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Excellence vs. Elitism

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Christopher Rush

There’s been a lot of talk lately about this whole “excellence vs. elitism” issue, and quite frankly, we here at Redeeming Pandora are mystified by the whole thing.  Clearly “elitism” is the way to go.

I suppose part of the reason this has somehow become an issue is because of the apparent recent backlash against appearing arrogant — and while we are certainly in favor of humility over arrogance, the notion that “elitism” connotes “arrogance” is wholly unwarranted and driven by the anti-intellectual morass Ray Bradbury warned us of way back in Fahrenheit 451, which Western Civilization as a whole has apparently ignored (our walls are becoming TVs, aren’t they?).  The mob of ill-educated, technology-idolizing, history-forgetting humanity out there who encourages us to read Shakespeare in “modern English” and ignore original versions in favor of contemporary reboots (excluding Battlestar Galactica, of course) wants us to think “elitists” are snobbish, arrogant, uppity, loathsome, and despicable members of society.  To this I rightly say tish and pish.  It is they, in fact, who are the snobs; they are the arrogant ones — the people who tell us to look down on others because they (the others) are better at something (probably most things) than they (the people telling us to belittle the elite) are.  The attribute of “snobbery” is not intrinsic to “elite” people — it is innate to “snobs.”  Likewise, “arrogance” is not a natural component of elitism — it is a hallmark of arrogant people.  That some desire is to conflate the attributes is actually a sign of their own guilt and timorous introspection of their own inferiority.

What is “excellence”?  Can you define it in some meaningful way? … I’ll wait. … I thought not.  Neither can I, in fact.  It is rather a vapid sort of expression, today.  Those who arrogantly decry “elitism” like to use “excellence” as if it somehow superior — so much so we are all compelled to acknowledge those who are excellent as excellent.  We see immediately the hypocrisy involved in the “excellence” camp: these people (though we are using generalities, we all can identify, unfortunately, particular individuals in our lives who mistakenly embrace this “excellence” camp, so you can mentally picture these misguided souls as we continue our exploration), knowing they are less skilled in some particular area than the elite want everyone to embrace the erroneous and inaccurate belief “elite = arrogant,” as if someone a moral inferiority can be foisted upon people of a certain skill or ability level where it does not innately belong, thus distracting us from their own moral impropriety by being even more arrogant by embracing this vapid notion of “excellence” to obscure their own inability (which likewise has transmuted into a moral inferiority, likewise unwarrantedly).  This is rather akin to what C.S. Lewis refers to along the lines of the “all I want” syndrome in Screwtape Letters — people who think they are not being greedy by only wanting what little bit they want are, in reality, being thoroughly greedy.  Likewise, the people who want us to think they are not being arrogant because they are not those people, are, in fact, thoroughly arrogant — pharisaical, in fact.  I acknowledge I am running the risk of likewise falling into this abysm, and some may already think the tone of this essay is entirely hubristic and self-defeating, but such is not my purpose.  I simply wish to express my incredulity at this so-called issue, proffering my perspective at how I see these concepts in contrast to so many I’ve heard weigh in on this so much lately.

It would be one thing if those who are propounding “excellence” were propounding the Greek concept of areté, which we all know incorporates the moral aspect of virtue (depending on which classical source you are consulting at the time, of course), coupled with the pursuit of justice and self-restraint, essentially the fulfillment of one’s ontology — being the best of whatever of its kind: a sculpture could embody areté, being the best possible sculpture of its design and theme and purpose; a person, of course, should strive to embody areté, being the best possible person he or she can be.  This sounds to me like the English concept of “elite”: being the best.  Again, I reject the unsupportable claim elite or areté is, ipso facto, arrogant — where is the basis for this?  Consider those who are the best at what they do: Neil Peart, Jack Benny, Gregory Peck, Carol Lombard, C.S. Lewis, Wayne Gretzky, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Jessye Norman, Danny Kaye, Itzhak Perlman, Carl Lewis, Ingrid Bergman, Edmund Burke, Lou Gehrig, Jim Henson, Sammy Davis, Jr. … to whom could we apply “arrogant”?  Sure, some of the elite are arrogant in their own way, at certain times (Michelangelo, Michael Jordan, Katharine Hepburn, Frank Sinatra), but most of those who are truly elite, the best at what they do and the best at who they are supposed to be … they are, rather, humble, generous, humanitarians — not arrogant or snobbish or vainglorious.  They don’t lord their skills over others; in fact, they are exactly the people so many others want to be with, the people others want to learn from, precisely because they are elite.  Did not Chesterton say “a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it”?  Yes, he did (see The Everlasting Man).  Why study under, why imitate anyone other than the best?  The great who know they are not God yet still great?

The deleterious nature of the vapid “excellence” the anti-elite embrace (perhaps out of jealousy) trumpets as its rallying cry “do your best,” as if “close enough is okay” is somehow a laudable mark at which to aim our life’s energies.  I’m not saying there is something wrong with “doing one’s best”; the problem is that we are too ready to turn our temporary campsite at the “do your best overnight campgrounds” into a permanent residency, forgetting we were only at basecamp and supposed to move on up the trail to richer, more rewarding, more challenging habits of mind, strength, skill, and virtue.  We become complacent and forget we are to become better than who we are right now, because who we are right now is not Christ-like enough according to God’s standards.  What part of “be holy, for I am holy” sounds like “just do your best”?  I’m not saying you have to do harm to yourself until you are perfect, nor am I saying we should never be joyful or content in this life — but we should never be satisfied with less than a continual pursuit of Christ-likeness.  “Just do your best,” the motto of those who want us to be “excellent,” seems, then, to be saying “doing things in your own strength, by your own ability, at wherever you are right now, is good enough.”  I disagree.  With “do your best” comes an implicit “but not better than anyone else.”

True, “elitism” has with it a connotation of selectivity, a sense only a small number of people can make the grade, fit in, be elite.  Why, though, is this bad?  “Excellence” becomes tied to egalitarianism, the forced homogeneity of Late Modernism that can’t stand superiority of any kind (even if learning from and modeling those who are superior are exactly what we as a moribund culture need).  Following Jesus, becoming Christ-like, means leaving the statistical majority and entering the practical minority.  Holiness requires us to be better than our sin-created standard of satisfactory, better than whom the majority of the totally depraved world demands us we settle to be, but as noted above, being elite does not then mean we lord our superiority (or basic difference) over others: true elitism embraces Colonel Potter’s reminder “the only person I have to be better than is who I am now.”  Not that this contradicts what we’ve said earlier: being “the best” is a personal issue far better than “to excel,” the verb form of excellence that intrinsically bears a competitive, “compare yourself to others” sense.  Elitism connotes humility, in stark contrast to excellence’s implications (at least, in how I’ve been hearing it used so much lately, when it has been used to mean anything at all).  What better example of elitism do we have than Jesus?  He, being the most elite of all, since there is only one God, modeled the importance of becoming like Him, like Love itself, yet showed us how to do that without moral superiority (certainly without social superiority!), without arrogance, without holding His already pre-existent equality with the Father an object of rapine.  Those who are elite become elite for the sake of emptying themselves out for others again and again and again.  Knowing the greater they are, they are still not God.

“Excellence” is nothing substantial.  “Excellence in education” means … what?  Higher SAT scores than other schools?  More Ivy League admittances than others?  That is competition, the precise opposite of Christ-likeness, the precise opposite of Love.  Would you rather have elite soldiers fighting for your country or excellent soldiers?  Would you rather have elite teachers guiding you through the Realms of Gold or excellent teachers “doing their best”?  Do you field your fantasy baseball league with utility infielders, or do you go for as many Golden Glove winners as possible?  Would you prefer your chef to be elite or just doing his best?  Do we want to laugh at the best jokes, listen to the best music ever, watch the best movies, the best TV series, read the best books (including comic books, of course), play the best games, have the best friends (while being the best friend), eat the best food, imitate the only true God … or shall we settle for those who give it the ol’ college try, who “do their best,” who are excellent, and thus, concerned only with standards made by human finiteness?  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want “Hey, he tried” as my epitaph.  True, it is one thing to know you’re adequate, but to have a fellow member of your profession say, “yes, you, sir, are adequate,” well … (we miss you, Bill).

If we return our usage and understanding of “excellence” to the Greek concept of areté (the way Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler used it), I’d be in favor of saying “let’s be excellent.”  Until then, though, “let’s be elite.”  Being elite allows us to escape from that morass of banality with which the world overloads our senses, desperately trying to convince us this incarnation is all that exists.  Again I say tish and pish.  Elitism is not a coterie of snobs: “excellence” is — and it’s worse, because it pretends it isn’t.  The true elites know who they are, are fine with that, and are willing to help show others how to get there.  “Conform to our mediocrity,” says “excellence.”  “Individuality is fine as long as we all do it together,” says “excellence” (we miss you, too, Frank).  No thanks.  I would rather imitate the God of Love; the God who isn’t short of cash, mister; the God who demands conformity to His only (elite) Son.  Perhaps someday someone will convince me this is less desirable than being excellent and satisfied with “doing my best,” like the Susan Wise Bauers of the world want me to be (no offense intended).  I’d say “don’t wait by the phone,” but that expression is lost on this generation, who can’t be parted from their phones even in the bathroom.  On that happy note, instead, I’ll just say, I welcome your excoriating refutations.  As always.

The American Dream is Killing Christianity

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David Lane

Almost every single person born in America has, at some point, had the desire to strike it big, whether through winning the lottery, working their way up the corporate ladder or simply finding a job that provides material comfort and support for their family.  I know this desire from experience.  Growing up, I always imagined making the big bucks, whether through athletics or business, I was going to be living the good life.  It was not until I ventured to other parts of the world that this concept changed.  Upon traveling to Japan on a missions trip with my church, I did not expect my perspective on life to be altered.  I was already a Christian and knew all the basics of living a Christian life, but something happened in me on that trip that changed my entire worldview.  My perspective on success was radically transformed.  All the stuff I wanted before leaving for Japan, the cool car, the new phone, the best snowboard, all of it became insignificant.  The missionary I worked with there showed me through his character and life-style success is not dependent upon money.  Joy and contentment are not fueled by materials but by the thirst for knowing and understanding the love of our gracious God more and more.  After experiencing this time in Japan and settling back down in America, I realized that the “American Dream” was the basis of this distorted idea of success.  What is it that drives the heart and soul of American society?  This force pushing America, this ideology that has created a lust for the things of this world, in a very real and frightening way is destroying the values and Biblical precepts of the Christian faith.  The American Dream is killing Christianity.

I would like to proceed by defining some key terms in my thesis.  The modern day American dream as defined by an online dictionary is “a life of personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally sought by individuals in the U.S.”  Christianity is defined as a life-long pursuit of Christ likeness in sanctification, abiding in Christ, and aligning our perspectives, perceptions and values with God’s.  I will define killing as replacing genuine nature and identity with a pale, materialistic, diabolical substitute.  In my thesis I will use the phrases “glorify God” and “bring God glory” very often, so I would like to define what that means right now.  To glorify God means to bring God’s innate glory to light, to reflect it and manifest it.  “In Scripture, glory means possession of the character, beauty and majesty that belong to the Lord.  It means an exact representation of His being.  It means reflecting His presence, His essence, His Life and His Name.  Thus, to glorify God is to manifest all that God is” (Missler).

In arguing the American Dream is killing Christianity, it is imperative we take a look at where the American Dream started and where it is now.  In fact, the original American dream, as established by our forefathers, is a dream that promotes Christianity.  But as we know from anything that starts out good, sin will eventually take root among it and begin to destroy its core values.  America’s forefathers wanted America to be a place where all people had equal opportunities to become wealthy and successful.  They did not, however, want this wealth to be the driving force of our culture.  This is made clear in the Declaration where it says very specifically that it is not this country that has given people these rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but these rights have been bestowed upon us by a Creator.  This is the original American Dream.  It was a dream based on humility and the desire for everyone, regardless of their race or their heritage, to have the opportunity to experience life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Our forefathers built this country on biblical principles.  John Adams, a key figure in the founding and establishing of America, said:

Suppose a nation in some distant Region should take the Bible for their only law Book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited!  Every member would be obliged in conscience, to temperance, frugality, and industry; to justice, kindness, and charity towards his fellow men; and to piety, love, and reverence toward Almighty God … What a Eutopia, what a Paradise would this region be (Fairchild).

Our forefathers had a desire to see a country born where men would be driven toward success through Christian principles, not the motivation of wealth.  Unfortunately, materialism has taken over and covetousness has become an integral part of the American Dream.  Dave Harvey, a member of the leadership team of Sovereign Grace Ministries, the Senior Pastor of Covenant Fellowship Church and the author of Rescuing Ambition, writes:

Locating materialism and consumerism in the coveting heart is important.  It offers a biblical diagnosis for a common social malady.  Consumer ailments don’t begin with shopping addictions or “an offer I couldn’t refuse.”  The real problem is sin.  Austerity and indulgence won’t cure the bankruptcy of soul and emptiness of life that commonly result when our covetous desires are allowed free reign.  Just as Jesus stood before the man in Luke 12, God’s remedy for sin stands in the person of Jesus Christ.  This Jesus was and is poised to liberate, seeking to unshackle the covetous heart with a vision of freedom secured at the cross.  Covetousness may be powerful, but it’s no match for a benevolent Savior (97).

This means in the modern-day American Dream there exists a deceptive masquerade that displays the need for materials as the cure for the heart.  In reality only a benevolent Savior can satisfy the hearts of the people.  The original American Dream’s precepts were parallel with Christian principles but have, over time, been distorted into a completely separate ideology based on the lust for wealth.  The reason for this is sin.  The American Dream is the manifestation of this sin.  It has distorted what started as an idea to promote the joy and well-being of a community to an idea that promotes selfishness and material gain.

As a citizen of America since birth, the American dream has been a very prevalent ideology in my life.  I, like most of my classmates and friends, have been immersed in a culture that depends on the values held by the American Dream to determine happiness and security.  Everywhere I look, I see people who live for the sole purpose of gaining material possessions in order to achieve their distorted perception of success.  Merely living in this culture has given me enough credibility to analyze effectively the problems so engrained in our thinking and our overall reality.  Being raised in a Christian home and as part of a Christian school that seeks to argue against and analyze the status quo, I have had the advantage of learning how to take a step back and logically investigate and scrutinize, from a biblical perspective, the roots of and problems with our culture.  This culture I am talking about has completely twisted many Biblical principles foundational to the Christian faith.

My thesis topic is relevant to all Americans because we are members of this culture and we are constantly feeding on the ideas of the American Dream, whether we like to think so or not.  We are immersed in a culture that has created a hole in what it truly means to live as a Christian.  As Christians, it is our obligation to abide in Christ and stand firm in the faith which often necessitates challenging the status quo and checking to see if our thoughts and actions align with God’s will for us.

To prove this thesis, I will argue that the American Dream is destroying the true meaning of success.  Secondly, I will prove that the American Dream has mangled our perception of the purpose of our God-given wealth.  Thirdly, I will prove that it has created in all of us, an inclination to make our identity dependent upon the things that we own.  I will then refute two specific counterarguments: first, it is okay to find security in material possessions; second, God requires everyone to drop everything they own and be a poor missionary in order to live as a Christian.  I will now proceed to my first argument.

My first argument is the American Dream is killing the very definition of success.  I believe that, Biblically speaking, success is the effectiveness of displaying and revealing God’s glory and love through our lives, actions, language, etc.  Although this is not a specific definition but rather a general synthesis from my research, I believe it to be true.  The modern American Dream has either made glorifying God an afterthought of financial success or even worse has completely disconnected God from success.  In the case of Christians, it has created a mindset that we are to work in order to live comfortably, and then after this is accomplished we can pursue a relationship with Christ.  With non-Christians, the American Dream has made financial success the only thing worth living for.  Both of these inverted ideologies are frighteningly dangerous and contrary to the biblical principles of our purpose as Christians.  Christ should be our motivation for working and living.  This means knowing that God wants us to work hard, be responsible, and always do our very best should be the reason we work.  King David gives a good summary of what it means to be successful upon his death bed when charging Solomon with the responsibility of his Kingdom.  He says, “So be strong, show yourself a man, and observe what the Lord your God requires: Walk in his ways and keep his decrees and commands, his laws and requirements, as written in the law of Moses, so that you may prosper in all you do and wherever you go” (1 Kings 2:2-3).  Notice King David does not tell Solomon to pursue financial prosperity and growth for his Kingdom, but rather he tells Solomon to put God as his primary goal in all things.  When we follow God’s commands, those actions and the heart behind those actions reveal God’s glory and love.  To reveal God’s glory and love means to outwardly magnify God’s character to those around you and inwardly worship Him.  It is important to note God does not look down upon those who are rich but rather He looks down upon those who are rich who have credited their riches to their own personal efforts.  This is exemplified by the rest of Solomon’s story.  Because Solomon listened to his father and asked for wisdom from God rather than material possessions, God blessed him with wisdom and material possessions.  This does not necessarily mean God will bless you with financial prosperity if you obey his commands.  God is not about making your life easier.  As it says In James 1:12, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”  God tells us directly we will face trials and living a life pleasing to him is not going to be easy, but we will receive a reward in eternity.  As for Solomon, his story shows us it is the process in which we attain the wealth that makes it right or wrong.  God does not see wealth as a sin.  In fact, it can actually be a wonderful tool to further the kingdom of God and bring glory to Him.  Dave Harvey writes:

In itself, stuff isn’t bad.  In fact, if received with gratitude, used in moderation, and stewarded in faith, stuff can be a tremendous resource of God’s purposes.  In eighteenth-century England, the Countess of Huntingdon, one of the richest women in the British empire, used her wealth and properties to further evangelical revival of that day.  Her homes became strategic meeting places for men like George Whitefield.  Her possessions were constantly at the disposal of her Lord.  Her vision of God moved her sight beyond stuff (95).

It is in no way a sin to be rich.  But having wealth has the potential to increase the opportunity to sin and decrease the necessity of dependence upon God rather than upon our material possessions.  Dave Harvey writes again, “Yes, affluence can be a spiritual disability that dulls people to their need for God.  Jesus was quite serious in saying, ‘How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God’ (Luke 18:24).  But this doesn’t mean God is biased against the rich; it means the rich are often biased against God.  Their affluence feels like it meets needs, but it really diverts attention from the Savior to their stuff” (Harvey 97).  The American Dream drills the ideology that we can achieve success through material possessions into our head the minute we are brought into this world.  One of the most noticeable and prevalent examples of this in America is found in television.  Although game shows and reality television are not necessarily directly against God, they do promote the American Dream’s distorted definition of success.  Who Wants to be a Millionaire? shows the lives of ordinary people trying to strike it big and finally be able to get the things that they want and achieve ultimate happiness through the answering of trivial questions.  Fear Factor brings contestants in to do things that are dangerous, nauseating, and simply disgusting all for money which will truly satisfy them and make everything they did worth it.  An extremely frightening example of the American Dream distorting what it means to be successful is found in modern churches trying to captivate members through new technology and better building facilities.  Churches base how good a church they are on how much they are financially growing.  Even churches are drawn into this materialistic American Dream. The American Dream sucks us into the idea that money is the pinnacle of contentment and happiness, and it destroys what it truly means to be successful.

My second argument in proving that the American Dream is killing Christianity is the American Dream has mangled our perception of the purpose of our God-given wealth.  Financial prosperity is in no way a right.  We are not entitled to wealth, but rather we are entrusted with it.  This is made apparent when looking at the words of Moses before entering the promised land in Deuteronomy.  He clearly points out God is the source of wealth, and it is by His power we are entrusted with any possessions.

When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.  Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God. … Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions.  He brought you water out of hard rock.  He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known. … You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.”  But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth (Deuteronomy 8:10-18).

It is very clear we do not deserve the material goods we possess.  God has entrusted to us all our possessions, but because of the values found in the American Dream we have claimed our possessions as our own.  God gives us the ability to produce wealth, and we are to use what He gives us to glorify Him in all that we do (Stearns 204-205).  As previously stated, God entrusts to us wealth, and we are to redeem what God has given us by using it to glorify him and not emotionally attaching ourselves to the actual wealth but rather to the Creator and giver of the wealth.  We should view them as what they are, which are blessings, not things we earned by actions we made.  By acknowledging that God has blessed us, we are giving the credit to him, thus praising his name rather than our own.  We should also strive to physically use these blessings in a manner that exalts God.  This is exemplified in 1 Chronicles when David uses the wealth God gave him to build a temple for the Lord.  David sought to use the riches he knew God bestowed upon him to more effectively demonstrate God’s goodness and to glorify Him.

Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours.  Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.  Wealth and honor come from you; you are ruler of all things.  In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all.  Now, our God, we give you thanks, and praise your glorious name.  But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this?  Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand.  We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers.  Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope.  O Lord our God, as for all this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you (1 Chronicles 29:11-16).

This passage is supporting the fact that God owns everything, and it all belongs to Him.  King David is acknowledging that everything God gave him deserves to go back to the sole purpose of lifting high His Holy Name.  The American Dream makes the purpose of our wealth to bring ourselves happiness.  It promotes selfishness and neglects God’s purpose for our wealth.  So this idea of God owning everything and expecting us to give it back to him begs the question, why would he give us anything in the first place?  This can be answered in the parable of the talents.  Jesus explains that the Kingdom of heaven “will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them.  To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability” (Matthew 25:14-15).  In this parable the traveler symbolizes God entrusting us with money and expecting us to invest this money in order to receive an investment upon his return.  The two servants who made an investment were esteemed and given more responsibility, while the servant who hoarded his one talent was chastised.  God gives us responsibility of material items because it presents us with more opportunities to personally decide to give back to him.  To personally decide to invest our God-given materials shows that we are more reliant on Him and are more concerned with exalting his name than our own.  The American dream promotes a mindset that we are to get money and things so we can enjoy them and so we can be satisfied.  On the contrary, God wants us to view our wealth with the purpose of glorifying Him and personally deciding to give back what He has so graciously given (Stearns 205-207).

My third argument is the American Dream has created an inclination to make our identity depend upon the things we own.  Identity is defined by Merriam Webster’s Dictionary as “the characteristics and qualities of a person, considered collectively and regarded as essential to that person’s self.”  In America, the characteristics and qualities of a person are largely based upon what we own or what we have achieved.  Celebrities are examples of this.  Their identity rests in what they have done, whether that means starring in a hit blockbuster or marrying a professional basketball player.  Paris Hilton, for example, is known to be the rich, pretentious, lascivious daughter of a billionaire.  That is who she is.  Her identity is based upon her wealth and what she has done with it.  This idea of the source of our identity being based upon things we own is completely separate from who we are in Christ.  1 John 3:1 says, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!  And that is what we are!”  Our identity should be solely based upon what we are in Christ, not upon what we own.  When we base our identity on materials, we begin to worship those materials as the source for who we are.  The apostle Paul asserts that our desire for materials is actually idolatry.  “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5).  Our hearts must be fixed on being children of God rather than children of materialism.  This means that we are to relate the very nature of our existence and everything that we are and do upon the fact that God is our father, and we are to serve Him.  Jesus says in Luke 16:13, “No servant can serve two masters.  Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve both God and money.”  As Christians, it is imperative that we place our identity in Christ rather than in earthly possessions (Harvey 94-96).

I will now move on to my refutation.  In my first counterargument I will refute the idea that security can be found in worldly possessions.  Security is defined by Merriam Webster’s Dictionary as “something that gives or assures safety, tranquility, or certainty.”  God desires and commands that our security or assurance of safety should be placed in Him.  Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6:6-10:

But godliness with contentment is great gain.  For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.  But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.  People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.  Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

This passage shows that if our security is placed in what worldly possessions we have, then our lives will turn towards ruin and grief.  This verse means that when we begin to love money, it gives root to more evil such as greed, lust, and pride.  For when will enough be enough — the highest value of materialistic western culture is not merely possessing.  It is actually acquiring, always seeking, and lusting to obtain just a bit more.  Being content in God brings great gain, not finding contentment in the world.  1 John 2:15-17 says: “Do not love the world or anything in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world.  The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”  This passage points out that loving the world not only is sinful, but it is stupid since you are willfully placing your security and contentment in something that will undoubtedly end.  Instead, we are to love the everlasting Lord and find joy in Him.  John Piper supports this truth that money cannot bring us ultimate joy.  He writes, “All the evils in the world come not because our desires for happiness are too strong, but because they are so weak that we settle for fleeting, money-bought pleasures that do not satisfy our deepest longings, but in the end destroy our souls.  The root of all evil is that we are the kind of people who settle for the love of money instead of the love of God” (66).  Piper is saying as Christians living in America, we have become content with perishables.  We try to find security and joy in possessions that will not last a second in comparison to eternity with God.  When we search for these things that bring momentary pleasure and seek them out as a means for joy, we are truly settling for a fleeting and temporary contentment.  Many people try to find security in their love of and devotion to what they own when in reality, only God can offer true and eternal security.  It is important to note it is the love of earthly possessions that destroys.  Many people misinterpret this love as merely owning or taking pride in your material possessions.  It is the love of worldly things that hurts us not the possession of earthly things.  This leads to my next counterargument.

Some Christians believe if we are not giving all of our possessions up for Christ, if we are not living as the apostles lived then we are not doing all we can do to live a Christian life.  I believe this to be a faulty argument.  As previously stated in my confirmation, God wants us to enjoy the things he has given to us but with an eternal perspective of these things.  He does not frown upon the rich but rather upon those who have made wealth their god and seek after it, desire it, center their life on it above and before God.  After all, everything in the earth is God’s, and it is only by his grace that we have anything at all.  In Haggai 2:8 the Lord says, “The silver is mine and the gold is mine.”  In Psalm 50:12 God says, “the world is mine and all that is in it.”  So saying it is wrong to be rich is accusing God of faulty distribution of wealth.  Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6:17, “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”  Notice that Paul does not say that the rich are to give up their riches.  He is actually asserting that the rich can be successful Christians by incorporating them into this letter at all, but he adds a warning to the rich, saying that they should not be arrogant or find their hope in wealth but in Christ.  To find hope in Christ means to confidently expect what God has promised to be true is true.  It means to have certainty in Christ’s truth and love.  Also notice God wants us to enjoy the things He has given us.  We should not feel guilty for having nice things, but rather we should feel grateful and we should turn our gratefulness into thanksgiving and the willingness to share.  Paul continues in verses 18-19, “Command them (the rich) to do good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.  In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.”  These verses affirm wealth is not wrong but we are commanded to use the possessions God has given us to bring Him glory.  The rich are not to hoard their wealth, but they are to be generous and in doing so they will be rewarded in Heaven.

The modern-day American Dream is a dream that ends with death.  You grow up, go to school, get a degree, marry a beautiful wife, have a great family with a big house and nice car, retire with money and the overall goal of pursuing personal pleasure, and then you die.  This hopeless ideology offers nothing except momentary pleasure.  It cannot bring everlasting joy.  As Christians we grow up as children of God, we go to school in order to understand more the character of Christ, we engage in marriage so as to understand more perfectly God’s merciful relationship with the church, we work in order to reveal God’s glory, and we accept death as a transition into a new life that will bring us ultimate pleasure and joy for all of eternity.  Everything we do in this life is for a God who has created us out of love.  We should delight in the opportunity to live a life that reflects that love.  So re-evaluate your definition of success.  Re-consider the purpose and overall goal of your God-given blessings.  Venture to the core of the Christian faith, and place your identity in Christ rather than in your material possessions.  Take back the American Dream to what our forefathers desired it to be.  Attack this culture that says success can be determined by your possessions and social standing.  Live freely in the truth of Christ, not of men.

Works Cited

“American Dream Quotes.” American Dream Quotes. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.

Fairchild, Mary. “Founding Fathers Quotes — Christian Quotes of the Founding Fathers.” Christianity — About Christianity and Living the Christian Life. 18 Feb. 2012.

Harvey, Dave. “God, My Heart, and Stuff.” Eds. C.J. Mahaney and Craig Cabaniss. Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World. Wheaton: Crossway, 2008.

Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005.

Missler, Nancy. “What Does It Mean to Glorify God?” Reflections of His Image.

Piper, John. The Dangerous Duty of Delight. Sisters: Multnomah, 2001.

Stearns, Richard. The Hole in Our Gospel. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009.

Forgotten Gems: A Trick of the Tail

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Christopher Rush

I Knew We’d Get There Somehow

See, I told you.  It took an extra year, but we managed to find time to talk about Genesis’s first post-Gabriel-era album, A Trick of the Tail.  As we’ve said elsewhere, it would be fatuous to contrast different albums from the same artist as if they are in competition, and certainly comparing or contrasting different eras of Genesis’s long, multifaceted career, would be especially fruitless.  Some people prefer the Gabriel era, some the Collins era — neither is “wrong” in that preference.  Both are wrong to say one era is “better” than the other.  Different eras, we also said, were marked by different creative tendencies — so we are not here to say A Trick of the Tail is anything other than a great album marked by many continuing elements from the Gabriel era as well as the nascence of new artistic directions (though the radio-friendly “pop music” version of Genesis most know best did not really come about until the line-up was down to Phil Collins, Tony Banks, and Mike Rutherford — and even then not until their late ’80s releases).  We begin in 7/8 time…

“Dance on a Volcano”

In a complex junction of rhythm and accent, Genesis proves they have not any musical talent in the intervening period transitioning from the Gabriel era to the Collins era (and we would do well to remember Phil Collins didn’t want to be the new vocalist in the first place, so any charges against him of greedily turning a great progressive rock band into a mainstream pop machine are thoroughly ungrounded in reality).  They are truly superlative musicians.  The message of the song is clear enough, once we have waded through the conflicting musical and lyrical barriers intentionally constructed to mimic the ideas presented: life is full of complications and dangers, but it is important.  “You better start doing it right.”  From the very beginning of the album we are reminded why we should always listen to more Genesis: their music is superb and their lyrics are true.

“Entangled”

“Entangled” is another great example of Genesis’s ability to create a thoroughly musically enjoyable song while simultaneously singing about something frightening or miasmatic.  “Miasmatic” works especially well here, considering the song is about a virulent plague and a medical staff only too eager to experiment on patients to find, essentially, a nostrum.  On the other hand, we can’t question how beautiful the music is.  This album is full of songs aesthetically superior to many albums, including other Genesis albums.  The weight of this song increases throughout, making the experience of it exponential until the, as Tony Banks himself put it, “cathedral-like” conclusion.  It is reminiscent of “Comfortably Numb” in a loose way, but it never gets as rock-heavy as Pink Floyd’s song.  Instead the weight comes from the cohesion of various musical lines, driven by the keyboards and not a guitar solo.  It’s still excellent, though.

“Squonk”

“Squonk” is one of those songs you think, from afar, that can’t really work that well, can it? people aren’t going to like it that much, are they?  But somehow, Genesis made it work.  Dipping back briefly into their “songs inspired by myth” mode, Genesis crafts a multi-sectioned song using typical fairy tale accoutrement alluding to the squonk (a ferocious animal in the forests of Pennsylvania that dissolves into tears when captured, according to some), though in typical Genesis fashion, the squonk captured here is not ferocious after all, but a simple, quiet creature preferring to be left alone, afraid of everything, likened to an ugly duckling.  It’s not an anti-hunting song, it’s not a pro-forestry song … it’s another impressive Genesis “getting you to think about it” song, driven by musicianship.

“Mad Man Moon”

Continuing the construction premise of multiple musical sections, “Mad Man Moon” is a kind of ternary form.  I’m tempted to call this song more “conventionally pretty” than “Entangled,” but I don’t want that to be taken as a slight against “Mad Man Moon.”  It truly is a lovely song — Tony Banks’s lyrics are typical Genesis, in that they are evocative and sweet and painful and revivifying at once.  The opening section of longing tinged with regret slowly blends into the middle section of the Sandman, whose castanets and syncopation bring the dreamer/narrator back to the opening melodic section, forcing him and us out of our dreams.  We, too, are “forever caught in desert lands,” but we should heed their warning and not “disbelieve the sea.”  There is more to life than this, but we don’t need to dream to find it or escape ourselves now.

“Robbery, Assault and Battery”

The middle “Sandman” section of the previous song feels like it comes back again, mixed with a call-back to “The Battle of Epping Forest” from Selling England by the Pound.  It’s easy to consider this the weak link on the album, but it’s not as easy to support that claim with meaningful reasoning, other than because it feels so much like “Epping Forest” on a localized scale (individual crimes and felonious altercations, not a massive gang war) it’s not outstanding as the rest of the album.  This is not even a fair criticism, I admit — musically it is engaging and full of variety, as so much of the album is.  The atypical syncopation has not gotten tiresome, even after so much use; it’s just one of those songs that doesn’t quite seem to get where it wants to be, but even still the journey there isn’t all that bad.  I know this is faint praise; perhaps the best I can do now is to say the song deserves far more appreciation than I have given it.  Give it a go yourself.

“Ripples…”

Though most of our collections don’t have the ellipsis, it was there originally, and likewise this song does a tremendous job reminding us of the major musical ideas on the album, fitting much better in with the album as a whole.  Again we have a song characterized by the weight of its sounds.  It tries to overwhelm us with beauty, and it comes pretty close.  If you enjoy songs that are beautiful and worth delighting in, you have found another one, thanks to Genesis.  Delight in this song, friends.  The extended musical break toward the close of the song reminds us of “After the Ordeal” and “The Cinema Show” from Selling England, but that can’t possibly ever be a bad thing.  Don’t be bothered by the lyric reminding us the good times of the past leave and don’t come back.  It is never too late to seek a newer world.  The point of life is to move on the beauty to come — take those memories with you as you sail away to a better life to come.

“A Trick of the Tail”

The penultimate song on this potentially-ultimate album sounds like a mix of “Squonk” and “Robbery,” but that is also not intended as a criticism.  It works well, in part because of the shorter length of this song — it doesn’t allow itself to drag on too long in its imitative mood.  The fantastical lyrics loosely influenced by William Golding’s second novel The Inheritors (again, “loosely”) remind us more often than we like to remember the grass is not greener in other pastures.  If we are not content with what we have now, we will be utterly disappointed wherever we go to find more or other things.  Let’s not be too hasty to leave the cities of gold we are in now, as Candide himself showed us long ago as well.  Better to dream of unnamed streets of gold, anyway.  Leave the searching for cities of gold to Esteban and his friends.

“Los Endos”

Leave it to Genesis to conclude an album driven mostly by beautiful sounds with an instrumental displaying once again their musicianship.  Combining various motifs of most (if not all) of the other songs on the album, “Los Endos” is a perfect “exit music” piece recalling to our aural memories some of the highlights of the forgotten gem we have just heard.  Perhaps more impressive is that the song works by itself, even if you haven’t heard the original sources.  Banks, Collins, Hackett, and Rutherford blend the best bits of previous material into an enjoyably new musical experience in its own right.  We should expect nothing less from these masters of music.  If you are wary of Peter Gabriel’s concept album era, if you are tired of Phil Collin’s radio-friendly pop era, well, first of all, quite frankly, that’s rather silly.  Stop that (I say to you in love).  Then give this middle period album, A Trick of the Tail, a try.  It has a great deal of the best of both other eras with very little of the potential drawbacks.  You will really enjoy this forgotten gem.

The Need for Increased Special Operations Forces Funding

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Erik Lang

Shock rippled through his body; instantly he knew he was hit.  His leg looked like it had been severed almost completely off just above the knee.  Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding fired his weapon a few more times and began to attend to his knee.  He quickly formed a tourniquet around his leg to stem the flow of blood gushing out of the stump.  His leg was “flopping around,” so Walding folded his leg up parallel to his thigh and tied it in place.  While trying to inject his leg with morphine, he slipped and stuck his thumb by accident.  “Well, now my thumb feels pretty good,” he remarked to his fellow soldiers, which brought a chorus of laughs in the grim situation.  Without immediate access to a medical facility, Staff Sgt. Walding held his position and continued to fight the terrorists that outnumbered them.

This incredible account of Staff Sgt. Walding is completely true, verified by his peers on the battlefield with him.  Within this engagement, vast numbers of insurgents assaulted the joint Special Operations Forces unit.  Men just like Walding fought for many hours without relief in unfamiliar territory.  Not a single American SOF member was killed.  To fight back against a large enemy in their territory for hours requires impeccable skill and courage, both qualities embodied within Special Operations Forces.  Accounts like this prompt my thesis: to provide more government funding for the training, production, and use of Special Operations Forces.

Throughout this thesis are several terms or acronyms used some people have never heard before.  They are used to simplify the words the acronyms stand for.  SOF stands for Special Operations Forces and refers to every military branch’s special unit.  Spec. Ops. is used interchangeably with SOF.  Irregular Warfare is defined as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s).  Irregular warfare favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capacities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will” (Baseops).  This means our military cannot engage insurgencies in open battle as war has been previously conducted in wars past.  The enemy is not clothed or endorsed explicitly by any government, making open confrontation with them difficult and tedious.  The military now incorporates methods revolving around reconnaissance, covert missions, and ways of engaging the enemy without the convenience of always knowing who or where the insurgencies are.  IEDs are Improvised Explosive Devices and are one of the most frequent ways insurgents inflict casualties.

The history of American SOF began in the mid 1700s during the French and Indian War between France and England.  Lt. Col. Robert Rodgers commanded a group of American militiamen to fight against the French using methods similar to what the Indians used, involving stealthy ambushes and fighting and traversing in rough terrain unfamiliar to French soldiers.  This unconventional way of fighting was the beginning of the idea of SOF tactics (Couch 1).  In every war America has been engaged in since, the use of special groups like “Rodger’s Rangers” that performed feats beyond those of ordinary soldiers has become more prevalent.  In the War for American Independence, Francis Marion conducted daring raids on British camps in the swamps of South Carolina and Georgia.  In the Civil War, Colonel John Mosby led a group of volunteers behind Union lines and regularly conducted surprise attacks on supply lines and enemy soldiers.  He earned the nickname the “Grey Ghost” (25).  However, it wasn’t until World War II when the idea behind modern SOF began to take shape.

The Germans had their own groups of commandos that had devastating effects on Allied Forces.  In response, America’s William “Wild Bill” Donovan formed the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, with the permission of President Franklin Roosevelt.  “Donovan trained them in parachuting, sabotage, silent killing, communications, and a host of behind-the-lines disciplines, including the recruitment and training of indigenous resistance forces” (29).  This is almost identical with what modern day SOF has become, especially in regards to training indigenous resistance fighters.  The OSS operated mostly in the European theater, working in the countries of Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France.  OSS worked behind German lines as saboteurs and intelligence gatherers and was a major contributing factor in helping end the war.  In the Pacific theater, the OSS also had great success, particularly in Burma.  OSS instructors helped organize Kachin and Karen rebels into an organized fighting force of 15,000 that wreaked havoc upon Japanese soldiers, killing thousands and wrecking crucial supply lines.  With the dissolution of the OSS after the war, many former employees began working for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).  Among them was William Donovan.  He worked closely with two veterans of World War II: Colonel Russell Volkmann and Colonel Aaron Bank, both of whom had extensive experience with the OSS.  This triumvirate made the nucleus of the modern day CIA.

During the Vietnam War and the military actions taken in El Salvador, the CIA operated closely with the military, perfecting their use of SOF.  In both of these military actions, SOF was instrumental in using its tactics and training to fight off Communist aggressors and train and equip the locals to fight the enemy.  After World War II and through Vietnam, input from other countries like England further assisted America in her growth of SOF.  Years of warfare have strengthened SOF to become the deadly, efficient fighting and instructing force it is today.

Today, the new enemy is terrorism, in whatever form it takes.  America is battling insurgencies around the globe, giving SOF credibility to help America adapt to the style of Irregular Warfare.  With the knowledge of fighting terrorist groups and infiltrating enemy lines, SOF is needed in today’s war more than ever.

I will prove how SOF needs more government funding to put more soldiers in the field by clearly demonstrating SOF is the most effective and efficient type of soldier (better qualified to combat Irregular Warfare than basic military units), is thoroughly successful in missions, and plays a large part in the War on Terror and would have an even greater impact with proper funding.  Arguments against extra funding for SOF are the assertions they are uncontrollable, ineffective, and fiscally irresponsible due to the uniqueness of SOF compared to standard infantry units.

Irregular warfare is a type of combat that involves countering insurgencies and guerrilla militias with precision strikes usually in isolated engagements.  The difference between traditional warfare and irregular warfare are the enemy and the strategies associated with fighting against them.  Traditional warfare was army against army, country against country.  The enemy was well known, specific to a country, and marked by uniforms of that country.  With irregular warfare, the enemy lives among the innocent, blending in with societies eliminating open warfare as an option for confrontation.  Currently, the war on terror is fought against insurgencies like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, which blend in with cultures and societies and attack American forces in isolated skirmishes and ambushes.  “Irregular warfare is emerging as a dominant form of warfare for the future.  Yet irregular warfare, at its root, contains many of the characteristics found on today’s battlefront in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the Global War on Terror (GWOT)” (Cannady 4).  With irregular warfare fast becoming the normal form of war, it is critical for America to adapt and effectively combat such insurgencies.  An adapting style of war calls for a special breed of soldier: a soldier that is highly effective, skilled, and enduring.  This breed of soldier is found in American Special Operations Forces.

America’s military is comprised of four branches of service: the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force.  Each of these services has its own group(s) of special operation forces.  These higher trained and qualified forces are superior to standard military units, given the nature of Irregular Warfare.  Simply put, these basic units are incapable of effectively completing missions in the War on Terror, making funding for soldiers that are effective and capable for this type of war imperative.  The Army has three different groups of Spec. Ops.  They are the Army Rangers, the Green Berets, and Delta Force.  The “Ranger Regiment is a flexible, highly-trained, and rapidly-deployable light infantry force with specialized skills that enables it to be employed against a variety of conventional and special operations targets.…  They generally practice to parachute into the middle of the action, to perform strikes and ambushes and to capture enemy airfields” (Powers 2).  The Army Rangers are a more trained group of infantry than the basic grunts.  They pride themselves on being first in the fight in any firefight.  They aren’t the Spec. Ops. Soldiers that wear camouflage face paint and night vision goggles, but they go through an intensive training course, hardening them for heavier, direct combat.  The Army’s Green Beret (Special Forces) soldiers’ primary job is instruction.  These are the soldiers America sends to aid foreign countries in properly training their military.  Given the nature of their job, Special Forces (SF) personnel must be fluent in at least one other foreign language, preferably two or three.  SF are incredibly effective in communicating with natives in countries, which provides them with the ability to penetrate enemy territory and conduct reconnaissance missions providing intelligence to command centers in friendly territory.  This knowledge base gives SF superior reasoning capabilities and insight into a foreign country’s unresolved issues, providing valuable assistance to the leaders of any country.  Every SF member is required to possess these skills, something not seen within basic infantry units.  SF’s efficiency when it comes to foreign relations is much higher to the alternative basic Army infantry.  Direct action and counter-insurgency are also part of SF’s job description.  Finally for the Army Special Operations is the Delta Force, the group least thought of when Spec. Ops. is mentioned.  Delta operates mainly on a classified level, often working in conjunction with organizations like the C.I.A. 

Back in 1977, when hi-jacking aircraft and taking hostages seemed to be the “in thing,” an Army Special Forces officer, Colonel Charles Beckwith, returned from a special assignment with the British Special Air Service (SAS), with a unique idea.  He sold the idea of a highly-trained military hostage-rescue force, patterned after the SAS, to the head-honchos at the Pentagon, and they approved (4).

Delta Force is rumored to have its own fleet of helicopters painted with civilian colors in order not to draw attention.  The main objective of Delta Force today is to be the silent resolvers.  If there is an incident developing America can’t officially get involved in, then Delta Force is sent to get in and out without alerting anyone to America’s presence.  At least, that’s what the rumors are.  The Army infantry doesn’t have the proper training to accomplish what Delta can.  Delta’s effectiveness in these precarious situations is evidenced in unclassified missions during the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Navy’s Spec. Ops. Group is the now famous SEALS.  SEALS are trained for land, sea, and air assaults.  These men are required to pass the rigorous Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALS (BUDS) course, which is a six-month long, physically grueling selection and assessment program.  One section of BUDS is “Hell Week,” where the candidates must participate in physical activities almost constantly for six straight days in a sleep-deprived state (allowed only 4 to 5 hours of sleep).  The SEALS’ most valuable contribution is underwater and amphibious assaults partnered with demolitions expertise.  No other SOF groups, especially basic military units, are trained to combat Irregular Warfare as effectively as SEALS.  They are trained in every type of environment and go through countless scenarios of missions.  They are also the only group to actively train for conflicts in arctic or subzero conditions.  SEALS thrive in aquatic environments, and their superior physical capabilities make their missions near flawless.

The United States Air Force has two different Spec. Ops. groups: the Air Force Pararescue Jumpers (or PJs) and the Air Force Combat Controllers.  “‘These things we do, that others may live.’  That’s the official motto of Air Force Pararescue.  If you have an aircrew member down in enemy territory, wounded or not, you can’t get anyone better to pull him/her out of there than Air Force Pararescue” (6).  PJs are responsible for responding to military personnel in distress quickly and transporting them to safety, and if necessary, fight off enemy hostiles harassing those in need.  PJs are required to have an extensive knowledge of medicines and treatments for any type of abrasion to the body and be able to treat the wounds in the field, while airborne, or even under fire.  Training for these soldiers lasts roughly a year, preparing them for almost every rescue scenario known.  Air Force Combat Controllers are soldiers who operate makeshift air traffic control towers in the field very close to enemy positions.  Their responsibility is to sneak into hostile territory, direct air traffic during missions, and then sneak back out without detection.  They are, of course, trained to react accordingly to defend against hostiles if they are discovered.

Marine Corps Force Recon is the final Spec. Ops. group.  They only recently joined the Spec. Ops. umbrella but have made great contributions to the SOF community and in missions like Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.  The Force Recon team is trained to conduct pre- and post-mission reconnaissance of the target location(s), advising Marines and other assaulting forces on the terrain, number of hostiles, etc.  Among the Marine Corps Force Recon men are the Marine snipers, highly qualified and trained separately in the Marine Recon sniper school.

The training for each of these Special Operations groups is long, intensive, and extremely difficult, physically and more so mentally.  The SOF soldier must be able to overcome all odds thrown against him by neutralizing the enemy, complete the assigned mission, and fall asleep with a clean conscience … then wake up the following day and do it all over again.  To live this lifestyle is taxing on the mind and must be lived by only those who are mentally sound.  Those who crack under pressure are quickly weeded out during SOF recruitment and testing.

The training courses are designed specifically to each group and their specialties, but elements similar in each group’s training program are the emphasis on physical taxation.  Physical Testing (PT) is every day, all day.  Punishments are given in the form of more running, sit ups, pushups, or whatever the instructors decide.  Physical fitness is mandatory, and those who fail to pass this qualification are quickly weeded out and sent home.  Communicating and acting as a team is critical to the execution of Spec. Ops. missions.  Numerous exercises and leadership reaction drills enforce the idea no one man can successfully operate by himself.  The team itself must work together in order to achieve perfection in execution.  These thorough and taxing training programs cannot be done by standard soldiers.  Special Operations Forces live up to their name; they are special.  Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror cannot be fought effectively by standard military troops.  They aren’t trained nearly as well as SOF.  This simple truth calls for more government resources to be dedicated toward SOF programs to take the fight to the enemy and keep Americans free from terror.

The quality of the soldiers from the Special Operations Forces breed are exceptional.  The contrast between the regular soldiers on tour and the Spec. Ops. warrior leaves a chasm of experience, training, and success.  The Special Forces Creed succinctly states the mindset of the SOF warrior:

I am an American Special Forces Soldier!  I will do all that my nation requires of me.  I am a volunteer, knowing well the hazards of my profession.  I serve with the memory of those who have gone before me.  I pledge to uphold the honor and integrity of their legacy in all that I am — in all that I do.  I am a warrior.  I will teach and fight whenever and wherever my nation requires.  I will strive always to excel in every art and artifice of war.  I know that I will be called upon to perform tasks in isolation, far from familiar faces and voices.  With the help and guidance of my faith, I will conquer my fears and succeed.  I will keep my mind and body clean, alert and strong.  I will maintain my arms and equipment in an immaculate state befitting a Special Forces Soldier, for this is my debt to those who depend upon me.  I will not fail those with whom I serve.  I will not bring shame upon myself or Special Forces.  I will never leave a fallen comrade.  I will never surrender though I am the last.  If I am taken, I pray that I have the strength to defy my enemy.  I am a member of my Nation’s chosen soldiery, I serve quietly, not seeking recognition or accolades.  My goal is to succeed in my mission — and live to succeed again.  De Oppresso Liber (North 4).

Simply put, Special Operations Forces are better at confronting terrorism through Irregular Warfare.  They are self-motivated and encouraged by their peers to live the words of the creed.

This drive and passion led to their effectiveness during missions.  In Operation “Chromium,” the objective of the joint U.S. Special Forces and Iraqi commandos was to take down an insurgent kingpin named Abu Obaeideah with his followers in Samarra, Iraq on the 10th of September, 2007.  Up to this mission, the SF unit had been training the Iraqi commandos with SOF techniques to better defend their own country.  Operation “Chromium” provided the perfect live action scenario to put the Iraqis’ practice to the test.  Reliable intelligence pinpointed Abu’s location in Samarra.  He and about 10 to 12 other insurgents were inside a small farming compound comprised of several buildings.  The raid took place at night, and three U.S. SF operators (Staff Sgt Halbisengibbs, Sgt 1st Class Lindsay, and Capt Chaney) led the assault as supervision.  Black Hawk helicopters carried the U.S. and Iraqi teams separately.  When the American chopper tried to land at the designated Landing Zone (LZ), the surface was filled with water prompting the pilot to set down closer to the target buildings.  The closer landing alerted the hostiles to the Americans’ presence.  The Iraqis were too far away to help, so the three SF operators did the only natural thing: continue the mission alone.  They systematically and quickly swept the first building, clearing it of hostiles until they entered the second house, where the bulk of the insurgents were.  Each Green Beret sustained injuries while killing the hostiles, but they proved victorious and killed Abu Obaeideah with a quick three-round burst.  The mission was a complete success, providing the fledgling Iraqi commandos with a prime example of the effectiveness of SOF.  All three SF soldiers were awarded medals for their courage (the Distinguished Service Cross and two Silver Stars).  Operation “Chromium” is one of many missions SOF have been involved with, including other operations like “Vigilant Resolve” and “Awakening,” where SOF battled enemies that vastly outnumbered them and emerged victorious.

Right now, America is leading the charge against the War on Terror.  Within the American effort against terrorism, no military group is used more heavily than SOF.  Their success is unparalleled by any other military unit world-wide, but their contribution comes at a price.  SOF resources are stretched thin, and men within these special groups are often deployed at least six months out of every year.  “When it comes to equipment, aircraft, intelligence, and other support, they say, they don’t get their fair share.  As one senior Special Forces officer put it: ‘We have a world-class capability for direct action.  We need the same world-class, well-resourced capability to do unconventional warfare’” (Robinson 2).  Unconventional warfare is the same as Irregular Warfare.  The soldiers within the Special Operations community do the brunt of the fighting because the war is exactly what they trained for.  The only problem is there are not many of these soldiers, so often it is the same men completing all the missions time after time, year-round.  With increased funding better facilities, increased access to weapons and aircraft support and SOF intelligence will all be more available to SOF, increasing missions completed each year.  Even government officials are starting to take notice of the power of SOF.  Rep. Jim Saxton, the chairman of the special operations subcommittee, while praising direct-action successes, says, “I believe the key to our military efforts rests in the unconventional capabilities.  It is vital that policy makers in the Department of Defense not lose sight of the strategic importance of unconventional warfare and ensure that we capitalize on those capabilities” (3).

Three arguments against creating incentives and providing more funding for SOF training and equipment are the assertions SOF are uncontrollable, ineffective and unnecessary, and fiscally irresponsible.  These arguments are unsubstantiated and based on faulty premises.

First, the uncontrollable argument maintains SOF are “Pariah Cowboys,” undisciplined and trigger-happy.  Trigger-happy describes one who wildly shoots anything that moves.  Special Operations Forces are anything but trigger-happy.

One of the hardest of the hard-liners was the group’s chief, Dick Clarke.  (Clark’s philosophy was to preemptively attack the terrorists.)  Asked if that meant using SOF, he replied: “Oh yeah.  In fact, many of the options were with special mission units.” … Such measures worried the senior brass, who proceeded to weaken those officials by treating them (SOF) as pariahs.  That meant portraying them as cowboys, who proposed reckless military operations that would get American soldiers killed.…  (The officiating generals didn’t like the idea of SOF and attacked Clark.)  Some generals had been vitriolic, calling Clarke “a madman, out of control, power hungry, wanted to be a hero, all that kind of stuff.”  In fact, one of these former officials emphasized, “when we would carry back from the counterterrorism group one of those SOF counterterrorism proposals, our job was to figure out not how to execute it, but how we were going to say no.”  By turning Clarke into a pariah, the Pentagon brass discredited precisely the options that might have spared us the tragedy of September 11, 2001.  And when Clarke fought back at being branded “wild” and “irresponsible,” they added “abrasive” and “intolerant” to the counts against him (Shultz).

Clark’s entire philosophy of taking the fight to the terrorist was completely ignored by military officials because of his use of SOF and their skepticism about SOF’s ability to take orders.  This prejudiced belief was directly responsible for the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Centers, who could have been stopped sooner if military officials listened to Clark.  SOF has the highest success rate out of any military group in the world.  The casualty rates comparing standard military forces and SOF is 26 to 2.

Advisor Dick Clarke is often pointed out by bureaucratic military advisors as being extreme and unstable.  The reality is Dick Clarke and men like him who serve as SOF are the most obedient soldiers available to America.  SOF go through intense training programs where they are only taught how do the job of SOF and are expected to follow every order to the letter.  Failure to follow orders during these programs means automatic dismissal from the program, sometimes without the option to even start over (Powers).  The notion of uncontrollable SOF is invalidated through the constant training and discipline these men go through.  The uncontrollable counter-argument has no base or evidence to support their claims.  SOF has creeds and prayers said on a daily basis to reaffirm the type of men they are: intelligent and effective.

The second major counter-argument SOF is ineffective is irrational.  When addressing the ineffectiveness of SOF, the incident that usually surfaces is the UN mission in Somalia where “Operation Irene” turned into a deadly 16-hour shootout with hostiles in downtown Mogadishu.  SOF members were pinned down and sustained heavy casualties when two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu.  Since this mistake, SOF trainers and officials have taken great steps forward in the Special Operations department.  Better and more intensive training, higher awareness of situations, and increased use and responsibilities have honed SOF into highly effective soldiers.  The fight in Mogadishu has given SOF a black eye that quickly healed but was never forgotten by SOF.  Every member of SOF knows of Somalia and goes through specific courses designed to ensure the mistakes made there will never be repeated.  After this incident in 1993, many Pentagon officials were hesitant about using SOF in any capacity.  “Some senior generals had expressed doubts about the Mogadishu operation, yet as it had morphed from a peacekeeping mission into a manhunt for Aidid, the new national security team had failed to grasp the implications.  The Mogadishu disaster spooked the Clinton administration as well as the brass, and confirmed the Joint Chiefs in the view that SOF should never be entrusted with independent operations” (Shultz).  Since the firefight in Mogadishu, there have been at least 24 successful missions, including Operations “Chromium” and “Vigilant Resolve” during the War on Terror, in which SOF was directly involved and made a significant contribution.  These missions involved hunting down terrorist training camps, targeting high profile Taliban/Al-Qaeda leaders, infiltrating and destroying terrorist drug productions, and more (North).  The Mogadishu incident was only one mission gone wrong.  The talents and benefits SOF bring to America’s military are indispensable and shouldn’t be shoved aside because of one bad mission.

Lastly is the assertion funding and incentives for SOF are fiscally irresponsible and unnecessary, and the funding would be better spent elsewhere in the military or even on programs like government-provided health care.  When the safety of America is at risk, other programs such as socialized health care must be put on hold.  The government does not, and has never had the responsibility to, provide health care to all citizens according to the U.S. Constitution.  The Constitution does say the government has the obligation to protect America’s citizens from all powers both foreign and domestic.  The real fiscal irresponsibility would be to provide funding to any program but the Special Operations program.   Government funding for the U.S. military was dramatically cut in the beginning of the year 2011.  Cutbacks due to the recession cost many in the military their jobs.  Congress currently is projecting to cut the military’s overall budget by even more, potentially up to 500 billion dollars.  With budget cuts as dramatic as these, America’s military is going to be significantly smaller, thus weakening the defense of America.  With America as a super-power turned invalid, other countries won’t hesitate to take advantage of a weakened America and attack.  The remaining soldiers guarding our country must be the best of the best, properly trained to fight the changing style of war: Irregular Warfare.  Our military must adapt its personnel and tactics in order to not be swept aside by enemies more prepared than America.  The soldiers best trained for this warfare are SOF soldiers.

There are many men just like Staff Sgt. Walding, men who will fight until they can’t fight anymore, ready to give their lives in defense of the freedoms we as Americans hold so dear, and more can be similarly trained to follow suit.  Through increased funding and incentives for SOF programs, the efficiency and expertise can increase even more to ensure even greater protection and strategic advantages against enemies of America.  For your own safety and a desire to see America combat fanatical aggressors, please promote my thesis, to rightly fund more SOF programs to other forms of funding.  Our very existence and way of life is at stake.

Works Cited

Baseops. “US Special Operations — Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Special Forces, Army Rangers.” Baseops.net. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.

Cannady, Bryan H. “Irregular Warfare: Special Operations Joint Professional Military Education Transformation.” Thesis. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2008. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.

Couch, Dick, and Robert D. Kaplan. Chosen Soldier: the Making of a Special Forces Warrior. New York: Crown, 2007.

Martin, Joseph J., and Rex W. Dodson. Get Selected! for Special Forces: How to Successfully Train for and Complete Special Forces Assessment & Selection. Fayetteville, NC: Warrior Mentor, 2006.

North, Oliver, and Chuck Holton. American Heroes in Special Operations. Nashville, TN: Fidelis, 2010.

Powers, Rod. “Special Operations Forces — U.S. Military.” United States Military Information. About.com. U.S. Military, 2011. Web. 11 Dec. 2011.

Robinson, Linda. “U.S. Special Forces Are Walking Point in the War on Terror. Here’s Their Plan.” US News & World Report. 3 Sept. 2006. Web. 11 Dec. 2011.

SOC. “U.S. Special Operations History.” Special Operations.Com. 2000. Web. 11 Dec. 2011.

Southworth, Samuel A. U.S. Special Forces: a Guide to America’s Special Operations Units. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2002.

—. U.S. Special Warfare: the Elite Combat Skills of America’s Modern Armed Forces. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004.

Media’s Negative Portrayal of Women

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Lia Waugh Powell

Jena Morrow, a woman affected by an eating disorder, once said, “I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame.  I have an eating disorder.”  This quotation may have little to no meaning to a person who has never experienced the damage of an eating disorder.  With an eating disorder, there is a sense of never being enough, never being happy that consumes you every day.  A constant battle of blinking back tears as your mind reflects on what you ate that day, and you can almost feel the fat being deposited in your body.  You can see the weight gain.  The fear of gaining weight devours you whole, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.  This occurs every day when you are battling an eating disorder.  That is every day for 8 million people in America alone (S.C. Dept. of Health).  Media have taken the woman’s body and twisted it into the perfect image, an image absolutely unachievable except through Photoshop® and excessive dieting.  The manipulated perception of beauty has driven countless women to developing eating disorders in an attempt to grasp and claim this beauty.  Eating disorders will continue to be a prominent issue in society until media change the way they portray women.

The connection between eating disorders and the media’s influence dates back to the 1800s.  Since the 1800s, the standard of female beauty often has been unrealistic and difficult to attain.  The rich and higher classes were far more likely to be able to conform to the thin and petite stature that was preferred in those times.  Women, typically, have always been willing to sacrifice comfort and even endure pain to achieve these standards, standards developed by what was considered high fashion depicted through European fashion (through whalebone corsets, and encouraging the binding of feet in Chinese culture).  In the 19th century, women with tiny waists and large bustles were valued.  It was desirable for an upper-class man to be able to span a woman’s waist with his hands.  Despite the inflicted pain and resulting health problems, such as shortness of breath (which could lead to pneumonia) and dislocated visceral organs, corsets became the height of fashion.

After corsets, in the 20th century many ideas of beauty changed.  During World War 1, women searched for comfort and power.  They cut their hair short and wore less complicated dresses.  During World War 2, women took to wearing skirts again, highlighting a very feminine look.  Many strove to be like Marilyn Monroe, who was a curvy sex symbol during the 1950s.  In the 1960s, the “thin” culture began to regain popularity when the European model Twiggy became famous.  Her petite frame became the object of affection in society, and ever since, thin has been the most desired body type.

The media began to gain more control over women as technology advanced and became more obtainable by the public, through multiple devices such as commercials on television, billboards, and magazines.  From the time children are first exposed to television, they see constant commercials for new diets to try out and beauty products to make you believe you need that particular product to be beautiful.  Average looking women wearing plain clothes with little makeup on are rarely, if ever, shown on advertisements on television or magazines.  According to the About-Face organization, “400-600 advertisements bombard us everyday in magazines, on billboards, on tv, and in newspapers.  One in eleven has a direct message about beauty, not even counting the indirect messages.”  This means media through advertisements bombard women — media’s perception of what beauty is and should be, rather than what true beauty is, thus causing unrealistic ideas of beauty and causing self-image problems.

With so many media influences, eating disorders have become incredibly popular.  Anorexia, otherwise known as Anorexia Nervosa, is the fear of eating, gaining weight, and/or becoming fat.  There are two types of anorexia: the restricting type and the binge and purge type.  Restricting Anorexia is the weight loss achieved by severe caloric restrictions and excessive exercise.  Binge and purge anorexia is akin to restricting anorexia, including periods of binge eating followed by purging behavior to avoid gaining weight (DSM-IV 65).

Bulimia, also known as Bulimia Nervosa, is an eating disorder characterized by secret episodes of binge eating.  Such activities are followed by inappropriate methods of weight control: self-induced vomiting, abuse of laxatives, and excessive exercise (67).  Bulimia and anorexia are life-long fights.  Once contracted, it is nearly impossible to fully recover from the disorders.

You need to be informed of the media’s influences because your children and my future children are susceptible to the dangers of eating disorders.  20% of people suffering from anorexia will prematurely die from complications related to their eating disorder, including suicide and heart problems (DMH S.C. Dept. of Health).  The fact something as severe as an eating disorder can be caused by the media is frightening.  It is our job to inform others of the negative effects the media can have.  You need to enforce healthy lifestyles in your children’s lives, so they can have positive body images and not go through the emotional stress and physically damaging effects of eating disorders.

To prove eating disorders are influenced by media portrayal of women, I will discuss my own experience with Anorexia Nervosa and explain why media were the main causes for my downfall.  Second, I will demonstrate the elaborate lengths magazines go through to achieve a flawless look through Photoshop® and people on television go through in makeup and the wardrobe department to conceal flaws and enhance specific features.  Third, I will prove the “Sex Sells” campaign pressures women into believing they must look a certain way to be beautiful.  Contrary to these points, the counterarguments of my thesis I will refute are first, the belief eating disorders are purely biological and not influenced by our cultural surroundings, and second, the belief media do not have any “control” over our society and thus women’s health choices.

My first argument supporting my thesis is derived from my personal experience with an eating disorder.  When I was 14 years old, I developed Anorexia Nervosa.  Media caused this because I believed I had to look the way the women did on television and in magazines to be considered beautiful.  I believed I needed to be extremely thin, have perfect legs, abs, and flawless skin.  I was terrified to eat and had an irrational fear of gaining weight.  There were days when I would eat a cracker and do several workout tapes to increase the number of calories I burned.  I would stare for hours at a mirror grabbing at my stomach, thighs, and arms in tears because I could grab fat, which in my mind should not be there.  I remember reading a book in which a girl had an eating disorder and was told she was not skinny or beautiful enough until she was capable of hugging herself to the extent her fingertips touched.  This became my goal.  I was never good enough, never skinny enough.  Eating became something I forced myself to do only because I knew I needed food to survive.  Weight loss would excite me.  I loved being able to feel my bones through my shoulders or feel my ribs when I touched my stomach.  However, if I turned on the television or walked by an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, all of the weight loss meant nothing.  Seeing glossy magazine covers that showed beautiful women essentially naked with no physical flaws, killed me.  Both commercials and television shows haunted me, such as commercials with Victoria’s Secret models with perfect bodies and with every woman looking flawless.  They had no fat arms, thighs, or stomach.  Their skin was perfect, and their smiles shined brighter than mine ever could be.  I was suddenly reminded I would never be considered beautiful like those women.  I would never be able to have a man love me and think I am beautiful until my body matched theirs.  The media caused my downfall because everywhere I looked, with an already low self-esteem, I saw images of thin women being portrayed as beautiful, and then I would look at myself and see I did not compete with those women.  My body was incredibly flawed, I had large thighs and arms, my face was round, and my waist was not as thin as those on advertisements in magazines or television.

The disorder continued until I strengthened my relationship with Christ.  With a weak relationship, I realized I would never be happy with the way I looked.  To this day, I accept the fact I will never have a perfect body.  However, now I know an almighty God crafted me.  Yet the battle continues within me.  I still cringe at the thought of gaining weight.

Media insert images with unrealistic standards for women to achieve through the television and magazines into the minds of 5 million Americans who struggle with eating disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.  Perhaps even more startling is the 119 percent increase between 1999 and 2006 of the number of children under age 12 hospitalized due to an eating disorder, the vast majority of whom were girls.  These statistics are important to acknowledge because they show the large increase of eating disorders in society for young girls.

My second argument is about the new phenomenon of Photoshop®.  Photoshop® is taking a photograph and digitally altering it.  With Photoshop® you can manipulate any photograph to make it look however you want it to.  In media, Photoshop® is used to make already thin models thinner and to airbrush their skin to give it a flawless finish.  Henry Farid, a Dartmouth professor, told ABC News in 2009, “The more and more we use this editing, the higher and higher the bar goes.  They’re creating things that are physically impossible; we’re seeing really radical digital plastic surgery.  It’s moving towards the Barbie doll model of what a woman should look like — big breasts, tiny waist, ridiculously long legs, elongated neck.  All the body fat is removed, all the wrinkles are removed, and the skin is smoothed out.”  About 99% of images are “photoshopped.”  This means practically every image we see, that our children are exposed to, has been falsified and changed, thus creating an image that portrays women in a artificial manner, encouraging beauty that cannot be achieved because it does not exist.

Like most adults, teenagers believe media influences everyone but themselves.  This is known as the “third-person effect.”  For example, in a national survey of more than 500 teens, nearly three-fourths believed sexual content on television influences teens their own age, but less than one-fourth believed media ever influence their own behavior.  This proves media have a rather strong grip on youth.  With images being “photoshopped” endlessly, there is an unachievable desire to be what the media tell you to look like.  Another example of the extreme measures taken by magazine editors is former American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson’s appearance on the cover of Self magazine.  Clarkson’s magazine cover portrays an at least 20 pound lighter singer, which caused controversy, especially since that particular issue was themed “Body Confidence.”  The magazine responded with the following: “Did we alter her appearance?  Only to make her look her personal best. … But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then we believe this photo is the truest we have ever put out on the newsstand.”  Thus in this case, Clarkson’s “personal best” is not what she truly looks like; it is a slimmed down and artificial perception of what she should be.

“The effect (of the media) also appears to be growing.  The researchers’ analysis reveals that, on average, studies conducted in the 2000s show a larger influence of the media on women’s body image than do those from the 1990s,” says Dr. Grabe.  “This suggests that despite all our efforts to teach women and girls to be savvy about the media and have healthy body practices, the media’s effect on how much they internalize the thin ideal is getting stronger,” she says.  “The results are troubling because recent research has established body dissatisfaction as a major risk factor for low self-esteem, depression, obesity, and eating disorders, such as bulimia.  At the same time, women’s displeasure with their bodies has become so common that it’s now considered normal,” says Dr. Grabe.  She hopes that wider recognition of the media’s role will encourage people to see the issue as a societal one, rather than as a problem of individual women as it’s viewed now (Medical News Today).

This article is significant because Dr. Grabe’s beliefs align with my thesis.  Media have a large impact on how society develops, and with their current portrayal of women, eating disorders can become even more popular in the future, even accepted and encouraged through media.  With media continuing to glorify the thin image as beautiful, and women having constant displeasure with their bodies because they compare themselves to those on television and advertisements, eating disorders will become more prominent in society.

For my third argument, I will attest the “Sex Sells” campaign has brainwashed our country and the world for the past 50 years.  The average American woman is 5’4” tall and weighs 140 pounds.  The average female American model is 5’11” and weighs 117 pounds.  Most female fashion models are thinner than 98% of American women (Smolak).  Models are used as sex symbols: whether they are walking down the runway or posing in a photo shoot, the main idea for them to achieve is anything sexual.  Our society revolves around sex from the Victoria’s Secret commercials on television, to a commercial that is focused on a cheeseburger such as Hardee’s most recent commercial featuring a woman in a bikini eating a burger seductively, completely unnecessary.  Sex is tied into everything.  Therefore, children are being raised in a highly sexualized society, believing they have to achieve the bodies portrayed on commercials or magazines and indulge in sex to be happy or accepted.  The media have belittled women to a point where it is acceptable to try and mirror what the media say to look like.  From a Biblical perspective, we as Christians need to emphasize true beauty comes from within.  1 Peter 3:3-4 tells us, “Do not let your adorning be external — the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear — but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.”

To summarize my points, women and future generations need to know the media have constructed worldviews that are not healthy to obtain, especially through eating disorders.  Choosing to live healthily and taking care of your body is important and necessary.  Trying to match some other person’s body that has been retouched is not only impossible but also harmful to oneself.

The first counterargument to my thesis claims eating disorders are biological or passed down through family genetics.  The basis of this idea is that neurotransmitters are linked to eating disorders shown by studies done primarily on the hypothalamus.  Specifically, the ventromedial and lateral hypothalamuses have been shown to direct eating behaviors in humans, as well as in laboratory animals.

The ventromedial hypothalamus has been called the satiety center.  When this part of the brain is stimulated, eating behavior stops, comparable to a feeling of being satisfied.  Conversely the lateral hypothalamus, when stimulated, correlates to eating behavior.  When functioning properly, these two areas operate to keep the body at a specific body weight, termed the set point.

However, damage to either of these regions can cause the set point to be altered.  It is the case then eating will reflect the new set point.  So if this new threshold is lower than normal, the animal can starve itself to death.  Decreasing the level of epinephrine in the ventromedial hypothalamus of rats has been shown to be interrelated with rats exhibiting anorexic behaviors.  Rats have been seen to adopt a low rate of eating, increase their rate of activity, reduce their carbohydrate intake, and respond with overeating.  Therefore, biological issues can cause eating disorders but that is not the solitary issue.  In order for any of what was said to be true, the hypothalamus must be stimulated.  Something must “spark” the change; it cannot happen by itself.  This disproves the counterargument because though there are traces of eating disorders being biological, in order for the disorder to happen the hypothalamus must be triggered.

This trigger could be a feeling of shamefulness or any other negative feeling.  The brain is a very powerful and complex organ.  With an overwhelming sense of never being enough, or believing one is overweight, one’s brain actually can increase the levels of serotonin, thus contributing to depression and emotions.  So while there may be genes that play a role in the level of serotonin within our brains (for some people), the emphasis on the media’s effects should not be dismissed.

The second key counterargument is media actually do not have any effect or influence in society.  Some people honestly believe every decision we make is our own and is not influenced by any opposing forces.  However, this is not true: media have a strong impact on society.  Richard Salent, former president of CBS News, says,  “Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.”  This shows the media do indeed have great power and are fully aware of it.

The public is exposed to programming carefully crafted to create thoughts in our minds, whether they are realistic or not.  For example, Reality television shows such as Jersey Shore utilize extreme sexual behavior and excessive drinking as a way to entice viewers into living a lifestyle like theirs.  Many young adults have since begun to practice that lifestyle, endangering themselves and others.  Every decision a person makes, including whether to make oneself throw up, or to stop eating and begin to exercise excessively, is influenced by someone or something else.  The Bible even acknowledges outside influences and how they are indeed dangerous.  Proverbs 4:13 tells us to guard our hearts because they are the wellsprings of life.  Romans 12:2 states to not conform to any patterns of the world or not be influenced by the world.  These examples are important because they show even before media began to have a large impact on society, struggling with conforming to the world and being a part of the world have always been issues.  Today, the world described in the Bible can be aligned with media and how they constantly exploit women through “photoshopped” and highly sexualized images with unnaturally thin statures.  It is unhealthy to compare oneself with such images and people, and women and upcoming generations need to be aware of the effects media have and be able to discern what is healthy and what is not.

It is important to be able to recognize advertisements with emaciated models and models who have been computer enhanced, advertisements that have a large person in them portrayed with negative character attributes, and advertisements that glorify images of people on diets, or advertisements that present people relying on food for stressful situations, loneliness, and frustrations.  Here are some examples how you can recognize unhealthy images, images worthy of protest.  If you find any of these qualities in media advertisements, you can contact the National Eating Disorder Association, which is an association dedicated to helping people with eating disorders and stopping media influences, who will then review your submission.  If they accept your submission for direct action, they will contact you within one week, and if they do not decide to take direct action, they will post all of the information on their Facebook page, which informs those who monitor their page.  In doing so, you will also be informed about harmful media messages and can help keep you aware of the media’s messages.  Partaking in this will help you take control of what messages you allow in your or your child’s life, and can even help other women you have not even met by reporting harmful advertisements and preventing others from seeing them and developing an eating disorder or prevent them from being encouraged to continue with an eating disorder.

Please contact the author for more detailed bibliographic information.

Higher Love: The Annotated Remix

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Christopher Rush

The following is a chapel address given April 20, 2012, with occasional musical accompaniment.

Entrance1

The title of this message is “Think About It: There Must Be Higher Love … Without It Life is Wasted Time … Bring Me a Higher Love … Where’s that Higher Love I’ve Been Thinking Of?”2  The subtitle this message is “Where is Chaka Khan when you need her?”3  I admit this is rather a lengthy title for a brief message, but it couldn’t really be helped.  I know what you’re thinking: why didn’t play that song as his entrance music instead of Sly and the Family Stone?  That’s certainly a good question, and the answer will undoubtedly be even better.  The answer is that it sets the mood quite well for what I want to talk about today: the nature of God’s higher love and the powerful ability of music to help us experience and delight in that love better than most anything else.  This will be done rather subtly, as a vast majority of the content of this message is taken from lyrics of songs.  See if you can identify all the songs used in this message.  As this opening song indicates, it is music that brings this worshipful experience about.  Music has always been closely tied to worship, communication, and thus loving God and one another: the Levitical tabernacle musicians; David’s role as court musician to soothe Saul; Elisha called for a musician in 2 Kings 3 to better hear the word of the Lord; Paul enjoins us in Ephesians 5 to speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (which is what I am doing to you here today); around God’s throne forever are beings singing and worshiping God.  These functions (worship, communication, praise) are all driven by one major impetus: higher love2.

Think About It: There Must Be Higher Love

Let us approach these thoughts on love through the framework of our title, beginning with the first line “think about it: there must be higher love.”  Immediately Brother Steve recalls to our attention love is connected to the intellect — he doesn’t say “feel about it,” or “emote about it,” or “sense it.”  He tells us to think about it.  Our memories are immediately drawn to Luke 10:27 and its synoptic fellows: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”  Loving the Lord with our minds is part of the primary commandment, the most important thing we are to do — this is the person we are supposed to be.  Love is not just an emotional component, though it partly is (and Brother Steve is also mindful of this when he shortly after this says to “look inside your heart and I’ll look inside mine,” in an effort to find this higher love).  It surely is partly emotional, since as human beings we cannot fully divide are emotive selves from our ratiocinative selves.  Sometimes we try, for various reasons and this can be temporarily fruitful, though to be fully human we must see everything wholly, from both sides; we always need to hear both sides of the story4.  This includes loving with our minds.  Since love is intellectual, love is rational, love is volitional, love is self-aware.  Since we have focused many times over the years on the intellectual nature of love, we can move from this notion of love being self-aware to the second aspect of our framing title: there must be higher love.

C.S. Lewis’s “argument from desire” may be applicable here5.  Lewis says we as human creatures primarily desire things because there exist satisfaction for those desires: we hunger because food exists to satisfy that hunger; we yearn for community because other people exist and there is God with whom to have community.  If a yearning exists innately for something apparently unfillable in this present existence, that should cause us to suspect another aspect to existence exists — perhaps not one in this present incarnation.  Though some argue against this, most of those counterarguments are built upon a materialistic presuppositional base combined with a neglect of Lewis’s emphasis on “innate” desire.  He’s not talking about the older child “oh, I wish I could fly” sort of nonsense — that’s not an innate thing.  Children are innately afraid of falling, not innately yearning to slip the surly bounds of earth and say “excuse me while I kiss the sky6.”  Perhaps the reason people yearn to live forever is because they, in fact, will.  Since we yearn for higher love, and surely we all do — we all yearn not just for love but a fully, wholly satisfying love that is divine7, transcendent, superior to the love we get even from our most intimately loved fellow humans — if Lewis’s argument is valid, and most rational people agree it is, as brother Steve says, “there must be higher love” — a satisfaction for this yearning exists.  It must exist — whether down in the heart (where? down in the heart8), hidden in the stars above, or overtly displayed in the stars above — but not just because we want it, since we have just been reminded to “think about it.”  It’s not there solely because we want it; it is already there, a priori, innate, uncreated, fully self-existent, and perhaps almost coincidently, just so happens to be the satisfaction to a deep-felt innate desire, one of the most primal, driving needs we as mortal beings have.  This love draws us to itself, lifting us higher and higher, and keeps on lifting us higher and higher, higher than we’ve ever been lifted before.  Once, we were downhearted, disappointment was our closest friend; but then when we met this higher love, disappointment disappeared and never showed its face again.  I said this love keeps on lifting us higher and higher9, intentionally and willingly.  Almost as if it is a personal being … but we shall get there soon enough.  Perhaps you are also wondering if this love can take you high enough — can it fly you over yesterday10?  Accepting all I’ve done and said11?  All of us get lost in the darkness; all of us do time in the gutter12.  You aren’t alone in wondering if Higher Love can build an emerald city with these grains of sand?  Will it take me places I’ve never known?  Will it make it all new that’s old?  It can do that; indeed, it can do that13.  Don’t turn your back on and slam the door on those12 who truly love you, banging their heads outside your wall14.  Turn around and stand and don’t be afraid to let your true colors show15.  The alternative, as we shall now see, is not good.

Without It, Life is Wasted Time

Brother Steve next tells us without this higher love, life is wasted time.  Not only must divine, transcendent love exist, but assuming it didn’t for a moment, life without it would not be worth living.  How miserable people without this Higher Love must be, to be created in the image of someone they have not met — not yet16.  Immediately our thoughts are taken to what many call the definitive love passage of the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13.  No matter how erudite or persuasive our communication abilities are, says St. Paul, even to the point of being able to converse with the angelic realm, without higher love our insights and offerings become substanceless cacophony.  Even were we to comprehend the mystical unity of knowledge and ideas so fully even Cardinal Newman was jealous17, without higher love our lucidity becomes silent18 and our perspicacity becomes mutely obtuse.  Were we to have faith that could crumble the mountains into the sea19 without higher love, we would be less voluminous than crumbled mountains scattered to the sea (and the mountains would win again20).  If we give ourselves away, and give ourselves away, and we give, and we give, and we give ourselves away21 even to the point of voluntary self-immolation, without higher love we have given nothing and we have gained nothing.  We need this higher love in everything we do but more than that it needs to be who we are.  We need this higher love brought to us, as Brother Steve says: bring me a higher love.  Continuing in 1 Corinthians, Paul encourages us this higher love has already come to us.

Bring Me a Higher Love

How Paul does it is something remarkable: transitioning seamlessly from superlative examples of the absence of this higher love, he metaphorically delineates what this higher love is.  But as N.T. Wright is so astute to remind us, Paul essentially always has the entirety of the Word of God in mind when he writes22 — thus, when Paul quotes or alludes to a particular verse he has the entire chapter or more in mind — and possibly things that weren’t even written down yet, being an apostle who got his revelation directly from God.  Thus, when Paul describes attributes of love it would be fatuous to doubt he has also in mind what was later transcribed for us by St. John in 1 John 4: God is Love.  Paul knew that even if he died before John wrote it.  Since Jesus is God, Jesus is love.  He won’t let you down, and I know He’s mine forever23.  Thus the following attributes are not about an abstract concept, not what some people call just an emotion, these are attributes of God Himself: Higher Love is patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not arrogant, not rude, does not insist on its own way (as Paul says in Philippians 2, as Jesus did not think His own innate equality with the Father something to be held on tightly, not that He was afraid of losing control, just that He knew emptying Himself for the salvation of us was perhaps a higher priority).  Higher Love does not laugh at what is not funny; it doesn’t wink at sin; it doesn’t rejoice at wrongdoing; it rejoices with the truth (again confirming the intellectual nature of love and its kinship to uniform reality).  Love broke the bonds and loosed the chains and carried the cross and took my shame and took my pain.  You know I believe it24.  Love believes all things (again, a sign of its intellectual community with what is, and love’s ability to see reality also for what it will be, not just for what it was).  Love never ends.  That’s a pretty remarkable litany of qualities of love as incarnated by Jesus — though perhaps it might even be more accurate to think about love as a kind of anthropomorphism of God Himself.

But then Paul starts to do something even more remarkable here: it’s not enough to just think of Jesus when we think of the attributes of Higher Love, though as we have said from the outset worship and abiding in love through living out this love is predominately what leisure and thus our purpose in life is.  Paul continues to tear down our immature comfort levels by reminding us of the evanescent nature of the sort of things we too-easily embrace or look to for identity and security: prophecies, languages, even knowledge itself (in the spiritual gift sense) —  our understandings of these, no matter how many terminal degrees we have attained in them, are actually pale, puny, shadowy versions of the real truth.  All the substance we think we are is in fact just flash.  We know reality, we know God, we know Higher Love — we love — partially, incompletely, ephemerally.  Later, in the life to come, in the next phase of eternity in which we already are, we will stop seeing each other, stop seeing ourselves, stop seeing God dimly, incompletely, in shadows; in the cold mirror of a glass, I see my reflection pass, see the dark shades of what I used to be.  I said Love rescue me25.  We will then see and live and love effulgently, completely, face-to-face.

We yearn for the sunshine of this Higher Love26 — can anybody find me somebody to love?27 we desperately cry.  Love is such an old-fashioned word, this dim world of superficial delight and lust says in response, attempting to dissuade us from Higher Love.  Higher Love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night and Higher Love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves28.  This is not easy to do.  The world would much rather have us apathetic toward Love than hate it — and sometimes we are there, too.  We don’t even care as restless as we are; we feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts29.  We must remember, though, that while we can only love partially now, but we can do it — Jesus came to give us Life and that abundantly — we have a down payment of Eternal Life in us now in the Holy Spirit, which is Jesus’ Spirit.  Higher Love has been brought to us.  Love will overcome; this love will make us men; love will draw us in to wipe our tears away30.  But we have to wait for its completion in the life to come.  The rest of it will be brought to us — or, perhaps more likely, we will be brought to this Higher Love when we have finished shuffling off this mortal coil31 and our curtain has been drawn and our hearts can go where our hearts now belong32, forwarding our mail to the place where the streets have no name33, a place that has to be believed in to be seen, where all that you fashion, all that you make, all that you build, and all that you break, all that you measure, all that you feel — all this you can leave behind; you’ve got to leave it behind34.  You can.  You will.  Higher Love is waiting on the other side.  It’s calling us even now!35  Leave behind the childish (not child-like36) ways of speaking, thinking, reasoning, and become mature, holy, elite (not just excellent) by dwelling in this Higher Love — knowing God, each other, ourselves, as we have been known by Higher Love all this time.  It’s a sort of homecoming35, you see.

This abnegation of our vision in the mirror is not easy to do, as we just said, nor is it easy to grasp.  Worlds are turning and we’re just hanging on, facing our fear and standing out there alone2 (at times, we feel).  We are partially in the dark, in enemy-occupied territory, where fear, the mind-killer37, is rampant and fear’s a powerful thing, baby — it can turn your heart black, you can trust; it’ll take your God-filled soul and fill it with devils and dust38 … if you let it.  But we must turn from fear.  Still there’s a yearning and it’s real to you and me, there must be someone who’s feeling for me.  Things look so bad everywhere in this whole world what is fair?  We walk blind and we try to see, falling behind in what could be2.  This is the danger as we go skating away on the thin ice of a new day39.

To respond to this, Paul now does perhaps the most remarkable thing — almost audacious — with this final verse of the chapter.  Faith — a great thing; impossible to live without it — you gotta have faith, faith, faith, I gotta have faith40.  Hope — a great thing; impossible to live without it.  Love — a great thing; impossible to live without it.  We turn away from fear, but we don’t turn to hope.  We don’t turn to faith.  The greatest of these, Paul tells us, is actually love!  Love is greater than faith; love is greater than hope.  Wowzah.  We turn from fear and embrace love.  As best we can, for as long as we can.  I can’t do it perfectly yet, because I’ve been a prisoner all my life and I can say to you we need this Higher Love to take us home because we don’t remember41 how to do it perfectly yet.  So where is that Higher Love I’ve been thinking of?2  It is here.  It is now42.

Where’s that Higher Love I’ve been Thinking of?

The words that I remember from my childhood still are true that there’s none so blind as those who will not see.  And to those who lack the courage and say it’s dangerous to try, well they just don’t know that love eternal will not be denied.  Yes I know it’s going to happen, I can feel you getting near.  And soon we’ll be returning to the fountain of our youth.  And if you wake up wondering, in the darkness He’ll be there — His arms will close around you and protect you with the Truth.  I know You’re out there somewhere, somewhere, somewhere; I know I’ll find You somehow, somehow, somehow; I know I’ll find You somehow and somehow I’ll return again to You43.  But oh, how I wish You were here44.  Right here, right now45.  Now that we know Higher Love is Jesus, and we know what Higher Love has done for us, we already know the answer to Brother Steve’s final question, though as we saw at the beginning of this brief exploration, he knew it already as well — it is both in our hearts and written in the sky above, though not as covertly as he suspected.  The Heavens declare the glory of God, as David says in Psalm 19.  Love is all around no need to waste it46.  It’s not really a question of where love is — we know it is here in part, we know it will be fulfilled later, we just have to wait for it.  Things will be just fine; you and I’ll just use a little patience47.  Brother Steve recognizes this himself: I will wait for it; I’m not too late for it; until then I’ll sing my song to cheer the night along2.  While we are in the long dark night of seeing in a mirror darkly, we are to sing a new song (see how this all ties together) and worship and wait patiently for the Lord.  How long do we sing this song?48  Until Higher Love comes and rescues us: until we can say I’ve conquered my past, the future is here at last, and I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see, the ruins to the right of me will soon have lost sight of me, love has rescued me25 — the Lord of Lords and King of Kings has returned to lead His children home to take us to the New Jerusalem49.

The issue, then, is what do we do in the meantime before the supper of the Mighty One49 is ready?  Every woman and every man needs to take a righteous stand, find the love that God wills and the faith that He commands38.  In the meantime we live a life of grateful worship, of genuine leisure, a life of reflecting however dimly the Higher Love in which we abide, the Higher Love with whom we have a personal relationship since love is a person.  It may feel like a battlefield50 sometimes, but love is a person.  A person who will return to take us home but for now maybe home is where the heart is given up to the One51 who has shown us what love is.  You want to know what love is?  I know He can show you52.  He already has — we celebrated it a few weeks ago, as we have said already.  So what do we do?  Who are we, while we live this life of love, of leisure? while we wait and sing our song?2  Let’s pull all these cords (chords?) together by looking at our final biblical song (in the sense of actually being in the Bible, since just about all the others songs alluded to this afternoon are biblical in the sense of being parallel with the Bible — and we all want to be parallel with the Bible): Psalm 116.

King David reveals great pain in the first stanza; in the midst of such pain and loss, his opening thoughts which recur throughout force us out of our complacency and the comfort of wallowing in our own miseries: I love the Lord, because He has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.  Because He has inclined His ear to me, therefore I will call on Him as long as I live.  David doesn’t require God to do anything — he doesn’t say “because God fixed all my problems, I will then worship Him and love Him” — so far all we know God has done was just listened to what David had to say.  That is enough for him; it is probably even enough for David that God exists.  Is that enough for us?  You are Who You are, God — that’s enough for me.  The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish.  Then I called on the name of the Lord: “Oh Lord,” I pray, “deliver my soul!”  As I have said elsewhen, pretty much all of you have lived lives far more difficult and painful than mine has been.  I don’t say this lightly, nor am I bragging: my life has been far easier than it probably should have been.  You don’t need me to tell you about the importance or even the difficulty of calling on the Lord and struggling to abide in Him when the going gets rough.  Most of the problems and pains in my life have been self-inflicted: a little bowling alley here, a little stop sign there, but nowhere near what most of you have already gone through in slightly less than half the time.  You can probably say even better than I, a posteriori, along with David the next stanza: Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.  The Lord preserves the simple; when I was brought low, He saved me.  The simplicity of David’s thoughts is so beautiful they almost hurt: here, too, are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron53.  But what David says next is almost shocking — we expect him to say, in our “work work work” mentality, in our culture that says “producing tangible, material goods is the only way to prove worth,” we expect David to say “get out there and do some good.  Get off your couch and start building bridges and purifying insalubrious water sources — do something to show how grateful you are to God for rescuing your life — go out there and ensure that rescuing wasn’t wasted.”  He says, rather, return, O my soul, to your rest; for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.  Be at peace, he says — get back to genuine leisure — be comforted once again that you are living a life you don’t deserve and enjoy it, delight in the things above, dwell in Love.  Return to your rest — that is why the Lord has saved us.  That’s why we can sleep while our beds are burning54 — we are commanded to return to rest, sing our song, wait and worship for Higher Love to fully return, because He is who He is and because He has dealt bountifully with us.

For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.  So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more55 — and yet God delivers us through them — you know that better than I.  So we walk and keep on walking with the Lord while we are still in the land of the living.  And we believe God is who He is, we believe God and what He has said even when we must acknowledge “I am greatly afflicted.”  All men are liars … no kidding.  Jesus made it Waterford® clear: in this life we will have trouble, we will be persecuted, we will be lied to, we will be defrauded, we will be cheated, we will be disappointed, we will be harassed, we will be intimidated — and that’s just from our friends.  We will agonize at sickness, at suffering, at loss, at death.  In this shadowy world of seeing and loving and living dimly, we will hurt, we will bend, we will break — but we are also to take heart, for Love has overcome it all.  Glancing ahead to verse 15, this is not something Jesus takes lightly: God does not shrug or yawn when those who stand up for Love51 are cut down in what to us is the prime of life.  He doesn’t because His Son stood up for Love and was cut down in what was seemingly the prime of His life.  I certainly don’t want to belittle or downgrade any of the loss, the scars, the wounds, the battles you have fought, but I do think it would be good for us to remember no matter how much pain we feel, how much hurt we experience, how much sorrow we endure, the worst thing that ever could possibly happen has already happened — and it didn’t happen to us.  The worst thing that could ever possibly happen would be if someone was perfect, sinless, blameless, who did nothing but heal and help and speak the truth in love and yet was somehow blamed, excoriated, tortured, and marred, who didn’t know sin let alone do it, to take sin upon Himself — not just one sin, not just the sins of one person, not just all the sins that had yet been committed up to that point, but every sin by every person, who ever did live, was living, had yet to live, all sins for all time, put upon Himself and become sin itself to take it all away.  That is Love.  The crucifixion of Jesus was the worst thing that could have ever happened.  We, in our utter, damnable self-centeredness think it was a great thing.  Oh happy day56, we say.  We call it Good Friday — how stupid a name is that?  Because God died and we don’t have to we say that is great — and it is, don’t get me wrong — I’m not ungrateful for life eternal; I just know we would do better remember the effects of this exemplar of Love are what are great — that Jesus rose from the dead, that He is alive, that sin is taken away, that Death has lost its sting — up from the grave He arose with a mighty triumph o’er His foe; He arose a victor from the dark domain, and He lives forever with His saints to reign.  He arose!  He arose!  Hallelujah!  Christ arose!57  That’s the happy day.  That is the “good” part.  The crucifixion itself is the worst thing that could have ever happened.  And that is why I am qualified to speak on Psalm 116: because I was there when they crucified my Lord.  I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.  I threw the dice when they pierced His side. … But I have seen Love conquer the Great Divide58.  Amazing Love — how can it be — that Thou my God shouldst die for me!59

What could we possibly do to follow a love like that?  David wonders the same thing in verse 12, the great turning point of the psalm, and one of the great questions in the Bible.  What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits to me?  What can I give back to God60, who has given me this life and the life to come?  This Higher Love that must exist, that does exist, that could not be conquered by death because no one actually killed Him, He laid his equality with the Father down, He laid his life down, and He took them back up again — what can I give back to Him?  The answer is so obvious it is almost embarrassing.  We give back to God that which He has given to us: life and love.  I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord; I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all of His people.  If it means living a life of reflecting Higher Love to the point of a painful death, so be it — it’s not anything more than Jesus has already done for me.  We must recognize who we are (we always have to know that first, before we can know what we want and why we are here61): O Lord, says David, king over a nation of millions of people, I am your servant.  I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.  You have broken my bonds.  You have loosed my chains.  You have carried the cross of my shame.  You took the pain24.  (It’s worth saying again.)  What do I do in reply?  I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the Lord.  I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all His people, in the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem, wherever I go, whatever I do, whoever I’m with, I will praise the Lord!  As this Love takes us higher and higher9, Brother and Sister Christians, there is a price for flight62.  Thanksgiving is a sacrifice because it means subordinating the sinful desires we want to delight in for the better delights of serving and praising the Lord; it is a sacrifice because we are living sacrifices, our lives are continuous (not continual) lives of singing, worshipping, living, and loving back to God the life and love He has given us.  Brother Steve says it so well: I could light the night up with my soul on fire / I could make the sun shine from pure desire / Let me feel that love come over me / Let me feel how strong it could be / Bring me that Higher Love2.

So we live a life of love.  This is the hallmark of the Christian.  This is the life, the attitude, the direction back to which music so easily refocuses our life.  The two greatest commandments we have seen are to love the Lord with everything we have, will all that we are (which has come from God at the first), and to love each other as ourselves.  This is how all those lonely people63 who are image bearers of someone they haven’t met yet will know we are Christians and what it means to be a Christian — by our love for one another, said Jesus when He was exhorting us to take heart in this dark world that He has overcome.  Paul’s declaration love was greater than faith and hope in 1 Corinthians 13 is not so audacious after all.  The world does not know we are Christians because of our faith.  You can’t see faith (and the world is a superficial place, in case you haven’t noticed).  The world does not know we are Christians because of our hope.  Lots of people have hope.  Though optimists seem far outnumbered by pessimists, it isn’t hope in future restoration or glory or a better life to come that truly distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian.  They will know who we are, they will know Who is in us, they will know what we are for (preferably not what we are against, at least initially) by our love64 — by our manifestation of Higher Love, our love for each other, for ourselves, for God, and for them.  Bring me that Higher Love.

And when this Higher Love has been brought to us, by us getting back65, being reunited with this Higher Love (and it feels so good66) — what we that be like?  When we all get to Heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be!  When we all see Jesus, we’ll sing and shout the victory!67  When faith becomes sight (oh Lord haste that day!68), when we stop seeing and living and loving in a mirror darkly and see and live and love face-to-face (not just face-to-face with Jesus but finally face-to-face with each other: we look at each other, wondering what the other is thinking, but we never say a thing69 — this will be replaced by the full, selfless, agape love we should have been loving each other with all this time).  Though, certainly, it is in our best interest, as we’ve said, while we can now, to take off our masks70 and fill each other up with light, Jesus, faith, spirit, joy, love, now71!  You got to live while you are alive.  But how will it be when we are there, when we get back to where we once belonged65 … party? karamu? fiesta? forever?72  All of that and more, for the Higher Love as it (He) continues to conform us to Himself will transform our existence into73 … the high life!

You know, it used to seem to me that my life ran on too fast, and I had to take it slowly just to make the good parts last.  But when you’re born to run it’s so hard to just slow down, so don’t be surprised to see me back in that bright part of town73.  When the Higher Love rescues us and returns us Back in the High Life Again what will that look like you ask?  We’ll have ourselves a time and we’ll dance ’til the morning sun, and we’ll let the good times come in and we won’t stop ’til we’re done73.  And considering when we’ve been there ten thousand years bright shining as the sun, we’ll have no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun74 … I don’t think the good times will stop coming in nor will we stop dancing and singing and living and loving for … well … ever.  We’ll be back in the high life again.  All the doors I closed one time (and I’ve closed more than my share) will open up again.  We’ll be back in the high life again.  All the eyes that watched us once (that great cloud of witnesses) will smile and take us in.  And we’ll drink and dance with one hand free and have the world so easily.  You know we’ll be a sight to see back in the high life again73.

In the meantime, while there is time, let’s go out and feel everything.  We must live while we can and drink our cup of laughter.  The finer things keep shining through, the way my soul gets lost in you.  The finer things I feel in me, the golden dance life could be.  Keep shining.  We go so fast, why don’t we make it last.  Life is glowing inside you and me.  Come out and dance with me75.  Come see that Higher Love is alive and well and lifting us higher and higher9 and while we sing our song, dance our dance, live our lives, and love this Higher Love to everyone and especially Him Who first gave it to us, we know soon and very soon76 this Higher Love will return for us and take us back to the high life again73.

Prayer

Lord, you have heard our voice and we love you.  We do not want to overrule your patience but come back for us soon, please.  You have delivered us from death — help us to return to our rest.  As we sing our songs and dance our dances, as we live the lives You have bountifully given us to live, help us Lord love one another, love ourselves, love You with a Higher Love.  And we patiently yet yearningly wait that day when you will rescue us fully, so we can think fully, see fully, talk fully, worship fully, love fully — each other and you, face-to-face forevermore  Oh, I want to be there in Your eyes11.  When the finer things will shine through forever, as our souls get lost in you75 forever, as we come to know and worship and love you increasingly more accurately forever, when we will be back in the high life again, we’ll have ourselves a time, and we’ll dance ’til the morning sun73 (which will never set, truly, on your empire77) and we’ll let the good times come in, and we won’t stop ’til we’re done, when we will drink and dance with one hand free, and have the world so easily, you know we will be a sight to see, back in the high life again thanks to your Higher Love73.  Lord, bring us this Higher Love2.  Amen and amen.

Works Referenced

N.B.: The artist listed is the version in mind when this message was written.

  1. “I Wanna Take You Higher,” Sly & the Family Stone
  2. “Higher Love,” Steve Winwood
  3. See (hear) 2
  4. “Both Sides of the Story,” Phil Collins
  5. See ch. “Hope” in Book 3, Christian Behaviour of Mere Christianity
  6. “Purple Haze,” Jimi Hendrix
  7. “Have I Told You Lately,” Rod Stewart
  8. “Down In My Heart,” Kids Praise!
  9. “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” Jackie Wilson
  10. “High Enough,” Damn Yankees
  11. “In Your Eyes,” Peter Gabriel
  12. “The Pass,” Rush
  13. “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” Meat Loaf
  14. “Outside the Wall,” Pink Floyd
  15. “True Colors,” Phil Collins
  16. “She Talks to Angels,” The Black Crowes
  17. Idea of a University, Cardinal John Henry Newman, esp. Discourse V, “Knowledge its Own End”
  18. “Silent Lucidity,” Queensrÿche
  19. “Stand By Me,” Ben E. King
  20. “The Mountains Win Again,” Blues Traveler
  21. “With or Without You,” U2
  22. E.g., Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision
  23. “Jesus is Love,” The Commodores
  24. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” U2 (lyrics taken from concert performances, especially Vertigo 05: Live from Milan)
  25. “Love Rescue Me,” U2
  26. “Sunshine of Your Love,” Cream
  27. “Somebody to Love,” Queen
  28. “Under Pressure,” Queen
  29. “1979,” Smashing Pumpkins
  30. “Sparkle,” Līve (emphasis added)
  31. Hamlet, III.i.75, William Shakespeare
  32. “Reunion,” Collective Soul
  33. “Where the Streets Have No Name,” U2
  34. “Walk On,” U2
  35. “A Sort of Homecoming (Danny Lanois Remix),” U2
  36. “Divided We Stand,” M*A*S*H
  37. Dune, Frank Herbert
  38. “Devils & Dust,” Bruce Springsteen
  39. “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day,” Jethro Tull (cf. “The Thin Ice,” Pink Floyd)
  40. “Faith,” George Michael
  41. “Take Me Home,” Phil Collins
  42. “It.,” Genesis
  43. “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere,” The Moody Blues
  44. “Wish You Were Here,” Pink Floyd
  45. “Right Here, Right Now,” Jesus Jones (cf. “Right Now,” Van Halen)
  46. “Love is All Around,” Paul Williams (theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
  47. “Patience,” Guns N’ Roses
  48. “40,” U2
  49. “Supper’s Ready,” Genesis
  50. “Love is a Battlefield,” Pat Benatar
  51. “They Stood Up for Love,” Līve
  52. “I Want to Know What Love Is,” Foreigner
  53. C.S. Lewis’s remarks about The Lord of the Rings
  54. “Beds Are Burning,” Midnight Oil
  55. “Tears, Idle Tears,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  56. “Happy Day,” Tim Hughes
  57. “Christ Arose,” Robert Lowry
  58. “When Love Comes to Town,” U2
  59. “And Can It Be That I Should Gain,” Charles Wesley
  60. Cf. transition between “Bad” and “Where the Streets Have No Name,” U2 from the Elevation 2001: Live from Boston DVD
  61. Cf. Babylon 5
  62. “Sister Christian,” Night Ranger
  63. “Eleanor Rigby,” The Beatles
  64. “They’ll Know We are Christians by Our Love,” Peter Scholtes (sometimes called “We Are One in the Spirit”)
  65. “Get Back,” The Beatles
  66. “Reunited,” Peaches & Herb
  67. “When We All Get to Heaven,” Eliza E. Hewitt
  68. “It Is Well with My Soul,” Horatio Spafford
  69. “Ants Marching,” Dave Matthews Band
  70. “Ghost Story,” Sting
  71. “Fill Her Up,” Sting
  72. “All Night Long (All Night),” Lionel Richie
  73. “Back in the High Life Again,” Steve Winwood
  74. “Amazing Grace,” John Newton (this verse attributed to Harriet Beecher Stowe)
  75. “The Finer Things,” Steve Winwood (cf., “Soul Singing,” The Black Crowes)
  76. “Soon and Very Soon,” Andrae Crouch
  77. Saying attributed to various world empires over the centuries, notably Xerxes’ Persian Empire, Charles V’s Holy Roman Empire, and Queen Victoria’s British Empire

The Glorious History of the Dolphin

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Erik Lang

Consider the dolphin.  We’ve all seen Flipper, the loveable rescue dolphin who fights crime and injustices upon his reef.  We love the cheerful chips, whistles, and crackles made by this playful creature and oftentimes dream of blithely tossing fish into their appreciative open mouths.  At least I do.  But do we know everything about the dolphin?  How has this animal impacted cultures of the past?  How does the dolphin behave with the rest of the world?  What is the dolphin exactly?  Let’s find out.

To begin this adventure, we must go back to ancient times.  Dolphins make their way into many different societies like Greece, Hawaii, India, and the rest of the world.  Dolphins are considered by many to be magical creatures, friends of the gods, and highly intelligent.  The classic Greek myth of the dolphin begins when Dionysius, the god of wine and debauchery, is abducted by Etruscan pirates thinking him a rich prince whom they could ransom.  After out at sea for a time, Dionysius caused grape vines to grow on the ships’ riggings he then used to make an obscene amount of wine.  The wasted pirates were at the mercy of the god of wine.  He turned the oars into serpents, frightening the pirates into the water where Dionysius left them to drown.  The pitiful cries of the pirates softened Dionysius’ heart, so he changed them into dolphins.  Ever since then, dolphins have been helpful creatures and friends of man, seeking to redeem themselves for angering Dionysius.  The seafarers during the age of exploration considered the dolphins to be good fortune in travels.  Dolphins oftentimes would leap around ships and guide them through unknown waters into safe harbors.  In Minoan and Maori (Pacific Islander) myths, the dolphin was a messenger of the gods and is oftentimes seen on reliefs, murals, and pottery being ridden by ancient deities.

The average dolphin weighs between 440-660 pounds and is around eight feet in length.  These specifications are pertinent to the bottle-nose dolphin, the one that is all gray and featured in the Flipper television series.  There are actually forty different species of dolphins, all of which have differing weights and lengths but are close to the bottlenose dolphin.  The smallest dolphin weighs about 90 pounds and is four feet long.  About five species of dolphin live in fresh water sources; the rest in oceans.  Dolphins are carnivores, eating mostly fish, squid, and some crustaceans.  Luckily for the dolphin, no other ocean predator really pursues the dolphin as a food source.  An occasional shark may get in a skirmish with one, but other than these few and far between instances, the dolphins lives a peaceful life free from worry.  The largest cause of dolphin death is the human, in reality.  Dolphins near Japan are killed for eating.  The Japanese decimate Pacific dolphin populations frequently.  Near the Balkan countries, native fishermen see dolphins as a competition for fish and a nuisance.  Hundreds of dolphins in the area are killed and their fat used for oil.  Dolphins are killed inadvertently by humans, too.  Many get trapped in fishing nets, and some dolphins choke on waste thrown in the ocean.

Many scientists believe dolphins possess intelligence to rival men.  This is dumb.  It’s probably the same people who say monkeys are our cousins.  Who’s in the cage/tank, then?  But dolphins do have a higher intellect than most animals, capable of compassion, playful interaction, even vanity.  Dolphins have a brain size relatively big for their body, bigger than a chimpanzee’s, for instance.  Dolphins are able to mimic human gestures like waving.  They also recognize commands and many words humans use after much repetition and respond by chirping, whistling, or whatever they do.  There are countless cases of dolphins saving humans from drowning or even sharks.  These heroic creatures seem to have an affinity for humans and crave their attention.  In an experiment to test dolphin intelligence, marine biologists placed a mirror in a dolphin tank and watched the reactions of the animals.  The dolphins immediately noticed their reflections and made faces at the mirror, blowing bubbles and doing somersaults.  In a further experiment, scientists marked a dolphin with a marker its side and put it back in the tank.  The dolphin immediately swam over to the mirror and stared at its new tattoo.

What many don’t realize is that the Orca (Killer Whale) is a member of the dolphin family.  Orcas are more aggressive than dolphins.  They hunt seals and even sharks and tend to swim in more open waters.  These great mammals have absolutely no predators.  Nothing hunts them, not even humans.  Orcas have a similar relationship to humans as dolphins do.  In SeaWorld, the Orca Shamu interacts with human trainers and members of the audience in fun shows.  They do have a sort of affinity for humans, not to the extent of dolphins — but still very playful, nonetheless.  Orcas are bigger and more powerful animals, and orcas do know it.  Sometimes, orcas attack humans thinking them seals or out of frustration from excessive human dominance.  There have been several cases of SeaWorld orcas attacking human trainers with some cases resulting in fatalities.  The Killer Whale Kilitik has had three documented cases of killing trainers.

So I encourage all to find a dolphin somehow and play with it; the same for an orca, although that one may be more difficult.  Wild dolphins don’t even run away from you, so there’s really no excuse, unless you can’t swim.  Right here in the James River there are a veritable plethora of porpoises, a close cousin of the dolphin.  They can be a viable substitute for the dog of the sea.  It is an experience that cannot be rivaled.  Pursue your passion, and experience the amazing companionship of the dolphin.

Forgotten Gems: The Distance to Here

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Christopher Rush

From There to Here

Līve’s fourth studio album, The Distance to Here, is a very full, high-quality album.  Many of course will think it inferior to their sophomore effort (while called Līve), Throwing Copper — and it is difficult to disagree, in one sense.  It is hard to compete with “Lightning Crashes,” “Pillar of Davidson,” “All Over You,” “Iris,” et al. Though, as we saw last time with Sting’s Mercury Falling, it’s just quite possible this effort from Līve, despite the lesser critical acclaim, may be a better, more solid album.  Certainly the “lows” of The Distance to Here are not as low as the “lows” of Throwing Copper.  Even if the “highs” of The Distance to Here are not as high as the “highs” of Throwing Copper, it would still be a more balanced, thoroughly solid album — but again, the point is not to place albums from the same artist in competition with each other.  The point here is to remind ourselves of forgotten gems, one of which is certainly Līve’s 1999 album The Distance to Here.

“The Dolphin’s Cry”

The initial a capella opening is gruff enough and soulful enough to remind us the reasons why Līve were so popular: the band itself was a mix of pounding rhythms and driving sounds, more often than not coupled with intelligent and imaginative lyrics — it is music, after all.  The figurative language lead singer/songwriter Ed Kowalczyk invokes in this song are particularly appealing, in a mysteriously intriguing way: “rose garden of trust,” “swoon of peace,” for examples.  As with so many high-quality songs, the main theme of this debut song is love: “Love will lead us, all right / Love will lead us, she will lead us.”  I see no problem personifying Love as a female for this song: Wisdom is personified as a woman throughout Proverbs.  Kowalczyk further reminds us of the importance of living wisely while we are alive, driven by love — quite reminiscent of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13: “Life is like a shooting star / It don’t matter who you are / If you only run for cover, it’s just a waste of time. / We are lost ’til we are found / This phoenix rises up from the ground / And all these wars are over.”  It’s hard to argue with the veracity of these ideas: it’s unlikely Kowalczyk didn’t have “Amazing Grace” partially in mind, but even if he didn’t, that we think of it when listening to this song supports its own worth.  In a way, we are all like phoenixes, needing to be reborn through love, as the war-like enmity between us and God is ended through this rebirth (as St. Paul emphasizes in Ephesians 2).  That the song is accompanied by a varied, driving music line is a nice bonus.

“The Distance”

I hesitate to say this song is anti-religion.  Religion has gotten a bit of a rough treatment of late, and we would do well to remember “the place where religion finally dies” is Hell, not Heaven.  Even so, there is undeniably an emphasis on personal experience — not necessarily “religious” in a watered-down, meaningless way we sometimes have when skeptically talking of “religious experiences,” but in a personalized, individualized, isolated event in which the Ruler of Heaven reaches down to the narrator in a palpable way.  “I’ve been to pretty buildings, all in search of You / I have lit all the candles, sat in all the pews / The desert had been done before, but I didn’t even care / I got sand in both my shoes and scorpions in my hair,” says the narrator in verse 1.  In a way he is right: it’s not always the right thing for us to do to mimic the experiences or lifestyles of other people who may have had some version of “success” in such a way (what does Jesus say to Peter, after all, but focusing on following Him the way Peter is supposed to, not just mimicking or worrying about how John is supposed to follow Him?).  The chorus explains the narrator’s realization in trying to do faith simply by copying the motions and superficially understood lifestyles (i.e., not understood at all) of “religious people”: “Oh, the distance is not do-able / In these bodies of clay my brother / Oh, the distance, it makes me uncomfortable / Guess it’s natural to feel this way / Oh, let’s hold out for something sweeter / Spread your wings and fly.”  I hesitate, likewise, to say the chorus is in favor of some ascetic rejection of the physical — more likely the song is reminding us genuine spirituality is not just a superficial “going through the motions,” “do what they do” sort of life.  From a purely physical/material perspective, the distance between us and God should be frightening — it truly is unsurpassable simply by our own finite, physical endeavors.  What the narrator (and we all) needs comes to him in verse 2: “My car became the church and I / The worshipper of silence there / In a moment peace came over me / And the One who was beatin’ my heart appeared.”  The parallel to Elijah’s post-mountaintop experience is inescapable.  Few better descriptions of God (“the One who was beatin’ my heart”) exists in rock music.  Kowalczyk reminds us it isn’t the expensiveness of the pilasters or the amount of sculptures adorning the walls that make a building a church: it’s the presence of God that makes a lost soul a dwelling place for the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Peace, the One who is beatin’ all our hearts.  The final outro thoughts, “This distance is dreamin’ / We’re already there,” are certainly true for a post-justification regenerate Christian.  In a real way, the distance between us and God is no longer genuine distance — we only experience it, dreamlike, in a mirror darkly, because we are not fully glorified yet.  We have dwelling in us a down payment of Eternal Life.  We are already in Heaven tonight in a significant way.  This is a truly great song.

“Sparkle”

“Love will overcome / This Love will make us men / Love will draw us in / To wipe our tears away.”  That is self-explanatory, isn’t it?  Any song about turning from hate to faith, driven by Love, declaring “the Giver became the Gift” (again, what exquisite ways Kowalczyk, for all his faults, describes God), encouraging us not to wait for more miracles or more Messiahs or wasting more chances — but see and embrace this Love now … how can it go wrong?  It can’t.  This one doesn’t.

“Run To the Water”

After three superb songs, it would be difficult for any band not from Dublin or Stockbridge to continue the streak.  Līve, somehow, does it superlatively with “Run to the Water.”  Superficially, the song sounds like a Cosmic Humanist/pantheist sort of ditty — but I refute such a claim.  The chorus is too much like Isaiah 55:1 to be anything but truth: “Run to the water and find me there / Burnt to the core but not broken / We’ll cut through the madness / Of these streets below the moon / With a nuclear fire of love in our hearts.”  I hope someday I have a nuclear fire of love in my heart for God and the things above (the things of Love).  The bridge makes the veracity of the song doubly clear: “Yeah, I can see it now Lord / Out beyond all the breakin’ of waves and the tribulation / It’s a place and the home of ascended souls / Who swam out there in love.”  The outro again, if a third witness be necessary, solidifies the intellectual, emotional complex of greatness that is this song: “Rest easy, baby, rest easy / And recognize it all as light and rainbows / Smashed to smithereens and be happy / Run to the water and find me there, oh / Run to the water.”  I’m starting to realize I don’t listen to this album enough myself.

“Sun”

We sometimes get the impression songs that are too fast can’t have much depth to them, in part because the tempo and most likely the duration of the song preclude much profundity of insight — or, if any impressive bits of terse erudition occur, the brevity of the song prevents much if any development of said terse inkling.  Such is the case with “Sun,” but its brief treatment of undeveloped thoughts works well somehow.  Musically, it is an appreciated variation being so quick and driving, especially since after this number the album mellows out tempo-wise for most of its remainder.  Lyrically, considering the Biblical parallelism so much of the album thus far has displayed, it would not be amiss to think the repetition of “sun” should not allow us to also think of “Son,” at least once in a while — nor would it be reading too much into the song to think Kowalczyk is also thinking of Jesus as the light of the world, especially in the chorus: “Sun sun merciful one / Sun sun / Sun sun won’t you lay down your light on us / Sun sun.”  Certainly it would be easy to ridicule such a spiritual treatment of the chorus, favoring a literal interpretation, solely (if you’ll allow the expression).  The verses, though, have too much (albeit brief) intellectual leaning toward a richer experience of the chorus: the verses are all about the need to recognize the material world (and this present incarnational experience of it) for what it is, allowing it its limitations and demanding we look beyond it to something more spiritual, more celestial, more meaningful, driven by “the force and the fire of love / That’s takin’ over my mind / Wakin’ me up / Obligin’ me to the sun / Obligin’ me to the sun” the narrator says at the end of verse two.  In verse three, we are enjoined to satisfy our earthly, human desires in an appropriate way while we are in this incarnation, “But don’t eat the fruit ‘too low’ / Keep climbin’ for the kisses on the other side” — the other side of existence, the spiritual side of life.  The end of the song says “All we need is to come into the sun / We’ve been in the dark for so long / All I need, all we need, all I need, all we need, yeah!”  That isn’t inaccurate.  So far it is at best difficult to find fault with this album.

“Voodoo Lady”

And then comes “Voodoo Lady.”  Admittedly, the low point of the album, though only because of the inexplicably salty lyrics.  At least it isn’t as bad as “Waitress” from Throwing Copper, which is admittedly a mild backhanded sort of compliment.  Musically, the song is skillfully done and musically distinct from the rest of the album; it captures a Bayou Voodoo sinister mysterious atmosphere well without descending into too much darkness (it is still melodic and digestible, musically) — it is darker than Graceland, but not too dark.  The lyrics, though, are off-putting.  “It’s got that word in it,” as Frank says.  Again, we aren’t here to super-spiritualize this album and “make it safe” by tacking on Bible verses.  The earlier songs, though, are too close to the verses mentioned to be over-spiritualizing it.  This song reminds me of King Saul’s encounter with the witch of Endor, but I’m not claiming Kowalczyk had that in mind.  It seems to have that same sort of feel: dark, inappropriate, sinful, yet something true and surprising happens in the midst of all this haze and no one was really prepared for it, even if it was supposedly what they said they wanted to happen.  Still and all, you wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you skipped this one.  I usually do, since I’ve heard it before.

“Where Fishes Go”

This song does an impressive job of both maintaining the mood of the previous, somewhat disappointing, song while also reviving the better lyrical mentality of the songs before it.  Though the tone of the song is one of irritation (in that the narrator has “found God / And He was absolutely nothin’ like me”), we shouldn’t be surprised when people find God does not match their inferior expectations — not everyone reacts with an upsurge of beautification.  Some are, justly to an extent, even more downcast and frustrated, confronted with the realization their perceptions of reality have been altogether incorrect for the entire duration of their lives heretofore.  Light dispels the darkness; it doesn’t make it feel better.  The sad part of the song is that we are to understand the unfortunate nature of the narrator’s somewhat cowardly reaction — fleeing from the Light of God to hide in the sea “’cause that’s where fishes go / When fishes get the sense to flee.”  We take the part of the chorus: “Whatcha doin’ in this darkness baby? / When you know that love will set you free. / Will you stay in the sea forever? / Drownin’ there for all eternity / Whatcha doin’ in this darkness baby? / Livin’ down where the sun don’t shine / Come on out into the light of love / Don’t spend another day / Livin’ in the sea.”  On another note, this album was actually among the first ideas I had for journal articles over a year ago when we began Redeeming Pandora, but as the lyrics of this song (and the pervasive beach/sea/ocean motifs throughout the album) indicate, I knew it would be too soon, considering Brian’s death.  Even almost two years later, it is still difficult to write about lyrics such as these, but we press on, knowing both the utter correctness and necessity of thinking about these ideas, comforted in part by the knowledge Brian is much better off than we are anyway.  Don’t let the people you know stay out in the sea of darkness any longer.  As Stevie Smith reminds us elsewhere: they aren’t waving … they’re drowning.

“Face and Ghost (The Children’s Song)”

The tempo slows down again quite a bit, as much of the latter half of the album does.  Lyrically, the song is another impressive collection of tensions, conflicting perceptions, ambiguities, and paradoxes.  The pervasive motifs of the sun, turning from darkness to light, the distractions of the ocean and the void, the mysterious place where the sky meets the land, all come again in this reflective yet yearning-filled song.  The chorus of questions is something we all long for, perhaps increasingly so the further away from the simplicity of youth (innocence) we get: “Can you hear the children’s song? / Can you take me to that place? / Do you hear the pilgrim’s song? / Can you take me there?”  We all want to go “high above the lamentation upon the desert plane,” where “the darkness turns to light.”  I told you this album was worth listening to.

“Feel the Quiet River Rage”

With a brief return to a fast pace and driving lyrical presentation, Līve grabs us out of our wistful pensiveness with a reminder sometimes pain and water are good things: let’s not be afraid to “suffer the wound” and “never turn from love” and “never turn to hate.”  We need to tear down the walls we construct to hide from the storm of living in a world that hates and fears us — that can do more harm to others than it can do good for us.  “Tear it down and suffer the wound.”  The River of Life, the River of Love has done the saving — let it flow; remember it is still flowing, even though the world is trying to be too loud for us to hear the quiet river rage.

“Meltdown”

Most likely the most abstruse song on the album, “Meltdown” also makes good sense if taken from the hermeneutical perspective we have taken thus far (that Līve is speaking truth more often than not).  God is a consuming fire, is He not? Moses and the burning bush? the Pillar of Fire by night for the Israelites in the wilderness?  Perhaps the song is about the revivifying effects of being in a committed relationship with a woman — but that doesn’t take away from the possibility that “We’re in a spiritual winter / And I long for the one who is / Fire!” makes a good deal of sense spiritually as well.  “How could it be you’ve graced my night? / Like a pardon from the Governor / Like a transplant from the donor / Like a gift from the one who is / Fire! / Amongst the dreamers / You are in my heart.”  Sounds pretty much like spiritual justification to me.  That would make the eponymous “meltdown” actually a good thing (perhaps the best thing) — the spiritual winter, the heart of stone, all has been melted down by the One who is Fire.

“They Stood Up for Love”

Regardless of what the music video implies (since we all know much if not most of the time music videos are out of the creative hands of the artists themselves), this song is a completely true and possibly the best song on the album, which is a bold claim considering the insufficient praise given the album thus far.  “We spend all of our lives goin’ out of our minds / Looking back to our birth, forward to our demise.”  Instead we should be the people who “stood up for love,” who “live in the light.”  I want to be the person who says “I give my heart and soul to the One.”  We are inheritors of a great obligation, from Jesus and Stephen through the Apostles and generations of the Cloud of Witnesses who have stood up for Love, to the kids at Columbine and Virginia Tech and all our brothers and sisters around the world living a much more difficult life for Love than we can even conceive.  Let us not let them down.  Home, indeed, is where the heart is given up to the One.

“We Walk in the Dream”

The more I am trying to convince you how great this album is the more I am proving it to myself.  For this penultimate song, I’ll just let the lyrics of Ed Kowalczyk do the talking (you can imagine how much better it is when accompanied with the rest of Līve’s music — but then stop imagining by actually listening to this song and the rest of this forgotten gem of an album):

“Dance With You”

It would be awfully disappointing for this album to end with a Cosmic Humanist sort of number, making us rethink all the interpretations and seemingly genuine lyrical offerings we have enjoyed throughout this outstanding album.  And it is easy to feel that here: we can too easily get distracted by Kowalczyk’s use of “goddess” and “karmic” and wag a finger and say “nope, not Christian.  Karma and goddesses are not Christian.”  There’s no arguing that, but I don’t think Kowalczyk is using “goddess” for “God” — I’m pretty sure it’s just a nice way of referring to the lady he’s with — if it is an anthropomorphic description of the setting sun … well, so what?  Tolkien, Homer, everybody calls the sun a woman once in a while.  Why not Ed Kowalczyk this one time?  And “karma” means “action.”  Do we dispute the notion our actions in this life affect the life to come?  After an album of oceans and rivers in conflict, the narrator is sitting on the beach, finally at peace, at one with God and nature (that can’t be a bad thing to desire, can it?), “aglow with the taste / Of the demons driven out / And happily replaced / With the presence of real love / The only one who saves.”  You can’t truly find fault with that, can you?  Read the chorus: “I wanna dance with you / I see a world where people live and die with grace / The karmic ocean dried up and leave no trace / I wanna dance with you / I see a sky full of the stars that change our minds / And lead us back to a world we could not face.”  I’m pretty sure I want that, too.  And if it takes the language of India to recognize this, what’s wrong with that?  Verse two is an excellent description of the futility of life without God: “The stillness in your eyes / Convinces me that I / I don’t know a thing / And I been all around the world and I’ve / Tasted all the wines / A half a billion times / Came sickened to your shores / You show me what this life is for.”  That last line is definitely one of my favorites of all time.  The bridge continues this notion: “In this altered state / Full of so much pain and rage / You know we got to find a way to let it go.”  We have to face this world now, while we are here — but that does not stop us from seeing the world, the life, the love to come.

And Back Again

I think I have just convinced myself The Distance to Here is a better album, with only one weak link (how many albums are truly elite from beginning to end, even “greatest hits” albums?), than Throwing Copper .  Perhaps that is a bold claim, and as we’ve said throughout, we aren’t trying to set up any artists’ oeuvre against itself in competition, but I think the album supports such a claim (their sixth album, Birds of Pray, is good as well — very Trekian, the way their even-numbered albums are considered better than the odd).  Nor do I think it is too much to claim listening to this forgotten gem of an album (with or without “Voodoo Lady”) is an act of worship.  If you haven’t yet listened to and enjoyed and worshiped God through Līve’s The Distance to Here, you should get on that now.  You will be better for it.

The Spark of the Nuclear Age

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David Lane

Every year countries develop new and different experimental weapons and methods to achieve respect and fear from other nations in a time of war.  These experiments contribute heavily to the advancement of society, the progress of mankind, and the expansion of nations.  America has had such an experiment and development in science.  The Manhattan Project, the atomic bombing of Japan, and the aftermath of the bomb were pivotal moments in world events.

On the second of August in 1939, Albert Einstein and others wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt telling of the Nazis’ attempts to purify uranium-235.  This process would be used to create an atomic bomb that had the potential to destroy cities in a matter of seconds.  Shortly after the letter, the United States began the multi-billion-dollar assignment known as The Manhattan Project.  The Manhattan Project was an extensive scientific experiment that could, in fact, change the world of war forever (Purohit).

The goal of the project was to develop a formula for refining uranium-235.  It was not to create the actual bomb, as many mistakenly think.  Over the span of six years, 1939-1945, more than two billion dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project.  Some of the most brilliant men on the planet were working together to develop formulas for refining uranium.  The hardest part of creating the project was to produce enough “enriched” uranium to sustain a chain reaction for a certain amount of time.  A huge enrichment laboratory was made in Tennessee.  An extraction system was developed that could separate the very useful U-235 and the completely useless U-238 isotopes.  Robert Oppenheimer was the chief among the master minds who unleashed the atom bomb.  He oversaw the project from beginning to completion ( Bellis).  Progress on the project was slow and uneventful until August of 1942.  At this time The Manhattan Project was reorganized and placed under the control of the United States Army.  The official name of the project was actually The Manhattan Engineer District.  More than one hundred and forty thousand civilians worked at various locations on The Manhattan Project.  Some of these workers did not know what they were working on.  The project was extremely classified.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked America at Pearl Harbor.  This attack on American soil sparked a war in the Pacific.  Almost immediately, on December 8, 1941, America responded with a declaration of war on Japan.  President Roosevelt ordered the atomic bomb after getting word the bomb could be made and The Manhattan Project was indeed successful.  Colonel J.C. Marshall was told to set up the top secret assignment of creating an atomic bomb so powerful it could destroy a city (Gonzales 33).  Two different bombs were produced through this assignment.  Both of the bombs worked differently.  The bombs were named “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.”  “Little Boy” was smaller than “Fat Man” and not as powerful (59).  On July 16, 1945, a test bomb was unleashed at 5:29 in the morning.  Many scientists believed the bomb would not work.  Some prayed it would not because they knew the power it could have and were afraid of the destruction the bomb could cause.  Nevertheless, the bomb succeeded in the test.  The explosion was massive, and the flash was blinding.  Later newspapers said a blind girl could see the flash from one hundred and twenty miles away.  The bomb was ready.  America had in its possession an item that could truly destroy a city along with millions of lives (Purohit).

Many of the creators of the terrifying bomb had mixed reactions.  Some believed it should not be used.  Many immediately signed petitions saying the “monster” should not be unleashed.  Robert Oppenheimer was extremely excited about the success of the project but was also very scared.  He quoted a fragment of the Bhagavad Gita by saying, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  Isidor Rabi, another extremely important contributor to the creation of the bomb, thought equilibrium in nature had been mixed up, as if mankind had become a threat to the world it inhabited.  This discovery would mark the beginning of the atomic age of warfare, a huge advancement for all nations.

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian and made the six-hour journey to Japan.  The pilot of the aircraft was Colonel Paul Tibbets.  The bomber’s main target was the city of Hiroshima.  Hiroshima had a civilian population of three hundred thousand.  It was an extremely important military center, containing forty-three thousand soldiers (DOE).  The atomic bomb named “Little Boy” was released from the Enola Gay at 8:15 in the morning.  The bomb measured 9.84 feet long and had a diameter of twenty-eight inches.  It weighed a remarkable 8,900 pounds.  The bomb was dropped at an elevation of thirty-one thousand feet (“Dimensions”).  The city was alive with activity.  People were walking in the streets, kids playing before school, and men and women were making their way to work.  The people closest to the explosion died instantly.  Their bodies were obliterated into black char.  Birds were incinerated in mid-air.  Shadows of bodies were burned onto walls, and clothing was melted onto skin.  Fires broke out everywhere, creating one massive firestorm blowing furiously across the land destroying anyone who had withstood the first part of the blast (DOE).  Staff Sergeant George Caron, the tail gunner of the Enola Gay, describes what he saw: “The Mushroom cloud was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple and gray smoke, and you could see it had a red-core in it and everything was burning inside.  It looked like lava molasses covering a whole city.”  Two-thirds of the city was destroyed instantly.  The co-pilot, Captain Robert Lewis, stated, “Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could no longer see a city.  We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of mountains.”  Within three miles of the explosion, sixty thousand buildings were completely demolished.  A survivor of the attack described the victims as follows:

The appearance of people was … well, they all had skin blackened by burns. … They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back. … They held their arms bent [forward] like this … and their skin — not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too — hung down. … If there had been only one or two such people … perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression.  But wherever I walked I met these people. … Many of them died along the road — I can still picture them in my mind — like walking ghosts (Rosenberg).

The goal of this bombing was not to merely destroy military forces; it was to demolish a city (Rosenberg).

All communications were destroyed in the bombing leaving Hiroshima stranded.  The government eventually received different reports from the outskirts of the city about fires and large amounts of smoke.  Sixteen hours later, the Japanese government finally received confirmation of what had happened.  They realized America had unleashed the most powerful weapon known to mankind on the city of Hiroshima (DOE).

America was not done with its unleashing of weapons of mass destruction.  Although America did give Japan the chance to surrender between bombings, Japan refused.  The next target was the city of Kokura.  Kokura was a massive collection of war industries.  The second option was Nagasaki.  They ended up having to settle for Nagasaki due to inclement weather.  The plane carrying the second bomb was named Bock’s Car (“Bombing”).  Piloting the aircraft was Charles W. Sweeney.  Sweeney said his greatest fear was “goofing up.”  He also stated, “I would rather face the Japanese than Tibbets in shame if I made a stupid mistake.”  The second bomb, “Fat Man,” was much heavier than “Little Boy.”  This made the aircraft more difficult to pilot.

The bombing of Nagasaki seemed jinxed from the beginning.  Many things went wrong such as bad weather, bad visibility, faulty communications, and even a malfunction with the bomb itself.  Despite the many close calls, Sweeney still accomplished his goal.  They left Tinian Island at 3:40 in the morning on August 9.  The plane headed for Kokura, but due to inclement weather and malfunctions with the extra fuel supply, they had to settle for the second option of Nagasaki.  Nagasaki was a major ship building city and military port (Glines).  The second atomic bomb exploded over the city of Nagasaki at 11:02 am.  A reporter flying in the plane behind the Bock’s Car said, “We watched a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shoot upward like a meteor coming from earth instead of from outer space” (Glines).  About two hundred thousand people were in the city of Nagasaki when the bomb exploded.  A survivor of the Nagasaki bombing explains a scene he remembers distinctly as follows:

The pumpkin field in front of the house was blown clean.  Nothing was left of the whole thick crop, except that in place of the pumpkins there was a woman’s head.  I looked at the face to see if I knew her.  It was a woman of about forty.  She must have been from another part of town — I had never seen her around here.  A gold tooth gleamed in the wide-open mouth.  A handful of singed hair hung down from the left temple over her cheek, dangling in her mouth.  Her eyelids were drawn up, showing black holes where the eyes had been burned out. … She had probably looked square into the flash and gotten her eyeballs burned (Rosenberg).

Numerous secondary fires erupted throughout the entire city.  The fires were nearly impossible to put out due to the break of water lines (DOE).  The devastation was incredible.

The effects of these two bombings were absolutely devastating.  They left Japan emotionally destroyed.  America, within the course of three days, had left Japan completely dumbfounded and awestruck.  The bombing of Hiroshima instantly killed sixty-six thousand to sixty-nine thousand people.  One hundred thousand more died by 1945.  And by 1950, over two hundred thousand had died from various lingering effects (“Dimensions”).  Everything up to one mile from the target was completely destroyed with the exception of certain concrete structures made to withstand a blast.  Everything was flattened and desolate.  It looked like a wasteland (Purohit).

The effects of the Nagasaki bombing were not as severe as Hiroshima, even though the bomb was more powerful and bigger.  This is mainly because Nagasaki is located in a mountainous area (Avalon).  But even with the mountains acting as barriers, the bombing of Nagasaki took a substantial toll on Japanese citizens.  Forty-two thousand citizens were instantly killed, and forty thousand were severely injured.  The bomb completely destroyed thirty-nine percent of the buildings in Nagasaki.

Both cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffered many strange and sometimes unexpected diseases and symptoms after the bombings.  Survivors developed symptoms such as blood cell abnormalities, high fevers, chronic fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, hair loss, and extreme depression.  All people after the bombing were more prone to infection and cancer.  Three years following the radiation exposure leukemia rates peaked.  The exact amount of casualties is unknown, but many continued to perish up to ten years after the detonation of the atomic bomb (Anhalt)!

In addition to the immediate and long-term diseases and injuries of the Japanese people who were struck by the bomb was also an immense amount of emotional damage and sheer terror.  The bombings struck an intense fear into all the citizens witnessing the event.  Many citizens ran away and hid for long periods of time due to the hysteria the bombing forced into their lives.  Before the atomic bombings people would pay no attention to a single plane, but after the nuclear bombing seeing a single plane would put more fear into Japanese citizens than seeing a mass of planes.  This terror would never cease to exist (Avalon). It undoubtedly shaped the way mankind sees warfare.

Arguably the biggest deal concerning the bomb was the effect it had on the ongoing world war.  The atomic bombing of Japan undoubtedly ended World War 2.  Japan surrendered after seeing the massive amount of damage and casualties of their own land and people.  Japan offered their surrender on August 10, 1945.  The only condition was the emperor be allowed to remain the nominal head of state.  America accepted the conditions of their surrender, but said the emperor could only remain for ceremonial purposes.  Japan was not happy and delayed their response.  During this delay America continued conventional raids, which killed thousands of more Japanese people.  Finally the emperor remarked, “I can not endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer.”  On August 15, the emperor announced his plan to surrender.  It took a few weeks but finally on September 2, 1945, the official ceremony of surrender took place and the war was over (DOE).

Countries continue to develop different weapons and methods to gain fear from other nations.  The atomic bomb may have been one of the biggest discoveries ever made.  The invention of this nuclear weapon has changed the way nations look at warfare and political matters.  The Manhattan Project, the atomic bombing of Japan, and the aftermath of the bomb were pivotal moments in world events.

Works Cited

Anhalt, Lindsey. “Atomic Bomb.” Arts & Sciences. Washington University in St. Louis. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://artsci.wustl.edu/~copeland/atomicbomb.html&gt;.

“The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.” Department of Energy. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm&gt;.

“Avalon Project — The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Avalon Project — Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/mpmenu.asp&gt;.

Bellis, Mary. “History of the Atomic Bomb and The Manhattan Project.” Inventors. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://inventors.about.com/od/astartinventions/a/atomic_bomb.htm&gt;.

“The Bombing of Nagasaki.” History Learning Site. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/bombing_of_nagasaki.htm&gt;.

Cohen, Daniel. The Manhattan Project. Brookfield: Millbrook Press, 1999.

Glines, C. V. “World War II: Second Atomic Bomb That Ended the War.” Web.

Gonazales, Doreen. The Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb. Berkeley Heights: Enslow Publishers, 2000.

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” VCE.COM. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://www.vce.com/hironaga.html&gt;.

“Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dimensions.” Dimensions Guide. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://www.dimensionsguide.com/hiroshima-atomic-bomb-dimensions/&gt;.

Purohit, Vishwas. “The Atom Bomb: A Brief History.” Buzzle Web Portal: Intelligent Life on the Web. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-17-2004-50656.asp&gt;.

Rosenberg, Jennifer. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” 20th Century History. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. <http://history1900s.about.com/od/worldwarii/a/hiroshima.htm&gt;.

Behind Closed Doors: The Food Industry

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Lia Waugh Powell and Kayla Cole Baker

Newspaper headlines and documentaries have recently exposed the horrors and corruptions within the food industry.  Most people today have a basic idea of what goes on behind closed doors in the food industry; few know exactly what happens.  This day and hour, animals are being produced, transported, and slaughtered in larger quantities than ever before.  This high demand creates a need for efficiency and quickness resulting in unfair and inhumane treatment for commercial purposes.

Factory farming, according to the ASPCA, is “a large-scale industrial operation that houses hundreds or thousands of food animals in extremely restricted conditions and treats them as non-sentient economic commodities.”  The mistreatment begins in the process of raising the animals.  Factory farms begin with force breeding, in which animals are made to reproduce at unnaturally accelerated rates.  This causes the animals to become exhausted and stressed, putting their immune systems at higher risk for disease.  Because all of the animals resulting from force breeding need to be stored, the unnatural overpopulation causes them to be cramped into small areas.  They have no room to move, causing animals to get trampled to death or badly injured.  The lack of space makes ventilation sparse and disease easily spreadable.  To control the diseases among animals, the farm workers consistently feed them normally unnecessary antibiotics and hormones.  In addition, these antibiotics are used to kill intestinal bacteria, stimulating growth to speed up production along with the hormones with which they’re injected.

The abuse is far from over with the raising of the animals.  When the farm workers transfer the animals to the slaughterhouse, they still do not treat the animals as if their treatment could inflict pain.  As animals are transferred, they are crammed into trailers, mostly in harsh temperatures.  As cold weather worsens, animals start to freeze to the sides of the trailers.  The skin of the pigs or cows sticks to the side, and when they are roughly being pulled off to enter the slaughterhouse, their skin remains on the trailer.  Many who got sick or injured along the way are forced from the trailers with a bulldozer and piled with the other dead animals, waiting to join them in death.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture says each year about ten percent or nine hundred million animals never reach the slaughterhouse.

After arriving from the farms, the animals are put in line to be slaughtered.  Federal law requires animals be unconscious during processing, but unfortunately, that is not always the case.  The majority of slaughterhouses use electrical wands or what the industry calls a “captive bolt” to make the animals unconscious, but these are not always effective.  An account from a worker of a factory farm recounts, “To get done with them faster, we’d put eight or nine of them in the knocking box at a time.  You start shooting, the calves are jumping, and they’re all piling up on top of each other.  You don’t know which ones got shot and which didn’t.  They’re hung anyway and down the line they go, wriggling and yelling, to be slaughtered, fully conscious.”  Even with this requirement, some observations tell us thirty percent of animals being processed are still conscious while they go through the assembly line.  One worker confessed, “A lot of times the skinner finds a cow is still conscious when he slices the side of his head and the cow starts kicking wildly.  If that happens, the skinner shoves a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord.  This only paralyzes them, it doesn’t stop the pain.”  The blame for this is put on faulty equipment or improper training of the workers.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a survey among all United State slaughtering houses, showing barely thirty-six percent were using “acceptable” slaughtering techniques.

The inhumane act of slaughtering does not only affect the animals, it takes a toll on the workers emotionally and physically as well.  A worker shares his experience with working in a slaughterhouse: “I’ve taken my job pressure and frustration out on the animals, my wife and on myself with heavy drinking.  With an animal that makes you angry, you don’t just kill it.  You blow the windpipe; make it drown in its own blood, spit in its nose.  I would cut its eye out and the hog would just scream.  One time I sliced off the end of a hog’s nose.  The hog went crazy, so I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into its nose.  Now that hog really went nuts….”  Not only emotionally, the lack of training the staff has acquired can stay with them the rest of their lives.  With bloody floors, sharp instruments, and thrashing animals surrounding, it’s easy to slip and injure yourself.  Without closely paying attention, the heavy machinery could cause major injury.  A worker testifies his observations: “The conditions are very dangerous and workers aren’t well trained for machinery.  One machine has a whirring blade that catches people in it.  One woman’s breast got caught in it and it was torn off.  Another’s shirt got caught and her face was dragged into it.”  Those disabled by machines and complain of the dangers are almost always replaced.

Those in the field of animal processing are not the only people affected by this way of producing.  The consumers eating these meats produced by factory farms are also harmed.  The antibiotics and hormones animals are required to eat because of the conditions they live in have harmful effects in humans who consume them.  The animals are fed these antibiotics all of their lives, and they become part of their body.  When we eat them, we also get the antibiotics and hormones they were given.  Consuming these can create a long-term problem with our own health.  The overdose of antibiotics can build up in our system, creating immunity from medicines used to fight certain strains of bacteria and illnesses.  Overdoses in hormones also affect us negatively.  Too much of a hormone can create growth problems in humans, just as it would make an animal grow unnaturally.  Within the food we eat are also defects as a result of factory farming and inhumane slaughter.  The food product from mass producing farms such as meat, eggs, and dairy products suffers in nutrition.  Using improper slaughtering techniques results in blood-spattered meat only acceptable for low-grade meat products, such as hamburgers.  As for eggs and dairy products, the force breeding and being injected with hormones to speed up the production affects the quality of the product.  There are not as many health benefits and nutrition as a natural, healthy process would produce.

Yet another way factory farming affects the world around us is environmentally.  When hundreds of animals are confined to one area, the surrounding land is harmed.  So many animals create much more waste than land can support, as well as putting chemicals in the air through processing.  This pollutes our soil, air, and water quality.  The excessive amount of waste is stored in waste lagoons, which often leak, admitting the manure into our ground and waterways, adding bacteria.  Side effects from this can result in Blue Infant Syndrome and other diseases.  The manure is also taken by companies to spray as fertilizer, releasing chemicals into the air we breathe and a gas dangerous to those in close proximity to a large amount called hydrogen sulfide.  Side effects range from sore throat to seizures and death.

In an attempt to stop this inhumane slaughtering, Congress recognized the Humane Methods of Animal Slaughter Act on August 27, 1958: “Congress finds the use of humane methods in the slaughter of livestock to prevent needless suffering; resulting in safer and better working conditions for persons engaged in the slaughtering industry; brings about improvement of products and economies in slaughtering operations; and produces other benefits for producers, processors and consumers which tend to expedite an orderly flow of livestock and livestock products in the interstate and foreign commerce.  It is therefore declared to be the policy of the United States that the slaughter shall be carried out only by humane methods.”  Though this held up while the demand for food was in smaller quantities, as it grew so did the inhumane treatment of animals.  This created the need for President Bush to sign into law the “Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002.”  This includes a resolution the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958 be fully reinforced to prevent this needless suffering of animals.  It also requires the Secretary of Agriculture to track volitions and report them to Congress annually.  This poses the question: if these requirements are laws to be reported annually, why has factory farming continued to be a problem?  According to Arthur Hughes, Vice-Chairmen of the National Council of Food Inspection, the new federal regulations have given slaughterhouses more responsibility to comply with plant operation, but requirements have left them powerless to enforce them.  He explains in an interview, “Drastic increases in production speeds, lack of support from supervisors in plants, new inspection policies which significantly reduce our enforcement authority, and little or no access to the areas of the plants where animals are killed, have significantly hampered our ability to ensure compliance with humane regulations.”

With all of the problems of factory farming evident above, the question comes to mind, “what can be done to change this?”  Simply stepping up for the rights of animals made clear in the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act can change the way these factories are run.  In 1999, McDonald’s and other fast food companies received word of what was happening inside these slaughtering houses. McDonald’s showed up to investigate if the safety concerns were true.  They then set up newer guidelines for workers to follow, but nothing more.  Ways to ensure you are not supporting this horrific issue is by buying products marked as organic or free range.  They both mean cows, chickens, and pigs have not eaten pesticides and are not being raised in factory farms.  This not only does not feed the fast food business money and encourage them to keep producing, but it also supports local farmers.  Another thing to look into is http://www.localharvest.org/, a Web site that allows you to find local farms near you and regularly order fresh produce and other foods with a good cause.

Works Referenced

Bonné, Jon. “Can the Animals You Eat Be Treated Humanely?” Msnbc.com Web. 14 December 2011.

Farm Sanctuary. Farmsanctuary.org. Web. 14 December 2011.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA): The Animal Rights Organization. PETA.org. Web. 14 December 2011.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Home Page. Web. 14 December 2011.