In memory, Robin Elizabeth Marsh, July 6, 1997 to August 31, 1997. The leader of our grief group once asked me when I was going to take time out for myself. She had met us when Jessica died, been there with us when Courtney died and had gotten to know us pretty well. I told her that after Robin was born, I'd finally take time for myself.

I miss her still, and sometimes, still dream.

It is amazing what one person can do, over time.

A Grain of Salt talks about Gandhi and Christ, but it made me think about what one person can do, such as teaching people to read, one on one, one person at a time, until a people could be freed.

If we just continue, it is amazing what we can do, if not in our own lives, in the lives of others.

One of the hardest things to do is to survive benchmarks, as one child approaches them, or as another passes them, and those who have died echo. Having our youngest start school was so stressful, especially as she talked about being baptized. Jessica was talking more and more about baptism, just before she became ill. She was never old enough to be baptized in our faith (ignoring, for a moment, the kindness of Catholic nurses in their own ways). She would be in college now, and all of her friends (except one) have gotten married in the last year or so. Tried to attend a wedding, but it was like running into a wall, I just could not.

On the other hand, Heather is rifle team commander this year, and should earn her forth letter in rifle team, something that is hers alone.

As for the weddings, we send gifts, we think, we go forward. Life moves on around us and with us.

I thought I would write about Cindy Sheehan and other grieving parents in the public eye. The sad truth is, every time a grieving parent is in the public eye, someone is trying to exploit them. That doesn't mean they don't have an agenda of their own (think of MADD), but that they don't get anything for free.

That said, having given myself some time, I am still appalled by the exploitation of Ms. Sheehan by those on all sides.

First, I'm not happy with those who are using her to promote an agenda -- for either side (either as a stalking horse or a free target). The one side should have more decency, the other hand should leave her out of things in their discussions.

Second, (in a very related way) I am offended by those who are using her as media fodder. The first group exploits directly, the second group exploits reactively. If you suffer grief, you may very well run into both kinds. The one seeks to turn you into a cypher, the second type seeks to make use of you as a cypher.

For those exploiting her, on the one hand they delight every time she is attacked. They revel in it. Every attack strengthens that group regardless of which side they are on (attacking or defending).

The second group feeds off of the attacks and makes them continue -- the term media circus has some real meaning in this instance, it is a circus. Either the second group is doing its best to help the first group, or the second group is exploiting Ms. Sheehan for their own benefit, or they are so clueless as to make one question their competence. Who sees any real analysis? Who sees any real kindness?

You will see the same thing in local news when a child dies of hard drugs or steroids in a high school and a parent speaks out.

Ask yourself.

If a thousand sons and daughters had died in Iraq (or perhaps 1853), leaving two thousand parents (drop some for orphans, add some for step parents) and only one of those parents acts out in what you consider a loopy fashion, should you conclude:

1) That one out of two thousand is a fully competent adult knowingly doing something crassly wrong who needs to be shamed and humiliated as an example for other grieving parents (I listened to a radio personality do just that, though when I called him on it, he backed off in a letter to me), or

2) They are suffering under the disability of grief and being exploited?

3) The person just wants media attention?

I suggest to you that if #1 is correct in the first half (a fully competent adult knowingly doing something), then people who say Cindy Sheehan is the most courageous woman in America and should be president may have something. If she is fully competent and knowing, then she may be right and she is definitely courageous. The more competent she is to face criticism, the more she acts from reason and knowledge rather than emotion and being exploited, the less she deserves any criticism.

If #2 is correct, attempts to shame them do nothing but feed and support those who are trying to use her to get attention -- and in a way that makes Sheehan look correct.

If #3 is right, any attention rewards them.

I think that public shaming attempts -- especially of a parent who has lost a child within the last year or so -- are useless, crass and exploitative, and do nothing but encourage those who would exploit the vulnerable. If the person just wants attention, it gives them the attention they crave in an atmosphere that provides them with enough positive voices that the public shaming attempt never reaches them and enables exploitation.

With each attack, the both sides are strengthened and those who have exploited Ms. Sheehan (if she is being propped up) are rewarded. Real dialogue, which this country needs, and real respect for death and loss and sacrifice, all of those are lost.

Now, as for someone who is exploiting a grieving parent, I think stringing someone along to make them a target for such public shaming attacks is evil and heartless. Drawing the poor family into things is sad.

I don't know Ms. Sheehan's heart and I've seen a lot on the war in Iraq to where I am unwilling to agree that she is correct or insist that she is wrong.

However, I can understand how she could believe as she does regardless if she has a noble or a crass purpose. I don't know how much of those feeding off of her, from both sides, raven like wolves attacking a wounded deer rather than are responsible for the wounding in the first place.

But I know that public shaming attempts against such a parent are useless, less than productive and shameful.

People who have buried children, when they make mistakes or act out in public, need first and foremost to be allowed space and quiet.

If her critics are truly right (if any of the critics of those in grief are right), what Ms. Sheehan needs and deserves is to be allowed her act in private.

If she is right, then what she really needs is people to make the issue about the dialogue and the concepts and thoughts and not about her.

Too often the grieving are exploited, by both sides (or all sides or any side) and then discarded. As human beings we deserve more both in the grieving and how we relate to it.

My two bits. I'll probably take this post down after a while, but I wanted to vent a little myself.

Post script:

I was asked which blogs I would condemn as exploiting Cindy Sheehan. None. I do not see blogs as significant in what is going on in her case, and I do believe that there is plenty of room to comment and review without exploitation.

Maybe if I read more blogs, but I don't see them as a factor in what is going on with this example or with most grieving parents (other than the fact that many of them do have blogs).

Interesting link to a thirty minute or so speach by a guy who was an engineer, then was a lawyer, and now is an entertainer.

What Do You Want to Be? -- links to a link that will take you to the download.

Interesting, different.

Often, in dealing with grief, you have to decide, what do you want to be? What do you want to become? This is because you are going to become something, as are all those around you, no matter what you plan on. Life and change will happen. Especially if you have subsequent children, you are going to relive, evolve and become regardless of what you think you are going to do. Life will not remain static, and if you do not anticipate and plan and decide, it will still happen, just without your input.

An excellent question: what will you decide to become? What will you do for those who are part of your life, how will you help or hinder them in what they are going to become? What will your choice be?

How can I keep on living, why should I keep on living? Hasn’t every parent who has buried a child had to face those two questions and had to face the traps that threaten on the way to finding answers.

One real problem is that because the pain is so great, it shuts everything else out. Then, once you are finally recovered enough to be numb or in shock, the only way you can reach emotion is to reach into the pain. It blots out everything else and seems to be the only real emotion left.

Sometimes children will start misbehaving so that they can be punished, because the emotions tied up with punishment and sorrow break through to real emotion and let some pain out. A child can become addicted to that cycle, and it can be hard to break.

Worse for adults is becoming addicted to anger and rage and pain as the only touchstones left, ones that will swallow a man or a woman in bitterness, leaving only dregs.

It is funny, but watching The Pacifier (my five-year-old had seen it several times, so I had to see it too with her), I was brought back to the only way I found to escape the traps. In the end, the hero realizes that children and family are the only things that matter, and he choses to remain near the children and to find his own way to starting his own family. Everything returns to that, to living life outside of myself, as the real meaning and the real hope.

That pathway out and away from anger for me was by remembering my wife and children and their needs and by finding a way to keep on going to keep on for them, while at the same time keeping Paul’s warnings about bitterness in my mind. "Any root of bitterness" is how the scripture reads, warning the saints in Jerusalem against the pain and loss that the fall of the city will cause them (Paul wrote them before the city was sacked, with blood running ankle deep, and the people scattered). Justified or not, I had to let all bitterness go.

---

I guess I should note that this blog is about faith and hope and surviving. About the three children we buried in a five year period and about finding our way home. Some times I write about related things, or about life in general, but everything comes together in living life for a real purpose and with a real hope, and when those are obscured or hard to see, living for those I love until I can see the hope and love I need for them again.

I write these essays for many reasons, but most of all to help those who are going through the same things I am going through, in hope that what has helped me might give them hope or tools to help them in their journey.

I pray that God will bless us all.

Stephen

In grief it is easy to read about how faith affected or effected many things. However, the word “faith” is used several ways, and they do not mean the same thing.

First, “faith” is used to describe hope or belief. When someone applies for a job and someone else says "I have faith you will get it" they are talking the first type of faith. Alma encourages people to have this kind of faith when they experiment upon the word, to just try to give it a place in their hearts.

Second, “faith” is used to describe the spiritual process by which one reaches through to the other side and connects with the power of God. It involves the first kind of faith, but it is something more (as there is a connection leading to the repeated comments that you can't have faith in things that are not true -- you can have type one faith but not type two faith in things that are not true).

Third, “faith” is used to describe experienced based understanding that does not rise to the level of knowledge. I.e. I have faith that the sun will rise in the morning or I have faith that my cat really loves me.

Finally, "faith" is used to describe the calm belief that results from the spiritual process of reaching through and connecting. It is the calm hope and peace that many in grief have following their prayers.

In understanding faith we need to realize that just as the Greeks had words for different kinds of love (such as erotic, friendly, parental, etc.) we need words for the different kinds of faith in order to understand faith better.

Also, it helps to understand that anger interferes with all kinds of faith. In my own life I've found that when I was angry the Spirit couldn't reach me. It came to me as we were studying in Sunday School today and the teacher remarked that Joseph Smith had the same experience of being unable to hear God when he was anger, and that it wasn't until he let go of his anger that he regained contact with God.

As Joseph put it in describing his experience "when the heart is sufficiently contrite, the voice of inspiration steals in and whispers."

I've had many issues as I have dealt with my losses (and seen many others with loss deal with their issues), and for a short time anger as a block to faith and to the whisperings of God was an issue for me. Then, when I was contrite, the Spirit began to whisper to me. I still had to rebuild myself, spiritually I was weakened from the experience, but but faith was there to restore me.

Paul warns against letting bitterness spring up, and I am certain that anger is a stem of bitterness, and one that harms our faith, in all the ways faith can be a part of our lives.

Neat, the blogosphere rankings came up:

Current Status: Adorable Little Rodent
Current Rank: #4932

Neat, thought I liked Flappy Bird a lot ;)

For whatever today's is for your blog, visit http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php and type in the name of your blog. If it doesn't come up, add it.

BTW, I've added http://whenigodeaf.blogsome.com/ to my blogroll.

I'm so glad my wife is coming home today.

On torture

the elder President Bush's White House physician, a former doctor in the Army Medical Corps, had to say recently on this Bush administration's treatment of prisoners:

"Today, however, it seems as though our government and the military have slipped into Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness.' The widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment -- frequently based on military and government documents -- defy the claim that this abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned officers at Abu Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay. When it comes to torture, the military's traditional leadership and discipline have been severely compromised up and down the chain of command. Why? I fear it is because the military has bowed to errant civilian leadership."

We are in an interesting place.

Usually, torture and its analogs are useless. If a prisoner has not broken and refuses to talk, you get nothing from them. If they break, you get whatever they think you want, not the truth. In any case, by the time you can get the prisoner to someone who knows the right questions to ask and who can get useful information out of them, the information is dated and useless.

But, there are always exceptions. At times someone can be turned without being broken. It is almost always a threat of harm, not torture/pain that does it, and almost always in a tactical setting. The prisoner who leads the way through the minefield is a good example.

However, in an irregular war, where names, places, people, and contacts are all unknown (imagine WWII if the Allies did not know the names of the Nazi chain of command) there is suddenly useful information. It is like fighting the war on crime.

As a society we have already faced the temptation to use "the third degree" on criminal suspects, to beat, intimidate and deprive them of rights in the name of a greater good. National Socialism promised that greater good and our parents had to deal with NS (or, in English, the Nazi Party) in a world war and its aftermath.

But we are in a position of great temptation. The enemy is irregular (in traditional war, irregulars have no rights and are generally shot on sight). The enemy will not treat prisoners any differently no matter how we treat their prisoners (and can not take any great number of them -- all of whom they will brutally torture and murder). And, the enemy holds the promise of useful information that will not decay, if we only take the time to turn them.

Now, we are not abusing prisoners with the goal of causing them pain. We do not want them to break. Instead, we are trying to seduce them with methods that actually work. Which is why we, ourselves, risk seduction.

When God told Joseph Smith that those who lied in order to deceive were not excused because they thought others were deceiving them (or trying to), I think he was stating an important principle. When Mormon refused to lead the people in preemptive war and warned them that the grace of God would depart from them in that endeavor, he was giving a strong warning.

Now the war in Afghanistan was not preemptive. I don't think the President told any intentional lies (and honestly, given the track record of those attacking the "cake" story, their opposition would have been enough reason to believe it was true).

But I think we are facing a terrible temptation and that we are giving way to it. I have no doubts that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I have no doubts about where it leads either. I think that in spite of the fact that those who point out the problems with abuse are caustic and at times glory in hostility e.g., they may be right this one time (heck, they may be right more than once, a stopped clock is right twice a day, hundreds of times a year).

I am not making a call for action. I'm not suggesting that we condemn anyone. But I do think it is a time for thought and discussion, knowing what we face and what we want to become. That is because the ends do not justify the means. The means are the end. How we live and how we accomplish what we do is what we are and what we will become.

Whether we are talking about how we treat people of a different sex, or a different religion, or a different race or a different creed, in peace or in war, how we act is what we are.

Useful context links:

John Bruce's Blog

powerline comments on POWs, etc.

After Carl had been with the firm about a year he cornered me. I'd always told him the truth and had been one of the partners who voted to hire him. He had learned a lot about the firm's history, including the number of disasterous hires who were gay. "How could you hire me, with all the problems they had?" I should have thought before I answered, but I think "But what did their being gay have to do with their problems?" kind of answered his question for him.

Of course Carl turned out to be probably the best employee we had ever hired. He finally moved on to a better firm, but I'd recommend (or hire him) today.

There are a lot of characteristics about people that have meanings, in different areas. It is easy to look at our own problems and forget those of others, or to define people by characteristics that have no meaning as to who they are in the context you meet them. At times society overcomes those lines (what professional sports team cares about the race of a player now), at times we seemed to be mired by them.

As I've mentioned, negotiation and mediation are professional interests of mine.

Stu's an author of hundreds of comics, has decided to let bloggers use them, subject to specific rules.

For the terms, see volokh archived comment

Thought that was neat.

Otherwise, visited Wichita Falls, where we used to live, went by all of our old houses and apartments, visited friends, spent time where the girls are buried, was grateful to Alison for caring for their tombstones. Read Harry Potter (can't believe I let my oldest talk me into taking her down to wait in line. She wanted to wait in line and wanted company. Then we got up at six o'clock the next morning for the visit to Wichita Falls).

Missed some people (they weren't in/around) took others out to lunch, got home in time to sleep.

I meant to write a post about why I have this blog, but decided that will wait.

annegb has left some comments that I've thought about changing into a guest post or two, they are really good. Next time I think I'll ask her if she would mind doing a guest post or two on my blog.

I used to write legal articles, had a research agenda that I followed in ADR (dispute resolution), negotiation and professional responsibility/ethics, with a couple articles on Civil Procedure. Civil Procedure can be thought of as "the rules of the game" where the game is being a lawyer, and if you litigate, civil procedure is your life's blood in many ways. In those interests I started a web site, my home site, adrr.com. It still runs about 60,000 hits a week, mostly for people who are interested in "accessible" writing (that is often a dirty word from an academic standpoint) -- writing that they can understand and follow.

What is interesting in terms of where I was thinking is how grief and the experiences of loss deepened some of my thoughts, but how those concepts (such as there being five, not two, standard negotiation patterns) were an outgrowth of my exposure to Elgin's work long before any of these things happened. Grief is an overlay, not a building block, and it took far more than it gave.

Well, life has passed me by, I'm 49 and unlikely to start once again getting cold calls from people interested in having me interview for tenure track positions (though my wife got a couple -- which really tickled her, though she turned them down for the present). I'm lucky in that I like my work and my co-workers, love my children and adore my wife.

But I miss doing research and writing seriously -- in an academic way. I didn't get over 20 zeros in the first six months of the year by not being serious about my research and writing at work, but it is a different kind of writing. When Jessica took sick in 1992, a lot of things began to die, including a number of dreams and interests I didn't realize were dead.

So, I hold my five-year-old daughter's hands as she goes to sleep (it keeps the nightmares away for her), think and dream and love my family and remind myself that there is a lot more to life and that I am lucky to have the things and people and love that I have.

And I may yet write an article on how the clash over ethics in negotiation is a clash between styles, more than a clash between right and wrong -- though it may be that as well. There is so much and never enough time for all of it.

Brigham Young said this, "We think the sisters ought to have the privilege to study various branches of knowledge that they may develop the powers with which they are endowed. Women are useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies, but they may also stand behind the counter, study law and physic [medicine], or become good bookkeepers, and all this to enlarge their sphere or usefulness for the benefit of society at large. In following these things they but answer the design of their creation."

In that regards, explorations, "Am I not a woman and a sister?" But what does it mean to be a woman, a sister, a feminist, a Latter-day Saint?

I always liked that quote while I was at BYU's law school, and it encouraged me when my wife was working towards her CRNA.

Alot easier to post on than the fact Robin would have been baptised this week and too many girls in our congregation who would have been Jessica's age are getting married. We even held one of the bridal showers in our house. Sometimes it is just too hard.

Well, they had us wait until this morning for the swelling to go down. After everything, the surgery will only be on Heather's hand, they are putting two pins in at 6:30 a.m. Win had to work last night, but will be getting off early and meeting me at the hospital. Heather is in good spirits, finished her econ final, I'm hoping she will still pass trig. She thought she was going to class this afternoon after surgery this morning.

Rachel has been very concerned about Heather. She is so sweet.

Anyway, things are well.

Heather had a close encounter with an SUV on her bicycle. She will spend the night in the hospital and when the swelling goes down they will operate on her in the morning.

My wife always accuses me of being too positive, but I expect Heather to recover just fine. Still, this reminded me that she is always my baby girl.

I try to post about once a week. This will have to do it for this week, I just don't have more in me.

When I was younger, a lot younger, I had an older guy tell me "all women are crazy" as advice. At the time I thought he was an idiot (to be blunt), but now I think he just didn't phrase it right. From a guy's perspective, all women aren't guys and don't think like guys. That doesn't make them crazy, so much, as make them women.

Kind of like my wife stopping sometimes and saying "you are such a guy" when I've acted normally (but "wrong" from a woman's perspective). For example, ask a guy to do something and he does it. A woman almost always will think he hasn't because he hasn't done the related things. A guy doesn't seem them as part of the same thing (and if the woman asking him to do whatever the task is also asks him to do the other jobs, what she would call "the rest of the job" he will happily do that too).

Such as "please fold the clothes" means also to put them up after folding and put the fresh sheets on the bed after folding them. It is amazing how much happier you can make young couples by teaching the wives to ask their husbands to do the other related things and by teaching guys that their wife means "do a, b & c" -- once they understand it, they are much happier doing what what make things go well. Twenty years of their wife saying "you didn't do 'a'" won't work. Because they did do "a." Five minutes of saying, "your wife may say 'a' but she means 'a, b & c'" works like a charm.

Anyway, are all women crazy? No more than all men are crazy. But, with work and patience they can not only love each other, they can make each other happy.

Father's day has often been very hard for me. I felt such a sense of personal failure at the deaths of each of the three daughters we buried. I would ask myself the question: "What good am I if I failed to keep my children safe and well" and asked it every Father's day. I had made my children the function to measure myself against, and with their deaths the value of my life seemed voided.

As time passes, I take so much joy in the children Win and I have in our home now that I am regaining hope in life. This June 19th it was good to wake up and see my daughters and to be not a survivor of tragedy living with loss, but to be happy at being a father and their dad. Time returns me to the basics of being in love with my wife and loving my children.

Finding meanings that work is not only the heart of an individual's life, but is the core of a successful communal enterprise. There must always be meanings that matter.

I will return to utopias and life and hopes of Zion, but for now I am glad that my life has returned to meaning.

Some links:

Nate Oman's latest on Utopia

Sojourner's Net

Ozarque on the meaning of words

So often I read someone urging someone else to just "drop their baggage" -- with the baggage being their job, their religious quirks, their spouse or something else the urger doesn't see, feel or hear as important.

How important is the "baggage" -- the things that we are certain that God doesn't really care about?

Laying aside the idea of a child or a spouse or a parent or a job as "baggage" -- what about God and the rules in the Old Testament? Surely God didn't really care about them, did He?

But those rules are what preserved the Children of Israel as a people and prevented them from being swallowed and assimilated. Without those rules to preserve the Jews as a peculiar people, they would have ceased to be a people.

It is easy for us to take a census, eat shrimp, use butter on our potatoes while eating steak or have some bacon for breakfast, while wearing a cotton/nylon blend and to think that anything to the contrary is just “baggage.”

But all of those prohibitions were, at one time, important to God. It was obedience as a people that made it possible for Christ to be born of Mary.

So I look at our world, our times and wonder what of the things we have that we might consider “baggage” are important like having blue threads in our hems, observing a Sabbath on Friday nights or reserving the priesthood to a family line of less than 10% of the population.

How many of the things we work with and are asked to obey work together in ways we do not understand, for purposes that we just fail to grasp, but that have meanings as significant as those had by the Macabeans who resisted the urge to drop their baggage and be one with what was the modern world of their time, and led the resistance against the Hellenic forces that sought to destroy the culture and heritage prepared for the birth of Christ?

I do not know, and I do not know the meaning of all things, but I do know that God loves his children.

BTW, for an interesting perspective on this, Someday Saint has an essay on her site:
Part Two

Utopias are interesting things. To me, utopia is my kids not getting sick (or if they are sick, not saying "don't pray for me, wait until I get older, if I live that long, then you can pray for me" and "am I going to die too this time"). I'm waiting on my five year old, her strep throat and her cough. Grateful for tylenol and antibiotics.

In writing about utopias, what I am really writing about is stable communal societies or organizations, not perfect places. To succeed, such an entity needs:

1. A shared culture that will work for both adults and children (I've seen a lot of attempts at utopia that worked for the adults, but that failed for the children they had, and a few that worked for kids but fail for the adults).

2. Sufficient resources to:
a. Establish the society,
b. continue the society and export from it,
c. endure, create accumulations, support members who have lessened productivity due to age.

3. Must be self-sustaining

Interesting examples include the Hutterites (a religious group of sealed communities that just keeps expanding. They export goose down to the outside world that at one point was the gold standard for goose down), small steel mills (there is a "modern" small fab plant steel mill system that is generally worker run in a communal system) and several worker managed piecework factories.

Entities that seemed like they would succeed and failed share some hinge or collapse points.

1. intellectual property issues and a changing environment.
2. rent seeking behavior
3. free riders and feather bedders.
a. the piecework factories manage to break through the "magic number of 100 to 200 adults by having a payment system that prevents free riding.
b. the worker managed railroads have worked on staffing levels of specific tasks to solve the same problem.
c. several worker owned companies have suffered from control groups forming and using that control to loot the communal good for the benefit of the group.
4. giving in to the temptation to create a management class (vs. renting or hiring it from consultants or outsiders as some unions have done).

Examples that are closer to home are law firms and other partnerships (which, for the professionals, though not the staff, are communal organizations which are prone to grow into non-communal ones), Yugoslavia under Tito (the only marxist state with a free market society), agricultural cooperatives (for machines that are effectively shared and for shared marketing tasks.

A failure of a cooperative endeavor occurs when:

1. The administrative cost is too high (centralized economies anyone?).
2. The cultural needs of the members diverge too far (you may think living in Big Bend as an artist is heaven -- but will your children who haven't learned to read by age 12?).
3. The level of assets fails to sustain the group (note, retirement planning need not be a part of the cooperative endeavor. It is for Hutterites. It isn't for steel mills).
4. Stratification destroys the communal nature.
5. External attack (the group of pacifists that got eaten by New Zealanders in the 1800s are a good example of this).
6. Problems of scale swamp the society.
7. Stratification (sometiems combined with scale issues) destroys the communal or cooperative nature.

The false issue is waste, as all systems have it.

Quick notes.

The magic size for many communal groups is 100 to 200. More than 200 and the group generates too many slackers and free riders. Under 100 adult workers and there seems not to be enough "community."

Cooperative groups can work just fine in a market society, competing with other such groups and non-communal groups. I would note that worker managed firms tend to outperform other management types inside the magic number size limits so that they can be quite competitive. It is very possible to run a country where the government runs the banks, military and universities and cooperatives handle everything else.

Universities can be used to create mental capital and intellectual property and they seem to do it well.

One thing the Amish have mastered is the art of making people suspect by virtue of their being willing to be leaders. There are problems with such a model -- especially when attacked violently by outsiders or when it needs to respond quickly. Communal systems benefit by having a slow economy vs. a fast one. (Imagine in the stock market only ran once a week instead of every day? If property had to be held for five years before you could sell it again and people preferred to live in the house their parents lived in.).

Some things are possible, some are not, though for miracles, I just want children not to die.

VADE MECUM....


FROM W. W. PHELPS to JOSEPH SMITH, Jr. .....

Go with me, will you go to the Saints that have died—
To the next better world where the righteous reside?
Where the angels and spirits in harmony be,
In the joys of a paradise vast?—Go with me.

Go with me where the truth and the virtues prevail;
Where the union is one, and the years never fail;
Not a heart can conceive, nor a nat'ral eye see
What the Lord has prepar'd for the just.—Go with me.

Go with me where there's no destruction or war;
Neither tyrants, nor sland'rers, nor nations ajar;
Where the system is perfect, and happiness free,
And the life is eternal with God.—Go with me.

Go with me, will you go to the mansions above,
Where the bliss, and the knowledge, the light, and the love,
And the glory of God do eternally be?
Death, the wages of sin, is not there.—Go with me.
50 Nauvoo, January, 1843.