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Wednesday Wit and Wisdom
By Jeremy | May 6, 2009
+ In the Valley of the Shadow of Suicide. My cousin-in-law shares glimmers of hope in an essay for Christianity Today after losing a son.
Early on, the suicide felt like a cruel cosmic joke. It was as if God, or the Devil, or some Job-like combination thereof, was mocking and toying with us. Had my husband and I not been devoted, if imperfect, parents? And what kind of awful irony was it that our boy with the sunny disposition, the one whose story embodied the pro-life message, would take his own life? Would his legacy be reduced to symbols of social stigma instead, in birth and in death? …
When I think of all that Gabriel suffered in this life, I do not understand. I find it difficult to trust God or engage him with the intimacy I once enjoyed. And yet every day, I inhale moments of grace. …
+ Man up and be a real dad. CNN shines “a spotlight on a figure that continues to plague neighborhoods all across the country: the missing-in-action father.”
This isn’t a tale of the stereotypical black athlete who grows up with the black father not in the home, leading to the cycle of violence and lack of family unity we see all around the country. Strawberry’s dad was there. But, according to the former ballplayer, he was a horrible father. And right now, there are also young white boys in suburban and rural America who have dads in the home, physically, yet they have mentally and emotionally checked out. And the same for Hispanics and Asians.
It has gotten to the point that a mother is considered essential in a family, but a father is optional, expendable, and increasingly irrelevant.
+ How David Beats Goliath, a New Yorker feature by Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point, Blink)
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,†he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, ArreguÃn-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, ArreguÃn-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.â€
+ “For most people, TV is a habit that costs in excess of $1 million over a lifetime.”
To put it into perspective, if you watch an average of 31.5 hours of TV each week (which the average person in the US does) and you value your time at minimum wage of $5.85 an hour, you are spending nearly $800 a month ($798.53) to watch TV. That comes to nearly $10,000 ($9582.30) a year. I would imagine that most people reading this value their time well above minimum wage, so the cost is likely several times that number. When you look at it from that perspective, watching TV is an extremely expensive and financially draining habit to have.
+ Ahead of his time. Rudy’s “protest and invest” mantra is catching on at the Wall Street Journal. (If only they knew the source.)
Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It’s also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don’t have without regard for our children’s future.
Topics: capitalism, christine scheller, economics, fatherhood, fatherlessness, grief, innovation, malcolm gladwell, news, protest and invest, random, rudy carrasco, savings, suicide, television, underdogs | No Comments »
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