I popped open the mailbox today and stuffed in between a couple of circulars and the gas bill was an open letter from Gordon Winrod. I took a little time to brush up on the man, and then spent about five minutes reading his treatise. The general idea was evident right from the start, but I read the rest of it anyway. Now I wish I had my five minutes back.

Before I started reading, I figured I’d have some good fodder for a blog post about all the irrational, ugly, maniacal, hate-filled things he said. But the further in I got, the more I realized there would be no way to quote anything from the document. Not because I’m afraid of the things in it, or because I worry what others might think of the vitriol, but really because nothing in the paper is worthy of reprinting, in any context whatsoever.

The upshot is that Winrod is being accused of being anti-Semitic, and he claims he is not. Then he spends five very tightly packed pages explaining that when he says he’s not anti-Semitic, he really means he’s anti-Jew, and that Jews are not Semites, but they are all child molesters. Not just a few of them, ALL of them. So says the Talmud. [Insert examples from scripture and other sources ad nauseum here.]

I personally am a huge proponent of free speech, so I guess I can’t fault Winrod for using it. However, I’m pretty sure any putative omniscients can see through a bluster of semantics. I don’t wish to lower myself to his level and pass judgment, but I do hope his Lutheran beliefs include a hell for the truly evil full of fire and torture, and that sociopathic bigots like him get what they deserve.

Oh, it turns out there is one part of the paper worth mentioning. It’s at the bottom of the last page. It reads: “THE WINROD LETTER, published monthly. Subscription: $15.00 per year. 50 copies of this issue: $10.00 p.p. The Winrod Letter…” Either there’s a market for this sludge, or his gall simply knows no bounds. In either case, color me appalled.

I’m not sure why I was waxing nostalgic about our planet last night, but it occurs to me that there are some pretty cool things about life, the universe and our little rock, third out from a mediocre star. In some semblance of order, here are 10 things that move me:

10. Gazing down the length of a river tightly hemmed in by overhanging trees in full autumn colors

9. Observing the intricacies of the planet from the peak of a lonely mountain

8. Stopping to listen to the almost tangible hush while walking or skiing through a forest during a heavy snow

7. Swimming in a clear lake during a late summer rain shower

6. Inhaling the recognizable but indescribable scent in the air that announces an imminent thunderstorm

5. Noticing the day each year when all the winter-bare trees and fields are finally green again

4. Embracing the isolation of a vast expanse of terracotta desert

3. Watching the sun sink below the horizon, when the horizon is a foreign sea

2. Standing in a wide-open field of waist-high grass facing eyes closed into a warm southwesterly breeze

1. Looking straight up at the sky at 2:00am on a moonless night and seeing the soft white arc of our galaxy stretch across it

Thanks for taking the time to read. Please comment with your own observations as I’d love to turn this into an ongoing discussion, or at least a list I can refer to when I need a little inspiration.

Once upon a time I could leave my house, go out to a restaurant or a movie, and find the experience moderately rewarding. This isn’t to say that there is something wrong with the service industry or the movie industry today, per se, although both of those could be topics for posts unrelated to this one. No, the real problem is children. And by children, I mean their parents.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but it seems to have been sometime between the Boomers and Generation Y. I don’t want to single out Generation X as the source of all the trouble, but let’s posit that there’s a huge amount of overlap. When I was younger, I got to go outside quite a bit. But outside meant in my neighborhood out in the woods or in a neighbor’s back yard so that we could yell, play kickball, fight mock wars and do all the things that kids do when their parents tell them to “take it outside.” And we did get to go out in public with the ‘rents, to public places, like movie theaters, playhouses and restaurants. However, I remember that things were a bit different then.

Were I or my brother perfect children? Not that I recall, but a line seems to have been crossed somewhere. We weren’t allowed to run freely about a busy restaurant while our parents occasionally glanced around wondering where we were or made a lame attempt to reign us in with a barely audible reprimand. We weren’t allowed to go out to a 10:00pm movie, never mind go to one, raise a ruckus and get away with it. And we surely weren’t allowed to talk back to another adult, swear, use all manner of rude gestures, or leave the table with uneaten vegetables.

There is an appalling lack of discipline and personal responsibility in our culture today. At some point it became taboo to paddle a child by way of demonstrating what’s right and what’s wrong. At some point it became OK to sue big businesses and family members for our own negligent or careless behavior. At some point it became the norm to label children with nebulous social disorders and medicate them into submission rather than identify children as children and realize they need structured upbringing and guidance.

There is an undercurrent of fear growing slowly but steadily because we’ve silently given away most of our ability to fend for ourselves. It comes to light rather starkly when you consider events like Columbine or the current state of air traffic security or when third graders conspire to kill a teacher in Georgia. Child-on-child violence is escalating, older kids seem to have no moral compass or fear of death, and parents want to wash their hands of all of it. And I scope all of this as a trend, not as a de facto standard. Are there good parents who are bringing their children up properly? Yes. Are there good children who will go to school and grow up to be doctors, scientists, teachers, laborers and good members of society? Yes. But there’s work to be done.

We have to reclaim our grip on reality. We need to have the freedom to discipline our kids, and we have to use that freedom. Discipline doesn’t mean corporal punishment, necessarily, it simply means impressing upon a child what is right and what is wrong. The method is irrelevant: religion, logic, life lessons, hard knocks, or a combination of all of the above are effective when used judiciously and consistently. Kids need to stay in school and schools need to teach them something. Kids need to be imbued with respect and humility and shown that it’s not a weakness to exhibit both. If we don’t go back to living up to our responsibilities and taking charge of the life courses we provide for our children, fear and violence are going to escalate until it’s uncontrollable and we tie our social fabric into an impossibly complex knot.