Hate Crime Law is Inadequate

Oh wow, I got my blogspot website back! Figured there was no shot after 9 years away!

On Thursday, April 20^th residents of Oak Ridge packed Pollard Auditorium for a lecture from Special Agent Andy Crabtree of the FBI for a look into Hate Crimes law as part of the Roots of America program. It was entertaining as well as informative, and I feel convinced that most everyone came away with a little more information about hate crimes.

Personally, I was struck by how outdated and ineffective many of the laws felt. It seemed to me that some of the things that can hurt people and communities the most are largely protected under the First Amendment. While all liberty comes with a tradeoff and no one really wants a culture in which the government monitors all our speech, I came away feeling like we could do better as a people. Hate speech may not seem as injurious as hate crime, but the belief that a person’s emotional health can be inoculated against injury simply due to protecting free speech is naïve.

Likewise, it also feels naïve to believe that we can address hate crime, or hate speech, with data points and information alone. If more information could heal our ills, I think it would have happened by now. Knowing how many people are homeless doesn’t build houses any more than knowing the data on food scarcity can create food for people. Data sets and information point us in a direction, but it is the deeper work of aligning our skills and resources that generate outcomes.

After the presentation from Agent Crabtree, around 75 Oak Ridgers sat around tables to talk about the way hate crime, hate speech, and the breakdown of beloved communities has impacted their lives. I was struck by how far back many of the stories I heard reached – back to childhood, developmental years, back to spaces where identity was being constructed. In many of those spaces and memories, the pain still lingered. It seemed that while each story I heard would have never passed the litmus test of being a “hate crime,” there were far too many instances where ignorance and hate had left unlawful and unmerited wounds.

Oak Ridge Periodic Tables recently won a grant from the New Pluralists called, “Healing Starts Here.” As the conversation Thursday night shifted into a question about what we might do to combat hate crime in our community, I caught a glimpse of where the healing might start… it starts when we’re together, caring for each other, supporting each other – sometimes even acknowledging to each other the times we have been complicit in hate speech by not taking a stand on behalf of someone else.

Educating ourselves about hate in our culture and in our communities is something that I feel must extend beyond rote memorization, quotable statistics, or graphs and charts. We become educated in our deepest places when we sit with another’s pain, still our own anxiety, and allow authentic community to rise. When we do this, we reach into the spaces that the law cannot, we give substance to the liberty we enjoy, and illuminate a path which recognizes that we are most free when we are together in humble and moral service, each to the other.

Since January 1^st, Oak Ridge Periodic Tables has sponsored approximately 800 conversational meals, with over 10% devoted to community leadership development. To subscribe to our monthly newsletter and stay up to date on the next Periodic Table opportunity, visit us at www.oakridgeperiodictables.com

 

Faith is Indomitable

Life is full of times that we will be unable to accurately interpret the evidences around us. There will be times when we are forced to make decisions about the future and in that choice no proven outcome will be guaranteed. This is where the rubber meets the road, and we can be either paralyzed by uncertainty, or we can adopt an indomitable spirit of faith. Faith is possessing the will to reach higher than our circumstances said we could, to push further than the limits said we should, to climb over what was seemingly insurmountable, and to overcome what no one in their right mind thought was possible. When we see these kinds of things happen in our world, we call them great. They are the product of the highest order of thinking available to us – faith. Faith is indomitable. 

Great men and women have led the way for us. When the skeptics and the nay-sayers said it couldn’t be done, some kept pushing with an indomitable faith and they did it anyway. When the evidence indicated there was little chance for survival, fireman James Drouin of Boston swam 200ft. across a broken ice shelf to rescue a young boy and win the Medal of Valor for his indomitable faith. When Dietrich Bonheoffer was told that returning to Germany to advocate for justice for the Jews would mean a death sentence for him, with indomitable faith he walked straight into the hangman’s noose. When oil rig driver David Morrison was told he’d never walk again after a massive head injury in a car accident, he recovered and went on to win a 10K marathon within five years.

When we hear a person try to convince us that faith is a belief in something that has no evidence, we need to stand up and tell the truth: that faith is the mechanism which proves itself worthy of our allegiance by creating its own evidence. The wheels of progress and innovation are greased by the indomitable faith of those who refuse to believe what their eyes are telling them, refuse to follow what the system has laid out for them, and refuse to abide by the futility of trusting what they think they know.

Evidence and empiricism are important like iron is important to your blood, but consume too much of it and you’ll have a poison running through your body and your mind that will end up squeezing the very life out of you. And we are being poisoned by a worldview that day in and day out tries to convince us that a belief in God is no better than a belief in Bigfoot. It is poison to our system and has led to a decay of our everyday decency.

Faith is not a blind leap in the dark. It is a hopeful step into the light.

The writer of Hebrews says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” That’s a definition of faith we should all be able to agree with. First, that faith is the product of hope. Lose all hope and we lose faith. Did you know that suicide rates among American teenagers saw their largest single year increase in fifteen years as reported by CDC last year? Did you know that 50% of American boys report feelings of hopelessness? Is it any wonder that we’ve seen such a massive increase in recreational drug use? There’s a vile poison infecting our well. It’s a poison that seeks to shackle our highest hopes by claiming that they are inherently misplaced because ideas are not real unless we can prove them scientifically.

Faith is itself evidence.  One day, I’m going to finish my book entitled, “Invisible Pink Economies.” The premise of the book stabs straight into the heart of this subject today: ideas are proven in their utility. A primary argument from unbelievers with regards to faith is that belief in God is akin to belief in invisible pink unicorns. It is an utterly ridiculous argument, because Invisible Pink Unicorns lack utility. They serve no function in our society or any other that we know of. Such refusal to be even remotely useful to us enable us to successful categorize IPU’s as a nonsensical idea.

But some ideas are in fact quite rational to hold, because they have a function. Our economy is one of these ideas. The concept of money isn’t real, but believing makes it so. I carry around a five dollar bill because I believe that I can get a gallon of gas a coke with it. I trust in its unreal value because it serves a real world function. By participating in banking, investing, and bartering I provide evidence that the economy is real. Our collective actions are evidence that this immaterial thing called “value” is real. But suppose we all decided that it wasn’t real, and we all took our money out of the markets and out of the banks. Suppose we refused to barter at all, what would happen to the economy? We’ve already seen what happens when you make loans with money that you don’t really have. Banks collapse from the failure to deposit more than is withdrawn. The sustainability of the markets depends on our faith in the system. In a sense, we are the evidence of the unseen.

God is more than just an idea, for sure, but faith works much the same way in our own lives. Our faith is the evidence of the unseen. As we work together and fellowship together, we stimulate each other to love and good deeds. The value of these things increases our hope and our confidence in the system by making faith deposits. Our greed, selfishness, and doubts make massive withdraws from the system and our hope begins to fail sending the market of our spirits into a tailspin, ready to crash and burn. 

So then, faith is the assurance of what we hope for, and the evidence of what we can’t see. These two truths work together to grease the wheel of the world. Without them, things come grinding to a halt.

I love the movie Empire Strikes Back. My favorite character in all the Star Wars movies is Han Solo. The reason Han Solo is so appealing to us is that he often acts courageously, in spite of his chances for success. "Never tell me the odds," he shouted out when C3PO told him the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field.  He truly believed he could fly through it and all C3PO was doing was sucking the life out of his attempt.

Those are the kind of people with indomitable faith that I want in my locker room before the big game. They're the kind of people I want at my bedside when I'm given six months to live. the kinds of people I want my children to grow into. Indomitable, regardless of how much the “evidence” is leaning against them. Indomitable all the way to the end.

As for the "evidence" crowd out spreading their poison, please let the grown-ups innovate and overcome. Plug into the hyperdrive C-3PO and let us drive. I subscribe to the belief that a trustworthy idea is worthy of my time, energy, and devotion and I am not to be denied. Ideas are trustworthy to extent they have real and beneficial function. Faith in God meets all these criteria.

The value of science isn't lost on me, nor is the value of faith. I don't have to trade one for the other. I can act on evidence without being shackled by its traps. I can reach for the unproven and reach for my unrealized potential during my stay on this planet. I can do this precisely because I believe I can.

Also, I know who I want in my corner. When it comes to the many unquantifiable decisions I have to make in life, it's always going to be the people who have the creativity, the will, and the indomitable human spirit to reach higher and further than our collective expectations. In short, I want to surround myself with people who have great faith.

Mass Amnesia and My Summer Vacation

When I looked out at the Gulf of Mexico from the bow of the charter fishing boat, I couldn’t help but count the plastic. Old plastic never dies, it is instead broken down into ever decreasing smaller bits. At 5mm broken down plastics begin to coalesce with mirco-flora, sand, plankton, and other basic staples to the ocean’s health. When they get even smaller, they are absorbed through gills or eaten, and can enter the flesh of every living thing in the ocean.

My eyes glance back to the cooler behind me and the stringer of fish that bears my name, then back again to the 11^th floating water bottle our ship passed. I wonder what they taste like. Perhaps worse than my fish, the oceans corals, which provide habitat for ocean life, already have measured concentrations of a whole host of chemicals from plastics with names that most of us couldn’t pronounce. As these reefs continue to absorb our waste products, they recede, and further reduce the amount of healthy bio-matter sea life can consume, thereby escalating the amount of microplastic these organisms ingest.

The whole scene is to me, Macbethian: a downward spiral of betrayal and ego; a betrayal of God’s gift of ocean. This gift provides over 1/5 of Earth’s digestible protein and it is wasting away one plastic piece at a time as the fruit of our conveniences and apathy blend like tiny beads and infuse themselves with the sand.

Back home and on dry land, the summer subtleties of things like “regulation” and “environmental protection” are debated. In my experience, it is not the fishermen debating these things. Fishermen have historically been the planet’s first ecologists because throughout history, their livelihood depended on it. Recreational fisherman today can tell you and probably even take you to specific places where their catches have been impacted by human beings. For fisherman, the life and death cycle of their trade is sketched directly onto the canvas of the water. The old fishermen see it best and most clear.

Jesus chose fishermen to be his dearest friends and closest traveling companions. As I am transitioning into an old fisherman, I am beginning to see that he did so for very good reasons. Fisherman are keen observers with great memories. In the age before GPS marking, fisherman had to know their spots, remember each drop-off or sandbar or hidden stump that held their prizes. Fisherman know when these spots are perturbed; they have learned almost subconsciously to recognize changes and patterns, and adjust their day’s work accordingly.

For micro-plastics to go unnoticed by the average man, or for that strip-mining operation that dumps cyanide into our rivers and streams to carry on unfettered by regulation, a kind of mass amnesia would need to happen to the American people. That mass amnesia would need to be orchestrated by the corporations which benefit and their allies. No amount of damage done to a place matters much to the corporation doing the extracting or building the products. They have no intention of living in places where factories and mines and metals unleash their havoc. Once the resource is consumed or the product complete, they will do what all corporations do, and that is move on to the next money grab.

The wave of amnesia lifts for the average man only when the impacts are felt directly… but the fisherman knows I think, before the rest. She sees it happening season after season after season. She reads the canvas at the end of her fishing line, and in that instinctive space knows firsthand how human and water are meant to interact.

Jesus chose fishermen, I believe, because fishermen know life and are committed to sustain it. Fisherman are more resistant to the mass amnesia and have their own built in immune system to anything that affects their trophy spots. We see it first, and we know it when we see it, just like I could not help but count the plastic in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’ve elected a President who has hand-picked leaders around him to spread mass amnesia, especially on the issue of the environment. We’re told that environmental regulation negatively impacts business, and I have no doubt that this is true. The right thing is almost always more difficult and it usually requires more from us, than the wrong thing. The wrong thing is usually cheap and easy. Doing the right thing costs, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it work differently.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reminds us that “sometimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths.” Whatever truth there may be to cutting corners on controlling pollution, whatever truth their might be in the cost savings of doing the easy thing, there is the overarching question of the harm to which such truths ultimately win our species.

Jesus is again calling fishermen and disciples to his journey of truth-telling. I, for one, cannot tell him no.

  

Trump, Iago, and the Introverted Alpha Male

I used to believe that Shakespeare's Iago was perhaps the most dangerous type of human archetype imaginable: an introverted alpha male. I now know that isn't true and it is solely due to all the conflicting feelings I have about President Donald Trump.

Iago is certainly Othello's worst nightmare and I have a sneaking suspicion that Shakespeare himself was probably much like him. If he wasn't, then he was single-handedly the most perceptive human to have ever lived, which could be equally as true I suppose.

Like all personalities, an introverted alpha male can go one of two ways -- either toward health or away from it. The further he slips from health, the more manipulative and scheming he becomes. The closer he moves to health, the more he leads from the back and from places of privacy or unbreakable conviction.

I used to believe that introverted alpha males were more dangerous than your standard run-of-the mill alphas, who merely rely on brute strength or forceful personality to exert their will. The reason I thought this was true relied on a simple idea: that recognizable aggression would be naturally resisted in the modern era.

Now I believe I was dead wrong. The quality of the male identity has been so eroded in Western culture that we've entered into an age of vicarious "maleness," that makes the more aggressive alpha more desirable. I guess if I had really been thinking hard about it, I would have seen all the clues.

From John Wayne to James Bond, Hollywood has time and time again given us hints as to the things that our society deeply desires, or fantasizes about, regarding its men. I suppose somewhere along the way, I just naively accepted that an external bravado would be very easy to manipulate by an introverted alpha. For the most part, that assumption has proven true in my own experience.

But we've not encountered an alpha like Donald Trump in my lifetime. Some might argue that perhaps it is Steve Bannon, the more reclusive and introverted alpha who is behind the scenes playing puppet master, but I am not so convinced. He no doubt is playing a pivotal role in the ever unfolding chaos, but I've come to believe he is less "the root" and more "the fruit" of Trump's leadership style.

I've had to process my emotions about Donald Trump pretty heavily these past days and I definitely don't mean in the same ways liberals are processing with signs and protest marches. I have always believed that reactions from masses of people were weak because the strength (or lack of) is easily shared, masked, and spread among the numbers. Iago wasn't a marcher, nor a protester. He was Machiavellian, plotting, and in his own sickness, he was never willing to admit to himself that he wasn't in actually in charge of the entire affair.

Equally surprising to me was learning that I share the same enneagram type with Trump and it was probably there that my thoughts about all this were slowly unraveled. We are both Type 8's, fearing weakness and vulnerability. Nevertheless, while Trump takes his core fears public with a show of strength, as an introvert I've always kept my desire to be in charge curled up in a fist, sort of an internal response to perceived threats. We are both wired up as protectors, but whereas the extroverted Type 8 starts a personal crusade to find aggressors, the introverted one is on a constant search for self-identifying victims. The extroverted 8 launches into battle, the introverted 8 is busy amassing soldiers. The former is looking for any fight to prove dominance, the latter is always preparing for one solid, final strike.

In sorting my own emotions, it was eye-opening to realize that my own reactive state stemmed solely from a recognition of my loss of power. Whereas prior to this election, I always felt like I could lead, influence, or even manipulate from the back row, I have needed to wrestle with the fact that maybe that isn't really an option. To preserve personal power, I have been coaxed slowly out of my comfort zone and had to admit that maybe the domain of introverted alphas has come under a new kind of threat... that any perceived victory against such provocative outward strength would only end in a compounded misery for the victor as it did for Iago. The iron hand beneath the velvet glove still wouldn't be enough to break through the open injustices to which the masses of Trump supporters cling and actually support.

That loss of power is unnerving to any 8 and it provokes visceral responses. Living under the reality that quiet strength may in fact not be enough can push introverted alphas away from health rather than toward it. The fear provokes a deep-seated need to assert rather than to rely upon core truths to which we once comfortably enforced by stillness, influence and the power of quiet resolve.

The results bring into question the most treasured of our values and perhaps more poignantly, what constitutes our manhood. I need more time to process those questions, but feel certain that given the fact I am contemplating them at all means that whatever power I once felt safe hiding within is nowhere near as secure as I thought.

All that brings me back to Jesus, or at least reminds me as to why I turned to Him at all. That's not such a bad thing and gives me great pause to rejoice. How those questions play out and how introverted alphas manage their core fears of power loss will require more thought.

Throwing Tomatoes at Watered Down Souls

I was watching the news this week, which does little more than infuriate me these days, and imagine my surprise to learn that Americans are putting our own science to use to reverse a trend that our own science created: addressing taste deprivation in the common tomato due to genomic breeding that has selected size over substance. Only in America!

It seems that as the tomato has grown larger through these past five decades, the water content has been upped at the expense of a tomatoes' taste. It would be much like watering down your favorite 12 ounce pop with a skill set that increased volume without adding sugar -- or more to the point for a coffee snob like myself -- adding an extra four ounces of water to a pot without ever touching the coffee content. Yuk!

Apparently, tomato connoisseurs around the world have noticed the change and are working on a solution in cross breeding. That's all fine and dandy, but what stood out in the CBS report to me was the fact that America was the #2 producer in the world of red, luscious, hamburger goodness. The question emerged regarding who was in fact the #1 producer of tomatoes.

Well, no surprise here when I did my own digging -- it's China.

It only makes sense from a square acreage standpoint, but I was still surprised to learn that they had us beat about 5 to 1 on tomato production. All of that would be but a curious factoid were it not for the Trump administration's blatant war on free trade. On the front lines of that battle is China.

I confess that what any of it means to me as an American is beside the point. It is at the bedrock of reality a reminder of what globalization means to our economy. In a world of import taxes and trade barriers, we're left with the reality that someone else does something better than us.... at least for now. Not only do they surpass us, but they do so at a ratio of 5 to 1, an unacceptable set of odds by any standard in a competitive, capitalist society.

Compounded to the complete and total beating we are taking in the tomato industry comes the importance of a now hyper-aggressive FDA examination of what we're sticking in our bodies. By tightening the noose on trade, Trump stands to affect much more than the auto industry or "Happy Meal" toys. At its root (no pun intended) comes the question of what we put in our bodies by way of food stuff too.

Higher tariffs can easily lead to cutting corners, as anyone in a for-profit business can attest. The overall quality of the tomato stands to weaken, not strengthen, under Trump's alternatively fictitious tutelage. All that really means to me is a weakening of the tomato and the creation of one that is far less worthy of consumption, thereby replacing it with one far more apt to be thrown in the next protest.

Any educated fool can tell you of the benefits of trade. It takes something far more rotten and akin to ignorance to tell us that we'll all be just fine. The problem is I've seen a good many of your thumbs and you grow with about the same commonality that you cook. Unless you're ready to garden yourself and learn the craft, we're on a path as a country to continue the watering down, both literally and figuratively.

But let's be real honest for just a second.

Watering down is what we do best. We've even perfected the task to 140 characters and a little devil we call Twitter. America first, baby!

It's All in the Hip

I haven't written lately. I've reached that point in middle age where one begins to ask, "What's the point?" As the country spirals toward calamity, I only really want to stop long enough to say that I've torn my hip labrum and potentially damaged the tendons along that right side.

It isn't like I can afford to go to the doctor. The affordable health care act saw to that. Not only am I paying $18,000 a year for insurance, I have a $3500 deductible on top that will only then take me to an 80 / 20 match. In other words, about 30% of my family income goes to insurance and deductibles so that I can then purchase the right to pay another couple thousand on a 10K surgery. I'd rather limp to be honest. Another 20% goes to taxes, so our family is actually bringing home less than half what we make annually.

I'm on my third insurance plan in five years, since the ACA was passed. Changed doctors numerous times too, against my wishes. I've watched as my options shrank rather than grew. Premiums grew at 10 times the rate of inflation since the law was passed. Deductibles did to while maximum out of pocket insurance payments dropped.

Whatever. I can deal with it, but let's not for a second assume I am not angry about it.

Despite the downward pull, I never felt in the hole enough to vote for a man like Donald Trump. Ten days into this clown's Presidency and both America and the Constitution are poised to be torn apart at the seams. Things are going to get even more nasty before they're course corrected, so I think I will take what I have left of my hip and at least be able to stand up in pain.

As a theologian, I happen to know a little bit about hips. In our tradition, a dislocated hip is indicative of a wrestling match with God as evidenced by Jacob in the book of Genesis. Timely and pointed are truths such as these.

I've said many times before and know it's true that "most men are not good enough to seek the dark, nor vile enough to make our nests there, we instead sit lukewarm in the mouth of that which has been written, quietly disbelieving and hollowly accepting the old familiar blasphemy: the shadow of what we know we could become."

Familiar words to me, long since committed to a place deeper than memory. It seems there is a certain fortitude to looking into an abyss and I've found that most men lack it, or least cannot look long enough without that same abyss looking back through them.

It's no surprise to me that so few in positions of sacred or religious power know the wound of wrestling with God. They honestly lack the stomach for it... but all clergy aside, we really aren't raising men anymore anyway, regardless of profession. That's why it is so easy to take the collective fear of the nation and channel into a series of self-proclaimed gods we don't really understand.

I've also said and written for years that "the entry to damnation always lacks the savage intensity of its content." Whether you're banning Muslims at airports or protesting against the demagogues with signs and banners, there's a "wholly other" degree of pain and despotism awaiting. That's an intensity with a twenty-thousand year old root and until we've wrestled there, we have little inkling as to where the bottom truly is.

Jacob knew. You see, in the sermon I will probably never preach, there is a stage being long set prior to the fight with God and the dislocated hip. Jacob's brother, whom he had cheated outright of his father's blessing and inheritance, is on the warpath. Jacob is nearly shitting himself with fear. He does what any good man does when faced with brute and barbaric strength banging at his gates -- he prays.

We're not a praying people so much anymore. It's too easy to make signs and pussy hats and take to marching, replete with Starbucks coffee in our off-hands (a little antiseptic hand lotion in our pockets) and a secure ride home with a pre-paid plane ticket if things get really physical. God forbid if somehow in all the community organizing, someone drops his friggin' knees and begs God for a little mercy.

Jacob wasn't wired up to anything but pray. His brother was bearing down on him and he knew it. His sins, perhaps more egregious than most, were very clear to him. There wasn't anything about "deserving" a blessing or "being worthy" in his prayer. Read it yourself. Hubris was gone, his hairy brother - the 'skilled hunter' and killer of things - was at the gates.

Jacob was always a momma's boy. The story says as much in multiple places. He would need more than a can of ramen noodles to get out of this one.

After praying, Jacob decided to send his angry brother a peace offering. That's pretty damn important if you ask me. He could have easily sent over a receipt for the soup he cooked and traded Esau's birthright for. Jacob could have reminded his brother in a letter (signed in triplicate) that while Esau was out working and hunting food, he learned the value of being domesticated. That domestication would now become the new birthright is perhaps the most hidden truth of the story. (Lord help me, I hate spelling things out all the time.)

Jacob went to bed that night a terrified, domesticated man who'd made his comfortable living off of the labor of his brother. No wonder he prayed. With swords on the march, his lack of fighting prowess haunted him, as did the hairless comfort he enjoyed as one of his culture's most educated (heck, have you read how he cross bred his animals to increase his wealth?).

Thankfully, God did show up that night for Jacob. But this showing wasn't exactly what he expected. Jacob had to get off his ass and put up a fight. Who could blame him? It all came down to this moment, this thought that Jacob had that he would actually HOLD GOD HIMSELF DOWN until GOD FULFILLED HIS PROMISE. That is a set of balls and Jacob found them. There was no "trickster" or "deceiver" here (which is what Jacob means in Hebrew). There was only a fight for the ages. God vs. Man.

In the end, it seems there was less a reason to fear than Jacob imagined. Esau loved his brother and missed him. Perhaps the two worlds (wild man vs. domesticated man) aren't nearly as far apart as they seem. Perhaps what they need is an opportunity to reconcile. In our current political climate, it is hard for me to imagine much different....

...with only one exception. In today's word, the domesticated man no longer prays. And when he refuses to pray, he refuses to fight in the right ways. And when he refuses to fight in the right ways, he is easily mowed over.

I long for the day to see my brothers join me with a limp. Reveal the vulnerability and know the limp can only come, and peace itself can only come, after a long night of violence with God.

That's the lesson of Jacob. It's all in the hip.

We're Almost There

The weekly saturation of educational doom from David Coffey has become so commonplace that I scarcely read them anymore. But alas, I just couldn’t resist a title like “Searching for the Best.” Here is exactly what needs to happen for me to take it seriously:

1.   I need to ignore the frequent references to the ACT. Feel free to look up the data yourself if you like, but the truth is that historical ACT composite scores in the United States have moved less than ½ of one point in thirty years. (They’ve moved up, not down despite one million additional students thrown into the mix, which ought to provide more than enough evidence of a bell curve, but whatever.)

2.   I have to ignore the “No Dentist Left Behind” fallacy of testing, which fails to acknowledge comorbidity factors in measuring anything. The “No Dentist Left Behind” fallacy was a satirical piece where dentist effectiveness is determined by the “absolute certain data measurements” of patient cavities. The more cavities the dentist fixed, the worse the data said he was. It’s absurd, but that’s what we do to teachers when we fail to acknowledge a myriad of features contributing to any problem.

3.   I have to accept that it is OK to teach to a test and manipulate a better outcome (Hawthorne effect, he says), which we all know is true. In fact, should the State determine that torture is an effective means of producing a desired outcome, then this is a logic we’d need to accept regardless of how we may feel about torture if we accept that “outcome” is the goal.

4.   Coupled with the above, I would need to accept that we’ve been given a test worthy of teaching to (which I don’t) and that somehow my seventh grade daughter’s future success as a human being is directly tied to her ability to use words like “feckless” or “sagacious” in a complete sentence. While it’s nice to know that she is sagacious enough to avoid fecklessness, I can promise you she’d be this way even if she had only an “amorphous” understanding of what I am ranting about as she “meanders” her way through “litigious” requirements to become proficient in the State’s “voracious pseudonyms” that replace real communication and supposedly measure her worth as a productive human being.

5.   I would need to ignore the basics of genomic diversity (there’s a reason we don’t use dunking a basketball or playing the harp as a litmus test for all humans) and further still, I would have to ignore the reality that a standardized test is specifically designed to give the “same” questions, in the “same” format, in the “same” amount of time to children who are not and NOR WILL THEY EVER BE the “same.” Anyone with two children knows you have change tactics to reach one or the other and that what worked for one, seldom worked for the other. Standardized testing refuses to acknowledge this basic reality of genetic diversity.

I could go on for hours, but I won’t. We could talk about how it was not the herds of unwashed Americans who gave us Enron, the housing bubble, or the big bank exploitation that nearly killed the world economy; rather it was our Harvard educated, “college-ready” standardized test-takers who pulled that number on us. Or we could talk about how JFK’s IQ was a solid 30 points below Nixon’s and yet he still managed to be twice the leader Nixon was. On and on and on, history screams at us. None of that matters much when there’s data to worship.

The only reason I am even bothering to reply (yet again) is because Coffey mentioned the Hawthorne effect. I am peculiar like that.

By mentioning it, he has opened up a real can of worms (that’s a metaphor -- just in case you were one of the ACT test takers thirty years ago scoring the same as the doomed and ignorant kids today are) … (PS: that’s satire).

The Hawthorne effect is not always discussed in favorable terms among data analysts. It is very often seen as a manipulation point that interferes with gaining an objective view of what is really going on. So to put it as simply as I possibly can, if measuring a student’s performance has a direct correlation to increasing that performance (and it does to an extent) then what we’ve measured is performance. We’ve not measured how well our kids can think and that’s at least half the problem.

Beyond this, again as clearly as I can put it, if the Hawthorne effect is to be taken as legitimate, then we could just as easily apply it to the test-makers themselves and increase their test creation performance by observing and measuring them. Until recently, that was not even an option, meaning no one could measure the effectiveness of the test-maker (which is criminal when you think tax payers fronted millions for a test we couldn’t test for effectiveness).

Surely you see the problem now. By applying the Hawthorne effect to the test-makers we’ve entered into “Achilles and the Tortoise” territory (if you know Zeno and Lewis Carroll) where the rulers by which we measure improvement can themselves be measured for improvement. This philosophically begs the question about what we are measuring at all.

All of this is of course a ridiculous conversation when we know outright that there have been numerous studies that reveal the opposite of the Hawthorne effect: that in fact measuring a control group produced WORSE results. One of them, quite disturbingly, involved surgeons who when measured for skill and effectiveness had higher patient mortality rates than when they were left alone.

Again, why does it matter? I guess it matters because we keep getting fish-slapped every week with the same old “We’re getting closer” nonsense, which incidentally, this week pointed us to a new product. And those of us who have a genuine education (not a standardized one) know something all too well: “Behind every measurement is a ruler for sale.” Clip that for your Facebook page and just owe me one.

I guess I’m done responding to the saturation of columns for a while. I don’t know why the Oak Ridger keeps giving space for the same shallow material that is clearly agenda driven, but…

Here’s a final thought before I go: Anyone who has seen Schindler's List where the Nazi soldier stands over the Jewish ammunition worker to measure productivity knows that the Hawthorne effect is real. But is that really the kind of world we want? Do we want it for our children?

Well, to use Mr. Coffey’s words… “we’re almost there.”

Reading vs. Writing Proficiency

Questions of Reading and Writing Proficiency

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with David Coffey on education, but in his April 7 “spotlight” submission, he raises what probably should be a given in education: strong leadership produces results. I am not sure we need 100 million dollars or a slate of longitudinal studies to demonstrate this as it is “conventional wisdom,” but filling in the knowledge gaps with evidence is hardly ever a bad thing.

That’s why I went and looked up the test scores for Quitman County Elementary School. Assuming that the scores I looked at were accurately presented on the school report card website (and in today’s world that tends to be a scary assumption to make), I found that indeed test scores rose significantly with the implementation of the reading initiatives described in the Wall Street Journal op-ed submitted by Richard Grant and referenced at length by Mr. Coffey. (Incidentally, scores have declined since then, which would make for an interesting value-added discussion, but we can save that for another day!)

What struck my fancy in the Quitman raw data was a fascinating comparison of the language arts scores to the scores of its kindred cousin: writing proficiency.  Fourth grade language arts scores did in fact reveal that only 18% of the student population was proficient in 2010 and only 22% were proficient the next year in 2011. No one questions that this is an abysmal failure in either education or motivation, or perhaps both.

But what about writing? Fourth grade writing scores in 2010 for Quitman County Elementary stood at 79% proficient and in 2011 they recording a whopping 93% proficient.

The data leaves us with what I will refer to as a “first things first” question. Simply put, as adults interested in the education of our children, we need to ask how a cohort of students who are 93% proficient in writing manages to see only 1 in every 5 of these exact same students pass a language arts test?

Here are the possible answers to that question and before we take even the first step into upending education or spending bucket-loads of money on solutions, we need to determine which answer is correct:

#1  Some students can write very well, but still can’t read for comprehension. We need look no further than master satirist Lewis Carroll and his poem “Jabberwocky” to see the idea of this principle in effect.

#2  The language arts test was either flawed or using a bad rubric. If they truly can write proficiently, isn’t this possible? Perhaps the reading portions were poorly constructed or graded much more harshly than deserved.

#3  The writing test was either flawed or using a bad rubric. Perhaps the students did not write nearly as “proficiently” as the test let on. It could be their writing submissions were graded on some kind of a curve.

#4  Students were less interested in the language arts test and in their utter boredom starting choosing random answers to be done faster. (This was me in school.)

I don’t know which of the above, or what combination of the above, is the correct answer. What I do know is that we owe it to ourselves and to our children to find out before we begin talking about “solutions” to problems that we do not fully understand.

If the rubrics of either test were flawed, then that is information parents and school systems should be made aware of immediately. If our standards are too high for reading comprehension or too low for writing proficiently, we owe it to ourselves to know which of these is true.

I am probably one of the few parents who actually took the sample portions our State elementary reading tests and can wholeheartedly say that if I were one of the students who passed writing, but not language arts, it would be 100% due to answer #4. The sample test that I took was ridiculously tedious and boring. So much so, that I found the sixth grade sample practically unreadable. I doubt my scores as a college educated adult would be all that much better than my sixth-grade counterpart who sat marveling over a spider webs in the window when faced with monotony in the classroom.

There may be other answers than the four I listed here. There may also be teams of “experts” out there who actually know the answer outright and can respond without batting an eye. Nevertheless, until we have had conversations such as the one I am suggesting here (and many more like them… let’s do math next!) then we can claim neither clarity nor sincerity with regards to what will work and what won’t work in education.

No one denies that we can raise test scores and there are many ways to do that. Many of these “methods” have significant trade-offs (just ask South Korea and look at the youth suicide rate). At issue though is whether or not we’ve educated our children in the process of raising their test scores and there aren’t too many ways to measure that snafu. But we can start by better educating ourselves. We need to determine why five times more kids in Quitman County Elementary can apparently write proficiently, but seemingly can’t read.

We need to decide if we are bringing the right ruler to the desk and whether or not we are measuring the right things because the raw data here suggests that maybe we aren’t.

340 Pound Hand-Checks in Basketball

Our local sports radio station had brief but interesting debate about stricter rule enforcement enacted this year with regards to defensive hand-checking in NCAA basketball play. It seems there’s quite a push (no pun intended) to tighten up defenses with regards to applying contact to your opponent during play.

I have mixed feelings about it at the NCAA level. I understand why we don’t see a ton of hand-checking or interference at the NBA level. Fans want to see a lot of shooting and quick cutting penetration to the basket. Allowing too much contact, hampers the speed of play and dampens scoring opportunities. On top of that, the skill levels are much more equalized among players such that expending that kind of energy on defense isn’t typically worth it over the course of a game. “They’re going to get theirs” is the mindset, so saving energy for faster transitions and offense only makes sense so that “we can get ours.”

I have to confess a pretty unpopular opinion though at high school, and most definitely at middle school levels of play. Size differences being what they are, hand-checks matter.

As the parent of a very tiny middle school basketball player, I feel pretty confident in saying at a 70-pound hand-check from a girl who hasn’t hit maturity going up against a 140-pound girl who matured very early, won’t be that disruptive to their dribbling, shooting, or just motion in general.

But when you turn the tables and have that same 140-pound girl hand-checking a 70-pound dribbler, you better believe it hinders motion. By comparison, I am a grown man weighing a meager 165 pounds. I can hardly imagine having to endure dozens and dozens of hand-checks and defensive obstructions from a 340 pound man over the course of a game.

I suspect that if I had to play basketball the way my daughter has to play the game now, I would come home at night with a smattering of purple and black across my entire body – as she often does now.

I will forgo making any “size matters” jokes and stick to the facts—size does matter in basketball. It matters less at higher levels because there is sort of a “break-even” point where too much size hinders player speed. But at the early stages, it is very common to see young players who have fully matured to adult sizes bring double the body mass of their opponents every week on the court.

No one likes seeing their bigs hampered by whistle happy refs. Taking size out of the game due to officiating seems downright criminal. But so does watching 150 pounds swat mercilessly at an 80 pound point guard.

Personally, I’d like to see post play stay as physical as possible while getting tighter calls made up top in middle and high school ball. Here are my top three reasons:

#1   Safety of the athletes.  The human body isn’t built to withstand too many collisions with objects that double its size. So Steph Curry weighs 185 pounds and Lebron tops out at 250 pounds… imagine giving Lebron an extra 50% in body weight and taking him to a solid 375. Now imagine that he was given mostly free license to reach, swat, and otherwise body up on Steph….

Steph is going to get around him, no doubt. He’s Steph freaking Curry! But I would bet that over time, Steph’s body isn’t going to keep up. That much of a size differential hammering on his hands, arms, and shoulders is going to greatly increase the risk of injury, as well as rapidly accelerate the general wear and tear to Curry’s smaller frame.

Given that 11-12 year-old girls haven’t developed safe-falling techniques, it’s going to be worse at lower levels and injuries will be more frequent. To back that statement up consider this quick fact --

According to a 2008 National Sport’s Medicine review of basketball, teenage GIRLS ages 12-15 comprised 50% of all post-game concussions.

Think about that… half of all sports concussions in basketball weren’t just girls, but middle school girls.

That’s 100% due to size differentials between pre / post maturity players.

#2   Most late bloomers don’t get to develop at the same pace in the sport. Because they are slower to mature, it is impossible to know for sure whether or not you’re dealing with a perpetual five-footer; or if you have a potential six-footer on your hands. Either way, nine times out of ten, the small kid will be on the bench, or worse – won’t bother trying out.

My sixth grade year, I was the smallest kid in the school. My nickname was even “Little Allred.” By mid-way through my 8^th grade year, I was the 3^rd tallest kid in my school. It happened that fast. I didn’t even try to play basketball until the 8^th grade because I believed I would never have a chance to play or contribute.

Calling a tighter game gives smaller players an opportunity to hone their dribbling and shooting skills on the off chance they do grow into a larger player. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve passed a big high school kid and asked, “Do you play basketball?” only to have them respond, “I would have but I didn’t know I was going to be this tall. I can’t even dribble because I never thought I would be big.”

Size matters… but maybe it shouldn’t matter as much as we allow it to matter when kids are young and still growing.

#3   Calling a loose game helps the bigs reach amazing success – but only in the short term. The older the opposition gets, the more the growth charts start to level out. By the 10^th grade, that 110-pound post player they pushed around in the 8^th grade weighs almost as much as they do… unless they learned to play correctly and learned to find success by doing things in good form, the bigs at lower levels find themselves hurting in big ways as the opposition catches up to them in weight.

Many of players of decent size find they have to actually JUMP for the first time in their basketball careers. They realize the fundamentals of boxing out weren’t just wasted ideas that their coach was always on about. As the rest of the players on the court grow and size gets closer to balanced, fundamentals matter more and more.

So many kids that found great success at earlier stages become team liabilities when size gaps begin to close. Teaching them fundamentals and calling tighter games better prepares them for what they will face at the next level.

So that’s my position on it… I say tighten the games up a lot at the secondary level. Let kids learn the sport, develop sound shooting, and quick, unobstructed transition play. It will reduce injuries, give smaller players a little more incentive to try out for the team while they grow, and it will ultimately make our team’s bigs that much better at what they are there to accomplish.

Star Wars the Force Awakens, Thoughts WITH SPOILERS

Since the first paragraph of most every blog often appears in links, I am going to ramble a second just in case some not wanting spoilers can be sure to avoid the remainder of this post. That said, if you’ve seen the movie, or if for some reason you don’t plan to and don’t care about spoilers, feel free to read ahead!

First of all, no matter what else is said here, I want to be clear: I loved the movie. As far as being a Star Wars fan or feeling like I got my money’s worth in a Sci-Fi picture, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (SWTFA) worked. There’s enough of a “tribute” feel toward the first films, mixed in with plenty of action, so seriously – What’s not to love?!?

Well, for me personally, it was the trope of a disintegrated family system, so common in our era of hero-making that was again presented for thousandth time with seemingly no thought of how prevalent it is in our culture.

I have read enough Joseph Campbell to know how the “hero’s journey” works. Our protagonists must endure some degree of personal tragedy, find a way to overcome that tragedy, and emerge victorious on the other side. If they don’t do this, they feel less “hero-like” to us (as if any of us from healthy family systems with living, loving parents are incapable of making the trip).

Still, here’s how it works if you are new to the idea: Batman loses his parents, Superman his home planet. Spiderman loses his uncle. Catniss loses her father, her freedom, and her friends. Captain America loses Bucky and General Maximus loses his wife and child. Bambi and Nemo lose their mom and Cinderella loses both her parents; so does Harry Potter. We could go on for pages. From Snow White to William Wallace to the Divergent series, the Maze Runner series, the Walking Dead, or even yet-to-be-named man or woman you create to play in Bethesda’s new Fallout IV game – the trope is alive and well in our story-telling today, and perhaps for all time.

So why would it bother me in Star Wars? More specifically, why would it bother me so much in “The Force Awakens,” when:

·         Anakin’s mom is tortured and murdered by sand-people

·         Luke’s aunt and uncle get torched by Stormtroopers

·         Alderan gets blown to bits by Tarkin (killing Leia’s adopted parents & home world)

I think it’s because (and here come the SPOILERS), Han and Leia represented what may have been the “only hope” for a potential unbroken family unit in six straight films. Alas, this wasn’t to be as not only do we learn that one of the great romances of our generation was a bust, they also managed to create an angry, crazy, “all kinds of messed up” kid to give the galaxy as a parting gift.

For me, watching Kylo Ren struggle with the light side of force in that gut-wrenching scene on the platform had a lot less feeling attached to good old Han getting sabered (which was emotional, no doubt), but rather left me with an even more hollow feeling of ridiculous it is to hope that true love and healthy families can exist in the Star Wars universe.

Gail Simone’s now infamous phrase “women in refrigerators” was once employed to raise awareness in us about how the deaths and injuries of many women in comic books serve the nearly solitary purpose of raising our emotional investment in the male protagonist… as the trope would have it anyway. The phrase refers back to the killing of Green Lantern’s girlfriend, Alexandra Dewitt, by the villain Major Force who later stuffed her remains in a refrigerator for our “hero” to find.

What we seem to have in the Star Wars universe is (thankfully) much different than the woman-killing trope (although look at all the dead mothers). We have in SWTFA a female lead, which is both welcoming and refreshing. But we still have the trope and in Star Wars, it’s the corpse of a healthy family that gets employed over and over again… Newcomer to the force, Rey, is apparently orphaned and comes from a broken family. Finn, our other newcomer to the SWTFA universe apparently has been kidnapped from his family and robbed of growing up in a family unit. Just like Darth Vader, Luke, and Leia all emerged from a broken families with dead mothers, absent or psychopathic fathers, and what seems to be a galaxy-wide orphaning of children where this beautiful thing called “the Force” is concerned.

I think one of the things that made Han and Leia’s relationship so meaningful in the Star Wars universe before SWTFA was that despite their differences, we had a feeling that love was going to prevail. The constant “dislodging” we felt for our protagonists was finding a warmer place to settle down and find health in the two of them. The idea of a real home, a couple that could fight honestly with each other and yet remain together, and maybe even a glimmer of a miracle in a happy family all seemed to finally be shaping up in our “happy ending” in the original films.

But alas at the end of the day, the TROPE is really the strongest “FORCE” in the galaxy and this hope we sensed didn’t stand a chance. Han and Leia split, ending one of greatest screen romances in divorce (or at least separation); Kylo Ren commits patricide (talk about killing a family unit, there you go), and our two other young would-be heroes are as they have always been in the Star Wars universe, galaxy wandering orphans carrying around the scars of their respective broken families.

History repeats itself in SWTFA, and not all of it in the right ways.

Sometimes I wonder if 1,000 years from now historians won’t look back at our idyllic fascination with disintegrated families and see it as more than just a literary device. I wonder if they’ll see it in ways that we don’t even see it now – as a perfect representation of where we are as a culture, met head-on with all the resolve that popcorn and Coca-Cola can muster.

Arrow: Seasons 1-3 (The Secret Review with Spoilers!)

Season One:

My name is Oliver Queen. I like secrets. I secretly slipped away on a boat with my girlfriend’s sister, Sarah Lance. She died. (But secretly didn’t, see season two... but dies again, dang it... I have no luck with the ladies.)

My dad, Robert, had a secret he told me. And a secret book too. The names were secretive, but I came home after five years with a big secret of my own. I can kill people real nice. With arrows that I sharpen in my secret lair.

My bodyguard Diggle doesn’t like my secret. I need to tell him, so I do… but only after I use my secret to embarrass him a little. My therapist says I have trust issues.

I learn that my mom, Moria, has a secret too. Lots of them actually. She is part of a secret plan to nuke my city. She has failed this city.

My sister Thea has a secret drug and alcohol problem. This makes me sad because she’s really nice person deep down. I need to keep her drug problem a secret until I can fix it.

Yesterday, I tried to help her, but she says I keep too many secrets. WTH? Women. Psh.

This chick at my company suspects me of secrets. She is goofy and wears goofy glasses and talks all nerdy. She secretly loves me, and I tell her my secret because... well, she is easy on the eye I guess. Plus she can secretly hack into computers and satellites. I don’t tell her all my secrets though, just the secret lair stuff. And I bought her some high tech stuff cause I am rich.

I was upset to learn my best friend’s dad “Merlin” has a better secret than me. His secret kicked my secret's butt. I don’t know where his secret lair is, but I will find out. He is part of the secret plan to nuke my city.

Thea, my sister, stays mad at me on most days because of my secret. She really needs a drink. I hate to say it, but she’s wound up pretty tight.

I go back to my 1^st girlfriend, Laurel, and secretly get her to cheat on my best friend Tommy. Tommy sees us because as secretive as I am, I like to leave the shades open when I make out. I am cool like that.

Laurel doesn’t know about my other secret… the one where I learned how to kill people real nice. She doesn’t like my other secret very much, says I am dangerous. Whatever.

Laurel’s dad is a cop. He huffs and puffs a lot about my secret. I can’t understand why, I mean really? I am doing the man a favor. He needs a drink too… except he has a secret drinking problem. Lush.

My best friend Tommy finds out my secret. But his dad Merlin, who has a better secret than me, gets his son killed. Plus he sets off his secret nuke! What a douche!

I have failed this city…

Cue the pouty music, I need to mope around some.

Season Two:

 My name is Oliver Queen. I still mope around because I failed this city and my best friend is dead.

My mom told everyone about her secret collaboration with the psycho-nuke father of my dead best friend to the world. We all are kind of sad now because she might go to jail. She could blame my dead best friend’s father, but she has too many secrets to come forward.

This year, I have new secrets to go with my new name, Arrow. You see four years ago, I had friends on the island that I told no one about. One of those was my secretly my former girlfriend Laurel's sister, Sarah, who didn't die on the boat. I kept that secret real good, didn’t I? Haha. You are all chumps.

Sarah has a secret like me. She kills people real good. I want her secret and my secret to make love, so we do. But honestly, she makes me mad because she kills people. My secret is going soft… I mean the first one of course. I don't like to kill people real good anymore because I am a hero.

I don't feel guilty about being with Sarah even though she is my ex-girlfriend’s sister because Laurel has a secret drinking problem now, just like her dad. I don’t like that kind of secret; in case you forgot -- my sister had a secret addiction last season. It makes me sad sometimes when I think about it in my secret lair.

My friend Slade Wilson got brain-washed from a drug with a stupid secret name. He is alive with a secret of his own. He can kill people real good. He is really looney toons crazy also, but that is no secret.

Slade doesn’t know that I have another secret… he doesn’t know yet that I secretly chose the love of his life to die instead of Sarah. If he finds out he is going to try to kill me real good.

OH SNAP! He does know that secret now! He is going to destroy everything I love and maybe expose my secret. That I am secretly the Arrow, the guy who formerly killed people real good.

In other news, you might like to know that my mom Moria and my dead best friend’s father, Merlin made a secret baby… my step-sister Thea! Whaaat? She got her freak on with that guy?!? Women, psh.

I can’t tell anyone this secret about my sister! It would just be awful, plus it would hurt my mom's chances at becoming mayor. She’s out of jail and ready to be a politician. Politicians have good secrets!

Thea, the secret love child of my mom and nuke boy Merlin, can sense that I have more secrets. My sister really doesn’t like me much... sigh. Women.

Laurel keeps drinking booze in secret. This still makes me sad. I gotta get this chick some help. Maybe I should tell her my secret… or tell her the secret that her sister is still alive and we are doing it secretively every night.

Everybody look out… the man my mom is running for mayor against is a guy with a dark secret. Oh no! That guy is brain-washing people with Slade Wilson brain-washing juice! This is a terrible secret that even affects my sister’s new boyfriend, Roy. He is getting brain-washed by the Wilson juice… but it will help him with his new secret, being my partner!

But first I need to tell Thea's boyfriend my secret. Crap, he killed someone while brain-washed wearing one of my costumes…. we gotta keep that killing a secret -- even from himself. Let’s lie to him when he gets up and say he was playing Monopoly or something instead of killing people real good.

Holy Smokes! My old friend Slade just killed my mom real good! It is no secret that I am sad. I am moping around some more.

Detective Lance is warming up to my secret. Still, he's always mad about something... like the way his daughter Sarah keeps secrets about her past.

Wow, Sarah my new girlfriend had a secret romance with another woman in the secret League of Assassins. So freaky, girlfriend! I don’t mind much. Everyone has secrets. Maybe her ex-girlfriend can help me in my secret war with Slade Wilson... maybe. I need to discuss this with her in secret.

I tell my partner Roy, who recovered from brain-washing to break up with my sister. Just protecting her like a good big brother would and keeping the secrets going so she can be safe. My sister is none too happy about even more secrets, but what she going to do about it? We da men shoot arrows! Yeah, baby.

Guess what? The season is over and I pounded Slade Wilson… but it costs me my company. Dang it... I be poor like you now! Still, Slade is down for the count. I lock him up in my secret prison on the island where my big secret started.

Season Three:

My name is Oliver Queen. My show is about brain-washing people and secrets. My best friend’s dad, Merlin, is back in town with another secret, but it isn’t a nuke this time. I am not too mad at him really. He’s got a pretty good sense of humor for a psychopath.

Bonus: I told my sister my secret. She wasn’t mad… finally sobering up I guess. I think she was still kind of sore about her boyfriend’s secret though. She flirts around some with a DJ who has a secret identity like a mad girlfriend might do when abandoned by a man who secretly killed people real good.

Her new boyfriend / employee who works above my secret lair is really a secret agent in the highly secretive league of assassins. This group is really mad at Tommy's dad, Merlin, for all his secrets. They are coming to kill him, but I won’t let that happen. He might have dropped a nuke on my city and killed a bunch of people real good, but this is still my city. I take care of the secrets here, not the pajama parade of ninja boys.

My girlfriend Sarah, the sister of my old girlfriend (the one I keep secrets from), is murdered! We really want to know who did it, but something tells me it is a terrible secret. Sarah’s ex-girlfriend is back in town to figure out the secret of who killed her… she is so mad at me now. Women. Psh.

No one should tell Sarah’s dad or any of her family the secret that she is dead. Quick hide the body! We might be able to use her in a spin-off series.

Remember how I lost my company? The dude that is running my company these days has a secret. He is kind of goofy. The goofy chick likes him. He learns my secret and gets really mad at me. Women.... and the men that act like them. Psh. I need to go flex or something I guess.

I find out the secret of who killed my girlfriend… it was my sister. This is bad. My sister was brain-washed by her dad, Merlin, and can’t be held responsible for her actions. Merlin did it secretly to take the heat of him. He has been training her to be a killer in secret. I can’t stand this secret and it makes me mad at her. How dare she keep secrets like that from me? What kind of crazy person keeps a secret like that? Broads... psh. Who understands them?

I really need to protect my sister’s secret, or the secret assassin league will come kill her. I don't tell Thea she is the killer. It's a secret. I don’t tell the secret assassins that my sister is innocent. I keep that a secret too.

I tell some lies to my friends because I want to go fight the secret league of assassins and secretly offer my life in exchange for Thea, my sister. I team up with Merlin who secretly killed my girlfriend after brain-washing my sister. I guess he’s alright for a psychopath.

Some point along the way, I met another dude who could move really fast… he has a secret too. His name is Barry Allen and he is trying not to fail his city. We do stuff together in secret… I mean, not that kind of stuff, but you know, secretive stuff. He doesn't like to kill people real good, so we are cool with each other I think. He's keeping his secrets real good though from his lady friend.... protecting her like me and my gals! Yeah, fist bump!

My sister discovers the secret -- you know, the one where she secretly killed my girlfriend… man, is she acting all depressed now. She goes and blabs her secret to everyone. She needs to man up.

Dang! My girlfriend’s sister Laurel (who was my old girlfriend twice over) found out the secret of how my sister killed her sister in secret because my sister blabbed about it to her. Laurel is really mad at me now. Crazy broad. She is even starting to train in secret to be a good fighter like her sister was in her secret life.

Hey Laurel, lets’ not tell your dad, the Detective! We have to keep this a secret or he will have a heart attack. (He does find out about this secret and gets really mad at me. Psh. What’s his deal?)

Meanwhile, I go fight the secret assassins' boss in a secret city and get stabbed through the lungs! Man, I thought that hurt… then I fell off a cliff and died. Wow, that really sucked. He killed me real, real good. I mean, it was awesome.

But two of my other secret friends from my secret stay in Hong Kong working for the secretive Amanda Waller resurrect me! How they did this is an ancient Chinese secret. I don’t even know!

While I am gone, the dude who runs my company practices all kinds of secrets in a shiny suit. He also hooks up with that goofy chick in what used to be my office.

I hope this crazy secret boss villain doesn’t find out the secret that I am alive. Or who secretly helped me that night! That would be bad!

My dead girlfriend’s sister Laurel is still really mad at me. She keeps training in secret to learn to fight with a boxer and with her sister Sarah’s ex-girlfriend. They try to keep it a secret, but her dad finds out. Worse, Detective Lance finally learned the secret of his dead daughter. He really hates me now… and Laurel too for keeping secrets. I bet he starts to drink again in secret. Lush.

Double ouch… that secret assassin boss that killed me real good knows I am alive. He is coming with a secret plan to make me the heir to his secret kingdom! I am such a stone-cold king of the world kind of dude!

I hatch a new secret plan of my own! My friends can’t know this secret... they can't handle it, but I can. My plan, you ask? I will secretly join the league as a double agent.

My friends are like mad at me now; this new secret isn’t going over well. They kind of whine a lot. Mostly about kidnapping my friend Diggle’s wife. He is so mad at me for keeping my double agent plan a secret. He says I have trust issues. Who does he think he is, my therapist?

That goofy computer girl and my friends try to rescue me and we make a little love. It was pretty good. I sent her off though, because there’s a secret plan to get me married to my dead girlfriend Sarah’s ex-lover. I don’t mind much… she’s pretty decent looking and fights ok.

Mr. Secret League boss thinks he has brain-washed me. Doesn't he know my name is Oliver Queen? I can keep a good secret. He doesn’t know I am about to secretly betray him. ROFL, what a douche.

I betray him on an airplane where I secretly hoped to die in a sacrifice to save my city. Whoops, I messed up. No decent obits for me I guess.

My friends, who are all kind of slow and silly, get over our trust issues to work with me. We find the secret location of his secret plan. It’s a bioweapon! I get shot after killing the secret assassin boss with a sword, or so everyone thinks. I will let them think I am dead. It’s a great secret.

We won! Now, I am going away with the goofy computer chick now to live a life without secrets.

Before I go though, I have one more secret:

I will secretly put my best friend’s dad, who killed his son and who brain-washed my sister into killing my girlfriend (who was the sister of my old girl-friend), in charge of that secret league of assassins for secret reasons. In his first act, he makes my dead girlfriend's ex-girlfriend (who I guess is technically my wife), and also the daughter of secret assassin boss dude that I killed bow down in allegiance to him. She doesn’t like this much, but I don’t care. Finally, I have my life back.

My name is Oliver Queen. I am happy.

The End.

Imperial Religion has No Place in the Kingdom of God

Preparing for the greatest day of the year, Easter, was a bit harder this year than last. On Thursday, the night we remember how Jesus was betrayed and handed over to both the religious and political Empires of His day, I happened to read of the new bill that seeks to designate the Bible as the State book of Tennessee.

There are a ton ways to scream “No” to this legislation, starting with the both the Tennessee Constitution and the United States Constitution. There is also the objection that the bill places the transcendental and eternal qualities of the Bible on the same footing as the Lily (our State flower) or the Raccoon (our State animal). Of course then there’s just down right common sense: The laws I use to influence my neighbor’s religion (or lack of) can easily be the same laws by which my neighbor one day attempts to subjugate me.

Those are fine ways to oppose this bill, but they are of lesser concern to me as a Christian pastor of twenty-five years. I am most deeply concerned at the way in which an action like this stands in stark opposition to the actions and words of the Bible itself, most especially as revealed in the person of Jesus.

When we read that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” in Gospel of John, I can only assume that there’s something about the way He lived, the Truth He stood for, and the Life He exemplified that is worth understanding and accepting.

In no instance do we ever see Jesus consorting with the political powers of the day to accomplish His objectives. We do not see Him leaning into the Roman Empire to advocate for “His rights.” We don’t see Him threatened in any way by what was likely the most godless, licentious, and sadistic Empires to have ever existed. He never feels backed into a corner, insecure in His faith, or anxious enough about the future to launch a political advocacy campaign for his religion.

In fact, Jesus not only refuses any collaboration with the Empire for the political advancement for His ministry and mission, he also actively bombards a religious Empire who worshipped and honored its religious texts with more fervor than the God who authored them.

“You search the Scriptures because in them you think you will find eternal life. But they point to Me!” He said in John 5:39. The religious Empire had “spirituality” whittled down to the very last bullet point, but as Jesus noted, in so doing they rejected the reasons the texts existed in the first place: to promote the justice and the love of God. (Luke 11:42).

Jesus came to us as a “New Word” (John 1:1-14) that would be written down, not by chiseling into stone (like the recent ‘In God We Trust’ campaign), but rather by inscribing eternity straight onto the human heart (2 Corinthians 3:3). The old systems of the Empire were not to be salvaged, Jesus came to declare a whole new system (Mark 2:22). He called this new way of being in the world “the Kingdom of God.”

The Kingdom of God has no room for Empire thinking. It is not taken by force, though many have tried (and continue to do so). The Kingdom is received as a little child (Mark 10:15). Children do not push their worldview on society, parents do that. Children do not legislate their holy texts, politicians do that. Children don’t force their morality on a community, Empires do that.

Jesus’ message about children and the Kingdom was very clear: Stop trying to be everyone else’s parent. We have one parent and that is God the Father.

As if that message were not clear enough, he spells it out in detail two chapters later with even more authority (Matthew 20:25-28). There’s no parenting or lording over others in the Kingdom. How can we claim to be His followers while being so absolutely dull and ignorant as to the way Jesus changed the world?

There is no room for the Empire in God’s Kingdom. Jesus stood every power structure up on his head and He never passed a law, raised an army, or flashed a fancy degree to do it. “It was accomplished” (John 19:30) by the unstoppable LOVE of God alone. God gets the credit for that -- not Pilate, not Caesar, not the Temple or the High Priests.   

How small the Love must be that needs an Empire to prop it up! What a powerless Kingdom that needs the backing of Human Law. Only an easily forgotten Faith is in need of Memorial; and only the most fragile promises need be etched in stone.  

How lost, the Way.

How forgotten, the Truth.

And oh, how shallow the Life.