A role for pebbles

"Jay!" he exclaimed, "You just gave me a great idea."
"I did? Well, give me it back because I could use one."

Mark, Jay's friend and editor, wasted no time, but raced to his car and drove home to write a column on his epiphany.

The next morning he came back to the office with a gleaming smile. "I may just get time for this, but I'd prove a point," he said as he started the truck and headed for the warehouse. When he got there, he pushed up the large garage door, walked over to the pile of tomorrow's newspapers -- every one in the chain, which was about half the newspapers in the city -- and loaded them into the truck. He still didn't tell Jay what his idea was.

"There's supposed to be little if any wind tomorrow, right?"
"I guess. What are you going to do?"

After driving to the park, Mark took a stack of papers out of the truck and started laying them on the sides of the path. "Pebbles, just in case," he said as he looked around and found a handful of stones to place on top of the papers. Continuing his run, he handed a few to Jay.

"I don't want to be your accomplice," said Jay.

"Yes you do," Mark replied. "They're taxing newspapers because they see our whole industry as a waste. We're struggling as it is, and now they're giving people just one more reason to not buy a paper."

"So how is scattering papers all over the park going to help?"

"It'll do several things, depending on the kind of person. If they're environmentalists, they'll be deeply offended, collect all of them and send them to the recycling center. If they're skeptics, they'll pick up one, read the daily news, then probably throw it away. If they're political, they'll pick one up, read the daily news, become deeply offended and then probably throw it in the garbage. If they're unemployed, they'll skip to the classified section, look for a job, then probably use it to wrap their presents."

"So basically, people will do the same thing they'd do if the papers were at the stand, just in a shorter span of time," Jay observed.

"Exactly! The quicker they're taken the quicker we'll run out. Come noon time, the 50% who grab a paper on their lunch break will be agitated that they have nothing to read with their afternoon coffee. After a few days of this, people will notice how much a part of their lifestyle newspapers are, and they'll either rally to have the tax removed or willingly put out the extra dime for something they now see as a necessity."

"Ok," said Jay. "But what if word gets out that the paper is scattered all over the park?"

"I see your point. Are newspapers really a nuisance for them, or is the whole issue just fuel for their cause? Nothing keeps recycling centers going like paper, and just about every day there's a paper that leaves a column open for green street's opinion. Even they need us."

They continued their masquerade while they talked, and by now all of the Main Street Park walkways were surrounded by the seven major newspapers of the city. It was about 5:30 a.m. The first morning rushers were entering town with their dew-covered headlights glaring through the dark fog. The brisk November morning could have been midnight, but the lamposts in the park were beginning to dim, and the moon was beginning to set. There was only a little breeze and the pebbles did their job.

When mark and Jay finished they went back to their office on Exchange Street. If that morning changed their common course of thought, then they didn't show it. From 7:30 a.m. on, their day was filled with the same hectic business of phone calls with upset, satisfied, and bored costomers; until noontime.

It wasn't strange enough to see newspapers all over the park, but it was exasperating for businessmen of all sorts to see empty newstands throughout downtown, just as Mark predicted. The phones of The Current Publishers office rang off the hook, and as they did Mark began his second column. He even used some of the complaints as quotes:

"What do you think you're doing? Do you have any idea how important it is for a busy man like me to know what's going on in my neighborhood? No news channel gives me that! No radio station suffices. I need words on a page. I can't bring my laptop to lunch," said Randy Traimor, a broker from downtown.
You'd think a lousy dime of taxes wouldn't get people all tangled up like this, but the change they have for a newspaper is as preset as their alarm clocks. Don't mess with a business man's alarm clock.
"I buy a whole stack of each paper every morning for my office," said Edward Callihan, president of York Real Estate. "I like to keep all my employees informed about every little movement in our area. What am I supposed to do now?" A stack is forty or fifty papers. There's fifteen major newspapers in our city. That's an extra $67.50 Mr. Callihan has to dish out every morning, if the city starts taxing this essential commodity.

You could imagine how bad mark got it the next morning, but you'd probably be wrong. His readers saw his point. He didn't misquote anyone, and in reality he was right. The same people who were mad at there being no papers at their stand were mad when they found out the city was trying to tax the journalists' pages.

But the state got after him. Here's an example of the difference between a democracy and a republic.

So what's the big fossil?

Introducing Ida, a.k.a. Darwinius, the newest fossil discovery that Darwinists claim is a missing link between monkeys and lemurs. It's a beautiful fossil, so well-preserved that some may categorize it as miraculous. But is it what Darwinists are claiming it is, a missing link?

There are a few reasons for why I say it isn't. First, there's the whole ambiguously vague timeline that comes up once again. As I observe the famous drawing that shows all our supposed ancestors following a homo sapien, I wonder why homo sapiens weeded out neanderthals but let apes survive. And I wonder why monkeys weeded out Ida's species but let lemurs share the trees with them.

Second, apparently Ida doesn't fit into the right time slot. According to the press release (http://www.revealingthelink.com/more-about-ida/resources/press_release.pdf), 47 million year-old Ida is "twenty times older than most fossils that explain human evolution". So Darwinists still have to explain 45 million years of primate evolution. I've always wondered why the gaps of the evolution timeline are in the middle. You'd think the timeline would be most vague in the beginning, having gaps prevail where the vast eclipse of time has shrouded the proof evolutionists are looking for. But apparently, the gaps are most prevalent where Darwinists need the most proof, namely at the spots that would link humans to another family of animals. It's clear that they don't have their timeline straightened out. All of the species on the timeline could have just as easily lived at the same time. But they insist that Ida is a missing link, an ancestor from whom future species of primates emerged.

Next, Darwinists are fascinated by how well-preserved Ida is, because fossils from the Eocene Era, the era they say she's from, are never so identifiable. (Explore a prehistoric time line.) Well, perhaps the Eocene Era wasn't as long ago as Darwinists assume. Or perhaps Ida is more preserved than most fossils from the Eocene Era simply because she is not from the Eocene Era, but from a much more recent era. But that presumption can't be true because it's not compatible with their overall theory. In order for Ida to be what Darwinists say she is, she had to have lived long before her monkey descendants. But the degree of her preservation suggests she's from a much later time.

Why am I so heated about this issue? Because areas that ought to be left to faith are being intruded upon by science. I don't understand why those who believe in physical healing through saints and shrines all around the world get labelled religious fanatics, while belief in an unidentifiable fossil makes one a reasonable modern citizen who is convinced by nothing but empirical evidence.

What's missinng

Mosaics don't scale our church walls anymore.
What is it that we're missing if not this?
We've let go of religious expression
because we have forgotten what it's for.
But if that's not what's missing,
then tell me, what is?
Religious expression in our schools - no more.
It's a thought tycoon that's itself religious.
I hope the students have learned their lesson.
Something underneath those who have the floor,
tells them to make their lessons
all but religious.
So what do you get when you take the human core
out of our textbooks and public places?
Economic and mental depression;
do we need to review the preconditions of war?
Where faith is not free to roam,
God spare me from what is.

A reason to really begin

I've been waiting for something positive to pop up that would motivate me to really start this blog. Well, that something came in the form of a poll stating more Americans now claim to be pro-life than pro-choice. The Gallup poll surveyed 1,000 Americans and found that those who lean towards pro-life values jumped from 44% to 51% in the past year, and this is the most that percentage has jumped since Gallup started the annual survey in 1995. I've heard that some are calling this the "Obama Effect", because it might reflect how Americans are becoming more aware of our president's true agenda. The common pro-life response to this theory, of course, is that we have always known Obama's agenda and were not surprised when he started to drastically change things as soon as he took office. According to this poll, however, 7% of a group of representational Americans had to wait until they saw the ax lying on the ground.

I sure hope this is the beginning of a new chapter in this cultural battle, a turning point that will mark similar trends in polls around the country. And I hope Obama is paying attention to the democratic pulse of our nation kept by these polls. I sure hope rescinding the Mexico City Policy and ordering Plan B was the end of our capital's pro-choice decisions. I hope Notre Dame and Georgetown start to see what their founding Church has been trying to tell them all along -- that jumping on the bandwagon is only a joy ride for a little while, and if the riders don't pay attention to the portents they're going to crash into the brick wall of truth the portents warned them about. The good news is the people are starting to see the truth, according to this poll. Here's the page:

www.gallup.com/poll/118399/More-Americans-Pro-Life-Than-Pro-Choice-First-Time.aspx.

Ambitious, spontaneous impetus

Somewhere between spontaneity and ambition, I find the way I ought to spend each moment.

It's simple. Look around you. Watch the movement in the streets. You'll see people driving to work, store clerks moving about tending their stores, students walking to school, talking to friends, baby carriages, traffic lights, newspaper stands telling you the daily weather and sport scores right on schedule, etcetera. But then you'll see a car stop a bit short for no apparent reason, or a news story that completely catches you off your guard, or a guy kiss the girl he's walking to school with. And these spontaneous happenings aren't rarities. In fact, they're part of our every day lives, just as much as the ambition that drives people to work every day. the fact is, whether we notice it or not, there are unexpected, crazy, spontaneous things happening all around us -- in fact thy happen so often that it's almost inaccurate to call them unexpected. We ought to factor in the unexpected when planning out our every day.

So what are we to do? Is there any cut and dry simple philosophy that we can pack up and take into the world with us each day, like our briefcase? I don't think so. Wisdom, justice, virtue, and all the things that matter most are too high above us for us to rightly define.

Our lives don't have lesson plans that our teacher has set before us so we may know the direction our course will take. Our lives are more like novels that must surprise us to keep our interest, and we're not the authors or the readers. We're the main characters.

Personhood

I’m not part of the world, but I have to admit that the world is part of me. No one you’ve ever met is a part of the world. The world is finite. It can be summed up by its zeitgeist and current affairs. But a person is incommunicable. He is his own adjective. She is exclusive and unrepeatable. His thoughts may sometimes coincide with those prevalent in the world, but only while dragging him down. She may see herself in a movie star or pop artist, but she only relates to them on a superficial level. The true calling of every human person is always more, always infinite and always eternal.