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.