Wisdom of the Saints XII

Follow after Christ and carry your cross for your salvation, as Christ carried His cross for your salvation.

St. Anthony of Padua
1195-1231

Crucify Him

Today is Good Friday, the day our Lord was crucified. We often do not understand what an agonizing death this was. Click here to see for yourself.

For my sins, and yours, and everyone's, He took this punishment willingly. With one twitch of the finger, with one fleeting thought, He could have summoned forth legions of angels to take His broken body down from the cross. They were ready. Any one of those angels could have destroyed the Roman Empire a thousand times over. They were kept still.

He had the power to do anything; He could have stopped the pain. He did not. He suffered unspeakable agony, and then He died.

Unlike the crowd in Jerusalem shouting "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!," Christ was innocent. He did nothing wrong.

We are all part of that crowd. We all did this. We are all to blame. We all owe Him everything.

Freewheeling Terrorism

It seems that in San Francisco (a city whose namesake must be mightily displeased by now) there is an event called "Critical Mass." This involves thousands of people on bicycles wheeling through the streets in defiance of both common decency and traffic regulations. The police are apparently powerless to do anything about it.

So an unwitting young family recently drove their minivan into this maelstrom. The socially-conscious bikers were not pleased.

Susan Ferrando, her husband, their two children and three preteens had come to San Francisco from Redwood City to celebrate the birthday of Ferrando's 11-year-old daughter. They went to Japantown, where they enjoyed shopping and taking in the blooming cherry blossoms.

Things took a turn for the worse at about 9 p.m., when the family was leaving Japantown -- just as the party of about 3,000 bikers was winding down its monthly red-lights-be-damned ride through the city.

Suddenly, Ferrando said, her car was surrounded by hundreds of cyclists.

Not being from San Francisco, Ferrando thought she might have inadvertently crossed paths with a bicycle race and couldn't figure out why the police, who she had just passed, hadn't warned her.

Confusion, however, quickly turned to terror, she said, when the swarming cyclists began wildly circling around and then running into the sides of her Toyota van.

Filled with panic, Ferrando said, she started inching forward until coming to a stop at Post and Gough streets, where she was surrounded by bikers on all sides.

A biker in front blocked her as another biker began pounding on the windshield. Another was pounding on her window. Another pounded the other side.

"It seemed like they were using their bikes as weapons,'' Ferrando said. One of the bikers then threw his bike -- shattering the rear window and terrifying the young girls inside.

All the while, Ferrando was screaming, "There are children in this car! There are children in this car!" MORE

Police finally arrived and rescued the family, but no one in the crowd of thugs was arrested. Damage to the vehicle was estimated at $5,300. The children were unharmed, at least physically.

The Anchoress has a good post about this event. I'm actually not very surprised. We have loads of cyclists here in Austin, and they are militant about their "rights" to the road. It's true that the law considers a bicycle to be a "vehicle" just like a car, and they are entitled to use the roads. Many bikers take this to extremes and believe they are entitled to ignore the laws that other vehicles must obey. You know, little things like coming to a complete halt when you encounter a stop sign.

I don't have any statistics, but my observations lead me to believe that most of the adults you see riding bicycles fall into one of two categories: they are either 1) homosexual or 2) DINKs. A few may be both. I suspect this is because those who have young children rarely have the spare time, energy, or money for things like cycling.

Looking at it this way, the San Francisco attack makes more sense. If most cyclists are people whose lifestyles do not include children, and indeed have rejected the whole concept of reproduction, then it is not surprising if they don't have much respect for people who are parents.

In other words, the family in this news story was not necessarily attacked despite their having children in the minivan. They may have been attacked because they had children with them.

Hopefully this was not a conscious decision by the cyclists. Yet I think it is fair to assume that as a group, the Critical Mass riders have less respect for, and understanding of, families and young children than does the general population. So given the slightest provocation, they reacted viciously and attacked the Ferrando family.

If you are a law-abiding cyclist who likes kids, I apologize for including you in this category. I hope you will try to convince your fellow riders to follow the rules of the road and be friendly to families in minivans.

Bikini Firefighter

Here is a story that is amusing on the surface. Dig a little deeper and it's disturbing.

Of course we all find it easy to laugh at the guy - but what makes someone do these things? What demons drove him into such self-destructive behavior? What happens to him now that his private quirks are national news? And most important, why do we all get such pleasure from seeing another human being humiliated?

Obviously people who drive under the influence have to be stopped. People who allow children to see things they shouldn't have to be prevented from doing so again. Yet who among us hasn't done things we would rather keep hidden?

I feel sorry for this person. After justice is done, I hope he gets some help.

Sith Lord Cheney

Darth Cheney dares the Senate of the Republic to resist him and his Master.

Vice President Dick Cheney said in Birmingham on Monday that the Democratic-controlled Congress must learn there is only one commander in chief, and he lives in the White House.

Criticizing congressional resolutions supporting the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Cheney said, "The fact is that the United States military answers to one commander in chief in the White House, not 535 commanders in chief on Capitol Hill.

"We expect the House and Senate to meet the needs of our military on time, in full and with no strings attached," Cheney told an audience of about 500 at The Club. Cheney was in Birmingham to address supporters of Sen. Jeff Sessions, who paid $1,000 each to eat lunch and hear the vice president. MORE

No strings? Congress is supposed to create strings. If their role is simply to give the Executive what he demands "on time, in full and with no strings attached," why do we need a Congress in the first place? Furthermore, who defines what are "the needs of our military" ? I think the Framers intended Congress to have some input.

No such formalities are acceptable to this administration, of course. Allow me to translate Cheney's demand: Attention senators: you must give Us what We demand. You are not permitted to question Us. Prepare the face the power of the Force.

Muslim Europe?

Here is an excellent interview with Dr. Phillip Jenkins, a Penn State history professor who studies religious issue. He is quite a bit more optimistic than Mark Steyn regarding the demographic trends in Europe and elsewhere.

Are fears of a future "Muslim Europe" well-founded?

Jenkins: I don't think they are because the numbers at present are very small. And while they're going to grow, by American standards Muslim minorities in Europe are not going to be that huge. The other big issue is that when people talk about Muslim minorities, they automatically assume that everyone of Muslim background is going to continue to be a dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore Muslim in Europe.

There's a lot of evidence that they're not. If you look at Algerian people in France, they have a strong sense of ethnic identity, but there's quite a low level of religious observance. They look like Episcopalians more than anything. Now obviously, there's a small and potentially very dangerous hardcore of quite extreme Islamists, and you'd have to be a fool to ignore that. But the majority of people are very happy to assimilate to some kind of French or Dutch or German identity.

Population-minded pundits such as Mark Steyn argue that you don't need Muslims to be a majority in any European country for them to exert disproportionate influence, especially given that: (a) a good plurality that knows how to hold together can run a country with a Parliamentary form of government; and (b) being an immigrant minority in a country can reinforce a sense of group solidarity.

Jenkins: Both valid points, but having a solid and well-organized minority can also generate more of a sense of national identity among that majority community that thought it had lost it entirely. We've certainly seen something of that in England, where English national identity is just coming into existence in the last five or ten years after being vaguely British for many years. Cultural Christianity is a much stronger force probably than it has been for 50 years in Europe.

READ MORE

The problem I see with this last part is that when Europeans decide to assert their "national identity" against minority groups, it tends to get out of control. Unlike the Jews in the 1930s, Muslims will fight back. It could get very ugly before everyone assimilates into one big happy family.