THE BATTLE CONTINUES

My mother, Marilyn Mazziotti Moran, lived, ate, and breathed politics. Not politics for the sport of the game, but politics focused on repairing the worm damage to the foundations of America. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 offered her the hope that not only could the assault on Constitutional principles be stopped, but that President Reagan could reverse the trend toward the complete subversion of our founding principles. It was a brief moment in time and in December 1988, just after the election of George H.W. Bush, my mother passed away. At least in the years before she died, she was blessed by the knowledge that the man she had touted for decades as a great American patriot, was her President and champion for American democracy against the Soviet Union.

When she died she left behind a file cabinet full of political material that she referred to constantly whether she was writing letters, campaign material, or preparing for a debate. I inherited those papers, but after several years I determined that the information had lost its significance. In stages I disposed of all books, papers, and pamphlets except for two small booklets which have sat on my shelves for about 18 years. Week after week (or less), I have dusted around these booklets as they lay apart from the books to keep from getting lost. The first is the Encyclical Letter of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae or Of Human Life. Humanae Vitae is famous for its reinforcement of the Catholic Church’s teaching, on the regulation of birth. It sounds archaic to the modern ear, but there is a feast of food for thought in its 23 pages. The second booklet is The Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptorus (Divine Redeemer) on Atheistic Communism. It is only recently that I decided it was time I actually read the two Encyclicals since my mother, a non-practicing Catholic, thought they were worth keeping amongst her papers. I am sorry I waited till now to become acquainted with what is the wisdom of those elders who sit at the gates of the city.

I found the well thought out and comprehensive writing of Pope Pius XI to be most interesting. A Wikipedia biography of the Pontiff who led the Catholic Church from 1922 to 1939, gave me most of what I needed to know about the author of a treatise on Communism during the very era of its march toward dominion in Europe and Asia. What my mother and Pius XI knew was that there can be no peaceful co-existence between Communism and Christianity. The former cannot bear to share the stage with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Like Herod’s insecurity over the existence of another King of the Jews, the State is the only god and there will be no other gods before it. It will not tolerate Christianity and the freedom of spirit, mind, and body that flows from a personal relationship with the Creator through His Son who emptied Himself for us. So, while Christianity cannot have full expression under Communism, it is ironic that communism can be practiced within Christianity precisely because the conviction of Christ should and does inspire Christians to practice community according the principles of the Gospel. Community is therefore a legitimate outgrowth of Gospel living and is a natural expression within Christianity. However, Communism must always be imposed from the top down because it is an artificial faith in an artificial god. It is the religion of the control freak. Christianity blooms from the individual under the inspiration of the Spirit.

I propose to post several paragraphs at a time of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical for digestion, bite by bite. The first thought I had when reading it was, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Yet, I remember an issue of Moody Monthly Magazine from 20 some years ago titled, “New Age, Old Lie” and that is precisely what the world faces today – a new age founded on an old lie. Therefore, the lessons and warnings of Atheistic Communism are as pertinent today as they were on March 19th, 1937 when this encyclical was published. It may be unpopular to call today’s political spirit Atheistic Communism, but it truly is the old lie in the new age. See if you don’t agree after reading this 73 yr. old document.



The first chapter of Atheistic Communism is introductory in nature so I will begin with -

Chapter II: COMMUNISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE – Doctrine.

False Ideal

8. The Communism of today, more emphatically than similar movements in the past, conceals in itself a false messianic idea. A pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor impregnates all its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism, which communicates a zealous and contagious enthusiasm to the multitudes entrapped by delusive promises. This is especially true in an age like ours, when unusual misery has resulted from the unequal distribution of the goods of this world. This pseudo-ideal is even boastfully advanced as if it were responsible for a certain economic progress. As a matter of fact, when such progress is at all real, its true causes are quite different, as for instance the intensification of industrialism in countries which were formerly almost without it, the exploitation of immense natural resources, and the use of the most brutal methods to insure the achievement of gigantic projects with a minimum of expense.



Marxist Evolutionary Materialism

9. The doctrine of modern Communism, which is often concealed under the most seductive trappings, is in substance based on the principles of dialectical and historical materialism previously advocated by Marx, of which the theoricians of bolshevism claim to possess the only genuine interpretation. According to this doctrine there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal and man. Even human society is nothing but a phenomenon and form of matter, evolving in the same way. By a law of inexorable necessity and through a perpetual conflict of forces, matter moves towards the final synthesis of a classless society. In such a doctrine, as is evident, there is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life. Insisting on the dialectical aspect of their materialism, the Communists claim that the conflict which carries the world towards its final synthesis can be accelerated by man. Hence they endeavor to sharpen the antagonisms which arise between the various classes of society. Thus the class struggle with its consequent violent hate and destruction takes on the aspects of a crusade for the progress of humanity. On the other hand, all other forces whatever, as long as they resist such systematic violence, must be annihilated as hostile to the human race.

A GREAT NEIGHBORHOOD

When my daughter Rachel married her husband Joel, he already owned a condominium on the north side of Chicago. They spent the first year of their marriage living there, but soon began looking for a house. They were limited by the fact that as a Chicago police officer, Joel is required to reside within the city limits. Now, I was born and bred on the Southside (notice that Southside is one word and is a proper noun) of Chicago as were my parents and grandparents. Though I became familiar with the downtown area of Chicago, known as the Loop, I never ventured north of that center of the city until I was an adult. Even then the occurrences were few and far between. Chicago’s north side was a foreign country to me and I had no inclination to visit. I never laid eyes on Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, until I was 52 yrs. old. I kid you not.

My son-in-law is a north suburban native so his desire was to remain in Cub’s territory. He made an honest attempt to consider houses on the Southside of the city, but was not content with what was available for the price. I said nothing since it was none of my business, but I have an old-fashioned belief that family members should never be more than a few blocks from one another or at most a few miles. My mother grew up at 67th and Hermitage within a few blocks of her grandparents and all of her cousins. At various times during her childhood my grandmother and her sisters had to supplement their family incomes with part-time jobs. Childcare was never an issue as long as one of the aunts was available to babysit which wasn’t really like babysitting since the cousins were always playing together anyway. My plans for being an active grandmother, always available to help my daughters, were made more difficult by the separation of a 50 minute drive

Once Joel and Rachel moved into their quaint Georgian on the northwest side of Chicago, I had to admit they made a good choice of home and neighborhood. I have been a frequent visitor of course, but this last week I camped out in their basement to help Rachel take care of newborn son Sean and 21 month old Ryan. Each day has been spent outdoors enjoying the sunshine and taking long walks with my grandson in this old but well kept neighborhood just east of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I must admit I am a little jealous of my daughter. Her neighborhood is a neighborhood in the best and most traditional sense of the word. As I strolled up and down each block, I was impressed by the well maintained homes and nicely landscaped yards. These are all small Georgians and yet it seems that each homeowner makes the most of this limited space in the most thoughtful and creative way. The warmer weather afforded many of the neighbors an opportunity to tend to their gardens and this gave me the opportunity to meet the neighbors. I watched as other moms and grandmas walked by with toddlers in strollers, stopping to talk to someone over a fence along the way. I had micro seconds of déjà vu knowing that my mind was recalling those same moments when I was a child in the Italian neighborhood on 69th street. Simple middle class folks, content with middle class homes, taking pride in maintaining their property and caring enough about their community to look after their neighbors who might be in need. Rachel has no shortage of willing neighbors always offering to help her with the kids.

After John and I had lived for 4 ½ years in Houston, we were offered a transfer back to Chicago. Apparently no one else in his company wanted to move to the frozen northland. I loved Texas and the people there, but I do not tolerate hot weather very well. Rebekah and Rachel were 2 yrs. old and could no longer fly for free which was going to limit their exposure to Grandma, Grandpa, and the extended family. This was an answer to fervent prayer on my part and within 3 months of the offer, our house was sold and we had moved in with my parents. While saving the 20% needed for a down payment, we visited suburban neighborhoods looking for our dream home. Of course my dream home was the house in which I had been raised in the city. It was a three bedroom raised ranch with a full basement and that was good enough for me. John on the other hand was more practical and worried that the Chicago neighborhood would not hold its value in the face of a changing racial makeup.

We continued driving through different suburbs, the most popular of which was Naperville. It was the up and coming town for people moving west of Chicago. I sat in the back of the realtor’s car as John fantasized about owning a bigger house in a suburb seemingly insulated from the problems of the big city. While he oohed and aahhed, I began crying. I hated the atmosphere of the suburbs. I told him I’d rather live in a Mexican neighborhood where people actually sat on their porches at night and talked to each other. His hopes were dashed and we compromised by investigating the suburbs closer to the Southside of Chicago. We discovered the best kept secret in real estate when we happened to drive through Palos Heights, only 20 minutes from my parents. We chose a simple 3 bedroom ranch in a wooded area with large oak trees everywhere.

We have been residing in Palos Heights for 26 yrs. It has been a great place to raise kids and was indeed a little more insulated from the problems facing not only inner city gangs, but all those upper income kids in Naperville with maybe a little too much money at their disposal. Our neighbors have been very good to us and we have developed good friendships. Still, it never took the place of the city in the sense that I missed sitting on my porch during the summer with all of the neighbors, listening to the Chicago White Sox and maybe being allowed to take a “midnight swim” in our above ground pool. I suspect the television has more to do with the lack of neighborly interaction than suburban living, but I do see a little more of that interaction in Rachel’s neighborhood than any other I have visited. I hope it stays that way for her family’s sake.

History and Lousy Weather

I do not have even the slightest grasp on the science of global warming and the overwhelming amount of information that makes for the overwhelming amount of scholarly- or not so scholarly - articles requires more than just a cursory reading. What I do know is from 30 years of reading history, which if I have learned anything, is that weather is one of the main factors in the course of human history. Long before there was media attention being paid to "global warming" I spent a great deal of time studying the Vikings with the kids. While they would read age appropriate books, I would read more detailed books for better background. One of the books about Viking incursions into Europe and the British Isles gave some attention to the theory behind why they had suddenly become so active. One accepted theory had to do with the global warming of the Middle Ages which resulted in a population explosion in the North which then resulted in a shortage of farm land to be handed down to sons for their livelihood. Whether or not this is the primary reason for Viking robbing and pillaging, we can’t be sure. However, these very changes in lifestyle/farming are the evidence for the warming of the earth at that time although there are no statistics to give us the minutiae for actual contrast and comparison. Of course this period of global warming was then followed by global cooling that lasted for several centuries and resulted in the Vikings having to abandon their settlements in Greenland.

In Chapter 1 of Simon Schama’s A History of Britain, the subject is the surprise discovery in the 1850’s of a perfectly preserved domestic hamlet called Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands. It was determined to have been settled 5,000 years before. Schama writes, “Its original settlers probably migrated across the Pentland Firth from Caithness on the Scottish mainland. The sea and the air were a little warmer than they are now, and once they had established themselves…” and “On land that is now thought unfit for any kind of food crops, the Skara Brae villagers managed to grow barley and even wheat.” He goes on to describe a rather peaceful well-developed community. Later – “Life at Skara Brae must have continued in much the same way for centuries. New houses were built on the midden dumps of their predecessors, and the little colony gradually rose above sea-level. But around 2500BC the island climate seems to have got colder and wetter. The red bream disappeared, and so did the stable environment the Orcadians had enjoyed for countless generations.” This chapter goes onto describe the same problems that occurred regarding the shortage of farm land.

A standard reading series for our curriculum was The Little House Series which should not be discounted as a source of information about pioneer America and the weather that caused so much heartbreak for settlers. It was even more interesting for me because I researched the Wilder/Ingalls clans in books that were very often the result of someone’s thesis on westward expansion. It was because of this extracurricular reading that I came to the conclusion that Laura’s daughter, Rose, had actually crafted the books from Laura’s notes and amateur writing. Those books give witness to the extreme weather that characterized the Great Plains. There was never any shortage of drought, locusts, flooding, excessive snowfall, extreme cold, fantastic tornadoes that in one account landed a Puffin (?) in one of Pa’s fields, hot weather in January, the brutal winters of the 1880’s and the brutal heat of those same summers which eventually sent Laura and Almanzo to Missouri. All of this was taken in stride by the gypsy pioneers of the 1800’s because weather was always unpredictable and extreme. They were often discouraged, but never alarmed and of course they didn’t have the media circus to broadcast natural disasters in real-time making it seem as if the sky was truly falling.

If The Little House books lack the intellectual weight that is a prerequisite for consideration, I would suggest The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin. This is a book on meteorology disguised as a story about one of the worst blizzards in the 1880’s. This is the synopsis – “January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent. By Friday morning, January 13, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.” I believe the weather stations were reporting temperatures of 70 degrees on the morning of January 12th. The stories were heartbreaking.

The stories giving witness to unusual weather are too numerous to chronicle here, but the last I’ll mention had to do with the War for Independence. George Rogers Clark with 180 volunteers set out from Kentucky to route the British in what is now Illinois. They set out on February 7, 1779, marching on snow, but due to an unusual bout of mild weather, they ended up marching in chest deep water having to carry their guns and powder above their heads for hours. Again this is the kind of activity that was understood to be a hard fact of life, but today would be met with the question, “What are we doing to our earth?” The idea that we can create weather, if it were true, would be a fantastic opportunity to produce an environment something akin to the weather in Camelot. Perfect seasons with perfect rainfall and just enough sun/overcast ratio. The seasonal temperatures would be characterized by steady inclines and declines. I myself would put in an order for lots of snow at regular intervals to keep it white and pretty with a gradual melt to prevent flooding and supply my garden with the moisture to produce healthy plants without me having to water in the spring. Unfortunately that has never been a reality and it never will.

While this article ( http://www.gcrio.org/CONSEQUENCES/winter96/sunclimate.html) from a friend is impressive in its comprehensive research data, we all know from the recent scandal at Britain’s Climate Research Unit that data can be manipulated (or buried), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html particularly if you begin your research with a particular outcome in mind. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-ambler/mr-gore-apology-accepted_b_154982.html

Science is corruptible. Whether that corruption will be taken into consideration by the adherents of Environmentalism remains to be seen

MOTHERS BEARING GIFTS

After getting married in 1978, John and I spent almost one year living in Tarrytown, N.Y., before being transferred to Houston, Texas in 1979. The first time my mother, Marilyn, came to visit me in Houston, she emerged from the plane looking like she was just arriving at Ellis Island with several shopping bags of food. We appreciated her concern for us, but it was hard not to laugh. She was correct in assuming there would not be a decent Italian butcher shop from which to purchase properly made Italian sausage and so we were delighted with the several pounds of sausage from Sarli’s Market in Chicago. I can’t remember what the other provisions were, but we were really amused by the several boxes of Uncle Ben’s Rice because the main plant for Uncle Ben’s was right down the road from us.

Over the years my father, my husband, and I, have had a good laugh about Marilyn’s Italian genes which compelled her to always be ready to provide the quality of food we were used to eating. This memory was inspired by my own actions this morning as I prepared to visit my two daughters for a couple of days. I have filled a huge canvass beach bag with two loaves of homemade bread, the remaining cookies from Easter, Bertolli olive oil (from Sam’s where it is considerably cheaper and will be a treat for Rebekah who can only afford to shop at Aldi), Romano cheese(also from Sam’s), and the ingredients for a wheat berry salad. I am my mother’s daughter and for that I am thankful.