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Category: Editorial

  • How the Left Ruined Dilbert

    © Scott Adams, Inc.

    A few months ago, a friend of mine at a different company, knowing I was a manager, asked my advice on how to advance. I suggested they meet with their manager to discuss the issue, and so my friend met with their manager and the department head to discuss their future. My friend was pleased when about a month later the department head scheduled a second meeting.

    But when I asked how the second meeting went, my friend immediately became fearful.  The second meeting had not been to discuss opportunities for advancement. Instead, my friend was charged with harassment.  The horrible crime:  my friend had shared a cartoon from this year’s Dilbert Desk Calendar.

    Like so many people, particularly those who work in IT, my friend enjoys, or at least used to enjoy, Dilbert and found the lampooning of IT culture often amusing.  I, myself, have a Dilbert desk calendar, and I’m not the only one in my office who share these cartoons, either informally, or even formally in company power points.  My friend was no different.

    The problem is that my friend’s manager took offense to a cartoon and, instead of talking to my friend, reported that they were offended to the Department Head and that landed my friend in jeopardy. The expectation of discussing advancement evaporated and was replaced by an interrogation about underlying meanings and the deeper intentions of a cartoon, a cartoon my friend had not thought much about, other than it is was amusing and he had a desire to share that amusement. Hope for advancement became fear for his job.

    Despite this being a first (and only) “offense,” much less any warning, my friend was charged with a level 3 (out of 5) harassment because the cartoon covered a “protected group” and like so many organizations, this other company has a “zero tolerance” policy to show their commitment to the cause.

    This was followed up later by a meeting with HR, and further training on harassment. At no point was my friend given anything that amounted to an investigation or a chance for a defense. In fact, my friend felt that any attempt at a defense would be seen in a negative light. Resistance was not only futile but would be counterproductive.  My friend was doomed the instant the boss felt offended and reported it.

    Now every work day is spent walking on egg shells, fearing that some innocent remark might not only be taken as harassment, but it might be misconstrued as retaliation as well. Talk about a hostile work environment!  As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.

    And there is the problem. We have little control over how others react to anything.  Even our best intentions can be misunderstood. I once gave a person a complement, but they thought I was being sarcastic and it took quite a bit of effort to work though the misunderstanding and convince them that my complement had really been just that, a complement. Anything we say, at any time, can be misunderstood. As a teacher, I have learned that I need to repeat things often because despite how clear I try to be, in a large class there will be some who misunderstand the first time.

    Normally this is fine.  Most people work through such things, as they should. But into this normal human interaction, the Left has injected its agenda, backed by a strict code of Political Correctness. The very people who preach kindness and tolerance, teach people to take offense and demand zero tolerance.

    Often this brings hand-to-face moments, to those who hear of the latest example of absurdity, such as the little boy expelled from school for nibbling at his Pop Tart until it was in the shape of a gun, or the little girl who was forbidden to tell a fellow classmate at school they were her best friend, because that excludes all the other children. Or like my friend charged with harassment for sharing a Dilbert cartoon.

    It isn’t funny if you are the one involved, and this is something I really do not think the Left understands,  because offense is largely defined in terms of the Left’s agenda. Whereas the Right tends to disagree, the Left tends to get offended, so the effects of such policies are to be lop-sided.

    For all its talk about standing up to the powerful for the powerless, in the world of PC (Political Correctness), the Left is the power, and they will allow no challenge. Once charged, you are guilty.  For all its talk of individuals, the Left is ultimately dehumanizing, seeing not individuals but member of groups, and it is the group, not the individual that really matters.  In place of normal human interaction, the Left imposes its agenda which dictates what one is allowed to think.

    To enforce PC, it replaces rational thought by zero-tolerance, a mindless following of the Left’s agenda.   It does not seem to consider that this might just be two people with a misunderstanding which needs to be worked through. Instead it sees members of groups, pitted against each other. Which group the Left will support in any given situation has little to do with the actual situation or circumstances, as that would require an analysis and thought that is precluded by the zero-tolerance rules set by the agenda.

    Ultimately what really matters is not the people, but the agenda. A few on the Left have learned this the hard way when they stood up for the principles they thought the Left supported, only to find that they were out of step with the agenda. As a result, and to their surprise, the forces of destruction normally focused on the Right suddenly turned on them.

    It is tempting say that this is just an aberration, and the people at my friend’s company are just overzealous. But I have been through enough training to known that once my friend’s boss chose to report to the Department Head, hands were tied as the zero tolerance rules and other mechanisms of PC culture kicked in leaving little room for thought.  It is very possible that the Department Head and the HR Representative also saw this as an absurd over-reaction.  But they had to play their roles, less their career be crushed by PC machine the Left has created.

    On my desk I still have a Dilbert calendar, which was given to me by my daughter.  I still look at it daily when I can, but it’s no longer the innocent source of humor it once was.  I no longer share them as I once did, fearing someone might take offence.  Now I look at each one with the question, could this cost me my job?

    Postscript:  The Friday after the meeting with HR, my friend was looking though the latest department wide email with the normal information about refrigeration cleaning and upcoming events when they came to the end and found a Dilbert cartoon, in which the female administrative assistant is plotting to take over the world and speaks of “Subjugation, Humiliation and Misery! HA HA HA!”  Yup, no deeper underlying meaning or intent possible there. Let’s hope nobody took offense.

    by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., Engineer, teacher, Christian apologist, and author of Preserving Democracy, What is Wrong with Social Justice?, Christianity: The Basics, A Short Critique of Climate Change, Christianity and Secularism, and Evidence for the Bible.

  • History, the Confederacy, and Monuments

    Recently here on EDN, Robert Cornwall had an excellent article on the need to study history. On that point I completely agree. That said, I thought the view of history in the article he recommended was a bit binary and one sided. To be sure, there is a lot of truth in the description of Confederate monuments being linked to the “the Lost Cause” and when I was younger (i.e., the 1960s and 70s) it was still not all that uncommon to hear at least some of the older southerners refer to “the war of northern aggression.”
    While there have been some attempts to remove the issue of slavery from the Civil War, instead trying to find some sort of economic justification, ultimately those attempts have failed. Whatever other factors may have been involved, they were clearly secondary. If one could somehow erase the issue of slavery from the early history of the United States, there would have been no Civil War.
    Granted, in the early part of the war, many in the North were focused mainly on preserving the Union. Any such pretext was removed with the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the latter half of the war both sides fought over slavery, the South to preserve it and the North to end it.
    Slavery, the original sin of the country, ran deep, dividing the it from its earliest days. It stained the Constitution, dragging it away of the goals of the Declaration of Independence where “all men are created equal” into a 3/5 compromise. It repeatedly plagued the early years of the country as a cancer eating away at its victim. Periodically, it would bubble to the surface, resulting in yet more compromises.
    While the Democratic Party was mostly pro-slavery, the Whig party was split between those who wanted to restrict or even end slavery, and those who were willing to accommodate it or did not care. As the abolitionist movement grew, this split among the Whigs eventually destroyed the party and out of its destruction emerged the clearly anti-slavery Republican Party. With the election of the first Republican President, Lincoln, the South, fearing what the anti-slavery Republicans would do, started the Civil War.
    The war ended, but the stain remained. While Republicans moved more towards the idea of the Declaration, Democrats continued to view issues through the lens of race. As Republicans began to lose political control of the South, the Democrats began to impose another form of racism: Segregation, which sadly would last until the 100th anniversary of the Civil war. While there are some notable Democratic exceptions, as there were for Republicans as well, for the most part the Democrats were the party of race, first supporting slavery, then of segregation, and the KKK was the base of many Democratic politicians who were often members themselves.
    I was recently asked by a young software developer how is it that this was turned on its head? I answered that in many respects it really hasn’t. Democrats still tend to see everything through the eyes of race while Republicans are still the party where the color of one’s skin just is not that important; what matters is what one does and believes.
    For many Democrats the focus on races and dividing people into groups is so strong that they have a hard time accepting that Republicans really do not care about skin pigmentation. Instead they take the resistance to dividing people into groups as itself a form of racism, and then create myths such as the southern strategy to project their former evils unto their political opponents.
    Yet a Republican can, as many did, oppose Obama and yet enthusiastically support Ben Carson because of their policies and positions not their skin color. For Democrats, Republican opposition to Obama is frequently portrayed as racism, and the explanations for Carson, when offered, range from the incoherent to the disgusting (i.e., portraying Carson as an Uncle Tom).
    So where do I come down on Confederate monuments? While, my mother was from North Carolina, my Dad was from Wyoming and I grew up as an Air Force brat, an Air Force that had been desegregated by Harry Truman, a Democrat, seven years before I was born. Most of my memories as a child come from Pennsylvania and California. I now live in Wisconsin. So I am basically a northern Republican and do not view the Civil War as a lost cause or a war of Northern aggression. After all, the South started it by firing on Fort Sumter. I view the Civil War as two things: A Victory, and Over.
    Something common among the military, but not always understood by civilians, is the way that true warriors can fight so hard during a war, but then see those on “the other side” as fellow warriors after the war is over, even getting together to commemorate those fallen in battle. Thus, I can read a book like Rod Gragg’s “Covered with Glory: the 26th North Carolina Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg” and not be rooting for my side to win and them to lose, but instead seeking an understanding of what they went through and suffered.
    Towards the end of the first day of fighting, a federal solder, Corporal Charles H McConnell of the 24th Michigan was falling back. He took his last bullet, and aiming at a large man in gray 30 yards away, pulled the trigger. The large man was Colonel John R Lane, of the 26th North Carolina. The bullet hit Lane in the back of the neck exiting out through his teeth. It was a horrendous wound that nearly killed him. Yet 40 years later, at the anniversary of battle, Lane and McConnell met again and became friends. How is this possible?
    Ultimately, it is because warriors realize, better than most, that in war those on both sides are caught up in something larger than themselves. Once the conflict is settled, it is time to move on and turn swords into plowshares. I can admire as tragic figures “those on the other side” like Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I can get a glimpse of the internal struggle that some faced as they came up against good friends in battle like Armistead and Harrison at Gettysburg. In short, I see them as people who suffered, and not part of an issue to be fought over.
    In this light, when it comes to monuments in cemeteries or places like Gettysburg, I would be very strongly opposed to their removal. As for the others, I see them as much more problematic. I do believe that some of these celebrate the military tradition of the South, something that is much stronger than it is in the North, and it is a part of who they are, or at least were. Note that what is often called the Confederate flag was not actually the flag of the confederacy but a battle flag. Like it or not it is their history. But I can also understand the difficulty in separating this from the reason for which the war was fought, the preservation of the evil of slavery.
    The love of history in me would hate to see their blanket removal as something akin to how Islamic radicals seek to purge the areas they conquer of any vestige of the things they oppose. Ultimately, I wish those involved would learn to be more like Lane and McConnell and I wish we could look back on the Civil War as a tragedy which engulfed the nation, caused by our compromise with the evil of slavery.
    Frankly it should be much easier for us than it was for Lane and McConnell, after all no one alive today actually fought in the Civil War. Maybe a solution is that, rather than remove the Civil War monuments, we should focus on the positive endeavor of building more monuments to those who fought so hard to end the legacy of segregation in the Civil Rights movement.
    Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., Engineer, teacher, Christian apologist, and author of Preserving Democracy, What is Wrong with Social Justice?, A Short Critique of Climate Change, Christianity and Secularism, and Evidence for the Bible.
     
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  • Elgin Hushbeck: A Cautionary Note On the Current Political Environment

    by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., Engineer, Christian apologist, and author of Preserving Democracy, What is Wrong with Social Justice?, Christianity and Secularism, and Evidence for the Bible,.

    There is no question that Liberalism in general, and the Democrat party in specific are in trouble. Not only did they lose the last election, but with their defeats starting in 2010, they have lost over 1000 seats nationwide, completely reversing the solid majorities they once enjoyed. They are now clearly a minority party in turmoil, divided as to whether their problem is that they were too liberal, or not liberal enough.
    To be clear, I am nowhere near ready to declare the party dead. The reason is that the Republican party, even though it has a strong majority of the state and national elected offices across the country, is not without its problems. In terms of the number of elected offices, the Republicans are where the Democrats where just 8 years ago. So things can change very quickly and now it is their turn to deliver and should they fail, things might reverse yet again.

    The simple fact is that there is a reason Trump won and it has nothing to do with fake news stories desperately seeking to find some connection between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Did the Russians meddle? Of course, they did. They have been trying to influence things here for a very long time. That is what other governments do. Just as Obama tried to meddle in the Israel elections to defeat Netanyahu or the British election and Brexit. And let us not forget that one of FDR’s chief advisers at Yalta later turned out to be a Soviet Spy.
    The real question is: Did they actually affect the outcome in any meaningful way? Here, barring some yet unknown evidence, the answer is a clear “No.” Trump won and Clinton lost because of factors far beyond the Russians. The Russians may have leaked some of the DNCs emails, but they did not cause Hillary to set up her own email server and then lie repeatedly about how and why she used it. And it was not the Russians that caused the new revelations in the week before the election but an FBI investigation of Anthony Wiener on possible emails to minor girls that discovered a whole new batch of emails resulting in the late minute uproar. It was not Russians that caused Hillary to take the election for granted such that she, for example, never came back to my state of Wisconsin while Trump was campaigning here vigorously. In short, Hillary was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign.

    While that explains why Hillary lost, it does not, except by default, explain why Trump won. While my view during the election was that both candidates were un-electable, but one was going to win, and frankly I thought it would be Hillary, I have come to believe that Trump actually won, and not just by default.

    One thing that was abundantly clear during the election was that voters are unhappy and angry with politicians. Democrats were hardly happy with Clinton, as was seen in the strong challenge from Sanders. Republicans of course rejected some of the best rising stars in their party to nominate Trump. While I will let Democrats speak to the democratic issues, for Republicans the reason was pretty clear. Since the 1960’s there has been an ongoing struggle within the Republican party between what might be called the Establishment Republicans and the Conservatives. Within the rank and file, Conservatives won long ago, but because of the power of incumbency, and other factors, Establishment Republicans remained dominate among elected officials.

    Thus, for decades Republican elected officials have campaigned on solid conservative principles, but have not governed that way. Whether it was government reform, repealing Obamacare, building the boarder wall, or a whole range of issues, election after election of strong promises, were followed by term after term of excuses. It would have been one thing had they fought and lost, after all no one ever thought that President Obama would sign a bill repealing Obamacare. Rather it was the perception that Republicans had talked themselves out of even fighting. For example, after years of pushing Republican elected officials, they finally passed a law to fund and build a wall along the Southern Border, but then the law was ignored, and the wall was never built even under a Republican President.

    In addition to this was the fact that for decades those in Washington on both sides seem so focused on their issues and agendas, that in a very real sense they had forgotten the people they represented, and more importantly the problems and struggles they face. It was not by accident that the states that switched from Blue to Red to give Trump the election were Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

    This is what Trump both saw and tapped into. He clearly does not speak the language of politics, but he spoke a language the people heard; and no, contrary to Liberal hyperbole, it was not a language of racism and bigotry. All of the Republican candidates this year, as in past years, said they would build the wall. The difference is that people believed, whatever his faults, Trump would actually do it. As Salena Zito summed it up “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

    So Trump is now the President and is moving ahead with his agenda as he promised he would do. Both Republicans and Democrats should be wary. For Republicans, it is important that they do not go back to business as usual. At the end of the day they must fulfill their promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare, build the wall, reform immigration, rebuild our infrastructure and our military and improve the economy and wages. In short, do the things that they campaigned on.

    There will surely be a place for negotiation and compromise. After they build the wall and get immigration under control, I believe most Republicans would support allowing those already here illegally who have not otherwise broken our laws a way to gain permanent legal status, though not citizenship. Given the narrow margins in the House and Senate, this however, might require some Democratic support.

    This brings me to the Democrats and Liberals in general. Many are clearly in denial that Trump won and is now the President, so much so they are becoming completely irrational, as with the constant desperate attempts to find any hint of a possible connections between anyone connected to Trump and the Russians, as if that would suddenly reverse the election and Hillary could magically become President.

    Yes, we have desperate and irrational people within the Republicans ranks as the whole birther silliness demonstrated. But for the most part they are at the fringe. The current irrationally among the Liberals is found at the highest levels of the party and throughout the Mainsteam Media. There are repeated stories of how no President has ever done X or Y before, such as the comment I heard the other day of a reporter claiming no President has ever criticized his predecessor before Trump. Really? Such claims are normally played to great amusement on talk radio followed up by clips many Democrats in the past doing what supposedly had never been done before.

    As many know I was not a supporter of Trump. I did not think he would be elected. I think he still has a lot to learn about being President. But he is President and he is learning, and so far has done an ok job and I think over all his cabinet choices are pretty good.

    Elections have consequences. While I would not expect Democrats to just fall in line and support Trump, I would hope that the knee-jerk opposition to everything Trump, would be replaced by a more reasonable opposition that recognizes that he won. Dragging out every single confirmation battle as long as possible, only serves to make the government even more dysfunctional than it already is.

    I would remind them that an all or nothing approach can lead to victory, but it can also lead to ruin. Will some people be hurt by the repeal of Obamacare? Of course! In a country of 319 million people there will be some who it has helped, but there are vastly greater numbers have been harmed by it. The law was never popular and Republicans have won election after election across the country running on trying a different approach. Perhaps Republicans are wrong, but Democrats, and the people they represent would be better served if they productively join in and actively sought ways of mitigating any deficiencies they see, than their current block anything and everything approach. All or nothing often leaves you with nothing, and there are many in both parties that would benefit from learning that lesson.
     
     

  • Learning from September 11, 2001

    by Henry Neufeld, Publisher of Energion Publications

    Henry Neufeld
    There are things we must not forget.
    Why is that? Because we need to learn and apply certain lessons. There are changes we make in who we are and how we behave because of those events. Historical events, or more precisely our perception of them, shape us as families, groups, nations, and yes, churches.
    Americans remember the Revolutionary War, the framing of our constitution, the Civil War, December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor), the Vietnam War, and now 9/11. Those events (or periods of time) shaped us. What we were taught about them shaped us, and our perception of them shapes us. Our perception also helps to shape the next generation.
    The first Gulf War shaped my life in a major way. I didn’t slog through the sand as soldiers and marines do. I was in the U. S. Air Force, and I did my job in the back of an airplane. My experience in the service, and in various conflicts also shape me. I hear the news differently. Occasionally my wife and I will see a news story and I’ll comment that in the old days, I would have gone and packed my bag, waiting for the inevitable phone call that would tell me I was deploying.
    I want to emphasize that I don’t regard my time in the Air Force as some sort of hardship or trial. I enjoyed what I did. I had the opportunity to avoid that first gulf war. I had just returned from deployment, and was asked whether I’d like to volunteer. Most people didn’t have that choice!
    My perspective on 9/11 and following events grows out of those experiences. As an American, that is.
    But I have a different set of formative experiences as well. Those experiences center around a man dying on a cross outside Jerusalem about 33 CE. I understand that event not only through my own experiences (none of us can avoid our own experience!), but also through other stories of the faith: the creation, the exodus from Egypt, Israel’s exile and return, shaped by and shaping so much of the message of the prophets, and the Maccabean Revolt. (It is unfortunate, in my view, that the books of Maccabees are not part of the protestant canon.)
    Those events form my view of what happens as a Christian, or even better as a follower of Jesus Christ. That latter distinction is important. I can see the cross as the horrible moment when the Romans, aided and encouraged by Jewish collaborators, killed Jesus. That hateful and fearful view has shaped the behavior of many who have called themselves Christians. They have, in turn hated and feared Jews. The result of that hatred was killing and the building of further hatred.
    It is important to note that our perception of an event sets the way we are formed by it. In the gospel According to John Jesus tells us that we are to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34). That sets a perspective on the cross. We are to be shaped by it as an act of love, performed on our behalf by Jesus, and thus be set on a path of love for others. And not just any sort of love, but love that makes us willing to sacrifice our very lives.
    It was that sort of love that said, “Father forgive them,” regarding people who were in the process of crucifying the One who spoke.
    How we remember the event impacts how we act because of it.
    This is illustrated in the Passover Seder where actions are taken to remember with sadness what happened to the Egyptians. (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-daniel-brenner/does-passover-celebrate-the-death-of-innocent-egyptians_b_2821971.html as an example.)
    I think the intersection of these two sets of formative stories, the “myths” (in the most positive sense of that word) of our country and our faith community, illustrate a number of things. Most importantly, they show us that the two foundations are not identical. As an American I am drawn to restoration of power, to the accomplishment of justice (I hope) through means of power, and yes, even to revenge. As a Christian, shaped by the story of One who died on the cross, I am called to be different.
    I wrote about the word “revenge” back in 2003 just before we invaded Iraq a second time, in the second gulf war. I titled my piece Revenge! Some have objected that their support of the war in Iraq was not based on revenge. But any time you talk about how a group of people, especially one as large as a nation, comes to a decision there are many factors.
    I know that there was an element of revenge. Why? Because there was an element of revenge for me. It took me some time in thinking of the war to get past it. At the end of the first gulf war many of us had that feeling that we really hadn’t accomplished the mission because Saddam Hussein was still there and still being obnoxious and dangerous (perhaps) as ever. The thought of seeing Saddam Hussein removed was a joyful one to me.
    Until I asked this question: How are things going to be better when we’re done?
    As I re-read my piece from 2003 and saw my suggestion of a power vacuum opening up to more problems with Iran, I thought about our current news. Are we better off now because Iraq was invaded in 2003?
    But then there is a second question that comes from that second set of formative stories: Are they better off because we invaded in 2003?
    This discussion should not be seen as one about our veterans. In a democracy we need a military that obeys civilian authority. There are many ways in which civilian authority can misuse the military, but I believe those are as nothing compared to the way in which a military not under civilian control might abuse its own power. The young men and women who carry out our political will should always be honored, however we feel about the orders they are given. In fact, one of the greatest moral failures of our country, in my opinion, is that we expect this service and then fail these people as veterans. Complete care for those injured or killed in a war should be considered a basic part of the cost of that war by any nation that wants to claim moral high ground.
    Yet that second set of stories tells me that I need to be caring about every Iraqi killed, and now about those killed in the current wars there, wars which resulted in part from our changing the political and military calculus of an entire region, a region few of us understand.
    I cannot tie all the loose ends in a blog post, but even more importantly, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to do so.
    What I’d like you to do is ask yourself about these defining events (and many more; your list may be different), and how they have shaped you. The two lists conflict and overlap. I would suggest that one shaped by both may need to resolve conflicts. It is hard to both love one’s enemies and also bomb them into oblivion. It is also hard not to respond with force when innocent people are slaughtered.
    While I believe that our ultimate allegiance belongs to God and his kingdom, I do believe that allegiance calls us to take positive action in this world and at this time. At the same time, my allegiance to God’s kingdom means that the way I respond will be controlled not by anger, fear, hate, or the desire for revenge, but rather by the desire to make life better for others.
    God’s love is not diminished because a person lives in another country, belongs to another faith community, or even because that person is a terrorist.
    What about mine?

  • Welcome!

    The Energion.com eZine will be a place for open but serious discussion of critical issues at the intersection between politics, religion, and philosophy.  If you are looking at this post, we are still in the most preliminary stages of setting up the site.  Beta launch is expected Wednesday, September 2, 2009.
    It is not the software that is Beta.  We are going to use the last four months of 2009 to improve the concept prior to full launch in January 2010.
    Even though we will be testing and developing it will still be worthwhile dropping by.  We will have prizes for the most constructive commenters and will be looking for some paid articles for good writers.  We will be linking to many blog posts on the issues we address.
    So join us early and stop by regularly.  You won’t regret it!

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