Babies and Christmas, continued

My goodness. I was surfing a variety of websites that I had seen but not visited this evening (taking a breather from wrapping gifts), and I came across this wonderful quote from Amy Welborn:

Back to our key questions. God took human form; and he took it not simply as a baby, but as the tiniest of all human beings, a mere biological speck, so small and so undeveloped that it could be mistaken for a laboratory artifact, a research specimen, an object for human experimentation. But this speck was God; this complete genetic human organism, in its primitive and undeveloped form, was so much "one of us" as to bear the existence of the Creator. He dignified humanity by taking the form of this creature he had made in his image; and he did it at the most inauspicious and feeble point in the human life story. At the heart of the Christmas celebration lies the fact of all facts, that God became a zygote.

Breathtaking, really. There in all its simplicity is why abortion is a grave evil, along with embryonic stem cell research. God's presence in the simplest, earliest and most elemental human form sanctified it forever.

I personally believe that each human being's life would be sacred without Christ ever having taken human form. (And thus believe that every human being who lived before Christ was sacred.) And there are plenty of non-religious, scientific, legal, philosophical and utterly secular reasons why destroying humans at any time before they are born is deeply and profoundly wrong.

But on this, the eve of Christ's birth, His existence is the only reason that need be mentioned. My prayer for Christmas this year is greater love for our children, and recognition of the Divine in each and every single one of them.

Babies and Christmas

I don't usually post such personal observations here, but I can't resist.

I have a beautiful 5-month-old baby daughter. I's almost 10:30 p.m., and she is sleeping, and I love to peek at her. Because it's the Christmas season, nearly all of the images of Christ that we see are of him as a newborn babe, and I just can't help scooping her up and kissing all over her sweet little pudgy baby face, and thinking that that's what Christmas is all about: babies. New life, and innocence, and complete vulnerability, and transformation.

Yes, transformation. Because that's what becoming a mother (parent) does - it transforms you. With absolutely everything I do with both of my children, I tell myself that God is watching -- would He be proud of the way I am treating the children He has entrusted to me, those precious angels that I waited so long for?

And there you are -- yet another way in which Christmas is about babies -- they are the penultimate gift.

There is much more that I feel I want to say, but it's late, and I am not sure how to articulate it. I guess I can say that I am ecstatically grateful to have these two beautiful children in my life. And I am ashamed that there was ever a time in my life when I thought I didn't want children. I am saddened beyond words that we live in a culture that treats babies like trash. And I feel discontented, in that I want to do more about that, and am not sure how to go about it.

I read this evening a post in my friend Ashli's blog, in which a reader offered a prayer in the spirit of the season - something about room at the inn - and in the heart. That seems very powerful to me. When our children come to us, do we make room for them? Isn't every child's creation in some small part the arrival of God in our midst over and over again?

I wish I would have felt like this twenty years ago. I wish I would have felt like this my whole life. I hope I can raise my beautiful son and daughter to feel their whole lives the way I feel now.

Shades of Ayn Rand: Oil dependence and a failed drug policy

In today's news on Fox.com, there's a story about the presidential election in Bolivia and left-wing candidate Evo Morales who boasts that, if elected, he intends to become "a nightmare" for the United States.

You may wonder - and rightly so - how a little country like Bolivia could even be an annoyance to the United States, much less a "nightmare."

I can answer that question with two words. Oil. Cocaine.

Morales is a Socialist who claims that if he is elected, he intends to nationalize Bolivia's oil and natural gas industries. At this writing, he is the leader by a substantial margin in the presidential election. This is unsurprising, given the number of poor in Bolivia. Socialism is only popular among the ignorant and the arrogant.

Morales also claims that he will legalize the production of coca.

There are two steps that should be taken immediately to defuse Morales' ambitions, and they are both unpopular.

The first obvious problem is that our dependence on foreign sources of oil and natural gas puts us constantly at the mercy of every two-bit tinpot nutcase with a chip on his shoulder and a reservoir of fossil fuels in his backyard.

Lefties claim that the answer is to reduce consumption. Ain't gonna happen. Get over it. We need to tap our own reserves in Alaska. We can do so cleanly and with minimal interference to the wildlife there. Yes, yes, that will be more expensive. But nowhere near as expensive as having to go begging to the Saudis, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales.

Ayn Rand predicted this in Atlas Shrugged years ago. In her novel, Americans were heavily invested in industries in South America that were nationalized (and subsequently destroyed), and that - amongst other things - contributed to the collapse of the American economy.

The second step that should be taken is that the "War on Drugs" should be declared a total failure, and ended. And yes, I am talking about decriminalization, regulation and taxation. The United States has spent billions trying to end coca production in countries all across South America. The end result is that we've created a black market that has crippled entire economies, devastated legal systems (how many Colombian judges have been murdered?), destroyed the livelihood of any number of indigenous peoples, and directly contributed to the rise of murderous drug cartels and bloodthirsty paramilitaries.

And all of this without ending the demand here in this country.

We should simply legalize drugs, regulate and tax it as the industry it is, and subject it to the tort system. Hell, if we can bring "Big Tobacco," the makers of asbestos and silicone breast implants, almost the entire obstetrics practice in the United States, Wal-Mart, and Microsoft to their knees, surely we can handle a few drugmakers.

It's inevitable. We can do it the smart way, or the stupid way. The stupid way is to wait until we simply run out of money.

Why not be proactive about it? Take those billions, and put them into rehabilitation and border security. The money would be much better spent.

Of course, assuming that drug use in the U.S. stays at current levels, that won't solve the problem of Bolivia's delusions of grandeur; it would just change the commodity we're dependent on.

On second thought, maybe that is the solution to the drug problem. A Socialist president a la Morales would likely respond by nationalizing the coca industry. And nothing would destroy it faster.