Posted on 08/28/2017 10:46:43 AM PDT by sodpoodle
Edited on 08/28/2017 11:59:22 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
This is a well-written article about a father who put several of his kids through expensive colleges but one son wanted to be a Marine. Interesting observation by this dad. See below. A very interesting commentary that says a lot about our failing and fallen society.
Semper Fi
“Faith is not about everything turning out OK; Faith is about being OK no matter how things turn out.”
Love that quote. So very true.
He seems to me to be someone who is at least honestly struggling to understand; and is open to change.
Faith, and the wisdom that comes with it, aren’t natural to everyone.
Political views[edit]
Schaeffer has gone from being a conservative Republican to becoming a liberal Democrat.[3][4]
When Schaeffer was young, he and his father attended meetings with Jack Kemp, as well as presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.[4] Schaeffer has stated that he helped produce Reagan’s book “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.”[4]
Schaeffer has written: “In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God).”[9] He added that he was a Republican until 2000, working for Senator John McCain in that year’s primaries, but that after the 2000 election he re-registered as an independent.[9]
On February 7, 2008, Schaeffer endorsed Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, in an article entitled “Why I’m Pro-Life and Pro-Obama.”[10] The next month, prompted by the controversy over remarks by the pastor of Obama’s church, he wrote: “[W]hen my late father – Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer – denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.”[11]
After the 2008 Russian-Georgian War, Schaeffer described Russia as a resurgent Orthodox Christian power, paying back the West for its support of Muslim Kosovar secessionists against Orthodox Serbia.[12]
On October 10, 2008, a public letter to Senator John McCain and Sarah Palin from Schaeffer was published in the Baltimore Sun newspaper.[13] The letter contained an impassioned plea for McCain to arrest what Schaeffer perceived as a hateful and prejudiced tone of the Republican Party’s election campaign. Schaeffer was convinced that there was a pronounced danger that fringe groups in America could be goaded into pursuing violence. “If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters... history will hold you responsible for all that follows.”[13]
Soon after Obama’s inauguration, Schaeffer criticized Republican leaders:
How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today’s wholly negative Republican Party.[9]
In an interview on October 23, 2009, Schaeffer said his and his father’s (Francis) position on abortion was co-opted by people looking for an issue that could shift political power within America.[14]
In 2012, Schaeffer criticized the Republican Party’s pro-life position on abortion, something which received criticism from Rod Dreher and other conservative Christians.[15]
Semper Fi.
good post. there’s hope for this father through his son.
Bttt.
5.56mm
I live in NY State and I can testify to the ignorant condescension against the South, particularly from “upper class” folks here and NE Liberals in general.
I will also say this to that part of this author that still holds his quivering, leftist snowflake bourgeois pretensions about having his kid go to Georgetown instead of joining the Marines: your son will come out of the Marines with greater experience, greater character formation, knowledge of humanity and the real world, and true leadership than he would gain in 4 years at any elite university. If at some point in the future he still wants to go to university, then he will find that his Marine Corp experience will only add to his ability to move ahead in life.
This is very true.
To a lesser extent, it’s true of most young people who take a turn in the ‘real world’ before going to University. I’ve never understood the rush to get them into college so immediately. A lot of them aren’t even sure what they want to do with college, yet.
I believe this article is proof that he has learned from his son and it has humbled him.
A good lesson for all the pompous, pretentious, ivy league liberals.
A Far-Left friend recently admitted to me that maybe her 30 year old son should have considered the Military. It would have given him direction.
Frankie Schaeffer is an ass.
However the book he wrote of letter to his Marine boot camp attending son is very good.
This goes back to 2002. I found it on several web sites.
John Is My Heart
This is a well written article about a father who put several of his kids through expensive colleges but one son wanted to be a Marine. Interesting observation by this dad. See below. A very interesting commentary that says a lot about our society.
By Frank Schaeffer of the Washington Post
Before my son became a Marine, I never thought much about who was defending me. Now when I read of the war on terrorism or the coming conflict in Iraq, it cuts to my heart. When I see a picture of a member of our military who has been killed, I read his or her name very carefully. Sometimes I cry.
In 1999, when the barrel-chested Marine recruiter showed up in dress blues and bedazzled my son John, I did not stand in the way. John was headstrong, and he seemed to understand these stern, clean men with straight backs and flawless uniforms. I did not. I live in the Volvo-driving, higher education-worshiping North Shore of Boston. I write novels for a living. I have never served in the military.
It had been hard enough sending my two older children off to Georgetown and New York University. John’s enlisting was unexpected, so deeply un-
settling. I did not relish the prospect of answering the question, “So where is John going to college?” from the parents who were itching to tell me all about how their son or daughter was going to Harvard. At the private high school John attended, no other students were going into the military.
“But aren’t the Marines terribly Southern?” (Says a lot about openmind-
edness in the Northeast) asked one perplexed mother while standing next to me at the brunch following graduation. “What a waste, he was such a good student,” said another parent. One parent (a professor at a nearby and rather famous university) spoke up at a school meeting and suggested that the school should ” carefully evaluate what went wrong.”
When John graduated from three months of boot camp on Parris Island, 3000 parents and friends were on the parade deck stands. We parents and our Marines not only were of many races but also were representative of many economic classes. Many were poor. Some arrived crammed in the backs of pickups, others by bus. John told me that a lot of parents could not afford the trip.
We in the audience were white and Native American. We were Hispanic, Arab, and African American, and Asian. We were former Marines wearing the scars of battle, or at least baseball caps emblazoned with battles’ names. We were Southern whites from Nashville and skinheads from New Jersey, black kids from Cleveland wearing ghetto rags and white ex-cons with ham-hock forearms defaced by jailhouse tattoos. We would not have been mistaken for the educated and well-heeled parents gathered on the lawns of John’s private school a half-year before.
After graduation one new Marine told John, “Before I was a Marine, if I had ever seen you on my block I would’ve probably killed you just because you were standing there.” This was a serious statement from one of John’s good friends, a black ex-gang member from Detroit who, as John said, “would die for me now, just like I’d die for him.”
My son has connected me to my country in a way that I was too selfish and insular to experience before. I feel closer to the waitress at our local diner than to some of my oldest friends. She has two sons in the Corps. They are facing the same dangers as my boy. When the guy who fixes my car asks me how John is doing, I know he means it. His younger brother is in the Navy.
Why were I and the other parents at my son’s private school so surprised by his choice? During World War II, the sons and daughters of the most powerful and educated families did their bit. If the idea of the immorality of the Vietnam War was the only reason those lucky enough to go to college dodged the draft, why did we not encourage our children to volunteer for military service once that war was done?
Have we wealthy and educated Americans all become pacifists? Is the world a safe place? Or have we just gotten used to having somebody else defend us? What is the future of our democracy when the sons and daughters of the janitors at our elite universities are far more likely to be put in harm’s way than are any of the students whose dorms their parents clean?
I feel shame because it took my son’s joining the Marine Corps to make me take notice of who is defending me. I feel hope because perhaps my son is part of a future “greatest generation”. As the storm clouds of war gather, at least I know that I can look the men and women in uniform in the eye. My son is one of them. He is the best I have to offer. He is my heart.
“Faith is not about everything turning out OK; Faith is about being OK no matter how things turn out.”
The military has been the making of a lot of people
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