Monthly Archives: September 2015
The Toronto Word on the Street festival was a hectic heads down exercise in focusing on the people that showed up with little time for long conversations. I was humbled by the diversity of the people that showed up to greet me. Thanks so much for the warm reception to a brand new city where I thought I didn’t know anyone!
One person asked “Who Supports You?” I know what she meant — she meant the question in terms of a sponsor. I do not have a sponsor, so the answer was easy in one sense — it is no one. I work in the model of Paul, who supported his efforts with his tent making. I suppose that is the model of Donald Trump as well, except for the orders of magnitude wealth difference. Beholden to no one. However, I really appreciate it when people buy my books, as writing is my current tent-making type of endeavor!
Also, I am supported in other ways. Her conclusion “so it is really you, alone” does not feel right either. I am not alone.
I am supported, just not financially, by my family and friends. My mother for example has done countless hours of research into the genealogy of our family and also on editing. I am supported by readers who comment with new stories and insights. I am supported by the churches I am a member of and the churches I visit. I am supported by everyone and everything God puts in my path. As long as I stay in God’s will, He is supportive. Should I be sinning, he will drop me like a hot rock. Most writers have what they call a muse when they write. I call it the holy spirit.
I don’t think any author can write without these kinds of support and I am immensely grateful to have it.
Another reader asked how contact me. I suggested at the time Facebook.com/Rekindled.info with either a message or a visitor post. I now realize that messaging may not work for everyone, and even it if does work I am not notified. Here are other ways to contact me:
Medium is my favorite way to be contacted, because if you log in with Twitter or Facebook onto Medium you will be able to comment on the specific part of a post you want to interact with. To log in press the circle in the upper right. Your comments on the articles I author are always private until I make them public and if you indicate you don’t want them public, I can leave them private, and either person you can delete them at any time. I am notified when there is a comment. Most of my blog posts exist on Medium, even if they are also on the web site, and the version on Medium is the most up to date.
You are also welcomed to write your own article on Medium and submit to one of my publications. There two collections. One is About Rekindled, meant for items about the book Rekindled. The other is We are all Overcomers, stories of real people overcoming adversity.
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In 1644 when Roger Williams returned from England with a charter for his New England colony providing for an experiment in toleration, it was still a small experiment watched but not admired. He has instituted the separation of church and state but his civil government was weak, his colony impoverished, and success was not certain. In the end, religious freedom did not spread back to England as he’d hoped for fear of Catholicism. Parliament blocked measure after measure put forward by King Charles II.
However, Parliament was not so prejudiced against toleration wording in the distant colonies, perhaps perceiving fewer dangers there.
After Rhode Island’s Providence Plantations charter of 1644, the first charter to inch toward religious freedom was John Winthrop Jr’s Connecticut. Caught between his father and Roger Williams he tried to please both temperments. He set up an established church but granted people “rights of conscience” in his Connecticut charter approved by King Charles II in 1662.
Soon after Rhode Island’s charter was re-approved by King Charles II with it’s wording in tact: “no one shall be molested, punished, disquieted or called into question for cause of conscience.” New Jersey copied the wording and the approach in 1665. It is the Rhode Island/New Jersey approach that made it eventually into the 1791 Bill of Rights.
Other experiments surfaced along the way. King Charles II inserted words into Carolina’s charter but let her hedge her bets with a Connecticut-like approach with taxes still funding a church. Freedom did not last well under these conditions. Georgia similarly tried to hedge her bets excluding Papists and lost fredom by 1752.
In 1681 Pennsylvania’s charter had initially neither established church nor promise of freedom. William Penn practiced religious freedom, but only for those who believe in Christ, as a “holy experiment”.
New York it seems was always run by business. She changed her government and her religion to suit her profit margins…and allowed as much religious freedom as seemed optimal. Religion never seemed the center of her conviction, and while in 1691 words about freedom appear, as late as 1720’s she was still actively persecuting dissenters. In the 1740’s the Moravians pushed the issue and by 1750 there seemed to be de facto religious freedom.
The Quebec Act of 1774 used religious freedom like a weapon. The act was approved by the British Parliament to institute a permanent administration in Canada that would keep the people loyal to Britain. The measure gave the French Canadians complete religious freedom and restored the French form of civil law. The expanded territorial claims for Canada catalyzed disputes with the 13 rebellious colonies to the south, and the colonies charactized the measure as a mere concession to Catholicism. From a British point of view it was a smashing success. In 1791 the approach was dropped as Canada separated from the USA and retreated to an English approach.
A few years before the Bill of Rights Virginia rejected its model of religious freedom which had an established church but claimed to respect freedom of conscience. However, religious minorities were still experiencing persecution. The Rhode Island model was adopted, and Thomas Jefferson championed that wording in the Bill of Rights.
The US Bill of Rights of USA of 1791 ended the experiments of the American Colonies and formed our current American construct, based on the Rhode Island model.
Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia 1891 again used religious freedom as a carrot to keep Australia loyal to the British Empire. The wording was modeled on USA, but did not preclude the states within Australia from establishing a church.
In our day, the entire discussion seems likely to be repeated in both a G0d-excluded-from-the-discussion and an Islamic context.
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When I wrote Shadow of Denali I wondered if I should add a warning label at the point I jumped off the cliff. Soon after publishing it I got a tweet to the effect of “jump and plan how to land on the way down.” That is just not so not the whole story, if you want to reliably survive. Even in an fast moving world.
Even without a motor, this is The Target Posture
Here are ingredients:
- Preparation. In the case of jumping off the cliff that means years of strength and balance training. The whole point is nailing the landing. There will be tremendous forces in play and muscles and shocks do help. In an agile software development we call this part hiring the best staff. That means staff with skills that can use them while working with others.
- Observation. When doing something you haven’t done before it helps to watch others doing similar things to get an idea what needs to be done. When I saw others jump overhead I observed two critical things: speed at take off would be crucial to clear the cliff and land in the open and posture (they kept their front ends up, their bikes straight, their bodies centered but forward). This was not riding off a cliff. This was driving with everything you’ve got off a cliff. In software development this is called getting input in in the form of user stories as to what actually must be done.
- Estimation of cost. There will be wear and tear on the body and on the mechanical machine, each will get a limited number of high force maneuvers before requiring significant maintenance or replacement (need for replacement is not good news…the medical community only knows how to replace a remarkably small number of components).
- Support and protection. Prayer is great. But it is at God’s discretion to provide the angels. I strongly recommend an additional support plan with some human angels. An organized race. A person on belay. Whatever it takes.
- Commitment to plan. Plans will change, but with no plan, there is no strategy. The plan to jump was formulated before the race started, and the commitment was there at the point of departure. In agile software development, this is called committing to which of the backlog of user stories go into a sprint. By the way, this is the last point where you decide not to jump off an object so high there is no reasonable expectation of nailing the landing. Reject that part of a Thelma & Louise act.
- Commencement: At this point cross a point of no return and make adjustments to the plan on the way down.
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Rekindled Chapter 1 opens with HH’s story as if it is certain who he was. That certainty is fiction. What is known is that the introductions to Roger Williams’s book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution opens with HH’s writing, and Roger Williams asserted that it came out of Newgate prison. The introduction is clearly meant as an inspiration for what follows in the book: a rational for the separation of church and state.
Because the text of HH’s writing showed up in an Anabaptist confession written in part by John Murton, Edwin S. Gaustad proposes that the author was John Murton. However the timing doesn’t really work. There is no evidence John Murton was in Newgate. There is no known reason he would have been released. Even John Barry was skeptical.
John Murton did probably know Thomas Helwys. Perry Miller and others thought maybe HH was Thomas Helwys. Thomas Helwys wrote to the king under his own name. He wanted a face-to-face audience, as others before him had been granted. It would be odd for him to be using a pseudonym. Besides “HH” is not “TH”.
Roger William’s detractors — led by John Cotton’s and Richard Mather’s grandson Cotton Mather suggested HH was made up by Roger Williams as a publicity stunt or a way to get John Cotton on paper saying things that would make others lose respect for him. There is no known reason Roger Williams would have had that Anabaptist document to copy from, but he could have. Ed Winslow had connections to the people in Amsterdam that would have had a copy — he could have been the original printer. I don’t however believe that Roger Williams was so cavalier with the truth on an issue so important. He never wrote any fiction at all that we know of.
The hypothesis of Rekindled is that Roger Williams told the truth as he perceived it. It was under that hypothesis that I searched Austin Friar for people of the right age whose communication terminated at the right time for them to be HH and came up with the two possibilities documented in the book (the second possibility is the Appendix of characters).
Even if I am right that HH was either of these people the connection van Meteren is still fictional. Emmanuel Van Meteren and his ancestry is historical; his sister and the connection to HH is fictional. There probably IS a connection between HH and Austin Friar, and Roger Williams and Austin Friar, but the details of the connection are not known. Roger Williams always carried a small Dutch bible with him, and spoke fluent Dutch. He was determined to get to Plymouth where the remnants of the John Robinson congregation lived. He shared the Lyon with people seeking that congregation, that appear to have reoriented to Boston once in New England. One plausible alternative to the story in the book is that he sought Plymouth because he wanted to live near a Higginson follower that died after he finally was able to get to Plymouth, another of Rutinck’s disciples. Possibly that person was the recipient of the HH papers from prison.
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The Blue Ink Review beat out the competition to provide the first professional review of the book Rekindled, posted here. I was warned to have a thick skin on this review business. Really, it is a fine review. It gets the spirit of the book right. What they say about what I did is true — I certainly did not make the characters use archaic language as that would have made the story really hard to read. I stand by that, even as I claim I did try to map their worldview into our language.
The review however might have made poor Roger roll over in his grave. Let me explain.
My favorite line in the review includes “this is an absorbingly detailed portrait of 17th-century Christendom”. Yikes!! Roger wrote an entire pamphlet denouncing the use in his day of the word “Christendom”, and its common use now isn’t that different. Specifically many Europeans did not follow Jesus — and so Europe should never have been called Christendom in his view. The Algonquian people that came to hear Roger preach may have followed Jesus — he would never have claimed he could be sure — but would never follow European customs. If they did follow Jesus, they would be part of the true “Christendom” for sure. Roger’s point is that the true Christendom is always invisible (in any century) and will never be a single geographic region or culture. Thus, the separation of church and state is critical to church’s success as well as the state’s.
Another line in the review says of Roger’s expectation of the Algonquian people “Because he doesn’t view them as “heathens,” he decides they shouldn’t have to adhere to biblical customs.” Sounded good at first, but wait. On the one hand, he certainly didn’t think Algonquian people should have to follow European customs.
Roger would have said all of the Algonquian people started as heathens, just as we all do. Until we decide to give our lives to following Jesus we are all heathen — Algonquian included. But the deeper meaning of the term “heathen” as the author of the review may have meant is that Roger did not view them as sub-human — and that is most certainly true. Roger certainly would have said all Jesus followers will want to follow the Bible’s commands, even commands that seem impossible to follow. It will be the power of the Holy Spirit that will enable them to come closer to following Jesus, not a person’s own power.
But Roger asked no person that did not want to follow Jesus to obey anything other than laws to keep the civil peace. So in that sense, when a person is heathen (European or Algonquian), he does not expect them to follow biblical custom.
For Christians, for his own life, the Bible was everything. The Old Testament taught concepts physically as a teacher might give a young child large physical letters to teach the alphabet. The New Testament graduated the student to word and sentence level concepts teachable at a more abstract level. As the inspired word of God, every drop, every morsel has significance.
Every culture has a moral code, and Roger would claim the Bible says every moral code in every culture is authorized by God as God is the ultimate delegator of the authority behind every civil ruler. He also would have said we all are doomed to fail the moral code, no matter what it says. As fallen humans (to use his words “Adam’s degenerate seed”) we are all rule-breakers (aka sinners). Just as the Bible reveals, he would have claimed following Jesus is the only way out of that paradox, for any century.
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Shadow of Denali
“See that mountain? It looks close, but it is three HUNDRED miles away.”
It was forty below zero Fahrenheit and February in Alaska, and the mountain was Denali. Alaskans called it Denali even then, now everyone will. The morning was early. The pick-up truck was so cold it was painful to sit still. It was hard to even think about unloading the bicycles much less riding. My digits were numb.
The man I’d just met, the fellow kind enough to lead me out on this training ride now that his friend was sick, continued: “You get lost here, we’re not coming to look for you. You’ll be found dead come spring if you are lucky.”
I would not be easily deterred. My gear had flown out to what would be my training home for the next week, a place three hours to the nearest road by snow mobile. There was no easy way to recover if I didn’t finish this ride.
I’d been training for a year for this ride. Superbowl Sunday on a below zero evening in New Jersey I’d spent riding in the coldest wind on the shore — forcing the ride to last all night long, eventually riding in quarter mile circles near home fearing frostbite. As planned I’d lit my survival stove at the end before retreating to heat. That’s how I knew it was going to be hard to unload the bikes while this cold.
We did ride to the river, and then the guys turned around. They tried one more time. “We’re going back to the bar at the trail head, why don’t you join us? You don’t really want to be the next Christopher McCandless.”
No chance. I was going on.
Denali photograph, taken by Mom in summer
The challenge was immediate. Crossing the river was the technical obstacle of the ride, besides ice and deep snow. The surface level is about twenty feet below the rim — and I climbed down that day, only to have two riders jump out over my head and disappear downriver. That’s when I realized to be competitive I’d have to jump, not climb, during the race. Once at the bottom, you lose perspective. It is like a maze of trails walled with enough fallen snow to obstruct vision. I was eventually helped by the other riders to find a way across as the race trail was not yet marked. I did survive, not ever too lost, and did jump during the race (I call it my Thelma & Louise moment — see attached link if you are tempted to try this — I wasn’t thinking but I was praying) and either I did nail the landing or angels caught me, I’m not sure which.
On the return leg of the race we had to climb UP that same ice wall, using the bike pressed into snow in places to help get traction. It took several tries. Some never made it up. After a few unsuccessful tries I rested. I looked up at the cloud-covered night sky where I knew Denali was hiding, and remembered about mountains.
When we moved to Utah I was only four or five years old. As we were driving in for my first time I exclaimed to my mom at one point, “that mountain is even bigger than dad!”
“Well yes silly, and God is even bigger than that.”
I got up and either climbed that wall, or the angels lifted me, I’m not sure how to tell the difference. Maybe it was a joint effort.
My mother followed the race on the internet, worried. Now I’m a mom and I don’t know how she stood that. About a year ago I met a friend of Christopher McCandless’s father, and the father is… Still. His. Father. Hurting.
It is a lot easier to take a risk than let your kids take a risk. It is a lot easier to compel good behavior than let them learn from little mistakes before they get too big (you hope). But I would not be who I am — trying new things, taking risks, if it I hadn’t been allowed those risks. So I cringe and watch my kids ….and try not to let them notice too much.
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Last November, the seminarian student originally from Romania called Lumi came and told us her story. If you have not heard Lumi, you can listen here:
She left us with an assignment—to figure out how to tell our own stories. Lumi is scheduled to return in April—what will she find? It is my hope she will find us preparing feverishly to tell our stories — first in church to edify each other, then outside. Toward that end I invite you to participate with me in a free online class called “Storytelling for Change”, available herehttps://novoed.com/storytelling-change . It will use about 3 hours of your week for 10 weeks. We are told in Revelations 12:11 that we will conquer evil not just by the blood of the lamb, but also by the word of our testimonies and being willing to tell our stories, and not to love our lives (aka our reputations) so much that we are afraid to give our testimony.
To quote Roger Williams:
Overcoming Evil
God’s people are all over-comers
When they fight with God’s weapons
In God’s cause and worship
In Revelations 2, 3 chapters
Seven times it is recorded
To him that overcommeth in Ephesus
To him that overcommeth in Sardis
And so on…
Revelations chapter 12
God’s servants overcame
The Dragon or the Devil in the Roman Emperors
By three weapons
The blood of the Lamb
The word of their testimony. And
The not loving of their lives unto death.
Reference: The Bloudy Tenant p. 190 Volume 3
For some the conversion or recovery of faith story makes an obvious testimony, for others not so much. Suggestions for where to look for your story include Bible verses you find difficult and the journey to understanding them. Also consider times where your fellow Christians have provided insights and assistance in your Christian walk.
For example, last week in Sunday School, I was sharing my uneasiness with Genesis 12-13:2 — that Abram is judged righteous and yet he got his livestock, silver, and gold in essence from selling his wife to sleep with Pharaoh. I was corrected — Rich O’Reilly has this way of knocking of you upside of the head in one sentence so cleverly you don’t realize it for a few hours…and he said something like: no the riches came later, when he asked her to go to Pharaoh it was to save his life. Which changed everything. For when I went to pray, it was 33 years ago and the truck was blasting Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” as my other half was sharing he’d need laser eye treatments for $600 a week to MAYBE save his sight—a sum higher than Mt. Everest to us then on our teaching assistant salaries. And the only way we found to do it was for me to take an engineering job I’d been offered on the East Coast—to sell-out the use of my brain to corporate America as I saw it then. And I did. And if you doubt the disgust level we felt, understand that in math each concept builds on the prior like a complex house of cards, and time away is like knocking house of cards from your brain structure. They said “If you don’t study it now you will never study it again” I can still hear my prof saying “ You will never again be pristine, you will have rotted your brain”.
I studied for engineering exams in waiting rooms of hospitals in New Brunswick and eventually at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore while waiting on his eye surgeries to complete. My company paid us more in medical benefits than they did in salary. When he was blind I learned leadership skills so that we could still backpack remotely alone. And when he died I felt I lost not just my spouse, but my reason for living on the east coast or anywhere, and my faith. The return to faith is another longer story. My point here is that out of that experience I was blessed—with skills, with resources from a career that lasted 33 years and enabled everything else I’ve ever done and what I’m about to do. And while that job has as of last year ended, God still calls on me to use those skills and resources toward his Kingdom, and for now that means telling stories.
As we used to say in cycling, sometimes it’s your turn to take a pothole for the team, so that the whole team does not go down. How can I look down on Abram or Sarai? We were both immensely blessed out of difficult challenges with murky practical solutions, and we both at points in the story feel completely inadequate to God’s call.
I invite you to join in submitting stories to the collection “We are All Overcomers” with your life experience and testimony.
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Roger stood in the 1600’s for life and liberty. Since the 1700’s we’ve believed in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The goal of happiness may spawn from an increased focus on the individual, a focus that took a big step forward with Christ’s recognition of each soul as valuable. However individualism did not fully flower until after Roger Williams was gone. It seems now that happiness has overtaken life and liberty as the most sacrosanct goal. If we are not happy, a diagnostic manual may assign us a “condition” and try to fix us.
My grandmother said not to be surprised that all cherries have pits. That meant if you found a thing like happiness, there would be a hard thing at the heart of it.
Supporting the life of the fit, the powerful, and the beautiful…that is downright Darwinian and never needed a constitution to protect it. The protected item in our nation was the life of the less fit. It meant the downtrodden, the poor, the rejected … the defenseless huddled masses.
Liberty sounds good, until it impinges one someone’s perception of the pursuit of happiness. Being politically correct preserves the happiness of individuals that might otherwise be offended or hurt. I thought I was guaranteed freedom of speech in this nation. Then I went to the library. Out in front was a “free speech” zone. It was very small.
Roger Williams fought to keep people from being punished by the government for publicly expressing and defending a conscience different from those in power. Yet the government in Kentucky is telling such people what they must not say is “sin”. “Sin” sure seems like first table concept in that it defines which things are offensive to God. The civil government isn’t qualified to judge, Roger wants to shout.
The government Roger Williams founded came to be known as Rhode Island — the aisle of roses. Thing is, every single rose has not just unique beauty but also thorns. Not the sort of aisle you’d walk down barefoot — yet beautiful nonetheless.
The decisions that really determine our values get made when laudable goals are in conflict. For example, an unwanted pregnancy pits the mother’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness against a forming baby’s life. In conflict resolution, the best answer is almost never either/or. It is win/win. To find it, we might have to pull a kobayashi maru…. changing the assumptions behind the rules and using our formidable technologies toward a different end. If a mom is pregnant and needs to choose not to be, we could find a way to deliver that life within to waiting adoptive parents…or a surrogate womb …any and all solutions but crushing either life. We have the technology…if we want to focus on protecting both lives we will work till we find the win/win.
We are promised the pursuit of happiness, not that we will always be happy. Happiness can follow being a part of something larger than oneself. That might mean sustaining some level of offense or hurt to recognize a larger goal (e.g. perpetuation of life across multiple generations), in pursuit of a higher happiness. Roger would recognize the pursuit of membership of something larger than himself (e.g. a charter, building the Kingdom of God). He wanted the respect of the institutions of his day and his free conscience. He struggled his whole life to find balance, to find and implement a win/win for “civil peace”/”freedom of conscience” now 371 years old — a win/win that needs to defended again with each new generation.
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Find me on twitter @TeresaLIrizarry.
Kim Davis, as a Christian, is obligated to honor her conscience. Therefore she cannot sign marriage licenses as they are currently constructed in Rowan county.
Kim Davis took an oath to uphold the civil law which now conflicts with her conscience. Her conscience led her to publicly ask the question if the law was just, which civil authorities have now answered.
Some are expressing surprise Kim Davis is in jail. However, she was not only upholding her own conscience but also instructing her deputies to dishonor the civil law. This is a line that she is well advised not to cross now that the civil authorities have determined the law will stand. Why?
17th Century thought divides the world into two spheres — derived from the 10 Commandments. The civil authorities at that time had many unjust laws, and Christians were adept at navigating through them. The first table was based on the first five commandments. The first table is the sphere of the authority of God who speaks through consciences, with a special record of past revelation vetted by the collective consciences of inspired followers kept in scripture. The second five have to do with keeping civil peace and fall within the jurisdiction of civil authority.
Kim Davis’s conscience leads her to a position based on scripture, a source she does not have the power to alter as the inspired word of God. Civil law would have a person in her position sign a document condoning sin, which she is convicted she cannot do. Kim Davis has pursued every avenue she can to change the law, and it is not about to change at this time. She therefore cannot perform her duties while honoring her conscience.
The civil state has no authority to tell Kim Davis her conscience in governing her own actions in the first table is wrong. While it has every authority to enforce its laws, there is also a precedent of making reasonable accommodations.
When does your religion legally excuse you from doing part of your job?
Can your religion legally excuse you from doing part of your job? This is one of the questions in the Kentucky County …Washington Post
In any case Kim Davis has no authority to expect other civil servants to break the civil law. That would be a forced worship, a sin as odious in scripture (Isaiah 66) as the sins Kim Davis was asked to condone. She cannot therefore perform her duty. We must give to Caesar what is rightfully Caesars. Therefore an honorable avenue left is to resign. I would hope that the she recognizes quickly as a Christian that compelling consciences of others is as odious as condoning sin herself.
Some seem surprised she is in jail, as the judge had “lesser remedies”. However, fines would have done nothing to protect the rights of the deputies reporting to Kim Davis. An accomodation would require other government bodies in Kentucky to act. As Kim Davis is an elected official, he cannot terminate her employment without cause. The physical removal allowed the judge to enable deputies to make their own decision to follow the law or declare a conscientious objection. Until she resigns or is removed from office the deputies were in the untenable position of being forced to honor another’s conscience in violation of the established civil law. The people of Kentucky may agree with Kim Davis— and they are free to vote their conscience. To leave her in place would have forced a judge to commit her deputies to following her instruction to break the civil law, honoring her conscience but not necessarily their own. That would have been utterly unacceptable.
There is no need for Kim Davis to remain in jail. She can honorably resign. On the other hand, the state of Kentucky may yet decide to make a reasonable accommodation. That leaves her with a motive to sit out her sentence in hopes of a more modern accommodation.
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In the uproar over Megyn Kelly, I pulled out your web site to see what it said, expecting to get angry. Incidentally, thanks for elevating her fame. I did not know her, but thanks to you I know of her now — and she’s awesome. She is hard hitting — a worthy opponent for sure.
Your immigration memo pleasantly surprised me. Did you write those first paragraphs, I wonder, or did some politically correct staffer — I just want to be certain you’ve at least read it. You made sense in your basics. Yes, we should expect people to follow the law. When my kids choose laws they don’t like, I still expect them to follow them. Same with people coming to our country. That’s why you must follow sexual harrassment laws by the way. I’m sure Megyn Kelly could help you with where to draw the line.
Raising the H1 visa salary cut-off makes tremendous sense, to encourage companies to develop our own impoverished youth. I have seen first hand the phenomena you reference in this area.
However, when I look into the eyes of immigrants, I find you to be missing something big in your policy. Maybe it is not a feature common in your industry, but it is a feature we expect in our political leaders. It is called compassion. I think you work and live pretty close to the lady that should be a daily reminder to you of this feature. I suggest to you that for many women such as myself, she’s a 10, a role model. She says:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Author: Emma Lazarus, on the Statue of Liberty
I
f you could add some chapters to your policy about how you intend to complement your current policies with laws and policies that display our compassion as a nation, I could support that.
I hear the pope is visiting soon. This current pope has this feature down. Maybe you could shadow him for a week and learn how this is done.
I know that’s a lot to ask. Most corporations have a philanthropic division that “handles that” while they stick to their core business. The problem is, compassion IS America’s core business. It is one of the values at the bottom of what makes us great. We are a nation of immigrants and you know that. Our own people are not even reproducing fast enough to shut that off and still have a healthy labor force.
I could make a claim we have historically been a nation of people running from the law — from our Puritan forefathers on down. But we need not. Those were unjust laws we were running from. Marin Luther King, Jr. in his letter from the Birmingham jail said any law is unjust that you would not be willing to apply to yourself. Without strong mechanisms to let in the people on which we choose to have compassion, we have unjust immigration policy.
We are a nation that has the rule of law and it helps us maintain order, an order women who cherish security benefit greatly from. So I support your idea of crafting laws that we expect to be enforced. Further I support re-optimizing the system to educate and employ our own youth. But show me the plan that does that humanely for the lady’s people — the people fleeing unjust laws now, today — or worse yet fleeing lands neglecting a rule of law. It is not a policy that merely enforces current law first because the current laws, as you point out, are flawed.
Thanks in advance.
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