Charlie Wear’s Notes

I liked Tony Snow, and I wasn’t alone. For several years I watched him as he hosted Fox News Sunday. He died too young at the age of 53 from cancer. His fought his disease in a very public way, with optimism and courage. Another young (remember, I think people who are in their 50s are young) journalist dead before his time.

It wasn’t hard to compare the heartfelt tributes to Mr. Snow to those for Tim Russert. Here were two men, on different sides of the political spectrum who managed to make people who disagreed with them to like them personally. Both of them were family men and good fathers. Both of them were caring to those they worked with. Both of them had a strong faith.

I couldn’t help but notice the number of people who praised Snow for his authenticity. In his last short time since leaving his post as White House press secretary he worked hard to raise some money to support his family in the years to come. We can all pray that the grief of his family will be soon forgotten as memories of his grace and humor outshine them.

Is there anyone in the US (who watches TV news, reads a newspaper, or checks out Google News) that does not know that Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press died yesterday? I was not a regular viewer of Meet the Press but I always enjoyed Russert’s hardhitting interviews when I would see them from time to time. I especially enjoyed his well-known admiration for his father that was clearly evidenced in his NY times bestseller, Big Russ and Me.

Russert was clearly a man of faith, a strong family man and someone who was "tough but fair" as John McCain said about him yesterday. He was the first of his family to attend college and was the product of the working man values instilled in him by his father who supported and educated his children after service in WW II as a sanitation worker and a truck driver.

Russert was 58 years old. I suppose that is one reason why his death has moved me so much, because he was just a few months younger than I am. He was a man at "the top of his profession" as McCain said. He was involved in the news story of his life, the 2008 presidential campaign and election. He collapsed at work doing the thing that he loved to do.

A few years ago the Tim McGraw song, Live Like You Are Dying was on an endless loop on my ipod. I was struck with the realization of my own mortality. The realization moved me to make choices to fashion a life that was more in line with the idea that our days are numbered. Of course, people, young and old, die every day. Some have made a big ripple in this pond we live in, some have not. I guess what is more important for me, at this stage of my life, is that I live each day in a state of contentment. That I appreciate the daily blessings I receive and that I pass them to those around me.

Today some more states have an election to choose the nominees for the Presidency. Political junkies are familiar with the film, "Wag the Dog," in which a ‘war’ is staged to avoid scandal in a presidential election. I love the part of the film where a politician announces that the fake war is over, thus ruining the efforts of the political operatives.

It is a shame, at least for the sake of the media, that the polls were wrong in New Hampshire and that Mrs. Clinton won that election. With a commanding lead of about 60 delegates, Mr. Obama will continue his march into inevitability. Soon the media will declare that the nomination process is over. Of course, it wasn’t long ago that Mrs. Clinton was the inevitable nominee.

On the Republican side Mike Huckabee marches on while all of the media talk is about McCain mobilizing the base of the party. The media has already started picking the Vice Presidential candidate.

It will be a shame if the American voting public mess up the prognosticator’s and the pundit’s predictions.

John McCain, born 1936, would be the only President born in the 1930s to be elected. The list of prior presidents:
George W. Bush, born 1946
Bill Clinton, born 1946
George H.W. Bush, born 1924
Ronald Reagan, born 1911
Jimmy Carter, born 1924
Gerald Ford, born 1913
Richard Nixon, born 1913
Lyndon Johnson, born 1908
John F. Kennedy, born 1917

If Barack Obama, born 1961,  is elected he will be the first president born in the 1960s. Which means that the 1950s and the 1930s would have never birthed a president of the United States. (Mike Huckabee was born in 1955).

I don’t usually discuss politics in any way, either in Next-Wave or on my journal. I find that like religion, political discussions can be very divisive. However, I want to go on record with a political prediction, just so I can look back and say I told you so 11 months or so from now! Here we go:

1. I predict that Barack Obama will not be the next president of the United States.

2. I predict that the next president of the United States will not be a Republican.

3. I predict that the Republican nominee will not be a Mormon.

Here are my reasons:

Cultural change comes slow and in an incremental way. For Barack Obama to be the next president we will have to overcome a number of historical firsts. First freshman Senator to be elected President. in the post-television era (read 1950 to present). First black man to be elected President. It is more likely that we will elect the first woman president, than the first black president.

In times of slow economic growth or recession, the party in power nearly always loses the presidency. It is pretty clear that 2008 is going to be a very difficult year economically. The Republicans have had eight years to address these issues and they are not finishing well, at least that will be the perception.

Check back with me on Thanksgiving Day and we will see how I did.

I don’t have much faith in the conventional wisdom. When the entire crowd is proclaiming some sort of "truth" my hackles begin to rise and I tend to question their view. I guess it is the same for me with science. I don’t have much faith in science.

I was watching a documentary the other night talking about the progenitor of the Big Bang Theory. He was a catholic priest, mathematician who extrapolated the tenets of Einstein’s theories and posited that if the universe is expanding that at some point it must have been smaller. From this came the "cosmic egg" and the big bang idea. Uh, that seems like an interesting theory and certainly is the result of some deep thinking. But I’ll tell you what, I am going to wait and see about the whole thing.

At one point in history a fellow named Galileo pointed out that the earth was not the center of the universe. That got him excommunicated, but we have pretty much been able to ascertain that he was right.

Okay, I said all of this just to say, Global Warming, huh? It snowed in Daytona Beach, Florida this week. I hate it when it gets that warm!

I like to read the news. As I scanned my daily LA Times email I came across this article, Larry Flynt: My friend, Jerry Falwell.

Rev. Falwell is a polarizing figure, no doubt. There are times when statements he has made have been an embarrassment. Reading Flynt’s article though, I saw a different, non-public side of the political pastor, Jerry Falwell, friend of sinners.

Flynt concludes:

 "I’ll never admire him for his views or his opinions. To this day, I’m not sure if his television embrace was meant to mend fences, to show himself to the public as a generous and forgiving preacher or merely to make me uneasy, but the ultimate result was one I never expected and was just as shocking a turn to me as was winning that famous Supreme Court case: We became friends."

From the New York times obituary of Rev. Jerry Falwell:

But, at his core, he remained through his career what he was at the beginning: a preacher and moralist, a believer in the Bible’s literal truth, with convictions about religious and social issues rooted in his reading of Scripture.

So there was no distinction at all between his view of the political and the spiritual. “We are born into a war zone where the forces of God do battle with the forces of evil,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Sometimes we get trapped, pinned down in the crossfire. And in the heat of that noisy, distracting battle, two voices call out for us to follow. Satan wants to lead us into death. God wants to lead us into life eternal.”

I was reading eric keck’s excellent post about last night’s charity fundraiser sponsored by American Idol. He writes:

doing the stuff… without any explaination… other than the obvious social justice…  (which was implicit and not delved into… but rightly so… a talent search show isn’t necessarily the platform or the motive.)

$30,000,000 for the poor… amazing in ONE night.  i was saddened to watch as i realized that money is a beautiful band-aid

I confess. I am an American Idol fan. I really liked Carrie Underwood, and I thought Taylor Hicks was the right choice last year. And yes, I like Reuben, Fantasia, Clay and Kelly Clarkson.

It just felt odd to hear Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell walking and talking in what I am sure were well-scripted scense through the poverty-stricken conditions in Africa, expressing compassion and really, abhorrence of what they were seeing. And then the videos of poverty-stricken American kids that are going to be helped by the money raised.

Here is what I was thinking: Where is the Church of Jesus Christ? I was wondering what would happen if we spent half as much on marketing, the production of weekend services and facilities and took the surplus money and poured it into attacking the roots of spiritual darkness at the tactical level. Attacking poverty with education and compassion and job training and financial initiatives. Attacking homelessness with clinics and housing and relationship. Attacking hunger and thirst with food and drink. Attacking violence with love. And fatherlessness with the love of the Heavenly Father. Maybe then we wouldn’t celebrate our efforts with a song that proclaims the absence of God and religion and we could imagine just a little bit what the kingdom of God might be like.

Ah well, I am pretty sure that wouldn’t meet my needs. I wonder if the worship leader is going to do my favorite songs this weekend.

Bad things happen, and from time to time, they happen on college campuses. In Nov. 99, twelve students died in the collapse of a bonfire on the campus of Texas A&M. At the time, I was struck by this tragedy. I wrote:

When tragedy strikes, people of faith are called upon to respond to tough questions. "God, why do bad things happen to good people?" One thing that can be certain is that the Christian God is a suffering God. Many times in the ministry of Jesus, He was moved by compassion. (See the gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, verse 36). In our tragedies and sorrows, God suffers along with us….until that day when…"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." Rev. 21:4.

Eric Stanford contributed a great article to a special report we published at the time, in it he wrote:

There’s nothing like the sudden death of the young to punch a hole in our papier-mâché "reality."

* In a world where medical advances are announced daily and life expectancy is stretching like a rubber band . . .
* In a world where the economy has been so strong for so long that it’s calling into question the very idea of "economic cycles" . . .
* In a world where we have more ways to distract ourselves (Discman, Nintendo, satellite TV, on and on) than ever before . . .
* In that sort of a world, we can easily become insulated from what’s really real. The padding muffles the sounds, softens the edges. We are anesthetized.

Life is for real. This is the real thing. People don’t always get that, anymore. And then the young die suddenly.

These are some of the thoughts swirling around in the aftermath of yesterday’s tragic shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech University. The media is demanding the answers to other questions: Can gun control prevent this kind of violence? Are campus officials to blame for not issuing an earlier warning?

I am reminded that all around the world, particularly in war zones, mass casualties are happening every day. People died on our nation’s highways over the weekends (this happens week in and week out in America). Storms and flooding claimed lives in the last few days.

I have no answers. Just a sadness and a desire for God’s kingdom to come, on earth, as it is in heaven.