy and Poland during the 19th and 20th centuries were different from the prior immigrations from England, France,Scotland, Holland and Germany. While this was considered to be a threat at the time, these immigrants are now part of the fabric of our country. The immigrations from Cuba in the 1960s and Vietnam in the 1970s were also "different" from prior immigration and certainly changed the face of the country, but once again, change was not harmful.
There is the argument that today's immigrants refuse to assimilate. To a certain extent, this is true of all immigrant groups. My father-in-law did not learn to speak English until he started public school. However, his native language was German, not Spanish. This was true despite the fact that the German immigration to Texas had occurred nearly 90 years earlier. You can still hear Czech spoken in Zabcikille, Texas and Norwegian in Clifton, Texas. Of course, we find these expressions from the old country quaint and they are used by the Chamber of Commerce to promote tourism. However, we feel threatened when we hear Spanish being spoken in our country. While parts of El Paso or San Antonio may feel like they belong on the other side of the border, the evidence shows that first generation immigrants who come here as children pick up English easily, second generation immigrants are fluent in both English and Spanish and third generation immigrants are usually fluent in English only.
There is also the wide-spread belief that Latin immigrants come to this country so that they can sponge off of welfare without paying taxes. One hint that this might not be true is the fact that Mexico's third largest source of income is money saved by expatriates working in the United States and sent back to their families in Mexico. It is hard to see the threat to this country from immigrants who are willing to work hard, save their money and try to make a better life for their families. Most immigrants don't earn enough money to pay federal income tax (nearly half of all Americans don't pay any federal taxes), but they do pay sales tax, gasoline taxes and property tax merely by virtue of buying things and living somewhere.
The border security issue actually cuts in favor of liberalized immigration laws. Currently, there are so many people crossing over such a large border that it is physically impossible to stop them all. The border fence won't change that. However, if we adopted a guest worker program and gave papers to people willing to work in this country, we could re-direct much of the border traffic into legal channels. If the Border Patrol did not have to direct its resources to keeping millions of would-be workers from crossing the border, it could focus on keeping out drug traffickers and potential terrorists and actually secure the border.
I don't know enough Spanish to sum this up in that language, so let me conclude with one of the languages of my heritage: "Ich bin ein Einwanderer."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
