Autism and Me

I need to start out here by making clear that I will be describing my own issues and quirks.  Someone else's may be different.  There is actually a lot of variety among people on the Autism Spectrum.  One of the leading experts on autism today is Tony Attwood, an English psychologist now working at a university in Australia (the Brits and the Aussies have been doing better than the American med/psych establishment on dealing with autism for at least the last 40 years!).  Anyway, here's one quote from Attwood:  "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism."  Meaning--the second one you meet may seem totally different.  None of that "If you've seen one you've seen them all" business.  Even my own kids and grandkids are different from me.  But we are all on the spectrum. 

That said, autism is not just a disability.  It is a mix of traits, some of which can be detrimental and some that can be helpful, depending on the circumstances at a given time and place.  And sometimes the particular strengths and weaknesses cannot be separated from each other.  You just have to learn to cope with them.

One common autistic trait that I share is a basic clumsiness.  I was never much good at sports.  I wasn't just the last one chosen for a game at recess--it was like, "If we have to take him, then we get______!"  (One of the best players, to offset me)  Over the years, I found that I could learn some physical things--if I wanted to badly enough.  It was hard for me to learn to ride a bicycle, too.  I tried three times to learn to play guitar; I finally succeeded when I was 15.  When as a newlywed I was trying to put a shelf up in our apartment closet, my wife broke out laughing at how bad I was with a hammer; twenty years later she was amazed at the quality of my carpenter work.

I mentioned above that some traits may be both strengths and weaknesses.  One common autistic trait I have is called "hyper-focus."  On things I like and want to do, I have tremendous powers of concentration.  But the flip side of that is that I cannot multi-task.  When I first started doing interior trim on houses, the men I was working with were impressed with how precise I was; some would even bring me their measurements and ask me to cut the pieces for them to install.  But I can't lead a crew--unless I have nothing else to do.  One time the church we were attending put a new roof on the preacher's house, and as the most experienced, I was leading half the crew.  But then I got tied up in one of the picky jobs, putting flashing around a dormer wall, and my son had to run the crew for an hour (fortunately, he was up to the job!).

Partly because of the hyper-focus, I was very good at school.  Attending elementary school in a rural area, that did not endear me to the other kids.  But we moved when I started 7th grade, to a suburban district on the north side of Cincinnati, OH.  I was in every accelerated class they had in high school--English, math and science.  I graduated fourth in a class of 265.  I got a scholarship for college, and was salutatorian of my college class, and spoke at graduation.  A lot of people in high school and college thought I would end up a professor.  That did not turn out, in part because of my other traits.

One of those seems to be not doing well with bureaucracy.  I don't do well in corporate settings.  I managed to start a small business when I was 25, as a janitorial contractor.  Going into offices as an outsider in the late afternoon and evening, I did not have to deal with office politics--I sometimes saw it going on, but I was not involved in it.  In my late thirties I transitioned into working as a carpenter and remodeling contractor.  Occasionally I worked as part of a larger crew, but mostly I worked with a close friend for the first five years, and after that alone--with my son as a helper at times. 

One thing that helped me with my customers, and is probably related to the hyper-focus, is that I am very detail-oriented.  And that not only applies to the details of the work itself, but also to things like showing up when I said I would, returning phone calls, getting one job before I left to do another, and cleaning up after I finished my work. 

One area that is difficult for me is emotions.  When things get emotionally charged, it's like something inside me freezes up.  My ex-wife could talk rings around me, and I could not respond quickly enough.  And that was probably a factor in our divorce after forty-eight years of marriage.  It is still hard for me to express my feelings.  Sometimes I can vent the emotion through music--singing and playing guitar.  But in interpersonal communication, it is hard for me.

In other areas, I am often a bit of an oddball.  When I was learning to play guitar, the Beatles were the big thing; I was into folk music rather than rock.  Instead of sports, I went into Boy Scouts, where I could hike and camp and stay individual.  And as a Christian, I am no longer part of any organized church, but what some now call a "free-range" Christian.  Some, especially people in the clergy, may be bothered by that.  But just as offices have politics, so do churches, and it frees me from that aspect.

There are other things that are not necessarily related to autism that also affect me and add to the effects of autism.  For instance, I am very much an introvert--on the Briggs-Myers test I scored as a 9 or 10, the severe end of the scale, as an introvert.  The big difference between introvert and extrovert is not whether or not we like people; it is how we re-charge.  An extrovert re-charges by being with others; an introvert has to be alone to re-charge.  That is likely also a factor in why I have spent so much of my adult life working alone.

There was an event in my childhood that probably masked some of my physical issues when I was growing up.  During kindergarten, I came down with rheumatic fever, which is a complication of strep throat.  I was really sick--I was in a hospital and then in bed at home for eight months.  It gave me issues with my knees for a few years, and left me with a heart murmur.  They gave me so much of what was then a new miracle drug, penicillin, that I ended up allergic to it a few years later.  Because of the heart murmur, I was restricted on physical activity for some years.  For a long time I attributed my being behind in sports and other physical games to that.

One thing that is common in autistic people is sensory issues.  There are an amazing amount of different ones we may have--and everybody has different ones.  My family members do not have the same ones I do.  Issues with foods are a part of this, but again, each person is different.  My ex-wife hated mashed potatoes; I was okay with them, but not peas or dried beans, even cooked.  One of my sensory issues that has protected me from becoming an alcoholic is that I cannot stand the feel of an alcoholic beverage in my mouth.  If a church is using wine instead of grape juice for Communion, I know it instantly.  As a teen, my father let me taste a beer one time (he was a very occasional drinker--about once every ten years he would get the urge to have a beer).  I could not stand it.  I never did have enough beer or wine to get a buzz on, and then want that enough to put up with the feeling in my mouth, so to this day I am a teetotaler--not for religious reasons, just because of my sensory issue.  But for years, I thought it was a result of that bout of rheumatic fever.  After that year, every time I got a sore throat, out came the prescription cough medicine--which, back in the 1950s, was probably about 40 proof!  I thought that caused my aversion to alcohol, until I began to learn about sensory issues with autism a few years ago.

This is just a start.  There are probably other aspects of autism in my life that will come to mind later.  Maybe I will post some more another time, after I think of them.  But this may give readers some idea of how being on the autism spectrum can shape people's lives.

I Dood It!

The title above is borrowed from one of Red Skelton's characters.  ( BTW, if you are ever in Vincennes, IN, there is a cool museum of his career, with his costumes, audio and video clips, and displays.  He was one of the few who started in vaudeville, made the change to radio, but then successfully went on to movies and TV--some, like Fred Allen, made it in radio, but went no further.)

And I have bit the bullet.  I have changed the name of this blog!  When I started blogging years ago, "postmodern" was a trendy term.  Now it is mostly forgotten.  And there have been changes in my life and situation as well.

The part that has not changed:  I am still a Redneck.  If anything, as I get older, my redneck traits seem to become stronger.  I get it from both sides of my family.  My father was born near New Richmond, OH, where his ancestors had settled in the 1790s.  It is now a small town east of Cincinnati, that's been turning into a Cincinnati suburb.  It is also historically considered the eastern edge of Appalachia in Ohio.  While the family had been farmers and small businessmen for generations, my grandfather pulled up stakes looking for work during the Great Depression, and ended up a cooper (making and repairing wood barrels) at a Seagram's distillery in Lawrenceburg, IN that had reopened with the end of Prohibition.  My father went through assorted blue-collar jobs over the years, but settled in Cincinnati (with a stay of 6 years in Brown County, OH, a rural area about 40 miles away from the Ford factory where he worked).

My mother was born at a coal mining camp called Blue Diamond, near Hazard, KY.  She was the fifth of seven children (the first two died before age 3).  Her father and her older brothers all worked in the mines in that area.  Her mother died of cancer, and her father died of injuries from a mine accident.  From the age of 12, she was passed from one relative to another depending on who could afford an extra mouth for a while.  This was also during the Depression.  When she was 16, she and a friend hitch-hiked to Cincinnati to live with her older sister.  A couple of years later, she was out with a friend (also from KY) and met my father.  They got married in 1940.

On the Autistic side, I first found out about what they then called Asperger's Syndrome in 2005.  The lights came on for a lot of things in my past life.  I was fortunate enough to be good at school; a lot of autistic kids struggle there.  But over time I learned I did not fit well in most corporate settings.  I found my way into the world of small business and have been self-employed since 1976.  I didn't get rich, but I usually made a living; there were a few rough stretches.  But as my three kids grew up and got married and had their own kids, the autism matter came into sharper focus.  The schools never diagnosed me as autistic or Asperger's, nor my kids; but they have been finding my grandchildren.  So far, at least 8 of my 10 grandkids have a diagnosis.  The rest will probably get identified sometime.

Why so many?  Some families go along for generations, and then suddenly they get an autistic kid.  In my family, from what we have figured out, we have been marrying other autistic people for at least three generations that we can tell.  We don't know enough about the people to go back farther than that.  So the genetics have gotten a bit more concentrated than usual.

How many are there of us?  Nobody really knows.  In the first place, autism was not even recognized by the medical and psychological professions until the 1940s.  Even after that, for many years they weren't that good at finding us.  It has picked up a bit in recent years.  The conservative estimate is that there are roughly as many of us in the US as there are Jews--2-3% of the population.  The number of school-age children seems to conform to that these days.  The wild-and-woolly estimate is that we may be as much as 15% of the population.  And we aren't just rednecks--we are found anymore in just about every ethnic group and every skin color.

Autism is a complicated thing.  Psychologists in the US are now calling it a spectrum, a range of characteristics.  Many autistic people have adopted the name "Neurodiverse" because we are not only diverse from the "Neurotypicals" but also diverse from each other.  In my own family, we have musicians, artists, science geeks, a computer programmer, a high-tech repairman (who is also a musician), and more.  I will probably be posting about some of the things I have learned about it in the past few years.

I will also keep posting about Christian matters as well; I have done that for years.  I probably will not add much political stuff--I will likely keep posting that at a group blog I am part of, "Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization."    (https://www.aleksandreia.com/)

I may come up with other things to write about as well.  We shall see.

What is Worship?

 I grew up in churches, went to a conservative Bible college, preached for a few years, and "led the singing" in the old-style services, and have been a "worship leader" with my guitar in small churches and small groups over the years.

When I was growing up, mostly we sang hymns and gospel songs in church services (the difference between the two was, gospel songs had choruses, hymns did not).  Hymns had come into fashion in the English-speaking churches around 1700 and after; gospel songs started with the revivals of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Before 1700 many sang the Psalms--passages from that book of the Bible set to music.

During my time in college things began to change.  Some new music was coming out, from several writers, that did not fit exactly in either category.  They were more complex than the simple choruses used in children's church services and youth groups, and had some feel of modern popular music.

By the mid-1970s the church I was part of was getting in on the new style music at least part of the time (we still used the hymnbooks, too).

There were several factors influencing the new music.  I was in Cincinnati, a city where Roman Catholics were a majority of the population.  Most Protestant churches also had some ex-Catholic among them.  So it was fairly easy for us to pick up on the songs coming out of the Catholic folk mass trend that started in the mid-'60s.  The Jesus Movement was going on a bit later, and added more music.  Meanwhile, the Charismatic Movement was starting up, and producing new music also.  A lot of this music initially had a lot in common with the folk music trends of the period.  And in the churches I was in for some years, we did not have fancy sound systems.  We did not have "bands" for worship; if we had a couple of guys who could play guitar and take turns leading the singing, that was good enough.  And some of the music would be written by local people.  Some of it was Scripture verses set to music.  Some was borrowed from the new movement of Messianic Jews.

As the Jesus Freaks and the Charismatics began converting rock musicians, the new music began to change.  There were bands and sound systems, and vocalists to do solo parts.  It did not happen all at once, but it began.  And new companies sprang up to market the new music.  One was associated with the Vineyard churches.  Another was Hosanna Music, which started putting out new albums 6 times a year, and books of music scores for the musicians.  Even at the time (late '80s) I was getting a sense that they were falling into the pattern that prevailed in the regular recording industry in Nashville--each new cassette/CD had one or two songs that were good or even great, and the rest were either so-so or even just filler.  And for smaller churches one problem was that their musicians got the idea they had to sound like the big worship bands on the recordings.  All too often they did not have the number of musicians, or highly skilled musicians, to make it work.  And over time it leaked out that Hosanna was recording a live worship set, but then taking it back to the studio and dubbing in additional instruments!

Even then, not all were happy with the developments.  From 1995 to 2005 I was part of a Vineyard Church in Cincinnati.  The head of the national Vineyard organization until his death in November of 1997 was John Wimber.  He was also pastor of the Vineyard Church in Anaheim, CA.  He had a background in music--he had been a member and manager of the group "The Righteous Brothers" until he became a Christian in 1963.  He walked away from that life and went into ministry.  But he also wrote a number of worship songs.  Some time after his death I read an interview with his widow, Carol Wimber.  She said her husband was concerned with the direction praise and worship music was heading; he thought worship songs should be kept simple enough that the average guitar player could play them for his small group gathering (no sound system, no band, no backup singers).

Over the years since, what I have been hearing from all over is that in many churches, worship music has turned into a spectator thing.   In the '70s and early '80s many of us sang our hearts out, standing the whole time, shouting out lyrics, going off script and singing choruses over and over, even sometimes making up new verses to a song.  In recent years, reports I have seen talk of people sitting and watching the band perform, as if it were a concert.

After 2009 I became what some of us called a "free-range Christian"--not part of any organized church.  I looked for a house church, but in Indianapolis there isn't much of them.  I did find a group of several Christian families that got together regularly, not even as formal as a house church; some of that group moved away, but others of us still get together a couple of times a month.  But I got away from the Contemporary Christian Music field and the praise and worship music market.  For a couple of years after my divorce, I was attending a local church in town, primarily for their men's fellowship group.  Their services were a mix of the old hymns and what was apparently more recent modern worship music.  What they were using did not impress me--the melodies especially were kind of blah.  I do not know for certain whether that is where the whole field has gone or if it was just the tastes of the local group.

But one thing I have learned over the years is that no Christian movement goes on forever.  I have been part of several--the small group movement, the charismatic movement, praise and worship movement, home schooling, and more.  But the useful life of any of them seems to be in the range of 20-40 years.  After that, they don't go away--but they quit "moving"--they don't really break any new ground, they just stay settle down and keep doing the same old things.  And the praise and worship movement is following the same pattern.

Personally, I have always loved music.  My own family was musical--my two sons are fifth-generation guitar players (plus other instruments).  I sang in church choirs and high school choir and ensemble.  I still love a lot of the old hymns and the new music as well.  But I have also come to the conclusion over the years that music is only part of worship.  I have seen too many people who were active in worship music, but their personal lives did not match what they sang.  This goes clear back to my high school years as well as modern incidents.

I have come to believe that musical worship can express your Christian life, but the music is not all of it--if it is all of it, you are not there yet.  There really is not that much in the New Testament that talks about what goes on in church meetings.  There is much, much, MUCH more about how you live all week.  There is a saying attributed to the Amish:  "Work is worship."  I think a lot of Christians need to learn to live that.

I am going to close this post with the words to one of those Scripture songs we sang back in the day, from Micah 6:8:

He has shown thee, O man, 

What is good and what the Lord requires of thee (repeat)

But to do justly, 

And to love mercy, 

And to walk humbly with thy God.

I Am an Exile

 A while back I found a book by David Kinnaman, of the Barna Research Group, at a thrift store.  The title is "You Lost Me" and it is about the departure of Millennials from the traditional churches.  [Barna Group prefers to use the term "Mosaics" for that generation "because it reflects their eclectic relationships, thinking styles, and learning formats, among other things." p.246]  Kinnaman actually sorts these wanderers into three distinct groups.  Some are what he calls "Nomads"--younger people who have drifted off after growing up and leaving their parents' home for college or work, but are likely to drift back as they marry and start families.  Many  people of previous generations followed that pattern.  A second group he calls "Prodigals"--people who grew up in the church, but have now rejected the faith and have no intention of coming back.  The third group he labels as "Exiles" which he defines as "those who grew up in the church and are now physically or emotionally disconnected in some way, but who also remain energized to pursue God-honoring lives....One hallmark of the exiles is their feeling that their vocation (or professional calling) is disconnected from their church experience." [p.75]

I am not a Millennial or Mosaic; I am part of the post-WWII Baby Boom generation.  But I am an Exile, by Kinnaman's definition, and have been for a while.  Even during my many years in churches, the only "vocation" that got much attention, in nearly all the congregations I was part of, was being in "ministry"--preacher, missionary, Bible college professor, and in later years, worship leader.  Nobody seemed to care what the rest of the people did from Monday through Saturday, as long as they tithed their income to the church.  Even when they did a sermon or teaching series on "spiritual gifts" most people got excited about the "gifts" that would get them up on the front platform, not things they could do outside of the building during the week.  When I was finishing high school and preparing for college, at the church my family attended in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, those of us in the youth group who planned to go to Bible college were a notch above the others.  The rest were just going to college or jobs--we were going into "full-time Christian service."  That was the prevailing attitude in many churches in the area in those days.

Over time, it turned out my "vocation" was something else.  In my late 20s, my wife and I bought a run-down house and fixed it up.  "Rehabbing" was a big thing in the older neighborhoods of Cincinnati in the '70s, and back then it was focused on homeowners doing it themselves.  Most were younger people like us, and they did not have the money to hire contractors to come in and fix stuff.  (If they did have the money, they could have bought a fancier house elsewhere.)  But I found that I liked doing it.  And I had learned how to do research in high school, so I was able to learn to do more and more.  By the time we were halfway through our second house, I was working on other people's houses and getting paid for it.  It turned out I was good at sorting out problems in houses and finding ways to fix them.  Even now that I am mostly retired, I still do some of that for family and friends.  I may not do all the fixing, but I can help them figure out the problem and how to solve it.

There's a saying attributed to the Amish:  "Work is worship."  I am afraid that attitude was mostly missing in the churches I grew up in, and still is in the majority of churches today.  All too many Christians do not have that idea.  In the years between graduating from Bible college and learning to work on houses, I had jobs under two different men in a franchise organization.  The first, in Cincinnati, held to more of an Amish view:  for him, being a Christian in business was about servicing his customers well and treating his employees well.  The second, who I worked for in Indianapolis for a year, thought being a Christian in business meant going to all of the Christian Business Men's Committee functions.  He eventually became a bigwig in their organization.  By the time I left that job, it was obvious to me that both his customers and his employees had little respect for him.  But he is still highly regarded by the CBMC and his local church.  I guess he has his reward....I personally prefer, mentally at least, to take the Amish approach.

The Decline Continues

 The decline I am talking about here is that of the American church.  For my thoughts on political stuff, look for my posts at https://www.aleksandreia.com/--"Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization."  I am likely to go back to keeping my posts here less political, and do my politics over there.

Back to the church:  I have posted back in the early years and my recent posts about the weakness of the church in America.  I am still seeing more signs of this condition.

About a week or two ago, I saw a news item about the United Church of Christ.  This is one of the mainline "Seven Sisters" denominations--part of their roots are in the Puritans who settled New England in colonial times.  The Puritans eventually adopted the name "Congregational."  In the 1930s they merged with another group, one known as the "Christian Connection" to become the "Congregational-Christian" denomination.  In 1957 they merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and re-named themselves "United Church of Christ."

Anyway, the news item said they were selling their national headquarters building in Cleveland, Ohio.  The article also revealed farther down that they had moved to Cleveland from New York City in the 1990s to save costs (both commercial real estate and living costs were cheaper in Ohio).  But now, the 9-story office building they had needed for their 300+ staff was too big and too expensive for the 100 people that their national office was down to.  So they are moving to something smaller and selling the old office.

The article does not mention their decline in membership, but it has been substantial over the years, just like most of the other mainline groups.  Most of the Seven Sisters--the UCC, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Methodists, the American Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ--are around half of the membership they had in the 1960s.  Some of their loss has been because of the growing secularization in our country, but a lot of it has been people leaving for other churches that are more conservative on theology.

I have a little bit of background in the UCC myself.  When I was in elementary school, my family attended one of their churches near a little crossroads called Five Mile, Ohio.  It wasn't because my parents were into the UCC--it was just the closest church to us, and my parents felt at home with the people.  It was a little country church, a simple building--no separate classrooms, just a big room with a coal stove on one side for heat, an old organ on one side and a piano on the other, with two sets of pews and an aisle between.  There was no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse out back (a fair number of the neighboring houses didn't have indoor plumbing yet, either).

They didn't have a full-time pastor, just an older retired preacher who came out on Sundays to preach.  When he quit, they went together with two other small churches in the area to hire a Methodist student from Kentucky to come out and preach on Sundays.  Occasionally, the UCC sent a couple of people out from the district headquarters, who lectured the local farmers about their current hot thing, the Civil Rights Movement.  It didn't go over all that well...not because the farmers were for segregation, but because it just was not part of their lives.  Ohio was never a slave state--the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that set up how the Northwest Territory was to be organized, settled, and formed into new states, actually banned slavery in the Territory.  And now this was Brown County, 50 miles east of Cincinnati, a rural area with few blacks living in it.   In the six years I went to school at Greenbush, a few miles away, we had one black student in our class for a year or two--no others.  There had always been free blacks in Cincinnati itself, and there may have been some in Ripley or other small towns along the Ohio River, but we were about 20 miles north of the river.  Five Mile itself was a little crossroads, named because each road took you to a larger town five miles away.  At that crossroads there was a general store (oldstyle, not like today's convenience store) with one gas pump.  On the opposite corner there was a small barn; the other two sides of the corner had farmhouses.  That was it!  Even the church was about a half a mile down the road; our house was about halfway between the crossroads and the church.

The church itself was small in numbers, maybe 40-50 people most of the time.   There was an old-style placard on the wall with places to post the attendance for the last couple of weeks.  It also said there were 64 (if I remember correctly) church members.  The standing joke was some of those were only there in spirit--they were out in the cemetery, not in the building!

We moved back to Cincinnati in 1962.  My father was working at a Ford Motor factory on the northeast side of Cincinnati, and the fifty-mile drive each way was hard on him and on cars.  But in 1972, when my grandfather died, my parents went back to Five Mile and bought a cemetery plot with space for 6 graves.  They buried my grandfather there; my grandmother was put beside in in 1979.  When my father died in 2010, he was interred there, and my mother in 2012.

Why did they do that?  I don't know for certain, but I suspect that in terms of community feeling and neighborliness, that little church was better than anything they had known since.  When we left there, we moved to a new suburban development on the north side of Cincinnati--a place that had recently been farmland, and was now growing rapidly with new houses and streets.  The schools were bigger.  The churches were bigger and fancier; but there was not as much love for your neighbors.  There are some things that growth alone cannot do.

The UCC finally gave up and sold the church building, I believe sometime in the 1980s.  A startup church bought it from them.  The old members from the area kept coming to church there.  If I recall correctly, it was some kind of independent charismatic church.  But the new church took off and grew.  First they added a kitchen and bathrooms to the building. and maybe some classrooms.  Finally they outgrew even the expanded building, and bought land and built a new church not far away.  When my father was buried in the cemetery, another startup church was using the old building.

If this pandemic slows down, I want to go back there.  I haven't been back for some years--it's 150 miles each way, a third of it not reachable by Interstate highways.  But I would like to stop by to pay some respect to my family, and to the community that they loved in that place.

A Question of Value

Behind what is going on in the news--the Afghanistan pullout, the riots in major cities the past year, the controversies for years over abortion, and more--is an issue that most people largely ignore.  What is the worth of a human life? 

It often seems to me in reading the news the past few years that as a nation, our thoughts on this are rather skewed.  For instance, George Floyd's life seems to be regarded as quite valuable, to judge from the riots in so many of our nation's cities.  On the other hand, the life of David Dorn, a retired police chief--and also black--who was murdered in St. Louis during the Floyd riots there, seems to be accorded little value by the same people who got so upset over George Floyd's death.  On a more recent note, during the Afghanistan pullout, we had the possible death of a suspected terrorist, who was spotted and locked by a drone, but the authorities refused to allow the kill; the terrorist went on to kill himself, but he took a large number of other Afghans and thirteen American service members with him, besides an even larger number of Afghans and Americans injured in the explosion.

What is the value of human life?  For much of the world, there seems to be no real concept of it.  Of all the world's religions, past and present, only two set any real value on human life--Judaism and Christianity.  No others put much if any value on human life.  As for atheism, its most famous proponents--Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and more--put no real value on life--all people in their way were expendable.

But why should human life have value?  It depends on what a human is.  What follows is an insight I read from C. S. Lewis; I can't remember which of his books it was in, and a brief search did not turn it up.  But here is the distinction I remember reading from him:

If a human being is simply an animal that lives for seventy years or so and then dies, then a state that can last for hundreds or even a thousand years is worth more than any one person.  But if a human being is a spiritual animal that can live briefly in this world but then potentially forever in Heaven, then the state by comparison is a minimal, temporary thing.

I would be the first to acknowledge that even many Christians do not seem to understand this.  But our secular neighbors do not get it at all.  But this is a part of the philosophical and religious divide we have to live in during our present times.

Change Happens

 Things do change over time, and people and what they get into also change over time.  And I am toying with changing the name of this blog.  Apparently it's possible; it may be a bit of a hassle.  I don't have a lot of followers anyway--I can notify them if I do it.

When I started blogging, "postmodern" was a thing.  It hadn't totally taken shape as to what it was.  And I guess I had some hope maybe I could shape it a bit myself.  My blog did not turn out to be that influential over time anyway, even before I stepped away for a few years.

Now I am back to doing some blogging, and a lot has changed over the years I was away.  I am now divorced, after 48 years of marriage (long story, and I won't go into it here--maybe some other time).  My parents passed away in 2010 and 2012, and my in-laws in 2018.  So I am now the patriarch of my family--still getting used to that, in some ways.  At least we are all here in the same city in Indiana; for a few years my daughter and her family lived an hour away in a rural area, my older son was in Seattle, and my younger son was in Naples, FL.  In 2015 and 2016 they all moved back into this area.  Some of my friends have passed on, some have moved away, and I have more grandchildren than I did when this blog started (ten, ranging in age from 4 to 20 years old).

And the grandchildren have caused some changes in perspectives and what we look at, and one thing that years ago seemed so minor I didn't even think of putting it in the blog name but now is a factor we have to deal with a lot of the time.

That factor is called autism.  In 2005, my older son found out about what was then still called "Asperger's Syndrome" and passed some printouts he'd made on to me.  For both of us, it was like a light coming on for a lot of things in our past.  My son later seemed to lose interest, kind of like saying "That's nice" and moving on.  My daughter found the book "Aspergirls" by Rudy Simone in 2007, and the lights came on for her.  (For a long time, it was assumed that Asperger's only affected boys; it was later figured out that some girls have it too, but they manifest it differently from most boys.)

But my kids married and had kids--and the kids started getting diagnosed as being on what is now called the Autism Spectrum.  (Asperger's is now considered as being on the "high-functioning" end of the Spectrum.)  As parents, my kids started having to do some research on the matter.  I looked at what they found, and did some more research myself, and we pass what we learn around.  And we have learned a lot.

Just to clear the air if anyone who reads this post is unaware of the current state:  No, it is not caused by vaccines or chemicals or what you eat.  It is genetic--you get it from your parents!  The CDC has a section about it on their website, and they pegged it as being 70-80% genetic.  That's actually the conservative estimate; there is an Italian study I heard of, but have never seen the details, that put it at 90% genetic!  There actually is a difference in how our brains are structured internally compared to what are now being called the "neurotypicals."   Autistic people have started calling themselves "neuro-diverse" because we are not only different from the neurotypicals, we can also be quite different from each other.

And no, there is not any "epidemic" of autism.  In the 1940s Hans Asperger first identified what later came to be called Asperger's Syndrome in Vienna, and German-Jewish immigrant physician Leo Kanner in the US first labeled a few children as "autistic."  A lot of Kanner's ideas about causes and treatments started being rejected by the 1980s.  In the last 20 years or so, they have gotten a lot better at identifying us.  But mostly they are finding the children.  They are only beginning to catch up with the adults like me.

How many are there of us?  Nobody really knows.  Like I said above, they are only beginning to deal with adult autistics.  The conservative estimate is that there are as many of us in the US as there are Jews--about 2-3% of the population.  The all-out, wild-and-wooly guess is that we may be as much as 15% of humanity.  It is known now that we're found in all skin colors, all ethnic groups, all nationalities--we're all over.  And they are facing the fact that we have actually been around for a very long time.

And it isn't a matter of one or two genes that cause it.  There are a bunch of genes involved.  Some families can go along for years, and then out of the blue, they get a baby who turns out to be autistic.  What seems to be odd about my family is that, as near as we can tell, we have been marrying other people on the spectrum for at least 3 generations, and possibly longer.  So in our family the genetics have gotten rather concentrated.  So far, eight of my ten grandchildren have been diagnosed--the other two fit the pattern, but haven't been identified for certain yet.  But with what we know now, we can see signs of it on both sides of the family--mine and my ex-wife's, and even on both sides of hers.  My son-in-law's family is beginning to figure out they are on the spectrum (yes, he is too).

And we do have variety.  We have musicians in the family (from my side--my sons are fifth-generation guitar players).  We have artists.  Of course we have one professional computer programmer, and a tech who repairs business equipment, both mechanical and electronic.  And we have all kinds of sensory issues!  My daughter has given up trying to fix meals that everybody will eat--if one or two don't like a particular meal, they can opt for leftovers!

So dealing with this has been a factor in our lives for some years.  There is a fair amount of information now, that was not available when I was growing up.  And there are strengths along with the deficits, it's just a matter of sorting out which is which.

But--even with all of this, I am still a Redneck.  My grandfather and at least two of my mother's brothers worked in the coal mines around Hazard, KY.  My grandfather died of injuries from a mine accident.  And my ancestry is half or more Scots-Irish:  the family names on my mother's side were Burns and Webb, both good Scottish names.  My father's name was Hawkins, which is English; but there are other names that married into his family that could well be Scots-Irish.  He grew up on the western edge of Appalachia in Ohio, near the town of New Richmond, where his forebears had settled in the 1790s.  My own guitar has been used for country music, bluegrass, old-time, and traditional folk--not much rock and no disco.  And for much of my working life, I was in construction--a few new houses, including one I built myself for my family, but mostly remodeling and home repairs.

If anyone is curious, a good source for the history of the Scots-Irish is a book by former Senator Jim Webb, "Born Fighting."  (No, not a relative as far as I can tell, or else extremely distant.)  And for a good short history of autism, its past, its recognition and progress, I recommend Steve Silberman's "Neurotribes."

My Own Political Journey, Part II

 I am going to start with a quote from Ronald Reagan early in his political career.  He said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me."  In many respects I feel the same way.

In Part One I described the political world at the local level that I grew up in during the '50s and '60s.  Back then, the Democrats were the party of the Working Man--the industrial unions were their power base.  

The Democrats were also strongly anti-Communist in those days.  The Cold War had its beginning under Harry Truman, who became President when Franklin Roosevelt died in office.   Even during World War II, though the US was allied with the USSR against Nazi Germany, Communism was beginning to be recognized as a threat; that was why Truman replaced Henry Wallace as Vice President--Wallace was considered too soft on Communism.  After the war Communists and their sympathizers were purged from government, from the entertainment industry, and from the labor unions.  The fall of China to the Communists and the Korean War that followed also fed this trend.

But the Vietnam War began the change.  While there had been some aid to South Vietnam under Republican President Eisenhower, it increased under Democrat Kennedy.  And it was massively increased under Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination.  Yet it was during Johnson's term that the Democrat Party embraced the anti-war movement.  Seeing he was losing the support of his own party, Johnson gave up the idea of running for a second term of his own.  He had served the last year of Kennedy's term, and beaten Republican Barry Goldwater in a landslide in 1964.  Under the 22nd Amendment, passed during Truman's term, he was allowed to run one more time because he had served less than two years of Kennedy's term.  But Johnson stepped aside, and his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, got the nomination at the party convention in Chicago.  But the convention was marred with mass demonstrations in the streets by anti-war activists.

Humphrey lost to Republican Richard Nixon, thanks in part to a third-party challenge by segregationist George Wallace that siphoned off Democrat votes in the Southern states.  I was not able to vote in that election; the voting age in the US was lowered from 21 to 18 by the 26th Amendment in 1971.  Four years later, Nixon defeated George McGovern in a landslide, only to be forced out of office by the Watergate scandal.

The American people watched as the Democrats, who had been strongly anti-Communist since WWII, were taken over by the anti-war activists and Communist sympathizers.  The Democrat-controlled Congress reduced financial aid to South Vietnam, and North Vietnam conquered the country in 1975--with many Dem pols (including a young Joe Biden) opposing letting Vietnamese refugees into the country.  The turnabout was noticed by many people.  The failures of the later Carter presidency added to the shift.

Despite being brought up as a Democrat, by 1980 I voted for Reagan.  While at times over the years I voted for individual Democrats, as the party shifted farther and farther to the left, I stayed put.  They left me, and it cost them my votes.

A lot has changed in the American scene in the last fifty years.  And one of the biggest changes is the reversal in the bases of the two parties.  These days, the top execs at the Fortune 500 companies are not Republicans; they vote Democrat.  Many of them are even supporting Democrat-inspired political correctness within their corporations.  The small business people (as in your town's local Chamber of Commerce) may still support the Republicans, but the national Chamber of Commerce is perfectly happy with the Democrats now.  

The industrial labor unions still exist, but their membership is a shadow of what it once was; the real power of the labor movement today lies in the government employee unions.  And in the old industrial unions, the leadership is out of touch with their members.  In 2020, the Pittsburgh local of the Pipefitters' Union endorsed Trump; the national union endorsed Biden--and then was shocked when one of his first actions was to cancel the Keystone pipeline, eliminating thousands of union jobs.  Do you really think the rank-and-file Pipefitters are happy with the union brass?  The union brass may have supported Biden, but many of the local grassroots union members voted for Trump.

These days the Democrat base is primarily the elites:  the government employees; the generals and admirals of the military; the Ivy League administrations and faculty, along with their imitators at the lesser universities; the college-educated well-to-do suburbanites, and others near the upper crust.  Their coalition also includes most (not all) of the LGBT crowd.  But they are losing ground with two grass-roots groups they have long taken for granted--blacks and Hispanics.  Historically, many blacks have been liberal on economics but conservative on social issues, and that is starting to affect their political choices.  Hispanics are not a monolithic group--there are differences among them because of the various countries they came from--but many of them are opposed to the socialist ideas that the Democrats are increasingly embracing.

The Democrat shift is obviously reflected in Barack Obama's 60th birthday party not long ago: a crowd of upper-crust celebrities, dancing and reveling without masks during what is supposed to be a serious health crisis, waited upon by masked servants, drawn from the lower class.

The real divide today is between what Angelo Codevilla in 2010 called the "Ruling Class"--the government officials (Democrats and many of the Republicans), the academic elites, the business moguls (both traditional and Silicon Valley), the national media brass (both news and entertainment) and their sycophants and wannabes--and the mass of the American people.  Not all of the people have figured it out.  But the changes are getting more obvious, and the number of people catching on seems to be rising.

I Am Not Surprised

Back in September of 2007 I wrote a blog post about how the churches in the area I had lived in had an appearance of strength, but not the reality.  The specific issue that caused me to notice that was the passage of a ballot initiative to allow riverboat gambling in the county.  Dearborn County, Indiana had a lot of churches--churches in the towns, a couple of megachurches in one area, and it seemed like every other crossroads had at least one rural church.  They all opposed the gambling; and yet it passed easily.

In the years since, this trend has continued.  Some big-name church leaders have been caught in sin, often but not always sexual misbehavior.  The "mainline" denominations have continued their decline:  some scholars have predicted that the Episcopal Church may disappear by 2040; they still have their buildings and a fair amount of money, but their decline in numbers continues, and the numbers of weddings and baptisms in their churches look even worse for the future.  The United Methodists have begun the process of breaking up into liberal and conservative groups.  But since the breakup was stalled by postponing their international conference because of the Covid pandemic, some congregations are pulling out early, even at the risk of losing their buildings.  And this is happening with both conservative and liberal congregations.

This decline is not limited to liberal churches, although they seem to be worse off than the conservatives.  The Southern Baptists are stagnating in numbers and beginning to show signs of disagreement among their leaders.  Other groups are not much better off.

And it isn't just the Protestants, either.  The Roman Catholics are still dealing with the fallout from the sex abuse scandals among their clergy.  Some years ago Rod Dreher, a writer I sometimes read, who was brought up a Methodist in Louisiana, moved to the Roman Catholic church after a personal awakening.  As the sex scandals came into the news, he moved to an Orthodox church.  But in the years since, several of the Orthodox groups became embroiled in financial scandals.  He has stayed with them.  But for myself, I don't see that one scandal is less bad than another.  All of them show a failure of the denominational brass to live up to their supposed standards.

But I think there is a distinction to be made, an important one.  The decline of church organizations does not necessarily indicate a decline in real faith.  It may only indicate a separation of the wheat and the chaff.  It has been noted for years that in most local congregations, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people.  The rest are just pew-sitters.  But there are signs that a substantial part of those 20% are no longer content with the traditional congregation model of church.

Back in 2015 Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope published the book "Church Refugees."  At the time the "Nones" identified by Pew Research, the "religiously unafilliated," were big in the news.  The assumption of many was that these were people who were no longer Christians.  But Packard and Hope started finding and talking to people, and found that many of them were still Christians, but were "done" with the traditional religious structures.  And many of them were not just the back-row, Easter-and-Christmas attenders, but were part of the 20%--a substantial part of them even pastors!  The authors estimated that nearly half of Pew's "Nones" were actually what they called "Dones"--Christians still, but trying to live their faith outside the traditional organizations.

I became part of that group years ago, well before that book came out.  Some of us weren't that enthralled with the "Done" label--some of us called ourselves "Free-Range Christians."  I did go back to a small church in the fall of 2018 because of a major disruption in my life that resulted in getting divorced.  I was helped by the men's group, and supported the church in gratitude.  But over time, they seem to be drifting into further decline, and I am back to "Free-Range" status again.

How will this turn out?  I do not know.  I do not claim to be a prophet.  But I do think that one possible outcome is that the Real Church, as defined by our Lord, will be revealed, with less drag from the institutional substitutes, and will remain when those are long gone.

My Own Political Journey Part I

 There are going to be a few posts coming up that concern politics in the US.  I am not going into the events of the past few weeks, and probably not that much into the events of the past few months.  But in another month, I will be 71 years old.  I have always observed politics--I have had a lifelong fascination with history, and politics is history in the making.  I am not that much of a partisan; I don't put bumper stickers on my cars, or go to rallies or contribute money to politicians. I have voted in elections since I was old enough--you still had to be 21 to vote when I started.  But for this particular post, I want to look back at what US politics were like when I was growing up.

I grew up in a UAW household.  My father worked for Ford, at a plant that made automatic transmissions.  My parents grew up during the Depression, and they thought President Roosevelt was wonderful.  My dad was the first of his family to finish high school.  He did not get the chance to go to college.  He was offered an opportunity after his graduation in 1936 to take a test for a scholarship, but it meant he would have to travel to the state capital to take the test, and his parents would not give him money for bus fare.  College was not the big deal then that it became after World War II.  By the '60s, many of my friends had fathers who had gone to college on the GI Bill after the war.  But when my father was called up for the draft, he flunked the physical (he was recovering from a bout of pneumonia at the time).  So he spent the war years working in a factory, making radios for the military.  And of course, he could not qualify for the GI Bill.

But in the '60s, the distance between the college-educated and the blue-collar worker was not that large.  Most of the college grads I knew back then were the first ones of their own families to attend college.  And white-collar and blue-collar people mostly lived in the same neighborhoods, went to the same churches and sent their kids to the same schools.  And many of them still remembered growing up in small towns and rural areas where the only people who had gone to college were the doctor, the lawyer, and the preacher.

And the two parties were not as far apart as they are now.  They routinely worked together in Congress and state legislatures.  Major cities like New York swapped the mayor's job back and forth from Democrat to Republican, and states often did the same with governors.  They had worked together throughout the war years, and continued for quite a few years after.  There were a few extremists in each party, but the mainstream of each side got along fairly well.  It was a surprise to many when Barry Goldwater got the Republican nomination for president in 1964, and he was not that popular in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio where I lived.  I remember one of his few partisans in my high school repeating Goldwater's slogan "In your heart you know he's right!" and being answered with "In your guts you know he's nuts!"--by the son of the Republican mayor!

The truth is, most Republicans in the Midwest in the mid-'60s were what would later be called "Rockefeller Republicans" after Nelson Rockefeller.  They identified more with him and President Eisenhower than with Goldwater.  (Eisenhower himself had to decide which party he belonged with when he began thinking of running for president!)  And the Democrats of that day were still strong anti-Communists, and otherwise only slightly more liberal than most Republicans.

In those days, the Democrats were considered the party of the working man.  The industrial unions were a major part of their strength.  The Republicans were considered the party of business--both Big Business and small business (think US Chamber of Commerce--big--and local Chamber of Commerce--small).

That describes the political world that I grew up in.  There were major changes in the '60s and after that had large effects on that world, and on my own political thinking.  The next post will go into that.

First Amendment issues

 The First Amendment to the US Constitution begins "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."

But what is "an establishment of religon"--a local church building? an organization?  What did those words mean to the people of that time, especially the ones who worked out the Constitution in 1787 and the first ten Amendments, now called the Bill of Rights?

At that time, most countries in Europe had an "established church"--a church linked to the government, often supported with tax money, and intended to be dominant in that country.  In England, it was the Anglican Church; and it not only received money from the government, but the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England automatically had seats in the House of Lords.  The Scandinavian countries and some states of German set up Lutheran state churches.  In a few places, it was Reformed churches that were the choice--Scotland's official church was Presbyterian, separate from the Anglican Church next door in England, even though they shared the same king.  And of course, some countries remained Roman Catholic--France, Spain, Italy, Austria and some parts of Germany, and others.  But one thing that went along with being the favored church in a country was the official effort to put down and eliminate all others.  This started during the Reformation in the 1500s, and continued for several centuries.  Even where dissenting groups were allowed to exist, they were discriminated against and put at a disadvantage.

For instance, in England:  if you did not take Communion in an Anglican church building, you could not hold any political office, national or local.  In Ireland, which was under English rule, you were not only kept from holding any office, the government would not recognize your marriage as legal unless it was performed in an Anglican church building.  This affected not only the Irish Catholics, but also the Protestant Ulster Scots, who were settled there in the early 1600s to help hold down the country after major revolts in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Most of the English colonies that became the United States had their established churches, too.  Virginia and most of the other southern colonies had made the Anglican church their official one; in Massachusetts and some of the other New England colonies it was the Puritans (by then called Congregational Church; after several mergers in the 1900s it is now the United Church of Christ).  Pennsylvania, one of the later colonies to be founded, was the first to welcome all comers, no matter what sect they were part of.  These colonial established churches had continued after the American Revolution.   (The Anglican churches had re-organized and re-named themselves as the Episcopal Church, with their first bishop on this side of the Atlantic--before the Revolution they had been under the authority of the Bishop of London.)

The established churches in Europe tended to be dominated by the nobility and royalty, regardless of whether they were Catholic or Protestant.  There had been a long tradition in noble families in Europe; one son inherited the estates, one went into the army, and one son for the church.  Henry VIII of England was not intended to be king--his older brother was to be the heir to the throne.  Henry was expected to end up Archbishop of Canterbury, the top bishop in the country.  But Henry's older brother died young, and Henry inherited the throne instead.

And it wasn't just royalty doing this.  In general, all over Europe, the bishops, archbishops, the cardinals, and other top church positions mostly went to the sons of the nobility.  And little to no importance was put on the son's fitness or morality in all too many cases.

And social position affected church position all down the line.  In the Church of England, a young man from an upper-class family would be ordained, and would be assigned several churches.  He would take the best one--the wealthiest, most prominent socially--and farm out the others to clergymen of lower status, paying them as little as half the official salary and keeping the rest for himself.  Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles who later founded Methodism, was one of those lower-class preachers.  It isn't commonly known today, but Charles Darwin studied for the Anglican ministry.  He admitted to friends that he felt no particular calling; but he wanted to go to university; Anglican ministry was considered an acceptable profession for one of his family's social status, and so his father would pay for him to go to Cambridge University.  He never was ordained; it is possible he went on that sea voyage on the Beagle, that got him thinking about evolution, to get away from his father's demands that he get ordained and take his share of churches.

That is the background of the term "establishment of religion" that the Founders had lived with.  And somehow they made the decision that the new nation would not have an Established Church.  In so doing they avoided a breakup of the new country.  The New Englanders would never have accepted another Anglican establishment; the southern states would never have accepted a Puritan national church.  And by that time there were plenty of other groups--Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, as well as smaller groups like the Moravians, Amish and Mennonites, and more.  And over time the states that had established churches cut them loose, and the new states that came in never bothered.  In the new United States, each church, no matter what kind, had to make its own way, without official government help and money.

And what about "prohibiting the free exercise thereof"?  There had been plenty of that in Europe and the colonies in the past.  I mentioned the restrictions put on other groups by the established churches in Europe.  It was not much better in most of the American colonies.  Quakers and others were persecuted in New England; in Virginia non-Anglicans were not allowed to have their own churches for many years.  That rule was ignored sometimes, because they needed the hardy Ulster Scots who were settling the backwoods areas of the colonies, to provide a buffer against the Indian tribes farther west.  But it remained on the books for a long time.

Against that background, the new American republic tried something new, a country without one dominant favored denomination, where all were free to worship as they believed they should.

And yes, this is history; but it also affects us today.  During the COVID-19 pandemic we are living these days, some governors of states tried to restrict churches from having services, limiting how many could attend, even if they practiced physical distancing and using masks and other precautions, and without regard for how much room they had to spread out in.  (For instance, saying stores could operate at 50% capacity, but churches could only have 10 or 25 people, even if their building could seat hundreds.)  Some churches (and some Jewish synagogues) complied quietly; others questioned why they were treated worse than stores and other social settings.  And finally the Supreme Court ruled that states could not put harsher restrictions on churches than they did on other places.  And court cases in recent years have reminded local governments that while they must not favor any one religion over another, they also must not show disfavor to religious groups either.

I'm Back!

 I know...it's been a long time.  A lot has happened in that long time.`  In the years since I stopped blogging, I have been on some forums, I have been on Facebook, I have been in some Facebook groups (some of those groups used to be independent forums).  I have learned that I don't really like big discussion groups--I like the smaller ones better.  I don't like taking part in discussions on sites that have thousands of members.  To me, a couple hundred is tons.  A few dozen is just fine.

I know I was never a big-name blogger, and I am okay with that.  I had a few followers, some of them friends--one was a man in another part of the country that I met when we were both commenting on someone else's blog, and we started emailing and commenting on each other's blogs.  We are still friends to this day.  He even managed to stop by and meet me one year when he and his wife made a cross-country trip.  And if this virus ever dies down, I may take a trip down his way.  I am retired now, and can take the time to travel a bit.  I was self-employed for 45 years, and never had paid vacations, so traveling was often hard.  And since I was a remodeling contractor, my busy season was spring through fall--it was hard for me to get away for more than a weekend during the summer.

I have been observing what's happened, and thinking about things during those silent years, and I guess I have some things to say.  Some of the things I want to say probably wouldn't work well in comments on Facebook or Twitter (I have never been on Twitter, and am not inclined to join it, or Gab, or Parler).

A few weeks ago Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit, the man they call the Blogfather, expressed some regrets that Facebook and Twitter and other social media had displaced the old blogosphere we used to have.  I have no illusions that I can bring it back.  But I am going to try to bring back my own little bit of it.  Whether anyone shows up to read it...I don't know.  But maybe some will.  We shall see.