Commentary Archives - Page 2 of 5

President Carter and Southern Baptists

Ed Briggs / April 25, 2015

As a former Southern Baptist myself, I was much interested in President Carter’s reaction to recent actions by the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC is the the largest protestant religious body in the U.S.

I have been a practicing Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met. …

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Commentary Stories

Would An Amish Man Kick His Horse?

Ed Briggs / June 13, 2014

Would an Amish man kick his horse right out in public? I would never have believed that until I saw it happen. It was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The horse was hitched to his Amish carriage in the parking lot of an Amish farm market. I believe the man may have wanted the horse to back the carriage up, and maybe the house had been slow or even reluctant about doing that. So the suspendered, straw-hatted man hauled off and kicked his horse. And I mean a hard, nasty kick. A God-fearing Amish man. Really??

Would the man driving his hot car with the power of 200 or more horses gun his engine like a race driver in order to surge pass me and my bicycle, which do not have the power of even one horse? Really??

Would someone explain why college football coaches are paid way more than the college president, any of the teachers, and very often the governor of the State? Really??

Would conservative people who deny a woman's right to the abortion of an unwanted pregnancy also try to deny her the right to contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place? Really?

Would people readily believe things published in gossip tabloids, but flat deny things published in scientific journals that deal with climate and environmental issues? Really?

Would politicians with premium health care coverage provided at taxpayer expense be opposed to providing affordable health care for Americans who have none at all? Really??

Would someone explain why rich and for-profit religious broadcasting companies are allowed to be classified as churches, thus paying no taxes and obliged to no auditing or accountability? Really??

Would a woman deliberately buy a tiny bikini bathing suit that does not cover much of her butt, then spend half her time at the pool or beach tugging and trying to get it to cover? Really??

Would a country whose military budget is six times that of China, eleven times that of Russia, and 27 times that of Iran have leaders who argue that we still are insecure and need to spend more? Really??

When the Amish man kicked his own horse, I was amazed and didn't know what to say. It was hard to believe.

Those other things you get used to.

Commentary Open Water Swim Events Swimming

We Lost A Swimmer Today

Ed Briggs / June 9, 2014

Today was my fourth completion of 4.4 mile Great Chesapeake Bay Swim. I’ve described this event is previous articles and won’t repeat the details here, except to say that it continues to be, for me, a thrilling and satisfying thing to do.

Other people do not always understand this.

I came out of the water near a woman who told me that she thought she may have saved someone’s life during the swim. A man near her was suddenly in distress and she motioned for help and assisted in getting him into the boat. This event has something like 80 boats standing by to assist if needed, so help is never far away from anyone. Sadly, we later learned that the swimmer’s distress was due to a heart attack and despite the emergency responders’ efforts he was dead on arrival at the hospital.

His name was Robert Matysek and he was 58 years old. A native of nearby Baltimore, he came from his home in South Carolina to attempt this swim for the 20th time. Several of his family members were also swimming. His family testified that “This weekend was always like Christmas, Fourth of July, and his birthday all rolled into one. He passed doing one of the things he truly loved.”

I was reminded of my East Tennessee hometown days. One of our local physicians loved the hike to Mt. LeConte in the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He had a ritual of making this hike on New Year’s Day with friends and family members. He had done is for years, when one year he had a heart attack and died on the trail. “He passed doing one of the things he truly loved.”

A high school classmate of mine started and owned a large and successful business. But his passion is hiking and climbing mountains in the Sierras. That is the thing he truly loves.

A few weeks ago I did an open water swim across the Tred Avon River from Oxford, Maryland. The distance across the river was only a mile. But “only” is a relative term. As the group of us were walking along the street in Oxford to begin the swim, we passed some local residents standing in a yard and eyeing us curiously. One of them solemnly pronounced: “You people are crazy.” …

We Lost A Swimmer TodayRead More »

Commentary History Religion Stories

Racism In the Fine Print

Ed Briggs / March 3, 2014

When my mother died in 1970, my father purchased burial spaces in the Grandview Cemetery of Maryville, Tennessee. Maryville was our home town, and the location of Maryville College, where my father and mother had met as students, and where Dad returned to spend most of his life teaching.

Grandview Cemetery is well named. The “grand view” is its view of the Appalachian mountain range, locally bounded by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Out town has changed a lot over the years, but the grand view of the Smokies does not change. If you want your body buried in a cemetery, this is a good place. …

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Commentary

Don’t Let Me Hurt Myself

Ed Briggs / January 12, 2014

Our state has finally passed a law making it a primary offense to not wear a seatbelt when driving your car. That means they can stop you and give you a fine without any other reason. Not wanting to be stopped and given a fine I have been trying to train myself to always buckle up. I put a yellow velcro strap around my steering wheel when I park the car. This reminds me to put on the seat belt when I get back in the car to start driving.

When I tell you that I have not done this very gladly, you will wonder what is wrong with me. Shouldn’t I be happy that people are looking out for my welfare and making laws that force me to do things for my own good? They say that seat belts save lives and that they want to save mine. They want to keep me from hurting myself.

Currently they are also working to pass laws about using cellphones in the car. This will also keep people from hurting themselves and others. Perhaps someday it will also be illegal to drive while eating a sandwich or drinking coffee. Or fiddling with the GPS. Or listening to the radio. Perhaps someday we will be required to wear crash helmets while driving, like the NASCAR drivers all do. That would save lives too. So would wearing those fire-resistant coveralls.

If it seems that I am being ridiculous here, I submit that the same rationale for requiring a seat belt also applies to requiring a crash helmet. A large percentage of automobile crash injuries involve head injuries. These would be greatly reduced by a mandatory crash helmet law. No one can reasonably deny that. So if we want a society that passes every law that can possibly keep people from hurting themselves, this should be on the list.

When I visited Cape Town, South Africa, I rode the cable car up Table Mountain and hiked around with all the other tourists. Besides the breathtaking views, the thing that struck me was that the mountain top had been left in its natural state. There were no fences or ropes or barriers to keep you from the cliff top edges. I don’t even remember a lot of warning signs. This was in contrast to a park my family used to visit which we named “The Do-Not Park.” Everywhere you went in the park there were signs warning you what not to do there.

There are two main entrances to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee side. Gatlinburg is the main one, but my favorite is the less traveled one at Townsend. Just inside the park at the Townsend entrance is a beautiful swimming hole we always called “The Y” because there the park road forks in two directions. When I was a young boy there were two things we loved to do at this swimming hole. We would try to swim upstream against the rushing current and see how far we could get. And we would climb up the steep cliff on the far side, as high as we dared, and dive down into the clear deep water. In the summer there was often an audience gathered on the bank to watch this diving. Young boys impressed a lot of young girls here. …

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Commentary Guns Stories

Mouse Trap

Ed Briggs / November 27, 2013

Being the last of November, the weather is thinking ahead to winter here in the DC area. That sometimes means an appearance of mice into our homes. So the other evening, while peacefully watching a movie in the family room, I saw one run around the corner of a sofa. It was startling and somewhat embarrassing. Something had to be done.

When I think of catching mice, I think of the wooden Victor brand mouse trap that you bait with cheese. You bait it carefully, especially after you’ve attached the cheese to the small bait holder and you bend the wire frame back over and secure it with the flopping metal pin. If you’ve done this before and had a trap spring on you and scare you half to death, you be sure you hold the trap from the harmless end and not the end that catches the mouse. To have a finger caught in a snapping mouse trap would not be fatal, but would hurt like hell. Which is considerably more than you would want something to hurt.

Our local supermarket did not have any wooden Victor brand mouse traps. They had a strange round plastic thing I bought two of because there was nothing else. The plastic things have caught no mice. It is unclear to me how they would ever do so. If someone thought this was a better mouse trap, then this is a case where better isn’t better and is actually silly.

The local hardware chain store did not have wooden Victor brand mouse traps either. Instead they had “catch and release” mouse traps. You are supposed to trap your mice, transport them somewhere, and release them unharmed. The instructions do not suggest where this might be: a neighbor’s yard, the school playground, hardware store where you bought these traps, the desk drawer of a co-worker–use your imagination. …

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Commentary Humanity

Communication

Ed Briggs / June 25, 2013

The man walking to his airport gate with a cellphone at his ear is giving final instructions to someone with a tone of importance. Sitting in the splashing jacuzzi does not deter the bathing woman from talking on hers. And even the hotel maid waiting at the bus stop for her ride to work is talking, talking, talking.

How can she afford this? Something has convinced even our lowest wage earners and their children that their phones and talking on them is a necessity of life.

I can remember when placing a call in our small town meant picking up the receiver and waiting for an operator to say “number please.” The phone numbers were three digits and all calls through this operator were local. A long distance call was needed even for another town just a few miles away. For those you needed to ask for a long distance operator. The reception on longer distance calls was often marginal. And because of the costs, long distance calls were considered a luxury and used sparingly. Often they brought bad news: a relative dead or a soldier killed in action. When the phone system was upgraded to rotary dial models that needed no operator, that was high technology. It was also the end of their jobs for a lot of women.

If this sounds like along time ago, it really wasn’t. It was not so long before those days that nothing like a telephone or telegraph existed. Or railroads or automobiles. Or a postal system or newspaper with wide circulation. It is not that far from when the fastest way to spread the word was someone riding on a fast horse or running on foot if they lacked one.

The trend, the ever-accelerating trend, has been toward universal connectedness. People talking with more and more people including those farther and farther away. News arriving from more and more sources, and faster and faster. Information arrives constantly today, as does misinformation. Important information arrives along with the unimportant. The process overwhelms the content and the purpose. The process becomes an addiction.

Do we really need all the information that comes at us constantly? We thumb through a stack of magazines and find nothing at all of use or interest. We flip through a hundred channels on the TV without finding a single one we want to watch. Broadcasters try to entice us with “breaking news,” but we have grown accustomed to the fact that it is neither breaking nor news. Most times it is just the same things repeated over and over. …

CommunicationRead More »

Commentary Sports

How Many Socks? – Reprise

Ed Briggs / November 26, 2012

This is a followup to a post of 2011-01-01 titled “How Many Socks?” To review, just search for it or click the following link – https://edbriggs.com/edbriggs/2011/01/01/how-many-socks/

Continuing on the subject of socks, let me mention the Thorlo brand. I first became aware of Thorlo socks when I started running in the ’80’s. The Thorlo running sock was bar-none the very best to be found. They were cushioned, well fitting, and lasted almost forever. They did cost a lot, but since running requires little besides shoes in the way of equipment, the cost seemed incidental. I have had Thorlo athletic socks perform for many years despite constant service.

Over these years, Thorlo has expanded its line again and again. It now includes a sock for every activity you can think of, and in multiple styles and colors and configurations. …

How Many Socks? – RepriseRead More »

Commentary

The Nickel Effect

Ed Briggs / November 21, 2012

For as long as I can remember, there have been "grocery bags." First they were paper, then they were also plastic, and often now you have a choice. But for the past year in Montgomery County, Maryland, you also have another choice. You pay a nickel for every bag you get from the store. But you have a choice of bringing your own reusable bags and avoiding the 5 cent charge.

The logic behind this policy is fairly evident. When bags were all "free," we bagged things wastefully and created mountains of trash. Also paper bags are made from trees and plastic bags are made from petroleum. Petroleum is a resource the world is running out of, and burning it creates gases that contribute to global warming. Cut-down trees can be replanted with seedlings and replaced over time, but we are cutting our forests much faster than we are re-growing them. Saving our wood and oil just makes sense.

The transformation in people's shopping habits during this first year of the new law has been remarkable. In the early months, few people brought bags from home and just paid the extra charges. But every 5 cent charge you paid was a reminder. You began to notice more and more people bringing their bags, and you made mental notes to do the same. When you forgot, you scolded yourself and felt stupid. As you carried your groceries out in plastic, you imagined people staring at you disapprovingly. Then you became a regular.

Social distinctions then appeared. The "better" stores have their own better bags including their branded snob appeal. Not many people are seen bringing Wal Mart bags in to shop at Whole Foods. (Bill Maher's name for Whole Foods is "Whole Paycheck.") But the new law applies everywhere and is no respecter.

I have not seen figures on the amount of wasted wood and petroleum saved by this one law in this one county, but it has to be significant. I do not know the effect if the law became a national one, but the result would have to be huge.

Like others, I was resistant to this law at first. But in these few short months, I have become a willing supporter. Bringing my reusable bags is easy and has become second nature. I feel good about saving our resources and the impact of all the waste we used to create.

I know this is one small step, compared to all the steps that are needed to bring our lifestyles into harmony with the evident strains of our economies and environment. But it is something, and it is easy.