The War on Women

In the latest skirmish in the War on Women, which began in the 1960s with Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” Democrat Strategist Hilary Rosan attacked Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 on Wednesday night.

 “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” Rosan sniffed. “She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we . . . why we worry about their future.”

Shortly after the remark, Ann Romney delivered her inaugural tweet. “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys.  Believe me, it was hard work.”  Romney appeared on Fox News the next morning, where she addressed the issue.

Rosan discounted Mrs. Romney’s value to her husband as an economic expert.  Maybe Ms. Rosan should read all the Progressive-issued literature that cites women make the purchases in the American family.  Moms are the ones who do all the shopping for the household, in addition to doing the housework, caring for the younger children, feeding, clothing, and tending to them.

Rosan must have opted for the industrial arts class instead of home economics.  No coupon clipping for Ms. Rosan.  The story is that at one point, the Romneys were so far from wealthy, that they lived in a basement apartment with a cement floor.  Ann had to find scraps of rug and sew them together so they’d have some sort of rug on the floor.  Does Ms. Rosan even know how to sew?

Some of us are not cut out for domestic life.  Certainly not myself and definitely not my former sister-in-law.  I’ve tried gardening, cooking, and sewing but living alone required that my energies turn towards keeping my job so I’d have a home, cluttered though it was, until my recent lay-off.  It’s not that I dismiss the domestic arts – in my day, I had a fondness for gardening and for the craft of doll-making.  But when the country is on the brink of disaster, it just seems superfluous to be sewing doll clothes and planting pansies and snapdragons.

My sister-in-law wanted to go to work and my brother wanted her to go out and make money, too.  With neither home very much, my nephew was pretty much raised by his grandparents.  Their marriage paid the price and so did their relationship with their son.  It’s a good thing he’s a forgiving fellow, about to graduate with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

I’m just not a female female.  Yet I wouldn’t dream of criticizing those amazing women who can raise children, flowers, and yeast.   I have less admiration for those women who leave their kids with strangers, or foist them off on family members to do battle in the boardrooms.  We should not judge (according to these female amazons) but I watched too many little tots being dropped off at our neighbor’s daycare center early in the morning and being dragged home in their jammies at 7 at night, while their mothers sallied forth to make a name in the business world.

Let us not confuse the women who must work with those who choose to work.  There are lower middle class women who must leave their children with family members or strangers in order to make ends meet.  Nor are the empty-nest mothers included in this group.

I’ve been out in the business world all my adult life and frankly, I just don’t see the great attraction.  Of course, I’ve never been home with five boys (oh my goodness) and maybe I’d be clawing at the door to get out if I had been.

My mother worked hard all her life until she got married.  Then she had us – two boys and myself.  My father had suffered two heart attacks from being out in the publishing world and was reduced to a minimum wage job as a security guard.  We were very poor.  Our dinner menus consisting of spaghetti and meatballs, hot dogs and beans, and fishsticks and macaroni and cheese, with the occasional chicken or steak.  Mom helped an accountant during tax season for extra cash.

We only had one car, which my father had to use to go to work during the day.  One week, he was on the night shift.  My poor mother stood at the kitchen window watching the squirrels go up and down the trees.  Then she began weeping and I fetched my father.  Our development was on a wooded hill, too far from the main street to walk.  From then on, my father worked the night shift so that we only saw him for an hour at dinner.

Soap operas weren’t for Mom, any more than modern women’s talk shows are for me.  Like Mom, I listen to the radio – Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity.  She was – and is – an active, intelligent woman.  She willingly did her duty when we were little, but once we got into her teens, she decided we were mature enough to leave us on our own.  Mom took a job as a bus driver with a local company.  We started doing better financially and Mom paid off the mortgage on the house ahead of time.

Mom is a fiscal and family Conservative (despite being distantly related to Robert Wagner - she has a weakness for Mother Nature, as do most of us).  But she knew we kids always came first.  My parents never left us with strangers.   Being a stay-at-home mother was a sacrifice for my mother, with her intelligent, active mind.  But she did it.

If anyone has declared a War on Women, it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans.  Mom’s a Republican and she didn’t need any legislation or regulations to go into her boss, when she was 21, and demand the same salary they were paying the male reporters.  “My landlord isn’t going to charge me less for rent and the store isn’t going to charge me less for a loaf of bread just because I’m a woman,” she declared.  “Pay me the same money or I’m leaving.”

She got the raise and then some.

In my speech at the Tea Party rally, I urged women to take charge and not let other people take charge of their children.  It’s not about the money, or the stimulation, or the titles; it’s about the kids.  That is the real War on Women.  The Progressives want to come between you and your children, Mothers of America, and your husbands, too.  If you’re sneering right now at your husbands, that’s a sign that they’re winning.  Stop it.

Get out your rolling pins and frying pans and stand up for your status as wives and mothers.  Sticking together begins with the family.  Throw out your Teflon frying pan attitudes about motherhood and go back to cast iron.

Your employer will never give you a Mother’s Day card.

Hoodwinking the Public

In the 1999 film, The Thomas Crown Affair, billionaire and art thief Thomas Crown hires a crowd of look-alikes dressed in the same suit, bowler hat, and brief case to help him steal a valuable painting.  No one knows better than a criminal that looks can be deceiving.  All but one of the bowler hatted men is innocent.  But which one is the criminal? 

America is a nation of mystery buffs.  We love to play armchair detective and solve crimes in front of our televisions and computers.  The Media loves to play detective.  But they are also propagandists.  One of NBC’s editors, in his zeal to prove a case of racial profiling, edited George Zimmerman’s 911 call to police on Feb. 26, 2012.

According to reports, on Feb. 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, 17, was walking to his father’s fiancée’s home from a convenience store after purchasing an Arizona iced tea and Skittles. Zimmerman, a member of a community watch program, called 911 saying Martin looked suspicious, then began following him, against the 911 dispatcher’s instructions.  Martin’s girlfriend says she was on the phone with him at the time and he said he was being followed and that he was scared.

At some point after the Zimmerman 911 call, the two men got into a confrontation in the backyard of a condo unit.  Neighbors reported a gunshot and one eyewitness said that the one man was holding the other man on the ground before the shooting.  All witnesses reported one of the men calling for help, although it’s unclear which one.

Zimmerman immediately admitted the shooting and was taken into custody.  He told the police that he fired in self-defense and the Martin had banged his head into the ground.  Zimmerman’s critics claimed he was lying about being injured.  However, ABC News released an enhanced video showing Zimmerman, in a white tee shirt, with a gouge in the back of his head.  The police did not press charges at the time, saying that the shooting was a matter of self-defense.

Then, the 911 transcript was released.  During the call, Zimmerman tells the operator that there have been robberies in the neighborhood and that the man he sees is behaving suspiciously.  The NBC News editor altered the audio recording so that Zimmerman appears to be saying, “This guy looks like he's up to no good … he looks black.”

This is the actual transcript:

Zimmerman:

We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy. It’s Retreat View Circle. The best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle.  This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about. [00:25]

911 dispatcher:

OK, is he White, Black, or Hispanic?

Zimmerman:

He looks black.

911 dispatcher:
Did you see what he was wearing?

Zimmerman:        
Yeah, a dark hoodie like a gray hoodie. He wore jeans or sweat pants and white tennis shoes. He’s here now … he’s just staring.

The edited version of the 911 call set off a racial controversy, with rallies being held around the country in support of Martin in which participants wore hoodies.  Obama inserted himself into the Media melee saying that he sympathized with Martin’s parents and that if he’d had a son, he would have looked like Martin.  His comments were taken as a sign of condemnation of Zimmerman before he’s been tried.

Zimmerman has now been charged with 2^nd degree murder in the case by Florida State Attorney General Angela Corey.  Corey denies that the belated charges have anything to do with public unrest or community demands, even though police evidence indicated the shooting was a case of self-defense.  The basis for the charges are not physical evidence but the suspicion of racial profiling.  The New Black Panthers have put out bounties on Zimmerman’s head and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have further fueled public outcry over the case.

Some wonder why Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder rather than manslaughter.  Second-degree murder must show a depraved indifference for life.  The prosecution must prove that Zimmerman followed Martin with the intention of shooting and killing him.  The obvious shooting indicates that Zimmerman disregarded the 911 operator’s instructions, but not necessarily that he intended to kill him.  He seemed to be worried that someone he believed to be an intruder was going to get away again.

Martin fled; Zimmerman pursued him.  At some point, they confronted one another.  Push seemed to have come to shove.  They wound up on the ground, with Zimmerman suffering minor head injuries.  Then there was a single gunshot, followed by cries for help.  Note that:  the cries of help came after the shooting, and according to the report of at least one neighbor, the body on the ground was very, very dead, despite the 911 operator’s protestations that the woman couldn’t know that for sure.

In one of the more contentious portions of the tape, critics say that Zimmerman uses the F-word followed by what they claim is an old racial slur of black people.  CNN had their audio specialist “wash” the tape to make the sound clearer.  The first word is obviously the “F” word.  The sound that is “washed” as best as possible is the sound of Zimmerman panting as he’s either walking or running to catch up with Martin.  You can hear CNN’s report for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOt1wEDy0SI

To this veteran dictatophonist, it sounds like Zimmerman is saying “F*&% cold.”  There is no detectable “oo” sound in what he says, but the “oh” schwa (an indistinctive vowel sound).  Remember:  it was a dark and rainy night.  However, the CNN anchor seems smugly self-satisfied that he’s hearing the “oo” word.

Martin’s mother stated today that she believes the shooting was accidental, although she just as quickly retracted the statement, saying that it was mischaracterized and that Zimmerman is a cold-blooded killer.  She only meant that their meeting was accidental and that Zimmerman never should have gotten out of his truck.  But then, it might not have happened if her son hadn’t had a craving for Skittles or worn a hoodie.  When last seen both alive, according to the eyewitness, the men were in very close quarters, and apparently face to face.   Zimmerman apparently did not shoot Martin in the back from a distance.

What the jury will have to decide is whether Zimmerman pursued Martin to detain him for the police or to take justice into his own hands.  “They always get away,” he says to the 911 dispatcher.  He knows the police are on their way.  If he believes himself to be a law-abiding citizen, it’s unlikely that he would deliberately shoot Martin and find himself in jail.

Obviously, Zimmerman ought to have followed the 911 dispatcher’s instructions and allowed the police to handle the matter.  No doubt, he’s wishing right now that he had.  He’d gotten fed up, apparently, with the inability of the police to stop the crime spree, and took matters – and a gun – into his own hands before he could be certain of the nature of the person whom he followed.

Zimmerman lived in the neighborhood.  He had a right to get out of his truck.  He had a right to keep an eye on his community.  He had a right to say something if he saw something.  He even had a right, in Florida, to defend himself with deadly force.  But there’s a difference between seeing something and saying something, and seeing something and doing something.

Martin’s father’s finacee lived in the neighborhood; Martin himself did not.  He was a stranger there, unknown to Zimmerman, especially in the dark.  Wearing the hoodie thing, he probably looked to Zimmerman like any of the goons who’d been robbing the neighborhood.

Therein lies the problem and the issue of profiling.  We shouldn’t judge people by their appearances, say young people.  But they do it all the time.  Through the generations, young people have selected the fashions of the criminal element, thanks to fashion designers who promote that kind of apparel.  In the 1980s, it was considered “hip” and “cool” to wear the cargo pants of the common shoplifter.  In earlier times, jeans were considered fashionable because they were the uniform of prison inmates and blue collar workers.  Then, of course, there’s the constantly eroding degeneracy of young women’s fashions.

Like Crown’s bowler-hatted army, young people wittingly or unwittingly are protecting the criminal element.  The rally organizers dressed in hoodies in solidarity for Martin; they should have thrown the hoodies on a great pile and burned them, instead.  Zimmerman must go to jail, although for manslaughter, not second-degree murder; a lifetime of jail is a bit lengthy for what amounted to an act of deadly foolishness. 

As for Martin, there’s a reason hunters wear orange when they go into the woods – so other hunters don’t shoot them by accident.  If you don’t want people to think you’re a criminal, you shouldn’t dress like one.  This juvenile argument that you can dress in whatever way you want without people judging or “profiling” you is unrealistic, unfair, and provocative.  That’s what children are known for, though; being provocative.  It’s time American youth grew up and stop aiding and abetting criminals by providing cover for them.

Meanwhile, the Florida Attorney General is going to pursue the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman.  She’s aiming high and claims she never misses.  Speculating, it would be hard to bring charges against Zimmerman for second-degree murder when he was crying for help after he shot Martin.  That won’t matter to the thronging masses outside the courtroom clamoring for justice for Martin.  She’s working them up to a charge that won’t hold.

She’s aiming high and the result will be that she’ll cut the hangman’s noose around Zimmerman’s neck.  The lowered charges will result in riots in the street, just as there were after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles.  The Progressives have had two months to prime the crowds for their big performance.  Corey’s denials notwithstanding, these charges were trumped up thanks to the threat of the mobs.

Obama is looking for a long, hot summer just like 1967 that will sweep him into office and help him turn America once and for all into a socialist state, where we will all look alike, dress alike, think alike, and vote alike.

'Nauts Think Climate Changers Are Nuts

According to a report by The Washington Examiner, nearly 50 former astronauts and scientists, including the former manager of the Johnson Space Center, think (NASA) the National Astronautics and Space Administration are a bunch of space cadets for endorsing climate change science and that the space agency’s reputation is endangered by being on the wrong side of science.

“Challenging statements from NASA that man is causing climate change, the former NASA executives demanded in a letter to Administrator Charles Bolden that he and the agency “refrain from including unproven remarks” supporting global warming in the media.

“’We feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate,” they wrote. “At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.’”

“The letter was signed by seven Apollo astronauts, a deputy associate administrator, several scientists, and even the deputy director of the space shuttle program.

“NASA had no immediate comment.  In their letter, the group said that thousands of years of data challenge modern-day claims that man-made carbon dioxide is causing climate change.

“’With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from (NASA’s) Goddard Institute for Space Studies leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled,’” they wrote.

“NASA’s website is filled with stories about the impact of climate change on the earth, animals, and ecosystems. Most administration officials agree with the position NASA has taken.

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decision or public statements,” the critics added.

“Their letter was heralded by outspoken global warming critic and author Leighton Steward who said, ‘These American heroes, the astronauts that took to space and the scientists and engineers that put them there, are right to criticize NASA’s advocacy of an extreme and unsubstantiated position.”

You can’t get a better non-endorsement of global climate change than former astronauts who’ve seen the big picture of the Earth first-hand, or the scientists and engineers who sent them there.   We specks of dust sitting here spinning around on Mother Earth have no conception of how big or how old Earth truly is.

These past few days have not gone well here in New Jersey for the climate change/recycling crowd. 

In Fair Lawn, N.J., the Brookdale Park playground was allegedly set ablaze by children playing with matches.  Rubber fires are notoriously hard to put out, especially on a very windy day.  The playground was constructed of recycled tires.  Burn, baby, burn.  Meanwhile, in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., firefighters were called to extinguish a compost fire.  Then in New Milford, an overheated battery charger set a home ablaze.

Farther away from the Garden State, Smart Growth advocates praise the use of retreated sewage water to irrigate fields in the San Fernando Valley.  Can anyone say “e coli?”

Let’s hear it for our courageous Apollo astronauts for not only risking their lives to begin the exploration of strange new worlds, but to protect our own world from tyranny-bound activists trying to seed our planet with a strange, quasi-scientific theory that will destroy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we know it.

Santorum Signs Off

This afternoon, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum announced that he was suspending his campaign.  The senator made the announcement from Gettysburg, Pa.

According to CBS News, the announcement came a day after Santorum’s daughter Bella was released from a Virginia hospital. Bella, the youngest of seven children, suffers from a rare genetic condition called Trisomy 18. She was hospitalized Friday. It was her second hospitalization in recent months. She had been hospitalized in January with pneumonia.

“We were very concerned about our roles as being the very best parents that we can be to our children,” Santorum said. “We made a decision over the weekend that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, we will suspend our campaign effective today. We are not done fighting.”

“Against all odds we won 11 states, millions of votes,” said Santorum, who said he found more support and a deeper love for this country than he could imagine. “It was a love affair for me, going state to state, and seeing the difference. I care deeply about where this country is going and the people who are feeling left behind or hopeless.”

While Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are still in the race, it’s all but certain that moderate Mitt Romney will win the nomination.  The GOP contends that he was the only candidate with a chance to beat Obama in November.  To Conservatives, their anybody-but-Obama strategy only means that if Romney wins, the inevitable socialization of the United States will be deferred.

All the fiscally-conservative Romney will do is take us down that road at a slower pace.  He’s still a Big Government candidate; it’s unlikely he’ll do anything to release its strangle-hold on the American people and the American culture.  Getting us out of debt is a giant step towards retaining our liberty so that no other nation controls the American people.  We’re far from any guarantee that our own government won’t go on regulating us into submission.

Santorum was our only hope, and he was a faint hope, at that.  If he isn’t a Big Government Guy, he is a Big Union guy.  His finances and his family’s health problems precluded him from staging any significant campaign against the well-financed Romney and the GOP machine.

So it seems we must accept Romney whether we like it or not, just as we were forced to accept McCain.  Sadly, the GOP, in its arrogance, sees nothing wrong with this, nothing wrong with rejecting Conservative values, nothing wrong in negotiating with Progressive Liberals (mainly because they’re Progressive Republicans).  No wonder they get along so well with Big Business and even Small Business.  They figure they have us over the electoral barrel, thanks to the brainwashing of several generations by Progressive Radicals.

Once again, we must sit and fume, and either pull the lever for a candidate we don’t want or stay home.  Here in New Jersey, we never even got a chance to decide, unless we just write in Santorum’s name on the primary ballot as a vote of no-confidence.  If we really want Conservatives to win, more Conservatives are going to have to get themselves onto the county and state primary boards, where the decisions about who will run are made.  If you are a delegate, do your job.  As for the GOP, they’ll never get another donation from me again.  They’ve sent enough mailings to wallpaper my study; they’ve all gone in the trash.

Whoever the candidate is, we Conservatives still have a lot of work to do.  I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell those I know within the Tea Party:  it’s not about the candidates; it’s about the people who vote.  Visibility is everything.  We will not change anyone’s minds hiding behind closed doors or beggaring ourselves to politicians whose votes have already been bought.

It’s all about we the people, not them, the politicians. 

Close Quarters

When I heard about the fire in Wanaque on the radio this morning, I didn’t even have to listen further to know which houses the report was about. I knew. I knew exactly the spot on Ringwood Avenue where the fire happened.

The news said six families were made homeless. The word in our little haven of small towns was that the families moved there when they were evicted from their homes because they couldn’t pay their mortgages, not even at the ridiculous rate of almost non-interest that homeowners are paying.

The families have been there awhile. Anyone who frequented the local CVS knew they were they’d been there awhile, crowded into a row of wooden-framed, Victorian-era houses. One must live where one can. I took a ride up Ringwood Avenue to confirm my suspicions. Yes; those were the houses. Since the pre-dawn fire, the middle house was a shambles and the owners of the tavern next door were evacuating their supplies.

The families were sitting in a parking lot across the street. From the looks of things, they had nothing but the shirts on their backs, and probably whatever the neighbors could give them. I drove back down the road to the local Stop & Shop to pick up some sundries I hadn’t time to buy yesterday. I also bought some bread, some peanut and jelly, a couple of gallons of water, some soda, and some juice for the kids and brought it back to them. They were just on their way to some new temporary quarters.

I couldn’t help wondering if this won’t be the fate of many families in Pompton Lakes, Bloomingdale, Riverdale, and other towns the Agenda 21 people have their hooks into? Already, a developer has built condos in the most flooded portion of Pompton Lakes. And now that the damage is done, the town of Bloomingdale is begging the EPA to restore the upstream dams that flow through that town.

Yes, rebuild the dams now that the homeowners have been flooded out of their homes. Pompton Lakes got the bad news that if they condemned “The Plume” that no one would be allowed to build on it again. But if some well-financed developer comes along with plans to build a light industrial park and ever more condos, that the town will not say nay to those homeowners who want to sell.

Residents of Pompton Lakes should take that short ride up Ringwood Avenue and look at the mess across the street from the CVS. That’s our town’s future. That’s your future. You might sneer at those poor people because they weren’t “from around here”. But that could very well be you someday, out in the street. That’s one of the hazards of densely populated areas. This is one of the reasons why people in the suburbs don’t want to live on top of one another.

Don’t think for a minute that the developers will be inclined to be more careful than they have ever been. Think when the old Acme supermarket mall was built – and when it burned down in 1997. Some of us still remember watching as it burned and the terrible stench that lingered for months. The builders knew that kind of domed roof mall was dangerous and that there were no firewalls between the units in the roof. Once the fire got going, it took about one minute for the flames to go from one end of the mall to the other.

The row houses smell pretty much the same as the old Acme market did. They smell of rot – of the Community Reinvestment Act, the banking scandals, TARP, Stimulus, and Agenda 21.

A note to all our neighbors on another matter, of no less importance. We’re in a very dry spell right now (although the Wanaque Reservoir is full). We don’t know yet how this fire started. However, according to the news reports, New Jersey is already on fire; this is no time to be light up the barbecue.

Pray for the families made homeless in Wanaque this morning.

Easter Sunday, 2012

“He is risen.”  Luke 16:6

Living in modern times, we often speculate upon the Second Coming of Jesus.  The Messiah’s First Coming was foretold for many generations before He was born in a manger in Bethlehem and crucified at Passover over 2,000 years ago.

His coming was foretold as early as Genesis, Exodus and Psalms.  The Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah have the most interesting predictions.  As the predictions were well-recorded, the enemies of Jesus accounted Him as nothing more than a well-rehearsed actor.

Most of the predictions of the Old Testament have their counterpart in the New Testament.  On one matter, however, the New Testament is pretty much silent:  Jesus’ appearance.  Other than stating that he had black, curly hair like lamb’s wool, there is not much information about what He looked like.

The scriptures of the Old Testament, specifically Isaiah 53:1-4, are more revealing; Isaiah 53:2 has no corresponding New Testament report:

“Who hath believed?  And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?  2  For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground; he hath no form or comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.  3  He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.  4  Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrow:  yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.”

So what if Jesus didn’t look like Robert Powell or Max Von Sydow?  Or maybe the early Christians had a different notion of what made a man handsome than we do today.  By all accounts of Abraham Lincoln20, he was considered an ugly man.  Yet if we look at the pictures of him when he was young, we see a rather good-looking man in the rugged sense of the word.

The silence of the Bible on Jesus’ appearance says nothing about Jesus that we don’t already know.  We wouldn’t care.  Or would we?  Did those who established the canon of the Bible fear humankind’s oldest prejudice and leave the matter of his appearance out?  Or was Isaiah right in his prediction that a corrupted, image-conscious world would scorn a savior who did not have the face and physique of the Greek God, Apollo?  Did His appearance count for nothing when Jesus was healing the sick, but matter plenty when His popularity turned?

How much worse we are today, how much more superficial we are, now that we have photographs, television, movies, YouTube, Skype, and Facebook.  In Lincoln’s time, though they accounted him ugly, they still listened to him, despite a high-pitched voice.  How will Jesus fare in a world so much more vain and wanton than the world in which He was crucified?

His appearance is the final test for humankind.  This is a world that will certainly not listen to any man (and especially any woman) who cannot pass the Hollywood screen test.  We do not see the good in anyone whose appearance is “uncomely”, bloated, misshapen, imperfect, as it were.  In job interviews, an applicant is judged within the first 30 seconds of the meeting.  No soul-searching there.

Jesus will return to a blinded world that thinks  He has come back for us to put Him on trial again.  The wicked have been putting Him on trial these 2,000 years now and still they don’t get it.  His appearance – and His appearance – will be the final test.   Since He did not die, and was granted eternal life for His sacrifice; indeed, He is eternal life itself, Emmanuel, “God with us”; He will look much the same as He did during his mission in Life.  If Isaiah is right, we’re in for a big surprise.

Here we’ve been thinking He looks like the imprinted image on the Shroud of Turin, notwithstanding the Bible’s very explicit description of black, curly hair.  We don’t deserve to know what He looks like.  It is not for us to judge Jesus, as though He were trying out for American Idol.  We can’t see past our mirrors, whereas He will be able to see right down into our souls.

When that day comes, you’d better hope you’re looking your best.