I recently arrowed send and, instantly it seemed, my novel-in-progress flew from my desk in California to an editor on the East Coast. The Fire Trail had been rewritten once again. Characters were developed more fully, I hope, scenes added and expanded, plot points remapped, histories made true.

I am enraptured by what is true, a true truth-junkie. In all of my novels I have tracked and tried to capture truth, turning this elusive and challenging quality into characters who live and breathe, people who people my pages. For it is the artist's solemn obligation to attempt this invaluable and possibly foolhardy feat, this re-presenting what is true about you and I, our world, our very existence. It is a big and scary subject, and some of us do not want to hear about it, for as T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

We call these realities "hard truths," and they are ones which make some folks squirm: the definition of marriage and why the state should be interested in its definition, the sacredness of life from conception to grave, the need for freedom linked to responsibility, liberty linked to law, democracy linked to an educated electorate. Yet all of these truths are necessary for American culture to survive, indeed, for free peoples of the world to survive.

Entering the election season, we citizens who own the great privilege of voting must understand these issues. It is good we have these months to debate truth, from all points of view. It is good that we learn what is at stake, recognize when truth is elasticized and remolded, is shape-shifting. In this learning process, we pull truth into its proper shape, into its true character.

And so in my little novel that flew through cyberspace I tried to pull these elastic truths back into their real shapes through my characters. The characters themselves, for that matter, are icons of many people I have known. They speak with voices I have heard. They have been molded with words as an icon is painted with prayer, so that they will one day face readers and say, "I am so pleased to meet you." Thus, the dance begins, a waltz or a minuet, a conversation between character and reader, a slow dance at first, but one picking up pace and tempo, as the music of language is heard.

Art is a medium of truth, or can be, should be. It is a way of expressing the inexpressible, explaining the unexplainable, touching familiar notes deep within our common humanity, as though we were an orchestra playing a symphony. The artist reaches into clay or image or symbol, tempo or melody or chord, and re-molds it to show something true about each one of us. The medium is only that, a medium, material used to tell us about ourselves as human beings, who we truly are.

With the rise of advertising over the last century, truth has become malleable, slanted, slippery. And with advertising we learn to be forewarned and hesitate before believing that snake oil will cure blindness.
But in the process, journalists, publishers, and politicians have been tempted to twist and stretch truth, so that honest elections are held hostage to news media, be it print, video, or electronic. Shades of gray stretch as far as the eye can see. Colors and definitions disappear in a wasteland of relativity. What are voters to do? We can only be aware, beware, and be wary of the lie that there is no truth, no right way forward. It is not, as they say and preach, all relative. Truth exists, is real, is true.

And so as we listen and read, as we consider the direction our nation should take, who should lead us through the wilderness of today, I am glad I created characters who live within the debates. I will refine them with honest fire, hammering and shaping their golds into revelations, beautiful and good and true.
For in the end, this is what we all desire, to know in truth where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going.

There is, to be sure, an innate human desire for fairness, treating everyone equal. We speak of being "equal under the law," that regardless of race, religion, and gender we will be treated equally. Whether your hair is pink or blue, your skin is spotted or smooth, you are obese or anorexic, young or old, rich or poor, man or woman, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, you will be treated equally (with the exception, of course, of the unborn).

We are wired to demand fairness, even if we are not always successful in our practice of fairness. Children say, "That's not fair!" A sense of justice (often without mercy) flowers in childhood. We are born with the idea of fairness.

History is the story, in many ways, of peoples who believed they, or others, were unfairly treated, who demanded fairness through whatever means available - letters to the editor, peaceful protest, less peaceful protest, riots, revolutions. Always, there is the righteous belief that they are right and are seeking "justice." God is on their side, and if they don't believe in God, then a residue of Godly fairness inspires them.

After all, we have been made in our Maker's image. We reflect his great love for us in our desire to love and be loved. We reflect his reason in our belief that we can reason things out, make sense. We reflect his justice with our own deeply held certainty that things should be fair. And lastly we reflect his mercy when we forgive our enemies, when we make amends, when we work to create justice for all, fair play for everyone, when we love one another.

But how do you right wrongs of the past? Christians do so by confessing and forgiving. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." We are sorry, we say to our God, we will change, repent. Then we move on, guilt-free to soar as a bird, at peace with ourselves and our neighbors, and with our God.

But what happens with a secular society with historical wrongs like slavery, when we do not believe in a God who will forge a peace between us, who will absolve us? How and when is national guilt forgiven? How long must the culture pay, make amends, before it turns in upon itself? How many reparations, how many preferments in education and employment, how many times must Lady Justice excuse crimes she would not excuse for others? She should be blind, weighing only the evidence.

There comes a time when these affirmative actions become divisive and racist, undoing all they were meant to do, turning upon the majority, and increasing alienation. There comes a time when these actions actually hinder integration.

A nation cannot be absolved by a priest or God. It cannot be forgiven its trespasses as a person can. A nation is left at the mercy of the aggrieved, where and when that group sees the opportunity to extort payment for their grievance. And in the process other minorities watch the rioting and the looting and the burning of their town and country. They become the aggrieved, a recipe for revolution.

It is time to honor fairness to all, a time when the reparations of slavery have put paid to the debt owed. We would hope, as citizens, that our government would sense that time is now and stand strong. We would hope that our educational institutions would as well, that they would honor each student, each admissions or faculty applicant equally, not by race, religion or gender, but by merit.

I was not born with a silver spoon, or a silver anything. I was born into the modest home of a pastor relying on the income from his church and their kindnesses. I never felt aggrieved with my economic status. I worked my way through college and couldn't afford grad school so got an office job to pay the rent. I'm not saying I wasn't envious of those who had it easier, but I came to see that life wasn't always fair. I counted my blessings, for, as my mother often reminded me, I had ten fingers and ten toes, two arms and two legs, wasn't deaf or blind, and was pretty good at reading. So I just needed to do my best and that was good enough.

Ever since Eve ate that forbidden fruit, mankind has acted unfairly. And so God destroyed the Tower of Babel, sent a great flood, and finally, in his mercy, called Abraham out of Ur to be the father of a great nation that would number as the stars. He gave laws to Moses. He chose a people who wrestled with him and his justice and his mercy. At last, after all this loving preparation, Christians believe he sent the promised messiah, the Christ, the Son, Emmanuel, God-with-us. We believe that this Jesus of Nazareth walked among us, showing by his life, death, and resurrection how we are to love one another, how we are to be just and merciful and fair. He gave us a way forward with his words, his life, and his death, to heal the brokenness, the unfairness, the mercilessness. He gave us a way forward to union with his Father - through his body, the Church.

A Western tradition blossomed from this creed. It struggled with how to be fair in an unfair world, among people who lived and loved imperfectly. The tradition of Judeo-Christian fairness enshrined in common law and courts was formed under monarchies. It birthed democracies. It formed the Western Canon, the foundation of higher education, so that the next generation, our future rulers, our best and brightest, would understand fairness and its child, freedom.

And so today we try to protect this great legacy. Fairness and freedom are ideals, imperfect, but vitally important to our nation and the West. It grieves me to see government bow to the extortion of the aggrieved, often for political reasons. Thomas Sowell of Stanford's Hoover Institution recently called it giving in to bullies:

"No small part of the internal degeneration of American society has been a result of supposedly responsible officials caving in to whatever group is currently in vogue, and allowing them to trample on everyone else's rights... Politicians who exempt from the law certain groups who have been chosen as mascots undermine the basis for a decent society...The goal of 'the rule of law and not of men' has increasingly been abandoned in favor of government picking winners and losers... a path that demoralizes a society, and leads to either a war of each against all or to a backlash of repression and revenge."

Life is not fair. We must support a "rule of law and not of men" (John Adams). In this coming election year, it is good to keep this in mind.

I've had the privilege to help out with the beginnings of a new Center for Western Civilization, located in Berkeley, one block south of the University of California on the corner of Durant and Bowditch. We hope to enrich the university curriculum with lectures reflecting the Western tradition of ordered liberty, privileged and responsible freedom, elected government, open markets, habeas corpus, rule of law, jury trials. These ideals are our rightful inheritance, principles that reflect John Adams' "government of laws, and not of men." Laws protect; men dictate.

These are principles not always found in required university curricula. It is also true that freedom of speech and religion is not respected on many college campuses, with the most egregious intolerance found in the cloistered halls of the Ivy League and in the lofty liberalism of our public universities, namely U. C. Berkeley.

There is a correlation between this rise of intolerance, with its enforcement by campus bullies, and our increasingly empty churches, according to Mary Eberstadt. In "From Campus Bullies to Empty Churches" (Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2015), she describes the peer and faculty pressure on students todeny their Christian faith, to consider such belief a fairy tale. Christianity is not acceptable in quad or classroom, and students want to fit in. Christians and their beliefs are ridiculed. Parents, beware of paying outrageous sums for such an education! Students, beware of going into debt for a lopsided program, to put it kindly.

And so it has been of some concern to many of us that the pillars of our society are crumbling and those who might rebuild the foundations - the best and brightest of the next generation - are being stripped of their heritage, our legacy to the young. Today a counter-revolution composed of brave warriors who are unafraid of the bullies, unafraid of the speech police, is challenging faculty and tenure tracks, armed with support networks. These conservative groups, folks that want to conserve our ideals enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights, grow stronger each day. They need our support.

Our Center for Western Civilization hopes to do just that. In these early days, we have connected with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), founded by Frank Chodorov in 1953 who saw the need for a fifty-year project to "revive the American ideals of individual freedom and personal responsibility... by implanting these ideals in the minds of the coming generations." A young William F. Buckley Jr. was ISI's first president. Since then they have held seminars and summer programs based on six major principles: limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, a free-market economy, and traditional values (i.e. Judeo-Christian).

This past year ISI established a U. C. Berkeley group, the Burke Society, and we hope to work with them as well. We will also network with others on campus concerned about these vital issues. God seems to be writing with our crooked lines, hopefully straightening them.While every effort we have made has been fraught with difficulties and impossibilities, doors keep opening. We boldly walk through them, wondering what is on the other side.

In April we will sponsor our first lecture. David Theroux, Founder and President of the C. S. Lewis Society of California, will speak on "C S Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism." Lewis was keenly aware of the threat of totalitarianism, having lived through two world wars and witnessed the rise of Hitler and Stalin. Our event has outgrown the planned venue and we are moving it to a larger one.

All the while my little novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, considers these issues as well: the borders between wilderness and civilization, the effects of the sexual revolution on American culture, the dangers caused by a culture of narcissism and grievance, and the inclusivity that allows barbarians through our gates. It considers what defines us, who we are, for if we don't know who we are, we don't know where we are going. Our own history - that of America and the Western world - answers these questions, and it is to our founding fathers and mothers that we must turn. We cannot afford to look away, denying that the pillars are crumbling.

Some take exception to the label,Western civilization. Are we being ethnocentric? Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament representing South East England, calls Western civilization the "Anglosphere," and this is a useful name, for it avoids the charge that we are speaking only of America and Western Europe. The Anglosphere - the free English-speaking peoples worldwide - has an important story to tell, and tell again and again, for as Hannan says, "the Anglosphere is why Bermuda is not Haiti. It's why Singapore is not Indonesia. It's why Hong Kong is not China (for now)... the individual is lifted above the collective. The citizen is exalted over the state; the state is seen as his servant, not his master." (Intercollegiate Review)

Much has been written denigrating the history of the West. Corruption, crimes, misogyny, slavery, conquest, and many other dark moments are brought to light, judged, and sentenced, both secular and religious. But this has been true of every era; there will always be the good and the bad in human society. And so we make judgments about what is good and worth conserving. We choose the good and reject the bad.

The existence of these dark events and those who perpetrated them does not warrant rejecting the foundations of our culture. And so, for example, we look to Michelangelo, Dante, Shakespeare in the Renaissance. We want to recapture their "mimetic content" as Joseph A. Mazzeo writes, to pass it on to the next generation, and to enrich and fortify our own. Likewise we want to disregard the Medicis, Strozzis, della Roveres, and other dark Renaissance figures. We judge what makes our people great, good and free, and eventually we realize that the artists and writers and statesmen of the "Western Canon" (so reviled and abandoned in our schools) looked to their own history, to the Christ story for mimetic content, for they lived in a living tradition. In the story of Christ we find the origin of our ideals, our unique Western worldview. We find the sacredness of each individual regardless of class, gender, race, and religion, a revolutionary concept. And of course Christ lived and breathed within the Jewish tradition of law and faith.

We must not take our Anglosphere inheritance for granted. It is unique, precious, and under attack from within and without. The first battle that must be fought is on our university campuses. The second is in Washington D. C.

The future of humanity passes through marriage and the family. So proclaimed Pope John Paul II. When traditional marriage and family is threatened, damaged, and destroyed, so is humanity's future. Many have written recently about the severe decline in birth rates that will soon cause a global crisis.

Today the Baby Boomer generation is moving into their senior years. Born in the post WWII boom, they comprise a significant percentageof the U.S. population. They will require massive care as they age. Where will that care come from? And with increased longevity, they will require such care farther into the future.

Since the second world war, we have lauded individual autonomy. In our pursuit of happiness we find we may have taken a wrong turn, have embraced self and mocked the authority of tradition, faith, and family to our peril. We have redefined and weakened traditional marriage through no-fault divorce, as we no longer recognize producing and nurturing the next generation as the primary goal of marriage. Birth control began the winnowing, and abortion killed the others who were unwanted. Children, as well as the elderly, have become inconvenient in their demand sacrifice of time and money. As we have sought our own way and individual happiness, we have been inevitably destroying the family and thus the future of humanity.

The world is soon to face a critical shortage of workers. It is ironic or perhaps an obvious result, that my generation of Boomers who failed to provide a substantial next generation, will now have fewerto care for themas theyage. In addition, we have not produced the next work force that will manufacture goods, the next police force that will ensure the peace, the next military force that will defend our borders. For a sneak preview, read P. D. James' dystopian novel, The Children of Men.

I've counted at least five trends that will probably coalesce in the next few decades: a worldwide (and massive) graying population, the destruction of the extended family that cares for the aged, the absence of a younger generation that will care for the aged (due to population decline), the increased longevity of the aged, and the culture of self over a culture of self-sacrifice.

As Nicholas Eberstadt writes in the Wall Street Journal,

"Our world-wide flight from family constitutes a significant international victory for self-actualization over self-sacrifice, and might even be said to mark a new chapter in humanity's conscious pursuit of happiness. But these voluntary changes have unintended consequences... by some cruel cosmic irony, family structures and family members will be less capable, and perhaps also less willing to provide... care and support than ever before... (which) promises to frame an overarching social problem...throughout the world. It is far from clear that humanity is prepared to cope with the consequences of its impending family deficit, with increasing independence for those traditionally most dependent on others - i.e. the young and old."

We've been warned about the population deficit, that we will not have the numbers to support our economy or defend our borders. But it may come home sooner than that, as we age and become abandoned by our own society.

Some of us have family. Some do not. Digging into the deeper andbetter part of our human nature, we want to care for both groups.

It is no surprise that with a national healthcare system that is economically unviable, assisted suicide is encouraged.What committee will decide who lives and who dies? What pressures will be felt by seniors to end their lives for the convenience of their loved ones? What happens to the mind (and heart and soul) of the physician who has journeyed down that path... one that no longersupports life. And should those in the medical industry who support lifebe forced to defend themselves?

In the end, I suppose, we do reap (as a world, a nation, a family, an individual) what we sow.
If John Paul II is right, and the future of humanity is indeed passed on through the family, we are in trouble. As marriage and the family dies, so does humanity.

And as the family weakens, the wisdom and culture of the past is not passed on. We are left bankruptnot only in terms of matters of defense at home and abroad, matters of health care. We are left without the moral compass of over two thousand years of Judeo-Christian ethos.

Let us renew life. Let us fight for every unborn child. Let us revere and care for our aged. Ancient societies understood this and so should we if it is not too late.

Let us support marriage and family life whenever and wherever we can

The horrific massacres in Paris reminded us all that once again the borders of civilization had been crossed. The barbarians entered the gates of Paris and the free world.

The killers attacked the West in an effort to silence us. I, for one, prefer logical debate to ridicule. It troubles me when religious images are ridiculed and defiled. But in the West we discuss our differences in peaceful forums.

Peggy Noonan recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

"Without free speech no difference of opinion can be resolved, no progress made in the law or in politics, no truth found and held high, no scandal unearthed and stopped...We know on some level that this is how civilization keeps itself together."

So the issue withthe Paris killings is not that the publisher should have been more restrained. The cartoonists were not "at fault" for their caricatures. The issue is how civil society deals with disagreement. We do not grab a rifle and shoot. We express our grievances through debate, speech, the courts.

Clearly terrorists who kill in the name of their god do not agree with our laws, or how we choose to redress insults. They are not interested in converting us to their beliefs through debate and apologetics. They are interested in forcing our submission, and submission is not peace. Submission is not freedom. We in the West honor freedom.

There are many trends in Western culture that I find disturbing and so I wrote a novel called The Fire Trail. One of the themes is the need for individuals in our culture of freedom to practice self-discipline, to consider one another's feelings. But without faith-institutions to curtail excesses in word and image, we seem to be at a loss. We do not want to, nor should we, limit speech by legal means. It is far better, to be sure, to limit ourselves, to control our urge to ridicule.

In many universities some who see themselves offended have tried to limit free speech by naming offensive speech "hate speech." This is a dangerous road to go down. I would rather be offended than to criminalize offensive (hate) speech. Protection of free speech is far too important, far too intrinsic to who we are as a people. We need this First Amendment right in order to survive.

Perhaps it is simply easier to claim offense than to engage in debate. It is easier to ridicule than to reason. Perhaps both sides - the offender and the offended - act and react simplistically out of laziness, mental sloth. Perhaps they are used to easy and not trained in the difficult.

Much has been written about the need for the return of virtue to the public square. The West was built on Judeo-Christian virtues, blended with Greek virtues. As faith recedes, virtue recedes. How do we return faith's virtue to the public square? Without the authority of that Judeo-Christian God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, how can we survive and still be free?

The Jewish legacy of the Ten Commandments gave us laws to honor God and one another. The Greeks spoke of the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, courage. Christianity added faith, hope, and charity, giving us seven virtues to battle the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.I have often thought that if we practiced these virtues, or confessed and repented the vices, the sins, we would have little need for legal restraints. But we are children of Adam and Eve. It is difficult to practice these all the time; we are constantly tempted. It is easy to envy and be angry, even easier to be gluttonous and greedy. It is easy to lust, encouraged by the soft porn around us. And pride honors all sins and has no need for virtue, not admitting it exists. Pride lives in denial. Pride is blind and blinding.

How do we infuse the public square with the desire to be good? We cannot legislate goodness. We cannot legislate love, honor, and respect. This is the great question of the twenty-first century, how to revive the legacy of faith as faith dims, as churches close and their lights go out.

So my little novel is my small peaceful contribution to the debate, a quiet call to recognize that the barbarians are on our borders, to admit our pride and our denial. I fear such admission may be too late for Europe, as one commentator lamented, but America has hidden strengths and is used to changing course and doing battle. Never before has there been such a need for such a change of course.

As the Anglican scholar, C. S. Lewis, wrote inMere Christianity:

"Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."

Our freedoms have been birthed, formed, and secured by the civilized world of the West, and that world is now threatened. We value life and love and freedom; others do not. The choice is clear. We must return virtue to the public square by supporting the faith-institutions upon whichvirtue depends.

Last week we celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This week we worry about building a wall along our southern border high enough and in time enough to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. And we worry about a president who disregards our laws.

Walls wall people out, and they wall people in. The Berlin Wall, a part of the "iron curtain" separating the Communist East from the free West, walled people in, imprisoning them. The purpose of the border makes a difference. The quality of freedom and the degree of tyranny on either side makes a difference.

America, as a free society, allows freedom of travel, albeit with the legal documents to do so, documents that protect not only the traveler, but the citizenry at home and abroad. We cross borders and checkpoints, and walls seem to disappear for legal American citizens. Those of us fortunate enough to be born here must never take this for granted. Those of us who have come here legally will, to be sure, never take it for granted. Those who crossed our borders illegally, however, have harmed both themselves and us, for the rule of law, our justice system, is integral to America's very definition. Illegal immigrants would not be coming to America if it were otherwise. But their breaking of our law has also harmed those legal immigrants who have waited in line patiently. Their breaking of our law hasalsoharmed the millions of law-abiding workers whose wages are challenged by an influx of a low-cost and illegal labor force. Laws are made for a reason and by the Americanpeople.

I have found that personal walls are useful parameters in my life. We call such walls self-discipline. I build walls around my time, boxing in an hour to write this blog, imprisoning an occasional day to write a another scene in The Fire Trail, my novel-in-progress, or fencing in a morning to worship God in church.
I don't always feel like going to church. I confess there are often other things I would rather be doing. But my time wall tells me it's time, it's Sunday, and since this wall is one of the Ten Commandments, I had better have a good reason for breaking this commandment. I don't always feel like writing a blog, but see it as a good discipline, an exercise in words, rather like my stretching exercises each morning. Who wants to exercise? We do it because we know we will feel better, that we will prevent injury by strengthening muscles and pumping the heart. If we ignore this time wall, we hurt ourselves. This istrue about our souls, minds, and bodies.

Since the sixties, our culture has torn down boundaries and mocked moral discipline, has destroyed all kinds of walls. Deviancy has been defined down; crime has risen. Standards of dress, behavior, academics, work, and many other areas of social interaction have sought to be inclusive so that no one be offended by beauty, truth, goodness, excellence or wealth. Our culture has mainstreamed variation, including everyone in one main stream. When this happens, when walls no longer define excellence, when borders no longer define truth, goodness, and beauty, their edges smudge and we find ourselves living in a tepid gray area along with everyone else... wearing the uniform of sexless comrades in a steely city, a dystopia growing more familiar each day.

It is as though we have mistaken inclusivity and warm-heartedness for love. But love, true love, loves the uniqueness of each created being, warts and all. Each of us can be no one else. Love rejoices in these differences, doesn't deny and merge them, hoping they will disappear in a gray land without borders.
And as we rejoice in our human differences, whether they be race, gender, beauty, or talent, let us also rejoice in the borders defining our nation, a land that is just and free, boundaries that celebrate legal crossings and prosecute illegal ones. This is the America that immigrants desire. This is the America we are proud of. This is the America we are honored to fight for in a world of shadows and merging grays.

In Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall," the narrator repairs a common-border wall with his neighbor, who claims, "Good fences make good neighbors." The poet considers what this means, asking,

"Why do they make good neighbors...
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offense."

His neighbor doesn't consider why, just repeats his slogan. But Mr. Frost's narrator is right, it is good to answer why we build walls, consider who's outside and who's inside and possible offenses caused by our defenses, for there are, or should be,good reasons.

Let us build a just wall along the borders of our nation that willprevent illegal entry. Let us encourage those here illegally to become legal through due process and to stand in line like everyone else. And let us keep the wall repaired to protect us all, to ensure that America remains her true self, America. Let us thus be good and responsible neighbors.

Last week we recalled the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Remembrance Day, which recalls the signing of the World War I armistice, and Veterans Day, honoring all military men and women who have served our country, soon followed.

Remembering these soldiers and these wars, recalling our defense of freedom and defeat of tyranny reminds us of the fragility of peace. Evil flies in planes across our borders, bombing our cities. It creeps through the jungle into our civilized world. But it is also deep within each of us, lying dormant, or not so dormant, asleep or not so asleep. A wall runs through each heart, a wall not so unlike the one that divided Berlin. On one side, the bestial; on the other, the celestial. One side is self-preserving and tyrannical; the other is self-sacrificing and honorable. Most of us do not see the border, for we are used to it and the territories merge. It is a smudged line at best, and we ignore it.

Similar blurry lines run through cultures. Parts are barbaric and others civil. One side recognizes the law of the jungle, might makes right; the other upholds the law God gave to man, life is precious, love one another, the common good is good. In some countries the boundary is clear, a geographical periphery bordering the nation, defined by democratic institutions. In some communities it is hazy and lazy, as law-abiding neighborhoods slip into law-breaking ones. Inner cities, once "gentrified," blur into crime-ridden communities, where politically correct policies encourage criminals.

Other lines are more clear. We can see clearly the border between the Trade Center Towers and the terrorists who destroyed them. We see the border between the peaceful shoppers in a mall and the terrorist who beheaded the coworker. We can see also the border between the innocent runners in a marathon and the terrorists who maimed them.

We fought two World Wars so that free peoples could live freely and peacefully. How ironic and tragic that we must go to war to ensure peace. It seems to be the way of man, that one side of his heart must triumph over the other in order to protect the good from the evil. The free must triumph over those who seek to enslave them. This is a just war.

The Berlin wall was hugely symbolic and terribly effective. Many lives were lost in attempts to flee Eastern Germany and the shackles of the Communist Soviet Union, to the safety of the West. But even with the wall finally down, and even with our rejoicing in its fall, we know there are still five countries imprisoned by Communism. For them the wall has not fallen; they do not remember victory on this day or any day; they mourn for the daily victims.

Hong Kong, back under Communist China's control since 1997, recently witnessed thousands of protesters demanding the right to vote in honest elections. The protest was quelled by tear gas, pepper spray, beatings, jailings, in an echo of the Tiananmen Square massacre twenty-five years ago. In Laos, the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, the only party allowed, denies free speech, religious freedom, and property ownership. Like its neighbor Communist Vietnam, the government tortures and imprisons those who disagree. Cuba follows the Communist playbook as well, keeping a tight grip on thought, speech, and freedom. The border between Communist North Korea and Democratic South Korea is a clear geographical boundary, a four-hundred-mile demilitarized zone, separating a people with common language and history. The Communist North tortures and starves its citizens, denies freedom of religion, thought, travel. As Mr. Marion Smith, Executive Director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal:

"To tear down that wall will require the same moral clarity that brought down the concrete and barbed-wire barrier that divided Berlin 25 years ago. The Cold War may be over, but the battle on behalf of human freedom is still being waged every day. The triumph of liberty we celebrate on this anniversary of the Berlin Wall's destruction must not be allowed to turn to complacency in the 21stcentury."

And so remembrance inspires us to rededicate and re-shore our beliefs, our courage, and yes, our military strength as a free nation in a world of shackled peoples. Recent midterm elections recognized this. I hope we will see more clearly the wall dividing freedom and tyranny, so that we may preserve our own scattered communities of peace.

And we give humble thanks to the brave men and women who have kept us free, fighting and dying for our freedoms. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

What is civilization? And more particularly, what is Western Civilization?

I have been pondering this question, not only with regard to the upcoming election, but also in light of the demise of Western Civilization course requirements on university campuses across our nation. We are told that these classes are elitist, that they promote only the West and shun the rest, and we need to be more inclusive, study all civilizations equally. (Perhaps that wouldn't be a problem if all were actually studied,but students who are leftfree to chooseoften neglect Western histories.)

In my reading and unraveling, there appears to be an odd word game at play here. To be sure there are many civilizations throughout the world and in time, and this meaning of the word "civilization," that is, a society of people and their culture, recognizes this. All are worthy of study.

What is more to the point, however, is how to conserve those aspects of a civilization we find valuable and necessary, i.e. those ideals of the Western world, going back to Athens, that we find crucial to free peoples today. Many of these aspects, these roots and ideals, are found in other cultures in varying degrees, planted by the West through colonialism. This is not being elitist or exclusionary. It is simply true.

Clearly there are aspects of civilizations that we might not want to encourage on our shores. The tyrannies of the Islamic State and of the Communist State come to mind; repressive and corrupt governments come to mind. We are not keen on beheadings and lawlessness and military dictators. We like free elections and freedom to travel and own property. Western democracies are (or should be) favored, because liberty, limited and representative government, free speech, the freedom to worship and assemble, the rule of law, are lauded as ideals.

What happens when we fail to teach our children the history of these ideals found in the development of the Western world? What happens to our electorate when we say North Korea and Iran have equally good forms of government and pose no threat?

In my ponderings, I've come up with a working definition of civilization, which one of my characters poses in my novel-in-progress,The Fire Trail, a story about the borders of civilization and the wilderness:

A civilized society is a culture in which the common good is desired and advanced, but individual life and liberty protected, in which the natural world is controlled but cultivated and cared for, in which respectful debate is fostered and slander discouraged, in which social charity is promoted, yet private property protected, in which the rule of law and representative government works to provide peace at home and defense of our borders.

A cousin to the question of civilization is the question of the Christian influence in Western Civilization's development. They are interwoven, for Christianity's inherent belief in progress, of bettering oneself and one's community, as well as the value of the individual, spurred Western Civilization forward. The work ethic was largely a Christian ethos that has become secular through time. Eastern civilizations did not develop in this way, for life was circular and determined by fate; one worshiped one's ancestors and was not so concerned with one's descendants; happiness was found in denial of the material world and retreat into a mystical state.

Christianity, in its theology of the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, recognized that at that moment man turned away from God, thinking he would make himself godlike. Instead of godlike, he became primitive, savage. By recognizing this original sin, Christianity claimed that God saved man from himself and from death, through God's own Incarnation. Man was shown and saved by sacrificial love. In this way, the Judeo-Christian tradition, i.e. the Western tradition, came to embrace (not always perfectly) the ideals of honor, sacrifice, communal charity, protection of life, liberty, and yes, it also claimed a path to happiness, not just its pursuit.

The idea of the noble savage, a romantic primitivism embraced since the eighteenth century (from Rousseau, Mead, Marx, and Engels to Karen Armstrong), does not hold up to reality. The natural world is a wild world, one that we humans must tame, just as we must tame the wildness within our own hearts.

Aristotle is quoted as saying, "the purpose of politics is not to make living together possible, but to make living well possible." It is most certainly both. And these are also purposes of Western Civilization, to create a culture that cultivates freedom of expression through word and image, one that encourages our nobler side, our more sacrificial and heroic side, one that teaches us to love. It does this by ensuring peace and prosperity, and by passing on these ideals to the next generation.

It is a truthuniversally acknowledged that the medium, if not the message itself, shapes the message, midwifes the message, and delivers the message.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian philosopher of communication theory, not only foresaw the Internet but bequeathed this popular phrase, "The medium is the message." Since I work with words and consider them the material of miracles, I like to think that words are powerful on their own, anywhere, in any medium. But lately I have been considering how powerful the medium is truly becoming, far more than McLuhan could have dreamed.

In our parish church we use a liturgy that can be dated to the eleventh-century Sarum rite in Salisbury, England; the daily hours, the psalter, go back to seventh-century monasteries. But more to the point is that many generations have said and say these same words, as though taking part in a great drama, weekly, sometimes daily. The words form phrases of timeless truth that were honed and perfected in Elizabethan translations of the old Latin, so that in many ways what we say evokes a Shakespearean play. The words are big words with large theological consequences of sin and redemption, sorrow and joy, darkness and light. These words make a difference in our hearts and lives,here and now. The language serves a clear purpose, to bring us in from the profane and secular world so that we can partake of the sacred and holy one, uniting the two. The language rebirths and recreates us, returning us to the secular world to be living mediums for the message. Our lives become words and the medium merges with the message in our own bodies.

The medium that holds these words, this message, is print on paper, pages bound into a book. But the same words come to us through the medium of our own speech as we say and sing them and through the medium of our ears as we hear them said and sung. Thesharedexperience of the people - the shared space, language, speech, processions, and the prayers and creeds spoken as one voice - is also a medium. So the medium of ritual provides a powerful experience of meaning, of message. We have pulled the heart from each word; we have traveled centuries with each word; we have looked into heaven with each word.

Such ritual is part of social constructions as well. Where it is ignored, society becomes deconstructed, torn apart. Where it is recognized as necessary, society weaves together, for a commonality is shared. In a democracy, we are reminded of such shared values through mediums of patriotic rituals: celebrating national holidays with parades and ceremonies, saluting the flag, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, singing patriotic songs, honoring memorials, monuments, and heroes of our shared history. When these mediums of our nation's message are ignored, or worse, belittled, democracy is threatened, for we act as individuals or self-interested groups rather than as one body, Americans with shared ideals expressed in common language and recalled through common history.

As we approach our nation's midterm elections, messages and mediums become hugely important. Illiteracy and short attention spans unfortunately demand entertaining mediums, TV and sound bites. Voters choose candidates and policy based on flashing images and pulsating phrases, delivered by powerful interest groups. A candidate today must be politically correct in appearance, attractive and charismatic. Votes are cast for race, gender, and other superficial standards.

It would not matter if these were high school elections for cheerleader or class president. But, as we have seen in the last two presidential elections, telegenic and scholarly does not mean experienced, and pretty words and phrases do not equal sound policy. Words are mediums for something greater; they must point to keeping us safe and our communities law-abiding. They must reflect constitutional protections to freedom of speech, religion, association.

Our colorful and rich diversity is one of the many glories of our nation, but we must melt into one pot we call America; we must share language and history; we must not forget who we are, but keep the message alive with each generation through the medium of patriotism, through symbol, ritual, and story. If we do not do this, if we do not pass on our shared story, we shall fragment, weaken, and be conquered by those who do not share our love for America and her freedoms.

I look to this moment in our national history, this first Tuesday in November of 2014, praying that the many voices of America will reflect educated choices, ones that respect law, liberty, and freedom of expression, ones that understand the power of this American message expressed in the greatest medium of all, a single vote.

My novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, is progressing. But little did I know, when I set this novel in Berkeley in September of 2014 (a decision made at least a year ago that almost seemed arbitrary), that so many events would collide in this month that illustrated my themes.

I'm not sure why I didn't focus on the Nine-Eleven tragedy to begin with, but I didn't. I was thinking of the time of year, time of sunset (and thus daylight versus darkness). I was thinking of temperature and dryness, and well, naturally, fire hazards. I wanted school to be in session, so that sort of ruled out the summer months, and while dry it needed to be beautiful with a trail that students would run. September seemed the answer. I plotted the month out, day by day, wondering how many weeks the plot should encompass. How long does it take for two strangers to fall in love?

The story begins on September 3 and my characters appear in the next few days. In real life, wars around the world had been escalating over the summer. Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared, becoming a "ghost" plane, never found. Russian fighters shot down a passenger airline over Ukraine. Islamic terrorism was rising and homegrown terrorists from Britain had usefully dangerous passports into the West. Journalists were beheaded, and their killers boasted. Events, again and again, and seeming ongoing, verified that Western Civilization's borders were being breached by fire.

The President addressed the nation on Wednesday, September 10, the night before the Nine-Eleven memorial. His words seemed too little too late, but indicated a more forceful course in military action. Many Americans hoped and prayed that a clear message would be sent, that we would fight for our peaceful world, we would die for our freedoms. We were still the power that defended liberty and representative government.

So I finally realized my story had placed the September 11 memorial of the Twin Towers attack at its very heart. The story's action would rise to this point, and then fall away from it. For in our own American history, September 11, 2001, will remain a watershed moment. It is an event that changed us as a nation, woke us up. Some have gone back to sleep, but, thank God, some have remained awake, watching and listening. Those who see the threat for what it was and is - an attack on our way of life as Americans - turned to examine our culture to understand how to be better prepared. Those who recognize the flames coming toward them are sounding the alarm. They are working hard to keep the fire trail clear, retain a true fire break.

Democracy requires patriotism, a civic devotion instilled in school. Classical societies knew this. Our founding fathers knew this. Many have recognized that a good society must cultivate good citizens, men and women educated according to a value-laden curriculum, instilling virtues that allow them to live peaceably together in pursuit of the common good and individual happiness. Instead, the last fifty years has seen a steady erosion of this foundation. Academia has grown cynical and elite and out-of-touch with what actually produces the culture that allowsto speak, to be cynical and elite and out-of-touch. The ivory towers, like Babel, have risen higher and higher, the windows darkened with ivy, the rooms dim. Patriotism has not been fashionable.The American way, the way of Western Civilization, these elite say, is just one way among many. We are not exceptional, so they say.

Alas, the American way is not one among many and we are indeed exceptional.America is truly a shining city upon a hill, as was Athens and Rome and Paris and London to the degree that they allowed democratic values to thrive. Over two millennia the development of free thinking peoples and their systems of governing has been unique to the West. So what happened? How did freedom and the flag become something to look down upon from on high? How is it that our homegrown intellectuals sneer and deride the stars and stripes?

Yale historian Donald Kaganwas recentlyquoted in the Wall Street Journal:

"Jefferson meant American education to produce a necessary patriotism. Democracy - of all political systems, because it depends on the participation of its citizens in their own government and because it depends on their own free will to risk their lives in its defense - stands in the greatest need of an education that produces patriotism. I recognize that I have said something shocking..."

How true. Too many schools haven't taught love of country for too many generations, and battles continue to rage in school boards over teaching patriotic curriculum, American history that explains who we are, what we stand for, and what we have to lose if we don't fight for those ideals.

These are urgent matters for our country. So as I tell the stories of Jessica and Zachary, two grad students at U.C. Berkeley who have come of age in this world and question some of its assumptions, I marvel at how these events have supported my September themes. For Berkeley celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, and this last Wednesday crowds gathered at Sproul Plaza around the corner from my little publishing office. Aged speakers reminisced how they defended free speech by standing on top of police cars with bullhorns.

Today, political correctness reigns at Berkeley and those speakers are now faculty. It is their turn to squelch opposing points of view, promote those professors who agree with them, shun those who do not tow the party line. As they preached their creed on Bancroft around the corner from my office, I was meeting with a committee dedicated to establishing a Center for Western Civilization atBowditch and Durant. I didn't realizethat,as we huddled and planned,free-speechers were calling for free tuition and telling tales of sixties sit-ins. I read about it later in the paper and I smiled.

I have reached September 11, 2014 in my novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, and have written Zachary's reflections on this horrific day, for reflections on history reflect my character's character. Soon I shall write the reflections of his mother Anna, and lastly, the reflections of Jessica. And so I shall weave American history into their stories, to enrich what it means to live in this exceptional land of liberty.

And I'm going to place an American flag on the porch of Comerford House, the center of the action. It shall ripple in sunlight and in shadow, high above the bay, blessing Berkeley, the shimmering San Francisco skyline, and the Golden Gate. It shall mark the fire trail that runs behind the house.