Pride is not only a hindrance on the spiritual level, keeping us from perfecting our own souls, but it is just plainly a nuisance when you’re trying to teach someone a skill or art.  I have a friend who is having trouble with a sphygmomanometer (blood pressure meter) and won’t show me how she uses it.  I have no trouble with the machine.  But I can’t tell what’s wrong unless I see it fail.

All right, she has a Master’s degree and feels humiliated that somebody has to tell her what she’s doing wrong in using that machine.  So there goes my teaching moment, out the window.  It’s the story of my life.  I’ve been trying to teach for more than fifty years, and pride always interferes.  I think what I really should teach is humility.  I think I might have enough of that to go around.

Where can I find truth?  Some people have an agenda, and they boast that I will find truth with them.  I have followed humble people, not necessarily wealthy people. As a matter of fact, they have renounced wealth and fame.  And through them I came upon the great thinkers of the past, most of whom can only point.  They point to a man who lived up to the prophecies of the Jewish bible, what we call the Old Testament.

Some say he was crazy to do that.  It is too impossible.  And it involves death.   Yet he rose from the dead as he predicted.  Now if anyone did that, you’d know about it.  I mean, word would get around.  And it did.  The result is that all of Europe came to believe it, and we had the gradual changing of Western Civilization to what we have today.

I’m kind of impressed with a story like that.  I believe in a Creator, God, and he called himself the Son of God.  And his followers usually stick to the truth that I can verify.  That’s what science usually does.  I follow science as much as I can, at least until the scientists get confused—and that can happen.  But I, too, am human, I make my decisions, and consider myself a brother to the Son of God.

I was a provisional scoutmaster at Camp Wauwepex, Nassau County’s scout camp. It was a hot August afternoon, and I had to do something with the troop.  So I posted the word: we were going to the Rodeo Grounds.  There was nothing attractive about the place but its name.  It was mostly hip high scrub oak—the tall shade trees were in the distance.

“OK, each patrol make a fire.”  They needed that skill to pass their Second Class Scouting test, and they’d learn something about the exigencies (from the Latin exigere, to go through) of life.  There was no water available, so when we were ready to leave, they had to empty their canteens to put out the fires.  Talk about what I made them go through!

I like to show people the beauties of life, and I regret that I showed them only that they had to go through some tedious things in life.  There were no doubt such things as salamanders, toads, and even rabbits hiding in the scrub, and though they loved fire building, they had to empty their canteens before the road back.  (I made sure the fires were out.)  Se la vie, mon ami.

I have tried, lately, to be positive: pro-life rather than pro-death, pro-immigrant rather than pro-illegal, pro-civilization rather than pro-Marx.  So I am a Republican.  My family in California is Democrat, except for my youngest brother, Rudy, his wife Karin, my niece Ingrid and her husband, Rodney, and Astrid, Ingrid’s mother.  That’s not a bad group to write for.

When the media (which, of course, are against Trump and therefore Democrat) have found such beautiful words like narcissistic, egoistic, self-centered and impetuous to describe our President, who happens to be Republican, fire all their volleys, there is little left for anyone but a Democrat.  This despite the fact that their candidate is so weak from mourning family deaths and from age-related lapsus memoriae that he cannot even mount a campaign outside Delaware.

Well now, this is a volley from one of the deplorables, or as Obama called us, the clingers, though what I cling to is Western Civilization, and its greatest influence,  Jesus Christ.  I find nothing to be ashamed there.

Words spoken on a memorable occasion, but repeated by indigenous people in their homes on the Peruvian Altiplano or the African plains.  I have tried to help that by contributions to CRS (Catholic Relief Services) who drill new wells, but fresh, potable water is such a worldwide necessity and such a worldwide scarcity.  I still cringe at the memory of a photo of an African child getting his mother’s cooking water from a muddied stream.

For us in select parts of the USA, we wash our cars with water that we can drink straight from the hose, little realizing how privileged we are.  Yes, as they say, we’re God’s children, and let’s not squander it.

On a hot day, there is nothing like a tall glass of water, tinkling with the sound of ice cubes or wedges in it, and I wish that privilege to all my friends.  May the foreign underprivileged get some too.