In a December 2000 meeting with congressional leaders, president-elect George W. Bush remarked, “if this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.”  Fortunately for us, we do not yet have a dictator for an executive, but that line has progressively blurred over the past few decades. 
    Since the Constitution was enacted as the supreme law of the land, the power of the president has grown exponentially.  This expansion of power has been variously justified by needs that were supposedly not anticipated by the framers of the constitution, but like Patrick Henry said of the constitutional convention, “I smell a rat.”
    In the past hundred or so years, the national legislature has gradually surrendered power to the executive branch, with a few exceptions such as the imposition of a presidential term limit in 1951.  Last year, our congressmen met for less than eighty days, and then only to rubber-stamp the policies of the president and his cabal of advisers.  The vast majority of disagreements were lodged along party lines.  If George W. Bush had been a Democrat like Bill Clinton, I have a feeling not one objection would have been raised by the Democrats.
    Since the attacks on September 11th, George W. Bush has been given free reign by both the press and congress to pursue war wherever he saw fit.  On September 25, 2001, congress passed a resolution authorizing the president to “deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.”  Using such language, congress surrendered any right to oppose military action as long as the president painted his enemies with the word “terrorist,” regardless of whether they had anything to do with the attacks on America.
    Since 2001, Democratic members of congress have submitted two constitutional amendments to repeal the presidential term limit.  In bill after bill, President Bush has used so-called ‘signing statements’ to declare that he has the right to ignore the laws passed by congress, and his Attorney Generals have worked tirelessly to insulate him from the judicial branch. 
    Only now are some members of the legislature waking up to realize they have rendered themselves impotent.  I am afraid their efforts of reform will be too little too late, but there is always hope.
    The President of the United States is not infallible, nor should he or she be the “sole decision maker.”  Be very careful about who you support in the next presidential election, because they will wield unprecedented power once in office.  Make sure you are electing the president of a republic and not the dictator of an empire.        

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    Every day, advertisers tell us that we need more; more cars, more clothes, more food, more money, more jewelry, more music--more of everything, as if the United States is an all-you-can-eat buffet with a huge neon sign that says, “pig out!”
    I’ve never been a wealthy man.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I scrounged around for change in order to buy a meal at El Famous Burrito. 
    Sometimes, we could only afford a drink, so we would sit and talk while taking advantage  of our refill privileges.
    Those are the times I remember most vividly, when everything seemed scarce.  Money was more precious.  Food seemed more flavorful.  Even my free time was more valuable--when my friends and I would make the most out of the few hours we had to goof off after school
    Excess seems to sour everything.  The more you have of it, the less you appreciate what you have.  That seems like common sense, but that message is often lost today when we are taught that happiness increases alongside the amount of money or stuff you accumulate.
    Unfortunately, that’s not really the case.  As a consequence, we are driven to accumulate ever-increasing amounts of wealth and luxury, because what we have never seems to be enough.
    A few years ago, Barry Schwartz wrote a groundbreaking book on the subject called The Paradox of Choice.  In it, he argued that our culture of abundance actually robs us of satisfaction because being confronted by too many choices raises our levels of anxiety and makes us discontent.
    More importantly, he presented statistical analysis showing that, past a certain point, there is no quantitative correlation between increased happiness and increased wealth.  “Once a society’s level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence, further increasees in national wealth have almost no effect on happiness,” he explained (106).
    Rising rates of depression and metal illness attest to the fact that while we have grown wealthier as a society, our emotional health has suffered.  As Schwartz points out in his book, it’s precisely the things that limit our choices (to a certain extent)--friends, family, religious service, group acceptance--that make us the happiest.
    That is why I believe mass production has decreased our quality of life.  Take the simple example of bread.  Everyone eats bread.  The grocery store offers rows and rows of different factory produced breads.  Can you remember the last time you ate a piece of Wonder Bread and thought to yourself, “wow, that is really good!”
    No, of course you can’t.  Now, have you ever made your own bread?  Have you ever kneaded the dough, added your own butter and spices, and pulled it fresh from the oven?  I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.
    The reason for this difference is simple.  Anyone can just go to the store and buy mass produced bread.  Every loaf is the same.  Every loaf is flavorless and bland.  Your own home-made bread, however, is one of a kind.  It is something that you worked hard to produce, and there is nothing else quite like it. When you make something yourself, or when you only own a few of that thing, you tend to treasure it because it is unique or scarce.
    You see, what is at stake here is not only the quality of the products we buy, but our quality of life as well.  In a mass produced culture that equates happiness with excess, we find that we suffer from a poverty of value.

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    Originally, the concept of ideology was not very alarming.  The National Dictionary of 1939 defines ideology as “the science of ideas.”  But since that time, ideology has taken on other connotations, specifically of dogma and of a rigid, doctrinaire, black and white understanding of the world.
    After the Second World War, both communism and fascism were said to be ideologically driven, but the same could easily be said for a wide variety of political beliefs.  Ideology, as I will use the term, constitutes a rigid set of doctrines and ideas that frame a black and white view of the world. 
    Ideology substitutes conscious reflection and careful consideration with easily supplied axioms that are supposed to apply to all situations.  To an ideologue, ‘X’ will always supply an answer or explanation for every problem.  “One simply turns to the ideological vending machine,” Daniel Bell once wrote, “and out comes the prepared formulae.”
    For instance, an ideologue might argue (hypothetically) that Hilary Clinton will not (or did not) win the election because she is a woman, while ignoring any number of other reasons she may have not been appealing to the voters.  Similarly, ideologues would argue that Barack Obama did not win because he is black, or that John McCain did not win because he is old and unattractive.
    Everything is reducible to one convenient excuse that confirms the ideologue’s previous beliefs about the nature of the country’s voting population.  America is sexist, America is racist, or Americans don’t respect the elderly.  These explanations draw on certain facts about America--some Americans certainly are sexist, racist, ageist, or all three--and turn them into convenient universalisms that can be called upon to explain everything about society.
    Ideologues believe in an interpretation of history that places them as the culmination of a great historical project; as the sum total of enlightenment and progress.  Anyone who doesn’t agree with the ideologue is either ignorant, simpleminded, or dangerous.  They are unable to see how anyone could interpret history or current events in any other way.
    When their explanations fail, as they inevitably do, they fall back on conspiracies to explain why things haven’t gone their way.  It is never their own failings, but the result of an evil boogieman that confirms a need to purify the ideology and take it to even more extremes. Because this boogieman must always exist to justify the need for any particular ideology, the ideologue will dismiss any progress that is made toward their larger goals as evidence that those stride-making individuals have sold out, been co-opted by the system, or that the change itself was meaningless.  But of course, despite their criticism, they would never consider surrendering these advances.
    The ideologue will never admit that he or she could be wrong.
    The real problem with ideology, as I see it, is that it closes a person’s mind to other possibilities and solutions.  In some instances, this can be dangerous, as in the case of people who refuse all medical care or who refuse to feed certain foods to their infants that are essential for their healthy development.  A blind adherence to ideology could result in unnecessary death.
    “But Mike,” you say, “isn’t your anti-ideology an ideology?”  No. Remember our definition of ideology: a rigid, doctrinaire, black and white understanding of the world.
    To suggest that we should be flexible in our approach to the analysis of problems and in our solutions to those problems, and that we should view every situation with a multifaceted lens, is in itself inherently unideological.  It is the negation of ideology, and therefore cannot be the same.
    I am not saying that ideologies are never appealing, convenient, and therefore useful to some people.  Given their prevalence, many individuals have clearly chosen ideology as the governing influence over their thoughts and beliefs.
    I am saying that we must choose otherwise.  If we are ever going to find solutions to the problems that we face in the Midwest today, we must jettison black and white thinking and grasp onto what works.  As Franklin D. Roosevelt tried one idea after another to alleviate the pains of the Great Depression, so too must we find solutions that work and apply them where they are needed.  One solution need not apply to every area, nor does that solution have to be maintained if it ceases to be useful.
    In my column “Cast Down Your Bucket Here,” I praised Booker T. Washington as a great American.  I did so not just because of his devotion to his country, but because he was willing to work with people he did not agree with in order to help his locality prosper.  He did not point fingers or blame others for his own problems.  He taught that hard work and self-responsibility would elevate his people.  He knew that his situation demanded a moderate course, and so he did what he could with what he had.  There is nothing contemptable in that.
    Likewise, we must not succumb to extremism or ideologies that seek to divide us into neatly opposing categories.  We must chart a middle course.  We must be open to a wide variety of ideas from a diverse pool of thought.  We must not close ourselves off to anything that might help us simply because it seems distasteful.
    On the other hand, we must be careful not to slip too far over the edge and embrace a course that is wishy-washy and lacking in substance.  That is how we got into this mess in the first place.
    We must be firm in our convictions.  In the spirit of pragmatism, we must be ready to compromise at certain times and be steadfast at others.  There is no contradiction or weakness in possessing a variety of tools from which to draw.
    To fix a complex machine, an engineer must be able to draw from a full tool belt.  It would be insane to suggest fixing a computer when your only tool is a wrench.  Ideologues, on the other hand, would tell you that a wrench will always be the best tool for any job, no matter how multifaceted the job might be.
    My friends, like many periods of history, we face difficult times.  Should we tear society apart with ideology, or should we go a different way?  The choice is ours.

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    To me, a victim is someone who has endured the pain of life but continually dwells on their negative experiences, often believing their injuries to be worse than all others.  I have personally endured car accidents, chronic medical problems, the deaths of friends and family, a decade of depression, and years of physical and emotional abuse, yet I consider myself neither a victim nor a survivor.  I consider myself someone who has lived life, an experience that Thomas Hobbes correctly described as nasty, brutish, and short, although I would add that it can be beautiful at the same time.
    No one escapes life unscarred; yet there are those who insist on reminding everyone how much they have been wronged in the past.  It is hard, however, to quantify pain.  Who can say whether one loss or injury is worse than the next, especially when life contains an excess of pain and injustice?  
    It is true things that have happened to us in the past leave scars, and sometimes, as in my experience, those scars take years to overcome.  But once those scars are there it is useless to continue to dwell on them.  We should not lust for revenge against those who have wronged us in the past.  We should encourage them to realize those actions were wrong, just as we must realize when our own actions are harmful and wrong.
    In no way am I excusing behavior that is hurtful to others.  But once that pain has been caused, what is the point of compounding it by dwelling on the injury for the remainder of our lives?  Often times we have no control over the things that happen to us, but we do have control over the way we react to it.
    Victimization is an overreaction to events that have harmed us, and it does nothing but perpetuate the harm by dwelling on those events, preventing us from proposing reasonable solutions to the root problems by clouding our judgment with negative emotions, which often times leads to disproportionate retribution.  
    Because life is short, we should accept the nasty and brutish parts so we can also embrace the beautiful aspects of life.  I have too much to look forward to to dwell on something that happened eight or ten years ago, and I suspect that we all have too much at stake in the present to continually worry about what happened in the past.  
    Victims do not accomplish great things; great things are accomplished by strong men and women who accept hardship and overcome it in order to forge a better life.  

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    Family and parenthood are concepts many people of my generation are used to thinking of with negative connotations.  We are too busy pursuing careers or remembering bad experiences from our own childhood.  However, family and parenthood are of utmost importance to our society and should not be neglected.
    Family is our primary source of childhood socialization. More than any other influence, parents, consciously or not, pass down their behavior as well as their genes to their children. Young children soak up the example of their parents at a surprising rate.  Whether your children grow up to admire you and seek to emulate you, or hate you and distance themselves from you, your behavior as a parent sets the standard for the rest of your children's lives.
    It would be very naïve to think parental or spousal abuse, divorce, or familial adherence to dogmatic religious and political beliefs has no adverse effects on childhood social and intellectual development, because we know full well that both good and bad behaviors and attitudes are learned and socially transmitted from one generation to the next.  To deny the role parents play (or absence from that role) in childhood socialization is willful blindness.
    I do not think our current problems with family are moral ones, or that they are somehow unique to our country.  I think many of our mistaken perceptions of parenting and the family stem from economic considerations, selfishness, and greed encouraged by our consumer economy.  Earning money and accumulating wealth are not in and of themselves negative, but they become detrimental when they are your sole pursuit at the expense of family and parenthood.  
    In our consumer culture, both men and women alike make the choice of things over people, whether it be not wanting to give up the freedom to go to bars every night, to working later and later hours at the office.  Responsibility at home takes a back seat to your 2009 Ford Explorer and plasma screen TV.
    This creates a climate in which pregnancy is considered the worst thing that can happen to a woman, men shamelessly run away from their responsibility as fathers, and parenthood in general is looked down on as a burden or a thing of the past.
    The family is the core unit of society, not just for Christians, but for human beings everywhere. We have to be conscious of the role it plays in transmitting values as well as genetic characteristics. In that way the family represents a delicate balance between nature and nurture. It should be valued by all members of society as the primary structure of our society.   When the family fails, the individual fails, and when the individual fails, the family fails as well.
 
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    In a recent political cartoon for the Detroit Free Press entitled “Traveling Across America,” artist Mike Thompson juxtaposed two women: a pioneer from 1857 and a businesswoman from 2007.  The pioneer declares, “the trip is grueling and filled with hardship.”  The businesswoman replies, “I hear ya!  My flight was packed and 20 minutes late!”
    In 1905, Art Young was far more critical of his contemporaries when he illustrated a cartoon for Life magazine entitled “World of Creepers.”  It depicts a sea of men in sport coats crawling along the ground under a dark cloud.  The word “fear” hovers just above the horizon.
    These two political cartoons express concern that we are (or were) becoming a culture of complainers, snivelers, and grovelers; mere shadows of our immigrant and frontier ancestors who attempted to prosper despite enduring constant hardships.
    Regardless of the individual veracity of comparisons between our contemporaries and the pioneers, cemeteries and mortuary records bear witness to the austerity of frontier life.  Death at the hands of disease, accident, and homicide were very real and ever-present, if a settler even lived past the age of five.  The fact that these individuals and families often prospered without helmets, Paxil, or inversion therapy probably seems unbelievable to a hypersensitive people who run to their lawyers whenever someone calls them a bad name.
    Hara Estroff Marano, in his essay “A Nation of Wimps” printed by Psychology Today (Nov/Dec 2004), argues that not only are we becoming increasingly incapable of coping with even the simplest traumas, such as scoring lower than a ‘B’ on a test, but that the pampering of our children is the main culprit behind that trend.  “Parents themselves have created many of the stresses and anxieties children are suffering from,” he argues, “without giving them tools to manage them.”  By preventing exposure to danger or challenge and then demanding more and more out of them, we are raising children who are anxious, depressed, and unable to deal with life.
    The answer to our low tolerance for pain and misfortune is simple.  Any long distance runner will tell you that you cannot run 8 miles without first being accustomed to 6.  You cannot run 6 miles without first being accustomed to 4, and so on.  Likewise, we simply cannot handle the harshest challenges of life, either mentally or physically, if we are coddled and prevented from becoming accustomed to the small challenges.
    In a harsh world we can either become tolerant by not shying away from pain and disappointment, or we can shelter ourselves and be unable to cope when those challenges rear their ugly head.  Friedrich Nietzsche recognized which was the genuine hazard: “for us life is more dangerous,” he lamented, “we are made of glass--woe unto us if we merely bump ourselves!  And all is lost if we fall!”

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