The Candy Cane Myth

This time of year, many of you will come across the Legend of the Christian Candy Cane.

It's a beautiful story unfortunately it's not at all historically accurate.

See http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/candycane.asp for the true story of the candy cane.

The thing is, if you take out the inaccurate stuff about some unknown guy in Indiana and just say "one can find some beautiful christian symbols in a candy cane", then the story still works.

For me, it's a much stronger testament to know that these symbols are there, even though nobody intentionally put them there.

Christian symbols show up randomly and beautifully in all sorts of unexpected places. Like the sand dollar which even has christian symbols inside it's bony shell or Passiflora Incarnata, known in the South as the "passion flower" or "May pop" that grows wild along fence lines and roadsides.

It's important for Christians to steadfastly maintain the difference between parable and fact. The world and its events don't come to us prepackaged with Christian ideals. It's up to us to take the real stuff of life as it comes to us and make some sense of it from a Christian perspective, and to do that, we must maintain the difference between the two.

Jesus himself often used fiction to illustrate greater truths. We call them parables and they're part of our tradition. Jesus never meant for us to believe that the Good Samaritan was a real person who we could go and find and talk to. If he had, he would have given us his name, but that doesn't keep the story of the Samaritan from being an incredibly important part of the Christian life.

Candy canes are just candy. There's no hidden symbols in them, but that shouldn't keep Christians from teaching their children to take the ordinary stuff of life and reinterpret them from a Christian perspective. You have to do it honestly though, without trying to sneak in mysterious confectioners from Indiana without explaining that he is a parable, and never really existed.

It's all about the strength of the house you want to build. Parables are houses built on stone, but parables presented as historical fact are houses built on sand.

Fiddling while Detroit Burns

Reports from the failed senate bill on the auto bailout are still sketchy, but at this point it looks like the holdout was between the UAW and senate republicans.

The UAW agreed in principal to lower the wages they charge American auto makers to the levels they charge foreign automakers producing domestically, but they wanted a year to implement the cuts. Senate republicans wanted the cuts to come in 2009 and when the two sides couldn't agree, the bill failed.

I have a few questions:
First, why was the UAW still charging more to work for american companies than they were for the same jobs at foreign companies? That this wasn't done years ago really makes the UAW look pretty greedy and unreasonable.

Secondly, we're told that the president may provide funds to the big three out of the already passed TARP money anyway. If that's true, I really would like to know how much a part this possibility played in the UAW's unwillingness to play ball with republican senators.

Playing Hardball
This is serious business. The market will probably take a really big hit today on the news. There was plenty of motivation on both sides of the senate to come up with a bill. The only player who might possibly benefit from the bill failing is the UAW who might have seen getting some money now from the president and more money later from the new more union-friendly, democrat senate as preferable to taking wage cuts now, rather than later.

Unions are used to playing hardball. That's what they do. Senators and Representatives and Presidents have to answer to their constituency, but unions have nobody to answer to but their members, and the best way to do that is by wringing out every last penny they can from management.

They're not fighting with management now though. They're fighting with the American people, and holding us over a barrel like this isn't going to play well. Not only do we hold the key to their future with this bailout money, but we're also the future consumers of their product and for the unions to burn what little goodwill they have left with the American people over two dollars an hour is simply foolish.

So who's at fault?
I think they're all guilty of fiddling while Rome burns, but then they were fiddling when the fire started too.