The Apostles Plus Apostles Build
Plans are in the works for two other efforts, a "Womans Build," where Habitat partners with volunteers drawn from the ranks of "the weaker sex" and an "Apostles Build" that will involve twelve churches. I think both the Womans Build and the Apostles Build will produce a lot of excitement in our county on behalf of Habit For Humanity. I don’t think I qualify as a volunteer for the Womans Build, but maybe they’ll allow me to help in some small way such as providing a meal. Barbara Carter wrote the following article for "The Middle States Regional Newsletter." The Apostles On a recent trip to New York City my family and I toured the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. To my surprise and excitement they were hosting an exhibition of Michel Östlund’s "The Apostles." Since I have been involved in promoting an Apostles Build for our Habitat Affiliate, I thought this would be quite interesting. There were thirteen paintings suspended from the ceiling with the light of the stained glass windows creating almost a candlelight atmosphere. The artist had studied the accounts of the Apostles, which included Paul, to establish the character and artist's impression of each. It occurred to me that in our Apostles Build that as we are recruiting our churches, perhaps we should be aware of each personality of the Apostles and seek the same characteristics for our build. Jesus chose this mix, so shouldn't we model our list of Apostles after His. Can we identify these characteristics among our church congregations?
John – Light of Heart Could we not also use this guide in selecting Board members, committee members, and family partners? After all, we do have a commission from Christ to be about His work, not to mention our mission for Habitat. I believe that these individual traits make up an excellent whole. Which one do you match? I highly recommend viewing this artist's exhibit, and for more information visiting www.thetwelve.se. By Barbara Carter
Unnatural Disaster The Welfare State Another Hurricane entered the Gulf of Mexico this week, Hurricane Rita. Hurricanes don’t always follow the path predicted by computers and humans, but it’s likely to be a greater threat to coastal areas of Texas than to the city of New Orleans, LA. The damages caused by Katrina have given Americans much to think about in recent weeks. Three different friends of this newsletter sent us the following article. We may not all agree with the author’s premise, but his is a different viewpoint that I find worth sharing. An UnnaturalDisaster - A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of The Welfare State By Robert Tracinski It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster. If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild. Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting. But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster. The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong. The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view. The man-made disaster is the welfare state. For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country. When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11). So what explains the chaos in New Orleans? To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story: "Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on. "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire.... "Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders. " 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' " The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad. What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome? Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them? My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.) What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department.] There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa. There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves. All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency. No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism. What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men. But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them. People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects. The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting. Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual Activist Reprinted here with permission
Bodock Beau Qualified Applicant Thankfully there’s still a humor column in this newsletter, and we hope our readers find one or more of the following amusing. Y’all Come Back, Hear? A New Yorker went to visit a friend down South, and they stopped in a neighborhood restaurant for breakfast. When the waitress asked the New Yorker what he wanted, he replied, "Eggs fried in olive oil and a whole wheat bagel with low-fat cream cheese, please." The waitress jotted this down, and then asked, "Hominy grits?" "I’m not sure," the New Yorker admitted. He turned to his friend and asked, "How many grits should I order?" Qualified Applicant A large company needed a new employee. The owner put this sign on the door: "Help wanted. Must be able to type, use a computer and speak at least two languages." After a while, a dog entered the office and went to the receptionist’s desk. The dog barked and pointed to the sign, but the receptionist said they couldn’t hire him. He barked and pointed again to the sign, so the receptionist got the owner of the company. When the owner saw the dog, he said, "I’m sorry, but we can’t hire you." The dog barked and pointed to the sign another time, so the owner asked the dog if he could type. The dog went to the typewriter and typed a letter. The owner read it and then asked the dog if he could use a computer. The dog went to a computer and operated a spreadsheet program. "That’s wonderful," the owner said. "But we still can’t hire you. We really need someone who can speak two languages." The dog pointed to the sign and said, "Meow." Laugh Letter Newsletter - September 2005 Reiman Media Group, Inc.. Jay Leno "Welcome to our 3000th show tonight. We did our first show in May of 1992; a man named George Bush was president, his approval rating was only 39 percent, and someone named Clinton wanted to replace him in the White House. So nothing has changed really. If you flew out here on Northwest or Delta to say the Pledge of Allegiance, this is just not your week. The Executive Director of FEMA Mike Brown has resigned. Well, I guess we found out what can Brown do for you—he can resign! [President Bush] called the rebuilding of New Orleans one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen, second only to Cher. John Kerry was in New Orleans. He wants to help but he can't connect with the common people. Arnold Schwarzenegger will announce whether he plans to run for a second term. Or as he calls it—a sequel. Federalist Patriot 5-38 Chronicle
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Barbara has been telling me about an "Apostles Build" for more
than a year. In Habitat For Humanity, a number of options are employed
to appeal to the volunteer spirit of individuals and organizations. For instance,
the Pontotoc affiliate has already involved volunteers in a "Blitz Build,"
an effort in which one or more houses are built in a single week. (Blitz,
the German word for lightning, appropriately addresses the speed of
construction.)
