Straight From The Hart

No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. Samuel Adams

The year was 1983. The president was Ronald Reagan and he was addressing the Congress as he said, “When I took office in January 1981, I was appalled by what I found: American planes that couldn't fly and American ships that couldn't sail for lack of spare parts and trained personnel and insufficient fuel and ammunition for essential training. The inevitable result of all this was poor morale in our Armed Forces, difficulty in recruiting the brightest young Americans to wear the uniform, and difficulty in convincing our most experienced military personnel to stay on. There was a real question then about how well we could meet a crisis. We had to move immediately to improve the basic readiness and staying power of our conventional forces, so they could meet -- and therefore help deter -- a crisis.” (Sound familiar?) Then he posed this question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retalia

I was shocked and saddened to open up my newspaper recently and see that Lester Pannell had passed away. I didn’t know him well personally. He was a teacher in the Lebanon school system when I was a student but I wasn’t in any of his classes. I remember seeing him occasionally when he was in my husband’s barbershop years ago and recall especially his distinctive voice. But I learned to know about him through his newspaper columns on birding and it was what I discovered about him there that gave me great respect for him and made me feel like I knew him. He was a man of great passion. His passion was learning about and seeking out different birds. Now I care nothing about birds except that they are part of God’s beautiful creation. I barely know a turkey from a parakeet, but I always read Mr. Pannell’s column just for the experience of soaking up his passion for them. In the 2001 movie “Serendipity”, the character Dean says “The Greeks never wrote obituaries. When a man died, the

It was just a normal school day in Lebanon.  I don’t remember the exact date but it would have been sometime in the late 1950’s.  An office aide entered my classroom and I heard the teacher call my name, asking me to come to her desk.  She had a strange look on her face as she told me to go to the principal’s office with the aide. Never in all my years of school had I ever been sent to the principal’s office.   I was too scared to even wonder what I had done wrong as the office girl walked me down the hall. Once inside Mr. Rainey’s office, I saw a couple of people standing there including a strange man dressed in a dark suit.  I remember he looked rather ominous. He asked me my name and when I told him, he handed me a post card, asking me if I had ever seen it before.  I recognized it as a card I had sent a week or so before to The Daily Worker, the newspaper published at that time in New York City by the Communist Party USA, asking them to send me a couple of issues of their

On Palm Sunday of this year, a total of 55 Coptic Christians were murdered while worshipping in their churches, one  just outside Cairo, and another in Alexandria.  ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombings. While persecution of all  Christians has been a tactic of terrorism for ISIS, the Coptics (or Copts as they are usually referred to), have been terrorized and attacked even more frequently than many other groups.  The militants have previously claimed that attacks against Coptics are revenge for Muslim women persecuted by Coptic crusaders in Egypt. It is also believed that this particular Cathedral was attacked for the second time because it is the seat of the Coptic Pope, and the persona of Mark himself, author of the oldest of the four gospels.  Copts are among the oldest of all the continuous Christian faiths, if not the very oldest. Furthermore, experts who have studied  ISIS and other similar groups confirm that these groups “absolutely detest cultural symbolism.”

Another National Day of Prayer has come and gone.  I hope you took  time to reflect upon your own prayer life, as well as the corporate prayers of our nation.  There can be no argument that we have much to pray about in these days of violence and the threat of more war.  My own list grows longer each day. I was first introduced to the Day of Prayer sometime in the mid-1980s when I was asked to be the speaker at the observance in the National Cemetery in Springfield.  When I moved to Farmington sometime later to pastor a church, I participated in that city’s prayer observances.   Upon returning to Lebanon I began putting together an  early evening inter-denominational community service after people got off work on the National Day of Prayer.  It was held on the steps of the courthouse or in the lobby of the Civic Center where we brought in special singers and speakers or choirs from one of the schools.  We invited city and county officials and law enforcement and first responders

My column in today's paper. The Origin of Evil As a child growing up on the cusp of the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, I still have a vivid memory of turning on the big console radio in our “front room” and tuning in to hear a male voice intoning the sinister words: “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man?” The answer of course was “The Shadow knows.” It was all we knew about evil in our childish innocence of that time, not having a live streaming of Adolf Hitler’s newest concentration camp during the Holocaust being piped though our television sets every evening. The closest we came to understanding a presence of evil during those days of the Cold War was running out into the yard every time we heard an airplane, trying to read what insignia might be emblazoned on its fuselage, hoping it was not a Russian bomber, because we were having drills at school of ducking underneath our desks just in case we were attacked. Now, thanks to the 24 hour streaming news on all our e

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is in the news again.  Yesterday’s news reports all centered on her possible role in “unmasking” the names of the Trump transition team who got caught up in incidental surveillance, and then leaking the  information to individuals both within and without the government who were not legally entitled to have such information.   These are only allegations of course, but they do tie in with the fact that former President Obama  made it possible on January 12 when  his administration finalized new rules that allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to share information it gleans from its vast international surveillance apparatus with the 16 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. Rice first came up on my news radar following the attack on our Consulate at Benghazi on September 11, 2012, when she was sent out to five news outlets, under the tutelage of Ben Rhodes, to inform the American people that we had nothing t

While we in the U.S. have been absorbed in our national news coming out of Washington D.C. and other places, some interesting things have been happening in Russia of which we need to take account.   On March 26, more than 1,000 people were arrested in Moscow, along with smaller numbers in 82 different Russian cities.  Those arrested were protesting against Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev because of allegations published earlier this month by a political opponent of President Putin and the Prime Minister.  Medvedev is a former president of Russia and a close ally of Vladimir Putin.   It was estimated that altogether 60,000 people turned out  for the protests throughout the country. The allegations were made by Alexei Navalny,  a 40 year old politician in Russia who has expressed opposition toward Putin and Medvedev and other officlals, charging them with high levels of corruption.  Navalny’s high profile expose alleged many accounts of corruption on the part of Medvedev, claiming that

I know many of you love stories about the people and places in Lebanon’s history.  I hope you enjoy this one about Raymond Medley and the Medley Drug Store, which was located at 221 W. Commercial in the building currently occupied by Walters, Staedtler and Allen, CPAs. Raymond, who was born on March 11, 1905 and died on March 12, 1984, was one of the most respected and well-liked businessmen in town.   He took care of his customers and their families and also their dogs and livestock. He didn’t charge for the animal care and  there were many families who received free care and advice from him over the years. When he died, his family found boxes of checks from customers which had been returned by the bank, and Raymond never tried to collect on them because he knew the customers were unable to pay. Raymond's mother died when he was a young teenager and he was the oldest of his siblings so he assumed major responsibilities early in life.  When he was about 16, he was walking

Well, did any of you women stay home from work as a protest this week?  I didn’t think so.  I didn’t see any of you marching in the streets wearing vulgar pink hats either.  We don’t do that in Laclede County.  We’ve never done it, not our thing.  Missouri women, especially those of us who live and work in the out-state  areas, have way too many other things to do, like going to work every day to put food on the table and buy gas for the car, and cooking and doing the laundry, and volunteering at church or other organizations. I’ve been doing some history research, and hard work, sacrificial love for family and country, and compassion for others is firmly engrained in the nature of women in this area.  It didn’t just start during the Civil War period, but I have some interesting stories about how it was demonstrated during that time right here in Laclede County. Missouri was a divided state during the war, and Laclede County was a divided county.  The county was home base for th