What I Saw at Tianamen by Claudia Rosett
It’s now 20 years since I ran through a cross-fire of tracer bullets, heading into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4 to witness the end of the uprising in which millions of Chinese, in the spring of 1989, peacefully seized control of their own capital and demanded democracy.
In a long career as a reporter, which has included both tanks and gunfire elsewhere, there is no story I have covered that has been more haunting, inspiring and important than that Tiananmen uprising. And there is no story that, in its plotline, has been more heartbreaking.
During the protests, on one of those warm spring evenings just before the crackdown, I was wandering around Tiananmen, notebook in hand, and came across a young man sitting in a beach chair on the monument where the demonstrators were soon to make their last stand. He had a question about what happens when you get your dream of democracy: What then? As he put it: “I know what China is dreaming. What is America dreaming?”
The answer of free societies, the old American dream, is that you may choose for yourself. Freedom, in the framework of a true democracy, allows individuals to weigh their own talents, skills and ambitions, choose their own trade-offs, and chart their own dreams. That gives rise to innovation, exuberance and prosperity of a kind that no government can plan or centrally command into existence.
This is a learning experience for me, you might as well come along.
Ever since the night before the Exodus Jews have celebrated a Seder, a supper before the Lord and a story told, the Haggadah.
More Happy Passover from the Anchoress
Happy Passover!
Pope Benedict XVI must be doing something right because the press is crucifying him again. Monsignor Raun writes, “On his way to Africa, the Pope was asked what the Church thought of AIDS and condoms. Our Holy Father answered that the real answer was sexual morality, not pieces of plastic. The press dubbed him ‘a moral monster’.”
The liberalized world and press avoid the Truth, especially on issues of life. They prefer to propagandize, for the furtherance of liberal, secular, “progressive” agenda’s, which leave God out of such deliberations. As if an investigation without Truth could be substantive.
“I suspect every abortion, every “compassionate” bit of euthanasia has the evil one stamping his foot in triumphant glee.” says the Anchoress. In speaking of God’s influence and grace in the world, she submits that such grace is “subdued in the world” when those “enthusiastic about subduing new life – of judging how much life there should be, and of what quality” play God.
Monsignor Raun makes a few points of his own:
1. Ten to twenty percent of the time, condoms don’t
work. For argument’s sake, let’s say they don’t
work 1 percent of the time. Would anyone say it
was moral to do something that there was a one-ina-
hundred chance of giving someone a deadly illness?
Would any sane person take such a chance
with their own life? (If there was a one-in-a hundred
chance that holy water could give you
AIDS, would any of you put your fingers in the
fount, or allow your children to do so?)
2. And the sad fact is that some people think they are
“invulnerable” if they wear a condom, and so they
are all the more promiscuous – all the more spreading
the possibilities of infecting others with the disease.
Condoms are the answer to AIDS for those people who
are only willing to do what it takes to stop this horrible
disease as long as sexual freedom is preserved – which
for liberal society has become the ultimate good in life.
If you don’t want to get sexually-transmitted AIDS, be
faithful to your spouse or live a chaste single life. This
and this alone, is guaranteed to be 100% effective. It is
also the moral teaching of Christ and His Church –
which is the Holy Father’s duty to teach. To teach anything
else is cruel, and to gamble with peoples lives.
And, from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we have this:
To achieve the maximum protective effect, condoms must be used both consistently and correctly. Inconsistent use can lead to STD acquisition because transmission can occur with a single act of intercourse with an infected partner. Similarly, if condoms are not used correctly, the protective effect may be diminished even when they are used consistently. The most reliable ways to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), are to abstain from sexual activity or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner. However, many infected persons may be unaware of their infections because STDs are often asymptomatic or unrecognized.
The above report sounds like Russian Roulette to me. Chastity is still the best policy, even according to disease control scientific and statistical reports.
Is he Borg? He is the Borg Master, and the Borg is on the move. It is hungry and ambitious, and knows no benevolent God of love and limits. By edict, it steals the inclination to Virtue, usurping the role of conscience. Borg Master, and no other, proclaims right limits and no limits. He declares who has a right to being and how to be. He looses the license of pride and greed into his pot of promises. He stirs his brew with class hatred and malcontention. Where there was the reign of virtue, decency, morality, there is enthroned a sceptered Specter; the One, the Borg Mind ruling a “no people – no voice.” The Borg Meister feeding on our fears, our frenzy and our fetuses.
The Borg Master contemplating and worshiping himself along with the adoring, mindless, masses. Everything becomes his; his hope, his audaciousness, his government, his plan! Your life is his to manipulate, as are your morals and your dreams. What you have will be his in the end. He covets your freedom and your laughter. He is building a State of being and a state of living in which you are a nobody, a number. Have no doubt; you, my dear cog, will be assimilated into the Borg.
Borg Mind Master wants your soul. He can taste it. He nibbles at your conscience. Resistance stirs his rhetoric, as word upon word, worms beneath your reason, reconstructing the underpinning of your logic, and your creed. Winning your vote, he has procured your serfdom. Licking his fingers, how delicious your servitude!
The good news is that people took action. There is no sleeping for Connecticut Catholics.
FIC Action President Peter Wolfgang will be on the Laura Ingraham show at 10:35 March 12th to discuss the anti-Catholic bill S.B. 1098, the two legislators–Lawlor and McDonald–who were behind it, and the incredible response by outraged citizens of all faiths at the state Capitol on March 11th. You can listen to Laura’s program here
“There were about 5,000 people at the state capitol yesterday– a weekday!–to protest this blatantly unconstitutional attack on religious liberty. Legislators of both parties are suddenly showing a greater level of deference and respect toward the Catholic Church and other faiths than FIC Action has ever seen.”
“Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in faith, knowing that your follow believers throughout the world undergo the same suffering.” 1 Peter 5: 8-9
Be Holy! 