I was a stranger ...

The crisis today is the largest in the history of the world with 65+ million driven from their homes, more than half of whom are children (UNHCR).  Thousands have died along the way.  If you're struggling for how to pray, here's a suggestion.

O God, our help in ages past, you led the Israelites through the wilderness.

Guide these who flee for their lives, as they board boats and trucks and cross fences, as they carry their children and walk for miles, protect them, Lord.

Our hope for years to come, you created us all for life, to find meaning, to know love, to seek after you.

We pray for these who have lost hope, safety, and faith.
For parents whose precious children are lost or have died.
For children who are struggling without food, water, and safety.
For communities abandoned and for communities overwhelmed.
Oh God, bring help and hope.

Our shelter from the stormy blast, you are the one who brings peace.  You protect us under your wings.

We pray for an end to the tyranny of ISIS, to the violence in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Myanmar.  
Protect those who haven’t yet found a way out.
We pray for the hearts of those who intend to kill.
We pray for the eyes of the world to turn toward this injustice.
Give wisdom to the leaders who now must choose how to bring peace.

Our eternal home, in you we find hope and help, for this life and for the next.

For those who have lost everything, we pray you will rebuild their lives.
For those in danger, open the doors to a safe place.
For those hungry and thirsty, restore their livelihood.
For those whose communities and families have been ripped apart, strengthen them with new bonds of fellowship.
And for the church, near and far, which worships in safety today -- inspire us to welcome the stranger.

Help us see how to reach out to refugees with mercy and how to pursue justice for them all.

Amen.

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Refugees continue to pour into Kenya, our friends tell us.

You can pray and help too -- World Vision Refugee Crisis Fund and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency

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Peace, peace, peace on earth we pray.

Momentary IQ Loss

Capital Beltway - safe following distance at 50 mph.  🤣 ... 70+mph is the norm, of course.

Green - safer.  Red - depends on no one making any mistakes or doing anything stupid.

Given the opportunity to choose between holding a two-ton boulder over some unknown person's head or keeping your distance, most would probably choose the latter ... except when driving in traffic.

Typical reaction time is 0.25 - 0.7 seconds.  If the fellow in front of you puts on his brakes, the brake lights are your visual cue, and you'll begin to react after that time interval.  Good enough?  Maybe not.

Research shows typical reaction time from stimulus to max braking is 2 seconds or more.  At 50 mph, that's half a football field, or 10+ car-lengths that you'll travel before you start to slow down.  If the guy in front breaks hard, you'll hit him, and legally it will be your fault.


Joining the competition in a traffic swarm can momentarily reduce your IQ to match that of the moron tailgating behind you and the idiots cutting in front of you.  You'll be tempted to close the gap ahead to keep your place.

Following too closely is considered aggressive driving and is a leading cause of accidents in most states.   It's also reported as behavior likely to elicit road rage.  Most states define safe distance as 2 or 3 seconds separation.

A reasonable alternative?  The 2-second rule allows you to flow with traffic.  Aggressive drivers will beat you by perhaps 3-5 minutes in a typical commute.  It isn't worth it. 

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(I was embarrassingly far into my adult years before I could say, "I don't care" about traffic congestion or rude drivers.  These days, it's a needed reminder on the DC beltway every week as we go to visit our granddaughter ... we'll gladly take an extra 5 minutes to get there safely.)

$50,000 a day

Data compiled and reported by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Spend $50 a day and live well.  That's normal for the wealthy.

So, if you spend $500 or $5,000 a day, it starts to get really strange.

When you reach $50,000, that's what you'd have to spend every day for fifty years to use up a billion dollars.

You could use that kind of wealth to influence government and manipulate the marketplace.  That way, you get millions more, and you can pump more wealth out of the world.  (We called them robber barons back in the early days of industry.  Today, they're the wealthy elite.)

Or you could use just what you need for a healthy life and use the rest to help others.  Some folks do that, and it makes a difference.

Is there any good path for the billionaires?  So far, 154 have pledged to give away at least half of their wealth for the common good.  Good for them.  

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They taught us about giving at church when I was a kid, and I thought it was just another religious rule.  Later, I discovered that most such 'rules' are practical advice for a healthy heart and that giving frees you from the insanity of always wanting more.  It brings balance to life, it frees you from the trap of fear, and it opens so many doors.  (Even a few billionaires have figured it out.)  Funny how that works. I guess there's more to faith than just being religious.  😏

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Spend $5 a day and survive, barely.  That's common, by the way, but it shouldn't be.  Incredible wealth flows up from lower echelons to the coffers of the wealthy.

The world needs to change, and in fact it is changing.  Extreme poverty (less than $2 per day) is declining -- that's improvement, but it's still a long way from being out of poverty.  Half of child mortality is from malnourishment;  22.9% of children under five are stunted.  More than half the world lives in significant deprivation.  

Justice and equality, national priorities, distribution and conservation, all must change, and most will of necessity.  Meanwhile, we have many opportunities to make a difference.

As for the 1,900 remaining billionaires and 14,600,000 millionaires ... we'll see.  
   Then there are the corporations whose only motive is profit.  
      They're richer than any individual and some are bigger than countries.

A Child's Future

Getting by or getting better, what occupies our days?  Life fills up quickly with mind-numbing routine, attending to work and meals and bills and kids and homework.  Days pass, and months, just getting by.

How might a child be inspired to greatness while living in such humdrum? 

Practically speaking, it won't happen.  Unless ...

Children will aspire to what they see in people they know and respect.  A good heart is a great role-model.  Encouragement and affirmation are powerful shapers.  Meaningful conversations (not lectures) about real life are powerful, and they're inspired by our honest efforts to learn and to become better people.

Education begins at home; core values are established there.  Schools often have difficulty supporting those values.  Issues of principle and character are furiously assaulted in the social arena. (ref)(ref)  It's a high-risk and difficult path to thoughtful adulthood; not everyone does well. (ref)

Teens are in the most turbulent period of identity development.  As they begin making their own choices, our best offering is to be an anchor of principle and values and acceptance.  Pray for them every day and for your own journey as well.

Circumstances can make it difficult for us to help our children mature; difficult, but perhaps not impossible.  Rich or poor, this culture or country or some other, who we are will still have the most impact on who they become.  Their vision for the future rises out of our vision for life and how earnestly we pursue it.  

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Children's ethics, principles, convictions, values, conscience, character, clarity, morality, and life goals come first from ours.  

The Race to Ignorance

Race issues are emotionally charged.
We should instead perhaps categorize ourselves by ear size.  
Or freckle count.
Is that reasonable?

The young lady's photo was originally part of a campaign against racism and prejudice.  It

was stolen by the racist organization, Stormfront.org, and used for the opposite purpose.

Their use (left) was posted claiming there's a world genocide against whites ...

Modern science has provided the truth about racial differences.  There aren't any.  We're all 99.9% the same, genetically speaking, just human.* 

(The few visible differences have been determined to be no more significant than freckles.)

Skin color, for just one example, is a response to environment rather than ancestry.  If a white population migrated from Canada to the equator to live in the sunshine (and somehow remained isolated from other populations), their common skin color would permanently darken in response to increased ultraviolet exposure.  The trait would change in a hundred generations or so, just the blink of an eye, anthropologically speaking ... white to black, just by environment.

Or vice versa -- that's how white people appeared in Europe despite being dark skinned when their migration began from the tropical regions.

The pure white (Aryan) race of Nazi propaganda never existed, anywhere.  Every population and all individuals share a common ancestry, and suggesting we segregate ourselves based on skin color or eye shape is perhaps as meaningful as making that same distinction based on ear shape and freckle count.

So why do we struggle with racial prejudice?  What's the root of wanting to identify ourselves as separate and distinct from others?

• Why do we have an 'in-crowd' in high school?  
• Why do we have social classes based on wealth?  
• Does in-group against out-group qualify as collective bullying?
  What part is played by selfishness, hubris, anger, insecurity, fear?
  What part is played by our discomfort with a more complex world than we can easily grasp?
• What legitimate justification exists for prejudicial discrimination?

At every level from individual to global, the motivation appears to be the same.  Economic, ideological, and political competition all follow the same logic of us vs. them; the results are divisive and deadly.

Recent research in genetics unveils a wonderfully complex mapping of thousands of physiological elements, none of which provide any meaningful way to racially separate one group from another.  We're all 99.9% the same, genetically speaking, just human.*

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*Ignorance = lack of information

Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real.

Discussions of racial difference often point to gang culture, crime rates, and poor educational achievement as proof of white superiority.  Research (gangs, crime, education) shows such differences arise from imposed poverty, discrimination, and denied opportunity.   
What we do and don't know

Astroturfing!

Astroturfing - the practice of faking a grassroots consensus while hiding the sponsorship behind the message.  It creates the impression of widespread support (where little exists) in order to popularize and exaggerate credibility.

... the creation of an artificial grassroots buzz favoring a viewpoint, i.e. lies, propaganda, brainwashing. ...



Examples:

Tobacco Industry: in the 90's, they funded the National Smoker's Alliance to generate what looked like public support for smoker's rights against legislation that would dampen their business.  It was fake support, of course, and the industry knew it.

By the time they were forced to come forward with the truth, that smoking “kills more people than murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol combined,” it was too late for the millions they'd killed ... deliberately, in defense of their profits.

Politics: GOPTeamLeader.com (now closed) offered a tool which sent a user’s letter to the editor to dozens of newspapers under different randomly generated names.  In 2003, virtually identical letters that were essentially lists of GOP talking points were published nearly simultaneously in over 70 newspapers across the US, creating the impression of broad support for controversial GOP policies.  Similar campaigns were used by GeorgeWBush.com.  

Such tactics are not exclusive to the right; the liberal website MoveOn.org used the same tactic the very next year.  Letters to the editor don't affect much these days, so there are twitter bots that fake and forward multiple thousands of generated messages.

Many organizations in the Tea Party movement are considered astroturfed, with direct connections to right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, and their activities controlled by wealthy supporters or the GOP.

The DNC under the control of the Clinton campaign persuaded Democrat voters that the choice of candidates rested completely on transparent process.  Not quite true, as we now understand.  By formal agreement, DNC staff and policy required approval by the Clinton campaign prior to implementation for more than a year before the primaries.

Environment: Since 1997 the Koch Brothers have spent over a hundred-million dollars funding supposed scientific organizations.  The groups are masked as think tanks whose purpose is to spread false ideas, to attack climate change scientists, and to popularize climate-change denial.  

Exxon has recently acknowledged that climate change has begun, due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels.  They had attempted to hide or obscure that truth for decades using deliberate misrepresentation detailed in a Harvard analysis and report, using non-peer-reviewed studies and editorial-style advertisements ('advertorials') challenging the science.  Exxon was aggressively and knowingly misrepresenting the results of their own scientific research across four decades, just like the tobacco industry did.  Residual misinformation generated by the oil industry persists in public thinking, even after having been repeatedly discredited.

... and anyone can buy thousands of 'likes' for their web page.

Today, it appears that the internet and media have become, among other things, a tool to shape us according to someone else's plan.  More often than not, the motive is money and power at the top of the pyramid.

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Apparently, Governments also do it.
Then there's Gaslighting.