There was a time when I was young and hopeful when I believed that I had only to voice my convictions, promising and correct, and the world would listen in respectful silence and change for the better.

Thursday, March 28, 2002

There was a time when I was young and hopeful when I believed that I had only to voice my convictions, promising and correct, and the world would listen in respectful silence and change for the better.

That was before I discovered that getting the Fibber McGee closet decently organized and balancing my check book lay well on the other side of my capabilities. A discovery it was that suggested to me that, perhaps, I lack certain skills necessary for rearranging the universe.

Even that discovery, however, left me with a number of unanswered questions. For one, why is it considered unpatriotic to doubt that terrorists can be reformed by wholesale war against non-terrorists?

Recently my least favorite commentator speaking to a Frenchman said loftily that if France objected to our use of capital punishment and refused to send back those who might be subject to it for trial, he would personally see to it that we would boycott France, our tourists would avoid the country. In short, France would be s-o-r-r-y.

I waited breathlessly for the Frenchman to turn pale, tremble, bite his fingernails, and, perhaps fall down in a dead faint. He was a stubborn cuss, though, and screwing his courage to the sticking point, as Mrs. Macbeth once advised her husband to do, bore up pretty well.

When I was very young and women in the voting booths were still a novelty I used to hear men snarling that the first thing women did when they got the right to vote was to take liquor away from men. Sadly I confess that I’m never sure whether it was the 20th or the 21st amendment that gave women the right to vote in national elections. I am certain, however, that it was the 18th that established prohibition as a federal law.

On the other hand it was Carry Nation, who – axe in hand -&160;did more to advance temperance in the country than Volstead ever could and she couldn’t even vote.

Just as those all-knowing men used to blame women for prohibition, the ills of the world are now being blamed on the fact that prayer has been outlawed in schools. Listen and learn, there is not and never was a law against prayer in schools. There is, and so far as I know, always has been a law against organized prayer in public schools. And a good thing, too. The Episcopal Church in my home town, a mission church sending the message out to the territories surrounding Nebraska, even while Nebraska itself was still a territory, almost split over whether or not girls making their first communion should wear little white veils and flowers in their hair. The more conservative of the congregation holding that to allow such was a step toward Rome.

Although the first bishop of that church was John Cruikshank Something-or-other I was not sent there. However I was enrolled at the age of five or six in the Girls Friendly Society sponsored by the church and meeting in the undercroft.

Every meeting started with prayer. And let me tell you that organized prayer in schools is not without distress for children. The Girls Friendly Society in reciting the Lord’s Prayer prayed, &uot;Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,&uot; while I had been brought up to pray, &uot;Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.&uot;

The Girls Friendly Society met Thursday afternoon and I tell you that even by Sunday morning Sunday School I was still in a frenzy of guilt. Because, even though I had managed to come out loud and clear and all alone with my &uot;debt&uot; and &uot;debtors,&uot; I had the feeling that my religion had been tampered with and that I had allowed it.

It is conviction that anyone who would tamper with either political or religious convictions should first have his checkbook audited and his closets examined.

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.