Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

30 Tips to Stay Married 30 Years Today: #3 Get Married in Church

Posted: March 11, 2018 by datechguy in culture
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Jesus Christ:Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.

Mark 10:9

I think it’s no coincidence that it’s been years since I’ve been to a wedding at Church and that so many of the weddings I’ve been to during that time have failed.

To many a wedding is just a big party and to be sure a wedding is certainly worthy of the celebrations that insures a large and joyous one if possible.

A Marriage however is more, it’s a legal public acknowledgement that the person next to you is your mate.  It says to the government and the world that the children that come from this union have a mother and a father and that the people involved in said union belong to each other.

But a marriage in church, particularly a sacramental Catholic Marriage is much more. It is that acknowledgement made before God something blessed and holy.  It’s a contract placed before something greater than any mere human industry and done in a ceremony that while joyous, is also consummate with the dignity and the solemnity of the event and the entity that the promise is being made before.

To be sure a church wedding does not guarantee a marriage will survive. From Henry the VIII who was married Catherine of Aragon with the greatest of religious ceremony, to Ronald Reagan to our current President men and women have revoked these public declarations even when made in church.  It wasn’t until the 60’s this become not only more common but accepted and it’s no coincidence that the social ills that come with illigitmacy , single parenthood and absent fathers are now the scourge of society. The Common Thread, the secularization of the society and the removal of God from marriage made this possible.

This comes from treating the marriage contract as a “scrap of paper” to be discarded by men rather than a sacrament made before God to be blessed and kept.

Previously:

30 Tips to Stay Married 30 Years Today: #2 A Long Engagement

Posted: March 10, 2018 by datechguy in culture
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Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure:
Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.

The Old Batchelour, 1693:

One of the biggest mistakes people make in marriage is haste. A trip to Vegas, or a rush to a Justice of the peace and suddenly you are in a legal relationship whose failure can cost you plenty.

A long engagement means that you get time to know each other, to spend time with each other, to see how others react in a crisis, to test your judgement. It also gives time to see how you act in conflict because conflicts WILL arise and you need to see how these will be handled.

Now by a long engagement I don’t mean living together, While that does provide some preview of coming events it becomes very easy to fall into the “it’s just a piece of paper” trap, which I will address in a future tip.

In the catholic Church there are meetings and marriage preparation that take place, these allows you to consider things that you have not advised by a person who deals with families every day and has seen marriages work and fail. This is an invaluable tool and a long engagement gives time for it to be used.

Additionally a long engagement give extra time to plan the Wedding date to maximize the chance of distant guests to attend, to give wiggle room in case an issue comes up and to be sure that your Wedding day is a memorable one.

The idea is to have a single wedding day in one’s lifetime, so take the time to make it a good one and it will help make it last.

Previously:

30 Tips to Stay Married 30 Years Today: #1 Choose Wisely

Posted: March 9, 2018 by datechguy in culture
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One month from today I will be celebrating my 30th wedding anniversary.

In an age when we see articles like this from old friend John Hawkins talk about how marriage is a bad deal this is a rare thing.

My standard line is to credit this success to my good luck and my wife’s failing eyesight but the reality is that like anything else the success of my marriage is not accidental and comes from decisions both past and current.

So over the next 30 days I’m going to give you 30 tips in no particular order of importance 30 tips on making your current or upcoming or future marriage last 30 thirty years.

Today’s Tip: Choose Wisely

Eddie Kagle [as Judge Parker] We want to get married.

Minister: Why? [confused looks] Too many people get married today without asking why?

Angel on my Shoulder 1946

This is such an obvious statement that it seems ridiculous to mention it but many people both get married and choose a mate in haste or without considering the most important things to consider.

  • Is this the person that I want raising my children? Teaching them right and wrong, protecting them?
  • Will this person contribute to our mutual partnership, if not financially, in terms of morale, in terms of action, or spiritually?
  • Is this person compatible with me in the morals and beliefs that I wish to pass onto our children?
  • Can I see myself waking up next to this person in 30 years and being glad that I did?

Today’s culture ignores these questions, encourages people to make rash decisions based on transitory emotions, but without these important practical questions, asked and answered up front, you are going to find that the seeds of failure will be planted right at the start.

Fake News and Vietnam

Posted: February 13, 2018 by chrisharper in culture
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During a visit last year to Vietnam, I made the trek to Khe Sanh, one of the key battles during the Tet Offensive, which happed  50 years ago.

For most of the journey, I bristled at the Vietnamese guide and propagandist, who maintained Tet was a major victory for the Communist forces. I finally had enough and offered some facts to the other tourists on the bus.

Simply put, the coverage of the 1968 North Vietnamese attack is a startling example of how the U.S. media got it wrong. The media presented Tet as a major loss for the Americans when it actually was a massive defeat for North Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese government launched the offensive during Tet, the celebration of the Vietnamese New Year. The attacks began on January 30 on targets in Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, and ended a little more than a month later when Marines crushed the last pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue.

As The Washington Post’s Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup documented in his book The Big Story, reporters systematically used Tet to turn the reality of a U.S. victory into an image of American and South Vietnamese defeat.

For example, journalists reported that that Vietcong had overrun five floors of the U.S. embassy when the VC never got inside the building. Newsweek’s coverage of the siege of Khe Sanh showed 18 photos out of a total of 29 of dead or wounded Marines or Marines huddling under cover, never mentioning that the Marines inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy.

That campaign of misrepresentation culminated in Walter Cronkite’s half-hour TV special on February 27, 1968, when he told his viewers that Tet had proved that America was “mired in a stalemate.”

Here are some important facts that got lost in the journalistic shuffle. The North Vietnamese Army lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action for no military gain.

As The New Republic put it recently: “The American public knew none of this, however. The misrepresentation by America’s most respected newsman and most trusted media outlets of what had actually happened during Tet stunned the American public and the body politic. Popular support for the war took a heavy hit, as the war’s critics now grabbed center stage….

“After Tet, American media had assumed a new mission for itself: to shape the nation’s politics by crafting a single coherent narrative, even if it meant omitting certain relevant facts and promoting other false or misleading ones. standing — just as they had convinced them a year earlier that America’s major victory was actually a major defeat.”

Sound familiar?

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