The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The daily educational program for children debuted on PBS in 1968, after two smaller runs – in 1961 with Misterogers on the CBC, and in 1966 with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the Boston-based Eastern Educational Network, a forerunner to the Public Broadcasting Service. Every day, Fred Rogers would get home from work, put on a cardigan and sneakers, and talk to his neighbours, delivering lessons on friendship, love, kindness, acceptance, and more. Viewers were an important part of the neighborhood, too. Now, the world is a great social laboratory for putting the ideas and values of Fred Rogers into everyday practice in a time of life and death – a time of the continuous present, without past or future.

As the world hits bottom – which may paradoxically be when it hits the peak for COVID-19 cases, which in the United States, now the world epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, may come in about two weeks time in mid-April – there will be, and already are around the world, early signs of recovery of a better us, and of a better world.

It is still both late days and early days simultaneously, but the 85-year-old argot of personal recovery can be applied now to public recovery, as well, I think: “One day at a time” and “just for today” should no longer be thought of as just private lifesaving advice for recovering alcoholics and addicts, but a public signpost for all for the rebuilding task that will be ahead, one person and one community at a time. The 12-step movement, dates back to June 1935, when Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician, both recently or newly sober (particularly Dr. Bob, although Bill W. wasn’t that many months ahead of him on the sobriety curve) became friends and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was born in Ohio. Both sayings, “one day at a time” and “just for today” are used interchangeably as both verbal slogans and written mottoes, the former coming from AA, and the latter, also a prayer to some, and a poem to others, from Narcotics Anonymous (NA), formed in 1953. They have proved useful as something pithy and easily grasped by the still-suffering in the early days of recovery, grasping for something tangible to hang onto for just one more second, minute, hour or day, grasping for those words every bit as much as a drowning person grasps for the rung on the ladder or life preserver.

Which is probably as good a description as any of the COVID-19 world we live in today, with a March that has birthed a dread spring in a month that seemingly never ends, where waking up every morning in March 2020 has been like having the voice of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard as a personal alarm clock inside my head, uttering such classic Star Trek lines as “damage report’ and “Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1c8IoTcgboKQu3u12DNJ_rRNzvH6k0ZNDK3p3b3KLEGBIZLJ4ktx6XBMI).

Fortunately, Gene Roddenberry has been a reminder to me since 1966 that character, courage and goodness are not proprietary virtues of the religious, non-religious, believers or non-believers. We all can and do share in them. And we’re going to need those virtues, and all of us, believers and non-believers, in the days ahead. In this month of unbelievable sounds and images, where the next day’s sounds and images routinely exceeds the horror and scale of the previous day, two stand out for me, one very well known, the other not so much. The first is the image of the floating hospital United States Navy Ship (USNS) Comfort as it entered New York Harbor March 30 during the Biological Armageddon coronavirus pandemic response in New York City. Mike Segar’s photograph for Reuters illustrates why it is often said “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Ordered to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday. What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the Comfort must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon. The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

The second that stands out for me is a brief audio clip I heard on Twitter March 24, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. It is the most chilling on the pandemic I have heard to date. I think that’s because of both the subject matter, but also because there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The automated message went out March 21 to health care professionals in Washington, D.C.

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

Roddenberry, a Southern Baptist-turned humanist, held and spoke a truth held and spoken by another Southern Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and others before him: the universe unfolds as it indeed should, and the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the series and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994. With remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard are offered in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge when Ensign Sito Jaxa, a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise, is killed on a covert mission in the line of duty (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/):

“‘To all Starfleet personnel, this is the Captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out’.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8&feature=share)

Writing a decade after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in his 1978  book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

Such men and women arise from unexpected and unlikely places.

Abraham Lincoln, who in a speech delivered on June 17, 1858, at the close of the Republican state convention at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield, reaching back to the first century and the words of the Apostle Saint Mark the Evangelist (“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”) gave what would become one of the most famous speeches in American history.

Said Lincoln on that late spring day: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free … It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Five years later, he gave the most famous speech in American history. Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word “Gettysburg Address,” lasted less than two minutes, and was delivered at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Nov. 19, 1863. Edward Everett, the former senator and secretary of state – and brilliant Massachusetts orator – who, without notes for two hours, preceded President Lincoln in speaking at Gettysburg, gave a brilliant speech that day, as expected, but Lincoln happened to follow with what we now remember as the “Gettysburg Address.” Lincoln’s speech immediately struck a chord and remains the best-known speech in American history more than 150 years after it was given. Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the day after their speeches, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Said Lincoln that long-ago November day: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2a-S3rjDBw&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1LKNwMramCkVoodunLwy1SGqQFCBsejS5cLU9Q0TgVYPPPGs7pFUBxdJw)

I wrote about AIDS in the 1980s. And I remember the climate of fear in 1986 that reporters were not untouched by when we were assigned stories that meant going inside provincial reformatories and federal penitentiaries to interview HIV-positive prisoners in Ontario. The high callings of journalism are to speak truth to power, as well as comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But exactly how AIDS was transmitted in terms of morbidity and mortality was not completely understood 35 years ago. So I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/empathy-and-compassion-are-the-gifts-of-our-shared-human-experience/).

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, also got it right in his first inaugural address Jan. 20, 1993 when he said, ”by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring … we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another.” He went on to say, we are “tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”

Guardian columnist George Monbiot argued yesterday that power has “migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilized where governments have failed.”

Joanne Rogers is 92 and the widow of Fred Rogers. She has been getting a lot of telephone calls at her apartment in Pittsburgh, says Los Angeles Times staff writer Amy Kaufman in a March 29 story wondering what Mister Rogers, who died in 2005 at the age of 74, would say and do to cope with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic?

“When Fred was a boy and scary things would happen to him, his mother used to tell him: ‘Freddy, look for the helpers.’ So he would have talked about the helpers,” Joanne said.

“Helpers,” she explained, are those individuals who – even at the height of global chaos – try to find a way to ease the burden for others; folks such as doctors, nurses, grocery store cashiers, and mail carriers.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity….’

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Apologies to Charles Dickens for the posthumous appropriation of the immortal opening line in his 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. There were simply no better words, surely not mine anyway, to describe our present age, an age perhaps not so different than Dickens writes about here, or similarly one 28 years after Dickens’ novel appeared, and which New York Sun editor Francis Pharcellus Church described in an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897 as being an age where even children are “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”

Robert Fulford, the noted 87-year-old Canadian journalist, magazine editor, and essayist, had an interesting piece in the National Post last March 19 (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/robert-fulford-the-worlds-a-lot-better-off-than-you-think?fbclid=IwAR1ouh4RiaSGeSe9VTzICtKe8GkzUnPcQVvlc_FBWoZMxw2ALmjQZm9ahKQ) that wound up being headlined, “The world’s a lot better off than you think.” While Fulford may or not have written the headline, I think he is right in the body of the article when he says we often don’t see this because at “the core of this difficulty is journalism’s professional obsession. We who read the papers (or write them) know that news is, more often than not, bad news. An editor I worked for used to say, ‘Every day a newspaper tells the public what went wrong in the world yesterday.’ (He wasn’t bragging.) Thousands of decisions following that pattern accrue into an attitude, which eventually becomes a reader’s habit.”

Mathematician and complexity scientist John Casti’s 2012 book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything looked at scientific modelling and prediction computer simulation as to how social “mood” can affect future trends and extreme events, sounds a clarion warning as to how easy it would be to slip suddenly into a new Dark Ages, and how the global food supply system could collapse (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/what-if-the-22nd-century-means-staying-at-home-with-long-distance-travel-a-thing-of-the-past/). Or the “digital darkness” that would come from a widespread and prolonged failure of the internet. Or what a continent-wide electromagnetic pulse (EMG) would do to electronics, and how we may have reached peak oil in 2000, and how any of those scenarios leave us vulnerable in overly complex technological societies to an “X-event” that would send us back to a pre-modern world – and again, a world without air or other long-distance travel – virtually overnight.

Of course, the probability of improbable events occurring in situations where one outcome is greatly favored over the other, is not necessarily a bad thing, as Malcolm Gladwell illustrated in his 2013 non-fiction book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. The book contains stories of underdogs who wind up beating the odds, the most famous, of course, being the story of David and Goliath. While I suspect someone like John Casti is also largely right that today’s advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that could ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards, I don’t share his certainty they will. That perhaps sets me apart from the more apocalyptically-minded, even if it’s true I have never met a premillennial dispensational-driven Rapture movie I can resist watching. I think that Montréal-born Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, is right when he persuasively argues the modern world is driven by pessimism, but it’s actually the best moment in time to be alive.(https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-29-2018-1.4597367/why-you-should-be-happy-you-re-alive-right-now-1.4597457?fbclid=IwAR0IrFO4GE8Q-Tv0tG1vz15HsIs_J3FcFJn8ChYYrlkCC4PFHF-Y676RCUg) and (https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/hating-pinker?fbclid=IwAR2xdjk8EAAmPb2bq1BB8ulBAkWufKaFQARpUJn1wzkiuzoeb7ZxcSRPd3E)

Now I have to admit Donald Trump seriously challenges that optimism at times. Actually, pretty much all of the time. But I learned long ago as an editorial writer that prognostication is a tricky and for the most part ill-advised business. If it doesn’t make a fool of you all of the time, it will much of the time. Trump is certainly testing that thesis when it comes to my own writing. Usually, I simply write a piece and stand by it, come what may. On July 17, 2016, less than four months before he was elected president, I wrote a blog post headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage,” where I noted, “We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s,” which sadly still resonates some 3½ years later.

I also wrote right after the sentence above:

“But the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/)

While I still stand by those words, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a Trump presidency has been far worse and more dangerous than I imagined at the time. I still believe we’ll make it through it, but it’s going to be a closer thing than I foresaw 3½ years ago. So much for prognostication. Mea culpa.

Also by way of postscript, it is perhaps also worth noting that Arnold Schwarzenegger, since he left the governor’s office almost nine years ago now, has continued rightly to grow in public stature. Writing a decade after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/1968-bobby-kennedy-described-by-arthur-schlesinger-as-one-of-ralph-waldo-emersons-representative-men-for-his-times/). While Arnold Schwarzenegger is no Bobby Kennedy, I think some of what Schlesinger said about the former might be applied to the latter.

In reality, editorial writers get paid to reflect and prognosticate for posterity’s sake, especially as years, decades, centuries or millenniums come to an end or advance to new ones.  As managing editor of The Independent in Brighton, Ontario, I ended my Jan. 5, 2005 editorial, headlined, “A world that is divided” with the equally cheery closing paragraph, “Disconnectedness is another word for feelings of ennui, angst, malaise and nihilism. It is corrosive and poisonous to the human spirit … a feeling of disconnectedness and marginalization – economic or otherwise – sows the seeds for despair and violence.”(http://www.eastnorthumberland.com/news/news2005/January/editorial050105.html)

“Calendars – like decades – are fairly arbitrary constructions in any event,” I wrote at the Thompson Citizen on Dec. 30, 2009. “If nothing else, Jan. 1 has the distinction of being an important psychological marker as the first day of the year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, the former promulgated by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., the latter by Pope Gregory XIII in A.D. 1582.

“As for decades, they may or may not coincide with a chronological 10-year period. Few would mark the start of Sixties as Jan. 1, 1960, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president of the United States. Many historians will tell you the Sixties arrived during that brief interval between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 and the British Invasion of the Beatles for their first North American tour three months later in February 1964.

As for the first sign of the Sixties, many of those same historians will tell you it was the disappearance of men’s fedoras – almost overnight – with the inauguration of the bareheaded Kennedy as president in January 1961. As for the end of the Sixties, well, let’s place that between Woodstock’s peace, love and music in the mud in August 1969 and the Rolling Stones Altamont Speedway Free Festival and Hells Angels concert security violence of Dec. 6, 1969. The death of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter pretty much ended the 1960s, in this case both psychically and chronologically.”

Still, I noted that even among editorial writers who consider themselves gifted prognosticators, “the wiser ones have the good sense the following December not to look back and see how many came true.”

Much, I think, is a matter of perspective about whether things are getting better or worse. And that means weighing trade-offs, which usually means at the individual level a gain in convenience  at the expense of a loss in privacy and the associated risks that come with that in an online world. We make those trade-offs every day. I grew up in a world of Monday to Friday banking where you approached a teller at a metal bar wicket with a passbook and went about your business. Long lines were not uncommon. Saturday bank hours were unheard of.  John Shepherd-Barron got the idea for a cash-dispensing Automated Teller Machine in 1965 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/how-many-guys-does-it-take-to-build-an-automated-teller-machine-atm-two/) while taking a bath after finding his bank closed. It was his habit to withdraw money on a Saturday, but on this particular weekend he had arrived one minute late and found the bank doors locked. He was inspired by chocolate vending machines: “It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash,” Shepherd-Barron later said. He sold his idea to London-based Barclays Bank. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969.

Without being Pollyannish about it, none of us, short of either a John Casti-like X–event, or A Canticle for Leibowitz scenario, as envisioned in American writer Walter M. Miller Jr.’s post-apocalyptic 1959 science fiction novel, are going back to pre-ATM days.  Nor are we giving up being paid electronically by our employers, paying our own bills online, shopping online, as well as booking airline tickets and hotel rooms online. It isn’t going to happen. Hence the trade-off: Hacking and identity theft will remain part of our vocabulary, and part of our reality, for the foreseeable future. That’s the bargain.

Likewise, we will continue to debate supply chains and carbon footprints, while eating an abundance of fresh foods our parents couldn’t have dreamed about much less envisioned.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” paraphrasing and quoting others before him, wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958 in The Gospel Messenger, the official organ of the Church of the Brethren. I think Gene Rodenberry, the Southern Baptist-turned humanist, who died in 1991, might well have agreed. A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994, as I wrote in a Sept. 24, 2018 post headlined, “Church of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the moral arc of the universe”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/)

Ensign Sito Jaxa is a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise. Two years earlier while in Starfleet Academy in 2368, she was a member of Nova Squadron, along with Wesley Crusher. Under the direction of Cadet Nicholas Locarno, Nova Squadron attempted the dangerous Kolvoord Starburst maneuver during a flight exercise – an action that resulted in a collision and death of fellow cadet Joshua Albert. Jaxa and her fellow cadets lied about their flying of the illegal maneuver to a board of inquiry.

Character, courage and redemption.

Now serving on the USS Enterprise, after being handpicked by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Jaxa was to assist a Cardassian defector, Joret Dal, return to Cardassia Prime by posing as a Bajoran prisoner captured as part of a bounty hunt, which would allow Dal to cross the border without difficulty. She would then be returned to Federation space in an escape pod, after Dal reached Cardassian territory.

Jaxa freely volunteered for the mission, and was surgically altered to appear as if Dal had abused her in his custody Dal was shocked that she was so young, but was grateful that she risked her life in order for the mission to succeed. The Enterprise-D waited more than 32 hours for her to return before Picard orders a probe to be launched into Cardassian space, despite being warned that doing so could be considered a treaty violation, but the probe only detected debris 200,000 kilometres inside Cardassian space consistent with that of a destroyed escape pod. Eventually, a Cardassian communique was intercepted indicating that the escape pod was detected and destroyed after escaping.

And then with remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge:

“To all Starfleet personnel, this is the captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8&feature=share)

Matt Ridley, the British journalist and businessman best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics, writes in a Dec. 21 piece in The Spectator (https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously/) headlined, “We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously: Little of this made the news, because good news is no news” argues:

“Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.”

Ridley goes onto write, “Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.”

He also notes, “Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that Britain is using steadily less energy. John Constable of the Global Warming Policy Forum points out that although the UK’s economy has almost trebled in size since 1970, and our population is up by 20 per cent, total primary inland energy consumption has actually fallen by almost 10 per cent. Much of that decline has happened in recent years.”

“Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010,” Ridley says, “I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.”

A New Year’s Eve toast, as the 20s are about to dawn, to the irrepressible Mr. Ridley’s optimism, and the hope he is indeed right enough on the epoch.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Dissed by the secular media and New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, Pure Flix Entertainment rocked the box office with opening of God’s Not Dead 2

The April fool’s joke this year apparently was on the secular skeptics, smarmy and oh-so-hip young Catholic religiös from New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, and myriad other naysaying Nellies. God’s Not Dead 2, which opened in the United States Friday, April 1, rocked the pop culture theater box office with a three-day weekend opening of $7.624 million in box office receipts as of Sunday, April 3, according to Box Office Mojo, the leading online box-office reporting service, operated by Seattle-based Internet Movie Database, (IMDb), which is owned by Amazon.com, and widely considered the number one movie website in the world.

That was a good enough showing for God’s Not Dead 2 to finish fourth that weekend behind Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zootopia and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. All in all, not too shabby, and suggesting some crossover appeal into the ranks of the unchurched. The original God’s Not Dead in 2014 went on to gross more than $60 million in the United States.

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian’s film critic, huffed in his April 28 review: “The almighty may not be dead, but Nietzsche is rolling in his grave. Angry, smug self-pity is becoming the keynote of the God’s Not Dead Christian movie franchise. This new drama is about how Christians are threatened and oppressed in … well, where do you think? Iraq? Syria? Places where millennia of Christian traditions are genuinely being trashed and their believers in real danger? Erm, no – this film is set in the U.S., where Christians are crushed under the jackboot of sneering liberals and pantomime-villain atheists.” The storyline for God’s Not Dead 2 (you can watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxz-Y-c2UUc) has public high school history teacher Grace Wesley (played by Melissa Joan Hart) responding to a student’s question about Jesus’ teachings, as they relate to the non-violent teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. The teacher’s response acknowledges that “the writer of the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying, ‘You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” In response to another student’s comment, she adds some additional remarks about those who would die for what they believe.

By the end of the day, the teacher finds herself facing the wrath of the principal, the school board, and her union representative, after a text message from yet another student in the class finds its way to the first student’s parents, who are irate.

Offered the chance to apologize for mentioning Jesus in the classroom, she refuses, asserting that she had done nothing wrong in answering the question. In short order, she is put on leave without pay and a proxy civil action on behalf of the school board by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) follows, as they attempt to have her fired and her teacher’s certificate revoked.

Now, truth be told, I’m a fan of the Guardian. The London-based newspaper is one of the truly serious remaining English-language titles internationally. And Bradshaw’s review is not without merit for pointing out places like Iraq and Syria where Christians are undergoing real persecution today. Point taken. But at the same time it would be naïve to suggest an overt reference to Christianity in American classrooms today is not somehow a potentially high-octane mix that could land a teacher in a major conflagration. So while the point may be overdrawn in God’s Not Dead 2, it, too, has merit and isn’t simply a matter of paranoia on the so-called Christian Right, as some secular liberals would have you believe. The Oberlin Review, established in 1874, and the student newspaper of Oberlin College in Ohio, called God’s Not Dead 2 “a Slice of Trump-Era Propaganda” in a headline for an April 14 review by arts editor Christian Bolles, going on in the piece to call it a “nauseatingly unnecessary follow-up” to the original movie.

In the original God’s Not Dead, released by Pure Flix Entertainment in March 2014 (watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjo5f9eiX8), Josh Wheaton, an evangelical college student (played by Shane Harper) enrols in a philosophy class taught by Professor Jeffrey Radisson (played by Kevin Sorbo), an atheist, who demands his students sign a declaration that “God is dead” to pass. Josh is the only student who refuses to sign. Radisson requires Josh to debate the topic with him but agrees to let the class members decide the winner.  I admit the cosmology, not to mention the philosophy, is pretty convoluted in places to be fully persuasive as Christian apologetics, but when it comes to evolution versus creationism this is a very old and convoluted debate in America, no matter which side you find yourself on. While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Saturday Night Live (SNL), which was perhaps last truly funny around the time it debuted on NBC in 1975 – about the same time the Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism debate reignited – parodied God’s Not Dead 2 last month, which while fair game, came as a surprise probably to exactly no one. Maybe that’s also why SNL last night, 30 years after its debut, brought back former cast member Dana Carvey to resurrect his “Church Lady” sketch, which he performed as character Enid Strict hosting her talk show Church Chat between 1986 and 1993, to deal now with a satanic Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

New Catholic Generation administrator Renée Shumay, joined by several of her young smirking cohorts, have done at last count at least three Catholics Watch vids on Gods Not Dead 2 since January, two based on trailers, and a more recent one based on the full movie, each being more smarmy than the one before. New Catholic Generation bills itself as a “Catholic teen initiative that uses YouTube to spread the Catholic faith.” God help us. Catholics kids are oh-so-cool don’t you know.  And we wonder why evangelical Protestant Christians sometimes question whether Catholics are really Christians?

Ohio-based vlogger Shumay, who has worked for the last year for Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), is an alumnus of the proud-to-be-orthodox über Catholic Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, I’m embarrassed as a co-religionist to say. If you are in doubt, check them out for yourself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcY_wn_6g7E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0cu_NXEXuU

It’s a very Catholic Thing, the whole “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship. Unfortunately.

Maybe someone should get the word out to Shumay and her New Catholic Generation hotshots that Protestant-bashing masquerading as pop culture criticism is not so cool in 2016.

While it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the sex-and-morality hot-button issues of his pontificate, although it does garner some coverage, one of the most interesting facets of Pope Francis in action is to watch is his truly remarkable rapprochement with Protestants, particularly evangelicals of all denominations, including his now famous impromptu iPhone video message two years ago for Kenneth Copeland, and other influential evangelicals, done during a January 2014 three-hour breakfast meeting chat at the Vatican with his close personal friend Bishop Tony Palmer, 48, of the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a close personal friend of the Pope’s, dating back to their days in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Tragically, Palmer died about six months later on July 20, 2014 in hospital following hours of surgery after a motorcycle accident.

Pope Francis, along with his meetings in 2014  with Palmer, and Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, also met with James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, Rev. Geoff Tunnicliff, chief executive office of the World Evangelical Alliance; well-known Canadian evangelical leader Brian Stiller, Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto. That meeting lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.

God’s not dead. But Catholic “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship of those working in the evangelical Protestant Christian filmmaking genre should be. If young Catholics’ big knocks against that Christian movie genre are too many heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting or cheesy sets that do little more than preach to the choir, we eagerly await their contributions alongside Pure Flix Entertainment to the movie canon.

Criticize or evangelize?

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