Monthly Archives: August 2021

High air temperatures are unbearable for workers who do outdoor work. According to the scenes from the construction site, employers do not care about employees who can put themselves in a life-threatening condition by stayingon hot concrete for a long period.

Construction sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina(BiH)are often places where violations of regulations are visible, and itis evident even these dayswhen air temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius.

Health workers have long warned that much more attention should be paid to this profile of BiHworkers, primarily by adjusting working conditions and shortening working hours, but many employers obviously do not care about their health.

Few constructionsites are currently active in the Tuzla area, and visibly exhausted from the heat, workers are unlikely to talk to reporters.However, on the hot concrete, through a conversation with one of the builders, journalists found outthat these days are unbearable for his team.

It is difficult, sincewe are in the sun all day, but a person gets used to absolutely everything. The sun, heat, winter,and snow are what accompany our work. The job needs to be done, and we are required to meet deadlines. You know it yourself, this is the situationin BiH, work is very important for all of us in order to feed our family, pay off the loan installment, the interlocutor pointedout.

At the beginning of July, the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Policy issued a recommendation to employers on the implementation of measures for protection against high temperatures, while the unions proposed the abolition of working hours in the hottestpart of the day, which meansfrom 12p.m. to 4 p.m. But, for employers, it is not worth the paper it is written on.

Inspections have themost importantrolein this whole storybecause they would contribute the most to compliance with all existing regulations. However, it is obvious that they do not make enough effort to change the current situation. They must act more repressivelybecause without that improvements intheconstructionfield and implementation ofmore humane working conditions,will certainly not bepossible, Skamo emphasized.

As it was confirmed, fortunately, inhumane working conditions to date in Tuzla and Sarajevo Canton have not resulted in heatstroke and other threatening conditions when it comes toconstruction and workers in other industries, which are forcedtowork outdoors.

Contrary to the recommendations of the federal ministry, the newFederation of BiH (FBiH)Law on Occupational Safety is good for the union on paper, but it needs to be put into practice in order to reduce injuries and deaths intheconstruction field.

This could follow only at the end of this yearbecauseemployers haveadeadlineuntil November this year to adjust the regulations and acts intheircompanies, Klix.ba writes.

E.Dz.

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Difficult Conditions for Construction Workers in BiH: Work has to be done, no one thinks about Health - Sarajevo Times

(Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

At only a few American colleges and universities will students not encounter some degree of leftist indoctrination from faculty and administrators who think it their mission to breed new change agents. Of course, it doesnt always work many students tune out the politics and concentrate on their studies (or just on college fun). But at the margin, the drumbeat of leftist propaganda has an impact. Some students who were previously middle-of-the-road are drawn into the orbit of statism and some who were already in that orbit are turned into ferocious Social Justice Warriors.

Still, this state of affairs is deplorable. What can be done?

In todays Martin Center article, Anthony Hennen surveys the landscape of ideas for saving American higher education, or at least saving students from it.

We could create new colleges and universities, and attempt to protect them against hostile incursions by leftists who can never leave anything alone. We could provide more funding and moral support for promising grad students who might eventually enter the teaching ranks. We could support non-leftist programs on our campuses and start new ones. Alumni who are unhappy about the leftward drift of their schools can complain and, more significantly, stop giving money. We can pressure state legislatures to use the power of the purse to cut funding for schools that allow politics to dominate. We could encourage students to forego college in favor of getting on with their lives.

Hennen sums up: For all the college reform ideas (aside from the moonshot of abolition), theres a guiding light: Change happens locally. It starts with making connections with young people, like-minded reformers, and community leaders. Higher ed is too sprawling, decentralized, and diverse for one approach alone to renew the academy. What will be key is building public support and taking initiative to right the current wrongs.

There is no one answer, but people who care about the politicization of higher education have a lot of options in battling it.

Link:

Numerous Strategies for Countering the Leftism of Higher Ed - National Review

A conversation with Claire-Louise Bennett is a dizzying experience: one minute as rowdy as a fairground, the next more like a reflective walk through woodland. She laughs a lot, and raucously, to the point where the ends of her sentences often disappear; and then she might pause for long enough for you to wonder whether the Zoom connection has failed. Our chat extends, but is not limited to, Beckett, suitable paint colours for bedrooms, the abolition of the monarchy, Heidegger, why theatre would be better in the morning than the evening, avant-garde writers Ann Quin and Annie Ernaux, writing on the dole and the difficulty of finding summer reading (You cant be reading Gombrowicz all the time).

Oh, and banana bread, on which I intuit that Bennett had no fixed opinions until everyone started talking about it: Im not making any fucking banana bread ever now, she says. Youve ruined it for me. She isnt opposed, though, to lockdown pastimes, at one point brandishing a terracotta pot that she has painted to look like a lion: probably not very sophisticated, but I enjoyed it immensely.

But her main achievement during the pandemic is Checkout 19, a fantastically various novel consisting of seven sections in which we loosely follow a narrator sometimes an I, sometimes a we, at different ages and in different places through an intricate collage of ideas, sensations and emotions. It runs to 224 pages, but at times feels like dozens of interwoven and overlapping stories. Included in them are a deep dive into the secret world of reading (The books looked back at us and something inside of us stirred) that juxtaposes EM Forster with Anas Nin, Clarice Lispector with Sidney Sheldon; the fable-like story of a man named Tarquin Superbus, a sort of aristocratic dilettante from an unspecified previous era who conjures up images of commedia dellarte, Shakespeares Malvolio and a figure from a Goya painting; and the story of a woman from her schooldays to an ambivalent, rootless adulthood.

Checkout 19 follows Bennetts acclaimed 2015 book of short stories, Pond, which presented the reader with 20 vignettes of a solitary womans life in a coastal town in Ireland (Bennett herself lives in Galway, and emigrated from the UK to Ireland two decades ago). Two years prior to Pond, she had won the inaugural White Review short story prize, after many years of what amounted to writing for herself; in her early 20s, she tells me, she decided that she wouldnt try to get published for another 10 or 15 years, until she had figured out how to create and structure a piece of work that would produce a meaningful and fulfilling and enjoyable reading encounter.

It was, she thinks, her involvement in theatre that provided a breakthrough. She had worked on performance pieces and installations and had originally conceived of Pond as a theatre piece, but then I realised that it actually could stay flat on the page and didnt need to be performed. It sort of performed enough on the page. The switch from one medium to another was tricky, she says, because I was interested in theatre. But I hated plays, which is a bit weird. And I hated actors. She roars with laughter. What did she hate? Just this sort of thing that happens: youre sitting in the audience, and then an actor comes stomping on and they start talking straight away, and you just think: Shut up! Its too much all at once, and its all very loud. And then someone else says something, and its all chat, chat, chat. And you just have to go with it.

The exception is, she adds, Beckett, probably the only person I can really think of who manages to subvert that very, very well. She is drawn in particular to the way Beckett represents our physical selves: You dont get this whole thing just landing in on you; you might just get the mouth or them from the waist up. Thats a bit gentler, youre kind of like: OK, I can handle that. And then in other ways, hes able to fragment or tap into a different frequency of being here.

The frequency of being here is both what Bennett responds to in others Quins work, she says, doesnt feel just like experimentation. That feels like someone really trying to get at what being alive at that moment feels like and is like and what she tries to represent in her own work. Shes been writing since Pond came out, she explains, but for a time perhaps in part because of talking about the book so much in interviews and at events, and feeling herself pinned down by others descriptions of her work she struggled to come up with something that felt like a book.

Oh God, I wrote some awful shit. Really very bad! At least Im able to tell, thats something. But its a horrible feeling when you keep on doing it. How did she know that it was no good? I felt my flesh was all sort of crawly and grey. And I wanted to get away from myself, really. I remember being in Madrid and just writing, oh, it was such horseshit. The answer, in Madrid, was unexpected: she went to see an exhibition of the surrealist Dorothea Tannings work, and found it so powerful that she wrote a short book about her, A Fish Out of Water, which was published last year by Milan-based Juxta Press.

Lockdown also produced a more conducive atmosphere for writing, quietening down daily life and allowing Bennett to stay still. She began to incorporate pieces of writing shed done nearly 20 years previously, and liked the different temporal textures that created, the different tones and registers and emotional intensities. She made few changes to those older pieces, and it becomes clear from talking to her that she dislikes things becoming too fixed, or perfected. She describes the experience of reading Beckett as giving her a sense of space and a kind of an ease, almost; you know, I dont know if there is any kind of meaning and I dont like to get too attached to ideas anyhow. Im quite able to sort of just hang in a way.

Bennett identifies herself as a writer when shes writing, and resists the label at other times; she is wary of the they that seems to crop up repeatedly in contemporary discourse, and alive to the idea that language itself has been shaped by the dominant classes throughout history, with particularly scorching effects for the working class and for women. Asked recently to write about a book that changed her life she says she realised that Marx and Engels The German Ideology, which she studied at A-level, had had a profound effect. After that, I just thought: Oh, my God, everythings just made up. And its made up by the ruling class, and there isnt such a thing as reality. Its all just ideology, and its there to suit them, and were all a load of plebs. And Im not. And they can shove it!

This is, she says now, a very concise and strong version of how she felt, but that was the upshot, and after that she felt the impulse to hoe her own row. She could well, she adds, have called Checkout 19 Im not going along with this.

If Bennett appears wedded to artistic flexibility, she says she is more emphatic on a political level; she is firmly opposed to the systems of privilege that enable a monarchy, for example, or the election of a complete buffoon such as Boris Johnson. Theres no ambiguity on that. If there was a revolution, Id be there. In Ireland, she praises the practical support offered to, among others, artists and writers; she received benefits when she was writing Pond, having explained to the authorities what she wanted to do, and I just cant imagine anything like that ever happening in a million years in the UK. I dont imagine shed think of her books in such a transactional way, but it seems to me that the authorities have had a pretty good return on their investment.

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett is published by Vintage (14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Claire-Louise Bennett: If there was a revolution, Id be there - The Guardian

Sports is about moments. And these moments can change the face of an entire game, country, or race. For cricket in India, it was the 1983 World Cup win. For the Black Americans, it was Jesse Owens' win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The US Ice Hockey team's victory over USSR at the 1980 Olympics redefined the word underdogs and how fans saw them.

The question arises why did it take so long? Did we just get lucky? Will we have to wait again for so long? Let's start from the beginning...

There are two contrasting stories at play here. The first story is about dominance and invincibility from 1928-1980. India won six consecutive gold medals from 1928-1956, one Silver in 1960, and another gold in 1964. The statistics speak for themselves.

KD Singh, "The Wizard" Major Dhyan Chand, and Balbir Singh Sr. are just a few legendary names that immortalized Indian Hockey during that period.

The Long Fall

The second story, though, is about agony, defeat, and hopelessness.

Ashwani Kumar, the then Indian Hockey Federation president, resigned in 1973, and all hell broke loose. PN Sahni took over when the game was divided between Northern and Southern blocs.

MAM Ramaswamy was the man from the southern bloc who eventually succeeded in gaining the presidency. But all these incidents took away the attention from the actual game, and India couldn't keep up with the world.

The International Hockey Federation introduced AstroTurf in the mid-1970s. The decision to play on Synthetic Pitches instead of grass was the beginning of the fall.

The grass pitches suited the game of Indian players who were known for their passing and dribbling abilities. AstroTurf, however, favoured the physicality of European and Australian players.

These grounds are expensive to maintain. The Indian Hockey Federation did not have enough funds. In preparation for the 1976 Montreal Olympics, authorities shaved off the grass and plastered the field with cow dung.

No doubt it didn't work, and we returned empty-handed. India did win a Gold at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, but the West did not participate in the Tournament to protest the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.

Kapil Dev's Indian Cricket team won the World Cup in 1983 and started a revolution. From the sponsors to the politicians, everyone wanted to be part of the madness. That further took the attention away from hockey.

Rule changes like the abolition of the offside play in 1992, allowing overhead shots, no cap on rolling substitutes, among others, further contributed to the decline, and the players took time to adapt. The game became fast-paced. Fitness and tactical play became much important than individual brilliance.

It all came boiling down to 2008 where India couldn't even qualify for Olympics for the first time in 80 years. The Jothikumaran scandal further rocked the game and lead to the suspension of the Indian Hockey Federation.

The Comeback

Hockey India took over, and that is when things started to change. The authority recognized the importance of fitness and world-class training. But, considering the mess the Indian Hockey was in, the comeback was always going to take time.

And then came the major push in the form of the Naveen Patnaik-led Odisha government. In 2018, they became the only state government to sponsor a national team. Even before that, the Odisha government hosted the 2014 Champions Trophy and the World Hockey League Finals in 2017.

Odisha Naval Tata Hockey High-Performance Centre in Bhubaneswar at the Kalinga Stadium is a prime example of the efforts put in by the Government. The centre was built in collaboration with the TATA group to provide world-class sporting facilities to all the athletes.

Both the men's and women's teams showed that they belonged right there with the big boys and girls.

What does the future hold?

The future looks bright. The results we got at the Tokyo Olympics from both teams weren't just one-off. A lot of work still needs to be done at the state level, and hopefully, this Olympics has managed to garner the right kind of attention.

In another project under the leadership of Naveen Patnaik, Rourkela is set to be home to the country's biggest Hockey stadium. Odisha will also host the Men's Hockey World Cup in 2023 for the second time. The Government also plans to lay 17 synthetic turfs in the Sundargarh district.

All this is bound to bring in more exposure and experience.

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha, Pradeep Suresh)

First Published:Aug 16, 2021, 08:19 PM IST

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Indian hockey: The resurgence and rebirth - CNBCTV18

Seoul (AFP)

Condemnation of quotas for women, vilification of a short-haired Olympic gold medallist, and calls to abolish the gender ministry itself: a backlash against feminism is on the rise in South Korea -- with even presidential candidates joining in.

While South Korea is the world's 12th-largest economy and a leading technological power, it remains a male-dominated society with a poor record on women's rights.

That has been challenged in recent years, with young women fighting to legalise abortion and organising a widespread #MeToo and anti-spycam movement that led to the largest women's rights demonstrations in Korean history.

At their most militant some campaigners have vowed to never marry, have children, or even have sex with men, while others have gone viral smashing up their make-up products on video in protest against the country's demanding beauty standards.

- Ferocious online campaigns -

Now a fierce reaction is spreading online.

Members of anti-feminist groups, often right-wing, have even bullied triple Olympic champion An San during the Tokyo Games for having short hair, and demanded she hand back her medals and apologise.

One such group's YouTube channel has drawn more than 300,000 subscribers since its foundation in February, and their online campaigns can be ferocious.

They have extracted apologies from companies -- and even a government ministry -- for using images of pinching fingers in advertising, which they claim "extreme, misandrist feminists" use as a symbol for small penises.

And leading mainstream conservative politicians -- including two presidential contenders -- have seized on the wider anti-feminist sentiment with pledges to abolish the gender ministry.

Critics accuse the department of "deepening" the country's social tensions, with young men claiming equality policies fail to address issues that affect men.

They say it is especially unreasonable that only South Korean men have to perform near two-year compulsory military service, delaying their career starts in a highly competitive society, while women are exempt.

Lawmaker Ha Tae-keung, who is seeking presidential nomination by the conservative opposition People's Power Party (PPP), says the ministry is obsolete and told AFP that it needed to be disbanded to reduce the "enormous social cost caused by conflict over gender issues".

In an earlier television appearance, he told broadcaster MBC: "It's like a zombie -- the ministry's still around although it's already dead, and that's why it's only creating adverse effects."

- 'Backlash to progress' -

Sharon Yoon, a Korean studies professor at University of Notre Dame in the US, said: "What we are seeing now is a very powerful backlash to all of the progress that feminist movements in Korea have made in the past few years."

Lee Jun-seok, the PPP's 36-year-old leader, has established himself as one of the most popular politicians among the country's young men.

He has repeatedly said he is against gender quotas and "radical feminism", and that the gender equality and family ministry needs to be scrapped.

Lee, who has been compared by some to former US president Donald Trump for his at times divisive rhetoric, insists the country's young women no longer face discrimination in education, nor in the early career job market.

"Through novels and movies women in their 20s and 30s have developed an unfounded victim mentality that they are being discriminated against," Lee told the Korea Economic Daily.

Jinsook Kim, a University of Pennsylvania postdoctoral fellow, said politicians were exploiting the resentments of frustrated men to try to secure their votes.

Nowadays, she added, "some of these men see themselves as victims of feminism", for example because of affirmative action.

- Loss of privileges -

The reaction comes against a backdrop of stuttering economic growth, rising inequality and soaring housing prices leaving many Koreans despairing of ever buying a home of their own.

Oh Jae-ho of Gyeonggi Research Institute pointed out that female participation in the workforce -- and hence competition -- had risen over recent decades while military service remained men-only.

"Young men feel that they are being unfairly asked to compensate for the sexist privileges enjoyed by men in the older generation."

Those privileges are longstanding: the South has the highest gender wage gap in the OECD club of developed countries, while women do 2.6 times as much unpaid domestic work as men. Only 5.2 percent of Korean conglomerates' board members are female.

- Spycams, revenge porn -

The country has also witnessed a disturbing rise in spycam and revenge porn crimes.

But women's activist Ahn So-jung said that politicians were "denying institutional discrimination exists against women".

"And they are dismissing women who voice concerns about women's rights as a source of gender conflict," she added.

Founded in 2001, the gender ministry has played a role in the abolition of the South's discriminatory hoju system, which saw children registered exclusively under the patriarchal line.

It has also set up an agency to help single mothers collect child support, and implemented programmes for working mothers and immigrant wives.

Minister Chung Young-ai pleaded for it to continue: "The improvement of women's rights so far has been possible because our ministry existed."

2021 AFP

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Anti-feminism backlash on the rise in South Korea - FRANCE 24

Right now, Rodrigo Ochigame is reading Russian science fiction, Yugoslav art history, Indian philosophy, and Afro-Caribbean political theory. They are listening to Belgian electroacoustic music, Mongolian experimental rock, and Ethiopian jazz. Occasionally, the PhD student in the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) even throws dice to select a new MBTA stop to explore. More often, they apply this practice on the MIT campus, randomly attending departmental seminars on topics ranging from astrophysics to macroeconomics to neurobiology.

Ochigames freewheeling curiosity actually stems from a deep conviction about disrupting cultural assumptions especially their own. Thats something Im trying to do with myself in everyday life. Whether its about reading literature or walking around new neighborhoods or attending research seminars in different disciplines, its a practice of intentionally unsettling yourself, of continually exposing yourself to divergent perspectives, so the ideas that are most familiar to you are disrupted, they say.

In fact, Ochigame discovers many of the literary and musical works they are interested in through alternative search engines that they designed. For example, Search Atlas, a platform Ochigame developed in collaboration with computer scientist Katherine Ye, broadens a users search terms into a worldwide search for content. In so doing, the site reveals the geopolitical information boundaries embedded in conventional search engines like Google boundaries that are invisible to most.

Searching for multiplicity, for a plurality of intellectual traditions and for possibly marginalized perspectives, is the key principle behind the alternative search engines that I design. I want to expose people to ideas they wouldnt find otherwise. That principle permeates all aspects of Ochigames life.

Artificial separation

Ochigame grew up in a family of Japanese immigrants in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, a region close to Bolivia, Paraguay, and the Pantanal tropical wetland. They describe Mato Grosso as a highly syncretic environment, where many different cultures, languages, and beliefs interweave.

Its really a place of cultural and linguistic syncretism. My own family had a mix of Buddhism, Christianity, and atheism. And in the border region, you also grow up amid many other influences, not only Portuguese and Spanish but also Lebanese, Okinawan, Guarani, Kaiow, Terena, Afro-Brazilian. From an early age, I suppose, Ive always been very puzzled by the diversity of available ways of understanding the world.

Just as the seeds of their epistemological bent were sown in their hometown, Ochigames blossoming interest in computer science took root on the streets of Mato Grosso. One day while out walking, at age 13, Ochigame happened upon some other kids playing with an educational robotics kit. Captivated by the activity, which was expensive and unavailable at school, Ochigame began to learn about programming and engineering on the internet, largely through free video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare. They built robots from cheaper microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators, ultimately gaining national recognition in Brazilian robotics competitions. By college, Ochigame was committed to studying computer science.

But soon after arriving at the University of California at Berkeley, more philosophical questions began to sprout in Ochigames mind. They enrolled in courses in the humanities and social sciences, and came to question the dominance of Western epistemological frameworks in computer science. The classes inspired them to unmask the implicit assumptions embedded in the supposedly universal formal models that computer scientists rely on.

Algorithms encode the cultural assumptions of their designers, Ochigame explains. Computer scientists tend to think of their formal models as universal, but I see those models as products of particular cultural assumptions, economic conditions, and historical contingencies. Because of a false impression of universality, the orthodox models are rarely questioned.

Such dogmatism, according to Ochigame, marginalizes important ideas. For example, their historical research uncovered that after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuban information scientists developed library systems that sought to give visibility to marginalized points of view a principle Ochigame now employs in their alternative search engines.

A broader view

When they considered graduate school, Ochigame sought a hybrid space where they could train in the humanities and think about computing from this different lens. The HASTS program at MIT has been a perfect fit. Under the guidance of Stefan Helmreich, the Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, Ochigames graduate work has incorporated reading hundreds of books in anthropology, history, philosophy, and computer science, as well as traveling around the world to visit archives and conduct interviews with mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. The flexibility of the curriculum has allowed their ideas to mushroom.

Even the most universalistic formal models of computation, like mathematical logic or Turing machines, encode particular cultural assumptions. Im interested in how researchers from around the world have developed unorthodox models based on different assumptions. For example: nonclassical systems of logic from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines from India, nonlinear electronic circuits from Japan, socialist frameworks of information science from Cuba. All over the world, people have imagined radically different ways of computing, Ochigame says.

Beyond their research, Ochigame has found space at MIT to disrupt universal truths. As a teaching assistant for the popular course 21A.157 (The Meaning of Life), Ochigame led students in questioning cultural assumptions around topics like family, sex, and money. They also contributed to 6.036 (Introduction to Machine Learning), for which they co-designed the curriculum around ethical and social issues in computing and artificial intelligence.

On the intellectual side of things, I couldnt have asked for a better place than MIT, Ochigame says. It is, in fact, the only place Ive ever felt a certain sense of belonging. The HASTS program is both supportive and transformative. My advisor is a model teacher who has incessantly disrupted my assumptions. Ive had a wonderful time. They add, But, politically, Im critical of the Institute. Going around multiple departments, Ive become intimately aware of how funders shape research agendas. Im worried by the Institutes dependence on military and corporate sponsorship, because this dependence restricts the questions we ask. For Ochigame, keeping a broad perspective should be not only a personal endeavor, but also a community and institutional one.

Reflecting that perspective, Ochigames living situation cooperative housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts comprises a multigenerational community of cultural and professional diversity. They enjoy the variety of guests that pass through, from street musicians to traveling monks, and can often be found chatting in the common areas and learning about those around them. Despite this plurality, the community is also one of shared values. As a co-op, we make decisions democratically. We dont have landlords. We strive to be a meeting place for diverse political struggles: prison abolition, queer and trans liberation, immigrant rights, and more, they say.

Ochigame sees vast landscapes of perspectives where some may see neat gardens. But how does one see the forest through the trees?

How do you make sense of multiplicity? Its tempting to say that a single model of the world is the correct, rational, or scientifically valid one, while the others are not, they say. But another approach is to just take a step back and appreciate the variety of possible ways of making sense of the world out there.

Link:

Searching for multiplicity, in computer science and daily life - MIT News

The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family. Lee Iacocca

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mothers sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, Woman, here is your son, and to the disciple, Here is your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. Bible (John 19:25-27)

Melanie Phillips, a journalist for the Times of London, authored a book titled Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain. In it, she writes, And when I started writing about family breakdown, I was also called an Old Testament fundamentalist. At the time, I shrugged this aside as merely a gratuitous bit of bigotry. Much later, however, I came to realize that it was actually a rather precise insult. My assailants had immediately understood something I did not myself at the time understand, that the destruction of the traditional family had, as its real target, the destruction of biblical morality.

An article about Ms. Phillips goes on to say Writing as one of Britains most prominent journalists, informed by dozens of contacts, digging into thousands of statistics, Ms. Phillips found that family unity caused national stability (whereas) family breakdown caused national instability. That is just what the facts showed. And even though she did not realize it at the time, accepting the real-world evidence supporting traditional family brought her thinking in-line with the ultimate source of traditional family: the Holy Bible.

Dennis Rainey, formerly with FamilyLife Today, published a book in 1989 titled "Staying Close." The following extensive quote comes from this book:

Today there is a war being waged against the family. Our nations marriages, specifically our children, face their own particular Dunkirk, but families can hope for little help from Washington or the legislators of their state capitals the problem is too large for them. Trained psychologists and counselors can assist only a comparative handful of the thousands of families that need guidance and direction. Mighty voices in church pulpits and on television and radio can provide influence, but if the war is to be won, it must happen with lay people like you and me.

Our nations families hang in the balance. With over five billion people inhabiting our planet today, your family, like mine needs to feel it is significant. Everyone in your family should realize it is part of something that will outlive all of them. What greater investment could there be that to learn to make your own marriage and family work, and then begin to reach out to help others do the same? Thats how you can build a heritage of destiny.

The choice is yours. I want to challenge you to help rescue Americas broken and bleeding families.

When Nehemiah directed the rebuilding of the wall at Jerusalem, he made each man responsible for the section of wall that was in front of his own home. Nehemiahs strategy was brilliant. Each man was highly motivated to rebuild the wall high and well-fortified in front of his own home. Why? If the wall were low or weak, that would be the first place where enemies would burst through to overwhelm everyone in their path.

The parallel for today is clear. The family is for a nation what the wall represented for Jerusalem our countrys protection. We need Christian families who will first begin building strong walls for themselves. Then we need you to reach out to help your neighbors build.

Over 30 years later, the problems Dennis Rainey cited have become significantly worse. We see socialism and its spinoff, communism, raising their ugly heads today. The Communist Manifesto has one of its primary tenets the abolition of the family. The question is do we care enough to do anything about it? Its up to you and me. We can watch Rome burn or we can get involved with our churches and otherwise to make a difference.

The Family & Marriage Coalition of Aiken, Inc. (FAMCO) was created to provide resources for you to succeed in your marriage and families. Roger Rollins, Executive Director, FAMCO, 803-640-4689, rogerrollins@gmail.com, http://www.aikenfamco.com/

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FAMILY AND MARRIAGE: The family is in trouble - Charleston Post Courier