In the last week, snow has provided the backdrop to my life.

While visiting my daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids last week in Pennsylvania, we had 20 plus inches of snow in their neighborhood. Snow fell nearly every day. I drove back to Front Royal, Virginia on Saturday to avoid the snow, only to find on the next day another three inches of snow here.

It was beautiful, huge whirling flakes plummeting down.

Snow is nature's erasure, leaving the land and the soul cleansed.

All my best to all who read these words,
Jeff

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Everyone I know suffers from some form of stress. Family obligations, work, money worries, anxiety over national events: these and other tensions wear all of us down. Our days become burdened with apprehension and strain, we hit the bed at night exhausted by anxiety, and we rise in the morning and within minutes find ourselves edgy and even overwhelmed by the demands of the day.

But are we meant to live this way?

In the article below, I ask that question and then suggest some ways out, advice I myself often ignore to my disadvantage. But I keep trying to remember that leisure, a real pause from life's activities and duties, might make me a better person, what my church might call more fully human.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-case-for-true-leisure-finding-rest-and-contemplation-in-trying-times_3655633.html

Here is a movie for our time...for any time. 

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.

It's about Sophie Scholl, her brother, and some friends who founded the White Rose during World War II, a group opposed to Nazi totalitarianism. It's also about freedom, love of friends and family, faith, and resistance to tyranny. 

My review and some thoughts on the movie are here: https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-suns-still-shining-the-courage-of-sophie-scholl_3665966.html

The movie is available free on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baRvF6ZBK18

If you can spare the time, please watch this important film. It reminds us of our humanity, of what it means to be alive, of goodness and honor. 

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“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Bradbury wrote the novel Fahrenheit 451about a world that systematically burned books.

In late December, I resolved to try and read more books than those I review for Western North Carolina’s Smoky Mountain News. I settled on a book a month, six old and six new, though I may change that proportion in favor of older books. I’ve just finished Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which I found difficult at first but soon came to enjoy. In those pages I was surprised to discover themes about harsh government, ambition, and cultural destruction pertinent to our own time.

Next up is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel about anarchists and radicals, The Devils, also known as The Demons and The Possessed, depending on the translator. My own translation is that of Constance Garnett, who long ago brought so many Russian authors, including Tolstoy, into the English-speaking world.

Wanting to compare her translation to more modern ones, I set off for the public library, donned the required mask, and looked on the fiction shelves for good old Dos.

Nothing. Nada. No The Brothers Karamazov. No Crime and Punishment. No Notes From the Underground. And definitely no The Devils. Looking at the library’s catalogue, I found The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot were checked out, and a couple of the Russian’s other books were available on eAudiobook and CDs.

The day before this disappointing excursion, I received the following email sparked by another article I’d written about books. Here is part of what my correspondent had to say:

I was a public school Librarian for 26 years. I blame myself and the American Library association for throwing away the old books. We were taught in library school that it was bad to have a collection older than x years (depended on [the] subject). So we threw out the old books and replaced them [with] teen angst, near porn, cataclysmic nuclear war and now drag queens reading LGBTQQRSTUV literature at story time. I apologize to you and all bibliophiles. We didn’t burn them we just threw them away because ‘the standards’ told us to.

Though I know the meaning of only the first four letters of that eleven-letter alphabet soup, I want to reassure this woman that I understand why librarians must remove some older books from the shelves. It’s just a question of space. As for what books the literary world is pushing at teenagers these days, that reading list might explain their high rate of depression and the feeling among some young people that the world is coming to an end.

But my understanding of discards ends when I’m looking at the “D” shelf in the library and see no books by one of the world’s most celebrated writers. Someone has checked out the two novels owned by the library, which is good news for our culture, but shouldn’t this bastion of civilization have all of Dostoevsky’s novels and stories in its print collection?

​While this absence may simply be negligence on the part of my librarians, others take a less benign stance on disappearing certain books. In our world of cancel culture we see lots of people running around with lit matches and cans of kerosene, ready to set afire, metaphorically, any book that offends them. Books from Huckleberry Finn and Sounder to Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters are condemned for their failure to conform to contemporary prejudices, removed from school reading lists, and in some cases, physically burned.

As one Massachusetts teacher recently tweeted, “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!”

Why this disdain for one of the world’s greatest classics? Is the reading too difficult for today’s students? Is it irrelevant? Did the teacher object to Homer’s portrayals of manhood, honor, and warriors? Does the faithful Penelope grate on today’s feminist sensibilities?

This teacher and others like her are robbing our children of their heritage. We may laugh or grouse about the ignorance of so many of our younger citizens, who can’t identify Jane Austen, our enemies in the Second World War, or the Bill of Rights, but the fault lies much less with them and more with those who taught them.

Of all the methods of conveying our civilization—painting, sculpture, music, and architecture—surely the written word must rank as the engine in this train of culture. Books were the transmitters of tradition and thought, and they remain so today. Whatever our political persuasion—liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, libertarians—most of us recognize the literary achievements of the West, and the need to honor them and keep them alive for future generations.

The nursery rhymes of Mother Goose, the great fairy tales and poetry, the plays of Shakespeare, novels and short stories, histories and biographies, books of philosophy and religion, political tracts like our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution: these are the heart of our civilization, and only we can keep that heart beating and healthy.

I’ll start by having a kind word with my friends, the librarians.

The article above first appeared on Intellectual Takeout on January 28, 

Throughout “Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost,” which I highly recommend, author and Epoch Times columnist Michael Walsh raises a number of questions pertinent to Western culture and masculinity in the 21st century. Is our culture capable of producing citizens possessed by a sense of honor? Do we still regard heroism—duty, honor, and country, often practiced in the face of tremendous odds—as a virtue? Are young American men today prepared to fight in a war as did Walsh’s father in Korea, a Marine at the Chosin Reservoir doing battle with a horde of Chinese soldiers?

Let’s start with that last question.

​To which the answer is no.
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Tonight this one’s just for readers of this blog.
 
This evening, just a few minutes ago, I stumbled across this video of Billy Joel singing “Piano Man,” and it reminded me of so many wonderful nights before masks and shutdowns became the new norm.
 
I thought of the night at Harvard Gardens in Boston, then a simple bar crowded and patronized by everyone from day laborers living on the Backside of Beacon Hill to doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital across the street, when I met my wife Kris, a nurse at that institution. I remembered nights at the Cotton Exchange in Charlottesville, when my brother-in-law played his guitar and sang to a room so crowded on one Saturday night that chairs in that establishment were actually broken. There were other nights too when Kris and I would meet at Charlottesville’s Lena’s Dance or at Court Square Tavern along with her fellow nurses for a drink after they got out of work, and the air would be thick and blue with cigarette smoke, loud with talk and music. I recollect as well those evenings at Bogart’s in Waynesville, North Carolina, when the bar was packed with husbands and wives, lovers, and men and women on the prowl.
 
I recalled those evenings in Asheville when I was alone after Kris’s death and would walk to the Battery Park Book Exchange for a glass of wine and the pleasure of being surrounded by books and other people.
 
So much of what was now seems lost to us.
 
Too bad.
 
Because so much of what was—well, it was wonderful.
 
Let’s hope and pray those times returns.

Were she alive today, my mother would surely be a target for cancel culture. She loved listening to recordings of Broadway musicals, and stuck the lyrics of some of these songs into the brains of her children. Even as I write these words, I'm humming "Bloody Mary" to myself and tapping my feet to "My doll is as dainty as a sparrow." 

Here's a bit of explanation from Intellectual Takeout: https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/cancel-culture-and-the-golden-age-of-musical-theater/

The older I grow, the more I admire and appreciate those of us who work with their hands and their minds. To all of you--builders, plumbers, electricians, and the rest--thank you.

The post below first appeared at The Epoch Times.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/self-reliance-an-american-virtue_3627546.html

The piece below appeared earlier this week on Intellectual Takeout.

What So Proudly We Hailed By Jeff Minick
 
At the Jan. 6 rally in Washington D.C., those of us entering the VIP section were required to throw our tote bags in the trash. We divvied up various items, threw the rest away, and entered the grounds.

When we left the rally, someone had emptied all of those cans onto the street and the muddy ground of the entranceway. Dozens of people were picking through this trash, looking for their belongings, and my daughter, her friend, and I all found our bags. They were a little worse for wear, flecked here and there with mud, but still usable.

I also found fifteen American flags lying in a cluster in that mud and grass.

The police had forbidden flags on poles in the VIP area, even small ones such as these, and I guess they dumped them in with the rest of the trash.

Call it the Boy Scout in me, but I picked up those flags, all of which were somehow still in pristine condition, wrapped them in a bundle, and carried them to the Lincoln Memorial where our ride home awaited us.

Those emblematic orphans are now sitting in a chair on the front porch of my house.

Old Glory. The Stars and Stripes. The Red, White, and Blue. The Star-Spangled Banner. The Grand Old Flag.

The American flag.

That flag has taken a lot of hits lately. Protesters have burned flags at their “peaceful” rallies. Some have cursed the country for which it stands. Some now see an American flag in the yard of a house as a sign that the owner is a fascist. And now someone saw fit to throw that flag onto the muddy ground.

The tumultuous events following the rally and the march on the Capitol have since caused me to ask myself what the flag stands for.

For me, that piece of cloth embodies so many ideas and ideals that to describe them all in this space is impossible. We face that banner when we sing our National Anthem, hands over our hearts. We turn to it when we recite the Pledge of Allegiance, saying “to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.”

Woven into that banner are the words from the Declaration of Independence, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Constitution with the Bill of Rights, those amendments proclaiming our liberties as natural rights rather than favors given us by any government, are also in the fabric of our flag. In those stars and stripes is the promise that we are a nation of laws, not of men.

In that flag I see the faces of those who have gone before us and shaped our country—the pioneers, slaves, Indians, immigrants from around the world, craftsmen and inventors, farmers and shopkeepers, and mothers and fathers. Here, too I see figures from our history books—Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Booker T. Washington, and an army of others whose achievements created the country I love.

Old Glory has waved above many a battlefield on which Americans fought and died to retain their freedom: Chickamauga, Gettysburg, Okinawa, Normandy, and a thousand other places, many of them now forgotten by most of us. Those red stripes in our flag represent hardiness and bravery, true, but also the blood of all those who paid the ultimate price defending their country.

​As we all know, our country is deeply divided right now. The mayhem at the Capitol Building and the discord following is just the latest sign of that division, one more example of our fractured culture, which some are even now using to further separate us.

Many of us have forgotten we are all Americans. Some political leaders, members of the mainstream media, and our cultural gurus want us divided by race, gender, or ideology. We must always resist these devious maneuvers.

We are, first and foremost, Americans living under one flag. Until we recognize that truth, we will go on beating one another up, figuratively and sometimes literally.

On holidays such as the Fourth of July and Memorial Day, my wife, prior to her death, used to line the sidewalk in front of our house with flags like the ones I rescued at the rally. As I pondered what to do with the flags I had retrieved, I decided to follow her example, but expand the enterprise. On pleasant days, I will stick the poles of five of those flags into the earth along the walkway leading up to my front porch. The others I will distribute to my grandchildren.

Maybe someone will take note of those sidewalk flags and remember who we are.

I took a break from writing this piece at 7:20 this morning and stepped to the back deck of the house. The rising sun, still partially hidden by the pines at the edge of the yard, made a flag of the sky, painting it with red, white, and blue stripes. “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning” runs the old adage, but that spectacle of nature “at the dawn’s early light” brought tears of wonder to my eyes.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/what-so-proudly-we-hailed/

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