Author: Eric Johnson

Worthy of Aristotle
My son, Charlie, started attending Mass with my wife and I right before he turned three. One day, he said, “Nursery is for little kids. I want to go to church,” and so he started coming with us. We were going to starting bringing him anyway in a couple of weeks.
He’s pretty well-behaved, but he doesn’t know much about what’s going on, so I try to clue him in whenever I can. Last Sunday, as we watched the parishioners receive communion, I told him that although the little round pieces of bread look like bread, they’re actually Jesus.
Without hesitation, he pointed to the crucifix over the altar. “That’s Jesus,” he said confidently. “Well, that’s a statue of Jesus,” I explained. “It’s kind of like a picture, because it isn’t the real person. But the bread is really Jesus, and it’s called the Eucharist.”
“How does that happen?”
“Father changes it into Jesus when he prays over the bread.”
“How does he do that?”
“God does it through him.”
We talked a little more about it, and Charlie seemed satisfied. Josef Pieper once said that children ask questions worthy of Aristotle, and I’m beginning to see what he means.

, something frowned on by death-penalty abolitionists. According to the lightweight Justice Breyer, it “is a relic of the past and inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society,” dontcha know. Leaving aside the perennial question of how unelected lawyers with unlimited terms of office have the capacity to judge shifts in pubic opinion, I don’t know how death-penalty abolitionists can make this case with any moral consistency. If the death penalty is wrong, it’s wrong — on anybody. Are they saying that it’s particularly heinous to execute a 17-year-old minor for a brutal murder, but not quite as bad to execute an 18-year-old for that crime?
Yes, that’s exactly what they’re saying. Here’s an excerpt from the UPI story about the four justices who dissented from the refusal to consider this particular case:

Monday’s dissent came in the case of Kevin Nigel Stanford, who was convicted in 1981 of a murder committed in Kentucky when he was 17 years and 4 months old.
Stanford and an accomplice repeatedly raped and sodomized a 20-year-old woman during the robbery of a gas station where she worked. The men took her to a wooded area, and Stanford shot her point blank in the face, then in the back of the head, to prevent her from testifying against him.

So if Mr. Stanford had been eight months older, then it wouldn’t have been as bad to execute him. Isn’t that what they’re saying? Can somebody explain that reasoning? Anyone?
If you ask the American public if they think the death penalty is appropriate for minors, you’d likely get a far different result than if you asked them about the case of Kevin Nigel Stanford. I bet there are many people who say they’re against a juvenile death penalty in general who would be willing to throw the switch for that particular “boy.”
The argument is particularly specious because we’re not talking about the violation of some arcane tax law, but about hurting and killing innocent people. Toddlers know it’s bad to hurt people. Little kids know it’s wrong to kill the innocent. A 17-year-old does too.
The court also refused to consider the case of sad, suffering Charles Kenneth Foster, who has been on Florida’s death row since the Ford administration. Justice Breyer, “If executed, Foster, now 55, will have been punished both by death and also by more than a generation spent in death row’s twilight…It is fairly asked whether such punishment is both unusual and cruel.” Justice Thomas would have none of that dreck:

Long delays are simply part of the death penalty jurisprudence imposed by the courts, Thomas said….Foster “could long ago have ended his ‘anxieties and uncertainties’ … by submitting to what the people of Florida have deemed him to deserve: execution,” Thomas said. “Moreover, this judgment would not have been made had (Foster) not slit Julian Lanier’s throat, dragged him into the bushes, and then, when (Foster) realized that he could hear Lanier breathing, cut his spine.”

Darn right! I love that man, a love dwarfed only by my affection for Justice Scalia.

If you read any Web-based discussion forums, you’ll see this a lot. It’s a simulation of slow, laborious talking, to wit: “time that you can never. Get. Back.” Or, “I was eating some of their chocolate cake (so! good!).” The first few times, that was novel. The 4,054th time, you should get a spanking. And not the playful, birthday-type of spanking.
2. “Well.” This is a mildly sarcastic interjection that has gotten way, way out of hand on the Web. Here’s one common usage: “The trouble with terrorists is, well, they terrorize people.” It used to be a way of calling attention to the meaning of a word or a phrase by pointing to its derivation. Great. But it’s become a way of avoiding a real explanation, such as “The problem with terrorists is that they’re effective in doing what they do.”
3. “Uh” and “um.” Verbal pauses, exported to written language. Not bad in themselves, but again, they’re overused. “Uh, Bert, we knew that already.” “If you want my opinion, I say…um, no.” Grrr.
I know others out there feel the same way I do. Please contribute your. own. pet. peeves.

Keeping people poor by importing poor people
I have nothing against immigrants. My grandparents were immigrants; my youth was spent working side-by-side next to immigrants in most of my dirty jobs (restaurant worker and construction laborer, to name two). There are plenty of immigrants, or their children, in the Marine reserve unit in which I serve. That many recent immigrants have contributed valuable things to American culture is indisputable; many if not most of them are patriotic in a way that would embarrass your average college professor. In the days after September 11, I was touched at how many Salvadorans had proudly mounted the American flag on their humble vehicles.
My suggestion that follows, then, is not in a spirit of fear or malice. I believe it’s a bad idea to turn illegal aliens into legal aliens just because they’ve managed to evade the INS for a sufficient amount of time. The idea of “legalization” is supported by a substantial number of bishops, as described in a recent Catholic News Service article, “Immigrants rally for legalization; bishop calls issue ‘justice'”. (A summary is here, but you’ll have to check your local diocesan paper to see if they ran the full article.) The key quotation, from Bishop Wenski of the bishops’ migration committee, is “As pastors, we witness the moral and spiritual consequences of a system which decries the presence of the undocumented and at the same time it benefits from their hard labor.”
The “system” to which the bishop is referring is, presumably, Federal law. I don’t know that it “decries” anything, but it does say that if you come to this country, you have to ask permission first. Is the bishop (or his brother bishops) saying that it’s unjust for a nation-state to control its own borders? It’s not as if the “undocumented” forgot to fill out a few forms so they’d be “documented.” They broke the law in coming to the U.S., and they continue to break the law by working and living in the country without permission.
If my choice was between a chancy existence in my hometown in Peru or Mexico, I might consider breaking American immigration law, too. I don’t blame the illegal immigrants themselves too much. The people I blame are the politicians and other leaders who look the other way when the laws are broken.
Juxtapose the bishops’ opinions on this matter with their calls for a “just wage,” and neither position makes any sense. You can’t complain about the stagnant wages of low-wage occupations, then encourage the importation of more low-skilled or unskilled workers. If there are more workers competing for the same jobs, the price of their labor goes down. If the number of workers remains the same, but demand for their labor increases, wages go up. It’s that pesky law of supply and demand, and like the law of gravity, it cannot be repealed by wishful thinking.
Why should American citizens — inner-city blacks, Hispanic farmworkers, or poor rural whites — have to pay the price because our elites are squeamish about enforcing any law that might possibly offend an ethnic minority, or because they like the cheap labor that serves them their food and cleans their houses? Drastically lower levels of immigration would make the low end of the labor market tighter. Employers would invest more in training and equipment for those workers. Training and equipment make workers more productive. When workers are more productive, employers can afford to pay them more. Isn’t that more “just”? What’s wrong with helping our poor that way?
Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that lax immigration enforcement killed 3,000 Americans last year, as reported by National Review. The State Department should have rejected 15 of the 19 hijacker-murderers, but they let them through without any serious scrutiny. (You’ll recall that the 20th hijacker was only caught when he started yelling at his flight instructors that he didn’t care about taking off or landing, he only wanted to know how to fly a plane through the air.) That isn’t related to the high immigration levels, but it does reflect the elite consensus that immigration isn’t really a serious problem, or worthy of vigorous law enforcement.
Encouraging contempt for civil law, lowering the wages of the poor, and exposing the country to terrorist attack — what’s the positive aspect about our immigration policies? One of the officers in my unit, who runs a construction business in civilian life, jokes that the government will wake up when the kids of the immigrants get law degrees and start charging $20 an hour for legal work. Then the fancypants yuppies will think immigration is a problem!