Prelude Lyndon La Rouche has died. The stories about him and his uber-weird political career are legion. This is a summary version of mine; it has a lot to do with Quakers. It wasn’t meant to, but that’s how it turned out. I First, though, I need to make what will seem like a pointless … Continue reading Lyndon La Rouche and me — Part I
Is This the Book For You?
This brief handbook is for certain kinds of people:
First, people who don’t know much about the bible, but think they would like to.
Second, it is for people who are independent-minded, and prefer to form their own judgments rather than simply accept the pronouncements of a traditional authority, no matter how venerable.
Third, it is for those who have a high tolerance for ambiguity because, as we shall see, one thing the Bible doesn’t offer is easy, automatic, simple answers.
This book is also for people who want a practical approach. There is, of course, much more to this subject than could possibly fit into these few pages; but it is my hope that when you have finished it, and become familiar with the tools it describes, you will be able to pick up the Bible, begin to make sense of what you read, know where to get more information about it, and not be afraid of following your leadings about its meaning wherever they may lead.
Beyond the personal benefits it offers, the ability to find your way around in the Bible is of particular value these days, when groups who claim to have the exclusive, true understanding of Scripture are running around attempting to impose their understanding on everyone else, or else.
I happen to think that these groups are mostly wrong, especially about what the Bible means. But I don’t think their efforts can be effectively blunted except by people prepared to meet them on their own ground, that is on the basis of knowing something about what the Bible says and how to figure out what the text means.
Thursday morning December 13, an Indiana teenager allegedly grabbed a rifle and a pistol, and forced someone to drive him to a school less than a mile from his home. Five hundred-plus students were inside.
Meantime, somebody (later confirmed it was his mom) called to warn the school. Staff there ordered a lockdown, which seems to have been completed just in time.
The cops were alerted and also got there in time; and though the boy shot his way into the building, he heard resource officers in pursuit and soon felt cornered in a stairwell. He fired at the officers, they fired back, and then he was found in the stairwell dying of a gunshot wound, reportedly self-inflicted.
It was all over in about three minutes.
Frisch is about as far from being “Nazi friendly” as you could want. Although he’s a longtime Quaker, his ancestors were European and Jewish, and some were lost in the Holocaust. He doesn’t need a “diversity officer” to brief him on all that. Nevertheless, he was canned within a couple weeks. In a letter to students, the principal, Bo Lauter, wrote, “Our students know that words and signs of hate and fear have no place at Friends . . . .”
But in fact there was much more diversity of view at FS about whether Frisch’s obtuse angle quip constituted “words and signs of hate.” Frisch’s firing set off a firestorm: petitions on his behalf were signed by hundreds of students, and hundreds of alumni (after all, he had taught at FS for 34 years without any complaints; he knew lots of alumni). There was even a sit-in.
That was the best we could do. Half an hour more of exploratory driving suggested that all access roads had either been closed or demolished. In the distance a cream-colored Border Patrol van raised a dust cloud, following a track near them; it was clearly not open to us, if we could even find it.
We headed back toward San Diego and the motel. Puzzled, I started googling local news reports about this. Why was the location so remote in the first place? Why was it then closed off, essentially hidden?
Turns out the administration was expecting all hell to break loose around them. Homeland Security sent a memo to local officials, warning them to expect huge, militant protests. In response, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department spent at east $50,000 on riot equipment, including lots of pepper spray and tear gas, then paid for 10,000 hours of overtime for deputies and staff to practice using it. Much more was spent on “securing the area” around the prototypes. (It certainly was too secure for us tourists.)
But there weren’t any meaningful protests. When the president came to visit last March, about a hundred veterans were assembled to wave MAGA flags and applaud. Nearby, 15 anti-wall protesters gathered to chant and wave posters; there was no trouble.
Local radicals told the press they had decided to ignore the whole thing. (Once, though, a few art grad students parked behind the prototypes on the Mexican side, and when it got dark, projected some anti-wall images on them; but no damage was reported.)