Capers With Carroll

As evidence that we have entered the season of buying things, BlogPatrol tells me that over the last week, of the 20 visitors who found my site through a Google search, 15 were looking for some variation on “Canon PowerShot SD1200.”

I wrote my product review in June, five days and 300 pictures into owning my SD1200, so perhaps it is time for an update.

I’ve lost count of how many pictures I’ve taken over these six months, but I continue to enjoy this camera and have grown to trust it. (My G3 used to accidentally power-on while riding in my zippered waist pack. This on-button avoids that problem.) The small size means I am comfortable carrying it almost any time I leave the house. That, in turn, means I have it with me almost any time some image catches my fancy, for example, this ground fog I spotted on my way to work one morning.

After 30 years of using film, I continue to marvel at a digital camera’s ability to capture low light or overly bright situations (or the two existing in the same frame), and at the ever-more-compact memory cards (the tiny unit in the SD 1200 carries more than the five larger cards I carried through China, in 2004, for my G3, and multiple times more than the 40 roles of film I carried through Europe, in 2000). Maybe these things color my conclusions. Maybe some jaded techie who never shot on film or lugged around a bulky SLR can find something to complain about on this mighty-mite camera, but I can’t.

On September 16th, I mentioned it would have been my cousin Lance’s 60th birthday, had he not drowned when we were both 17. I quoted a haiku I wrote the day after his death, and promised a post once I had taken some time to ponder the matter.

After two months of thinking on the subject, I’ve concluded that my thoughts haven’t fluctuated much over these 43 years. I’ve only gained the supporting details to confirm my immediate impression. When Lance died, indeed, all my meanings changed.


It’s not surprising that we’re posed next to each other. Until 7th grade, when I fell in with a group of boys at school, Lance was my closest friend.

In the picture, it looks like I might have had three inches on Lance, but the athletic prowess was all his. When the cousins played football in the park beside Grandma’s house, I got pushed aside by rushers while Lance ran for touchdowns. I shied away from sports, while Lance played a year above his age in Little League, and led his league in home runs. During picking season, he climbed stronger and faster, and dared avocados further out on the branch. It was that athleticism and daring, in fact, that led to his death, scuba diving in kelp beds off Laguna Beach.

It was an idyllic childhood. While our parents sat for their monthly corporate ranch-board meeting, the cousins played Hide and Seek outside, or Murder-in-the-Dark or pillow fights in the back bedroom. During work weekends in the orchard, we pulled weeds for an hour or so and then ran off to catch lizards and frogs. On summer days at Grandma’s, we’d dig a big hole in the sand and cover it with a piece of plywood to make a fort. At Baldy, we’d spend a weekend in the snow or a Fourth of July moving rocks to dam up the stream. By junior high, we’d sold the ranch, but Lance’s family had moved to a rural house near Fallbrook. Days we rode a raft on a nearby pond and nights we played flashlight wars in an acre-or-so of feral bamboo. Lance always knew how to come up with a new activity.

Mostly, it was fun play without mischief, but I do remember an incident from the era of this picture. My parents had gone shopping, leaving Lance and me in charge of my four younger siblings. For some reason we were trying to fool my youngest brother into believing my middle brother was injured. Lance picked up the telephone and hollered, “Quick, send an ambulance! Devin is hurt bad!” Then he went pale and hung up the receiver. In an amazing coincidence of timing, my parents had been calling to check on us. The connection had been made, though the phone had not yet rung. Needless-to-say, it did ring immediately after he hung up. It’s the only time I ever remember us in trouble.

It was my childhood that ended when Lance died (even if adulthood didn’t arrive right away). The protective coating had been stripped away. Though we were more attuned than most children to problems in places like Africa, and my grandparents had suffered a serious automobile accident, our clan had been spared so many of life’s ravages. That ended when Lance was wrenched from our midst. Then, while I was in college, a flood devastated the house at Baldy, and Lance’s parents separated. The idyll was over.

The first change I saw after Lance’s death was that we all hugged more. Coming from New England Puritan stock, we had not been very demonstrative in our affection. Now we hugged the people we loved while we still had them.

Lance drowned in the spring, in the middle of track season. In high school I had discovered an ability to run long distances, my first athletic success. The second change I observed was a loss of purpose in my running. I suddenly realized how much of my inspiration to excel in track came from a desire to impress and compete with Lance. A pulled muscle also hampered me, but it was my most disappointing track season. I ran competitively two more years, and eventually got my mile time down to a pretty respectable 4:32, but without Lance, I never again had the need to prove myself athletically.

I can’t prove the connection, but the third development that shook my family after Lance drowned was religious. Growing up, we had all been part of the Methodist Church. Yet within five years of Lance’s death, half of the family had moved to more conservative churches, while the other half had found something more liberal, or stopped attending altogether.

Death brings to the surface a host of religious questions, and my family had been a long time without a death. We would continue so. Forty-three years later, of the 27 family members in the photograph, only Lance, my grandparents, and a cousin of my mother’s are missing today. For myself, I suddenly had to wrestle with questions of God’s fairness, and of my own mortality.

I was almost 23 before I reached spiritual equilibrium by placing my faith in Jesus Christ. For me, that has been a very happy result. It has led to virtually all of the deep satisfactions I have enjoyed in the intervening 36 years and gives me promise of even greater joys to come. Over the years, though, I sometimes mourned the price Lance had to pay for my propitious wake-up call. Not any more. I recently heard from his sister that in an old box of Lance’s things, she and her mother discovered a testimony, from just a few months before his death, of the same decision I’d make later. While I have been here, Lance has been in the very presence of the risen Christ.

I do not know why God chooses to take some to Heaven young, and leave others on Earth to grow old, but I suspect it has less to do with the nature of this life than with the variety of individuals with whom God wants to populate Heaven. Scripture tells us they will be from every tribe and nation. Experience tells us they will be from every age and experience. God, who created all diversity, must delight in it.

I praise God for the part Lance played in my life while he was here, and for the changes wrought by his leaving. I praise God for the hope of seeing Lance again. Looking back 43 years, and not expecting to live another 43, I am closer to seeing Lance again than to the last time I saw him. That’s change I can believe in.

After my eulogy for Oscar last week, it was not my intention to write again soon about the death of a 17-year-old. But I looked at the calendar today and realized this would have been my cousin Lance’s 60th birthday. All these years later, it threw me for a loop.

In a very close extended family, Lance was my senior by only three months. Until I entered my teens, I had no closer friend. About Easter of our junior year of high school, Lance drowned while scuba diving off the Southern California coast. The next day I wrote this haiku:

It won’t happen tonight, but I will be working on a post. You can watch for it.

Democracy requires a difficult-to-maintain veneer of decorum over the hottest of passions. When all else fails, the two sides must still be able to speak to each other politely and be heard over the din. There should also be respect for office. One test of this might be self-inspection on the part of those either angered or pleased about Rep. Joe Wilson’s outbreak during President Obama’s healthcare speech: Did they have the identical or an opposite reaction when the Iraqi reporter threw a shoe at President Bush?

For the record, I disagree with Rep. Wilson on several points. First, I believe a speech by the President to Congress should be interrupted only by applause, whether polite or exuberant, or it should be submitted to in stony silence, out of respect for both institutions. Second, Rep Wilson’s explosion came when President Obama declared that no illegal alien would be covered under the coming healthcare plan. As I have expressed before, I don’t believe most of our undocumented neighbors are the kinds of bogey-men they have been made out to be. Even with ten or fifteen million of them combined, I don’t believe people working at minimum wage in farm fields or sweatshops harm America as much as the executives who have given themselves huge bonuses out of money the government intended for bailing out mismanaged businesses. (If it turns out any recipient of those multimillion-dollar travesties was here illegally, I say, yes, ship them home with empty pockets.)

On the other hand, when it is journalists or bloggers who catch a president or congress spinning facts to the detriment of truth, it is our duty to point that out. The subject over which I am best prepared to support such a charge is abortion. In Wednesday’s speech, President Obama asserted, “And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”

Fact: H.R. 3200, as it currently stands with an amendment written by Rep. Lois Capps (R-Calif) and approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee (30 pro-abortion Democrats favoring and 28 Republicans and pro-life Democrats opposing), the bill “explicitly permits the Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, pro-abortion advocate Kathleen Sebelius, to include abortion in the services offered by public option and requires abortion coverage in the government health plan if the Hyde amendment is ever reversed. HR 3200 authorizes taxpayer-funded affordability credits and the Capps amendment specifically requires taxpayer subsidies to flow to plans that include abortion, but creates an accounting scheme designed to give the impression that public funds will not subsidize abortion. The Capps amendment also requires that a plan that includes abortion be made available in every region of the country.” Source

Fact: Later that same day, this same committee defeated (30-29) a bipartisan amendment proposed by Reps. Joe Pitts (R-PA) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) designed to prevent mandated abortion coverage in the essential benefits package. Source

Conclusion: Unless President Obama is proposing to remove the Capps Amendment and replace it with wording from the Pitts/Stupak Amendment, he lied in his speech this week.

Secondly, Obama’s reference to federal conscience laws “under our plan” can only be true in a sense so narrow he would need to cross his fingers behind his back. Last March, the Obama administration published in the Federal Register a proposal to rescind all Bush-era protections for medical personnel who refused to participate in abortions on moral grounds. Obama apparently means that the current “our plan” promises to protect those conscience laws which remain after his previous plan has eliminated them altogether. To this observer, that also looks like a lie.

Two years ago, when speaking to a Planned Parenthood audience, candidate Obama promised to eliminate these conscience protections and to include abortion-coverage in his national health insurance package, “In my mind, reproductive care is essential care,” he said. “It is basic care. And so it is at the center and at the heart of the plan that I propose. Essentially … we're gonna set up a public plan … that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services. We also will subsidize those who prefer to stay in the private insurance market — except the insurers are going to have to abide by the same rules in terms of providing comprehensive care, including reproductive care. I still believe that it is important for Planned Parenthood to be part of that system.” (Note: By "reproductive care," Obama means abortion and by “part of that system,” he means federal subsidies.) Source

I was alone with my wife in the privacy of a living room when candidate Obama sat with Rick Warren and described himself as a moderate on abortion. Even then, I did not blurt out, “You Lie!”

The record, however, shows that during three different years in the Illinois Senate, Barack Obama led opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. At the same time, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly and the US Senate voted 98-0 to pass nearly identical legislation. Even the pro-abortion group NARAL remained neutral. But “moderate” Obama fought hard to protect the rights of hospital personnel to abandon living babies and let them die. Then he denied he had done so. He maintained that denial until the case against him was so strong that he could maintain the lie no longer. On August 18, 2008, just two days after the Saddleback Forum, his campaign admitted the truth. (Links to Obama’s votes on Illinois BAIPA)

It damages our Democracy when a congressman interrupts a president’s speech to call him a liar. But the damage is at least as severe when a president lies to Congress and to the American People. We do need to fix our broken health insurance system, and some of what the President is proposing impresses me as reasonable. However, when he uses his condescending “I’m an adult, so stop acting like a child” look to cover his lies on abortion, and then gives the same look to put down the legitimate fears of others, how can I as a voter trust him?

It is also difficult for me to trust the President when groups with whom he has partnered get caught in blatant disregard for the laws of our country. One prime example is the number of times hidden cameras or microphones have caught staff members in Planned Parenthood facilities across the country telling purportedly under-aged girls to hide the age of the men who have impregnated them, thus allowing Planned Parenthood to evade reporting laws on statutory rape. Unfortunately, those videos have become common enough to lose their punch, and I still haven’t seen where Obama has even acknowledged their existence.

Already, however, the Obama administration is racing to sever its connections with ACORN after a video that left me gasping when I saw it yesterday. An under-cover investigative couple walks into an ACORN housing office in Baltimore: She pretends to be a prostitute in need of housing to bring in and set up undocumented girls (under age 15) from El Salvador; He wants to divert funds from this “business” to make a run for Congress. Without batting an eye, two ACORN staffers pull out code books and begin explaining how it will need to be set up to best avoid taxes. The good news is: the Obama Administration will pull ACORN’s contract to help with next year’s census. The bad news is: Obama has worked closely with a group long-accused of lying and misrepresentation, and never saw a problem until all plausible deniably disappeared.

The President not only lies, but he hangs around with people for whom lying is a way of life.

I say that as civilly as I can manage.

A sample of the Planned Parenthood videos: hiding statutory rape, accepting donations earmarked for eugenics, showing as a lie PPA denials of racist sympathies

Just one of several editings of the ACORN videos. Variations abound.