My husband sent me a link to an article he found this morning. I decided to allow his words to be my blog entry this morning:
The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web. ~ Warning sounded on web’s future
My husband’s thoughts upon reading this article:
What’s wrong with getting a decent education and figuring out for yourself if you can trust a website or not? Are they gonna start thinking for us now? ~ Ron
Conventional wisdom tells us that opposites attract. Ron and I are not opposites. We score almost identically on all personality tests except that he generally scores higher than I do on scores measuring how introverted you are. I am an introvert; my husband could live in isolation. However, he chooses to be in a family because we teach him about unconditional love. In our imperfection we teach him to love the unlovely. We make him more Christ like. I like being married to someone who thinks more like me.
Who is going to be a part of the intellectual elite who get to decide which sites contain good information? I wonder what grade Christian sites or sites advocating intelligent design would get? How can the world wide web “remain neutral” and apply any kind of system that classifies information as good and worthy of reading and just plain trash?
And, I can see it now. Some Christian group will decide that the the secular humanists are right and their rules are superior to freedom of thought and being led by the Holy Spirit. We will develop a parallel “Christian” system. Good Christians will only go to the sites which express “Christian” thoughts and ideas. The people developing the list will need a salary, operating expenses, a place to do business. Our tithes and offerings will be diverted to this new effort and instead of visiting the fatherless and the widows, meeting their needs in a real, tangible way, we will step it up a notch in our effort to win the culture war.
It took me 30 months to legally adopt Beverly and David. I will not tell you the wait was easy. There were days when I was so into me and my wait that I had trouble seeing the big picture. On those days, I would withdraw from discussions about adoption. After a few days, I would declare an end to my pity party. I am not saying there isn’t a plethora of red tape surrounding international adoption. There is. But, I can understand why it is like that. What I can’t understand is how you can bring a child into the US illegally faster than you can bring a child in legally. It is hard to believe that this can happen in our world.
As a Christian who has been surprised by the stance of so many Christian organizations and groups against open adoption, I want to point out that closed record adoptions, more specifically the trail of lies that closed record adoption leaves, opens the door for illegal practices that put children and mothers at risk. I pray for the day the universal church supports honest, open adoptions.
Marissa has a dream. She wants to sing on Broadway. She has a back up plan too. She plans to go to the technical college and pick up some work skills. She used to want to pursue a program, Fashion and Store Management. That has changed. She wants to be a photographer. So, she only wants to take classes that will help her do that. Most photographers are self taught, there isn’t a photography program. But, there are classes in the Web Design and Computer Art & Design programs that would teach her skills that would help her optimize the photos taken with her digital camera.
I am a little worried about the whole photography thing. It doesn’t seem like a real job. I know that there are people who make a living from taking photos. My cousin supplements her family’s income taking photos. But, I kind of mean a job that pays above the poverty level and has benefits. Ron pays for our family’s health insurance. Our insurance covers a huge chunk of Marissa’s medication costs.
Annual Cost of Medications
Medication #1
$ 2045
Medication #2
2836
Medication #3
904
TOTAL=
$ 5785
Because we have insurance we only pay around 20% of these costs. If we had to pay it all, our family would pinch and save to come up with the other 80%. Her medications keep her focused and help to control her rages and anxiety. Controlling her environment and supervising her are far more effective than medicating her, but these interventions alone are not enough to keep her and those around her safe. I know that many, many of my readers are critical of medicating children for behavioral reason. I was too at one time. Life experiences have changed my mind.
One of the things I do to help Marissa meet her dream of going to the technical college is try to teach her how to behave in a classroom. One of the major reason we started home schooling is because Marissa’s classroom behavior was disruptive. It is hard to be disruptive in a mentoring program when you are the only student, so home schooling was the solution to part of the problem. But, if she is to return to the classroom, she will need to develop new skills. So, Marissa and I go to community classes together. We practice skills like arriving at the campus in time to find a parking place and travel to the classroom, getting to class on time, being prepared mentally to learn, having the things you need to take notes, listening while the instructor is talking, participating in group activities, and using time during breaks wisely. Whether they know it or not, the other students are peer mentors.
Monday we went to a class entitled The Culture of Poverty. This class is based upon the research by Dr. Ruby Payne of aha! Process, Inc. It was very good and spoke of the hidden rules one has to understand and be able to play by if one is going to survive in poverty.
One of the first activities we did was to create a family budget for a family of four living at the 2008 HHS Poverty Guideline, $21,200. At first Marissa was not that interested. But, I personalized it. One of the girls who lived in my home as a foster child would meet this criteria. Her family consists of her, her boyfriend, their baby and her 15-year-old half-brother. We were able to create a budget for them as long as we left off health care, insurance, Internet/cable TV and planning for the future. If this were Marissa, her medications would consume 27% of her budget. Actually, my foster child is doing pretty well. Except for the time she lived with me, she has grown up in poverty. She has good survival skills.
Marissa has grown up in the middle class. She doesn’t have the skills to survive poverty. Should I be teaching her about rummage sales and where the free clinics are? I tend to vote for the candidates whose platform and voting record demonstrate that they are for smaller government and more personal liberty. I would prefer to keep more of my income so that I could help my daughter and not stress over whether she will or will not qualify for a certain program. I would prefer to be able to make any addition to my property that I wanted without government interference. My candidate generally loses. I don’t get my knickers in a twist because while I know that there are forms of government that I would rather live under, I don’t believe any government is going to create a Utopia. Human government cannot cure the problem of evil in this world. We do have big government. There are many programs out there, programs that use poverty as a guideline and not developmental level that may help Marissa when she is an adult. Maybe I should embrace the starving artist photographer job with gladness. Some people may think I am overly negative. Research done on adults with FASD has demonstrated that only 8% of the individuals in the study had no problem with independent living or employment. I am not being negative; I am being proactive and realistic.
Some of the things that occurred to me as I listened to this program:
The speaker, a certified trainer for aha! Process, Inc., spoke of world view using a much larger definition than I have in the past. In the past, I have used world view to speak almost entirely to mean how one answers question related to theology and philosophy. How I view God, creation and man drives my behaviors. The speaker included other driving forces including time orientation (present, past or future oriented), casual or formal language, family dynamics, what love and acceptance are based upon, food, clothing styles, etc. She argued that these driving forces are different for those living in poverty, the middle class and the wealthy.
I was struck by how many of the things listed in the section regarding the “Hidden Rules” or world view of poverty are almost identical to the diagnostic criteria used to label a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder and wondered how many attachment “problems” really are the result of seeing the world through different lenses rather than a true mental illness that needs to be treated. I noticed that there is a community workshop on Parenting Someone Else’s Child. I bet that would be interesting.
I wondered how Dr. Payne’s thoughts would be applied in Haiti. Particularly, I wondered how a person survives poverty without any resources. “I know how to make ‘cookies’ out of dirt, lard and a little salt so that my kids can fall asleep without feeling hunger pains.”
If what Dr. Payne teaches about poverty is true, we won’t ever fix poverty with money. Money doesn’t change the way people think.
The class was very good and stimulated a lot of abstract, how to save the world kind of thinking. Oh, and I have to tell you this, because it proves that people with FAS can learn abstract thoughts. We were in the grocery store yesterday and Marissa told me that I should by a lottery ticket. “Weren’t you listening in class the other day? I don’t know how to survive in wealth!” To which Marissa responded, “Mom, you can still live middle class. Just do it with more money!”
Last, I bet no one links into this audio of Arnold Kling on the Economics of Health Care and the Crisis of Abundance (warning, this discussion is almost an hour long). I found it interesting, but I have a master’s degree in nursing and I minored in nursing administration. So, this discussion is right up my professional alley. Are there any other home school mom’s who, when things are not going so well, dream of their professional life? I hope I am not the only one.
“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
~ John Adams
Many of my readers may have thought I was being hasty or flippant when I declared I would not vote for John McCain. I still haven’t decided whether or not I will vote for a third party candidate or write in Ron Paul, but I haven’t changed my mind. I have been watching the candidates running in the Libertarian party. On March 21, Dr. Mary Ruwart announced her candidacy. As I read through her homepage, I was introduced to her book Healing Our World In an Age of Aggression. You can read a free download of the 1993 version of this book on her website. But, I find reading books on-line tedious. I read one chapter on line and decided I’d rather pay to read the newer version. It arrived last Monday.
Healing Our World is a well written defense of libertarian thought. The books foundation is that taking money from someone by means of force, taxing them, to pay for the special interests of others no matter how benevolent that special interest seems is aggressive and violates the maxim we all learned as kids, “Don’t hit first.” This simple ‘Good Neighbor’ rule, the one that worked in the sandbox when we were five still works now that we are adults and our sandbox is our city, state, country and world. Playing fair works one-on-one and it works in groups and between communities and other nations. Furthermore, she points out in example-after-example that our current system doesn’t work. Apparently, government involvement in the market inhibits innovation, increases costs and lowers the quality of services; bureaucracies do not improve efficiency and ensure a prudent, responsible use of resources. Who’d have guessed?
As I read this book, the small government, low taxes and adherence to the Constitution side of me was doing emotional flips; I found many of the ideas forwarded in the book fit my overall feeling that liberty tied to personal responsibility should be the foundation of how our culture works. There was another side of me that kept remembering Paul Proctor’s warning during the 2006 Election. He was warning Christians not to put their faith in Christianizing the culture through the political process, “But friends, this is not Christian evangelism. This is religious environmentalism — an earthly and erroneous idea borrowed from secular society and the liberal left that says man can save himself and the world he lives in if we all just get onboard the Vain Train To A Better America and apply ourselves.” It seemed to me that the book described a Utopia that could be created by man in the absence of God. Liberty cannot exist in the absence of a foundation of personal responsibility. I believe that foundation is found in the person and power of Jesus Christ. In Healing Our World Dr. Ruwart puts forth the belief that consequences, particularly financial consequences in a free market system, are strong enough to provide the foundation for personal responsibility.
Unification can be achieved in one of two ways: by choice (nonaggression) or by force (aggression). The result we get is very different depending on the means we use.
I am not sure the author meant this to be the turning point in the book. This line, from the book’s last chapter was my turning point. She was talking about a unified, one world government. Dr. Ruwart went on to explain herself by describing the physical union between a man and a woman. It can occur in one of two ways, by choice or by force. The results are very different. And, all of a sudden, I was imagining myself as a Bride of Christ, choosing to enter into a covenant relationship. He is ruling and reigning in a one world government. The very thing that I chafe against, and vote against, in human government is something I long for with my heavenly Father: a relationship that is not forced with a King whose love is perfect and who rules in my best interest. I thought of the story in Genesis 47:13-25 when Joseph had bought up all the land of the Egyptians. And, I saw the story differently than I had in the past. This is a story of the second coming of Jesus. He is the one who has saved us! Let us all find favor in the sight of the Lord.
So they said, “You have saved our lives ! Let us find favor in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh’s slaves.” ~ Genesis 47:25 (NAS)
I will leave you with this last thought on Christian Libertarianism.
CHRISTIAN libertarians see no inconsistency in being both. For these libertarians freedom Is important for more than economic reasons. It allows Christians to transform the culture through the church and the family. This transformation is no business of the state’s. Ayn Rand is dead - Christian libertarianism, by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. and Jeffrey A. Tucker
“But, oh my soul, don’t be discouraged. Don’t be upset. Expect God to act! For I know that I shall again have plenty of reason to praise Him for all that He will do. He is my help! He is my God!” ~ Psalm 42:11
Feed the Hungry
The Ancestor of Every Action is a Thought ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
