Thursday, May 1, 2014

This Week

This week, Saturday, two days from today, I am supposed to give a 50 minute presentation on how to build your own blog. Ha! If they only knew!

What lies behind the polished surface of a reasonably well crafted monologue? A blog post is either the tip of a quiet life iceberg, or it is a hollow, hyper perforated pickle ball, full of air and noise, flying with great force for a few feet, only to land with a few soggy bounces.

Blogging is not my first life goal. However, at the present, it is a vehicle that accomplishes a lot of things for myself and our family.

I am aware of the power of the written page. Take the spread of Christianity—and of communism. A Christian missionary to China in the early 1900’s wrote of the full blown contest between the Leninist advance agents and Christian missionaries who were competing for the soul of the awakening Oriental giant. Large numbers of Communist ideological leaflets were being distributed among the gullible peasants, with dozens of articles attacking the ideas of God, the Bible, missionaries, and the church.

A war of words had begun which has had full and ebb tides for continual decades since then, and has been recorded in the blood of both incarcerated and executed Christian expats and nationals,  and the sequence of Communist leaders who pass from worship to hatred to indifference among their own people.

Why would I blog? Writing and spreading words around is both soothing and incendiary. For a few paragraphs, as I think about what to say to people about blogging on public policy and our family’s civic engagement, I will muse about the back stories of this week.

This week, we went to church as a family. Our late teen girls prepared a lesson for children. Team teaching in rotating pairs, they spell off parents who would listen undistracted to adult teachers. Sunday morning we came home from church. What is the balance between Christ and Plato, between Augustine and Socrates, between Aquinas and Aristotle? Why is the word theology not in the Bible? Do family life lessons need to be strained through many layers of historical religious creeds? For seminarians, this is usually their bread and butter.

Philosophy and theology encapsulate life, and they can also plug up the jets of civic service. Where is the black robed regiment of the 1600’s and 1700’s in New England, that struck fear into the hearts of overbearing English regents, that led King Charles to plan to send bloody Percy Kirk, fresh from war with the Moors, to New England to stamp out the fires of town hall democracy by crushing the congregationalist churches. Charles died, and Kirk never sailed, and ministers continued to preach sermons that were “blogged” (printed in the 1680’s, and re-printed in the 1770’s ), whose phraseology was directly incorporated into the Declaration of Independence. No wonder English redcoats in the revolutionary war made it policy to stable their horses in American churches and burn the benches for firewood.

This week, I finished replacing the bearings on our old utility trailer axle drums. I did the bearings myself, Monday morning, hurrying to get it done and get to the first electrical job. Mechanics are great, but cash flow is small. That evening, we loaded the crop of ewe lambs up and moved them to the neighbors pasture. Which were more active, the lambs, gamboling up to the loading ramp, or the teenagers, racing after lambs who had a different mindset? Why make an effort to milk dairy sheep? We almost got stuck in a wet area of that pasture. After coming home, I had to wash a layer of mud off my van in the dark. I wanted to be ready for work the next day.

Our neighbor has leased his barn and garden space to the manager of the Bellingham Farmers Market. We had a nice introduction to each other yesterday. I wonder if he will like our children like the two girls from Utah did last summer. It is great to share notes with other value added Ag people, even if they may be city oriented progressives or traditional farm kids.

Dairy sheep continues to be a money sink, as we are not yet licensed to sell aged raw milk cheese. That is coming! But, the process of doing this without loans teaches our young people character and basic business principles—the old fashioned ones that built America. Do I hate banks? No. Do I over work our family? I don’t think so. There are a lot of fun moments. And, working the land as a family gives opportunities to talk about water rights, land rights, social programs, capital programs, work habits, marketing, education—you get the picture.

This week, we started a new unit study in our home schooling. We use a curriculum that looks at basic school subjects through the lens of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, the classically recognized pinnacle of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Published by an organization that has fallen into great disfavor and whose founder is currently under accusation for serious ethics violations, this curriculum is nevertheless one of the best. So we quietly continue to use it.

It seems that success and favor destroy more people than failure and rejection. The text? “Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake”. Does that sound like civic service?

This week, I spent a few minutes at the end of the work day chatting with the Bellingham home owner whose kitchen and bathroom I am being paid to help remodel. We talked about under cabinet lighting, about the beauty AND the price tag of energy efficient undercabinet LED light tape.

Then we talked about their parents home on Portal Way, and the grouchy county inspectors who have declared the back forty to be wetlands, and won’t let them drive a pickup truck out back. We talked about the rude City of Bellingham public works employee, who twice angrily snarled at this lady the day before, when she suggested the water shut off might be farther from the road than it was.

We talked about the militant activism of public sector unions, about their punishing and demanding attitudes towards the public they are “serving”. We talked about Freedom Foundations bills in the last several months that highlighted Washington union leaders pushback against Wisconsin style reforms here. You get the picture.

This week…

This week, I am tired. Yet, I am happy. My desk has several months old piles of unfiled public service handouts, articles, meeting notes. My computer desktop is also spilling over. Every day I read about problems in our country. This blog. That blog. This city. That family. This business. That government leader. Learning and engaging in public policy really can destroy that “Better Homes and Garden” look.

This week, I and five of our young people will trek to Meridian High School for a day of engaging with other public policy volunteers. We will raise a standard for conservative Whatcom citizens. For one day, as a group of locals, we will renew the focus of conservative civic service that was the norm in the American past, that has been co-opted and outflanked by decades of focused socialist, agnostic educators bent on separating our children to their agenda.

This week… ??

See you at Meridian at 9 a.m. on Saturday!

JK

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