Personal: December 2004 Archives

Last week, I commented on the sad decline of the Washington Metrorail system, saying "the slack-jawed yokels who run it are slowly turning it into a costly mess with Third World-quality service." My friend and frequent Catholic Light contributor Victor Morton e-mailed me with the happy solution: former mayor Marion Barry is probably going to be on the Metro board.

You may remember Mayor Barry from a popular video he made in 1989. The production values were low, but his "How to Light a Crack Pipe" was an international hit. He also did many other noteworthy things, to wit:

He turned a solid local reputation as a civil rights leader into an international reputation as a crack addict and frequenter of loose women.

He went to jail for six months, and during a family visitation period, in a roomful of adults and children, he received a Lewinsky from a "friend" who was there visiting him.

He wasn't mayor the whole time, but in 30 years D.C. went from a city of 800,000 people in the mid-1960s to fewer than 500,000.

At one point, the Control Board appointed to straighten out the city's mess could not account for over $100,000,000 spent by the Barry administration.

That's just off the top of my head. But the people quoted in the article are probably right: he's one of the most qualified local officials to help run Metro. He's already bankrupted and despoiled the city: why not extend that success to the whole D.C. area, too?

It is very, very cold today in the D.C. area. It's so cold, my thick Russian wool coat feels as protective as a wife-beater t-shirt when the wind blows. It's so cold, when I speak outside, my words freeze in mid-air and fall to the ground, where they smash into pieces.

Naturally, there were delays on the Metrorail this morning, so about 200 people and I were left standing on the freezing station platform until a train arrived, which took over 20 minutes. The Metro was formerly the sole glory of the Washington-area transportation system, but the slack-jawed yokels who run it are slowly turning it into a costly mess with Third World-quality service. Used to be that although the roads were terrible, you couldn't get an ambulance, the police were incompetent ("Ask Us About Our 200 Unsolved Murders This Year!" is their slogan), Washingtonians could at least point to the Metro as the one thing that worked in the city.

The Metro board, made up of obscure elected officials from Washington, Virginia, and Maryland, can pat themselves on the back for taking a public good and running it into the ground — and making it more expensive, too. In three years, my daily commute has gone from less than $6 to $8.55. That actually masks the true price rise, because if you added $10 or more to your farecard, they used to give you a 10% bonus credit. What they are doing with that money, I cannot say: there are broken escalators at lots of stations, and they've reduced the frequency of trains during the off-peak hours, to the point that walking is a better option if you're going less than a mile.

But the point is: it's cold today. Also, the St. Blogs comment function seems to be broken, and Richard needs to fix it because the rest of us have no idea how to do it.

...At the fourth house they encountered that morning the Marines kicked in the door and "cleared" the front rooms, but then noticed a locked door off to the side that required inspection. Sgt. Rafael Peralta threw open the closed door, but behind it were three terrorists with AK-47s. Peralta was hit in the head and chest with multiple shots at close range.

Peralta's fellow Marines had to step over his body to continue the shootout with the terrorists. As the firefight raged on, a "yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade," as Lance Corporal Travis Kaemmerer described it, rolled into the room where they were all standing and came to a stop near Peralta's body.

But Sgt. Rafael Peralta wasn't dead — yet. This young immigrant of 25 years, who enlisted in the Marines when he received his green card, who volunteered for the front line duty in Fallujah, had one last act of heroism in him.

...In his parent's home, on his bedroom walls hung only three items - a copy of the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and his boot camp graduation certificate. Before he set out for Fallujah, he wrote to his 14-year old brother, "be proud of me, bro...and be proud of being an American."

Not only can Rafael's family be proud of him, but his fellow Marines are alive because of him. As Sgt. Rafael Peralta lay near death on the floor of a Fallujah terrorist hideout, he spotted the yellow grenade that had rolled next to his near-lifeless body. Once detonated, it would take out the rest of Peralta's squad. To save his fellow Marines, Peralta reached out, grabbed the grenade, and tucked it under his abdomen where it exploded.

Imagine what it must be like to be those Marines who were saved by Rafael Peralta. Every Christian knows that salvation was purchased with Christ's blood, but that fact can feel abstract in the quotidian reality in which we dwell. Those men know that every moment they live was directly purchased by a man who sacrificed his earthly life for them.

Many actions are Christ-like, such as feeding the poor or comforting the sick. To will your own death on behalf of others is to make yourself an alter Christus, another Christ, just as St. Paul wrote. As the article says, Sgt. Peralta may well receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. I pray that he is enjoying the greater honor of seeing the Holy One face to face.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

A hot-headed Rad-trad acquaintance suggested that since our parish is closing, maybe the congregation should do what had been done in another part of the country: buy the property from the Archdiocese through a non-Catholic front man, and get our own priest. My reply was admittedly a little huffy:

Hi, D--

I understand you believe that it's OK to "go independent", but that is absolutely foreign to me.

I converted to the Catholic Faith and was baptized in 1980, and endured all the stupidities going on in the Church at the time -- in a particularly liberal place -- in order to do so, offering it up as an act of faith.

I stayed for those months and put up with their nonsense in order to provide a little witness of reverence and faith to other people who were entering the Church there at the same time -- people who didn't know any better, and otherwise might never see anyone kneel at the Consecration or (once I was baptized) receive the Sacrament on the tongue.

The goal always before my eyes was simple: to receive the Sacraments, have my sins remitted, and to enter into communion with the Church of St. Peter. In spite of all the faults and errors of the people running that RCIA program, I knew that the priest in charge there would indeed confer the sacraments validly -- if barely so -- and at his hands I would become a Catholic, a member of Christ's one true Church.

I have no interest in becoming a Congregationalist.

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(So, yeah, the tone of that is not too nice, but sometimes it seems these angry types don't take you seriously unless you sound a little cranky. That's today apologetics tip, folks.)