Ulrich grew up in the same small town as Annie, and he paid her no mind until one bright May he noticed her in church on a Sunday morning, dressed to celebrate the Lord’s Day. He had conversed with her on previous occasions, but from then on she occupied spaces in his mind. Ulrich, a farm boy, didn’t know anything about being a suitor, and so he had to watch while she paid attention to other men. It was enough to drive a man to drink, and unfortunately, it did.

Young men easily find many distractions, but not Ulrich. Ulrich died an early death. Some said he drank himself to death. Would that his father, or a teacher, had noticed his obsession and guided him onto another path. Life, as Robert Frost said in speaking of a road not taken, is fraught with choices. If we don’t have guidance, we must seek it.

Barack Obama surpassed Pres. Trump in oratory, but Pres. Trump is way ahead as a man of action.  That’s why, although I’ve been an educator since before I was an adult, I favored Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education.  I have been a public school teacher for thirty-one years, and teacher in a Montessori School for ten years.  I want the public schools of America to succeed, and I realize that what they need is competition.

The Charter schools will pass away. They are mom-and-pop shops that have no future. But there is another, impressive parallel school system here in America that would give the public schools the healthy competition they need, and that is the American Catholic Schools. They outdo any similar school system worldwide, and are a unique development of Western Civilization, of which America is part. Betsy DeVos’ voucher system would enable these schools to give our public schools the competition they need, even among themselves, and ensure the survival of two outstanding American developments.

It’s a word that shows how some people misread their fellow human beings. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche did not think very highly of Western Civilization, while Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutierrez (Liberation theology) thought in salutary terms of those two aforementioned rascals. People reflect the good that we associate with God or the bad we associate with some of his namesakes like Allah.

Sure, every man or woman contains some good. It is as certain as the rising sun, but the question is, which will predominate in a person, the good or the bad? We speak of a final judgment, but when will that come? Until then, all bets are off.

For myself, I want to play it with a certain certainty on what has been considered good for centuries. There are some situations in life where you want to be sure. My wife says I take too many risks while driving the car.

There was a boy who thought Cuba had the ideal government—1936 cars and all, plus 1936 medical care for all, except of course the ruling communists.  He thought Karl Marx’s good intentions were manifest in Cuba, not realizing that the only place they had ever existed without a dictatorship to support them was in Haiti.  Yes, poor maligned Haiti, the only country where socialism made a stand without dictatorship.  They’re still recovering from that dog-eat-cat situation now.

That boy grew old and became a presidential candidate in the world’s most advanced democracy, the only place he’d have a chance.  People are still beguiled by Karl Marx’s seducing promises, even after the failure of the Soviet Union.  (And they even had a dictatorship to support them.)

You have to realize that bleeding heart liberalism is no way to even try to survive in a primitive social setting, where the tenets of modern civilization no longer prevail.  Accept that you are a child of Western Civilization, and don’t give atavism a foothold.

This is not really a bad winter, but I don’t take them as well as I used to. I often think of T.A. Daly’s poem, Da Leetla Boy. (Daly worked for a while in a grocery store where he studied his customers’ Italian and Irish accents.) I remember the lines:

                              I no can count how many week,

                              How many day that he ees seeck,

                              How many night I seet and hol’

                              Da leetla han’ dat was so cold.

The little boy did not make it through the winter, and it made me think of what the immigrants of those days and today go through here in the North.  I am all for a better policy at our borders, but I’m also for kindness toward the immigrants who are already here.

Balancing the Judeo-Christian “laws” of kindness with instinctive acts of self-protection is sometimes a difficult task.  But I’m confident we can do it.