where the 57 meets the 91

More on the Rutgers story

2012-02-07T09:36:00.000-08:00

You may recall a tragic story out of Rutgers from a year and a half ago involving a pair of roommates, a webcam, a spied-upon romantic encounter, and ultimately a suicide. If not, you can refresh your memory here.

I mentioned at that time why the whole story fascinated me so much. If it does the same to you, you might be interested in this rather long article with a detailed account of the whole saga.

Late-night IM conversations about your future roommate...saying unkind and critical things to make yourself sound cool...being sexiled from your dorm room...gossiping...it's all so mundane, and so close to home...and yet look how it ended up. Still amazes, fascinates, and horrifies me.

Breaking families apart in the name of justice

2012-02-02T23:26:00.000-08:00

A couple stories here (note that the video and the article are two separate stories) of parents arrested for illegal immigration, with their kids taken away from them.

The scars of childbirth were still healing on Amelia Reyes Jimenez's stomach in 2008 when police came to her Phoenix apartment and took her three-month-old daughter from her arms.

Three and a half years later, Reyes Jimenez and her four children have become statistics in the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigration. Each year thousands of children of undocumented immigrants, like Amelia's kids, wind up in foster care when their parents are arrested for immigration violations. Some are even adopted by U.S. citizens while their parents are held in federal detention centers or deported back to their native countries.

Reyes Jimenez's son and three daughters are now living in foster care in Phoenix, and are awaiting possible adoption. Reyes Jimenez is back in Mexico, her parental rights terminated by an Arizona judge, and she cries when she remembers the raid that began it all.

"My daughters were calling, 'Mommy, my Mommy,'" said Reyes Jimenez. "I felt destroyed. I felt like I would never see my girls, even worse [the baby] was so small. I had just bought her cradle and her stroller."

A new study by the human rights group Applied Research Center estimates that as of summer 2011 there were at least 5,100 children of detained immigrants in foster care in 22 states.

[...]

"It's sort of like saying, okay, you came here as an undocumented immigrant, we're going to break up your family, we're going to keep your kids," said John De Leon, and attorney who represents the Guatemalan and Mexican consulate in immigration cases. He says he has seen the issue grow into a national problem over the last decade.

[...]

Reyes Jimenez was sent to a detention center an hour outside Phoenix. It would be six months before she had any contact with her children, and nearly two years before she would see them again in person.

"I didn't know anything about my girls; they didn't give me any reasons," she said. "I would ask about them and nobody would answer."

Reyes Jimenez, who pled guilty to the misdemeanor, then spent nearly two years fighting deportation. Ultimately, she was loaded onto a bus and dropped off in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, just across the border.

Someone should do something about this.

Assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist

2012-01-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

Remember the "Axis of Evil?" Back in 2002, President Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as three countries which, in their own ways, posed grave threats to the security of the United States and the world.

We all know what happened to Iraq.

These days, Iran is the one that's been getting a lot of attention, due to their oft-bellicose rhetoric and pursuit of a nuclear energy program which may or may not enable them to build a nuclear weapon. Across the political spectrum, most Democrats and Republicans agree in saying that Iran must not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. Sanctions have already been imposed, and many are openly talking about the possibility of another pre-emptive war.

And now, an Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated. Andrew Sullivan raises a few good points in the wake of this event:

I do not know the life, background or motivations of one Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who was killed, along with another passenger, when a motorcycle rider out of a Bourne movie stuck a plastic explosive on his car door and blew him to smithereens. What I do know is that he was a scientist working, we're told, as a procurer in Iran's nuclear power/arms program. Does he make the decisions in this theocratic tyranny? Is he responsible for the policy? Maybe he is an adamant Khamenei supporter. Maybe not. But he has been assassinated by someone. How should we respond?
Here's how Rick Santorum responded to these kinds of killings:
On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.
There is no way in Catholic - or indeed any moral - teaching that such assassinations can be celebrated as "wonderful". The person saying so is attacking some of the core truths of Christianity

Santorum has also apparently proposed treating Iranian nuclear scientists as enemy combatants. My point is this: If you're a scientist, in Iran, and your government is telling you that the United States is a dangerous country that might invade your country (just like it did your neighbor), and the best way to defend against this is to create a nuclear defense - "peace through strength," one might say - then what would you do? Put yourself in his shoes.

This is probably not a person who even bore us any ill-will! And yet apparently his death is worth celebrating (and, by implication, his assassination was justifiable) simply because he was on the other team.

Whether you're going by "love your enemies," or "an eye for an eye," or "civilian casualties during wartime are unfortunate but inevitable," this one's pretty hard to justify.

Let alone celebrate.

Five non-religious reasons to like Tim Tebow

2012-01-10T15:08:00.000-08:00

Every Sunday when Tim Tebow is playing, me and my boys at church anxiously wait for the sermon to finish so we can huddle around an iPhone and check the score in the Broncos game.

Okay, fine, let me revise that. My boys check their iPhones during the sermon; me, being the one who usually preaches, I anxiously wait for myself to finish so I can join in and find out what's happening.

Tebow, of course, is famous for his open - some would say too open - displays of his Christian faith. And I don't doubt that a good deal of the vituperation that comes his way is due to the fact that he may be seen as sanctimonious or preachy.

And if that's why some people dislike him, then it's easy (and possibly correct) to assume that many people like him precisely because he is an outspoken Christian. And sure, as a Christian, I really like Tebow's commitment to missions, his love and compassion toward the disabled, and his completely astounding success at saving himself for marriage. (And again, how awesome is it to see someone who truly practices what they preach and isn't a hypocrite. Right?) I like the man off the field.

But in all honesty, I don't think that's why me and my boys are glued to our iPhones, post-service. It's not why I'm rooting for him. Derek Fisher is a strong Christian, and I'm a Laker-hater. Same goes for Matt Barkley and USC. I may admire them off the field, but that doesn't make me root for their team. But Tim Tebow, on the field, has a lot of things to recommend him to fans who share his faith and those who don't.

Firstly, Tebow is one heck of an exciting player to watch. Partly because he does take off running in a particularly bruising fashion more often than most QBs, but also because he seems to have a knack at playing badly until the very end and then coming through in the clutch. That may not be a testament to his skills as a QB, but it sure makes for fun games. That game against the Steelers was one of the most exciting and entertaining and edge-of-your-seat games I've seen in a long time.
Second, no matter how much he gets badmouthed, he responds by winning (or not). He doesn't rub it in when he wins or whine when he loses. He lets his playing do the talking for him.
He makes his team better. People rightly point out that much of the Broncos success during their 7-1 streak was due not to Tebow's late-game heroics but to a solid defense that kept the Broncos in the game. But where was that defense during the Broncos 1-4 start? They had potential, sure, but it wasn't until Tebow came in and set an example of being willing to go out and take a beating for the team that they truly lived up to their potential. Sometimes, the most valuable players aren't the ones with the best stats, but the ones who intangibly make their team better. You've got to put Tebow in that category.
Conversely, Tebow very clearly appreciates both his teammates and his fans. He gives them credit and recognizes that he wouldn't be where he's at without their support.
Finally, he excels far beyond his skills would suggest. This is what baffles me about people who dislike Tebow and say it's because he sucks and shouldn't be winning...because isn't that exactly the underdog story that Americans and sports fans love so much? Isn't that what Rocky Balboa did? Or the team in Hoosiers? Or the 1980 US Olympic hockey team? Did the same people who dislike Tebow for this reason find themselves rooting for the Soviets when they watched Miracle?

Broncos-Patriots this weekend. Hopefully Tebow and the Broncos come out to play and make it an exciting game. If they lost, I'm sure they'll do it with class and dignity - and if they win, dang, this is getting to be one heck of an exciting run.

Tebow v. Roethlisberger

2012-01-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

This afternoon, the Denver Broncos will host the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first round of the NFL playoffs. Fans of football and even casual attention-payers of the news know all about Tim Tebow; the Heisman Trophy-winning, two-time BCS champion quarterback with an unorthodox style of play who led the Broncos to a borderline miraculous series of victories before coming back down to earth in the final three games of the season - all while gently but clearly proclaiming his Christian faith. And whatever else you may say about Tebow, no one would call him a hypocrite.

Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback for the Steelers, has a Super Bowl victory under his belt and has his own list of late-game heroics, but he is also well-known for two ugly allegations of sexual assault.

So, for those who go in for such things, there's almost a ready-made "good versus evil" storyline here, right?

Wrong. Have a look at an interesting article that brings a little bit of gray into the equation.

Ron Paul for President

2012-01-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

Four words I never thought I'd say. But with the Iowa caucuses occurring tonight, I'm rooting for the libertarian kooky grandfather of a congressman from Texas.

Let's start with the obvious: our political system is dysfunctional. Our national debt gets bigger, second-by-second, because it's a lot easier for politicians to promise tax cuts and spending increases than the other way around. States like California pass laws saying that it's okay for citizens to use marijuana for medical purposes - only to have the federal government pass a contradictory law, and send in fully-armed SWAT teams to enforce compliance. Democrats in Congress are supporting, and Republicans in Congress opposing, a payroll tax cut - and yes, you read that right, because when it comes down to it politics will trump principles any time.

And I don't think most people running for president this coming year will be able to do much to change things. President Obama ran on a platform of significant change, and yet on many issues he's governed along the same lines as President Bush - who, when it comes down to it, wasn't all that different from President Clinton. Someone like Mitt Romney might be marginally better than Obama, but the overall course of the nation's politics is unlikely to change very much.

With an ever-increasing national debt, and ever-expanding entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, this can only go on for so long.

---

Enter Ron Paul. He's not perfect, and I don't agree with everything he says. But on a few fundamental issues, he stands apart from the rest of the field.

US Foreign Policy: Paul has repeatedly caught flak for his statements regarding 9/11; specifically, pointing out that in some ways it was a response to American foreign policy. I talked about this in some depth here. In short, he seems to be the only Republican candidate willing to acknowledge that part of Al Qaeda's motivation in attacking us was because they were pissed off at our support of Israel and particularly the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. Others simply chalk it up to the idea that "they hate us because of our freedom." Whether or not we should change our foreign policy is an entirely separate issue, but we at least need to try to understand the motivations of our enemies. Paul is the only GOP candidate I've seen who will do this.
Liberty v. security: Benjamin Franklin once said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Since 9/11, though, the general policy of both parties has been to trade liberty for security. It's why airport security now does either naked full-body scans or patdowns; it's why President Bush allowed "coercive interrogation methods;" and it's why President Obama just signed a bill allowing him to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial if they're merely suspected of terrorism. Yes, this has probably contributed to the fact that there haven't been any terrorist attacks since 9/11. But if you think it's not worth the sacrifice of liberty, then Ron Paul is really the only candidate who will agree with you on that.
Reducing the size and influence of the federal government: Most Republicans claim to stand for this; Paul would go a lot further than any others. This is important for many reasons: it would allow states to be more flexible in responding to their individual needs; it would allow individual citizens to have more say in terms of policies that affect them; it would set the federal government back on a course to fiscal stability.
Taking divisive issues out of the realm of politics: I was talking to a good friend of mine last night. He supports gay marriage and illegal drug use; I'm opposed to both. We both happily agree with one another in our support of Ron Paul, because these are issues that should be decided by individual people, and individual churches, and whatnot - not by the force of law. In other words, whether you are pro-immorality (haha, I jest) or believe that morality is only true when people freely choose it, it's not an issue for the government to decide. (Unless, obviously, it harms other people. We can go more into that another time.)

I don't think Ron Paul will win the nomination. But if he did...and if he won the election...and if he then was actually able to implement his policies, then I think they would either save the country or completely devastate it.

Given the course we're on now, though, that's a risk I'm willing to take. Now we'll see what happens with the caucuses...

The old lady whisperer

2011-12-29T22:54:00.000-08:00

EMS is a traditionally male-dominated field; at a guess, I'd say 80% of my EMT coworkers are guys. The percentage is probably even higher among firefighters. The other night, we got a very funny reminder of why that's not necessarily a good thing.

My partner a couple Saturdays ago was a girl, and we'd been having a pretty crazy shift. Our first call came in over the radio as a "choking" at a liquor store. I've only ever transported one choking victim to the hospital, because they usually expel whatever they're choking on by the time we get there. But when we showed up on scene, it turned out the patient had just fallen down dead in front of the counter. So we did CPR and took him to the hospital, and last I heard he was still hanging on.

Then, a call went out in our area for a girl who'd got shot 9 times - but we missed out on that one, because we were in the middle of a three-hour (midnight to 3 AM) wait at the hospital for a bed for our current patient.

Anyways, so, we cleared the hospital at 3, and drove over to our post, and then got another call, for an 85 year old lady who was acting funny. We showed up, and her son and her husband were trying to get her to respond to them. Four (male) firefighters were already on scene, trying to find out what was going on. The family was saying that she wasn't answering questions, was totally altered in terms of her mental status, etc, etc. One of the firefighters was trying to get a blood pressure, but she was taking swings at him to prevent him from doing so. Then, the two (male) paramedics showed up. And the lady is just glaring at all of us, shaking her head and shaking her fist when we ask her questions, whether we speak in English or Spanish.

She's also naked except for an untied bathrobe, and we're just sighing because it's 3:30 in the morning, and if she can't answer three questions to determine her mental status (name/place/date) then we're legally bound to take her to the hospital, and no one likes having to forcibly carry a naked and combative old lady to a gurney at 3:30 in the morning.

Then my partner steps up and asks a question that four of us at least had already asked, to no avail. "Senora," she said, "como se llama?"

And I kid you not, all of a sudden, the patient looked as if someone had just given her the nicest compliment you can imagine. "Yo?" she asked, almost incredulously? "Juanita." [Name changed for HIPAA purposes. =)]

All seven of us male EMS personnel just kind of looked at my partner, took a step back, and gave her a "All yours" look. My partner, who barely even speaks Spanish, did her best to encourage the lady in Spanglish to come and follow us - and no matter what my partner said, the patient was just like "okay!" She even started listening to me, too, I guess because I earned some brownie points just by wearing the same uniform as my partner - whom I referred to at that point and for a time afterwards as the "old lady whisperer."

Another life successfully saved.

The extent to which guys grow up

2011-12-13T18:54:00.000-08:00

Went to Barnes and Noble today with Sharon; while we were browsing, this book caught my eye:

"OOH!" I said, as Sharon shook her head at me. "How cool!" I was about to look at it, but then another, even cooler book caught my eye:

"DUDE!" I said, and this time I grabbed it and started flipping through it. I think Sharon thought I was joking, but I wasn't. And then she pointed out the sign atop the shelves:

Whatever. I don't care. Trains and emergency vehicles are still awesome.

Restaurant Secrets

2011-12-13T11:50:00.000-08:00

From Reader's Digest, a list of "20 Secrets Your Waiter Won't Tell You." First, and worst: after 8 PM, whether you ask for regular coffee or decaf, you're most likely going to get decaf!

Celtic Thunder

2011-12-11T08:32:00.000-08:00

My sister introduced me to this song a few days ago. I want to follow these guys into battle, or something.

Illegal immigrant becomes brain surgeon

2011-12-06T12:42:00.000-08:00

One of my college professors had a saying that went like this: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."

True, but that being said, here's an anecdotal story that explains why I'm not very hot on the idea of deporting illegal immigrants.

Quiñones-Hinojosa was determined to put food on the table for his family, so he did the only thing he could possibly think of: literally jumped over a fence between his native Mexico and the United States and became a farm worker in Southern California.
He started by picking tomatoes, corn and broccoli. Later, he operated dangerous machinery in the fields. But things changed for him after a conversation with his cousin.
"The critical portion that got me out of the fields was my own cousin telling me that I was going to spend the rest of my life working as a migrant farm worker," Quiñones-Hinojosa says.
He could not imagine that life. He left the fields and headed north. To pay for community college, he shoveled sulfur and scraped fish lard from tankers — an excruciating job that almost cost him his life.
His journey then took him to University of California, Berkeley, and later Harvard Medical School. After 10 years, since first jumping over that fence into America, he became a U.S. citizen.
Now, Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa is a respected brain surgeon who directs the Brain Tumor Program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital. He says more needs to be done to help those who can follow in his footsteps.

See, in my mind, the type of person who would risk their life crossing a desert to come do manual labor and send money back to their family is a good person. The type of person I'd want to be more like. The type of person who has the character and drive to, hey, even become a brain surgeon.

On a happier note

2011-11-28T17:43:00.000-08:00

We have the top ten love-related words in a foreign language that don't have an English equivalent.

Includes the Yagan word for "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start" and the Japanese word for "the sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall in love."

Also, apparently the Arabic phrase "You bury me" is romantic.

Penn State thoughts, part II

2011-11-18T18:42:00.000-08:00

Jerry Sandusky stands accused of a series of monstrous crimes, and he's not doing himself any favors. Bob Costas conducted a disturbing interview with Sandusky here, in which Sandusky proclaimed his innocence, but also seemed to have trouble with answering whether or not he was sexually attracted to underage boys.

Most people don't take 16.3 seconds to figure out the answer to that question.

So I think we can agree that Sandusky is a pedophile; thus making it very easy to stop right there and write his crimes off as something that we could never, ever in a million years, do.

But let's not stop there. Because Sandusky is not the first person in a position of trust over young people to fall in this way; think of the legions of Catholic priests over the past decade who abused boys (and in some cases, girls too).

I have a particular vested interest in this; I serve as a youth group leader at my church, and it's not just Catholic priests who have done things they shouldn't have with children. Every so often, you'll hear of a youth pastor who ends up hooking up with one of his high school girls. It's disconcerting, as a 25 year-old youth group leader with a number of high school girls in my group, to hear of other 25 year-old youth group leaders hooking up with their high school girls. Like, what the freak?

And because of that - even though I am not a pedophile - I think very seriously about what caused those youth pastors to fall, and how I can keep the same thing from happening to me.

So here's a list of five things I've come up with over the past few years. Things that I keep in mind - things that Sandusky definitely should have kept in mind - and hopefully things that can help you, too! They're not rules so much as...things to consider.

Leaders are called to be "above reproach." This one's specifically from the Bible (1 Timothy and Titus, specifically), so if you're a Christian leader, you definitely have to listen to this; if you're a non-Christian leader, I still think it's an excellent principle. The idea of being "above reproach" is easily misinterpreted; some people think it means that a leader cannot be criticized. But that's exactly the attitude that led to the problems at Penn State. The true meaning of being above reproach is quite the opposite. It means that a leader needs to live a life that does not leave room for people to question their motives. Now, this has to be balanced with a bit of risk-taking, I think, and so everyone is going to have to figure out what this means for themselves. But certainly, even if Jerry Sandusky initially thought there was nothing wrong with showering together with boys, he could have asked himself if doing so was truly "above reproach" - and clearly, it wouldn't have been. And that would have been that.
Admiration, trust, and power are a dangerous combination. This is in my opinion what led most directly to the Catholic priest scandal. When you have leaders in a position of trust over people who admire them and make that admiration clear, and those leaders have power over those people, and there is at least the potential for physical attraction...bad news. To be quite candid, I mean...I'm a guy. I find girls physically attractive. You know what makes people seem even more attractive? When they admire you! And hence I know I have to be completely merciless in ensuring that my relationship with my high school girls doesn't take a single step away from an older brother relationship, even in my mind. (And girls, if you're reading this, don't worry, I'm good at it!) It means you have to guard your thoughts and heart and recognize the sacred trust that you've been given, the trust that people put in you, and never even allow yourself to get to the point where you'd even consider misusing your position of power. Again...if Sandusky had done this early on...how much pain and suffering could have been averted!
No one ever sees themselves or their actions as shady. I exaggerate slightly, but in this particular context I think it's super easy to think that "this situation is different." I don't think a single youth group leader who's ever hooked up with one of their kids thought for more than a moment that they were being shady. No, they probably saw the relationship they had with the other person and thought it was something special, something different from all those other shady youth group leaders who've done shady things. So again, if you think something is unique and romantic while the entire rest of the world seems to think it's wrong and/or illegal - yes, it's possible that they just don't understand. It's more probable that you're deceiving yourself into doing something really bad.
Sexual abuse is more common than you think. There are two major reasons why this is important. One is that it means something that you mean as an innocent gesture could retraumatize someone. You might mean a hug to be encouraging, but maybe when they were a kid an older guy touched them in an inappropriate way; why risk it when an encouraging word can have the same positive effect as a hug? Two. I don't know why this is, but I work the night shift and thus listen to LoveLine with Dr. Drew every night, and thus I know that people who have been abused are more likely, through no fault or intention of their own, to put themselves in a situation where they get abused again. Dr. Drew tells me it's so, and from people I know that seems to be the case. Therefore, if you give any room to create a compromising situation, the very people who need to avoid that the most are going to be the people who join you in that compromising situation. If that makes sense.
Sometimes the people with the biggest heart for a particular ministry or type of leadership are the most dangerous people to be put in that position. I don't say that they shouldn't be put in that position; I mean that they're dangerous people to be put in that position. As you all know, I went to Cambodia recently to join in the fight against human trafficking. Many of the people we met with and served were people who were, in some way, coming from a place of sexual brokenness. So, for example, you have guys who used to be addicted to porn, who know firsthand the damage that porn can do to their brains and to their relationships, and who thus have a heart for all people who are forced into the sex industry in some way, and thus have a great desire to go out into the red light districts and reach out to sex tourists. All good - but you can also see the danger for these people in going out into the red light districts, right? Something to remember.

Add comments and thoughts of your own.

Penn State thoughts, part I

2011-11-15T18:41:00.000-08:00

I have been following, with a sense of surreal horror, the story that has been unfolding out of Penn State over the past week or so. Surreal, because of the quick and unceremonious end to the 46-year career of Joe Paterno, whose presence in college football I'd just come to take for granted. And horror, because of the allegations of child molestation on the part of a former assistant coach, which prompted Paterno's ouster for his lack of action. There aren't many things more evil than child molestation.

So for that reason, though I am sorrowful to see Paterno's storied career end, he absolutely had to go. Even if, as some say, he couldn't legally have gone to the police but instead was restricted to reporting the incident to the athletic director, he is still responsible for what happened in his program.

Much has been said about Joe Pa's failure to act, and about Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant who allegedly witnessed an assault taking place and instead of (1) stopping it forcibly or (2) calling the cops, chose to (1) leave and (2) call his dad to tell him how disturbed he was by what he'd seen.

Obviously, not what he should have done. And not what we hope we'd do. Journalist Randy Parker wrote an open letter to his son, urging him not to act with that same cowardice if he's ever faced with a similar situation. New York Times columnist David Brooks took a slightly different angle, pointing out in a sobering column that McQueary's actions (or lack thereof) should cause us to look with concern at our own, similar deficiencies.

I think it's time for some wisdom from Chesterton, through his fictional detective Father Brown. Father Brown is here explaining to an American journalist his method of solving crimes, which involves putting himself very much in the criminal's shoes:

“Don’t you think,” he said, abruptly; “that this notion of yours, of a man trying to feel like a criminal, might make him a little too tolerant of crime?”
Father Brown sat up and spoke in a more staccato style.
“I know it does just the opposite. It solves the whole problem of time and sin. It gives a man his remorse beforehand.”
There was a silence; the American looked at the high and steep roof that stretched half across the enclosure; his host gazed into the fire without moving; and then the priest’s voice came on a different note, as if from lower down.
“There are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he said; “and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues.”
They did not answer and he went on in the same heavy tone, as if he were dropping words like molten lead.
“You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it horrible because I could commit it."

Very wise. And if we don't want to ourselves act as McQueary did, we must recognize why he acted the way he did, and recognize that if we're not careful we ourselves could fall into the same trap.

It strikes me, too, that in all the coverage of this, in all the condemnation of Paterno and McQueary, and in all the soul-searching that has engendered from the likes of David Brooks, there is something missing.

Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach who is accused of these horrible crimes, is being condemned, and rightly so if he is indeed guilty. And yet...where are the articles and letters telling people to make sure we, too, don't end up like Sandusky? Where is the soul-searching?

That's simple, you reply. It's unnecessary, because Sandusky did what he did because he was a pedophile, and the vast majority of us are not pedophiles.

But I don't think it's as simple as that. And in my next post, applying Father Brown's method, I'm going to try to explore what could lead to something as screwed up as what Sandusky did - and maybe, just maybe, we'll learn to be horrified not because Sandusky's sins were so far off, but because they were so near.

Stay tuned.

Story of a Girl

2011-10-25T23:37:00.000-07:00

This is the story of a girl I met on one Sunday and said goodbye to on the next Sunday.

In that one week, she changed my life.

---

I haven't written too much of anything on this blog about my Cambodia trip. Part of that has been due to the fact that I take a very long time to process things, especially things that either make me very sad or very happy, and the trip basically oscillated between those two extremes.

But another reason I haven't said much publicly about the trip is because of the nature of the ministries with which we were involved. We went to Cambodia to join in the fight against child sex trafficking, and that meant we worked with people who were getting death threats for their work against organized crime rings, and met people who had been victims of sex trafficking. For the protection and privacy of everyone involved, a certain degree of prudent secrecy was required. We took hundreds of pictures; but some of the most memorable moments occurred in situations where we had to agree not to take pictures.

In the times I've shared publicly about my trip since I've been back (such as last week at Cornerstone), I've had to leave some things vague. In particular, there have been a few stories that hit me really hard, but that I've been unable to fully share in large settings because they're not necessarily my stories to tell. Yet now, I think it's okay for me to at least share this. So here goes.

---

On our second week in Cambodia, we went to a place called Svay Pak. CNN just ran an article about Svay Pak yesterday. To sum it up, the article says this: "Svay Pak has a disturbing reputation. The village outside Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh is known as a place where little girls are openly sold to foreign predators looking for sex."

That's where we went on our second week in Cambodia. We worked at a church, running a VBS/Sunday School type thing which helps gets kids off the streets and thus makes them less vulnerable to predators. In this, we were assisted by the youth and young adults of the church, about 40 guys and girls between the ages of 16 and 28. They were really cool and really fun and I got to know some of them pretty well in the short time we were there.

One girl in particular was really easy to get to know. Partly because I played guitar and led the Cambodian kids in singing our English songs, while she led them in doing the dance moves for their Cambodian songs; partly because she was trying to learn Korean and was eager to practice with me; and partly because she was utterly merciless in teasing me and making fun of me for all kinds of random things. As were they all. But she stood above the rest, man. She was spunky and sassy and confident and outgoing, and despite her age - she was only 18 - she was clearly a leader among the girls there.

When we went out to the nearby brick factories to pass out rice and do wound care for the people there, I would ride back with her and the others in the church tuk-tuk (motorbike-drawn-carriage) rather than the team van. Partly because I'd gotten stung by a wasp in the van; partly because it was much more adventurous riding in the tuk-tuk; and partly just because I really liked hanging out with her and the others.

On Wednesday afternoon, our third day of VBS and our third day of brick factory outreach, we rode back to the church, and I remember that ride in particular because I realized I had learned the names of all five of the Cambodians in the tuk-tuk apart from her, and I remember thinking that was somewhat ironic and probably something I should rectify. But at that point, it's a little too late to ask.

After lunch, our team met up privately with the pastor, and he told us that a number of the youth and the young adults - the people I was becoming fast friends with - had once been victims of trafficking themselves. He mentioned one girl in particular, but I didn't recognize the name.

You see where this is going. This is the video that came along with that CNN article. Please watch it.

That evening, the day we heard her story, my buddy Brian and I stayed behind in Svay Pak while the rest of the team headed back to Phnom Penh. We helped clean up a new building that the church had just acquired, guest-taught an English class, and sat through a Khmer Bible study before heading back. All the while, the girl continued being her sarcastic and teasing self, while my mind steadfastly rebelled at the idea of even beginning to comprehend the pain and suffering she had endured as a child.

---

On Saturday, our team was scheduled to go visit a home for girls who'd been rescued from trafficking. We were going to throw a party for them. There are fifty-seven girls at that home; two of them are my friend's sisters, and one is her cousin. They were also being sold as sex slaves. They were rescued when the girl, my friend, bravely alerted people to what was going on. Having been through terrible trauma, she was able to help rescue her sisters and cousin from the same situation.

Before the visit, early in the morning, Brian and I went back to Svay Pak to teach a Bible study. Afterwards, we joined four others, including my friend in the video, for visitations of church members.

We walked down the muddy path through open fields, the sun already scorching our skin even at nine in the morning, and she and the others asked me and Brian about our lives back home as they told us about their lives in Cambodia. After a while, there was a pause, and she asked me if our team was going to be going to the shelter for the girls later. I said yes, we were. And then...

She gave me a funny look, and her tone changed and grew more cautious and more vulnerable as she asked: "What do you think about the girls there?" And I knew in that moment that she wanted to know if I blamed them, or judged them, or thought less of them because of what had happened to them. Because of what had happened to her.

So I just smiled and looked at her, and said something that was true, and something that I hoped would answer her unspoken question. "I hope they'll like us," I said.

She smiled back. "They will," she replied.

---

When I read the article and watched the video on CNN, 1414 people had liked it on Facebook. That's a lot of people. I hope that many of them give of their time and energy and money and prayers to combat this heinous crime which is still ongoing in Cambodia and around the world.

The reason I'm writing this is because it wasn't enough for me just to see a video like this. I mean, sure, I've been involved in various anti-trafficking efforts, and I did go to Cambodia in the first place. But that being said, it was an entirely different thing to realize that this happened to a friend. And that's why I say she changed my life. Before, fighting against human trafficking was just one thing that I was almost willing to dedicate my life to but not quite ready to fully commit to. Now...it's on.

This is happening to real people. Real children, as we speak. We saw others, girls under ten, who are still being sold every night by their own parents. And that's hard enough to wrap your mind around when you're hearing this and the girls are standing there, right in front of you. From half a world away it seems entirely unreal. I hope someday you all get the opportunity to meet my friend; but until then, I want to write this post as a kind of a substitute, so she's not just a face in a video to you.

I will always remember the final evening we all spent in Svay Pak. After sharing with each other how we'd been blessed during our time there, we all stood in a circle and joined hands and prayed. She was next to me, on my right, and as the Cambodian pastor closed us all in prayer I could hear her crying, just like she was crying in the video. Except that those tears, mixed in with occasional whispers of "Hallelujah," were tears of joy.

That's the image I want to leave you with. Don't be deceived; though she is still recovering from what she experienced, I want you to see her smiling face in the first picture I posted and realize that that is her reality, now; joy, and redemption, and ongoing healing.

After the prayer, we all sat down, and she quickly took the little bracelet off of her left wrist and placed it on mine. It had a little cross attached to it, and the beads on the bracelet spelled out the phrase "FEAR NOT."

"I want you to have this," she said. "Don't forget about me."

I didn't. And I won't. I still wear it, every day, everywhere I go. And when people ask about my Cambodia trip, and about what I learned there, I point to the bracelet, and smile, and tell them, "Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine."

So pray for her, and for Cambodia, and for all the girls still trapped in sex trafficking there. Pray for justice, and for healing, and for restoration.

A few random observations on the GOP debate

2011-10-18T17:42:00.001-07:00

Rick Perry just gave the most rambling, incoherent, jumping-all-over the place answer I've ever heard. The question was about how Texas had a million uninsured kids, and somehow he managed to, in thirty seconds, jump around and finish by accusing Mitt Romney of hiring illegal immigrants in his house.
Speaking of which, Perry and Santorum have been total jerks in terms of interrupting Romney when he speaks. Santorum talked over Romney's response for thirty seconds, and then when Romney finally said, "Look, can I respond?" Santorum was like, "Nope, your time is up."
Also, CNN totally misquoted Ron Paul on his response about health care. Paul said something along the lines of "we need less government involvement in health care in this country." The banner at the bottom of the screen reads: "Paul: We need less health care in this country."
Bachmann is totally trying to be someone's VP. Every time someone gets attacked about something, she jumps in and says "Well, you know who's really bad on [insert issue]? President Obama!"
And right on, Romney. Giving a shout-out to legal immigration.

I went into this debate with three people I like/would consider voting for. This is only strengthening that impression...

Mitt Romney on...well...various things

2011-10-17T22:57:00.001-07:00

This one's a bit lighter than the previous video I posted. =)

Ron Paul on abortion

2011-10-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

Last night's shift

2011-10-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

Was interesting. Had my first suspected case of elder abuse and transported one of the victims of a rather gnarly car accident in Whittier.

But most interesting of all was a call for an unconscious infant. That's always freaky when you get that call, but thankfully, the kid was fine. She had a twin brother, and I can't tell you their names due to privacy laws, but here's what was interesting about it:

You know that scene in Talladega Nights where we find out that Ricky Bobby's sons are named Walker and Texas Ranger?

...Yeah, people actually do things like that.

WORD.

2011-10-10T09:05:00.001-07:00

Introversion and baseball

2011-09-28T19:21:00.000-07:00

Flipping frantically back and forth between Rays-Yankees and Braves-Phillies at the moment. And I have a theory.

I think there has to be some kind of correlation between being an introvert and liking baseball. Not sure where the causation comes in, but in order to really (HECK YES LONGORIA JUST HOMERED) enjoy baseball, you can't just be relying on outside stimuli. Like, it was just 3-2, with the bases loaded and nobody out, and I'm flipping out internally while Sharon, sitting next to me on the couch, couldn't care less. Because nothing's actually happening. There's no big hits like in football, no crazy dunks and constant back and forth action like in basketball, and so on and so forth, but the tension and suspense is intense, if you're paying attention.

And isn't that one of the components of introversion versus extraversion? The need for external stimuli? I'm constantly amazed by how stimulated a lot of my extraverted friends seemingly need to be, all the time. Nothing wrong with it, people are different, but I can't identify with it at all. As an introvert, I can keep myself occupied just by being alone with me and my thoughts for a long, long time. Which is part of what I think allows me to enjoy baseball and not find it any less exciting than football.

Anyways, enough about that. I'm going back to watching the game.

Rob Bell and Gandhi

2011-09-24T15:06:00.000-07:00

I wrote this months ago, and so it's kind of old news by now, but I think it's worth posting.

---

There's been a stir lately, in certain circles in which I move, about a dude named Rob Bell and a book he wrote entitled Love Wins. Although he eschews labels, Bell seems to be arguing in his book for a form of universalism - the idea that, in the end, everyone goes to heaven.

Lots of people have been getting on Bell's case, because universalism is generally considered to be a heretical doctrine.

And while I do agree that it is a heresy, what bugs me most is not that Bell is arguing for universalism. Believe me, I definitely understand the desire for universalism to be true. The doctrine of heaven and hell, of judgment, is I think undeniably the most emotionally difficult doctrine of Christianity to accept. At a philosophical level it makes sense; on a Scriptural level, it's pretty clear - but still, man. I can't put it better than several famous preachers when they said things along the lines of, "Any time you preach about hell, you better be doing it through tears."

And many of you reading this don't believe in hell, and you may be troubled that I do. Trust me,I don't believe in it because I find the idea appealing. I believe in it because I think it's true.

So the fact that Bell is preaching universalism, well, he's wrong, but that in itself doesn't bother me a whole lot.

It's how he does it that really gets me.

Here's an excerpt of Bell's narration in the promotional video for the book:

Several years ago we had an art show at our church and people brought in all kinds of sculptures, and paintings, and we put them on display. And there was this one piece that had a quote from Gandhi in it; and lots of people found this piece compeling. They’d stop and sort of stare at it, and take it in, and reflect on it—but not everybody found it that compelling. Somewhere in the course of the art show somebody attached a hand-written note to the piece, and on the note they had written: “Reality Check—He’s In Hell.”
Gandhi’s in hell? He is? And someone knows this, for sure; and felt the need to let the rest of us know?

In other words, this is his argument: If you argue that there's a heaven, and a hell, and the only way to get to heaven is by believing in Jesus, then what you're basically saying is that someone as good and saintly as Gandhi is in hell. How could you say that? How could someone as good as Gandhi not be in heaven?

In saying this, Bell is not merely missing the mark on the doctrine of hell; he's missing the whole point of Christianity.

The point is that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, in whose ranks you and I and Gandhi all fall. That none of us could possibly earn our way into heaven because we are sinners, even the very best of us. Even Gandhi. And so this perfect, sinless man, who also happened to be God, came into the world and died to take the punishment for our sins so that we didn't have to pay that punishment.

You, and me, and Gandhi all needed this. No matter how good we may be compared to others. No matter how much of a "saint" we may be in the eyes of the world.

And...just on cue...out comes a book about Gandhi. What do we learn from this book?

Although Gandhi's nonviolence made him an icon to the American civil-rights movement, Mr. Lelyveld shows how implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa. "We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs," Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. "We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."

[...]

Yet he could also be vicious to Manu, whom he on one occasion forced to walk through a thick jungle where sexual assaults had occurred in order for her to retrieve a pumice stone that he liked to use on his feet. When she returned in tears, Gandhi "cackled" with laughter at her and said: "If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously, my heart would have danced with joy."

So...was Gandhi not a great man?

Eh, no, all in all, he probably was. A deeply flawed great man, yes, but most great men are deeply flawed, and it's undeniable that Gandhi did some great things.

But was he a perfect man, good enough to make it into the presence of God on his own merits?

Nope. Only Jesus can do that.

And that's the point Rob Bell is missing.

Rundown of the Republican Candidates

2011-09-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

Since primary season is heating up, and in a few short months it'll be time for registered Republicans to cast their vote in state party primaries, I thought I'd go ahead and provide a brief rundown of the eight "major" candidates. I'll try to be somewhat impartial here, and then, at some later point, I'll get around to saying what I really think about them.

Note: This isn't meant to be comprehensive. I may be leaving things out. Hopefully nothing important though.

Rick Santorum

Political experience: Former Senator from Pennsylvania.

Perceived strengths: A champion of social conservative causes, such as restricting abortion, banning gay marriage, allowing school prayer and the teaching of Intelligent Design.

Perceived weaknesses: Lost his last election by something like 18 percent; viewed as extreme on social issues.

Primary emphasis: Social issues. Also notable for his defense of a vigorously aggressive foreign policy.

Newt Gingrich

Political experience: Former Speaker of the House during Clinton's presidency.

Perceived strengths: Seen as an intellectual, "ideas-man" type. Knowledgeable about history and current issues.

Perceived weaknesses: Seems to have no filter on his ideas and has a bunch of bad ones in addition to good ones. Also, seen as a hypocrite for denouncing Clinton's affairs while he was having one of his own.

Primary emphasis: Fairly well-rounded and knowledgeable on social, economic, and foreign issues.

Michelle Bachmann

Political experience: Congresswoman from Minnesota.

Perceived strengths: Everything you like about Sarah Palin. Social conservative, energetic speaker, raised a family while succeeding in politics.

Perceived weaknesses: Everything you don't like about Sarah Palin. Not much experience and a habit of saying controversial things.

Primary emphasis: Social issues.

Mitt Romney

Political experience: Former governor of Massachusetts, runner-up for 2008 GOP nomination.

Perceived strengths: Smart, successful businessman with a good grasp of the issues. Also performs best against Obama in polling.

Perceived weaknesses: Seen as a flip-flopper for his changing stance on some issues (like abortion); also passed a health care law in Massachusetts that many compare to President Obama's unpopular health care reform.

Primary emphasis: Economic issues.

Rick Perry

Political experience: Current governor of Texas.

Perceived strengths: Texas has been one of the most successful states, economically, over the past decade. Popular with all kinds of conservatives.

Perceived weaknesses: Everything you stereotypically don't like about Texas: brash, cowboy-ish, unapologetic in his support for the death penalty. Also passed a controversial law mandating HPV vaccinations for 12 year old girls.

Primary emphasis: Generally well-rounded, but like many governors his weakest area is foreign policy.

Ron Paul

Political experience: Congressman from Texas.

Perceived strengths: Says what he thinks; strong libertarian and constitutionalist, which are uncommon traits in a politician. His supporters think his views will save the country...

Perceived weaknesses: ...while his detractors think his ideas are extreme and will destroy the country. Many of the questions he gets in the debates have been along the lines of "Wait, do you really believe ____?"

Primary emphasis: Paul doesn't exactly fit into any of the social/economic/national security divisions; his economic policy has the most overlap with conservatives, while his foreign policy has the most differences.

Herman Cain

Political experience: something with the Federal Reserve; but better known for his time as CEO of Godfather's Pizza.

Perceived strengths: Good speaker, and it's worth noting that in the first few debates, focus groups overwhelmingly preferred him to the other, better known candidates.

Perceived weaknesses: Lack of political experience, history of controversial statements.

Primary emphasis: Seems fairly well-rounded.

Jon Huntsman

Political experience: Former governor of Utah; ambassador to China under Pres. Obama.

Perceived strengths: Moderate, supposedly Obama's most feared general election opponent due to his general election appeal, successful governor, fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Set aside partisan politics to serve a president of the opposite party.

Perceived weaknesses: Set aside partisan politics to serve a president of the opposite party. (Matter of perspective, that one.) Seems to have trouble connecting with people. Has broken from party orthodoxy on certain issues (civil unions for gay couples, global warming) which are dear to many party activists' hearts.

Primary emphasis: Economic issues.

Republican politics, explained

2011-09-21T16:16:00.000-07:00

The 2012 election is just around the corner, and a number of Republican candidates are already vying for the chance to take on President Obama. I was about to do a blog post with a rundown on each of the eight supposedly "major" candidates, briefly summarizing each candidate's strengths and weaknesses, but I realized that it might be important to address a few of the ideological differences between the candidates as well. And this might require a brief primer on what issues make a Republican a Republican.

Briefly, then, in politics, there are three main types of issues: social issues, economic issues, and national security issues. We'll take a look at each.

Social issues involve things like abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, and arguably the illegality of drugs. In general, social conservatives support laws to protect "traditional values" or "morality" in these areas; in general, social liberals support laws to advance "progressive values" in these areas. Although I know Republicans who are on the opposite side of one or even all of these issues, generally, if you're pro-life, or anti-gay marriage, or in favor of school prayer, or support the "war on drugs" and feel very strongly about these things, you'll vote Republican.

Economic issues involve things like regulations on business, environmental policy, taxes, and health care policy. In general, economic conservatives believe in less government intervention, fewer regulations, lower taxes, and a smaller "safety net" of programs like welfare; economic liberals believe in more government intervention, more regulations, higher taxes, and a larger "safety net." Again, I know Republicans on the other side of each of these issues, but generally, if you feel passionately about these issues on the conservative side, you'll vote Republican.

National security issues involve things like support for the U.N., support for Israel, support for the War in Iraq, support for "enhanced interrogation methods," etc. These issues are a little more difficult to categorize, since a lot depends on who is in office. American presidents generally have kept similar policies as one another on national security issues, so their party will usually follow along and the opposing party will often oppose it. The main difference, then, is one of emphasis; Republicans generally are more skeptical of the U.N. than are Democrats, and a little more supportive of Israel as opposed to the Palestinians (though not by much). If a President Gore had launched the Iraq War and instituted waterboarding (and he would have, had he been in office), the Democrats would have been for it and Republicans would have opposed it; since it was President Bush who did it, the Republicans supported him and the Democrats howled in protest.

In the same way that ordinary voters will often care more about one of these areas than the others, candidates are often perceived as being stronger in one area or the other. Now that we've got these defined, my brief summary of each candidate will make a little more sense when I get around to posting it.

Full arrest

2011-09-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

The week before I left Cambodia was a pretty busy time for me. In addition to packing and preparing for the trip, and preaching at church on Sunday, I worked six straight nights, which was rather brutal. It left me very little time to blog, which was unfortunate, because something happened worth writing about on the fourth of those six night shifts. Let's see if I can remember it now.

---

It was around two in the morning, and they'd just woken us up to move us from one post to another one way on the other side of our zone, eight miles away. I was driving, and my partner, Jordan, had already fallen back asleep. Right as we were about to pass under the 605 freeway, along Washington Boulevard, a call came through for us.

"2120, County Fire," crackled the radio.

"2120, go ahead," I replied, with as much cheerfulness as I could muster. It's either forced cheerfulness or low-pitched grumpiness, and that second one is hard to hear over the radio. Jordan stirred slightly and murmured something much more grumpy than cheerful.

"2120, you've got a call in 40's area. [address redacted.] Seven-oh-six echo-three. For an unconscious."

I always kind of chuckle to myself when they give us a call for an "unconscious person" at that hour. I mean, Jordan was unconscious. You don't see me calling 911 on him. It's two in the morning! People are supposed to be unconscious.

In all seriousness, though, when you get a call for an unconscious person, it could mean several things. Perhaps someone won't wake up or is super-lethargic, maybe due to hypoglycemia. Or they could just be really, really drunk. Had that one a few times. Or, maybe they're dead - in medical terms, they're in "full arrest," with no pulse and no respirations. Full arrests, I'd been told, would often come in as "unconscious person." But I wouldn't know. I'd worked as an EMT for 10 months, and had never gotten a full arrest, with the exception of one guy who had gotten killed in a car accident. But I didn't really count that, because he was so far gone we didn't even try to bring him back.

So we're cruising down Rosemead, now, and guessing at what it is. "Drunk," I say. "Full arrest," says Jordan. When we pull up in front of the house, even though it took us a long time to get there, the police were just arriving (they come on any unconscious call) and the fire department was nowhere in sight. Family members were running out of the house, looking terrified.

This didn't help settle the dispute; I've had family members running out of the house looking terrified with a drunk person, and Jordan had seen the same thing on full arrests. Then the family screamed, "He needs CPR!"

At that point, I conceded that Jordan was probably right.

---

Jordan went inside to verify that the patient was, indeed, in full arrest; I grabbed a hard backboard out of the ambulance and joined him inside. In a full arrest, you want to get the patient on a backboard so you can effectively do CPR - soft surfaces, like a bed, will prevent the compressions from having their proper effect.

The patient was, indeed, dead, and so we got him on the backboard, strapped him on, and got him out of the tiny bedroom he was in and outside, where we could more effectively do what we needed to do. It's difficult enough moving a two-hundred pound person on a large backboard through narrow hallways under any circumstances; it's especially hard when the patient is pure dead weight, with no control over his arms, and you're slightly nervous because it's your first full arrest.

By the time we got him outside and onto the gurney and loaded into the ambulance, fire had arrived, so we got a bunch of people in the back of the ambulance and got to work. I did chest compressions; Jordan breathed for him using something called a bag-valve mask; one paramedic hooked him up to an AED (the thing that shocks the heart); another tried to start IVs so that we could inject him with medicines like epinephrine and atropine, which can restart the heart. A firefighter stood by, ready to take over for me or Jordan when we got tired.

After about ten minutes, with no luck at getting the heart restarted, a paramedic made the decision that we should start for the hospital and continue trying to get the patient's heart started again en route. I jumped into the driver's seat and, following the paramedic squad truck, drove to the hospital.

Now, I'll let you in on a little secret. Driving with your lights and sirens on ("code 3") is not nearly as fast or stressful or exciting as it seems from watching an emergency vehicle go by. It's really just normal driving, and especially when you have a patient in the back, you're driving smoother than normal. On the way to calls, I generally keep it at the speed limit, and once you know where you're going it gets to the point where you and your partner will have casual conversations about all kinds of things while you're doing it. Once, my partner and I spent nearly the entire five minute Code 3 drive to a call laughing about something funny that had just happened. Hope that doesn't burst anyone's bubble.

This, however, was a little different. This was actually what you would expect it to be like. The squad was racing to the hospital, and I was doing my best to keep up without totally throwing everyone in the back off balance. I could hear what was going on, and twice I heard them say that they had gotten the patient's heart to start beating again on its own - before losing it. My palms were probably a little sweaty.

We got to the hospital, and got him inside - and again, normally, there's no rush, but this time, we were almost running alongside the gurney as a doctor held the door open for us. Eight pairs of hands moved the backboard from our gurney to the ER bed, and the doctors and nurses at the hospital took over.

And that was that. Jordan spent an hour and a half doing his paperwork; I spent nearly as long cleaning out the huge mess in the back of the ambulance. The good news is that, by the time we left, the patient's heart had started beating on its own again, and though he was still on a ventilator, they were moving him out of the ER and into the Intensive Care Unit. Like with almost every call, I don't know what ultimately happened to him, but that's pretty much the best outcome you could hope for given the circumstances.

The difference between "cause" and "fault"

2011-09-13T01:25:00.001-07:00

I have a habit of responding to major, life-changing events in my life by not blogging about them for a long time, so, having just come back from Cambodia, I shall write a short post about last night's Republican presidential debate. (If you want to hear about Cambodia, come to my Friday night fellowship this Friday.)

The following clip is of an exchange between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, two Republican candidates for President. Neither of them stands a chance, so if you're looking to vote for someone who's going to be the nominee, look at Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. But here, Paul and Santorum are arguing about why Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11. Paul, citing Osama bin Laden's own words, states that it was as a response to U.S. foreign policy. Santorum vehemently disagrees, saying that it was because of America's freedom and prosperity. Here's the exchange:

And if you notice, at the end, while the moderator is speaking, Santorum shakes his head and says that Paul is saying 9/11 is "our fault."

Sorry, but I've got to side with Paul here. There's a difference between saying that our actions caused something and that something is our fault. Based on Al Qaeda's own words, they attacked us on 9/11 as a response to our actions. Acknowledging that in no way justify's their response, nor does it even necessarily mean we should change our actions.

But to refuse to consider the true causes of 9/11, and to instead say, baselessly, that they only attacked us because of our freedom and our prosperity, undermines the ongoing effort to fight terrorism and prevent more attacks from happening. You can't fight your enemy if you don't understand them.

I have never been a huge Ron Paul fan, but I think his website makes a great point here:

This phenomenon of opposition to American foreign policy translating into terrorist activity is so well-established, the CIA created the term “blowback” to describe it. Some still refuse to even address the notion of blowback, which means they will remain blind to the root problem of why terrorists want to attack us in the first place.
Could you imagine police detectives trying to stop a serial killer while completely ignoring his motives? Or how about if police simply dismissed the murderer as “crazy,” which is probably true, as many so many of these Islamic terrorists are certainly not of the same mind as you or I. Yet, in order to stop such a murderer, crazy or not, law enforcement still tries to get inside his mind, paying particular attention to certain patterns.
Yet many still stubbornly refuse to look at motive or patterns when it comes to trying to prevent terrorism. Instead, they tell us that terrorists simply “hate our freedom.”
This is childish—and dangerous.

Two of my favorite songs

2011-08-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

Nice and peaceful.

This is why I love my job

2011-08-02T17:03:00.001-07:00

Here's a brief summary of what I did at work yesterday:

Got a free meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, vegetables, a caramel covered brownie, and a Coke
Went to the batting cages (and hit an 80 mph fastball for the first time in my life!)
Went to a petting zoo!
Spent twelve hours with a couple of fun and stimulating people (we had a ride-along, so there were three of us)
May have actually legitimately saved someone's life; we didn't do a whole lot but she was definitely not looking good and if she hadn't gone to the hospital - fast - I don't think it would have ended up well for her

And got paid to do this!

Scholarships for Future Teachers in the Philippines

2011-07-16T20:02:00.000-07:00

My brother Mark, currently serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, is working on making education more affordable for some of the students there. Check out the video:

For more information, including how you can help, check out the website!

In case any EMTs read this...

2011-07-03T01:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a little conversation my partner and I just had:

Me: When you get your driver's, be careful on u-turns, because it's where you'll get tones without expecting it.
Him: Okay.
Me: [Does a u-turn.] Gotta do it slow, like that. Now, on the other hand, I think it's actually impossible to tone by accelerating too fast. Like, I've been in rigs where people specifically try to tone by accelerating, and they never succeed. See? [Accelerates.]
Road safety device: click-click-click-BEEP.

Moral of the story: The new rigs accelerate really fast. Or have sensitive road safety devices. Or something. And I now have no credibility on anything.

For everyone else, the road safety device is a little thing that beeps at you if you brake too hard, turn too quickly, or go over 68 miles per hour, in order to make sure you drive the ambulance safely. Also, it apparently can beep at you if you're accelerating.

Cool crossword puzzle

2011-07-02T11:12:00.002-07:00

Let's say you were making a crossword puzzle - which is already pretty difficult, I would think. And let's say it's 1996, and you want one of the answers to be the name of the dude who won the presidential election.

But...you're making this crossword puzzle the day before the election. How do you do it?

Take a look.

On another randomly nerdy note, if you've ever wondered what the difference between England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom is, here's a good video explaining it.

Ministry, EMS, and burnout

2011-06-24T14:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a very lucky man. I spend the vast majority of my waking hours either working as an EMT or serving in some Christian ministry capacity, and both of these are highly fulfilling callings. They both give you an opportunity, day in and day out, to help people. I think that's what draws a lot of people to these fields.

Interestingly enough, though, they both have very high rates of burnout. Bitter pastors. Paramedics who yell at their patients. Youth group leaders who say "I really don't care if my kids go and screw themselves up." EMTs who say "Why won't this person just die already so I can get back to sleeping."

Why? Why do big-hearted people turn into calloused jerks?

The usual suspects: lack of sleep, poor nutrition, irregular schedules, high stress. All true.

But also, I think, part of it is in your attitude toward helping people. Are you helping people because they deserve to be helped? Or because it's good to help people?

Because some times, it's really fun to help people - or if not fun, at least it brings you satisfaction. If you're a likable person, someone I get along with, really, it's no skin off my back staying up till 5 with you to help you with something. Or picking up the phone to hear about your relationship problems when I'm just about to nap. I want to do that for you, because you listen to me and respect me, and you remind me of myself.

If you're a couple of charming old guys who keep thanking me for my help, of course I'm going to want to stand on the side of the freeway with cars whizzing by and pull you out from your wrecked car and load you up into my ambulance. If you're a terminal cancer patient who nonetheless spends the whole thirty mile transport making jokes and laughing at mine, yeah, there's few things I'd rather be doing than helping you out.

But it's not always like that.

Because sometimes your patient spits at you, or cusses at you and tries to wrestle his way off the gurney. Sometimes they call you a liar and say that you're stupid. Maybe they'll pee on your gurney or throw up on the seatbelts or bleed on your blood pressure cuff. And sometimes - most of the time - they didn't really need to call 911. They could have dealt with this on their own, without interrupting your lunch or waking you up from your nap.

And sometimes, you just can't stand the people who come and ask you for advice and help. You know they're not going to listen anyway, and their habits and attitudes and values and hobbies are just so annoying. They've got no respect for your time, or space, and clearly don't care very much about you outside of what you can do for them.

Even if the bad apples don't actually outnumber the good apples, it can sure seem like it sometimes. So if you base your service to others on their likability, you'll eventually realize that you're pouring out your time and energy and money on people who you really just don't like. Thence comes burnout. The job or calling that you once had so much passion for is now a big old waste of time. And energy. And money.

But while you can't choose to like people, you can choose to love people. And love, in many ways, has very little to do with the recipient. It has everything to do with the giver.

And if you love people - regardless of how annoying or combative or dirty or sinful or disrespectful or whatever else they may be - then helping them is going to be worth it.

Every time.

The Nine Lives of Chloe King

2011-06-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to make a quick plug for my buddy Ki Hong Lee, whose new show debuts on ABC Family tonight. It's called The Nine Lives of Chloe King, and you can read it about it here.

According to his character bio, Ki Hong

plays Paul, a second-generation Asian-American obsessed with video games and comic books. He may look like a slacker compared to his high-achieving siblings, but he's always up for adventure -- and now that his best friend Chloe is out to save the Mai, there won't be a shortage of excitement.

Oooh, and here's a video:

This totally blows my mind

2011-05-25T23:55:00.001-07:00

Today's xkcd comic is pretty good, and, I have to say, pretty true.

As you can see, it hits particularly close to home for me.

But that being said, what blows my mind is the alt-text for the comic. Hover your mouse over it, and the artist tells us this: "Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and repeat, you will eventually end up at 'Philosophy.'"

No way, right?

Well, I did it three times, trying to be as random as possible, and I can report that it is true for "Roman Polanski," "British Thermal Unit," and "Norway."

Crazy, huh?

Doug Odgers, RIP

2011-05-10T00:42:00.000-07:00

Early on Sunday morning, an ambulance crashed on the 10 freeway in Ontario. The cause is still under investigation. The ambulance was driven by a 25 year old named Jose Ugarte, who survived the crash with what are being called moderate injuries. His partner, 23 year old Douglas Odgers, was riding in the back and died as a result of the injuries he sustained in the accident.

---

I met Doug a little after 7:00 PM on the evening of January 1st, 2011, and I spoke to him for the last time at 4:00 the next morning. We spent nine hours of our lives together in an ambulance, working the night shift and earning holiday pay for it.

I don't remember any of the calls we got that night, but I do remember some things from the shift. We got put on fire coverage right off the bat and posted at Telegraph and Leffingwell, where we parked and watched an episode of Family Guy on Doug's laptop. We got our lunch break in Pico Rivera and ate at the Jack in the Box on Telegraph and Paramount. We talked a lot about sports that night, about the Dodgers and about the Packers (his favorite team). He gave me some ideas for what to say at the wedding I was MCing the next night. I don't think I used all of them, but some of them were pretty funny.

Nine hours isn't a lot of time to get to know someone, but I do have one story I can eulogize him with. It's a little thing that Doug did, but it meant a lot to me, and it's something I've tried to emulate in my life.

The EMS world is a very hierarchical one. When you're on scene, with the firefighters and the paramedics, you show them respect, especially if you're among the majority of EMTs who hope to one day join their ranks. And this attitude can carry over to the way you interact with other EMTs, too. We may all have received the same training, but experience counts for a lot. Most guys are pretty chill about it, but some will try to pull rank on you. Regardless of whether or not they do, if you're a smart younger EMT, you'll show some respect to the guys who have been around for a while and you'll be willing to learn from them.

Doug, in reality a year younger than me, looked older; he'd been an EMT for three years and had a regular fire shift in the city of Artesia. Me, on the other hand - I'd been an EMT for three months and hadn't even gotten my driving privileges yet. Within a few minutes of meeting, while we were checking out the rig, we'd established these facts. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I was already clear in my own mind that he was the boss on our shift that night. And then, he got out of the rig, and asked me a very simple question:

"Want a coffee?"

And then he trudged off to the inside of the station to go get me a coffee.

Veterans don't usually do that for rookies.

But he did for me, and though it may sound like a very small thing, it was huge in setting the tone for the rest of the night. A very fun shift.

And for me, ever since then, whenever I'm working with a new kid, I make a point of asking if they'd like a coffee or something from the vending machine before we hit the road. I do that because I want my partner to feel as comfortable and respected as I did that night when Doug got me coffee.

Rest in peace, buddy.

Osama bin Laden, dead

2011-05-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

I never really expected this to happen, not after such a long war on terrorism with so few discernible results. It's been nearly ten years since 9/11, ten years since bin Laden became the world's most wanted man.

Well, earthly justice comes to a mass murderer. Death - even the death of someone as loathsome as bin Laden - isn't anything to rejoice over. It says in Proverbs, "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles" and in Ezekiel, "As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live."

But justice...justice certainly is something that we can rejoice over. At a time like this, when we see a man who planned and ordered an operation that resulted in the deaths of 3,000 innocent people...a man who supported a Taliban regime that oppressed women and non-fundamentalist-Muslims...when we think of all the suffering for which this man was responsible, it seems entirely justified that, at the very least, he should experience a fraction of that cumulative suffering.

Can't say I was a huge fan of the president's speech. Might be because he's a Democrat and I'm a Republican and I suffer from the whole being so partisan you can't give your opponent any credit, but I don't think that's it. I think I'm just a lot more uncomfortable with the whole "America can do anything!" language than I used to be. Whoever it's coming from.

That being said, though, I do like this pic:

EMT Life: GSW

2011-04-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

Working as an EMT requires you to be able to embrace some amount of uncertainty when it comes to planning your day. Once you've checked out your rig and ensured you have all your supplies, you go over the radio and tell dispatch you're available - and then you wait for them to send you wherever they please. You don't know whether it'll be Long Beach or Fullerton or East L.A., and you definitely don't know how your day is going to look. You may have a quiet day, like this past Tuesday, where we only had two calls and I was able to start and finish a 250-page book. Or you may want to have a quiet day and nap, like I did a couple Saturdays ago, but instead get switched over to fire coverage and end up responding to five 911 calls. You just never know.

You also never know if your day is going to involve a significant "first." They day I got my first traffic collision started out just like any other day. The day we had a 570 pound patient was completely unremarkable at first. They day I get my first full arrest and have to perform CPR for the first time, well, it's not marked on my calendar. It'll just start off like a normal day.

Yesterday started off fairly normally.

---

Dean, the vending machine man, was busy stocking the machines, and if he sees you when he's busy stocking the machines, then he makes sure to give you a free bottle of "tequila" and wish you a good day. (It's actually water.) He gave me four extra ones to take to the lady up at the front desk; I took them up there and she thanked me and told me to take an extra one for my partner.

She and I wished each other a good day, I went out, grabbing my traditional start-of-shift coffee on the way, and Josh and I went available. They sent us down to a post near Long Beach, where we spent a pleasant hour, him playing his guitar, me reading my Kindle. Then we had a nice, long 26-mile transport, which fortuitously enough placed us a mile away from a Little Caesar's when we got our break and brought us back to our service area around 6:30. Five and a half hours done and we'd only had one call. Quite a pleasant, relaxed day.

That's when they switched us over to fire coverage. And then gave us a call. And the thing about this call was, they prefaced all the information by saying "Do your best, guys." They don't always do that.

The reason, though, wasn't because of the nature of the call (someone's "eyes were burning") but because it was way the heck far away, and we theoretically have eight minutes and fifty-nine seconds to make it to a call before we're late, and though I've never really figured out what it means to show up "late," trying to drive into the setting sun through L.A. traffic with an emergency waiting for you is not particularly pleasant.

"We're going to get cancelled," I predicted, as Josh weaved his way through the streets of L.A. Normally, with a call that far away, and something like "burning eyes," the fire department will get there long before you do and decide that an ambulance is not needed.

Man, it seemed like everyone in L.A. was calling 911 that afternoon! We had been given that call because we were the closest free unit, even though we were miles away, and then while we were en route we heard another call go out just a few blocks away from ours. Whoever was responding to that one must have been really far away. The call was this: "GSW, stage away for PD."

Translation: Gun Shot Wound, stay the heck away until the police determine that the shooter isn't going to shoot you too.

"Aww man," I said, "wish we'd gotten that. Would have been my first GSW."

"Mine too," said Josh. "GET TO THE RIGHT YOU DUMB CARS!" (Driving with your lights and sirens on can get rather frustrating.)

Then dispatch entered the conversation. "Robert-1303, you guys are cancelled." (Told you!) "But standby for another one. You'll be taking the GSW call."

---

By the time we rolled up on scene, police had secured the area. There were two victims, one who'd been shot in the arm and the thigh and the other who'd been shot four times in the leg. They were pretty lucky. There was a lot of blood on the ground, but none of the wounds were life-threatening. We put them both in the back of the ambulance and sped off for the hospital; the guy who had been shot twice seemed to be in worse condition so he took the gurney and received most of our attention while they guy who'd been shot four times sat in one of the chairs in the back.

It was a chaotic, bumpy ride with two medics, two patients, me, and a whole lot of tubes in the back. There were two IV lines hanging from the ceiling, an oxygen line running from the wall to the patient, and five cords running from the bulky heart monitor. All of these had to be maneuvered around while providing care to the patient.

The key thing to remember in any situation like this - and I think having so many things to trip over this time made it very easy to remember - is to calm down and not rush. If you freak out, all you're going to do is trip over something. And possibly faceplant on the patient (I've seen it happen). Or possibly rip something out that shouldn't be ripped out (almost seen that one happen, too).

Anyways, we got to the hospital, and unloaded them, and they were immediately swarmed by a trauma team.

A few minutes later, while we were still cleaning up, another GSW came in to the emergency room. You can read about it on the news. Since it seems like they're withholding some of the details, I'll do the same, except to say that she did not look good at all when they brought her in.

You know what I don't get?

2011-04-16T02:30:00.000-07:00

Why people get so worked up when other people say something dumb, and feel like it's their responsibility to discipline/punish that person.

I don't mean if you actually know the person - if your friend says something dumb, then as their friend you should try to correct them so they don't make a fool of themselves and offend other people in the future.

But, like, take Alexandra Wallace. She's the poli sci major at UCLA who posted a video of herself making some pretty dumb comments about how Asians talk too loudly on the phone in the library and interrupt her epiphanies. So she makes a fool of herself in public, and some people respond by saying that she needs to be punished in some way or another, ranging from academic disciplinary action to, well, death. Which I really don't get. Not just in terms of degree, but the whole idea. Yeah, if someone hurts someone else, they should be punished. But how is one person being dumb in a very public way hurting anyone?

Here's another example. Under the headline of "TSA Officer Admits Plot to Post Porn on Christian Site," we read that a TSA officer, well, plotted to post porn on some creationist's Facebook page. Why did he do it?

When interviewed about his role in what he described as a “blitz” against Ken Ham, Seashols stated: “Somebody posted . . . an asinine statement that Ken Ham made [on an Atheist forum], and that raised our hackles. . . . It was retaliation.”

Retaliation for...making an asinine statement. Asinine, for the record, means "extremely or utterly foolish." So, again, we have someone deciding that someone making a fool of themselves in public earns them the right to be punished.

There's something about this that really bothers me, something that I can't quite put my finger on at 2:45 in the morning.

Packrat

2011-04-14T18:34:00.001-07:00

Cleaning out my room today; I've got a whole bunch of stacks of papers to go through. Some of which were probably time-sensitive. Oops.

The difficulty, for me, in cleaning out my room, is that it requires me to get rid of stuff. This is not naturally something I like doing. For example, I just came across a little quarter of an index card with the name "Dad" written on it. I think this was from last year's family Secret Santa gift exchange, and my dad was the person I was getting a gift for.

Yup, had trouble getting rid of that. Family gift exchange, dude! Memories.

Anyways, I also have a shoebox with some old CDs that I made in high school, and I'm listening to them right now. All I can say is that I had kinda scattered musical taste back then. I guess I still do. Anyways, here's the track listing for the CD I made at the end of 2003, with my 19 favorite songs that I heard for the first time that year. (It's in reverse order, so track 1 is my 19th favorite song. I like ranking things.)

1. 50 Cent ft. Snoop Dogg - P.I.M.P.
2. 50 Cent - In da club
3. Michelle Branch - Are you happy now?
(Yes, let's pause and note that in the first three songs, I have both 50 Cent and Michelle Branch. Told you I had eclectic tastes.)
4. Shin Seung Hoon - I believe (from My Sassy Girl)
5. Daniel Beddingfield - If you're not the one
6. Uncle Kracker - Memphis soul song
7. The Ataris - Boys of summer
8. Fountains of Wayne - Stacy's mom
9. Whitney Houston - Didn't we almost have it all?
10. Five for Fighting - 100 years
11. Linkin Park - Somewhere I belong
12. Liz Phair - Why can't I?
13. Zydeco Hounds - Bayou pon pon
14. Good Charlotte - Anthem
15. Allister - Somewhere down in Fullerton
16. Sean Paul - Get busy
17. Lonestar - Amazed
18. Third Eye Blind - Blinded

And my number one favorite song from 2003 was:
19. Evanescence - Bring me to life

Alrighty, back to sorting through papers...

Isaiah 10

2011-04-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

Anytime you go through the OT prophets, you're bound to come across passages describing God's wrath. For some people, those with a particularly well-developed sense of justice, these passages intuitively make sense; for others, they may be confusing or even problematic. Why is God so angry about things sometimes?

Isaiah 10 starts right in the middle of a list of indictments against Israel for some of the sins that they've been committing as a nation. So today what I did was I actually went back to the beginning of that section and made a list of some of the things God accuses Israel of.

Pride. (9:9-10) - Israel's response to the disasters that have been befalling them is to say "Hey, someone came and attacked us? We'll just rebuild!" At first glance, nothing seems wrong with that, and it even sounds very self-reliant and strong. But then you realize that this is Israel, whose whole relationship with God was supposed to be based on reliance and trust. He'd led them and provided for them on countless occasions. Furthermore, the basis of God's covenant with Israel was the idea of blessings for faithfulness, and punishment for faithlessness. This punishment was meant to lead Israel to realize that, hey, they were doing something wrong, and they needed to repent. So by doing what they were doing now, they were basically plugging their ears and saying they didn't want to listen and didn't want to repent. Ever known someone who, against the pleas and advice of everyone around them, kept on doing bad stuff that hurt the people close to them? That's what Israel's doing here. And what exactly are the things that God wants them to stop doing?
Bad spiritual leadership. (9:16) - The priests and prophets of the day were telling people things they wanted to hear, rather than things they needed to hear. While that may make people happy, if it ends up taking them further away from truth that they need to hear, that makes it an utterly selfish act on the part of the leaders. Spiritual leaders are given a special trust, and we all shudder when we see them violate that trust (say, the whole Catholic priest scandal or when you hear about a pastor sleeping with his secretary).
Unjust lawmaking. (10:1) - Closely related to bad spiritual leadership. In this case, the national leaders were making laws that favored certain people, padded their own pockets, etc, etc. National leaders are also given a certain trust that shouldn't be violated.
Abuse of three particular categories of helpless people. (10:2) - God cares a whole lot about widows, orphans, and the poor, and he is particularly incensed when people take advantage of members of these three vulnerable populations. The national leaders had sinned against these people through their unjust laws; others had sinned against them by neglecting and ignoring them.

You kind of start to get a picture here of the problem with sin. The problem is that it has consequences that cause pain to self and others. The ones listed out here are particularly obvious in terms of their consequences to others. And that should help us to understand why God is so anti-sin.

Speaking of helping the needy, take a moment to pray for Bryan Stow, the S.F. Giants fan who got beaten by a couple of thugs at a Dodgers game last week. I was actually at the hospital they took him to that night, bringing in a patient just as his friends arrived at the ER to see how he was doing. If you'd like to donate anything to help with the costs of his medical bills, there's a couple links at this site.

Isaiah 9

2011-04-05T10:01:00.001-07:00

Starts off with a beautiful picture of a day of future redemption. Remember, this was written in the face of looming national disaster, so the people to whom Isaiah was prophesying were about to experience a lot of bad things. Here's the reassurance that those things won't last forever:

But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.
You have multiplied the nation;
you have increased its joy;
they rejoice before you
as with joy at the harvest,
as they are glad when they divide the spoil.

Biblical redemption is a wonderful theme. (Some of my personal favorite passages: Hosea 2:14-20, Jeremiah 31:11-14, Psalm 51:10-13.) But it's not based in mindless optimism or just hoping things will get better. The next four verses present three reasons as to why, reasons which in a sense reverse-build on each other. (i.e., the first reason is founded on the second, which is then ultimately founded on the third.)

For the yoke of his burden,
and the staff for his shoulder,
the rod of his oppressor,
you have broken as on the day of Midian.
For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult
and every garment rolled in blood
will be burned as fuel for the fire.
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

See them? The day of future redemption will come because:

Burdens, brokenness, pain, outside oppression - the things that cause earthly problems in the first place - will be gone, because:
The things that caused them will be destroyed and put away ("burned as fuel for the fire"). In that, there's a sense of justice. And that's because:
"For to us a child is born." Referring to Jesus, who in his first coming broke the power of sin, receiving the justice due for it in his own body, and setting us free from its power; and in his second coming will usher in a day of reckoning and a new, redeemed heavens and earth.

Isaiah 8

2011-04-04T09:30:00.001-07:00

A bit more reading material for you, and a bit more devo accountability for me.

Here's what's going on in this chapter: God is speaking to the prophet Isaiah during a time of great national idolatry, and he tells Isaiah that the Assyrians are about to invade and take over. Two passages that stuck out to me.

vv. 5-7a: "The LORD spoke to me again: 'Because this people have refused the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, and rejoice over Rezin and the son of Remaliah, therefore, behold, the Lord is brinign up against them the waters of the River, mighty and many, the king of Assyria and all his glory." My paraphrase of the point of this: "If you turn away from me, and instead trust in sinful man, then I'll let you do that, but be aware that there are going to be other sinful men who wish to harm you. It may be fun and delightful at first, to trust in princes instead of in me, but it'll come back to bite you." (cf. Psalm 118:8-9)
vv. 11-13: "For the LORD spoke thus to me with his strong hand upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying: 'Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall regard as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread." My paraphrase of the point of this: "Your attitude must be different from that of the rest of the world, because your foundational assumptions are so very different."

So, a couple personal application questions to round this thing off.

In what ways am I trusting in man, rather than in God, for satisfaction/protection/hope/pleasure/whatever?
In what ways are my attitudes the same as someone who doesn't believe in God?

EMT Life: 24 hour shift

2011-04-01T14:28:00.000-07:00

Working my first 24 hour shift today, in the city of Commerce. Our station here is in a little building in an industrial lot; we've got a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a day room where my partner and I are currently chilling in the recliners. Here's how the day's gone so far, and I'll be updating this throughout the rest of the shift.

0700 - Showed up. The shift starts at 7:00, so I was a little nervous I was going to be late. But, fortunately, the previous day's crew was still out on a call, so I had lots of time to get settled, get some coffee from the coffeemaker, and meet my partner.

0740 - We get sent out to post, to cover for another ambulance that's out. Halfway there, we get sent to a different post instead.

0815 - After sitting at our post for a few minutes, I finally give in and decide to use the restroom at CVS. I had been waiting for twenty minutes, figuring we'd get a call and not wanting to be in the bathroom when it happened. But hey, we hadn't gotten a call for twenty minutes, so another three probably wouldn't make a difference, right?

0817 - Wrong. First call of the day. Run out through the CVS to the rig and we hit the road for the call. It's a traffic collision in the city of Montebello. Both cars are pretty banged up, but our patient, the driver of a sedan, appears to be relatively okay. She's got pain in her arm, knee, and neck, so we immobilize her to a backboard and take her to the hospital.

0915 - On our way back to station from that first call. We're about twenty yards away from our driveway, and I can almost taste the Lipton Brisk Iced Tea that I've got waiting for me in the fridge, but then my partner realizes that the group of people waving to us from across the street is not just saying hi. We stop, come across a teenage girl who's having difficulty breathing, and call in the alarm. Medics show up, and we take her to the hospital.

1010 - Back at station. We'll see how long this lasts...

1050 - Got a call for a burn injury. Guy was working on cleaning a water heater when the pilot light ignited fumes from paint thinner that had wafted in from the garage. Moral of the story: don't do that. 1st degree burns to the face and forearms.

1150 - After being sent to a post rather far away from our station, we get a call for a baby having a seizure. Turns out, the baby isn't having a seizure, but simply has a fever and has the chills. Dude, babies are hard to pick up. Don't forget to support their heads.

1310 - Back at station, enjoying lunch. Our last call put us at a hospital that serves lunch for free to EMTs, so we got chow mein and tacos.

1400 - Still at station. Friends is on!

1450 - Sent out to post in the city of Montebello. Sat there for about twenty minutes, then got cleared to go back to station. Got out of the rig, turned it off, and as we were about to walk in the door the phone rings and they send us back out to cover for Huntington Park. Three minutes later, we get a call in the city of Huntington Park; we're still very far away so dispatch adds a "do your best" to their instructions. Halfway there, we get canceled, then sent to another post, then sent back to station. So it's now 4:03 PM, and we're back in the recliners.

1705 - They sent us out to post, which we did for about an hour and a half. During that time, while we were sitting in a parking lot, a lady drove by, stopped her car in front of ours, did the whole "I'm watching you" hand gesture with a very threatening look on her face, pointed at each one of us, and then made a throat-cutting gesture. Don't know what that was about. Anyways, so then we got a call for "difficulty breathing" which turned out to be some dude who'd OD'd on meth. Finished that call around 8.

2035 - We'd just gotten back, and I was about to update the post, but before we could get settled in, we got sent out to post once again. Sat there for a while until around 9:15, and then we got a call for an assault. Rolled up on scene to find three police cars surrounding a residence; some punk had kicked his girlfriend in the stomach. He'd run off, but she was there, lying on the floor in pain, and we took her to the hospital. Medically, she was fine...emotionally, not so much.

Anyways, it's 11:45, so I'm going to try to go get some sleep.

000 - So much for sleeping. Got sent out to post, then sent back to station, then sent to another post before we could get back, then sent back to station. In other words, drove around in circles till around 12:40 AM. Promptly dropped off to sleep when we got back.

0215 - The phone rings, and they sent us out to post again, which we did until about 3:30. Came back and, you guessed it, fell asleep again.

0516 - The phone rings again. This is how it works: they call you on the cell phone, you blearily answer, they bluntly say "you have a call," and then you have one minute to wake up your partner, put on your boots and sweater, and get out to the ambulance and tell them you're en route. I don't know if we quite made it in under a minute. Anyways, it was a traffic collision on the freeway, which was very difficult to get to due to the fact that the entire freeway was backed up behind it. When we got there, the car was really badly damaged, but the lady inside was pretty lucky and only had some minor pain. So we took her to the hospital, dropped her off, got posted again for about 15 minutes, and then got sent home right at 7.

Breakfast and Tim Pawlenty

2011-03-22T00:24:00.000-07:00

Josh (my partner at work) today asked me, rather randomly, what my favorite meal of the day was. I thought about it for a moment, and I'd have to say breakfast. Why? Partly because, well, breakfast food is just good. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast with apple butter, omelets, waffles, pancakes, etc, etc.
But more than that, what sets breakfast apart is this: you basically always eat lunch and dinner. And so no matter how many special or memorable lunches or dinners you have, 90% of them are just mundane affairs.

Not so, breakfast. Although it may be the most important meal of the day, it often gets eaten in a rush, put off until around 11 at which point it is actually basically your lunch, or passed over entirely.

And so, the only time you ever really sit down and have a proper breakfast is on some kind of a special occasion. Waking up early and going to Denny's with your friends...or starting off on a long day's road trip...or being invited over to someone's house on a weekend for breakfast. Anytime I actually eat a proper breakfast, it usually means something good.

In other news, a few Republicans are starting to declare their intentions to run for president in 2012. Today, Tim Pawlenty released a video. I saw Pawlenty speak back in 2004, in Santa Barbara; of the people who've declared themselves as candidates so far, he's my favorite. (If Mitch Daniels announces that he's running, that might change.)

Something to be thankful for

2011-03-13T00:09:00.000-08:00

A month or so ago, I was partnered with an older EMT who's been around for a while and also happens to be a worship leader at his church. We didn't spend a whole lot of time talking about our respective ministries, with one exception.

After a long transport up to L.A., we were posting in a parking lot, and I took a phone call from a kid in my youth group. Spent twenty minutes listening to him/her tell me all about what some might call typical garden variety high school drama (not saying I would call it that, but some might), and then ended the call. My partner chuckled and said, "And that's why I don't do youth ministry."

I laughed, too. Like any kind of ministry, leading a youth group has its own set of unique challenges, and some people are more cut out for it than others. But if you ask me, the most difficult part of it isn't the fact that you're dealing with teenagers. It's that, a lot of times - most of the time, even - you're going to be doing a lot of labor for very little obvious results.

That's just the name of the game. They say that 90% of kids who grow up going to church stop going during or after college. Given that, teaching high school kids about Jesus can often mean this: teach them and then watch as they go off and completely ignore everything you tried to teach them. Then, hopefully, someday, they'll be ready to hear it, and they'll remember what you said, and actually apply it, and figure their life out. (Disclaimer to all my kids who are reading this: Not you guys. You're doing great.)

And of course, that last part requires a great deal of faith. You're planting seeds, so to speak, knowing that those seeds are going to lie buried for a long time - and finally, hopefully, sometime, someone else will come along and water them and make them grow. A good verse to hold on to, in that situation, is one that I memorized in college, 1 Cor. 15:58, which reads thusly: "Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."

So there's that, right? We've got that paradigm established? You just do everything you can and trust that God will eventually bring about good results - whether or not you're around to see them. Do-able?

I was reading this past week, though, about a guy who probably had to work really, really hard to even get himself to that point. Name's Moses. You've probably heard of him. Spent 40 years leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and watching frustratedly as they kept grumbling and making idols and forgetting the fact that God had created a big ol' miraculous pillar of fire to lead them by night. Moses went up on a mountain to go talk with God, and while he did that the Israelites made for themselves a golden calf and started worshipping it - and then, best of all, claimed that they'd just "happened" to throw their golden jewelry into a fire and it just "happened" to come out as a golden calf.

You can imagine how frustrated Moses must have been.

And so, I just imagine if I were in Moses' shoes, what I would be thinking as I grew old and my life drew near its close, with my people poised on the cusp of entering the Promised Land. I'd probably be thinking that, well, although I wouldn't be around to see it, that I'm confident things will turn out okay. Once they enter the Promised Land, they'll finally grow up, and shape up.

But instead...look at what God says to Moses in Deuteronomy 31:16-18:

And the LORD said to Moses, “Behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers. Then this people will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them in the land that they are entering, and they will forsake me and break my covenant that I have made with them. Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured. And many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’ And I will surely hide my face in that day because of all the evil that they have done, because they have turned to other gods.

Moses - freakin' Moses, of all people - not only didn't get to see the fruit of his labor, but God didn't give him a whole bunch of hope regarding the ultimate results of all that he had worked for. Of course, it all ended up all right in the end, but that was a long, long way off.

What's my point in writing this?

When we - as small group leaders, prayer warriors, youth ministers, elders, whatever - actually get to see the fruit of our labors, to see God's redemptive plan worked out through our labors, it is an utterly, utterly incredible blessing. It's not what we should be aiming for, or expecting - but when it happens, man, it's something that should fill us with an incredible sense of gratitude and joy.

EMT Life: Posting

2011-03-04T00:46:00.000-08:00

Many repeated requests for me to actually start posting again have gone sadly unanswered for a while now, primarily because the longer I stay away from actually writing something the more I feel like my first post after an extended absence has to be absolutely earth-shattering.

The problem is, I'm rarely in the mood to write earth-shattering posts, and they normally take a very long time to write, and I don't sit in front of a computer for 9 hours a day like I used to.

Instead, I sit in an ambulance for 9 hours a day. And, while we're on that subject, let's just make that the topic of my post.

I'm not on a 24-hour shift yet (though hopefully I'll be working one this coming week; keep your fingers crossed) so I don't have a station I sleep at and such. Instead, what happens is this: I show up at work, get in my ambulance, and then wait for dispatch to tell us where to go. Either we go to a call or we go to a post. Posting is the subject of this, er, post.

A post is basically a place you go and park your ambulance while you wait for them to tell you a place to go. Sometimes you'll be given a post, and before you even get there they'll give you a different post or a call; other times you'll be sitting in a dark parking lot literally for hours.

But it's not always a dark parking lot. Posts are generally given to you as an intersection (say, as a fictitious example, Dorothy/State College or 57/Yorba Linda) but you have some leeway in choosing where you're actually going to park. Some people say it's a quarter-mile radius, others a mile; at any rate, some people will look for a park, others a convenience store, or still others just a large parking lot that's easy to get in and out of. There is one particular post that everyone likes, though. Here's a picture I once took while posting there.

Yep, that's the beach. Here's a few more pictures I've taken while posting. Most of them didn't turn out that great because my phone is my camera (Bonus points if you can guess where these were taken!).

If you want, you can try to "clear pagers," which is radio-speak for saying "don't try to call us on the radio because we're not in the rig, so page us instead." While clearing pagers, I've bought white elephant gifts at Ross, nearly memorized the entire menu at Juice It Up, and read the first section of Max Lucado's No Wonder They Call Him Savior at a Barnes and Noble.

Or, you can just chill in the rig. My partner plays guitar; I read my Kindle or write sermon prep notes in my notebook; some people will chat a lot; a few even bring their laptops and play World of Warcraft. No joke. For that matter, I finished reading Les Miserables while posting in Gardena one day, and I've had phone conversations approaching an hour and a half while posting.

But of course, you can't just totally zone out, especially if you're on fire coverage or even if you're just in an area where you might suddenly get put on fire coverage. (Reminder: fire coverage = being ready to respond to a 911 call.) The radio is constantly crackling with different peoples' callsigns, and you have to always subconsciously be listening in case yours gets called.

Not every day is full of posting - and there are definitely days where you don't get any down time, period - but once in a while you get a good long amount of posting time. It usually seems to happen on those days when I didn't bring my Kindle or my laptop and/or have a quiet partner.

My partner and I were joking yesterday about what an accurate portrayal of EMTs would look like in a TV show. (Hint: not Trauma.) It would probably include lots of driving around in circles, looking in vain for a good place to park, and some high-tension drama when dispatch refuses to let the EMTs clear pagers.

Whether such a show would be a commercial success, or interesting to anybody at all, is another matter.

A Song I Like

2011-01-27T10:18:00.000-08:00

Heard this on the radio last night...I think I heard it once before (did someone play it at church? =P) but I like it a lot. I may be posting something a little more later today, since it's my day off, but in the meantime, enjoy "My Savior My God" by Aaron Shust.

Pro-life arguments...and pro-life action

2011-01-24T23:04:00.000-08:00

Ran across a couple posts recently that I wanted to excerpt here. The first of these makes a few points about abortion that have been made before, but deserve to be repeated:

Pro-life advocates contend that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of a defenseless human being. This simplifies the abortion controversy by focusing public attention on just one question: Is the unborn one of us? If so, killing him or her to benefit others is a serious moral wrong. Conversely, if the unborn are not human, elective abortion requires no more justification than having a tooth pulled. This is not a debate between those who are pro-choice and those who are anti-choice. Every pro-life advocate that I know is vigorously “pro-choice” when it comes to women choosing a number of moral goods. They support a woman’s right to choose her own doctor, her own school, her own husband, and her own career—to name just a few. But some choices are wrong, like killing innocent human beings simply because they are in the way and cannot defend themselves. We shouldn’t be pro-choice about that.

[...]

Meanwhile, pro-life advocates use philosophy to show there is no morally significant difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today that would justify killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying you had no right to life then but you do now. Stephen Schwarz suggests the acronym SLED as a helpful reminder of these non-essential differences:
Size: You were smaller as an embryo, but since when does your body size determine value? Large humans are not more valuable than small humans.
Level of Development: True, you were less developed as an embryo, but why is that decisive? Six-month olds are less developed than teenagers both physically and mentally, but we don’t think the former have less of a right to life.
Environment: Where you are has no bearing on what you are. How does a journey of eight inches down the birth canal suddenly change the essential nature of the unborn from a being we can kill to one we can’t?
Degree of Dependency: Sure, you depended on your mother for survival, but since when does dependence on another human mean we can kill you? (Consider conjoined twins, for example.)

The second article talks about ways that people and churches can get involved in life-related issues beyond simply making logical arguments like the ones above.

[We need to be c]reating cultures of adoption and rescue. Human trafficking is the emerging danger. It's been going for a long time, but the Church is recently (and awesomely) stepping up efforts to combat it, even here in America. My friend Justin Holcomb and his wife lead efforts of Mars Hill Church in Seattle to rescue sex workers, sex abuse victims, and runaways in their city. Others are working hard to rescue young girls from the sex trade. On the other front, the Church is exponentially embracing the beauty of adoption. It has become a bona fide movement, thank God. The reactive culture of rhetoric and protests must give way to these proactive missionary movements. We will begin changing hearts and minds on these matters of life and death as we create cultures of adoption and rescue. But only communities can create cultures, so churches have to buy in corporately. More families adopting, more families serving and taking in pregnant teens, more churches helping families do those things, more churches loving families and kids, more churches finding ways to minister to the exploited and marginalized and to support missions and organizations that already are . . . these are the pro-active, missional steps to creating truly pro-life cultures.

Something to think about, guys.

Civility

2011-01-20T13:27:00.000-08:00

That's the popular word in politics right now, "civility," especially in the wake of the shootings in Arizona, and the general consensus is that we need more of it than we currently have in our public discourse. As President Obama said in his speech memorializing the victims of the shooting:

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

[...]

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives - to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.

So, that being said, here's two suggestions as to how to be more civil when you're disagreeing with somebody. These apply not just to political disagreements but to all kinds of disagreements.

Don't assume peoples' motivations. In politics, it's very easy to assume that people who disagree with your political views also disagree with your own underlying goodness. For example, a couple posts ago, I brought up the issue of gun control. Let's say that you hate gun violence, and that leads you to believe that guns should be banned. Then you come across someone who supports expanded levels of private gun ownership. Does that mean that they like gun violence? Absolutely not - but that's the kind of motivation assumption that people do all the time when it comes to political issues.
When you "win" on some question, don't rub it in. Let's say you were an Obama supporter in 2008, or a Bush supporter in 2004. Your guy won. Be happy with that. Do you need the additional "victory" of gloating in triumph over the "other side?" (Hence my bumper sticker rule.) Politics isn't a sport; it should be a joint endeavor to try to make the world a better place. And, for that matter, gloating is pretty messed up in sports, too.

The Basics: Human Nature

2011-01-13T17:09:00.000-08:00

If you're just now joining us, we here at this blog are in the midst of an irregularly-scheduled and oft-interrupted series entitled "The Basics," in which we're discussing a few of the foundational assumptions of the Christian faith. Back in November, I stated that the whole basis for Christianity can be explained in this simple sentence: "This guy Jesus said that he was the son of God, and that he could forgive our sins, and we believe him."

This statement rests on three fundamental propositions: first, that there is a God; second, that we are sinners; and third, that Jesus died and resurrected and in so doing took the punishment for our sins.

We discussed the first proposition in a series of posts last month (if you want to find them, just click on the tag at the bottom of this post called "the basics") and now we move on to the second.

Proposition Two: We humans are in some way flawed/fallen/sinful/however you want to describe it.

This is the offensive one. No one takes personal umbrage at the mere idea that there may be a God, but when you get to this second part, you're starting to question peoples' character, and self-conception, and that's dangerous territory to be entering.

It's an old debate, actually - this question of whether human nature is basically good or basically fallen. Remember Locke and Hobbes, from AP Euro? Locke said that human nature was basically good - a "blank slate," tabula rasa - while Hobbes said that human nature was basically evil, and that life in a state of nature was, as a result, nasty, poore [sic], brutish, and short.

If you have a nerdy family, like me, you may have had this conversation over the dinner table. (Not the nerdiest family dinner conversation we ever had, either - but that's another story.) If you had nerdy friends in college, like I did, you may have stayed up late at their apartment, discussing this, wishing that you had a car so you could go home and go sleep. (Gosh, where do I find all these nerds? It's completely baffling to me.)

And both sides, I suppose, have their evidence. In one corner, we've got Mister Rogers; in the other, Hitler. The aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic can provide evidence for both sides, as can almost every war from the beginning of human history.

A little closer to home, we all know people who are simply good. I make reference on this blog, often, to a friend of mine who died from cancer a little over four years ago. He was quite possibly the best person I've ever met. He touched my life and the lives of so many people around him. He was a "prince among men," in my mom's words. And now that he's gone, the rest of us have got a lot of slack to pick up. A lot of good to do on his behalf. Maybe you know someone like him, someone who is just plain nice and kind and good-hearted. Value them. Appreciate them. Cherish them. They might not be around forever. And these people, well, they make the "human nature is essentially good" argument look pretty good right about now.

What about you, yourself? You may not be the best person ever, but you're overall a pretty good person, right? You've made mistakes - who hasn't? - but nothing too major. You may have hurt people, but your intentions were good. Hey, it happens.

One of my former roommates definitely felt this way about himself. And I can confirm that, though he had his flaws - roommates always do, after all - he was a genuinely nice guy. And he didn't like being told that he needed forgiveness. I was once listening to a song called "Mighty to Save," a song with the following words: "Everyone needs forgiveness, the kindness of a savior" - and my roommate popped his head in the door.

"See," said he, though I had not asked him for his opinion, and was in fact just quietly studying in my room, "I don't agree with that. Most people are pretty good, and they don't need forgiveness from God or from anyone else."

His point of view is, I think, not an uncommon one. But the Bible says something very, very different. "For all have sinned," reads Romans 3:23, "and fall short of the glory of God."

So which is it? Who's right? Can it really be true that everyone - you, me, the nicest person you've ever met - is a sinner, with a natural tendency toward evil, desperately in need of forgiveness?

That's what we'll be discussing over the next few weeks.

A Late Comment in the Wake of the AZ Shooting

2011-01-12T10:12:00.001-08:00

If you haven't heard, some kook tried to kill a congresswoman on Sunday. She was shot in the head, but thankfully, it looks like she's going to survive. Six others, though, are dead, included a nine year-old girl.

Things like this always spark up the old debate about the Second Amendment and whether or not private ownership of guns is a good idea. Some people say this shooting proves we need to ban guns altogether; others say that it proves exactly the opposite - that we need to permit more gun ownership and allow concealed weapons.

I have my views, and I've already gotten into a couple discussions about this with people who hold the opposite view. And as this debate plays itself out both in your life and on a national level, I think it's important to remember this:

98% of all people - +/-2% - who have a strong view either way hold that strong view because they think their view would have prevented this tragedy.

It's easy to forget, when someone disagrees with you about the solution, that they probably are just as upset and horrified about the underlying situation as you are.

EMT Life: Dead on Arrival

2011-01-11T01:51:00.000-08:00

Today started out as an unusually good Monday, and this after an unusually good weekend. Driving to work this afternoon, I was looking forward to a nice, quiet shift. Every shift is different, of course, but most of them are unremarkable enough so as to be soon forgotten, faded into a blurry mix of vague memories from weeks gone by.

I did have a dream, last night, about work, but it was pretty bland as well. All I remember was that I was driving with my lights and my sirens on, and instead of just using the main siren, I was also using the secondary siren, known as the "growler." Here's a picture, so you know what I mean. The main siren is the knob at the top left, and the growler is the knob that's just barely in the picture at the bottom.

You don't use the growler much, unless it's necessary to go really loud. And I'd never actually had the opportunity, in real life, so maybe that's why I remembered it so vividly from the dream.

---

Our first call was a nice easy transport out of a hospital to a mental institution. They gave us our break after that, and we were only a couple of blocks away from a friend's house, so I drove over and chilled there for about twenty minutes. Then came two more calls. After the second of these, they put us on fire coverage, and we drove down to Cerritos to post ourselves in a parking lot and wait for a 911 call.

After about twenty minutes, the call came. "Robert-1303, County Fire," the radio crackled. "Robert-1303, go ahead," I replied, as my partner grabbed his map book and a pen.

The call was for a traffic collision (TC) at an intersection about three or four miles away. I knew the general direction, so I turned on my lights and my sirens and we got underway while my partner double-checked the exact location. As we were passing through intersections, I realized that my main siren was only making one type of sound, instead of the two it's supposed to (you switch back and forth while you're going through an intersection), so I started using the growler too. Just like I had in my dream.

I'd never gotten a call for a TC before. Once, a month or so ago, we got a call for what we thought was a TC, but it turned out that it was just a guy who had suddenly vomited while driving, freaked out, pulled over, and called 911.

With that being my only TC experience, I wasn't totally sure what to expect from this one. After six minutes of speeding down the road, we finally arrived on scene. And this one was real.

There were several fire engines and an ambulance already on scene, along with a number of sheriffs. Bystanders stood by, as they are wont to do, on the street corners, surveying the damage. My partner and I donned our helmets and our jackets, grabbed a backboard, and walked over to the accident site.

Broken glass crunched underneath our boots as we rounded the rear of the fire engine. The other ambulance crew was waiting there, and they shook their heads at us and said, "It's a fatality." Turning to the scene of the accident itself, we quickly understood why.

There was a semi truck there, which had clearly been just beginning the process of turning left when the accident had occurred. And lodged underneath its front grille was a little old sedan, completely deformed and caved-in from the impact of the collision. It had sped over a nearby hill and into the intersection as the big rig was beginning to make its left turn. It was too late for either driver to do anything about it.

The firefighters had just begun the process of extricating the driver of the sedan when we arrived, and through the twisted metal I could see his arm, clenched in a fist and motionless. They sent the other crew back and told us to wait for a few minutes just because. "But you're not going to be taking anybody to the hospital tonight," the captain said. It was a job for the coroner now.

We waited for about half an hour while everything was taken care of. They cut off the roof of the car, and just on the off chance, attached heart monitors to the victim's chest. Nothing. He didn't have any obvious wounds, apart from some blood on his face, but he was clearly dead.

This was my first death as an EMT. It didn't really hit me, and still hasn't. I think it would have been different if he'd been alive when we arrived and then expired. I would have gotten to know him, just a bit, if things had happened that way.

But they didn't.

The Wonder Years

2011-01-06T00:28:00.000-08:00

Used to watch this show with my bro growing up. This scene was one that always stuck with me. In it, Kevin, the younger brother, who is always being bullied and beat up by his older brother Wayne, has taken advantage of his parents' being gone for the weekend to throw a party. The video picks up with Wayne gloating over Kevin's quickly-dwindling amount of time to clean up the house before the parents arrive.

I'm speaking about the idea of substitutionary atonement this weekend at AACF UCI Winter Retreat, and I'm always reminded of this scene whenever I address that topic.

NFL Playoff Predictions

2011-01-03T10:39:00.000-08:00

Almost always laughably wrong, but here's what I say:

Wild-Card Round:
Jets over Colts
Ravens over Chiefs
Packers over Eagles
Saints over Seahawks

Divisional Round:
Patriots over Jets
Steelers over Ravens
Packers over Falcons
Saints over Bears

Conference Championships:
Patriots over Steelers
Saints over Packers

Super Bowl:
Saints over Patriots

I'll be hoping for a Packers-Chiefs Super Bowl though - rematch of the very first Super Bowl!

Not really into New Years' Resolutions

2011-01-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

But I did say, back in July, that I would stop texting while driving, and maybe it's about time I actually followed through on that...

EMT Life: Mapping

2010-12-31T11:08:00.000-08:00

I've gotten the chance to work a few fire shifts lately, meaning I've experienced a number of harrowing and nerve-wracking moments over the past couple weeks.

The most stressful of these, by far, was on Tuesday, when we decided to get some food. We "cleared Nextels" (which means we told dispatch to call us on the phone rather than on the ambulance's radio if there was a 911 call) and went inside a burger joint to get lunch. The five minutes between ordering/paying and then receiving our food were five very, very long minutes, spent staring at the Nextel, hoping it wouldn't ring.

It didn't, fortunately, and so we not only got our food but had time to eat it!

After that, though, the next-most stressful part of the job is probably mapping. Here's how a 911 call works:

You're sitting in your ambulance, not doing much, just minding your own business, and all of a sudden you hear your call-sign called on the radio. You respond with your call-sign, indicating that you're listening, and then they'll say a message something like this:

"2118 Channing Way, cross of Shattuck, six-twenty-nine hotel two, code three for a chest pain."

Your job, then, as the attendant, is to pull out your Thomas Brothers map book and figure out how to get there. Here's the relevant corner of the map page I cited in the call above (it's my old apartment in Berkeley.)

First off, you have to know where you are; let's say you're just kind of chilling at Willard Park, that little green rectangle down in the bottom right - facing east on Derby. What do you do?

Well, first, you find the map grid. "Six-twenty-nine" refers to the page - you're already on it, so that's good. "Hotel two" is column H, row 2. Your call is on Channing, so either look for it or for the cross street of Shattuck, and then verify with the address where it'll be. (Code 3, by the way, means you're going with your lights and your sirens.)

Now, this call is really close to your current position, so you have some time to figure this all out. On a longer call, you may just want to figure out a general direction first, tell your driver "go over to College and start heading north" and then you figure out as he's going what your next step is.

Because you have a time limit on this. From the time you get the call, you have 8 minutes, 59 seconds to arrive on scene (at least in LA County). And the tricky part is trying to remember all the numbers they just gave you. I try my best to scribble down the address (number and street) and the map page, but that's sometimes hard if you've never heard of the street before and you have to think about it. I very nearly screwed up on Tuesday; I started telling my driver how to get to 736 J3 when we were actually supposed to go to 735 J3. I'd already told him to start heading east on a major street, but fortunately, before we got to that major street, I caught my error and told him to head west instead.

Then, of course, you get to the call, and you do whatever you need to do there.

Come on, guys.

2010-12-29T22:50:00.000-08:00

The news today is that CWA and FRC have pulled out of CPAC because of GOProud.

Translation: Two large conservative organizations, which also call themselves Christian organizations, have stopped associating themselves with a really big conservative organization because that really big conservative organization is allowing an organization of gay conservatives to participate at its annual conference.

Two of the nation's premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited.

I wouldn't care a whit about this if CWA and FRC were purely secular organizations. But they're not. They claim to speak from a Christian point of view, and therefore I feel completely justified in rebuking them from a Christian point of view. Here's my beef with them:

If you have a problem associating with sinners, then really, honestly, you probably shouldn't be part of any political organization, period. Yes, homosexuality is a sin. Know what else is? Let's just cite 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 - we've got sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, greed, drunkenness, thievery, swindling. Those sins are rather commonplace among politicians. So if you want to get on your moral high horse and not associate with sinners, then quit singling out gay people and maybe stop working together with dudes who cheat on their wives and/or their taxes. Be consistent, at least. Hate all sin, or else you look pretty darn homophobic. That being said...
If you're really approaching these issues from a Christian perspective, why on earth would your top priority be to (1) shun unrepentant sinners and (2) condemn them from your position of moral superiority? Shouldn't you instead be trying to share with them the good news, the amazing news, of the gospel, the news that saved you from your own ugly sins, a salvation that is offered as freely to them as it was to you? Or does the whole "this man receives sinners and eats with them" thing not really mean that much to you?

More to come another time, perhaps. This is a small part of a larger issue.

Sleigh Ride

2010-12-17T16:54:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite Christmas-time music videos:

The Basics: Right and Wrong

2010-12-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

One last post in favor of proposition one - there is a God - before we move on to the second part of this series.

The idea of right and wrong - let's call it a conscience - is a pretty universal human trait. It expresses itself differently across different cultures and different eras, but with the exception of sociopaths basically everyone has some inherent sense of right and wrong.

It's been said many times, many ways, but it's worth repeating: Without a God, there can't be an objectively correct standard of right and wrong. There can be generally-agreed upon standards (say, for example, the "golden rule"), and there can be extremely moral people who don't believe in God, but any standard of right and wrong is ultimately just an expression of a preference on some level unless it is given by a higher authority.

That is why you so often hear the phrase "well, it's true for me, but you have your truth also." It's why people talk about not "imposing values" on other people who may believe differently. Yet you'll notice that even the most post-modern, tolerant, relativistic people have their own standards on which they're unwilling to compromise. It'd take a rare and specially committed moral relativist to say that, for example, some people believe that it's morally right to torture children, and that's okay.

The rest of us - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists - can all pretty much agree that it's morally wrong to torture children.

So, whatever we may say, we all hew to some standard of objective truth. From where does this come? There are really only two explanations.

1) If there's a God who created the universe and us with it, then a true objective standard of right and wrong would be whatever he says. Not surprisingly, this is what the Bible says - we all have an idea of right and wrong because we are created in God's image and with a certain knowledge of his standards.

2) If there's not a God, and our existence is purely as a result of naturalistic processes, then our conscience comes not from a true, objective standard of right and wrong - since, after all, such a standard cannot exist without God - but from the fact that such a belief is evolutionarily beneficial.

We know how evolution by natural selection works, right? If a mutation occurs that makes it more likely for a certain living thing to reproduce and pass on its genes, that mutated trait will become more common. It's a simple, elegant, and brilliant concept.

In order for us to have evolved a conscience, then, it first had to arise as a mutation. Those early humans who carried it had to gain an advantage over those who didn't, and thus they were able to survive and reproduce more than those who didn't.

And it was, in fact, such an advantageous trait that those without it completely died out. Based on what we see today, having a conscience was as essential a trait, evolutionarily, as having a liver that doesn't randomly explode when its owner hits puberty.

Here, then, is my question: Is believing in right and wrong a beneficial trait, evolutionarily?

I don't see how. It may be beneficial for society for there to be a generally believed-in standard of right and wrong, but on an individual level, it's not a beneficial adaptation. Let alone one that would be so dominant.

Certain aspects of it, sure. A primordial human who had a mutation that caused them to believe that it was wrong to eat their kids would pass on their genes much more effectively than one who didn't.

But what about two early humans living next to each other, one who has a conscience and one who doesn't. Who's going to survive longer? The one who believes it's wrong to murder or the one who has no problem with it at all?

And believe me, if I didn't believe in right and wrong, I'd have a lot more offspring by now than I really do.

So what, then, does this mean? If evolution by natural selection wouldn't lead to the development of a species with a near-universally present conscience, what could?

Hint: Go back to the list of options.

The Basics: Three possibilities

2010-12-10T01:52:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a long post. A very long post. My apologies. I'll try to keep it as short as possible.

You may have heard that the Earth is exactly the right distance from the Sun for the existence of life. If we were a few miles closer to the Sun, all the water would have boiled away; if we were a few miles closer, the water would freeze. This is, as far as I know, true.

Some people use this as evidence for a Creator. The fact that the Earth is the perfect distance from the Sun, they say, means that it had to have been put there by someone who was interested in cultivating life.

Unfortunately, that's actually not much of an argument, scientifically. Think of it this way. Let's say there's a one in a million chance that a planet would be the right distance from its star to cultivate life. What are the odds? - except that, in a galaxy with 100 billion stars, probability-wise, it'll happen a few times.

Not an argument against the existence of God - but not really one for it either.

However, when you take a look at the universe, a similar argument is a great deal more suggestive.

There are four "fundamental forces" in the universe - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Let's talk about gravity, since it's the one we're all most familiar with. Gravity has a certain strength - g, the gravitational constant. We can imagine what gravity would look like if it was stronger - we'd be riveted to the ground. We can imagine what gravity would look like if it was weaker - we'd kind of be floating.

Here's the interesting thing. If gravity were a bit stronger, the universe would have collapsed soon after it began; if it were weaker, planets would never have formed. For the other three fundamental forces, they are likewise the perfect value/strength to permit the universe/elements/whatever to form.

We look at this, and just as we do with the Earth, we think "aha!" It's almost as if the universe was designed to work. The odds of the fundamental forces of the universe being this perfect are astronomical.

And unlike the Earth among the planets, there's only one universe.

But, to be fair, it's not just a choice between an astronomically improbable coincidence and God. No, there are a couple other options. Set aside the almost impossible chance that the universe just happened to get it right, and you're left with three options.

1) There are actually a multitude of universes, called the "multiverse." Of these universes, ours is the lucky one that got the fundamental forces right. There are a billion others that didn't. So we just happen to be the lucky lottery winners.
2) There's only one universe, but it kept undergoing big bangs and then big crunches until it got the fundamental forces right.
3) A being of some kind outside of the universe shaped it to be conducive to the existence of life and everything else.

The thing is - at least as of now - there's absolutely no possible way to see outside our universe (thus verifying the existence of others) or to see before the Big Bang (thus verifying that there was a prequel, if you will, to this universe). So it comes down to an issue of presuppositions. If you're open to the idea of there being a God, then you'll probably lean toward that. If you're not, you'll probably lean toward the multiverse or the repeating big bang theory.

But that's all it is. Presuppositions. Scientifically, at this point, there's not a lot of evidence for the multiverse or the repeating big bang theory - they're simply theoretical constructs that would explain, in a naturalistic way, the way in which an utterly improbably universe would come to be. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - but there's every reason to keep an open mind about all three of these possibilities.

Intuitively, is a multiverse really that much more plausible than the existence of God? Again, like I said in my previous post, we're getting pretty supernatural no matter which way we go.

One more reason why this is worth examining: Which of these three possibilities would affect your life? Multiverse? Doesn't really mean a whole lot to you. Repeated bangs and crunches? Won't affect you for billions of years. Personal, conscious God who created the universe? That might have some major implications.

And that might be worth considering.

Wisdom from Mrs. Smith

2010-12-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite teachers ever was my 8th grade U.S. History teacher, Mrs. Smith, and for some reason yesterday, while sitting in my ambulance in a parking lot in Gardena, I remembered something very wise which she once said. Ready for it?

"You have the right to be bored; you do not have the right to be rude."

Isn't that great?

TPC Winter Retreat 2 - Old Spice Parody (again)

2010-12-06T10:08:00.000-08:00

Manball. At the best retreat of your life.

The Basics: A Supernatural Beginning

2010-11-30T22:06:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I laid out three fundamental propositions that undergird the Christian faith. Today, we'll begin to look at the first one. Remember it? No? Here's a refresher:

Proposition one: There is a God.

We'll be taking a look at this one in the next few posts before moving on to the second and third propositions. So let's get started. And let's start at the very beginning. Like, the very beginning.

Most everyone agrees, nowadays, that there was a beginning. There was a time when science had advanced just far enough to cast doubt on this, but I don't know of anyone reputable these days who postulates that the universe has always existed, without beginning. Christians, of course, believe that this beginning began when God created the universe. Atheists, on the other hand, would argue that the "big bang" that created the universe was not initiated by any kind of sentient being. But Christians and atheists and everyone in between pretty much agree that there was a beginning.

Does the very fact that there was a beginning prove that there is a God? Depends on who you ask. Some would say that any action has to have a cause, and thus there had to be something - more specifically, someone - to begin the whole process. Stephen Hawking, on the other hand, recently said that he believes the properties of gravity could lead to something (the universe) coming from nothing. So, okay. Maybe he's right.

The point I wish to make, however, is this: many, many people say they don't believe in God because they don't believe in the supernatural, as all things that exist and happen can be explained as the result of purely natural processes. They will astutely point to things that were once ascribed to divine action that have been shown to be totally natural - say, for example, the rainbow.

That is true for many things, but once you get to the origins of the universe you are beginning to deal with things that are utterly unnatural and incomprehensible to our minds and our experiences of the natural world. Hawking says that something could come from nothing, and he might be right, but if that's the case then that's completely freakin' mind blowing. Have you ever seen something come from nothing? Can you even conceive of what that would possibly look like? Not just a bunch of random atoms coming together to form something visible and tangible, but nothing coming together to form something.

And this brings up some really interesting questions. If you’re like me, and you really only think about what you see in front of you, then there’s nothing all that strange about the universe. Things are as they are. But, now that we know that there was a beginning of some kind, think about that beginning. What was there before the beginning? How did something come from nothing? It’s one thing to say that life evolved from non-living molecules. That, at least, is conceptually believable. Everything breaks down to atoms, eventually. But something from nothing?

And if we have a finitely-sized universe - which is an implication of a universe with a beginning - then what happens when you reach the end of it? Do you just fall off the edge? (And if so, into what?) Or do you somehow boomerang around all the way back to the other side?

There’s something supernatural about all of this. I mean that in a very loose sense of the word “supernatural.” I don’t mean that it proves that God exists, or that there’s some type of invisible spirit world. But, whether it’s some weird dimensional anomaly or whatever, it’s pretty dang hard for us to intuitively grasp what this even looks like. Or how this even works.

Something supernatural happened to create our universe. Something unique. So keep an open mind about what that might be. And we'll get a bit deeper into this in our next installment.

TPC Winter Retreat - Old Spice Parody

2010-11-27T23:25:00.000-08:00

Want to come to TPC Winter Retreat this year?

Yeah you do.

The Basics: Three Propositions

2010-11-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

It's very, very easy to get sidetracked and misled about what Christianity as a faith is about.

Let's say you've only ever gone to one church in your life - either consistently as a member, or on occasion in your childhood, or dragged out by your friends in college or whatnot. Depending on what this church is like, you might have some ideas about the basic necessities of a Biblical church: Sunday potlucks with casseroles and/or japchae; a welcome team; a praise band that does four songs at the beginning and a response song at the end; parties where you burn secular CDs; abstinence pledges and purity rings; your own unique church lingo that no one else understands. (And depending on your story, you might quite possibly be scarred by this.)

If you've never been to church and don't have any close Christian friends or relatives, you might have a similarly warped view of Christianity. This isn't your fault. It's the fault of idiots like the Westboro Baptist Church, hypocrites like Ted Haggard, or the far-too-many people who make Christianity more about politics or boycotts or moralizing than about Jesus.

Even if you've gone to several churches, you may still be affected by the cultural peccadilloes that show up generally in American Christianity. There's a whole website devoted to these things. It's rather unfortunate that so many of us can identify so much with that website.

And the reason I say its unfortunate is because if we're not careful, we're liable to let our culture - either our own church culture or our societal culture - define what Christianity looks like. This means that people who don't naturally fit in to that culture might think that Christianity is not for them. You know - don't like potlucks, or icebreaker games, or songs that use a simple 1-4-5-minor 6 chord progression, and you might as well forget the whole Jesus thing altogether. Right?

No! No no no!

The gospel - the core, central message of the Christian faith - isn't about any of that cultural stuff. It transcends culture and is relevant and applicable to anyone and everyone. I said in church the other day that explaining Christianity is this simple: "This guy Jesus said that he was the son of God, and that he could forgive our sins. We believe him."

That's really it. It's that simple.

Now, that simple statement rests on three fundamental premises.

One: That there is a God. Duh. No God, no son of God.
Two: That we humans are, in some way, flawed/fallen/sinful/however you want to describe it. No sin, no need for someone to forgive sin.
Three: Jesus died and was resurrected and in so doing was able to forgive our sins.

That's really it. Now, there are certain implications of all of this, to be sure - intellectual belief requires some volitional response - but let's start with the basics. Three fundamental premises upon which the entire Christian faith rests.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be taking a look at each one of these. Stay tuned.

EMT Life: Types of Shifts

2010-11-24T07:16:00.000-08:00

Working as an EMT has corrected a lot of the misunderstandings I had about what the job would be like. Whenever I tell people I'm an EMT, they ask me what's the most interesting thing I've seen, expecting that I see lots of interesting things every day. But the truth is, in seven weeks of working as an EMT, I've never performed CPR, and I've responded to exactly two 911 calls, one of which was canceled before we even arrived and the other of which involved the patient telling us "nah, it's okay, I don't need to go to the hospital."

I have seen some interesting things, to be sure, but the job's not all 911 calls. And, for the record, don't ask me what the most interesting thing I've seen is unless you really want to know. Seriously. It's kinda gross. (And it wasn't even on an actual call.)

There are two basic types of shifts: "fire shifts" - in which the ambulance is primarily responsible for responding to 911 calls - and "private shifts" - in which the ambulance is primarily responsible for things called inter-facility transports; IFTs, for short.

Also, there are two basic lengths of shift. You have "short shifts," which are usually between 9 and 12 hours long; and 24s, which are - you guessed it - 24 hours long. There are short fire shifts and 24 hour fire shifts, and short private shifts and 24 hour private shifts.

When you start, they assign you to short private shifts. So you get a lot of calls that may involve:

Someone who was in the emergency room for a medical problem or a traumatic injury being discharged to a nursing home or rehab center. We drive them.
Someone who tried to commit suicide or otherwise harm themselves being transported from the emergency room to a psychiatric hospital. These are always interesting.
Someone who was in the hospital being discharged to their home. Usually very easy, except sometimes homes are not at all built for ambulance gurneys.
Someone in a nursing home or other care facility who needs to go to a doctor's appointment and, for whatever reason, requires transport by ambulance.
Oh, yeah, and dialysis calls. Lots of those, especially in Orange County. Don't know what dialysis is? I didn't either, really, until I started working as an EMT. Read about dialysis here. A heck of a lot of people are on it.

These make up probably about 80% of the calls you receive on a typical private shift. Stepping up the excitement a bit, you once in a while get what's called an "Urgent BLS" call. (BLS = Basic Life Support, meaning EMTs can do it, as opposed to ALS - Advanced Life Support - requiring paramedics.) An urgent BLS is usually a problem with a patient at a nursing home that doesn't quite justify calling 911, but definitely needs fairly quick medical attention. These ones are a little more unpredictable and require a few more of the skills you learned in EMT school.

And, once in a while, you get put on "fire coverage." This means that all the 911 units in the area are actually on 911 calls, so they need you to cover and be ready to respond in case there's another one. This happens, at least for me, maybe two or three times a week, but only once did I ever get any 911 calls out of it. (The aforementioned two calls happened in rapid succession at around 2 AM on a Sunday morning.)

IFTs aren't as glamorous as 911 calls, no doubt, but IFTs are where you hone your skills and learn a lot the ins and outs of the job. And it's still pretty cool being able to meet and help lots of different kinds of people in need.

More on all that in a later post, though.

The Basics: Skepticism

2010-11-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you, but I have trouble believing in things I can't see. It's not so much out of some intellectual skepticism as much as of a lack of imagination, or something like that. You can tell me that something's true, and it's not that I think you're lying, but something just doesn't click and cause me to believe it unless I see it too.

This has certain implications in my life. Among other things, I give people the benefit of the doubt possibly more than I should. You can take a really long time telling me "this person actually does some really shady things and you should watch out for them" but - to your peril and my frustration - I'm likely to just brush it off until I see it myself. Constant problem - though, I suppose it has its upsides as well. On a similarly ambivalent note, I'm not likely to get too sad if you tell me something that happened to someone far away. A good friend of mine died four years ago this Christmas. But it still hasn't hit me, deep down in my heart, that he's gone. It's just head knowledge. Which is good in a way, but sad in another.

All this to say, for me, seeing is believing.

Now, you may be thinking, that's interesting coming from a guy who calls himself a Christian. Think, for a second, about what a Christian has to believe: an invisible God created the whole universe, a long time ago, way before you were born, and then a guy named Jesus, who was the son of this same God, was born to a virgin and died on a cross to take the punishment for our sins and was resurrected. Because of all these things - all of which happened long before I could see them for myself and all of which are totally unique and not exactly replicable - the world has hope. Oh, and so what do we do? We pray to this invisible God and live our lives making decisions based on the assumption that the Bible is his word to us, he is all-good and all-knowing, and he is ultimately in control of all things. Assumptions which, if you think about it, have a heck of a bearing on our decision-making process.

It sounds absurd. And none of this is easy for me. I have friends to whom, it seems, belief comes easy. I admire them. I'm not one of them. Tell me that there is a God, and if I weren't already a Christian my first instinct is neither to fall on my knees and worship, nor to scoff in unbelief. It's to say "okay," and then turn back to more tangible and immediate things in front of me.

And yet...

Somewhere along the way, this apathetically lazy excuse for a skeptic was convinced that all those things are true. And not just true, but important. And not just important, but life-changingly transformative.

In the next installment, we'll begin to explore how that happened. Stay tuned.

This blog's not dead, it's surely alive

2010-11-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

For the first time in a while, I have not just a two-day, not just a three-day, but a four-day weekend! This is partially the result of my getting temporarily and accidentally fired from my job - another guy named Fullmer quit on Tuesday and somehow our names got mixed up and thus I wasn't actually put on the schedule until Thursday - at which point, all the Monday shifts were already taken.

So, I've got a four day weekend, which means after the hecticness that is every Friday, I plan on taking advantage of Saturday and Monday to clean the house, clean my car, catch up on some reading, and get this blog going again. It's been hard to find time for blogging these days - I used to sit in front of a desk for eight hours a day - eight regular, routine hours - and now I sit in an ambulance for nine random hours a day and then often go somewhere without my computer.

But, I have things I want to write, so hopefully I can get better at being a little more faithful at posting here.

In the meantime, just a couple things:

I don't mean to give these people any more of the fifteen minutes of fame that they want, but there is, I think, a good lesson to be learned here. A couple in Minnesota is deciding whether or not to abort their baby, and they have put the issue to a vote. So, yes, they're clearly aiming for attention, and annoyingly enough they're getting it; and yes, I could say so much about the total incoherence of saying "we're so traumatized after having three miscarriages that we're not sure if we want to try to have this one;" and yes, reluctantly, I'd say you should go and vote for life. BUT the main point I want to make is this. If you go to their site, and read this post, you'll note that they've been getting messages from people offering to adopt the child if the parents decide they don't want it. That, my friends, needs to be the response of pro-lifers. I read a great article last month about this. Can't find it now. But point is, there are going to be unwanted babies. And those of us who believe abortion is wrong need to support adoption in whatever way we can.
I love this website. It's great. I don't 100% agree with everything the main dude says, but he's always thought-provoking. He made a post a couple weeks back about the creationism v. evolution debate, from a Christian perspective, which is worth reading. (Note that he and I find ourselves on opposite sides of the debate.) My favorite part, though, was this: "In my defense of Christianity, I will just stick to the resurrection of Christ and the fact that something cannot come from nothing. The fact that something cannot come from nothing gets me to God. The resurrection of Christ gets me to the Christian God. A simple two step process that does not require a PhD to get there." I'd started thinking along the same lines recently, with an additional third simple, yet profound truth. I started writing down a few musings about these three truths while I was in Taiwan. And hopefully I'll start posting about them.
The other thing that I want to post about is what it's like to be an EMT. It's a great job, and I love it, but I think it's probably pretty different than what most people expect. It's definitely different from what I expected. So hopefully I can give a few little interesting insights.

So between those two serieses, and some random postings here and there, hopefully this thing can get back up and running again.

But right now, it's Friday, and Friday afternoons are always the hecticest few hours of my week, so I gotta get going!

God, football, and an ambulance

2010-11-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

I don't know what more I could want from a five minute video. Awesome story:

CA Voting Guide - Candidates

2010-10-29T09:44:00.001-07:00

As promised; hopefully this isn't too late for any of the absentee voters among you.

It's a little harder to be objective with candidates than it is with propositions; people are a lot more complicated than paragraphs and they have much longer and more convoluted histories. As a result, I'm not going to make any pretense of objectivity here. This is completely my subjective view. But, I do think it's a good subjective view. =)

US Senate: First off, I'd like to invite you to watch this video. Don't worry, it's short - 17 seconds. Seen it? Okay. That's Barbara Boxer. I think I could leave it at that, but if you want more, I could point out how Boxer is one of the most liberal members of the Senate, and not in a Russ Feingold liberal-but-principled-and-competent way. No, in a mediocre LA-Times-declined-to-endorse kind of way. In an abortion-is-okay-until-you-bring-the-baby-home kind of way. Vote for Carly Fiorina. Please.

Governor: Rohit, I hope you've been taking your aspirin. I've thought long and hard about this one, and I'm still not sure. I watched the first debate and was underwhelmed by Whitman, and, I have to admit, charmed by Brown. That's no reason to vote for anybody, but I took a good look at Whitman and asked myself what happened the last time we had a wealthy, fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican try to take on the Democratic legislature and the public employee unions. We had...now. Not working out so well.

Here's my thing. I think executive experience in an executive is very important, which is one reason I opposed Obama for president. You know what's better than just executive experience? Executive experience PLUS an intimate knowledge of the company/corporation/government/whatever. My bosses at Care Ambulance used to be EMTs who worked their way up. That's one reasons why (shameless plug) Care is such an awesome company.

And, do you know what California's biggest problem is? An intransigent Democratic legislature, and an intransigent set of public employee unions, who have been knocking down every attempt at necessary change in the way this state is run. Does Whitman have the right ideas? Yes. Does she have the ability to take down the legislature and the unions? Probably not. Does Brown have the right ideas? He seems like he's moderated out since his last stint as governor, and if he truly is the pragmatist he claims to be now, then he has to recognize that things have to change. And in the same way that "only Nixon could go to China" it might take a Democrat to get the legislature and the unions to go along with what needs to be done.

So hide your kids, hide your wife, and for the love of Pete don't tell my parents, but I think I'll be voting for Jerry Brown.

Lieutenant Governor: Gavin Newsom, as mayor of San Francisco, violated the California constitution by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Whatever your view on gay marriage, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about changing things, and breaking the law is not the right way. Abel Maldonado, on the other hand, was appointed Lt. Governor and then didn't even get enough votes to get confirmed. Plus - well, let me just put it this way. I used to work for Abel Maldonado. Soon afterwards, I realized that politicians are shady and I decided to get out of politics. I'll leave it at that, and I'm going to vote for Jim King.

For the rest of these folks, I won't mouth off as much. Hopefully, having endorsed one Republican, one Democrat, and one independent, I've now lulled you into trusting my judgment.

Secretary of State: Damon Dunn

Controller: Tony Strickland

Treasurer: Mimi Walters

Attorney General: Steve Cooley

Insurance Commissioner: Mike Villines

Board of Equalization member (district 3): Michelle Steel

Congress (40th district): Let me just say something. In a year when 65% of the nation says they're willing to get rid of every single member of Congress and start over entirely, it makes you realize how lucky you are to have a good Congressman. I will be very cheerfully voting to re-elect Congressman Ed Royce.

Fullerton City Council: I'm going for Bankhead, Chi, and McKinley.

CA Voting Guide - Propositions

2010-10-16T18:42:00.000-07:00

Election Day is coming up soon, and this coming Monday is your last chance to register to vote! As I did in 2008, I'll list out the CA ballot measures, try to give an objective account of the pros and cons of each, and explain why I'm voting the way I'm voting. Some time between now and November 2nd, we'll get to the candidates.

Proposition: 19
What it would do: Makes growing, cultivation, and possession of marijuana legal for all adults over the age of 21. In essence, if you can drink alcohol, you can smoke pot.
Best argument for: Marijuana is less addictive and less harmful than alcohol, so why should we treat it any differently? Especially since we're spending lots of money on punishing people for marijuana use, and we could conceivably make money off of taxing it.
Best argument against: Marijuana is a gateway drug, and this would cause major problems in terms of conflict between federal and state law. Also, apparently, the proposal is badly written, with lots of loopholes and contradictions.
My thoughts: I'm very open to the idea of legalizing marijuana - I've never used it myself and I don't think people should, but I don't think it is either constitutional or necessary to make its use illegal. However, almost every major newspaper in California is opposed to this proposition because of how badly written it is. When newspapers - which are mostly liberal and therefore would normally favor the legalization of pot - say the proposition is badly written, I'm going to take them at their word.
My vote: No

Proposition: 20
What it does: California has 53 seats in the U.S. House of representatives; the districts that these seats represent are drawn up by state legislators. Oftentimes, this leads to a process called gerrymandering, which is when districts are drawn in a way to sort of "stack the deck" by putting more Democrats or more Republicans in a certain district. This proposition would mean that a non-partisan group of commissioners, rather than state legislators, would draw congressional district lines. (Proposition 11, in 2008, did the same thing for state districts; this one is for federal districts.)
Best argument for: Legislators shouldn't be drawing the boundaries for other legislators because of the potential for conflict of interest.
Best argument against: You can't vote for or against commissioners, so there's less accountability.
My thoughts: I don't see why this is that necessary; the big problem occurs when legislators draw their own districts, which isn't the case here. Nevertheless, might as well consolidate the whole process.
My vote: Yes

Proposition: 21
What it does: Creates a new annual fee on vehicles, of $18, that will be used to help preserve state parks and wildlife areas. In return, all state parks will no longer have entrance fees.
Best argument for: State parks are open for everyone's use and benefit everyone, and therefore it's justifiable to tax everyone for their upkeep.
Best argument against: Vehicle registration fees are already high, and this will hit everyone regardless of income, and many people don't actually use the state parks.
My thoughts: I'm tempted to vote for this; out of pure self-interest, I think I'd save money overall. But I don't think I can justify forcing poor people in the inner-city to pay their money so I can skip paying for state parks.
My vote: No

Proposition: 22
What it does: Changes the law so that the state government cannot borrow money from local transportation and property taxes to pay for state projects.
Best argument for: Gas taxes and property taxes are used in the local area to benefit the people who are paying them (through roads, fire service, police service, etc.) and so the money should stay there.
Best argument against: The state is in deep trouble and it needs all sources of funding it can get to avoid bankruptcy and ruin.
My thoughts: Local services are vital services, and stealing money from local governments is just a temporary fix to the state's problems.
My vote: Yes

Proposition: 23
What it does: A couple years back, the state passed a stringent set of environmental regulations to combat global warming. This proposition would suspend those regulations until the economy gets better.
Best argument for: We have the third-highest unemployment rate in the nation in large part because of all the burdensome regulations on business in the state, and these regulations go way beyond what any other state or country is doing.
Best argument against: Global warming is a major issue, and this will force businesses to create "green jobs" that will actually help the environment and provide employment.
My thoughts: I'm not against addressing global warming, but all that these regulations do is (1) make legislators feel good that they're doing something and (2) drive more businesses and jobs out of California to other states.
My vote: Yes

Proposition: 24
What it does: Overturns recent changes to California tax law that changed the way businesses can do their taxes. In essence, a "no" vote means that companies have more accounting tricks they can do to avoid taxes; a "yes" vote means they can't use them.
Best argument for: Some of these tax loopholes are just dumb. Why would you be able to deduct losses from one year against income from another year?
Best argument against: Anything that makes it easier for companies to do business in California is a good thing right now.
My thoughts: "Closing tax loopholes" sounds nice, but honestly, all you're going to do is drive businesses to other states, cause unemployment, and lose tax revenue overall.
My vote: No

Proposition: 25
What it does: Changes the process for approving a state budget. Currently, it takes a 2/3 vote of each house to approve a budget; this will change that so a simple majority can approve a budget.
Best argument for: California's budgets are always late, which means we sometimes aren't able to pay for vital services and instead issue IOUs. Seriously.
Best argument against: The 2/3rds requirement forces compromise, so that no one party can force its way on everybody.
My thoughts: It sounds good to me, especially since it explicitly says it doesn't change the 2/3 vote requirement to raise taxes. However, a bevy of organizations I trust, from the CA Chamber of Commerce all the way down to the Korean American Grocers Association, say that it's a bad thing. Maybe they know something I don't.
My vote: No

Proposition: 26
What it does: Remember that 2/3rds requirement for passing new taxes I mentioned above? Well, sometimes, in order to bypass that, legislators call something a "fee" instead of a "tax." This proposition will broaden the definition of taxes to make it harder to do that.
Best argument for: Anything that keeps the government from raising taxes on this already taxed-out state is a good thing.
Best argument against: It will be harder for the state to raise revenue, at least in the short-run.
My thoughts: See "best argument for."
My vote: Yes

Proposition: 27
What it does: Look up at Prop 20. Now back at me. Remember how I mentioned Prop 11, which took the power to draw state legislative districts out of the hands of state legislators? This would repeal that.
Best argument for: The commission that draws district boundaries under Prop 11 is unelected and therefore not directly accountable to the people.
Best argument against: Setting aside how tacky it is to vote on a proposition repealing a two year-old proposition, letting politicians draw their own district boundaries is a total conflict of interest. To quote an old Prop 11 slogan, we want voters to choose their politicians - we don't want politicians to choose their voters.
My thoughts: I voted "yes" on 11. I've changed my minds about a few things since 2008, but redistricting isn't one of them.
My vote: No

Personal update in one picture

2010-10-02T17:24:00.000-07:00

The line between normal and evil

2010-10-01T15:53:00.000-07:00

If you haven't yet heard of the tragedy that occurred at Rutgers over the past week, then let me fill you in: A college freshman by the name of Dharun Ravi secretly filmed his roommate, Tyler Clementi, having a sexual encounter with another man and live-streamed it over the internet; Clementi, upon finding out what had happened, leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Ravi and his friend, Molly Wei, now face up to five years in jail. More info here.

I just found out that I know Molly Wei through two degrees of separation (three? I know someone who knows someone who knows her - whatever that makes it). But even before I found that out, there was something that struck close to home about this for me. I feel like I knew Wei, and Ravi, and Clementi. Something I couldn't quite explain, but let me try.

Ravi and Wei are being rightly excoriated for their actions, and I write this not to defend them in any way. They violated the privacy of a young man in multiple ways, in what was in effect a form of high-tech bullying, and they are most certainly responsible for the consequences - the sad and unnecessary death of that young man.

And yet - I can't help but feel a degree of sympathy for the two of them...

I used to have a picture on my computer - I can't find it now, and I'm somewhat glad of that - from my freshman year of college. It was of me and a pair of friends, on my friend's bed, leaning up against the wall he shared with our neighbor, another friend. Our facial expressions are somewhere between amused, horrified, and curious, as we listen with our ears pressed up against the wall.

I hope I don't need to spell out what we were listening to.

I'm rather ashamed to admit that, now. It sounds creepy and weird, and a total violation of privacy. But in all honesty, that's just what we did freshman year. My floor was the hormonal floor. Six couples. Lots of "sexiling." And lots of "Oh my gosh do you know what ___ and _____ are doing in the room right now?!" At the time, it just seemed normal. It was just what we did.

How easy, and how little a thing, it must have seemed for Dharun Ravi to run down the hall to Molly Wei's room and say, "You won't believe what Tyler's doing right now!" And then...how easy, and how little a thing - how small a step - to watch through his webcam on Molly's computer. Why would you even stop to think about what you were doing?

I don't know the thought process that led Ravi and Wei to then invite others to watch. Maybe a friend gchatted them, and they were so engrossed in it that they thought nothing of bringing him into their little circle as well. I doubt there was ever a time when they stopped to think about what they were doing. And I doubt there was ever a time when they took a big enough step to even have second thoughts about it. It's hard to think that you're ever crossing a line when you're just taking a bunch of small steps.

A series of small steps, probably nothing that a typical college freshman wouldn't do. But the end result is the tragic death of a young man. Somewhere, two normal college freshmen crossed a line and killed a friend through their actions.

So what does this all mean?

Let this be a wake up call to all of us. The little things we do that we know are kind of wrong, but really probably aren't that big a deal - they can have consequences far beyond anything we can imagine. What may be to us little mistakes can cause untold pain and suffering to others.

And please, let's stop imagining that there are "bad people" out there who are somehow fundamentally different from us "good people."

We're all just people, people who have something deep down inside that is screwed up, something called sin that manifests itself differently in different people. Depending on our circumstances and our foibles, some may seem worse than others...

But before you so readily condemn Ravi and Wei, take a good look at yourself.

Podcast

2010-09-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

I'll have some thoughts on the Brown/Whitman debate a bit later, and a for-real personal update should be coming soon, but in the meantime, I had a chance to guest preach at Cornerstone Church this past week, and the podcast is available here, if you'd like to listen to it. Many thanks to the nice folks at Cornerstone!

More important than any paltry personal update...

2010-09-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

Socks

2010-09-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

This isn't really earth-shattering or anything, but I realized something odd this morning. (Interesting stuff going on in life right now, but I haven't had much time for blogging and the longer I put it off the less likely I am to write it. And instead, in the meantime, you'll get mundane posts about my habits with socks.)

Yesterday, when I came back from being out, I came up to my room and removed my socks. Left them next to my bed. I thought that maybe I would throw them in the hamper, but just in case I ended up going out again I wanted to have them handy. You see, they were my pair of socks for the day. If I needed socks later, it would be this pair, the pair I had already used.

I ended up not going out, as it happened, but I never put the socks in the hamper. Now, they're still sitting next to my bed, and since it's a new day, I think I shall put them in the hamper.

But, it is interesting, because they're not actually any dirtier or less suitable for wearing than they were last night. It's just...a new day. And so I will get a new pair of socks.

Mens' brains

2010-09-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

Funny article in the Telegraph, in which the author discusses a new study that says men and women actually think more similarly than most people believe.

I do hope Professor Rippon doesn't tell my wife this. I have a nervous suspicion that the only reason my wife tolerates my untidiness, my laziness and my procrastination when it comes to any household task is that she assumes this is how all men are hard-wired to behave. I daren't think what she might do if she realises that these defects are purely mine.

He goes on to list some rather odd male idiosyncrasies:

There must be a reason a man will ignore the symptoms of cancer yet groan and wail as if his cold were the flu. There must be a reason he can tell you Leeds United's first-choice midfield from their title-winning season of 1991-1992, even though he doesn't support them, and yet can't tell you the birth weight of his own children. There must be a reason he will bin unread the instruction booklet of any electronic trinket he buys, yet devote hours to reading about the specifications of cars he will never own.

I think most guys can identify with that - and lots of girls are probably nodding along in incredulity as well. And lastly, I'm just glad to hear to find out that apparently I'm not the only guy who does this:

Why would society want us to empty the loose change from our pockets on to the nearest household surface every evening, rather than simply spend it, like women do?

Nine years

2010-09-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Today marks the ninth anniversary of September 11, 2001. I was over at Kevin's place today, and we talked about it a bit, and it's hard for me to imagine that for a lot of the kids in our youth group, 9/11 is just a very hazy memory from way back in second grade. For that generation, they don't really remember a pre-9/11 world.

I was a tenth grader back in the fall of 2001, having just come out of a very pleasant summer and looking forward to a very promising year. On September 12th, and for many days afterwards, it seemed like everyone was saying that "9/11 changed everything." Did it? I don't know. There's many other things that I remember more from that year, and at this point I kind of feel like I - like my youth group kids - don't really remember what it was like before 9/11.

And so I went back and reread something I wrote in the months after 9/11. Maybe it'll bring back some memories for you, too.

---

Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, dawned like any other morning. The alarms went off too early, the sleep-deprived people rolled out of bed, and there was no indication in anyone’s mind that today would be any different than the usual work or school day grind. The night before, I had stayed up till 1 AM, doing my English homework and talking to my friend Kristine online. At this point, 5:30 AM, Tuesday morning, as I stumbled into the shower, my deepest concerns were the quality of my essay on Huckleberry Finn.

Still in a state of dozing, I walked outside into the chilly morning weather. Summer was definitely wearing off, and there was still a bit of fog lying over the still, gray streets. I checked my watch, because I didn’t usually walk to school. I had plenty of time. Shivering, I walked along the sidewalk to school.

I had finally adjusted to the temperature by the time I got to school, so the nicely heated band hallway felt like an oven to me. I had really overestimated how much time it would take me to walk from my house to school; there were only two other people in the hallway, Prashant and Sarah. Prashant walked up to me.

“Dude, did you hear? Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center!”

I was surprised to hear this, of course, as I had heard nothing of the outside world since the night before. I was far from concerned, however. I assumed it was simply a plane crash, and try as I might, I could not get too concerned about something that was happening on the East coast. Still, I inquired as to what exactly had happened.

“Yeah, like one was an Airbus and the other was a Cessna,” explained Prashant. “One after the other. It’s crazy.”

“Man, that sucks,” I said. “Weird coincedence though.”

More people arrived. Some knew what had happened, some didn’t. There were varying accounts of what had happened. At first everyone just thought it was a weird coincedence, but then the rumor started spreading that two passenger jets had crashed into the towers, and it was intentional – not an accident. Now I was getting worried. I frantically walked around, asking people if they knew anything more than I did. Everyone was beginning to get frightened. The bell rang and everyone - amazingly - still followed the system of picking up their bags and walking to 0 period. I waited for several friends to go to 0 period. Anna’s usually carefree happy face was now worried and even a bit terrified. “They hit the Pentagon,” she said, her voice trembling.

“What???” I asked incredulously. This was too much. I turned my head forward.

As we walked out of the hallway, I noticed David and Olivia, locked in an even tighter embrace than usual. In this terrible moment, the only comfort they had was each other.

We passed out from one hallway to another, walking as if we were in a trance. What could we say?

We got to our classroom. AP European History with Mr. Madrid. Mr. Madrid was usually irreverent and funny, but today his face was grave. He greeted us with as much cheer as he could, but no one noticed. We were all too scared ourselves. Even those who had heard nothing as of yet were beginning to realize that something was very, very wrong. Mr. Madrid explained what had happened for those who didn’t know.

“This morning, a plane was flown into the north building of the World Trade Center. Another one followed a few minutes later, and one has also apparently crashed into the Pentagon.” He went on to explain what this could mean. Somehow, his calm voice reassured us in a way. In the face of all this horror, he gave us hope that perhaps everything was really ok. About halfway through the period, another teacher popped in, his face grave.

“The South Tower’s collapsed,” was all he said. Mr. Madrid spoke about this for a few minutes, and everyone was silent. Mr. Madrid took this as a cue to begin teaching the material. He left a small TV on, in case anything drastic happened.

No one was really paying attention to the notes on Renaissance art. Class finally ended. As we were walking out the door, the same teacher came in. Most of us could overhear him say “The other one’s down now too.”

More rumors swirled. By the time we got to the band hallway, I had heard many things, including a rumor that the White House had been hit by a car bomb. I was freaked out at this point. I’m no lion-heart, but I can usually keep my inner emotions to myself. I couldn’t now. “They car bombed the White House! That’s horrible!” I said, trembling.

We went out on the field to practice, as we always did. For the first time ever since I joined marching band, I wasn’t concentrating. No one was. A little freshman was babbling on about what had happened until several people told him to shut up, not now. I did my marching as I always did, but without thinking; all my thoughts were on New York and how the world I had known was tumbling down.

1^st period came to an end like it always did, always does, and always will. One hundred shell-shocked individuals walked out to their next class. My next class was English. Ms. Cerrutti, like Mr. Madrid, sought to reassure us and answer any questions we had. Her aide Caesar kept an eye on the news while we presented our projects. The principal came on the intercom during 2^nd period, asking all teachers and students to concentrate on whatever it was we had to do and not let this affect learning.

Apparently the teachers took this announcement literally; only one of my four remaining teachers made any allusion to the events of the day. That was Mr. Steele, my Computer Science teacher.

“Today, we are going to take notes, because I think that by changing our routine, we would be doing exactly what these people want,” he said in a halting voice. “I personally am not going to talk about it, because I deal with stress by making jokes, and that would not be appropriate here.” After he finished lecturing on robots and recursive loops, he turned on the tv, for anyone who wanted to watch. These were my first images of the attacks. I sat in horrified fascination as the news played the tape over and over again. None of my other teachers made any reference to it, though certainly the students were not paying full attention to the day’s lesson.

Band practice had not been cancelled, but once again, my attention was elsewhere. I saw the clouds in the sky, and the sun setting behind them. The same sun the people back East were looking upon. What now? What had happened to my world? Did the U.S. even exist anymore? What was next? I had no idea what to think. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and I was floundering. My mother and I tried to make sense of it all as I drove home that evening. I pointed out the beautiful sunset. “Maybe...just maybe it’s a sign,” I said. “A sign that...today – that everything that happened today - will be repaired someday.”

Suddenly life’s little problems didn’t seem so big anymore. Watching the news that night, I realized that it didn’t really matter how I did on my Huck Finn essay. There were more important things to worry about. Kristine and I talked about the events of the day that night over the internet. She asked me the traditional greeting “what’s up?” “Apart from everything,” I said, “nothing.” That said it all. We were all empty inside, drained. We spoke for about an hour about everything, and then bade each other good night. Before I signed off, I looked at something my friend Jon wrote:

“The flames will cease and the dust will settle. And from the ashes our nation will rise greater than before. We will unite, under one banner, as Americans. We will not let fear overcome us, and we will stand up against tyrants and madmen. Because there is one thing that is impossible to break, the spirit of an American.”

“Amen to that Jon,” I said, and signed off. 12 midnight. September 11 was over.

Health Insurance

2010-08-28T17:46:00.000-07:00

Saw in the news, a few days ago, that Blue Shield of California had received the needed approval to raise its insurance premiums by up to 29%. Having seen that, I became slightly alarmed when I noticed that I'd received an "Important Communication" in the mail from...Blue Shield of California, my insurance provider.

Uh oh.

Sure enough, they're raising my premium by about 29%, from $181 a month to $234 a month. That's a lot of money, y'all, especially considering that the total amount I've spent on health care in the past two years has been $35. (It would have been $135 if I hadn't had insurance.) Do the math, and you'll see that I would have saved a great deal of money if I hadn't had insurance.

Now, of course, that's to be expected - if my insurance premium is the average amount that someone my age/sex/location is going to cost in terms of medical care, then there are going to be people who cost considerably more than that, and people who cost considerably less. And in a sense, buying insurance is done on the off-chance that you end up having huge medical bills. Better to pay a medium amount of money than the risk paying an exorbitant amount.

There's another way of looking at this, though, than simply "well at least I'm managing my risk." Because, if my $234 isn't going to me, then it's going to someone else's medical care. That someone could be, I dunno, some kid from a poor family who can't afford to pay for their son's chemo. Or any number of other scenarios.

Takes the sting out of it, a little bit.

Little League World Series

2010-08-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

Just saw "Chinese Taipei" beat Panama. That was the result I wanted, but the way it ended was kind of sad. Down 5-1 with two outs in the sixth (which is the last inning in Little League), Panama seemed to be getting a rally going. With a runner on first, the batter singled to right, but when the right fielder threw to second, the runner did a headfirst slide into the base.

After originally calling him safe, the umpire reversed his call and called the runner out, because headfirst slides are illegal in Little League for safety reasons.

And thus Panama lost.

Felt bad for the kid, all the more so because I got in trouble for the exact same thing (a headfirst slide into second) back in my Little League days. It didn't, however, eliminate my team from a chance at the international championship game.

But, go Taiwan!

Left brain v. right brain test

2010-08-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Last night, Justin came across this little test thingy. You may have seen something like it before; it's a bunch of names of colors ("red," "blue," "yellow," etc) written out in a different color font than the word. Just click on the link. It's easier than me trying to explain it!

So you're supposed to try to read it and instead of reading the word, you say the color the word is written in. I always find this really hard, but Justin just breezed right through it. Belinda and I tried it, and both struggled through in about twice the time it took Justin to get through it. Katie, I think, was fastest of all. Belinda and I were amazed.

But then we turned it around, and tried reading the words instead of saying the colors. Belinda and I both did it in under five seconds, while the Kuos lagged behind.

Apparently, this has something to do with left brain and right brain. For me, I barely even notice the colors, and I just automatically start reading the word, so it's really hard for me to do it the first way. But, I guess right-brained people notice colors before they process words.

Interesting stuff.

Well, this is interesting, isn't it

2010-08-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

I've been saying for a while - since, oh, about 2003 - that no matter how much people disliked President Bush during his years in office, eventually many of his decisions would be vindicated and he would be seen as a pretty good president, in much the same way that Lincoln and Truman were highly unpopular before their images were completely rehabilitated.

Well, what do you know? In the midst of a huge brouhaha over whether or not a massive Islamic cultural center should be built only blocks away from Ground Zero, suddenly a number of Bush's harshest critics are longing for the former president's tolerance, foresight, and - bet you never thought you'd hear this - attention to America's image in the Muslim world!

Maureen Dowd: "The war against the terrorists is not a war against Islam...George W. Bush understood this...W. needs to get his bullhorn back out."
Eugene Robinson: "I, too, would love to hear from former president Bush on this issue...He was absolutely right on this point, and it would be helpful to hear his views."
Peter Beinart: "Remember when George W. Bush...used to say that the 'war on terror' was a struggle on behalf of Muslims, decent folks who wanted nothing more than to live free like you and me? ... Words I never thought I'd write: I pine for George W. Bush."

In other news, apparently the OC Fair sold 8,000 sticks of fried butter. I'm proud to have been part of that. =)

More on personality challenges

2010-08-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

I beat my brother in chess yesterday, for the first time in my life. Once, many years ago, I'd gotten him down to only his king, but even with several extra pieces I was unable to checkmate him, and I think finally I resigned. But yesterday, after a long match, and only a few turns after I thought my best option was to force a draw, I checkmated him.

I don't know if this feat will be repeated anytime soon, as my brother is definitely a superior chess player to me. One of the reasons for this, I think, is because he's much more of a big-picture thinker than I am. Thinking several turns ahead and going over various possibilities in my head is not something that comes naturally to me; I usually make a move that seems right at the time, generally heedless of the consequences that will come in a few turns.

Here's where Myers-Briggs comes into the picture. Now, of the four aspects of personality in that test, I think the S/N dichotomy gets by far the least attention. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between an introvert and an extravert, even if some introverts are deceptively loud and some extraverts deceptively quiet; ditto for thinkers and feelers and judgers and perceivers. The difference between sensors and intuitives is not as externally obvious, but I've been realizing that it's just as important and consequential.

Consider this: recently, a friend of mine decided that they wanted to do something. To protect the innocent, we'll change the story up a little bit and say that my friend, Darth Vader, wanted to build a space station called the "Death Star." (If you've never seen Return of the Jedi, perhaps you should read this in order to better understand the analogy.) My response was to say "awesome!" and to give all the advice I knew about building such space stations.

Darth Vader then went and asked another friend for their advice. And this friend pointed out that maybe it was a bad idea to build the Death Star in the first place, considering that the Rebels always seemed to be destroying it, etc, etc.

Of course, this was absolutely right, and when Darth Vader mentioned this to me, I replied, "Well, yeah, that's a really good point. I completely agree." Darth didn't explicitly say this, but I could imagine that he would have been like "Well if you don't think I should be building the Death Star, then why wouldn't you say so in the first place???"

The reason, Darth, is this: Sensors, like me, are small-picture, details-oriented people. If you tell us you want to do something and you ask us for our help, we'll get to work without ever once stepping back and asking whether or not said project is a good idea in the first place. That's a big-picture question, and our minds don't naturally work that way.

Which isn't, by any means, an excuse. The point of this, as with all personality weaknesses, is not that non-sensors need to learn to deal with this but that sensors need to learn to watch out for and compensate for this. Extraversion is not an excuse for not giving your friends their much-needed alone time; introversion is not an excuse for not looking in on your lonely friends; thinking is not an excuse for being a cold and callous jerk; feeling is not an excuse for refusing to listen to reason; judging is not an excuse for being a control freak; and perceiving is not an excuse for being LATE TO THINGS ALL THE TIME.

Ahem. Sorry. Judging is not an excuse... =P

Anyways, point is, being able to step back and look at things from the big-picture perspective is an important aspect of having good judgment, and that means that those of us who don't naturally do that need to make an extra effort to do so.

Well that's just interesting timing

2010-08-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

I generally don't listen to FM radio in the car, but I'm trying to get back in that habit. And the last two days have yielded interesting results...

Yesterday: On my way back from the OC EMS office, I stopped by Barnes and Noble and skimmed a book called The Myth of a Christian Nation or some such thing. By Gregory Boyd, in case you want to look it up. He touched on the subject of whether or not America was, is, or should be a "Christian nation" - a subject about which I have rather strong opinions which perhaps I will get into another time. Then, on the way home, I was listening to KKLA, and they were talking about the Prop 8 decision, and they were interviewing a dude who's putting on a rally in DC about "Taking America back for God." Rather oddly EXACTLY THE SAME TOPIC as the book I'd just been reading.

Today: Driving back from the DMV, listened to 107.9, and the pastor dude was talking about prayer, and about praying with intensity and fervor and persistence and all that. I get home and check my email to find a prayer request from a good friend in my inbox. As soon as I'm done reading that, I get a text message from another good friend, regarding a prayer request. WHAT THE?

Anyways, I'll be upstairs for a bit...

Prop 8 overturned

2010-08-06T23:58:00.000-07:00

First off, I'm neither particularly surprised, nor particularly upset, about Judge Vaughn Walker's decision invalidating Proposition 8. The ruling itself merely reflects the central underlying problem; if he'd ruled in favor of Prop 8, it wouldn't have changed a thing. Or, to put it another way: the issue is not whether same-sex couples can get their relationships called marriages by the state. The issue is what we, as a society, view marriage as. And that's not something that a judge can decide.

Marc Ambinder, at The Atlantic, summarized Judge Walker's findings of fact here. Now, findings of facts are the things that the judge determines to be true, based on the testimony of witnesses and evidence provided. Of the facts that Ambinder lists, most of them ("Same-sex love and intimacy are 'well-documented in human history'"; "California has no interest in reducing the number of gays and lesbians in its population") are really not too controversial. Out of thirteen facts listed, I really only have major qualms about one. This one: "Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in the characteristics relevant to form a successful marital union."

And on that one point of disagreement, I find it hard to believe that Judge Walker can say some of these things with a straight face. Consider these two quotes, which Albert Mohler reproduces here:

"The sexual orientation of an individual does not determine whether that individual can be a good parent."

"[H]aving both a male and a female parent does not increase the likelihood that a child will be well-adjusted."

Read those quotes again, and consider what they mean, and compare them against each other, and I think you'll see a microcosm of the whole issue.

Here's what I mean. The first quote is, to me, pretty straightforward, and I have no qualms with it. A straight person and a gay person are equally likely to be good parents. Sounds about right to me; the qualities involved in being a good parent (patience, willingness to discipline, love, etc.) seem to be things completely unrelated to one's sexual orientation. So far, so good.

But is the second quote saying exactly the same thing? Absolutely not. It's saying that a parental unit composed of two people of the same sex is functionally equivalent to a parental unit composed of two people of the opposite sex.

And that to me - no matter what the witnesses at the trial might have said - is just contrary to common sense. Think about it. Although there are exceptions, once you know someone pretty well, you can generally guess whether or not they've had siblings, and what sex those siblings are. Girls who have brothers just interact with guys differently than girls who don't have brothers. Likewise for guys who have sisters and guys who don't. Having a sibling of a particular sex totally influences you.

And if that's the case, how much more having a parent! As a guy, there are things about being a guy that I learned from my dad. Because he's a guy. There are things I learned about interacting with girls that I learned from my mom. Because she's a woman. Like it or not, the human race is divided in two very large groups, the members of which have some very salient differences, and it's important to learn how to navigate these differences.

Which isn't to say that there aren't heroic single parents out there, who really do a fantastic job of raising their kids. There really are, and those are some of the people I look up to most. And - though I don't know this personally - I'm sure there are a bunch of gay couples out there who do a fantastic job of raising their kids.

But how blindly ideological do you have to be to say that there is absolutely no advantage in having a mom and a dad?

And here's where this serves as an analogue for the whole issue of gay marriage.

You can say - and I would agree - that, all other things being equal, a straight person and a gay person would make equally good parents. But that's an entirely different thing from saying that two people of the same sex make an equally good parental unit as two people of opposite sexes.

In the same way, you can say - and I would agree - that straight people and gay people deserve equal protection under the law. Someone's sexual orientation should not be, in any way, a basis for discrimination against them. But that's an entirely different thing from saying that two men in a committed, loving relationship is the same as two women in a committed, loving relationship is the same as a man and a woman in a committed, loving relationship.

It has nothing to do with the individuals involved and everything to do with the "combined product" so to speak.

This is how introverts think

2010-08-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

Here is an awesome article that was forwarded to me by a loyal reader of this blog, who happens to be, last I checked, 100% extraverted on the Myers-Briggs personality test. It's an article about being an introvert in an extraverted world - in this case, the typical evangelical church. Reading over this, I was struck by two things: one, that I can totally identify with many of the things the author talks about; two, that for people who are not as introverted some of these behaviors and feelings may seem completely bizarre. And so, introverts and extraverts alike, I recommend you read this.

(Yes, I know that Prop 8 got overturned today. I have a few thoughts about that, as well, but I'd like to read the whole opinion before I sound off about it.)

Let me just list a few of the things that really stuck out to me:

"Much of our common church life is geared toward extroverts. We're encouraged to talk openly about everything God might be doing in our lives, pray out loud for long periods of time, shout out answers to questions asked from the pulpit, get involved in many different activities, "reach out," mix 'n' mingle, and enjoy goofy games with the singles group. In many ways, the church is an extroverts' world." So true!
"[L]ately I've been starting a new practice: getting up early enough to spend half an hour in the Bible and prayer myself before I go to church. What's the point of pre-church church, you may ask? The point is getting my focus. I can find crowds so disorienting that I'm totally unable to enter into worship or focus on God once I'm in them." I should discipline myself to do this more. I have the same problem, and whenever I do the "pre-church" thing it definitely helps.
"I have a good friend at church who is thoroughly extroverted. She excels at making conversation. She's great at thinking on her feet and spotting new people. I, on the other hand, am far better at contributing to a conversation once it's already rolling. Many times, purely by accident, we've ended up being a great team. She starts the talking and puts the new person at ease; I take it from there." Never thought about this consciously, but this definitely does make things easier.
"The secret, I have found, is giving myself breathing space. Linger at the tea table for a few extra minutes. Go to the bathroom more than you need to. Sit on your bed with the door shut for five minutes in the middle of the party. Pray. Blank out if you need to." Yup, totally do all of those. (Note: I just hung out with a couple of introverts, and they agreed that they also do these things.)
"Filling a role, with a specific purpose and visibility, made it far easier for me to interact with people. I am fine when I know what the point is — what I have a job to do and can interact while I'm doing it. I thrive on what I see as meaningful work — far more than I thrive on goofy games or purely social get-togethers. Visibility meant that more people approached me, allowing me to minister to them in ways that probably wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed in the chairs." This is huge for me in terms of conversations. I have trouble starting conversations with people - unless I have an "excuse" to. When I worked at the Angels Team Store as a cashier, I loved talking to the customers - but if I'd been sitting next to them at the game, I would have had no idea how to even begin.

Read the whole thing.

I'm back

2010-08-01T06:36:00.001-07:00

And I've been back for a while.

I figured that my first blog post back after such a lengthy hiatus basically had to be earth-shatteringly amazing; having neither the time nor the inspiration to write such a post, I refrained from writing anything. (I actually figured out something cool on Friday night, that I will share at some point! But not yet.)

A couple things, though, that I wanted to mention, so here I will ease my way back in with a couple announcements.

My sister is selling a bed. $150. Full-size. Pillow-top. (I don't know what that means. Apparently it doesn't just mean that there are pillows on top.) If you need a bed, let me know.
My friend is looking for housing in Berkeley. Female, grad student, fun and interesting. If you know of a housing opportunity for such a person, let me know.
Very, very important article. Drowning doesn't look like drowning. Read it.
Not that I'm, you know, preparing a Sunday teaching at 6:44 AM on a Sunday morning, but dude, I never realized how cool Luke is. Both the person and the gospel.
Keep praying for Jesse in Japan and Katie in Thailand!

Romans 9, 10, 11

2010-06-15T16:47:00.000-07:00

Haven't had much time to blog lately, and likely won't have much time to blog in the next week and a half before I leave for Taiwan, but I wanted to take a quick break and write a short (are you all happy?) blog post about three chapters in Romans, the doctrine of election, and God's grace. (Yeah, I'm going to try to keep it short. Promise!)

These three chapters came to my attention again a couple weeks ago, during worship team small group, when Jesse cited Paul's words in 11:33-36 in discussing how our doxology necessarily follows from our theology. A couple weeks later, after high school Bible study, we were discussing the idea of election, and we talked a bit about Romans 9. On Sunday, at dinner, these three chapters came up again; and yesterday, finally, at Jesse's recommendation, I listened to an awesome message on the subject of theology and doxology. (You can listen to it too, here!)

So many good things that were discussed over the past few weeks, but let me just focus on the doctrine of election. Those of you who took AP Euro may know this better as "predestination" - the idea that, contrary to what many today would say, it is not we that choose to be saved but rather God who first chooses us. Yes, at one point, I made a conscious decision to become a Christian, but long before that, God chose to show me grace and save me by regenerating my heart so that I would accept Him. Romans 9 is maybe the clearest, though by far not the only, Biblical support for this doctrine.

But it's still a difficult one to accept, right? We, 21st century Americans who so value choice, like to deal with the stark reality that some will be saved and some won't by saying that, well, it's okay, because it's really entirely your decision. Saying that, well, ultimately it's actually God's choice - wait, is that even fair?

Paul dealt with this objection, in Romans 9, by pointing out that, given our nature as created beings of an infinite Creator, we are similar to a clay pot made by a potter - basically, He can do whatever He wants with us. That's His right as our Creator.

Something else occurred to me today that helped me put the idea of election into a more proper perspective. Step back for a second and think of what salvation involved. It involved God the son, Jesus, coming down and incarnating Himself and dying on the cross. It was the single most costly sacrifice ever. It wasn't just a matter of picking out names from a list and saying that they were going to be saved.

Given that - doesn't it make a little bit more sense that it would be up to Him whom to graciously give that gift to?

Derek Fisher and me

2010-06-09T23:25:00.000-07:00

Last night was only the latest in a series of recurring scenes from my life: sitting around in someone's living room, surrounded by Lakers fans, watching whatever non-LA team I'm rooting for this week go down to defeat at the talented hands of Derek Fisher.

Moments like that, I never know what to feel. I rarely twitter these days, but at the end of April, after Fisher did his thing yet again, I felt sufficiently moved to write the following: "Watching derek fisher hit clutch 3's is like...watching a WWII movie with a heroic and noble soldier who is unfortunately on the german side." Another apt comparison could be the 2008 election, when Joe Biden, whom I have an extremely high regard for, was picked to be Obama's running mate. I could have almost rooted for Obama just to get Biden into office. Almost. And after seeing Fisher last night, tearing up after helping his team to another victory, I feel like I could almost root for the Lakers again, just for his sake. Almost.

What happened to me? I wasn't always this way; there was a time, long ago, when I counted myself a Lakers fan. I'm a proud southern Californian, and I'm beginning to get quite fond of hanging out in L.A., and I will bleed Dodger blue for the rest of my life. But this time of year, when all those Laker flags are affixed to the windows of SUVs, I get into my rebellious mode, and I become a fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Utah Jazz, or the Phoenix Suns, depending on where we're at in the playoffs.

How did I get here?

---

Derek Fisher was drafted by the Lakers before the 1996-1997 season, which, coincidentally, was the year I began watching basketball. I had two teams that I rooted for above all others; the San Antonio Spurs, led by David "the Admiral" Robinson; and the Los Angeles Lakers, led by the talented guard duo of Nick Van Exel and Eddie Jones. Shaq had come to the Lakers that year, too, but he missed about thirty games with an injury and was replaced by Elden Campbell, who, unknown to many, was the top scoring Laker during the 1990s. The Lakers had just acquired a youngster by the name of Kobe Bryant from the Charlotte Hornets, and ten year-old me managed to acquire basketball cards for both Fisher and Bryant - the future of the Lakers! Whatever the future would hold, though, it seemed like at present we could never get past the Utah Jazz, with their deadly pick-and-roll combination of John Stockton and Karl Malone, backed up by the absurdly good freethrow shooter Jeff Hornacek.

The Spurs, for their part, had some talented players, but 1996-1997 was a horrific year for them. They missed the playoffs by a mile, finishing with the third-worst record in the league. But in a marvelous stroke of fate, they won the draft lottery and chose a power forward by the name of Tim Duncan.

---

My loyalty to the Lakers and the Spurs didn't come into conflict until two years later, during the strike-shortened season of 1998-1999. Van Exel was gone, and Jones and Campbell were sent off to Charlotte in a mid-season trade, and honestly Dennis Rodman and Glen Rice just didn't do it for me. So when the Lakers and the Spurs met in the second round of the Western Conference playoffs, it was the Spurs that I rooted for. My three closest friends in my 7th grade homeroom class were all huge Lakers fans, and so when my Spurs ended up with a 4-0 sweep, it made it all the sweeter.

So next year, 8th grade, I got really bold, and decided to put my money where my mouth was. I bet those three that the Lakers would not win the championship. $15 with Chris, $10 with Tung, $2.50 with Thomas. Two hours of work would cover that for me now, but back then it was a fortune. And when the Sacramento Kings took the Lakers to a fifth game in the opening round (it was only out of five back then) I was oh so tantalizingly close to winning! But the Kings fell short. The Phoenix Suns didn't put up much of a fight in the second round, and the conference finals looked to be another blowout, with the Lakers up 3-1 against the Portland Trail Blazers. But the Blazers won two in a row and forced a seventh game. Going into the fourth quarter of that game, they had a fifteen point lead, and I was all set to call Tung to start gloating.

But then, the Lakers didn't give up. And twelve gut-wrenching minutes later, the Blazers were on their way home and the Lakers were on their way to the NBA finals, which they would win easily over Indiana.

---

Now you might say I was just bitter for losing my bet, and you might be partially right. But I also knew that something had changed about the Lakers. They were no longer the lovable, scrappy, not-quite-good-enough to beat the Jazz team I had rooted for years before. They were now the Yankees of the National Basketball Association.

And plus, their fans had a tendency to destroy things and light cars on fire when they won, which I found a bit off-putting.

Anyways, for three straight years I watched the Lakers plow through my Spurs and through the rest of the NBA on their way to title after title. Finally, in '03, the Spurs came through and won another championship. But then came 2004. '04. 0.4.

---

I'd always liked Derek Fisher, even at the depths of my resentment toward the Lakers. He had none of Shaq's arrogance and none of Kobe's propensity toward scandal and none of Phil Jackson's elitism. His work ethic and the way he played the game, tough but clean, were the very same things that I liked best about the Spurs, and about my favorite player, Tim Duncan.

I don't think I can properly describe 0.4. You just have to watch it. Try to understand what this would feel like if you were a Spurs fan. A miraculous comeback by the Spurs, capped by an improbable shot by Duncan. You're elated like no other - and then all that is suddenly, completely crushed. By the one Laker you actually like.

They say that when General Lee led the Confederate Army into Maryland during the Antietam campaign, Yankee ladies would watch him ride by and say "Oh, I wish he was ours!"

Yeah. Kinda like that. He's on the wrong side, but dang. What a guy.

---

I left for Norcal in 2004, and Derek Fisher did too, signing with the Golden State Warriors. Now, the Warriors are kind of like the Norcal version of the Clippers, so it's hard not to like them. Especially when your roommate is a Golden State Warriors fan. (I swear, that year, we only watched two things on our TV - Warriors games and Friends episodes.)

It was a nice couple of years, basketball-wise. The Spurs won a couple more championships, the Lakers sunk back into mediocrity, and Derek Fisher was on a team of lovable losers who I was happy to root for. Had he joined the Spurs, my joy would be complete, but it was not to be.

---

And now, look what's happened. The Lakers are back on top of the basketball world, and Derek Fisher continues - in his quiet, unassuming, unselfish way - to be a central figure in the whole thing.

I think Boston's still got some fight left in them, and I said before the series that it'd either be Lakers in five or Celtics in seven. Game 4 should make it a lot clearer which way it's going to go.

If the Lakers win tomorrow, and then reel off another victory to clinch the series, I guess I just have one request to the networks. Please, please, please, when you do the post-game interviews, interview Fisher. Zoom in on him when the trophy gets passed to him. If you can get him named Finals MVP, all the better. Avoiding covering all the rioting that will surely be happening in LA.

I may never again be a Lakers fan, but if an LA win means another title for Fisher, well, I think I can live with that. He's earned it.

World Cup!

2010-06-09T09:29:00.001-07:00

Even if you're not a huge soccer fan, the World Cup is just plain awesome. And it begins in just a few days. Will England finally break the drought and win its first World Cup since 1966? Will South Korea have another fairytale run to the late stages? Can little Honduras pull something off? Will North Korea even score a goal in its three games in the "Group of Death?" (Yes, yes, yes, and no, in my dream world.)

Anyways, here are my predictions for the group stages. Top two teams from each group advance to the knockout round.

Group A
1. Mexico
2. Uruguay
3. France
4. South Africa

Group B
1. Argentina
2. South Korea
3. Greece
4. Nigeria

Group C
1. England
2. Slovenia
3. USA
4. Algeria

Group D
1. Serbia
2. Germany
3. Australia
4. Ghana

Group E
1. Netherlands
2. Cameroon
3. Japan
4. Denmark

Group F
1. Paraguay
2. Italy
3. Slovakia
4. New Zealand

Group G
1. Brazil
2. Portugal
3. Ivory Coast
4. North Korea

Group H
1. Honduras
2. Spain
3. Switzerland
4. Chile

I'm going out on a limb with my predictions regarding South Korea, the US, Denmark, and Honduras, so we'll see how that turns out. I tried to do a bracket but I may have done it wrong; anyways, my prediction for the final is England over Argentina, 3-2.

England versus the USA this Saturday at 10:30 AM!

I feel like playing soccer.

I should start a series on this, or something

2010-06-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

Politics is really a lot simpler and less extreme than it's often made out to be. In my previous post, I talked about illegal immigration, and how it's sometimes cast as an issue of lawless destroyers of American culture versus white-supremacist Mexican-hating vigilantes.

In reality, of course, it really comes down to two questions: Should we enforce current immigration law? Should we change current immigration law? Sure, people may bring different motives to the debate, but really those are the only two questions at issue. If we focused on those, rather than on impugning each others' motives, etc, then we'd be far better off. We'd probably have solved the problem by now.

Reason I bring this up is because I just read an article in the Washington Post endorsing gay marriage. Hot topic, that one. Another emotionally charged issue, which is often caricatured as a battle between those who want to destroy the traditional family, and those who just hate gay people. Again, I can't speak for the other side, and I can't speak for everyone on my side, but I for one got really tired, a really long time ago, of being called anti-gay because I'm against gay marriage.

Reading this article helped me to distill this complicated issue into, I think, its central question. A pair of choice quotes from the article:

The Perry case -- scheduled for closing arguments next Wednesday -- was brought by two couples whose relationships are marked by the sort of love, commitment and respect that leads naturally to marriage.

[...]

They seem prepared to reject laws that serve no purpose other than to deny two committed and loving individuals the right to join in a mutually reinforcing marital relationship.

See what their point is? Marriage is about love, commitment, and respect in a mutually reinforcing relationship between two people. And because that's the case, why would you disqualify people who meet those criteria?

They're right - if their definition of marriage is right. If marriage is about love, commitment, and mutually reinforcing respect alone, then there is no reason to restrict it to heterosexual couples. If marriage is about something else, something more, something that by definition involves one man and one woman, then there's every reason in the world to restrict it to heterosexual couples.

I've written about this at length before. Not going to revisit it again, because honestly there are many issues I care about far more than this. My point is simply that the whole gay marriage debate comes down to a simple, rational question about how you define marriage.

How about abortion? Is a fetus a living human being or isn't it? That's really the definitive question. Nothing else matters if you figure that out.

The war in Iraq? (1) Did Saddam have WMDs? (2) Does a country have a right to start a preemptive war? Answer those two questions, and you'll come to a much better and less divisive policy decision than if you should "no blood for oil!" on a street corner.

Okay, the rhetoric needs to seriously cool down

2010-06-05T19:16:00.000-07:00

I've stated my own views on illegal immigration once or twice on this blog before, but for those of you who are coming late to the party, let me reiterate:

The way I see it, if someone is willing to risk their life crossing a desert to work 18 hours a day to send money back to their family, that's the type of person we need more of in America. A lot of my fellow political conservatives are particularly worried about the effect of mass illegal immigration on a cohesive American culture. But if you ask me, the vast majority of those illegal immigrants are people who hold exactly those good, traditional values we hold dear - even if they don't speak English. If we're going to start talking about mass deportation, there's plenty of other people who should go first. Most of them college students. (And no, I'm not advocating deporting anyone. Joke.)

That being said, even if I am correct in saying the vast majority of illegal immigrants are productive members of our communities, obviously there are still problems with letting people come into our country illegally. Terrorists. Gangs. Drug traffickers, particularly, in Arizona. So let me sum up the totality of my policy on this issue as this: Build a fence, put in some gates, and if they're not terrorists or gang members or drug traffickers let 'em in.

Barring that, it's understandable that Arizona would pass a law like they did. If you have hundreds of people being killed or kidnapped every year, and the signs point to illegal immigrants as the culprits, then why on earth wouldn't you try to solve the problem by simply enforcing federal law? I mean, if illegal immigration is *illegal* then it means that you don't have permission to be in this country. In other words, you're trespassing. And if you're trespassing, it kind of makes sense that you have to leave the area you are illegally in.

If I sneak into a park at night and I get caught by a park ranger, I mean, yeah, it would be nice for him to let me stay - but I'm not going to be surprised if he makes me leave. That's just common sense.

But people don't see it that way, not when it comes to illegal immigration. Phil Jackson had the audacity to try to stay relatively neutral and say "It seems like Arizona is just enforcing federal law" and all of a sudden people are jumping all over him. The OC Weekly has an article entitled "City of Orange to Spin Wheel of Hate" in which a snarky author claims that "rule of law city" (which Orange is going to declare itself; i.e., a city that supports enforcing immigration law) is a "buzzword" for "Mexicans get out."

Um, no, no it isn't. If there's one thing that would push me to the right on this issue, it's when people make such baseless, vile, smearing claims against other people who simply believe that it's important to enforce the law. Or that we don't have the money to provide public services if people keep entering the country illegally.

Sure, there may be racists on the one side of the issue, just as there may be reconquistadores on the other side. But to claim that all opposition to illegal immigration stems from some type of anti-Mexican racism is intellectually lazy, politically and rhetorically counterproductive, and quite frankly an uncalled for character attack on a lot of good people.

Can we all just kind of chill a little bit on this issue?

Outrage

2010-06-02T21:09:00.000-07:00

I've had major writer's block recently, which is why I haven't posted anything for a while. Not quite all the way out of it, yet, but a very grave injustice occurred today that demands comment. Since I'm not in the writing mood, I'll keep this short (thus also satisfying everyone's constant demands for shorter posts).

I had heard rumors, today, that a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers was one out away from throwing a perfect game, but had his bid ended by a controversial call. For those of you who don't know, a perfect game is where a pitcher does not allow any hitters from the opposing team to reach base. Perfect games are exceedingly rare - there have only been twenty in the whole history of baseball. We almost had number twenty-one today, but with two outs in the ninth, a Cleveland batter made it to first base on an infield hit.

But here's the thing: it was an awful call. The runner was out. It wasn't even close. Read about it here and click through on the link there to watch the play. Even in normal speed, the runner is clearly out. But the ump got it wrong. And thus Armando Galarraga will be denied his rightful place in the record books. (Kudos to Galarraga for staying classy about it, though - he apparently said something along the lines of "No one's perfect.")

Watching that replay makes me upset, and not just in an intellectual way. I'm not a particularly emotional person, but blown calls like this really get to me. Any Angels fans out there remember the 2005 ALCS against the White Sox? Game 2? Bad call cost the Angels the game, and I was furious. Viscerally, throwing pillows furious.

And even when blown calls aren't involved, I can list off a long series of sports moments that have put me into temporary depressions. The 2005 UCLA-Cal game. The 2004 USC-Cal game. The 2007 Oregon State-Cal game. Big Shot Bob's knife in the heart of the Kings in 2002. And, of course, 0.4.

Reason I bring this up, though, is because I realized something...

So right now, I'm sitting at my desk, in my room. On my right are a couple of paintings I bought for a couple bucks in Cambodia. On my desk itself is a letter from my Compassion child in India. And on my left, taped to my dresser, is an assignment from my Korean 10 class, where we had to write about why we were studying Korean. And I talked about North Korea, and the refugees, and the human rights crisis.

And in another tab in my browser, I've got a couple Bible studies and a worship set that I'm working on.

All around me, I'm surrounded by visible reminders that not all is as it should be - poverty in Cambodia and India, human rights abuses in North Korea, and a neighborhood all around me of people who don't know Jesus - and yet I muster more visceral outrage at a missed call in a baseball game. I am more viscerally heartbroken by Cal's missed opportunity at being #1 in the nation.

Maybe it's just a defense mechanism - my subconscious keeping me from becoming emotional over things that would just be too overwhelming. I don't know. But it is odd...

Prop 13 and poverty

2010-05-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

Among political issues that are specific to my home state of California, quite possibly none are as divisive as Proposition 13. Passed in 1979, at the high-water mark of California's "tax revolt," it limited the ability of the government to raise property taxes. And depending on who you talk to, this is either a great law that has kept many homeowners, especially the elderly, from being taxed out of their homes - or it's a horrible law, one that has deprived our cash-starved state of necessary funding.

Count me in with the first group. Yes, I know that we're running a budget deficit somewhere along the lines of $26 billion. But I also know that spending in the state of California has increased by 40% over the past decade. (To be fair, I have heard that statistic disputed, but it seems to be fairly ubiquitous, so until I hear otherwise for sure I will stick with it.) Our spending has been increasing, and our taxes are already very high relative to the rest of the nation. So you could try to raise taxes on the rich and the businesses - but good luck keeping them here, if you do that. Or, you could repeal Prop 13, and raise money largely off of people who can't afford it - but don't have the power to move, either.

No, the only solution is to cut spending, or else face a fiscal crisis. But there's the rub. Cutting spending is not an easy thing to do, even if it's spending that wasn't around ten years ago. If you want to try your hand at closing the deficit, you can use this handy little tool at the LA Times website. Almost every single one of the programs they offer as options to cut seems important. Almost every single one is deeply, deeply important to some people out there.

And you have to cut almost all of them to even get close to cutting the deficit.

---

Going to school at Berkeley did very little to raise my "social consciousness." Sure, people would form picket lines to protest on behalf of the university workers, but that told me a lot more about the students (especially when they yelled and cursed at you for just trying to go to class) than it did about the actual plight of those they claimed to represent. Likewise for the "naked protests." Yes, those are exactly what they sound like. It had something to do with sweatshop labor, I think, but again, they did a rather poor job of drawing attention to the problem and a rather good job of drawing attention to themselves.

What has made me more conscious of the many different kinds of people around me has been being part of the workforce. (Going on missions to Taiwan and Cambodia helped, too.) I've worked, I guess, six different full or part-time jobs since I started working in high school, and if you ask me there's no better way of learning about people. I've worked together with illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, single moms, very openly gay men, parents who lost children, construction workers who could have been philosophers, and the sister of a professional baseball player. I'm very thankful for all their acquaintances, and I learned a lot about life from these people and their vastly different experiences.

In the past two years since graduation, while working at my current job, I feel like I've come to appreciate domestic poverty a lot more than I ever did before. I get paid pretty well, and I'm living rent free, and yet I definitely still have to be careful with my money. I can't get Jamba Juice for breakfast every morning, like I'd like to. I haven't fully paid off my credit card in over a year. And there's some maintenance that my car could definitely use, but that I just can't afford right now.

But again, like I said, I'm making far above minimum wage and I have nothing to complain about. So sometimes, when I print paychecks for one of our clients, and I realize just how little "minimum wage" actually comes out to, on a bi-weekly basis, I wonder at how some people survive. If I don't have rent to pay, or a wife and kids to feed, or any major health problems, and yet I'm still tight on money - how do people with all those things make it on such little income?

Plus, I listen to the soundtrack from Les Miserables in my car fairly often. That takes "Wow, there's a lot of income inequality..." and changes it to "We must do something about it! Start a revolution!"

Now, as much as I've always been intrigued by revolutionaries (I especially love their songs!) the details of what a revolution entails and what its goals are always turn me off. I don't think I need to explain to those of you who read this blog what usually happens during revolutions. Plus, it's not the days of Robin Hood any more. It's not like the rich got rich by stealing from the poor, so it'd hardly be fair to steal back from the rich what was already rightfully theirs.

But even if the current situation is fair, there's still a problem. Even if government-provided health care is not a right (or even a good idea), there's still a problem when millions of people can't get health care and others can. Even if some people's work cannot justify earning more than minimum wage, there's still a problem when they can't properly feed their kids.

And even if our state simply cannot afford to help out the needy anymore - there's still needy people.

That's a problem. And problems demand solutions.

---

For a long time, our solution has been to let the government take care of it. Poverty and hunger exist in this nation? Start a "war on poverty," and finance it with tax money and - increasingly - deficit spending - and when it doesn't work, ratchet everything up, higher. The government spends more, and it borrows more, and the problem doesn't get any better. So we spend and borrow more. And then we get to where we're at right now.

Cut spending, and you put hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in jeopardy. Continue the way we're going, and you put the whole state in jeopardy.

What do we do?

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I'll finish this later. My ride's almost here.

By request, a North Korea update

2010-05-25T17:19:00.000-07:00

If you've been following the news, you know that tension has been simmering between North and South Korea over the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean naval vessel. On the night of March 26, the Cheonan sank about ten miles off the coast of North Korea (it was still in South Korean waters at the time, however). 58 sailors were rescued and 46 were missing. As of now, 40 bodies have been recovered and the remaining 6 are also presumed dead.

Suspicion immediately fell upon North Korea; immediately after the sinking, another South Korean ship spotted and fired upon what appeared to be a boat of some kind fleeing to the north, though it was later claimed that the "boat" may actually have been a flock of birds. (I guess it was dark? Really dark?) But all random flocks of birds aside, North Korea has a history of, er, creatively interpreting naval boundaries (see the USS Pueblo incident), they (the Norks) were recently embarrassed by the South Korean navy in those very same waters, and oh, yeah, the damage pattern on the ship suggested that it had been hit by a torpedo. And then - guess what? - they recovered fragments of a torpedo! And then - bet you didn't see this coming - it was basically identical to other North Korean torpedoes that have been recovered in the past.

If you want more details, check out this blog's section on the incident. It's awesomely informative.

So, what happens from here? President Lee of South Korea yesterday announced a near shutdown of trade with the North, along with some joint military drills with the U.S. and plans to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council. It's a start, but hardly more than a slap on the wrist. (Especially the U.N. Security Council part.) Of course, North Korea is behaving like a petulant child, claiming that if they're punished for this then they will start a war. A petulant child with nukes, and with approximately 30,000 artillery pieces within striking range of a city of 10 million.

My coworkers think a war is quite possible (Mrs. Kim also thinks that a new Korean war would signal that the Second Coming is near) but I personally doubt it. A U.N. resolution, watered down by the Chinese, will probably express some mild form of disapproval, and then things will continue as before.

With the hopeful exception of South Korean public opinion. The two previous presidents, Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Dae Jung, carried out something called the "Sunshine Policy," which rested on the mistaken belief that North Korea just needed to be loved more. This did nothing but pad the pockets of the regime and increase the rations of the North Korean military. (You should hear Mrs. Kim talk about this...) Lee has always been much more of a realist about this, and there are signs that South Korean public opinion is heading that way too, as a result of the sinking of the Cheonan. Our own President Obama has had, I think, a fairly good North Korea policy, and so it may well be that this will be the moment when the world (minus, of course, China) comes together and stops propping up the regime of Kim Jong-Il.

And the sooner Kim falls, the better for the North Korean people.