The ‘Wait, What?!’ of the Week, October 30, 2015

Back in July 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama said this about the president at the time, George W. Bush: “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents -- number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back -- $30,000 for every man, woman and child.” Candidate Obama characterized President Bush’s actions regarding the national debt as “unpatriotic” and “irresponsible.” And you know what? I agree.

In the 6-1/2 years since Mr. Obama took office in January 2009, the national debt has increased by another 9 trillion dollars; it now stands at $18 trillion. The debt is expected to reach $22 trillion by the time he leaves office.

Wait. What?! When Bush increased the national debt by $4 trillion in eight years, it was unpatriotic and irresponsible. So what would you call it when the debt increases by $9 trillion in 6-1/2 years?

If an enemy foreign power wished to destroy our nation, a sinister and effective tactic would be to saddle future generations of Americans with a crushing debt that can never be repaid. When it finally “hits the fan,” it is not gonna be pretty. Calamities of biblical proportion never are. When that time comes (not if, by the way), you’d better have a good supply of the “Five B’s”: beans, blankets, boots, bullets, and Bibles. 

Just sayin’.

Halloween Is Candy Day

Saturday is Halloween. When you mention the word “Halloween,” many things come to mind: carved pumpkins; wild and weird costumes; haunted houses; trick-or-treaters; yard decorations of skeletons, witches, and ghosts; and gathering together to sing the old traditional Halloween carols, such as, um, such as — hey, there aren’t any Halloween songs, are there? I guess “Thriller” by Michael Jackson and “Monster Mash” by that guy impersonating Boris Karloff are the only songs that even come close. Where is Irving Berlin when you need him?

Anyway, if you are a kid, there is one thing above all others that comes to mind when the word “Halloween” is mentioned: candy. On the official Candy Overdose Meter, Halloween leaves all the other holidays in the dust. You could add up the candy you get from all other holidays during the calendar year — Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Arbor Day (with its delightful chocolate-covered tree bark) — and it would not add up to half of what you get in an over-stuffed pillow case after an evening of trick-or-treating on Halloween.

When I was a kid, each of us would amass at least 40 pounds of chocolate, which was enough candy to keep our acne flourishing for months, until we got a chocolate bunny booster shot at Easter.

Let’s face it, if there was no candy on Halloween, the holiday would be about as exciting as National Dental Hygienist Appreciation Day. (And if there was no candy on Halloween, many dental hygienists would be unemployed.)

To the candy industry, Halloween is similar to what Christmas is for shopping malls: it makes or breaks their entire financial year. Depending on whether or not sales are good during Halloween determines if executives at the Hershey Corporation will receive massive cash bonuses, or instead receive small bags of stale Hershey Kisses. (No, I’m kidding. The big bosses always get their money, but if sales are down, right after they purchase yachts with their bonus money they’ll have to announce layoffs at the factories.)

Halloween sales are crucial to the candy industry, which explains why we started seeing Halloween candy on store shelves around Labor Day. (I was about to take offense at seeing Halloween candy during the first week of September, but then I saw Christmas stuff for sale during the second week of September. Yikes!)

Selling Halloween candy in September doesn’t bug me nearly as much as what has happened to the SIZE of the candy bars. You practically need a microscope to see them nowadays. Just recently I peeled the wrapper off a mini candy bar, and I was stunned. “This is a Snickers?” I said. “It’s not even a Snick!” It was like having an individually wrapped peanut M&M. You’d have to squeeze about two dozen of these so-called candy bars through a Play Doh Fun Factory just to get what used to be considered a medium sized candy bar.

Remember the good ol’ days of our youth, when a jumbo sized Three Musketeers bar was about the same size as a meat loaf? Now that was a candy bar!

The mini, microscopic candy bars are simply embarrassing. And I’m going to make sure the trick-or-treaters who come to our house on Saturday get real candy bars, as large as I can find at the store. 

Correction, I just had a brief discussion with my wife, who informed me of the price of chocolate these days. Apparently, jumbo sized candy bars now cost about the same as a Porsche. So, on further review, the trick-or-treaters who come to our house will get a delightful treat. And in case they’re not sure, I’ll let them borrow my microscope.

Is Blindness Punishment For Sin?

In John’s gospel, chapter 9, we read the fascinating story of a man born blind who was healed by Jesus. At the very beginning of this episode, Jesus’ disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The conventional wisdom back in biblical times was that illnesses and birth defects were inflicted by God as punishment for sin. Stop and think about that for a minute. Imagine that you have a disability, such as blindness or a missing limb or the inability to walk. Even if you have loving family and friends to assist you, your day-to-day life is a real struggle. But then add to that scenario the fact that everyone in your community is convinced your disability is punishment for something terrible you’ve done. Whoa! Talk about miserable!

Can you imagine how awful that must’ve been back then? I suspect the physical difficulties were dwarfed by the heartache of receiving zero empathy or understanding from all of the villagers.

In answer to the disciples’ question, Jesus explained that neither the blind man nor his parents sinned. Then He miraculously restored the man’s sight, and the subsequent interplay between the healed man and the Pharisees is fascinating. Go read it sometime.

But let’s get back to the idea of assuming physical disabilities are divine punishment for sin. As Christians living in the modern, scientific world, we know nowadays that God’s awesome creation is filled with a lot of uncertainty and randomness. God created the world “good,” but once sin entered into the picture, physical corruption and death followed. So we live in a wonderful yet fallen world, and our understanding of genetics, probability, and statistics makes it clear that accidents do happen. These accidents have nothing to do with a person’s moral character. It’s just, well, bad luck.

In God’s mysterious plan for the world, bad stuff happens to good people and we are called to rely on God’s mercy and grace to deal with whatever problems confront us. This would be quite depressing if our life on earth was all there is. However, the reward of eternal joy in Heaven will make all the struggles here seem minor.

So, living on this side of eternity, here in our fallen world, certainly can be filled with pain and suffering. But at least nowadays we no longer blame afflicted people for their disabilities.

Or do we?

Consider these scenarios: 1) Someone looks at a poverty-stricken single mother and thinks to himself, “Hey, if you didn’t get pregnant in your teens, you wouldn’t be broke today.” Or maybe the thought is: “Hey, if you didn’t nag your husband all the time, he wouldn’t have left you, and you wouldn’t be in this situation.” Very compassionate, huh?

2) How about the many people in our society who struggle with drug and alcohol addiction? They lose a job or lose their driver’s license, and people quickly mutter to themselves, “Hey, if you just had some willpower, your life wouldn’t be such a mess.” No thought, of course, is given to what it’s actually like to struggle with a chemical addiction, nor the fact that some people are genetically predisposed to become addicted more easily than others.

3) Here’s another one: people who get diagnosed with heart disease or diabetes. No doubt many people think to themselves, “Hey, if you didn’t eat like a pig for the last 40 years you wouldn’t have gotten sick.”

Yes, we modern people are very understanding, aren’t we? We’re nothing like those hard-hearted folks in the first century. Yeah, sure. 

Maybe it’s time to be honest about our supposed “enlightened” attitudes nowadays. Maybe it’s time we show a bit more compassion and mercy to those who struggle with various afflictions. Because you never know, God might strike us blind as punishment for our sinful and hard hearts.

The ‘Wait, What?!’ of the Week, October 25, 2015

Bernie Sanders is running for president. He trails only Hillary Clinton in the polls for the Democrat party nomination. During a televised debate last week, Sanders offered the most memorable sound bite of the entire evening when shouted this about Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!”

Wait. What?! The man says he wants to be the President of the United States, and the person ahead of him in the polls is being investigated by the FBI for possible crimes committed when she used a secret, unauthorized, unsecure email server, and then deleted tens of thousands of messages before investigators could review them. And Sanders effectively takes this issue off the table by claiming (wrongly) that everyone is sick and tired of hearing about it?

Something is very fishy here. That is simply not what a candidate does if he truly wants to win the nomination. I have a feeling Senator Sanders took a dive to clear the way for Mrs. Clinton. He is only pretending to run for president and is now engaged in running interference for her. When he spouts far-left Socialist ideas, by contrast her Socialist-Lite views seem moderate. 

I wonder what high-level cabinet position in the Hillary administration has been promised to Sen. Sanders?

The Ultimate Bathroom Reading Experience

In response to my various columns, essays, and blog posts, I get a decent amount of email feedback each week (although some of it is, in fact, indecent).

Some of the email messages make me smile, especially the ones that say, “Hey Bill, your column today about the casket that fell out of the hearse on the way to the cemetery was really funny.” Other messages make me shrug, especially ones like this: “Hey Bill, you ended a sentence with a preposition again, something I cannot put up with.” And still other messages make me cry myself to sleep, especially the ones that say, “If you think that was funny, young man, you’ve got another think coming! Love, Mom.”

However, recently I received an indecent email that caused me to stare at my computer screen with my mouth hanging open. (As opposed to the rest of the time, when I stare at my computer screen while my mouth chews on a donut.) I didn’t know how to react to this particular message.

Here is the actual email note (except for her full name), which unlike the three quotations above, I did not make up:

“Hi Bill, M. here. My husband and I met you at the Main Street Marketplace last year, and I bought a couple of your books. I thought you would enjoy the humor in this. I had not read your book ‘Matter of Laugh or Death — Volume 7’ yet, and Wednesday I had to have the prep for my 5 year colonoscopy (which I know you’ll appreciate since you discuss your own procedure in the book).”

Umm, that is correct. I did write a column about my colonoscopy. No, actually it was two columns.

M. continued: “Trapped in the bathroom for 5 hours straight, and then again the next morning for 5 hours straight, I needed something funny to pass the time. Then I remembered your collection of humor columns. It was the most hysterical thing I’ve ever read. It made me appreciate the absurdity of what I was going through, and kept me laughing for 10 hours. My husband couldn’t believe how good a mood I was in, although as time passed it got a little less good. But I told him it was because of your book.”

Now, please understand, I’m not reprinting M.’s email just to pat myself on the back and boast. I’m reprinting M.’s email to try to sell some darn books! They told me 3,000 people attend the Main Street Marketplace each week. So you’d think a guy would be able to sell more than seven books, even if the book for sale was the 1996 Phone Book. And since the publisher’s minimum order quantity was 500 books, let’s just say I’ve got a fair number of heavy cardboard boxes piled up in my basement. If I could get rid of some of those books, that would be awesome. 

I’m thinking of three possibilities here. First, I can rent a dumpster and toss out the boxes of leftover books. However, destroying books is probably a sin, and besides, the boxes are kind of heavy. For the second option, you can contact me at MerryCatholic@gmail.com and I’ll mail you a copy of my book. If you think it’s any good, send me a check. My third idea is to contact the American Gastroenterologist Association, and try to convince them to write prescriptions for my book as a required part of the colonoscopy preparation procedure. But if my humor book becomes an official medical device, in keeping with the healthcare industry’s pricing structure, I’ll have to change the price of the book from ten bucks to $243.86 — with a 20% co-pay.

The ‘J’ Word Can Get You in Trouble

In the gospel reading for the weekend of October 24th and 25th, we hear about a Catholic priest in Manhasset, NY, who gave a blessing during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and during the blessing he mentioned the word “Jesus.” Immediately, a local politician jumped up and angrily interrupted the priest. The politician grabbed the microphone and, as a stunned crowd looked on, declared, “This is inappropriate!”

Oops, wait a minute. My mistake. We don’t read about that event in this week’s gospel reading. That occurred in the United States a few years ago. It seems that just mentioning the word “Jesus” in public is very offensive, and doing so can get you in a lot of trouble.

No wait, that’s not quite right. It’s perfectly OK to mention the word “Jesus” in public, as long as you do it as part of an angry and profane curse, for example, when you stub your toe or lose your cell phone signal. You can shout out the name of Jesus as profanity and it’s perfectly acceptable.

Or if you are a self-proclaimed “artist,” and you’ve received a taxpayer-funded government grant, you can dunk a crucifix in a jar of your own urine, call it “art” and see your work displayed in the finest museums.

In these situations, the name of “Jesus,” along with the requisite vulgarities and scatology, constitute freedom of speech.

You get into trouble saying the word “Jesus” in public only when it’s part of the concept that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the founder of Christianity, and—here’s the real offense—in the process imply that you personally believe what the Bible says about Jesus is really true.

Oh sure, there’s stuff in the U.S. Constitution about freedom of speech and freedom of religion, blah, blah, blah. But in our sophisticated modern culture we all understand that the clearly written freedoms of speech and religion in the Constitution take a back seat to the unwritten freedom FROM religion, which is based on the also unwritten constitutional right NEVER to be offended.

In this week’s REAL gospel reading, it is interesting to notice that many people 2,000 years ago also were part of a sophisticated modern culture—that is, they too were offended when someone said the word “Jesus” in public.

A blind man named Bartimaeus sat by the roadside begging. When he heard that Jesus was passing by, he called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!”

The next verse in the gospel says, “And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent.”

That’s pretty much what happened to the Catholic priest in New York. As soon as he mentioned the word “Jesus” he was rebuked and told to be quiet.

In our country, all believers in Christ have the constitutionally-guaranteed rights both to exercise our faith freely and speak our minds publicly. We all should be more like Bartimaeus, who, when told to be quiet, instead shouted all the louder, “Son of David, have pity on me!” We should take our cue from St. Peter who also was told by people in authority to stop talking about Jesus. Peter said, “We must obey God rather than men!” (Act 5:29).

I have an idea. Let’s stop using safe, generic figures of speech. For example, when someone sneezes, instead of saying, “God bless you” (which is usually a mumbled “G’blessya” anyway), say firmly and loudly, “Jesus bless you!” I bet you’ll get some very surprised looks. 

Now of course, when someone sneezes and you respond with, “Jesus bless you,” you really have to mean it.

The ‘Wait, What?!’ of the Week, October 16, 2015

Last week President Obama was in Seattle, and he said, “Why are all these Republicans so down on America? Listening to them is really depressing.”

Wait. What?! Why are Republicans “down on America”? Um, this is the man who came into office and said he planned to “fundamentally transform” the nation. Would you want to fundamentally transform something you considered to be good? This is the man who sat in a church for 20 years and listened to Rev. Jeremiah Wright condemn America in the most vile and racist terms, including shouting during a sermon, “God damn America!!” This is the man whose wife (our First Lady) declared in 2008: “For the first time in my life, I'm proud of America.”

I’m pretty sure Republicans are not “down on America.” But they might be plenty concerned about what’s happened to this country during the last 6-1/2 years.