The Land of Opportunity

 

I’ve had the good fortune to meet people from lots of different places around the world: Mexico, Canada, China, The Philippines, England, and Africa. Two of my children were adopted from Guatemala, made possible because of the desperate economic conditions in that country. I ask each person I meet who has left their home to come to America “What made you decide on America?” I wonder why they didn’t choose another western, progressive country? It seems that they all chose The United States because of the opportunities we have here. What kinds of opportunities are the talking about? The opportunity to take care of themselves. The opportunity to find a means of supporting themselves and making a better life for their families. Not one of these people has mentioned that they came here because of our kick butt welfare system or because our new president wants to facilitate change. They seem happy with the way things are done here.

I’ve only ever run across one person who resented being here in the US. He was 16 years old and his family had moved to Southern Utah from South Africa. He was constantly making negative comments about the US and was quick to share what he thought was wrong with our country. One day, a school teacher had had enough and said to him “If you hate America so badly, then go home to South Africa - we don’t need you here.”

My point? For all of the people around the world that don’t like the United States of America I believe that there are many more who still see us as the “Land of Opportunity” and are indeed clamoring to come and make a life here, legally or illegally.

A great story about church correlation

http://bycommonconsent.com/2009/07/14/what-should-you-do-when-the-lesson-manual-is-wrong/

Having, some time back, served on the Gospel Doctrine writing committee of the Church for nearly ten years, I would never, ever, take a Gospel Doctrine manual to be an official and binding declaration of Church doctrine. We tried to get things right, we prayed about our work, and what we did was reviewed in Salt Lake before publication, but it scarcely constituted scripture.

 A story:

 Once, the scriptural selection about which I was
 assigned to write a
 lesson included, among other things, Acts 20:7-12,
 in which the
 apostle Paul drones on for so long in the course of
 a sermon that a
 young man (ironically named Eutychus or “Fortunate”)
 dozes off and
 falls from the rafters. Paul has to restore him to
 life. As a joke, I
 inserted a passage in my lesson manuscript that read
 somewhat along
 the following lines:

 “Have a class member read Acts 20:7-12. Have you
 ever killed anyone
 with a sacrament meeting speech? How did it make
 you feel? What
 steps can you take in the future to ensure that it
 does not happen again?”

 Members of the committee laughed, and the committee
 chairman sent my
 lesson on up, incorporating their suggested
 revisions but also still
 including my little joke, to Salt Lake City. Where
 it passed
 Correlation. (I can only assume that each member of
 the committee
 chuckled and then passed it on, expecting that
 somebody else would
 remove it.) When I received the galleys of the
 lesson back for final
 approval just before it went to press, the joke was
 still there. I
 faced one of the greatest moral crises of my life,
 but finally called
 Church headquarters and suggested that they probably
 didn’t really
 want the lesson to go out to Church members entirely
 as it stood. So
 the joke was removed.

 The point being that Gospel Doctrine manuals are not
 to be confused
 with authoritative divine revelations.

Festival of Colors

Anyone that knows me knows that I have an interest in hinduism. This comes mainly from my listening to KHQN while I went to BYU. I found this on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBy_1PSjvWc

I wish they did this when I was there.

Where does this go?

Mass Boston Mission home burns

I'm not sure if it was still used to house the mission, but it did when I was there. Sad. It was a beautiful building.

http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/1740673/?nextnav=recent

New Orleans Dash

This photo was while I was stuck on the freeway, trying to figure out what happened. Lots of downed trees.

My 3 day dash to New Orleans.

Dash to New Orleans.

In keeping with my habit of renting a car and driving forever, I finally decided to see the Gulf of Mexico. I took Hayden with me to ease the pain on “the Mama”.

The trip down started a bit late. I didn’t get going until after 9am. Driving down to southern Illinois was uneventful other than a bad bit of rain south of Decator. I eventually got off the US road and onto the interstate around Salem. Nothing of note other than all the snails around the Arby’s when we stopped for a bathroom break. It only took about 30 minutes before traffic stopped. I mean, it moved occasionally, but at most about1 mile an hour. I decided that I’d seen too many people get stuck in a ditch trying to turn around and I got off on the next exit, around Herrin, IL. 

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=herrin&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=45.957536,65.126953&ie=UTF8&ll=37.818734,-88.948746&spn=0.180083,0.254402&t=h&z=12

The apocalypse seemed to have happened. I had noticed the trees down but I thought it was because there was a storm previously in the week. Was I wrong. There were power lines down and semis trying to backup, hopefully not back to Carbondale. Very interesting pictures.

OK. I finally got my way out of that mess, on to finding a bathroom and somewhere that had power…not until Missouri. I figured I had to get to Memphis before I stop for the night. Long, boring drive. I find Illinois more interesting.

The Motel 6 in West Memphis…meh. Smelled bad there. South Memphis wasn’t any better. Bad storm that night though.

The next day we had breakfast at Waffle House and got stuck at the back parking lot and had to tell a police officer to move his car so we could get out. Drove like mad to get to New Orleans. We went over the causeway (longest bridge over water) and headed for Mobile. There are some amazing bridges down there. Too bad it’s a stupid place to live. As we were headed to Mobile, I realized that I haven’t seen the Gulf yet so we headed to the beach. When we did see it, it was a ruddy brown. Probably due to the river there. There was a ship works there too.

We didn’t get to Mobile. We went in to Alabama, just to say I’d been there, picked up a state map and headed back to Jackson, MS. The drive home from there was uneventful, except I HAD to stop at Cairo, IL. That place should be torn down. And the Fort Defiance park…underwater. I laughed pretty hard at that. What a place. Sheesh.

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=36.988306,-89.151637&spn=0.002845,0.003975&z=18

Go to the north to view the city, and to the south and east to go over the bridges. I also have my shots of, well, the river, that used to be Fort Defiance.

That’s about it. Had a great time and put on 2050 miles on the Kia Rio that I rented. Good car, cheap trunk latch.

http://groesser.multiply.com/photos/album/20/New_Orleans_Dash