I’m now several days into this unemployment thing, and a couple of things have caught my attention. I’m still processing this, but felt that the observations were worth noting.

Self-Esteem

As much as I might want to not be defined by what I do or what I earn, it’s an interesting social experiment to strip away someone’s livelihood and see how their self-esteem and self-image suffers. It’s one thing to be intentionally not working outside the home. I have good friends who do the “Mr. Mom” thing, and they don’t seem affected in terms of their masculinity or feelings of self-worth. (Perhaps they’re just immersing themselves with feelings of “yeah, I’m not making $100,000/year, but I’m spending time with my kids that Mr. Smith will never get!” Those feelings may be rooted in something other than the truth of that statement.)

For me, it’s hard to shake the feeling that as you walk into a public place, people are seeing a huge “I’m Unemployed!” sign on your chest. (Given the nature of the current job market though, I’ve wondered that such a sign might be a good idea.)

Sympathy

Unfortunately, when you lose your job for cause or by way of “right-sizing,” feeling good about your abilities is much more difficult. When friends see you at the grocery in the middle of the day, they pleasantly say, “Are you taking the day off too?” How do you respond? Do you tell them the truth and then suffer though the almost certain sympathy parade, or do you hide the reality and push that conversation off for another day?

This Friday, it will officially be two weeks since my job was eliminated. Now, even though I know that “the clock is ticking” in terms of each day burning up the severance pay that I received, things are not yet in dire straights. If need be, I can find any number of ways to cut monthly expenses, and I’ve already found some short-term contracting jobs that may result in some income. Because of this, it makes it even more frustrating when someone calls and wants to bring us dinner, or provide us with some other financial assistance.

People are homeless in my hometown. People are living on the streets, and starving. How could I, sitting in a comfy house with lights, heat, and an internet connection, possibly accept something from someone? On top of it being a huge hit to the male ego, it just seems ridiculous from the outset.

Control

One of the hallmarks of unemployment, as I’ve learned, is the sense of “no control” you immediately feel. As a Christian, I’m fully aware that this is not necessarily a bad thing for me to learn and feel, since it should cause me to become more dependent on God. As Christians are wont to say, “None of us are really in control. God just let’s us think we are.”

One of the few things that an unemployed person can control, is who knows that they’re out of work. Accordingly, if well-intentioned friends decide to “cast the net” for you, and spread word far and wide, the one thing that you can control suddenly is also out of your control. If you have friends who are currently unemployed, I strongly encourage you to treat the information as confidential unless and until your out-of-work friend asks for you to help spread the message.

Emotional Land Mines

The last thing I want to note here is something that I was completely unprepared for: emotional land mines. These are the little things that surround you that look completely innocent, but in the context of unemployment, suddenly seem very different.

That container holding all the loose change on the counter? Suddenly, late at night, you find yourself counting it. You know this is ridiculous behavior, but you do it anyway. The other night, I found $38 in quarters and dimes, and another $20 in pennies and nickles (counted by one of those noisy machines at the grocery). I can’t remember the last time I had noted the change in that container. Now, even though the amount is trivial when compared to the upcoming bills, I’m unable to walk past it without stopping to count out a bit more.

Yesterday, I discovered that my son had “taken his lunch” to school. What he took was a small snack pack of cheese and crackers. The fact that he did so reminds me that he senses the looming financial issues, and feels like he needs to do whatever he can to cut costs. The fact that he knows, and that he’s trying to “do without” cuts into my soul. I fully recognize that I can teach him important life lessons by how I respond to this situation. Even so, they are lessons that I would much prefer to not teach… lessons I’d prefer that he not be forced to learn by observation.

Books in boxes seem innocent, don’t they? However, when there are framed pictures, pencil holders, and other “office knick knacks” sitting in boxes, they represent an office worker with no office. I keep vacillating between pulling all that stuff out and putting it up in a room in the house (as if to put a stake in the ground that says, “I’m going to work from home!”), or leaving them in the boxes so I can easily move them into a new office somewhere. The longer they sit on the floor, right by the back door, the more they remind me of what has changed.

The truth is, much has changed, and so have I.

Last Friday, I joined the ranks of the unemployed.

This was not by choice.

Given the state of the economy in the US, even in the tech sector, this is not completely unexpected or, for that matter, all that newsworthy or unusual. Even so, for me, it is unusual. For the first time in my adult life, I am making a job change against my will, on my own.

In the past when I’ve changed jobs, it’s generally been my choice to do so. For awhile, I would get bored at a job, find something new and shiny somewhere else, and dash off to see if the grass was truly greener on the other side of that fence. Sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn’t. Around our house, the running joke was that as soon as benefits would start to kick in, it was time for me to look for a new job.

Once before, I was given the opportunity to relocate to Rochester, NY, but chose to stay in KY. As a result, I was out of work, but so were roughly 100 of my good friends and former co-workers. We shared the misery of the corporate decision to shut down our location, and could each take solace in the fact that it wasn’t so much a reflection on our individual abilities as it was a reflection of where our parent company wanted to take the business. The business had changed, and if we didn’t want to move along with it, then we would be unemployed. (In a bit of ironic and poetic justice, the relocated company went under within a year, giving the 98% of the employees who didn’t relocate a bit of smug, if misdirected, satisfaction.)

Unfortunately, this time, there’s not really anyone else to commiserate with. It’s true; I can share in the misery of the hundreds of thousands of people across the nation who have lost jobs recently, but the company I was working for is still in business, and in fact, hired a new employee just a few weeks before my departure. And so this time, it feels far more personal than before. This time, my departure, in spite of a severance package, had all the earmarks of a very pointed and personal condemnation of the work I did and was doing. No longer could I sit back and say to myself, “The different skills and abilities that I bring to the table are so varied, it won’t matter if the business changes so that this skill or that isn’t needed… surely they’ll need something that I have to offer.”

Apparently, they didn’t, which causes all sorts of inner reflection. Is my skill set actually that limited? Much of what I was doing was documentation, both user-level, and design/specification work. My boss, for whom English is a second language, seemed to be rewriting much of what I wrote over the past year, leading me to question my ability to formulate coherent sentences using my first (and only) language. Had my writing skills really diminished so dramatically and quickly? Even worse, given that I had been put into a role that was principally producing documentation, were my technical skills even less-useful than my writing skills?

Now, lest you (the ever-patient reader) think that I’m engaging in a drawn-out session of pointless self-flagellation, I’ll admit that most of these moments of self-doubt have been short-lived. Thankfully, I am surrounded by supportive (and possibly dishonest) friends who have continually told me, “Tim, it’s not you.” While I appreciate that sentiment, and am working hard to believe it, the fact of the matter is that at some point, bills have to be paid. At that moment, and at that point, my friends and family can only do so much. At some point, the value of what I can bring will be measured (or not) by compensation for the work I can produce.

At that point, it is me.

The house is quiet, save the heater clicking on and off, and the mysterious clicking that the ductwork makes as it heats up and cools down. The dog is back in the house now (still alive, which I might add is remarkable, give the hour of the day he chose to wake me), he’s been fed, and the chill of stepping outside to hook (and subsequently unhook) him to his chain has finally passed.

The sound of “Christmas Time is Here” from the “It’s Christmas, Charlie Brown” soundtrack still rings in my ears, and I quickly remember the explanation a music major recently gave me for some of the non-social reasons that minor keys sound “incomplete,” and therefore are prone to generating melancholy moods in Westerners.

I briefly sat in front of the tree, looking at the variety of ornaments hanging there: handmade memories of school projects, the obligatory UofL/UK ornaments, the football tailpad that the boys decided should be hung on the front of the tree like an ornament…

I sat in the dark and thought of the many people, family and friends, who I’ve shared Christmas with over the course of my life. I thought of some who’ve since died, and some who’ve moved away. I thought of some with whom I’ve had some sort of falling out. I thought of the pride that keeps me from attempting to renew such friendships.

I thought of my parents, and how much I miss both of them. I wondered idly if the boys would feel the same about me at some point in the future, and then dismissed such thoughts with the assessment that no great fissure exists in my relationship with either of them, and since I’m the only father they’ve ever known, they could hardly find themselves missing someone else. I found that strangely comforting, and not, all at the same time.

I looked at the wrapped gifts under the tree, and thought again of the strange behaviors that so many of us engage in to (supposedly) celebrate Jesus’ birth, and how we repeat this to ourselves as if to convince us that it’s true. I thought of the many lies (or at least, half-truths) we tell ourselves to convince ourselves of certain things. I dismissed this to the realm of common human frailty.

The heater kicks on again, making me wonder (by way of the short cycling time) if there is some obvious shortcoming in the house’s insulation, which immediately makes me wonder if the payback of any resolution there would be fast enough in the current economy. I begin having meta-wonderings about my thought processes, and decide that the random ramblings of my brain, no doubt making fascinating reading here, are strange enough in and of themselves to just allow them to sit here in isolation.

My mind returns to thoughts of how we celebrate this holiday, and wonder why I (and others like me) am prone to finding ways of excusing self-serving behavior as “good” or “holy remembrance.” I randomly wonder why, if doing for others is really the point, I don’t expend as much energy helping the poor or the homeless. The truth is, I tend to do for my own… my friends and family, and nobody else.

I note that Twitter is starting to pick up now, as is Facebook, and realize that somehow, at 17 and 20, both of my sons have somehow learned to sleep late on Christmas Day, something I never seemed able to do. This reminds me of why I got up in the first place, the dog, whose life I chose to spare (in the spirit of the Day), and I make a mental note to be thankful toward him for getting me up, lest I sleep right through moments like this.

Instead of just telling everyone the same thing over and over, I’ve tried to codify my recent advice about keeping your system safe and secure online into one document. I’ll be moving this to my “Protecting PCs” page soon.

Please note that this advice is primarily intended for home users. Much of this applies to businesses, but there are some additional things a business should do that aren’t feasible for the home user.

Rules and Advice

Here are the basic rules from which my advice springs:

1. Don’t trust sites that you visit regularly (NY Times, Courier-Journal, etc) too much. Commercial sites pay a lot of money to make sure their systems aren’t hosting bad stuff, but your opinion of “bad stuff” and theirs may be different. They may feel that it’s perfectly OK to track your shopping behavior as you go from site to site, but you may not. Also, because big sites tend to be trusted, hackers know that planting something bad there will almost guarantee to infect lots of people.
2. Protect yourself against problems with untrusted sites by limiting how much of the content on their site your computer downloads and uses.
3. Learn to trust VERY few sites (Facebook? Kinda. MySpace? No!)
4. Trust your friends, but don’t trust your friend’s computers. You may be a freak about how you take care of your computer, but they may not, so you have no way of knowing that the email they sent with some really cool application or movie or picture, wasn’t really sent by a virus on their system.
5. Recognize that porn sites and sites with bit-torrents are prime places for hosting bad stuff (they use freebies to get traffic). Accordingly, this is why the worst virus infections hit computers used by teens.
6. Recognize that control over your computer is worth real money to a large number of people, most of whom have ties to organized crime, and have no problem with doing all sorts of things, and putting forth a great deal of energy, just to get control over your system. Recent research has determined that hackers have gained remote control of hundreds of thousands of computers, and organized them into large “botnets” (networks of Internet robots) that they can use in various nasty ways to make money.
7. In addition to #5, recognize that information you possess may be even more valuable, especially if you do online banking, make purchases, and so on. Passwords to bank accounts can be worth $1000’s, so you have to protect the computer accordingly if you use it this way. Recently, a small town had it’s bank account wiped out to the tune of $50,000 when a virus was implanted to get the town clerk’s passwords to the town bank account. Crooks now tend to steal smaller amounts from more people, as it’s less likely to be noticed.
8. Virus infections used to be something like taking out the trash. Not anymore. Today, a computer infected with a virus is like a bowl of soup with poison poured in. Even if the color of the poison makes it stand out, how can you be certain that you got it all? For the most part, you can’t, and would just throw the whole bowl out and start over. This applies to computers, as the only way to REALLY know that a machine is clean is to throw everything out and start over.

What I wrote above should frighten a lot of people, because most people treat the Internet as a friendly place. It’s not. The percentage of bad people online is probably higher than it is in real life, largely because of the anonymity that the Internet provides.

With that said, there are two major ways computers are used, and the approach is different for each one:  used only by me, and used by others. Each scenario requires some variations to accommodate the advice above.

Used Only by Me

If the computer is used by me only, then I can take full responsibility for everything that happens to it, and have complete control of where I surf, what I download, and so on. For the most part, what I wrote above might very well be all that is necessary to protect someone who is the only user of a computer. However, even someone who is careful can do something dangerous, so having some extra protection in place makes a ton of sense.

A) Keep your computer up-to-date

If you’re running Windows, you should be downloading updates from Microsoft automatically. If you run custom software or business-critical stuff (or if you’re a control freak like me), you might want to install them manually, but otherwise, you should set your system to install them automatically. Microsoft sends these out on “Patch Tuesday,” the second Tuesday of each month.

To monitor potential issues with other applications, download the Secunia Personal Software Inspector from here: http://secunia.com/PSISetup.exe and it will alert you to applications that have known security issues. You don’t need to run this all the time, but you should at least run it once a month. I recommend running it on Patch Tuesday, since that’s when you’re updating everything else. The little notice from Microsoft that your system was (or needs to be) updated can be your reminder to run Secunia.

If you’re running something other than Windows (Mac OS X or Linux), then the risk of your system getting infected is much lower. This is for a variety of reasons. Even so, it pays to keep your operating system (and other applications) up-to-date.

B) Keep your computer from downloading bad stuff to begin with

This may seem obvious, but it’s not, and this suggestion has several parts
to it:

• Get this file: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.zip and follow the directions in the ReadMe.txt file.
• Download the Firefox web browser from here:
  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/. There are other good web browsers, but Firefox can use some add-ons that make it much safer than the other options out there.
• After installing Firefox, download and install NoScript from here:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
• Next, download and install AdBlock Plus from here:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
• Get the ad filter list from the following location (AdBlock should prompt you for this):  http://easylist.adblockplus.org/easyelement+easylist.txt
• You’ll notice that NoScript causes a bunch of stuff to break, the first time you visit a site that uses “active content.” Go here http://noscript.net/features for an explanation of what it’s doing, why, and how to allow the content you want, and block the content you don’t want.

Using the blocking HOSTS file, Firefox, AdBlock, and NoScript addresses
rules 1-3.

C) Protect your computer from bad stuff that you got anyway

In spite of our best efforts, sometimes, stuff sometimes finds it’s way through, and hits our computers. There are two ways of addressing this problem: sandboxing bad stuff, and catching bad stuff after it gets in.

As I mentioned earlier, viruses are like poison that’s been dumped into soup. The stuff in section B was telling you how to keep the poison out, but what if some of it gets through? The hope of most Antivirus products is to search out and find the “poison,” hopefully before it’s mixed in thoroughly, and hopefully before you eat some of it. However, new kinds of viruses come out every day, and the people writing them are so good, they typically install all of the major Antivirus software on a test machine, and don’t bother releasing a new virus unless it goes undetected on the test system.

Geek note: Yes, I’m aware that there are products that attempt to protect your system based on the behavior of malware, often referred to as “heuristic” scanning. There is not much in the way of conclusive evidence that the end-user products that do this are as effective as the overall strategy I’m recommending here.

At this point, most Antivirus products will not protect you from something brand-new. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run an Antivirus, but it means you should not pay much, if anything, for it. My current recommendation is the free version of AVG, found here: http://free.avg.com/. Pay for Antivirus only if you have extra money sitting around, and can’t think of anything better to do with it.

To “sandbox” downloaded things, imagine the scenario of the soup with poison in it. Instead of dumping stuff into the pot as the soup is cooking, what if you just dump it into a bowl? If you do this, then all you have to throw out is one bowl, and the rest of the soup is still good. What do you sandbox, and how do you do it? You sandbox anything that touches the Internet, but most specifically your web browser, your instant messaging software, and your email client.

I use and recommend Sandboxie (called this because it was originally developed to “sandbox” Internet Explorer, commonly called “IE,” so the name was really “SandboxIE”). The sandbox keeps everything you do on the Internet in a “sandbox,” and doesn’t let it get out to touch the rest of your system without you doing so very intentionally. You can download and try Sandboxie here: http://www.sandboxie.com/. If you decide to buy it, it’s about $30 USD.

D) Don’t surf or answer email using an Admin account

I put this last because many of the steps above require you to install software, update your system, or change the configuration. All of these are risky things to do, and they are things that shouldn’t happen very often.

One thing most people don’t recognize is that most versions of Windows (except for Vista) run, by default, as the System Administrator. Why is this a big deal? Well, in computer terms, the System Administrator is God, and can do whatever he/she wants, like installing new applications, and changing the way the system works. Obviously, it’s important to have an account like this, but unless you install new applications all the time, there’s no reason to use this account most of the time.

Instead, create a new admin user. Now, log out, log back in as the new admin, and change your old user account to be a non-admin account. Finally, log back out, and log in using your old name & password, which is now a “regular user.” You won’t be able to install applications here, but most software should work correctly, and even if you do get bad stuff, it won’t be able to infect your system in nasty ways. In effect, by restricting the rights of your account, you’ve put handcuffs on all of the applications you run, which is similar to sandboxing. (However, I recommend that you run in a sandbox, even as a non-admin user.)

Used Only by Others

If the computer is used by other people, you want to do everything in A, B, C and D above, except for installing Sandboxie. Instead, download and
install Microsoft SteadyState (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx), and make sure you turn on “System and Disk Protection.” SteadyState gives you a ton of features, but the most important (from a security standpoint) is the ability to simply reboot, and have the system completely forget about everything that happened on the startup disk. (Obviously, if you want to save any work, you need to store that on a jump drive, or another disk.)

If you’re logged in as an Administrator, SteadyState will ask you if you want to save changes when you shutdown/reboot. This allows you to use the admin account to install new programs, save those changes, and then go back to normal usage.

For All Systems

Remember item #7 at the beginning? Imagine that you’ve done everything that I’ve suggested, but now you’re surfing around, and hit a site that contains some bad stuff. You shouldn’t allow it to run everything, but you ignore the NoScript add-on and run all their content anyway. At this point, you’re running your browser inside a sandbox (or within a SteadyState-protected user account), so all the bad stuff will go away when you shut down the sandbox (or reboot). Unfortunately, any bad code you’ve downloaded during this session will still be there. What do you do?

Always… always… ALWAYS shutdown your browser/system and start from scratch before doing any kind of financial transaction, or hitting any site that requires important passwords. If you’re using Sandboxie, shut down the sandbox and start a new browser session. If you’re using SteadyState, shutdown and reboot.

If you follow the advice above, you’ll keep your system clean and free from nasty stuff, and you won’t have to worry about anyone capturing important financial information from you.

Fire and Brimstone from John McCain

At the time of this writing, most voters in the United States who are going to cast a ballot have probably made up their minds who they’re going to vote for in the Presidential race. In my case, my work was going to take me out of town for Election Day (today), so I cast an absentee ballot last week. (No, I’m not going to reveal who I voted for. You’re free to make assumptions and guesses, but one of my favorite aspects of the voting process is its anonymity and privacy.)

As the title suggests, this post concerns the campaign of Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for President. Being the representative of the Republican Party, the expectation in the US is that he will be supported by social and theological conservatives, generally known here as “the Right.”

In recent days, I’ve started to notice that Senator McCain’s campaign is starting to take on some of the attributes of lesser-known elements of those on the theological Right, both in tone and substance. As a registered Republican, I’m not particularly happy or comfortable with this development.

Negative Campaigning

Like a lot of people in the US, I have a distinct distaste for negative campaigning. At the same time, I’ve grown so accustomed to it, it doesn’t surprise me anymore, and tends to just become background noise when I hear it. It frustrates and turns me off, regardless of who’s doing it–even “my” candidate.

Unfortunately, those of us in the tech industry are all-too-familiar with negative campaigns. Here, we tend to summarize it by it’s most common traits: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (commonly called “FUD”). Although generally associated with Microsoft in some of its early “campaigns” against rivals, it’s commonplace for many technology companies. The basic idea behind a good FUD campaign goes like this:

First and foremost, you should fear a solution from my competitor. Although they may be good people, their solution to the problem at hand has many negative outcomes that you should associate with them, even if those associations are almost impossible to prove. For my FUD approach to gain any traction, I have to cause you to accept that there are valid reasons for you to fear the opposition.

Second, you should feel a certain level of uncertainty about my competitor. Perhaps they are not as well-established as I am, or they have demonstrated some recent blunders in strategy. Uncertainty, by itself, would probably not sway you, but when I create a bit of this to go along with your fears, I’m creating an overall uneasiness that can be very effective.

Lastly, with the mood of suspicion that you’re developing, I can cast doubt over many things that without the fear and uncertainty, you’d have no reason to doubt. For example, I can look at recent announcements from the competition, and tell you “Knowing what you know now (from my recent revelations that created fear and uncertainty), can you believe that they are actually going to deliver on what they’ve promised?”

With FUD, I have set the stage for you to look for a better solution, almost entirely by discrediting what has already been presented. The best part of this is, I may be able to do this, even if I don’t have something better to offer, or have any offering at all.

FUD campaigns, ultimately, take many of the traditional debating techniques and approaches (Poisoning the Well, the Slippery Slope, the False Dilemma, and so on), and combining them in an effective whole. Why would I do this? I do so, because of the notion of elevating myself, by way of demoting others.

“Religious” Wars in Tech

In technology, there’s no shortage of case studies for FUD both ways. In recent years, the Mac vs PC/Windows dialog has degraded into a comedy of one-upmanship. For years, people assumed that Microsoft was the “king of FUD.” However, anyone who’s seen any of Apple’s Mac/PC ads would have to agree that the commercials concerning Vista have been largely (if not entirely) a FUD campaign.

Other examples would include the language wars of C++ vs Visual Basic, Nokia N95 vs iPhone, and the always-entertaining iPod vs anythingbutipod.com. In each case, you can frequently find a FUD campaign, and it generally seems to come from the side that doesn’t have the leading position (if not in marketshare, in public perception).

Old-Time Religion and “Angry Christians”

Having grown up in church, I have a fair amount of familiarity with different preaching styles. One style that has been “out of vogue” for some time now is the “hellfire and damnation” sermon. This sermon doesn’t attempt to persuade you to a point of faith by suggesting that God’s ultimate plan for your life is an “everlasting life” that begins today. No, this sermon persuades you that the eternal pain of Hell is so great and so horrible, that any reasonable person would choose Heaven (and any path that might lead to Heaven) instead.

On the plus side, a hellfire and damnation sermon doesn’t display the (apparently) naive nature of the “pie in the sky, by and by” Christian who seems to be the scorn of non-theists everywhere, who smiles about “God’s perfect plan,” apparently unaware of what may be going on around them. In contrast, the hellfire and damnation sermon seems to suggest that not only are you sinful trash, but you’re so trashy that even Satan himself might be disgusted with you, and might have something particularly nasty in store for you.

Having heard one such sermon, an Atheist friend of mine asked, “Why do the saved seem to take joy in hearing about the damnation of the lost?” It’s a valid question, and one that makes me glad that the hellfire and damnation style has gone by the wayside. (I’m not debating or critiquing the validity of any theology that may be presented in such a sermon. I’m criticizing the style of presenting the holy argument solely in the style of a FUD campaign.) It should come as no surprise that avoiding the hellfire and damnation style causes many pastors to be criticized for “softball” sermons.

Questions for McCain

All of this leads me to have some questions for the campaign of Senator McCain:

• Does a negative campaign signal that you have nothing positive to say? When I listen to Senator Obama’s campaign, I hear him criticizing your plans, your record, and your approach, but when I hear you, I see and hear mostly criticism of the man.
• Does the demonstrated inflexibility and adamant conviction of your supporters encourage discussion and change,  or does it only promote alienation, polarization, and stratification of the electorate?

Questions for Christians, Conservatives, and Liberals

Finally, all of this has me looking inward as well, and asking questions of a wider group:

• Are Christians being fair to expect non-Christians to consider an opposing view, when they are generally unwilling to do so? I’ve asked this question a few times recently, and the response I’ve found is… underwhelming, to say the least.
• Is either side (Conservative or Liberal) being fair to expect those from the other side to consider an opposing view when they are generally unwilling to do so?

Later today, we should have an idea of how effective the Republican Party’s FUD campaign has been in convincing voters in the US to support “anythingbutobama.” It remains to be seen whether, as a nation, we’re destined to continue shouting at each other, and growing more and more polarized in our views, even as we complain about the inflexibility and stubborness of the other side.

No, the preacher didn’t get an extra wind, but there was a meal provided, we sang songs, and we were encouraged to demonstrate God’s love in a tangible way. Today, my church went to a local park at 10:00am, removed the shingles from the roof, did some roof repair, demolished some old bathrooms that were no longer needed, and made their pavillion area suitable for use by the public.

Hammer Worship

There was no fanfare. TV and radio crews didn’t show up, and outside of the park director and the members of our church, nobody will know who did the work or why.

My role was minimal, involving a lot of holding ladders for people that were not afraid of heights, handing materials up the ladder to these hardy souls, and providing the strong-back/weak-mind combo that I’m famous for in such situations. The other participants were amazing, and symbolized some of the best of what “the church” can be–a group of otherwise disparate individuals forgetting their own agendas for a few hours and putting other people first.

I’ve told our pastor several times, and I reiterated it to him again today: I don’t think I can ever go back to sitting in a pew on Sunday mornings. I know some are called to such a place, and I encourage them to continue to worship in whatever way they’re led.

As for me and my house? We’re gonna serve.

In case you’ve never seen “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Video Blog,” I highly recommend it. In the same spirit, the Evil League of Evil has posted a request for new applicants. Here’s my application:

Below is from a comment to the Washington Post. I don’t agree with the tone, but this comment struck a chord with me that needed to be struck.

Amazingly, Christians have supported the behavior described below, and called it “conservative.” I’ve been guilty of supporting some of these behaviors myself. Now, I’m not naive enough to think that the Democratic Party is better–I’m just tired of giving the Republican Party a blank moral check, and trusting them to behave in a manner that pleases God. Being pro-life on abortion legislation doesn’t mean that the GOP values life the way God intends. One could argue that, based upon the demonstrated behavior of the last eight years, the opposite is true.

I’m more and more convinced that God will hold me accountable for not speaking out long ago… for not saying to the GOP “You will no longer be allowed to associate yourselves with people of faith. You’ve demonstrated that you’re not morally better, and in countless ways morally worse, than the liberal Democrats you so willingly demonize.”

I may not vote for a Democrat in November, but I’m feeling quite certain that I won’t be voting for the Republican ticket. They just don’t deserve another chance.

Link to the article:

We have been hearing since Reagan that “Government is the problem”; that government should get “out of the way”; that the private sector can always do it better and cheaper.

If one has this philosophy then it is natural to undermine government; to get it “out of the way”. Conservatives since Reagan have systematically undermined the efficacy of the government by gutting any agency which it views as “standing in the way”.

You appoint “your guys” no matter how incompetent; you oust the professionals; you gut their budgets. You oppose anything which might “impede” the private sector corporations – consumer protections; food inspections; road and bridge inspection; financial regulations.

You politicize the Justice Department, so that it finds nothing, even torture, objectionable. Anti-trust enforcement becomes non-existent.

You never lift a voice or use the bully pulpit against corporations shipping jobs wholesale overseas. Our retailers buy their inventory from China and you ship them our money, never insisting that China adjust its foreign exchange rate. Then you borrow the money back from China to plug our budget deficit, caused by corporate tax cuts and cuts for the top 1% of Americans. You ship the borrowed money to our oil suppliers and oppose any effort to reduce dependency by seeking alternative renewable sources of fuel. After all, you’re an oil man.

You start an unnecessary war costing hundreds of billions of dollars much of it going to favored construction companies doing work shoddy enough to electrocute ten soldiers in their showers. Hired thugs masquerading as “security details” rake in more of the money, answering to no one. You “rebuild” Iraq (which we never had to destroy anyway) while the Iraqis have almost $80 billion in the bank.

You shred the Constitution, abridge habeas corpus. You get elected by selling your “values” while robbing the country blind. You never talk about economics. You always scare the voters with the next bogeyman around the corner. When the media disagrees with you, you attack it as “unfair” with “liberal bias”. You start your own propaganda media outlets that parrot the party line.

You take the country into a permanent state of war with a volunteer army – a state so permanent no one even notices it anymore as they go to the mall. You ask nothing from them but their acquiescence. “Just go shopping folks!”

You want to spend a trillion dollars to rescue the financial sector, run up a half a trillion dollar budget deficit and still spew nonsense about “small government, deregulation and lower taxes”.

We are witnessing the impoverishment of America. ….and this Grand Old Party (remember it?) wants four more years.

Posted by: toritto | October 9, 2008 4:25 PM

At 7:15 PM EST, I noted an article on Google News, originally published on Fox News:

Fox News Story on Google

Unfortunately, if you click the link on Google, Fox News tells you that no such story exists. Is this yet another example of Fox News being “Fair and Balanced”? Did someone at the top see the link, and bury the story?

We’ll never know. If you search Fox News’ election site, you’ll find no such story exists anymore.

Interesting.

First, Fonzie jumped over a shark in that fateful episode of Happy Days, and the show lost it’s following and whatever credibility it might have had with its audience as something worth watching. Since then, the digerati have begun referring to the phenomenon of fading into irrelevance as “Jumping the Shark.” Here’s a way to tell if this has happened to your preacher. From today’s New York Times:

“I would say endorsement is a strong word,” he said. “I’m planning to make a recommendation. I’m going to evaluate each candidate’s positions in light of Scripture and make a recommendation to my congregation as to which candidate aligns more so.”

Let me be clear. I have no problem with anyone publicly endorsing a candidate for any office, and doing everything in their power to influence others to support that candidate.

Jumping the Shark from the Pulpit

My first problem is someone wanting all the benefits that come with being a 501(3)(c), but also wanting to be a political entity. The purpose of the existing law was to ensure that political influence didn’t make its way through the financial channels of a charitable organization. Granted, you can argue that even with the existing law, a huge number of organizations, both on the left and the right, have successfully circumvented this law. That hardly suggests that preachers should take advantage of that fact.

The Larger Problem

My second problem is with the way that preachers have (historically) assessed candidate positions. Very rarely, if ever, does a preacher truly look at the breadth of a candidate’s career and official positions on various matters and then elucidate all the various ways in which Candidate A might meet some scriptural litmus test but Candidate B does not. Instead, they grab for a particular element of a candidate’s platform, and then ignore any evidence that might suggest that the candidate is less than Billy Graham or Mother Theresa.

For example, how would one judge Senator McCain “according to scripture”? Do you use the standard that the New Testament provides for deacons, and then say “Well, he’s not the husband of one wife, because this is his second marriage”? Given that a deacon is considered a “sub-shepherd” within a flock, shouldn’t we hold Presidential candidates to a similarly high standard? Likewise, do we look at Governor Palin’s family with the same scrutiny that we would examine a potential preacher or deacon? Certainly Senator Obama’s position on abortion is going to go against the grain for conservative Christians. What of the rhetoric that has been forthcoming from his church? What of Senator Biden?

Get Carter?

I dare say that few, if any, Southern Baptist churches would look at the positions of either Presidential candidate and suggest (with a straight face) that they meet the New Testament qualifications for a deacon. The only problem there is, anyone who would meet such qualifications and also desire to hold the highest office in our country runs the risk of being largely ineffective, as evidenced by the term of President Carter. President Carter aligned more closely with my theology than possibly any other in the history of our nation. Unfortunately, any number of less-theologically-sound presidents (both Republican and Democrat) have been better leaders for our country.

Christians would have done better to have examined President Carter’s qualifications outside of his theology. Can he work in a bipartisan way in the mess that is Washington, D.C.? Does he have the ability (or disability, depending on your perspective) to reach compromise solutions?

The Proof of the Text is in the… Preaching?

To close, here’s a word to all the preachers out there waiting anxiously to push your congregations toward one candidate or another (either explicitly, or by the power of suggestion and association). If you’re going to use scripture to determine who your flock should support, make sure you haven’t already made up your mind before you begin the examination. As a former pastor of mine used to say, “a text without a context is a pretext to a proof-text.”

If you’re going to go that route, just be honest with everyone about what you’re doing, and leave your Bible in the cushy chair before you step into the pulpit. For prooftexting the scriptural soundness of your favorite candidate, you won’t need it.

It will just slow you down.