Dear Reader,
On this eve of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, I’ve put together a feature for you that is hopefully a little different from the pieces you may have read this past week. For obvious reasons, it was hard to write about something that has marked our world so deeply now for twenty years, but I hope I did it justice. (One note: apart from the cover photo, I purposely did not include any pictures or links, as it was late and, honestly, I needed a break this year.)
Before you get too far into things, I should probably warn you that I was a little worked up when I put together this week’s Hot Takes. I try really hard to bring a balanced perspective to the news, but I’m at my wits’ end in as to what to make of our President and his penchant for government overreach. I stand by my words, but I’m sorry to have had to write them.
Regardless, thanks for reading,
Craig
P.S.: As a reminder, you’re welcome and encouraged to email me directly with feedback, ideas, links, etc. at cmdunham [at] gmail [dot] com. Just know that, unless you specifically tell me not to, I may quote you here (though it will always be anonymously).
Hot Takes
I had some other items picked out for this week’s set of Hot Takes, but then Thursday afternoon happened and this story broke. While it’s normally too early for me to want to respond to breaking news, I couldn’t help but marvel at and respond to the tweets that accompanied the President announcing his “Path out of the Pandemic” yesterday.
Let’s start with this one, in which he announces his plans to require private businesses to do his dirty work of legislating vaccinations:
“…Ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated,” or what, for those who refuse? His plan does not say, but economic penalties for employers are surely what’s coming, which could force businesses whose employees refuse to comply or be tested to become the bad guys themselves in having to fire them.
Unless, that is, his Vice-President - also speaking Thursday - contradicts him:
Consider the juxtaposition of the statements within these two videos:
Contradicting messages aside, the tone of Biden’s rhetoric is threatening, scolding 80 million American citizens who have yet to be vaccinated, that “our patience is wearing thin.” Who is “our” here?
But Biden doesn’t limit his threats to citizens; he also goes after American governors:
“To get them out of the way.” It’s curious how tough Biden talks when addressing American leaders - so different from how he speaks to the likes of, say, the Taliban. The former are not enemies of State; they are elected officials Biden plans to take out.
Finally, consider the condescending tone in this ultimatum to the American people:
Before someone makes the argument that Biden may just need to fire his social media writer, there is no confusion from the videos or the executive orders signed as to what his intent is. Our President has crossed plenty of lines in his 46 years in public “service” (though I have doubts as to whom was actually being served), but my hope is this line-crossing would awaken those Biden supporters honest enough to say, “No. Stop. Enough. This is not right and against everything America is and has stood for.”
Here’s my theory: the powers that be (and we’re not talking Biden and Harris) have decided Joe’s time as President is coming to a close, which is why, Katie bar the door, he’s going to go out in a blaze of executive order glory on their behalf before they pull the plug. When you don’t take questions at press conferences, you tip your hand as to whom it is you’re really accountable. Biden is not accountable to “we the people,” but “they the puppet masters.” This is his last hurrah before they put him out to pasture (not that he knows it…or much else).
Getting (somehow) a free pass on everything from a porous border in Mexico (before a federal judge had to intervene), to skyrocketing inflation (due to his redefinition of “infrastructure” and his ridiculous spending to fund it), to the total incompetence of his cabinet and staff in general as well as in particular in Afghanistan (I still haven’t heard of one civilian leader or military general being asked to resign), and now to the next iteration of yet another vast government overreach, our current President is nothing but a front for a much more sinister group of people pulling the strings.
Biden is not a king; he is a pawn. What he is doing and how he is being used to do it is reprehensible. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want (I used to be a headmaster, so I’ve been called worse), but what is going on in this country is not written in nor worthy of the Constitution upon which these United States of America were founded.
I write all this as neither a Democrat nor a Republican, nor as one who considers himself a patriot or a Christian nationalist with some maligned idea of America being God’s favorite. I write this as a student of history, literature, and humanity, who in a mere 50 years on the planet has studied enough examples of how liberty and freedom dies, as well as personally experienced a slow-but-sure confiscation of civil and religious liberties and political and economic freedoms in the name of government.
As first American President George Washington stated in his farewell address of 1796,
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
I fear Washington’s words are prescient for our here and now. May it not be so under Joe Biden…or anyone else who occupies the Presidency of the United States.
Weighing Heavy
Leading up to this Saturday’s twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, sadness and grief have been appropriately prevalent themes this past week. Network news anchors have introduced stories with 9/11 survivors and/or their families; magazine and newspaper editors are running similar in-depth articles and editorials; even online influencers - when not linking to many of the aforementioned - are creating their own media memorials with the hashtags of #NeverForget and #Remember911.
And, no, we should never forget. And, yes, we should remember.
But I confess that the sadness of 9/11’s painful twentieth anniversary - a commemoration I vividly remember thinking then was so far away - has competition in my lamenting heart these days. Without trying to take away from those murdered and martyred at the hands of the terrorists, as I’ve thought back over the past twenty years, much weighs heavy - both as a result of and since that awful September day.
Five Laments
I’m sad that I can only barely remember what national unity felt like. Granted, it came at a terrible price at the time, but in the days that followed the attacks, America felt like America - people of all backgrounds and beliefs, colors and creeds coming together for the sake of something greater than ourselves - probably for the last time since, at least that I can recall.
There’s no question it was the briefest of windows in time - deciding on matters of war tends to divide a people pretty quickly - but I haven’t completely forgotten that feeling - yet - despite the division sown by so many seeking power in the past twenty years.
I rue the decline and distrust of our civil institutions. This, of course, began in the late 1960s and 70s (though one could easily place its true seeds as far back as the beginnings of modernity in the 1500s), but there’s no question as to the increased doubt cast since those planes hit the towers and the Pentagon.
Urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs wrote presciently in Dark Age Ahead, just three years after 9/11, warning of the decline of five particular institutions - public and private life (the family), education, science, and corporate and professional trust - as if she had a direct line to our here and now. Family, church, schooling, medicine, banking, governing - all have taken massive hits - many self-inflicted - to their integrity over the years, and our society has suffered as a result. (Interestingly, that so many Americans still believe 9/11 was “an inside job” speaks to the deconstruction of our collective civil trust.)
Despite the effect of 9/11’s laser focusing on the frailty of human life, I’m discouraged how quick we are to forget its worth. Our forgetfulness of the value of life has been no more apparent than the absolute stunning and sickening protests in Texas that - gasp! - babies would live as a result of that state’s abortion ban.
Do we not remember the heart-breaking tragedy of 3,000 innocent lives that were murdered twenty years ago? Do we still refuse to recognize the evil of 62 million innocent lives that have been murdered in the past fifty? God have mercy on us.
This one might seem strange (or selfish - forgive me for either), but I still feel pangs of occasional guilt over the fact that I did not know a single victim, nor anyone who knew a single victim of the attacks. Having grown up and come of age in rural Illinois, then living at the base of Pike’s Peak in Colorado Springs at the time, my paths had not crossed with anyone who died or knew of anyone who died in the attacks on New York, D.C., or Pennsylvania.
While certainly impacted by the visuals as much as the next person, there was a limit to my grief - almost a type of survivor’s guilt - when compared with that of those who had lost loved ones. Ultimately, of course, I was grateful for this, but I remember thinking how strange it felt to grieve nationally rather than personally.
Finally, if there is a last lament of these past twenty years since 9/11, it is my sense (particularly after the debauched American departure from Afghanistan a week ago and the Taliban’s return to power) that the world has not been made one iota better after the death of Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and all the money, time, and lives lost there over the past twenty years.
If anything, it feels like the anticipation of a bad sequel - of American society and its institutions continuing to disintegrate at an ever-quickening pace; of Afghani women and children being treated sub-humanly again; of terrorist groups recruiting and training and taking their best shot; of people living in fear and handing over more and more liberties and freedoms to a government always willing to exchange them for a promise of protection; of not being able to relate to friends and fellow citizens as fully and helpfully as possible. It does not feel like progress; it feels like more of the same misery for so many involved.
Hope to Go with the Heartache
These are my laments (or at least five of them; there are others) having to do with and stemming from 9/11; they are ones I find myself thinking about and periodically bringing to God year after year in groaning prayers and written words. Perhaps you resonate with them; perhaps you don’t. Either way, they’re the ones I’ve thought about this week in the midst of all the media memories, and ones that I’m sure I’ll continue to revisit as the anniversary comes around again and again.
Thankfully (and at the risk of tying too pretty a bow on top), God has given hope to go with the heartache. The words of the psalmist in Psalm 2 have been ones of assurance - of God’s sovereignty over all that has happened, as well as of the return of Christ as ultimate and eventual king. He writes,
“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,
‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying,
’As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.’I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me,
‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
If you lost someone on 9/11, I’m sorry, and I hope you are able to grieve meaningfully and in community with others who will worship in grieving with you. If you (like me) somehow went untouched by that particular event, I hope you’re able to grieve with someone who needs you, or perhaps lament other losses that have come as a result.
Toward any of that, let me leave you with a song from my friend, Michael Card, inviting you to offer your sadness and sorrow - whatever it may be - as an act of worship to God, that by His grace, it becomes an opportunity for comfort for you.
Peace.
Come Lift Up Your Sorrows
If you are wounded, if you’re alone,
If you are angry, if your heart is cold as stone,
If you have fallen, and if you are weak,
Come find the worth of God that only the suffering seek.
Come lift up your sorrows and offer your pain;
Come make a sacrifice of all your shame;
There in your wilderness He's waiting for you
To worship Him with your wounds, for He's wounded too.
He has not stuttered, and He has not lied
When He said, "Come unto me, you're not disqualified"
When you're heavy laden, you may want to depart,
But those who know sorrow, they're closest to His heart.
Come lift up your sorrows and offer your pain;
Come make a sacrifice of all your shame;
There in your wilderness He's waiting for you
To worship Him with your wounds, for He's wounded too.
In this most Holy Place, He's made a sacred space
For those who will enter in and trust to cry out to Him;
You'll find no curtain there, no reason left for fear;
There's perfect freedom here to weep every unwept tear.
Come lift up your sorrows and offer your pain;
Come make a sacrifice of all your shame;
There in your wilderness He's waiting for you
To worship Him with your wounds, for He's wounded too.
Come lift up your sorrows and offer your pain;
Come make a sacrifice of all your shame;
There in your wilderness He's waiting for you
To worship Him with your wounds, for He's wounded too.To worship Him with your wounds, for He's wounded too.
Come worship Him with your wounds, for He's wounded too.
Post(erity): “On the Yard Sale”
Each week, I choose a post from the past that seems apropos of something (of course, you’re always welcome to search the archives yourself whenever you like).
In honor of the yard sale our family is hosting this weekend (details below), here’s a post from June 27, 2010, when we held a large yard sale in St. Louis. An excerpt:
“Personally, yard sales are too intimate an experience for me to really enjoy; there's just something awkward about strangers publicly evaluating what you once thought you wanted. Maybe I just felt self-conscious about all the old Stephen King novels I was getting rid of (would you want to know that YOUR neighbor has read a majority of the man's books?), but the whole process seems a huge invasion of privacy.
As I was enduring the invasion, I took some mental notes on the variety of yardsalers we encountered during the day. I don't pretend that this list is exhaustive (and feel free to add your own set of usual suspects in the comments below), but generally speaking, here's who I did business with during our particular sale on Saturday.”
Read the whole post…and come and buy stuff.
Peaches’ Picks
Peaches hopes to see you this Saturday, September 11, from 7:30 a.m.- 1 p.m. (address is 836 N. 15th Avenue, Bozeman, MT, 59715). Items to be sold include:
Lots and lots of girls clothes of many sizes (XS-L)
Homecoming /prom formal dresses (XS-L)
House decor and kitchen items
Plants
The girls will also be serving coffee for $2/cup, complete with cream, sugar, and the best barista smiles available in town. And, Peaches will be giving out barks for free.
Come by and say hi.
Fresh & Random Linkage
“A New Navy Weapon Actually Stops You From Talking” - No civilian apps just yet, but I can think of a thousand offhand (1st graders, politicians, etc.)
“A Jiffy Is Used as an Actual Unit of Time” - I’d never wondered about this before, but now that I think about it, I can’t believe I hadn’t.
“Reading Stephen King in Maine” - As a past occasional Stephen King reader, I resonated a lot with Douthat's observations and experiences here.
The Matrix is back, but I’m not sure I needed it to be (2 and 3 were meh).
Until next time.
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