Perfection is the enemy of good.
Shakespeare
I decided to start this essay early because it’s best to write when you have an idea rather than just before an editorial deadline. But then the murders of Jews at Bondi Beach, students at Brown University, our servicemen in Syria, Rob Reiner and his wife in Los Angeles, the physics professor in Boston, and the terrorist attack that was barely averted in Los Angeles occurred. These are stressful times in our country and around the world in places like Ukraine, Gaza and in Sudan and Nigeria, where Christians are being slaughtered.
However, I suspect we need a break from the latest mayhem. So, if you pick up the Focus during Christmas week, I offer some less stressful perspectives for your consideration.
Nonetheless, the holiday season is stressful for once-a-week columnists. To allow The Focus staff to be with family, the schedule demands we produce multiple columns in short order around Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Of course, the plight of columnists has no cosmic significance.
Schedules – or their lack – are also tough for retirees. If it were not for my iPhone and our Gary Larson cartoon day calendar, I might not know what day of the week it is. I do have some anchors for my week, including the Thursday afternoon Focus deadline, Saturday morning Bible study and church on Sunday. However, I’m challenged on the other days of the week.
When I practiced medicine, my life was organized around my on-call schedule. You might be surprised, but for a doctor, the worst holiday to be on-call was Thanksgiving, which always falls on Thursday. The office was closed on the Friday after Thanksgiving, so it meant being available 24/7 for four straight days, making rounds on the group’s hospitalized patients and seemingly endless trips to the ER to admit sick folks to the hospital.
Enough whining, so back to the story. This essay began last week when it was 10° at our place, and that’s just too cold. Not to sound like an old codger, but I remember the “freeze of ‘85.” On that January day, it was 24° below zero in Knoxville, which was the coldest place in the United States, including Alaska! I remember looking out my back door and watching what little moisture was left in the air freeze and twinkle down as tiny frozen particles of ice.
Becky and I are blessed and well-provisioned for winter. We have a real fire most evenings, and I’m thankful for electric power and natural gas heating. Winter is hard for the birds at my feeder. I even feel sorry for the dozens of nuisance squirrels in the woods outside my study. I especially feel sorry for the mentally ill and drug addicted homeless. Winter is hard in nature and on the aged, weak and infirm. Liberals closed the institutions where the impaired were once cared for, releasing those with demons in their heads to the streets.
The quote for this week’s column has been variously attributed to Shakespeare and Voltaire, but probably derives from axioms predating both. Tragically, we often see good being sacrificed in the pursuit of liberalism’s notion of perfection.
The mental institutions were not perfect, but closing them in the 60s and 70s released the impaired to roam free and prey upon each other and citizens like Rob Reiner. Overriding common sense is NOT good. The results of misguided liberalism released a woman with demons in her head to stab a woman in a Macy’s bathroom in New York, murder on the light rail line of Charlotte, North Carolina, and assault people in numerous places across the country. Wise up people! There must be a balance of emotion and logic. Liberals destroy everything by violating the notion of good in their emotionally driven pursuit of perfection, which does not exist.
The principal function of government is to protect its citizens. I’ve been to Sydney, Australia, where Islamic terrorists murdered Jews at a Hanukkah celebration. Early reports say the murderers had visas, swore allegiance to ISIS and had legally purchased numerous guns in a country that removed guns from most of the population in the 1990s. The same Jihadist problems exist in England and across Europe.
Next year is the 250th anniversary of our country, and we will also host the Olympics and the World Cup. Among the millions Biden allowed into our country, thousands with terrorist or suspected terrorist ties were also released. Buck Sexton observed that “Western Civilization is under attack.” I agree. Diversity may be perfection’s noble goal, but without assimilation, it is a disaster. The globalized Intifada is real, and it is now here. Wake up people!
A normal person does not attack or kill others. The assassin at Brown University is not normal, nor is Charlie Kirk’s murderer, who has gender dysphoria and a Little Pony obsession. Surely, with numerous cameras on the Brown campus, the murderer will be found, but I doubt the parents of the slaughtered students feel better that Brown was a gun-free zone.
I never leave my home unarmed. I may be killed, but I will not be slaughtered. And I recommend that the next dangerous mentally ill person released by an activist judge go home with the judge.
Amidst Jihadists, cowardly appeasers of antisemitism, murderous furries with gender dysphoria, progressive Democrat Socialists, and the irrational who believe President Trump can instantly fix the mess that Biden created over four years, I decided to take the Charlie Kirk challenge. Just before his assassination, Charlie finished his book “Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life.” In the Bible, God says we are to work six days and on the seventh, we are to rest and worship God. Charlie found that turning off his phone and disconnecting from the internet to praise God and focus on his family transformed his life. I’m going to give it a try and put it on my Sunday Sabbath schedule. Join me.
