Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

The Moore Tornado

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Moore Tornado By Ks0stm [CC-BY-SA-3.0]
By Ks0stm [CC-BY-SA-3.0]
As you have probably heard, the city of Moore, Oklahoma, was struck by an especially bad tornado on Monday. It killed twenty-four, including seven children at the demolished Plaza Towers Elementary School. I normally don’t spend a lot of time on disaster stories here at Off on a Tangent—there are disasters big and small every single day—but I decided to spend a little time on this one since I happened to drive through Moore only a few short hours before the storm hit, and because I have a lot of family in the Oklahoma City area.

Melissa and I just got home from a big, week-long road-trip to Oklahoma. My cousin Thomas graduated high school in Lexington, Oklahoma, on Friday, and my other cousin James got married on Saturday in nearby Seminole. Photos of both events are coming soon (after I find some time to do some processing).

I have family near Lexington to the south and also in Oklahoma City to the north, all of whom are fine and escaped the storms without harm or any serious property damage. A less severe tornado struck Lake Thunderbird and Shawnee on Sunday, touching down after the storm system had already passed Norman (and while we were visiting with family in Lexington), and then the real monster struck Moore on Monday only six hours after we had left town on our way home.

We had been staying at a hotel in the city of Norman, which is about seven miles south of where the tornado crossed Interstate 35 in Moore. I remember, as we left on Monday morning, seeing the movie theater and hospital just off to the left of the freeway . . . and it was pretty surreal to see them later, badly damaged but still identifiable, during CNN’s tornado coverage.

If you want to help support the victims of the tornado disaster in Moore, I recommend donating to Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City or the American Red Cross. These two, and others like them, send the money where it’s needed and offer much-needed assistance to anybody, “regardless of religion, race, creed, or socio-economic status” (to quote from the Catholic Charities web site).

Make sure you are donating to these or other reputable agencies; unfortunately, scammers seem to come out of the woodwork after big, newsworthy disasters.

2013 Road Trip: Downtown Memphis

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We arrived in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, early Wednesday evening and spent some time walking around and seeing the sights. There was some sort of big festival happening on Beale Street with a lot of people and motorcycles. And of course, I had the obligatory ‘Walking in Memphis’ stuck in my head the whole time:

Melissa had an appointment at a local gallery/museum mid-day on Thursday, so we had a long drive Thursday afternoon all the way to Norman, Oklahoma, just south of Oklahoma City. Here are some of my photos from Memphis.

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2013 Road Trip: Nashville Zoo

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Melissa and I left Tuesday on a road trip to Oklahoma for some family events—one of my cousins is graduating high school and another is getting married. We took three days making the trip out, spending Tuesday night in Nashville, Tennessee, and Wednesday night in Memphis. We arrived safely here in Norman, Oklahoma, late Thursday evening after a total of 1,345.2 miles in my trusty Subaru.

Since the trip from Nashville to Memphis was only a few hours long, we had some time to kill on Wednesday. I wanted to go check out the sights around Nashville and get a feel for the place. So Melissa decided we would go do the most unique thing Nashville had to offer, something we couldn’t do in any other city in America. We went to the zoo.

Not exactly what I had in mind, but we had a good time anyway. Read on for a bunch of animal photos.

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Liberal, Conservative, or Catholic?

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His Holiness Pope Francis, formerly Cardinal Jorge Bergolio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, was elected to the papacy just over two months ago. The secular media, as they had before the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, spent much of the interregnum clamoring for a hard-left, liberal ‘reformer’ who would rewrite the basic tenets of our faith so that it might fit in better with the ‘modern’ world. Meanwhile, some particularly conservative forces within the Church clamored for somebody off to the right of Benedict XVI, somebody who might restrict the Mass in the vernacular and restore the pre-Vatican II ‘Tridentine’ liturgy (the ‘extraordinary form’) as the normative Roman Catholic Mass. Neither side got their way. As I told one left-wing friend of mine just after Bergolio became Francis, ‘Breaking news: Catholic cardinals choose a faithful Catholic to lead the Catholic Church.’

The Church is not liberal, but the Church isn’t conservative either. She is neither. She is both. She is Catholic.

The Catholic Church is an institution that is concerned with discerning and communicating the truth. Some of this truth has been communicated to us through Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Some comes to us through natural law and reason. Some, well, we just haven’t gotten around to discerning it yet. But if you study our Catholic dogmas and doctrines with an honest and open mind, they are consistent, clearly defined, and logical . . . at least if you accept our predicate assumptions, not least of which being the assumption that we live in a created universe. When the men who lead our Church craft religious declarations—through councils, papal encyclicals, and so-on—they are generally unconcerned with whether they are perceived to be right- or left-wingers. They are concerned with speaking the truth. Sometimes the truth seems to be ‘conservative,’ and sometimes it seems to be ‘liberal.’

Consider, for example, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. If we listen to the secular media—always a poor source for accurate information about the Catholic Church—we might think that Benedict XVI’s pontificate was a hard-right traditionalist orgy. He was retrograde and backwards, say the critics. He spent his time kowtowing to the lunatic fringe of old-fashioned Catholics who still write their Facebook posts longhand . . . in Latin . . . with chisels. How dare he claim, in this modern, enlightened world, that marriage, sex, and babies are—and ought to be—intrinsically linked with one another? How dare he say that all human beings with human DNA have some basic human rights from the moment they come into existence? What a loon!

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Real Education Reform, Please

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There have been several efforts over the last twenty years to reform the American education system. Each has failed. There have been a few pinpoints of light in particular places, like Michelle Rhee’s four-year chancellorship of the District of Columbia public school system, but they have been sporadic and short-lived. Rhee’s reforms in DC were incredibly effective, but they proved so unpopular with the voters that they threw Mayor Adrian Fenty (D-DC)—and Rhee—out of office after one term. The system has since, predictably, deteriorated.

The broad state- or nation-wide ‘reforms’ have been oriented mostly toward standardized testing and incentive-based funding of schools based on the aggregate outcomes of those tests. In Virginia, we implemented the Standards of Learning (SOL) system back in 1995 to gauge students’ academic performance, and we based the accreditation of our schools on their students’ performance. The system was poorly designed and poorly implemented at the outset, and it resulted in a pervasive ‘teach to the test’ mentality in Virginia’s schools. Most of my teacher friends condemn the SOL’s, and with good reason. I didn’t like them much myself, and I still have many criticisms of the system. Indeed, Governor Jim Gilmore’s (R-VA) poor handling of the SOL’s back in the ’90s is part of why I did not support his failed 2008 run for U.S. Senator.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, a federal law that was crafted by the bipartisan team of then-President George W. Bush (R) and the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), expanded SOL-like programs across the country and tied funding to schools’ academic performance as measured by standardized tests. It passed in 2001 and soon did to the whole country what the SOL’s did to Virginia.

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Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.