The Parable of the Mouse Hole

The Parable of the Mouse Hole

Once upon a time there was a family. A hard working, well behaved family, who moved into a nice apartment in a good, if not wealthy, part of town.

Every morning the kids went off to school well fed upon a breakfast of cereal and milk - a breakfast the mother had lovingly set before them. Then mom and dad each got busy with their respective responsibilities, working hard always with a mind focused on the well being of the family as a whole, and the future of the children in particular.

This went on for some years as the children grew. But all was not right. The neighborhood itself started to go down hill. Land owners -- including this family's landlord -- seemed to stop caring. Paint started to peel, roofs to leak, lawn and gardens to become overcome, first with weeds, than with trash.

Mom and dad soldiered on. The kids did too, but all was not as it was. Dad, who had held one steady job for years suddenly found himself jobless. He quickly sought another but could find nothing that paid as well as the old one.  Mom, too, started looking for work outside the home. This was needed to make ends meet.

Getting to school safely started to become difficult for the children, and the atmosphere in the classroom -- once a place of quiet, serious, teaching -- changed to one of noise and strife. Homework became mere exercises, and the children sensing this, and with minds focused elsewhere, started to do less well in their studies.

Still, month in, month out, the family soldiered on.  Then IT HAPPENED. It wouldn't seem like much to an outsider. -Nothing worthy of a headline. But for this family this little event -- caused by a few little mice -- changed everything.

Mom had gotten used to the peeling paint, the chipped sink and the dripping faucet. But one morning when she went to the cabinet to get the children's cereal she found the box had been chewed through by some mice, and the cereal was spread out on the cabinet shelf mixed with chewed cardboard and mouse droppings.

That morning the children went to school with no breakfast. And the next. And the next.

Complaints about the mouse infestation started to spread throughout the building. The landlord promised change but the change never came.  Families who could move away did. Others, with nowhere else to go, suffered in silence.

With family breakfast no longer part of their lives the children each started going off on their own. Mom and dad started to lose hope too, and conversation slowly ceased. Where once there had been a hard working happy family -- a household filled with joy, hope and promise -- now there was only sullen quiet and sometimes anger; a family adrift. Just one more among many such families in a neighborhood that suddenly saw itself with no future.

The landlord himself rarely showed except, of course, when rent was late. He himself had long ago moved elsewhere.

Then one day there was a knock on the door. Standing there was a bold and brash man in a bright suit jacket. "I'm going to make this neighborhood great again" he proclaimed.  And when invited in he looked around and told the people that he would NEVER live like this. He was a rich and powerful man. And that if they'd support him in his attempt to take over the building and the neighborhood all would again be wonderful.

"But what do you plan to do?" asked the husband. The man in the bright suit jacket gestured broadly, walked across the room, and pointed to a hole in the baseboard. "Close this in!" he proclaimed. "Then the apartment will be sound again!" "Are not mice eating the food? Your food. Food you worked for. Food that should be feeding your children!"  "Yes" said mom and dad, thankful that finally someone was going to make things right again. "That is where and when everything started going badly" they thought to themselves, "with the intrusion of those mice!" It was all suddenly so clear!

And so a campaign started and more and more people got behind it. "Make the neighborhood great again!" "Chase away the mice!" "Fill in the mouse holes!"  For the first time in years the family, and many of their neighbors, had become believers.

How does our parable end?

We don't know yet.  But the mice will be going. That he promises.

Published by American Thinker
9/16/1015

Laws Are For the Lawless

Some thoughts on the Obama Admin's new overtime law.

Here's a surprise for some no doubt... I'm with Obama here. To me the problem with unions, union rules and government meddling with business, is that the unions lost their focus on supporting the general workforce and focused instead on simply helping themselves.

The forty hour week -- the assuring that working people should be able to have a life for themselves and their families -- is a great good. That law had to mandate this was and is a shame, but ending sweatshops and crushing work demands sadly DID require intervention.

Today many employers have looked for and found loopholes to allow them to demand long hours far beyond the forty hour week. Calling a mid-level worker a "manager" or worse, a "management trainee" has simply become a way to take advantage of workers -- making them give the employer what amounts to unpaid time, often doing things that are a far cry from "management."

Should the government have to intervene? No. But businesses have  brought this upon themselves. (Those who have practiced no such abuse will see little if any change in their labor costs.)

The argument that this will "cost" workers hours seems to me bunk.  What it will "cost" them is UNPAID hours - a price that I expect most are more than willing to pay.

Don't like regulations?  Then regulate yourselves! Law is, as the old proverb says, for the "lawless."

Confessions of an (Almost) Hopeless Reactionary

During my morning workout I was thinking about what a reactionary I'd become. Why I still sometimes smile when I think about the success of the American Revolution. Can you imagine? Worse yet, I actually fly an American flag at my home.

No! I am past it. I have to come to admit that and be willing to change. Indeed, if I were starting over in family life I'd no longer call my son a "boy," or if I had a daughter, a "girl." Think how hurtful that is to the gender confused! Better by far to confuse my own children so those others don't feel ostracized. I realize that now.

The American flag would have to go. Seeing it must be far too troubling to a passing Mexican immigrant. He or she has enough troubles already having to hide the fact that he snuck into the country. I have been thoughtless. No more!

I'd never again speak of things like "bacon" or "pork chops." Such might offend the folks at the Mosque built up the street on land donated by the city.  I'd also buy some black burlap for Jan. (Although I'm not sure she'd agree to wear it. She may not have come to grips yet with the error of her ways.)

And most important of all I'd not teach my son or daughter to read properly. How unfair to the dyslexic kid who can't!

Nope. I'd do none of those things! And I'd most certainly vote Democrat to make sure no one else did either!

See! A behind the times reactionary can change! I feel so much better now that I need no longer think.

Slightly edited version published on American Thinker Blog
Oct. 10, 2014
"Confessions of an (Almost) Hopeless Reactionary"

The Coming of the Morlock

Earlier this morning I got a PM from a valued and respected friend living in Europe that included the comment "I see the flag flying from your wood pile and it disturbs me."  He equated my flying the US flag on my home with "nationalism" which, in his eyes, along with religion, is the source and cause of much of the world's sorrow.

After several back and forths I shared this thought: If things 'go south' with ISIS and their breed you and your more 'advanced thinking' European friends will likely be looking to 'backward-thinking' American southerners bearing the US flag to (once again) come and save you.

Why might this be?  The answer can be found in history, both ancient and modern, but also in works of thoughtful fiction.

H.G. Wells is known, today, mostly as a writer of "science fiction."  And indeed that he was. But underlying most of his works is the voice of a concerned student of history.  One who saw the ideas trending in the Europe of his day, and who, via his "fiction," tried to warn us of the future he saw coming our way.

In one of his most famous, interesting and thoughtful books, "The Time Machine," he spoke of a future where mankind had come to be split into two separate races. An effete group, living lives focused on daily pleasures, totally dependent on others for their food, shelter and the literal cloths on their back, and a barbaric offshoot of humanity -- violent and depraved, living off the flesh of others

The effete group -- called the Eloi -- lived in total acceptance of whatever came their way, hoping, simply, to be allowed their days of simple pleasure and taking as little note as possible of the quickly encroaching ugliness. And as they did, the Morlocks -- their barbaric 'cousins' -- daily expanded both the scope of their barbarity and the depth of their depravity -- that until it came to completely threaten the Eloi's seemingly paradisaic world.

In the end it was the Time Traveler -- the hero of the book -- who had to save the day. He did that (with what success Wells left unanswered) by attempting to reawaken within the Eloi any old-fashioned  manly virtues that might remain -- the (even in his day -- and far more so today) seemingly archaic values of Victorian England.

Wells book was amazingly prescient. But as even he realized, its message was possibly coming too late.

Today, if we are saved from the all too present "Morlock" -- they who comprise ISIS and their ilk, that salvation will come I think, not from England, nor from New England, but, from the old-school thinkers and doers that (Thank God!) still exist in such places as the American rural south.

My Articles for PJ Media's "Lifestyles"

The 10 Best Sherlock Holmes Mysteries  7-19-2014

The Top 10 Film Noir Classics   7-7-2014

The Top 10 Surf Songs of the Sixties  6-28-2014

10 Awful, Terrible, Frightening Things That Are Going to Kill Us All (But Somehow Never Do)  6-26-2014

The Top 10 Influences that Made the Baby Boomers Who They Are  6-21-2014

Looking Back, What Are We To Make of Sgt. Pepper’s?  6-17-2014

The Technology That Led To Rock and Roll, Part 3  6-16-2014

Taking the Time Out to See  6-9-2014

The Technology That Led To Rock and Roll, Part 2: The Guitar Amplifier  6-3-2014

The Poor Man’s Ferrari  5-28-2014

What Exciting New Technology Led to Rock ‘n’ Roll?  2-21-2014

Art for Whose Sake?  5-19-2014

Why What Obama is Doing is Bad, Bad, Bad

Progressives aren't pissed by what Obama is doing. That, itself, shows what is important to them as a group: Getting their programs in place no matter what the Constitution says and no matter what other citizens want and think.

But the damage being done to our Republic goes far beyond whether these "programs" are good or not. Programs, after all, can always be changed.  But destruction of the very foundation of our Republic-- its laws, its governing principles, its taking power from any one man or group of men and accepting as bedrock that it belongs to us all -- "We The People" -- cannot be so easily undone.

As James Madison wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

What Madison is saying is this: If you, or any person or group, favors what Obama is doing just because you/they think "it's good," or because you/they love to be able to say "hurray for our side!" --  than you/they don't love our Republic. No, nor do you love democracy. What you do love is tyranny.

Courts, Gnats and Camels

Today the country is all astir with arguments about the Supreme Court's decision on the 'Hobby Lobby' case. And, of course, the sky is again falling.

When I look at this the problem that I see has little to do with contraception, or even, for that matter, with abortion. The real issue is that very phrase "the Court decided."

Why should they need to? Why should we want them to? 

At Mount Sinai the sons of Israel were given 10 commandments. Leviticus upped it to thousands. Rabbis later added what became the Talmud and Mishnah as people looked to them to rule on finer and finer points of law. Worship over time became the study and debate of their rulings.

Then came Jesus saying "You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!" and went on to reduce the laws to two: Love God and your neighbor.

Then came the churchmen and it started all over again.

We have our Constitution. We have (or had) free will. Why debate what the robed ones say? I, for one, prefer discussing foundation principles, not their chosen gnats.

The more rules we make the more rules we'll need. And that'll leave us no closer to having a just, free, caring society. No, just a more litigious one with yet more gnats and more camels.

Gulp. Gulp.