4
Thursday, April 7, 1983
Daily Nebraskan
Ft3 n Ti n
SelicgQdDdJis sailesmraemi 'po'ey'omi yotiu
They always find me. I stay at home, they visit me. I
rush around, they delay me. They appear from nowhere.
Who expects an inquisition? They appear right before mc.
I must stop, trample them or make a hard turn.
They catch me when I am distracted. I stop and lift a
brow, as I would for any impending collision. Their faces
are round and smiling. Their hair is short and simple.
Prickly heat blotches their white cheeks.
"Hi," they say. "How are you today? My name is
John, or Matthew or Mark or Luke. What is your name?"
"J'appelle Claude," 1 reply, "Lxcusez-moi. Je suis
tardi."
k : : ' .1
David
Wood
"1 am happy to know you. Say, have you praised the
Lord lately," they say. miraculously producing cards and
pamphlets.
1 cannot shoo them. They are like mosquitoes. I finally
have to swat them. Used-car salesmen would take lessons
from them.
They knock at the door. They stand there with their
wives and children, all beaming. "Hi." they say. "How are
you today? We are the Samaritans. We live just down the
street. Say, do you think the problems in the world are a
sign of our times?"
"Obviously."
"Well then, we share some beliefs." The literature
starts manifesting like loaves and fish.
I used to collect the brochures and pass them back out
to later door-to-door disciples. "Maybe you can attend
one of our worship groups" 1 invite. 1 used to keep
candles and ask for gifts for the Rev. Sun Yung Moon.
But reverse solicitation is a mistake. The tiders of the
Word will creep in if you undo the chain lock.
"Say," they invariably ask, "did you know the
prophesies are one-by-one coming to pass?"
"Yes " 1 reply. "I am a Republican."
"You must let Jesus into your heart " they eventually
sing.
"1 believe in the sanctity of the individual," I say.
"Thank you."
"Say, do you do drugs?" they ask with sudden earnest.
"Do you listen to rock music?"
"Backwards" J say. "My toast is burning. Bye."
"You don't want to go to hell," they are always safe to
say. "Let us help you."
"I have a bath running. Bye."
"God wants to talk to you. Let us now say hello."
"1 have someone on the phone inside. Bye."
"Why do you act afraid?"
"Oh. You must have the wrong address. You want my
neighbor. He is an idol-worshipping heathen. I know, too,
there is a pagan on the next block down."
They say they will pray for me.
I say they will prey on me.
"Open. Jesus is at the door. Let faith in."
Christ. Because I deny God, they infer 1 have no
religion. Christ almighty. My faith in mortality is at least
as deep and studied as their faith in immortality. I firmly
believe in death and omnipotent reality. The natural
sciences are my Scriptures. The Word is in mathematical
symbols for me. I am a devout secular humanist.
The party line is drawn.
The texture of existence is strongly stitched without
embroidering it with grand designs. They spoil the simple
symmetry and are not needed. If God is the bounty of
nature, he cannot then be Paul Bunyon, too. He has no
divine preference or purpose beyond his own elegant self
description. "Your attitude will lead to anarchy and ruin," they tell
me.
I tell them that an abiding reverence toward death is
intensely moral. Life is like an astounding dream. You for
get it the moment you wake. But you do not wake. You
are just no more, which is as good as never having been.
You will never know it. It is the same for everyone.
From that realization, you can derive all the Christian
ethics you can use. You really want a rich, full, long life
when you know you are mortal.
"But there must be a hereafter," they say. "Otherwise,
why are we here? Something cannot be going fuU glory
and then, like that, end without ..."
Parental-support law eadieii'ou
There is a button inside most of us labeled Family
Responsibility. Press it and you send a modest shock wave
through the body, even the body politic, until it hits our
nerve center of guilt.
The Reagan administration knows its way round these
circuits well. Last week they leaned long and hard on this
:yr. Ellen
" Goodman I
button. They said that states can now require adult
children to help pay the nursing-home bill for their
parents on Medicaid. It's called the Family Responsibility
requirement.
This isn't the first time they've tried to cut costs and
foster ideology at the same time. There is a general belief
that we can and should take care of our own: Defederalize
into the arms of families.
The belief in a moral obligation to family is shared by
most of us. We are vulnerable to charges of selfishness. We
judge harshly the fathers who desert their children onto
aid for dependent children. We cringe at the notion
that elderly parents of comfortable adult children may be
on government poverty programs.
Yet there is something treacherous in trying to force
parental support onto the list of legal family obligations.
The ethical bargain - parents raise children, and
children care for parents in their old age - has never been
pure. Since 1597, English law has tried to shore up moral
responsibility to care for poor relatives.
In 19th-century America - when the economic family
unit was disintegrating - family-responsibility laws
proliferated. By the 1930s, 35 states had such laws, and
all of them directed at the families of the poor.
As Michael Grossberg, a family-law historian at Case
Western Reserve University suggests, "There was generally
the attempt to use the law to get poor families to live up
to the expectations of nonpoor families."
But in fact the laws were, as law professor Carol Bruch
of the University of California at Davis say, "written in
invisible ink." They were rarely implemented.
There was and is a prejudice in the United States
toward supporting children over parents. Our
19th-century judges were reluctant to burden adult child
ren in a way that would jeopardize the next generation.
We hear this reflected among today's elderly who "do
not want to be a burden."
Since the 1930s, we have built a system of pensions:
Social Security, Medicare and even Medicaid to shore up
and share out burdens. The elderly have voted again and
again for the "independence" of government programs
over dependence on their children.
Now, when the Medicaid cost of nursing-home care is
between S 10,800 and $ 12,000 a year, when the average
age of a nursing-home patient is nearly 78, do we want to
enforce a parental-support requirement on a 55-year-old
son or daughter? Do we want to jeopardize the security
of two older generations?
I touch this subject gingerly because I share a strong
sense of moral obligation: family responsibility. I am
convinced that most of us worry-about and plan for and,
if necessary, want to help our parents in old age.
I resent deeply the inherent, and unsupported,
accusation that there are thousands of adult children
living in luxury while their parents languish-in nursing
homes on Medicaid. They are as rare as welfare mothers
in Cadillacs.
Still, there is a vast difference between a moral
obligation and a legal obligation. Would thetate act as
family collection agency? Would it determine who can
and can't help their parents? Would it then require the
elderly parents to list all of their children's assets? Would
the government assess and distribute the costs among
sisters and brothers? What about grandchildren? Would
this really foster family unity?
Finally, I find it pernicious that in a time when medical
costs are rising outrageously, when the assets and savings
of many elderly are devoured by these costs until they
qualify for Medicaid, we are offered one solution: Pass
the bill to the children.
I'm glad that most of us have a button marked Family
Responsibility. But where's the button in this
administration that reads Social Responsibility?
(c) 1333, The Washington Post Writers Group
Photo by Dave Bentz
Bro Cope
Eko Cope's ranting,
raving defeats any
religious message
"Young people want three things out of religion.
One, a wonderful personal experience, a lot of
stroking, a warm personal affiliation.
Two, some kind of a challenge.
Tfiree, a sense of meaning and purpose. "
These are the words of Rev. Robert V. Smith,
a Methodist minister and professor of philosophy
and religion at Colgate University, as reported in
the Chronicle of Higher Education.
There are three things that young people don Y
want out of religion.
One, attacks on their personal character, espec
ially when these are unwarranted.
Two, staunch challenges of their current value
systems and generalizations regarding morality or
immorality.
Three, nonsense.
Young people walking past Broyhill Fountain
yesterday heard all three. A sure sign of April
appeared despite the snow and wind - an overly
righteous evangelist. A rather large crowd gathered
to hear him. He gave his name as Bro Cope. He
gave little else that wasn't offensive to most
members of the audience, who. were more amused
than impressed by his Bible-quoting.
Bro Cope has a lot to learn about acting as a
disciple of God. For a man who claims to be a
leader, he lacks every tiling but a strong set of lungs.
He claimed young people need leaders and heroes.
Fine. But what they don't need is someone claiming
to be more than he is, someone who has nothing
better to do with his time than harass bystanders
and passersby.
What kind of a "leader" or "Christian" would
accuse all college men and women of being "whores
and whoremongers?" What kind of man would
label all fraternity boys and sorority girls as
wimps and expect to get a serious response?
It's one thing to urge people to turn away from
sin. It s quite another to misconstrue Bible passages
and insult us in the name of God.
Bro Cope gained himself and his cause no res
pect, especially after yelling at one young man,
All you want to do is get your penis into some
wnore." He went on to tell one woman that she
would be gang-raped by 15 men.
This from a man who then said, "I am morally
perfect."
Our university has no place for such offensive
insults and blasphemous remarks. There's nothing
worse than a person professing to know God while
in the same breath denouncing his fellow men.
Bro Cope said "You partiers cannot inherit the
kingdom of God." He should learn to recognize his
own faults before defeating his purpose.
As one man responded, "You aren't drawing
people toward God. You're turning them away."
