The summer of 2013 saw strikes by fast food workers in seven cities. I doubt the increased difficulty in getting burgers and fries will endanger the republic. But we really should consider what this development tells us about conditions in our economy and our culture. Few of us think about it, but economists and policymakers [...]
I have always hesitated to comment on the state of our military culture. I have never served and, for a variety of reasons, seriously doubt I ever will be (or ever would have been) called upon to enter combat. But over the years I have come to know a number of military families reasonably well, and to [...]
A Summer 2013 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, (“Saying No to Teach for America”) provides yet another indication of why our children are becoming ever-less educated despite the billions we put into their education. The story tells of Teach for America’s travails in the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Teach for America is a [...]
Mecosta’s Fourth of July, while rather grand for its size, would hardly compete with the spectacle in one of our large cities. Thank goodness. For several years, now, my family and I have spent the Fourth of July in Mecosta, Michigan. It is a small, somewhat unprepossessing town. But it has a number of important [...]
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent Supreme Court decisions concerning same-sex marriage has, or should have, nothing to do with the (supremely important) issue of the relationship between family and society. From a legal and constitutional standpoint, the greatest damage done by these decisions was done long before they were handed down. For [...]
“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” These lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are often quoted, but seldom taken to heart. Even those of us who consider ourselves students of Eliot’s work on civilization’s decline tend to overdramatize what is really a quite tawdry cultural age. [...]
Some conservatives, and our libertarian friends in particular, have been rather enjoying hearing about recent Obama Administration scandals. I would not begrudge anyone a certain amount of perverse pleasure in the discomforts of an administration that has been seeking to undermine our culture, way of life, and economic freedom since day one. But I honestly [...]
Oftentimes we need to be reminded that we are more than animals. The attachment modern society has to stoking the fires of primitive passions we share with the beasts (feast, fight, fornicate) is literally dehumanizing—it makes us less than we by nature are. This, of course, is the very essence of corruption and causes great [...]
Edmund Burke The awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence,—and…having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has in and by that disposition virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to [...]
No longer recognizing our duty to form children’s character to fit the norms of virtue, our society more and more sees children as a burden to be indoctrinated into autonomous self-sufficiency as quickly as possible. Now even the Boy Scouts, for so many decades dedicated to forming virtuous young men, sees itself as just another [...]
In responding to a post of mine criticizing our liberal culture for its hostility toward the traditional family, a commenter wrote: “I do not know a single liberal who…does not value (and participate in) both traditional and non-traditional families.” I think it is important to examine this liberal response to conservative criticism, not because the [...]
A friend and colleague often forces me to read The Chronicle of Higher Education. It is a dreary compendium of leftist ideology and smug conventional wisdom he enjoys using to depress me. Nonetheless, I do occasionally read beyond the opening paragraphs to see what I would be thinking if only I were as “smart” as I [...]
Even during an age in which acts of callous brutality have become common, the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell shocks. It was Gosnell who ran the filthy abortion clinic in which live babies were murdered, women were subjected to “treatment” by unlicensed assistants (including massive and even deadly doses of drugs), and fetal remains were [...]
The news headlines remain depressing, of course. Innocents have been killed and maimed in Boston through an act of spiteful hatred. Revelations of the chillingly casual killing of innocents in a Philadelphia abortion clinic continue to seep into our ideologically anesthetized and unapologetic mainstream press. The Affordable Care Act wheezes toward completion for itself, and for [...]