Doug TenNapel's Blog, page 11

The Land of Opportunity

I love that my country is known throughout the world as the land of opportunity. That's not just a statement about making money. You can't have opportunity in a corrupt, third world hell hole with no right to property, a right to fail, or a right to succeed. It is protected by the will of the people, and piggy backs on top of man's natural desire to create resources, then use them on his family, his community, and even his charities.

Show me an oppressed person, sloshing through mud in a poverty stricken far off land and his hope is that America will provide him with an opportunity. The world's economic slaves don't dream that France will do something about his plight. They put no moral expectation on Saudi Arabia to help them. The world hates America because they expect so much from the leader of the free world. If their hope is in their Cuban government, they're screwed. No business owner in Mexico hopes Mexico will help him, he'll get more help from the crumbs that drop from our country's table before he'll get help from his own.

My parents were average Americans, and that means they are exceptional. By no other luck, or act of God's grace was I born here, into the world's greatest system of government, and into the world's greatest people to grasp a charter by a handful of brilliant visionaries. My mother a teacher's aid and my father a carpenter had an artist who made a decent living at the arts… which is near impossible if you ask most artists.

I worked crap jobs, but I did work. If I worked a shift at Wendy's or shoveled molten cow fat at Foster Farms, I learned from my parents to work not just harder than anyone else, but to work in a way that honored my dad's name. I learned from church to work as if God was my employer, not just because I would earn my money, but because excellence at work was the right thing to do. I failed at that task, but I always had that ideal in my mind, and it transferred perfectly into the arts.

But the hardest lesson I ever learned was by running my own small business in California. We made video games. It was by far the hardest thing I'd ever done. The stress kept me up at night, grinding my teeth with stress and being such a time burden it even put my marriage on the rocks. From that point on, I came to not only respect all business owners, but I had a deep gratitude for what they do. They provide jobs. So the usual socialist attitude of many artists that demonized "the rich" didn't find a home in my heart.

There's nothing that eats away at a man quite like not having a job. A man who works to provide and carry his own weight is an empowering, honorable thing that repurposes a man's trouble making hands into something constructive. In that sense, given America is the world's most powerful economic engine, we are also the most empowering of the individual.

As I saw my country over the last four years lean away from providing opportunity for our great work force and lean toward "compassion", bail-outs, redistribution of wealth and a demonization of high wage earners (aka employers), I grew worried that we might have lost our charter. I couldn't believe that we changed, but it seemed like America suddenly forgot what made us great, what made us unique from Europe, and what provided the grease for the wheels of liberty.

Nothing could shake us from the spell of Hope and Change quite like 10% unemployment. Take away a man's job and see how much he cares if his car is run by fossil fuels or solar panels. Crush an economy and see if he would prefer "a new kind of politics and unity" over a job.

We're still the land of opportunity. Not perfectly so, but good enough for now. That's what last night's election was about. The GOP didn't win because we're pro life, for gun rights or for freedom of speech. The GOP just looked like the only change of course available to a frustrated, industrious people who want nothing more than for government to butt out and let us get to work.

The Pool Guy

Recently I have put my mind to acknowledging miracles and looking for them in every day life. The average reader will assume I'm doing this because I'm prone to believe in miracles and they would be wrong. I look for them because I'm prone not believe in them. It's sort of like how I read as many scientific journal articles that mention missing links because I don't believe in them. I'm hoping they prove me wrong, and I'm rooting for them just the same.

Part of how I will identify miracles, as opposed to just freak accidents, is to pray with specified complexity. If I ask God for a donut, I might be offered a donut by a colleague and wonder if it was a coincidence or a miracle, but if I pray that I get a custard filled chocolate glazed donut from a stranger in need of my help, the details go to rule out a happy accident. It still isn't empirical evidence, but it helps assuage my skepticism. Anything that takes my skepticism down a notch is always a good thing because I'm got enough for two people, even if those two people were David Hume.

So my pool guy rings me at the back door. He never rings me at the back door. He hands me a pool thermostat trigger thingy and says, "I've had this part in my glove box for 8 months. Your heater went out, and given I had the part, I just tried to pop it in and it's working fine."

I've had my pool guy for seven years, and we're good enough friends, but our conversation almost never goes to religion. That shows how crappy of a Christian I am, I suppose, but it gives me the credibility to say that he's not one of those spooky kinds of guys. He's looking down at my back door, looking for the right words to say, "God told me not to charge you for the thermostat trigger."

All of the normal skeptical thoughts came to my mind where I instantly dismiss a supernatural event, credit it to his own guilty feelings, personal manipulation of my own religious experience or who-knows-what. Anything but the reason he gave me, right?

I reached for my wallet, "You don't have to do this. I can pay, and I'll credit your good intent as not actually charging me because God doesn't want you to. This can be a tip."

The pool guy looked almost angry, "I know, I already ran through every excuse I could and I felt justified in charging you and blowing off God telling me not to charge you. So I was about to charge you and God told me again not to charge you. So I'm not charging you."

Neither of us would have made the mistake of thinking the pool guy did so out of generosity. And while I was happy to be spared being charged 200 bucks for the part plus my pool guy's labor fee, it's not like my life would have ended if he gave me the full bill. Before he left I told him my daughter's lizard-saving miracle story. I wasn't sure why I saw two weird miraculous events within two weeks but I thought it was at least my responsibility to share them.

My pool guy left and I didn't know exactly what to think. I did take my pool guy at his word because I know him to be a normal, average guy who has never shared a supernatural event in seven years of knowing him. Why these two seemingly insignificant events? Why were they both at the pool? Why are these other people communicating with God and I'm just here to watch it happen?

I don't have any of those answers. I do think that part of why we get mad at the idea of God doing miracles is that He never seems to do them in a rational order like we would want them. God doesn't perform a miracle where there is the greatest need, or he would be all over Africa, or follow the fire department around saving everyone's life. He doesn't do the best thing, because there are better miracles that could be done.

For whatever reason I'm thinking about miracles of late, I can do the Pulp Fiction choice and either see a miracle like Jules or see a freak accident like Vincent. The end of their story arc will tell you that Vince was the none-too-good way to go. I'll take the $200 bucks and thank God for it, then tell you about it.

Olivia Collects Lizards

I was downstairs in my basement studio, slaving away like the slave of a slave when I felt the need for a coffee. That's normal. I go through a pot before lunch every day, so going upstairs to feed my coffee addiction happens all the time.

But when I got upstairs and headed toward the coffee maker, there's my son Johnny (age 3), soaked head to toe having just come out of the swimming pool. He's dripping water all over the floor which has a surface long destroyed by four kids. But he has a helpless look on his face, "Dada, will help me get dry?" Once again, it's a normal part of my day for Johnny to whine at me about something he's helpless at doing on his own. I dried him off, then had to hang his swim trunks outside on the usual Johnny's-swim-trunk-hook.

Now in the back yard, my daughter Olivia (5) was sitting by the pool-skimmer-intake thingy (I don't know what it's called, ask my Pool Guy). She looked distraught. I yelled across the pool, "What's wrong?" She pointed to the pool skimmer intake thingy, "The lizard went in here."

My daughters have been collecting fence swift (aka blue bellies) lizards and keeping them in aquariums. Unlike boys, they nurture the lizards to death. Olivia puts her littlest pet shop houses in the aquarium and when we watch TV she turns the aquarium around so the lizards can see the cartoons.

I was a little set back by how calm Olivia was for having lost a lizard, "Livie, if that lizard went into that drain, he's dead." Then she said something profound, which I quickly dismissed, "Don't worry, Daddy. I already prayed to God and He saved the lizard!"

It sounded like she didn't want to take responsibility for being a bad lizard-herder. "Olivia, God didn't save that lizard if he went into that drain! He will have been sucked down the piping and into the other big-motor-thingy (Again, ask my Pool Guy)!" She repeated her, "I'm trying to tell you! I already prayed to God and He already saved the lizard!"

Now I'm feeling upset about the lizard but don't want to traumatize Olivia about having just ground her lizard into pool meat. I lifted the hose out of the pool to stop the suction, and when the hose is removed it automatically shuts down. Lifting a lid, I found a catch-all with a basket made to keep leaves from going into the cleaning system and clogging everything up. I unscrewed the lid, pulled out the basket, and when the water drained, it revealed the little lizard, holding on to the sides. I took it out and set it on the towel next to Olivia. She wasn't surprised.

Then it all came together, and you already know where I'm going with this. When Olivia said her prayer to God was probably about the time I felt the need for coffee. She had already prayed to God and He had already saved that lizard.

My first impulse is to dismiss all possible miracles as coincidences. But if I just simply read the facts as they came to me without a skeptical bias, I witnessed a simple answer to prayer. Don't ask me why God didn't answer my prayer last week to save a dying baby but does not answer a prayer to save a baby lizard. The main thing is that He appears to use our own free choices, He can use our habits and appetites, he uses our relationships and responsibilities to answer some prayers.

To Have Never Been Born

A friend of mine visits the sick in hospitals. For the last few weeks, he has been spending time with a young mother and her deformed baby. This baby was born without parts of the stomach, can't digest food, has a laundry list of problems that have largely kept the baby in a place of suffering for almost a year. The baby is swollen, bloated from problems associated with her illness, "She's going to die." my friend told me. When he visits, the mother just cries and talks about how she is angry at God, if she believes in Him at all.

Should this baby have been born? The mother knew about the deformation while the baby was just a fetus. We could all do this baby a favor and get rid of it, right?

Wrong. Life is good. That's not mitigated by suffering. Nor is life made good simply through experiencing pleasure. This little girl knows her mother loves her. My pal can tell that both the baby and the mother love each other, and respond to each other's presence. While grotesque suffering is a powerful thing, it's not as powerful as the love between a mother and her child. It's easy to see suffering, but harder to see relationships, bonding and love.

We are terrified of suffering. That's what a culture of comfort, pleasure and a lack of suffering has gotten us… an unreasonable standard of living. In the olden days, people would have 8 kids and only a few would survive into adulthood. More people in general were exposed to a difficult life, it lowered expectations which will always produce a more grateful, happy individual.

The classic definition of happiness used to be a life well lived in pursuit of virtue. Now it's been changed to a life in pursuit of pleasure. So more than ever, the idea that a life can be worthwhile though full of pain and suffering with little pleasure is unfathomable. That's why you'll hear the justification for abortion as being "a mercy killing for a child born into poverty with no chance to have a good life."

At the end of time, I can imagine that suffering baby standing before God. The Almighty asks the baby girl, born into suffering and pain if she would rather have lived her life or never to have been born. Mind you, to never have been born means she would never have a name, would not know the beauty of another person's face, to hear the voice of her mother, to love and be loved. I can't think of a life that would rather not exist, even if existence meant living just 24 hours in pain.

I would ask the same of the Holocaust survivor. You can never have been born and been spared starvation, torture and the gas chambers, but you also couldn't experience love, sex, fatherhood, that time your granddaughter made you laugh so hard you were brought to tears, your children wouldn't be born, nor their children, etc. They would likely rather choose existence over being blotted out from history. One of the few things more terrifying than living a life in suffering is to never have existed at all. Even a fetus would rather have a few months than nothing. In short, all life loves to live.

Finally, I'd like to make a case that the good is more powerful than suffering. I know abusive people whom I've also shared good times with. The abuse is bad, it's always bad, but it can't remove the good times. Suffering can't take an absolute good away. Think of a kiss shared with an ex girlfriend or boyfriend. If the kiss was good at the time, even a bitter break up can't kill that kiss. Or as they used to say, "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

To have never been born is to never have loved at all. There are worse things than suffering.