Today is our first day back to school, after a three-week period of vacation for our children. They go on a year-round schedule of nine weeks on and three weeks off.
I saw a video of a New York four-year-old running in the snow with only shoes and short underwear. People expressed alarm, and challenged the father's action, suggesting child abuse. The child seemed fine. That child may very well come as a Navy Seal twenty years hence to save me from unjust captivity in Iran, after Christian mission work I do there, merely for spreading the Gospel around where needed.
Here we have a discussion of an elderly lady on the Supreme Court and her alleged disregard for the U.S. Constitution.
I need to check the exchange rate, to see whether it is propitious to bring some money here from our stash in South Korea, Land of the Morning Calm. I like the interest rates there. I also like doing nothing with respect to money, but just focusing on my theological studies, as it were, per se. Nonetheless, it is only prudent to keep a regular check on the exchange rate.
I have been walking about with attention to erect torso carriage here lately. It feels unnatural, but something that I could get used to. I am also focused on drinking more tea in the mornings, two large glasses a day, if not four or more, from my evening tea binges. Sipping tea is a fine exercise, I find. It ennobles the common mind, tattered at the end of the day due to extremes of fatigue in quotidienne stresses from the normal man's working day.
Now-a-days we have perchance more stress than that sustained by our forefathers of yore, back when men were men and women were women here in America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, as it were, per se. The field of procuring a livelihood for one's burgeoning brood is ever more complex with a move into a higher degrees of socialism, what with the contingent higher tax rates and greater governmental oversight. Many are carried away with the capitalist spirit of recent decades whereupon they blithely assume the rules have not changed, and large numbers of teens report the desire to "own their own business," as their primary life time goals. They are largely unaware of the greater costs and difficulties entailed in operating a business now and in the coming decades in the U.S. Our national debt burden has never been so high, greatly reducing the potential for a healthy low tax business environment.
At the same time, there has never been a better time for intelligent high-achieving Christians, those who graduate at the top of their high school classes, to contemplate pursuing a low impact career (with low requirements of contact hours, licensing, continuing education and soft-support such as boozing and schmoozing potential clients). Something as innocuous as a massage therapist could bring in enough to live on for a small family, while minimizing work time requirements.
Several factors help Christians to survive and thrive in this socialistic environment:
1. Being willing to eschew high consumption (frequent full baths, eating out, vacations, fancy clothes, and thus and such)
2. Having family money saved up to enable home purchases without debt.
3. Living in low income communities.
4. Doing home improvements themselves.
5. Barter and Trade with other Christians
6. Having larger numbers of Children and investing more time in raising them. Adoption is great for this.
More children means less tax exposure in spades, and qualifies one for Medicaid and Food Stamps for his children. Christians stand under a moral duty to carefully gauge the shifting political and social landscape to always see where they can best position themselves to optimize their moral agency capacity before God.
A Lawyer making 200,000 a year, but paying high taxes and living the "proper lifestyle" appropriate to that career, may be morally culpable when he gets to the Pearly Gates and is seriously asked why (given his fantastic upbringing and consequent strong work ethic and study prowess) he didn't just pump gas for 20 hours a week and give 100 hours a week to volunteer work, coaching soccer, living off the dole, and teaching Sunday school classes, studying the Bible like it was going out of style. What is he going to say?
If his tax goes towards building a culture of entitlement where weaker, less fortunate people (in their upbringing) are continually shielded from Christian influence, there is not much he can say.
This is not to suggest that people could feel morally clean to vote for socialism, or to advocate it, as that ineluctably introduces the concern of complicity in theft writ large, robbing Peter to Pay Paul, now that we the people are rulers, living in a democracy, and must carefully consider whether we overstep the mandate of government to reward good and punish evil, from Romans 13.
Naturally, you are not in any wise robbing Peter when you legally enroll your children in public schools and let them take up the tab for the education of your burgeoning brood. However, you put yourself in a serious "hot seat" of moral concern when you vote for or advocate the public schooling mandate, to be sure.
Similarly, you are not ipso facto culpable merely by virtue of working in the public school system, or in the government social services sector, provided you came about your job legally. However, if you had the means to avail yourself of a similar job in the private sector, you might have some prayer material to consider. It is far more easy to control the consumption of your money than to control the means by which you earn that money within any given society. Hence, moral culpability is less potent for the way you earn your money.
While it is clearly not an admirable profession, I can see no reason to blame a fellow for running a tattoo parlour, or for brewing whiskey for sale, if he earns good money to support his family and then takes his leisure time to invest it well in his family and missions work about the neighborhood.
Advocating socialism and learning to survive within a socialistic environment (with characteristic asymmetric power relations between the individual and the state) are two different entities.
Once the individual assesses the political and social climate and realizes that his moral agency capacity is impaired in by a colossal degree for each extra dollar he earns in a private business (for the government usurping his right to control allocation of his property, the fruit of his labor), then he incurs a moral duty to minimize tax payments, reduce his consumption (living in low income areas), and maximize his time with family, church members, Bible reading and study, and mission work in his low income neighborhood.
He should seriously reconsider the "Church vacations" where people take their money and go for short trips to impoverished nations to do mission work. This is a relatively huge expense, using after tax monies, and is perhaps best understood as a vacation for stress relief from his extensive work and schooling schedule.
Home schooling children, when done with attentive parents, gives better academic preparation for college and makes more efficient use of time. Public schools, with their long days and noisy classrooms, stress out young people, such that they "need" these Christian "do-gooder" vacations in order to handle their highly stressful lives, taxed, as it were, by the public schools.
Love, Nathaniel
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