Urban Onramps

My friend Derek Perkins’ son, Mike Mike, had his picture in the paper this weekend. He’s playing high school football in Valparaiso, Indiana. He ran for 197 yards in just 7 carries. Here are two stories in the Valpo newspaper:

– October 4: Valpo finds plenty of ways to punish Pirates
– October 5: Valpo running backs sharing, winning

Here’s a great pic from the paper:

Mike’s a junior. He had a good season last year at St. Francis High here in SoCal. Derek, my friend and the former executive director at Harambee, is now on staff at First United Methodist Church in Valparaiso. The Perkins’ family moved in the summer time. In the first weekend of November, I’m going to be out there visiting them. I’ll be in town to speak at Wheaton Academy in the Chicago metro, and I think it’s just 60-90 minutes to Valpo. I’m taking my son, Samuel, with me. It will be great to visit Derek, Karyn, Mike Mike and Shelby.

Here are some more pictures of Mike when he was a kid:

Here’s Derek and Mike Mike crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. I think this was back in 1997 when a bunch of us Harambee men attended the big Promise Keepers Stand-in-the-Gap thingy on the Washington Mall. On that trip we had 6 men and 14 boys. We took a week out of school in October (I think it was October). We went to New York City, then to Philadelphia, then on to DC.

Here’s Mike with two of the young Harambee guys back in the 90s. I think this was a bit of a photo shoot for a Harambee newsletter.

Here’s Mike with my son, Samuel, back in 2000 or early 2001. The Perkins and the Carrasco shared a home for eight years, so this was shot in the house, the living room I think.

In the kitchen with Sam Sam, probably late 01 or early 02.

This is truly back in 2000. Sam was a little guy.

In the 90s, with his dad, Derek.

I think I like this one best. Here’s what I have to say to you, Mike: “Sports, football, it’s all good. But your mind will be spry and generative much longer than your body and muscles. Invest in your mind. Now. Today.”

It’s treatable. Really treatable. In death’s grip, he’s as funny as ever. And I think he’s a Christian believer, too.

Andy Kessler writes in today’s WSJ about the proposed $700 billion payout plan, the Paulson Plan:

You can slice the numbers a lot of different ways. My calculations, which assume 50% impairment on subprime loans, suggest it is possible, all in, for this portfolio to generate between $1 trillion and $2.2 trillion — the greatest trade ever. Every hedge-fund manager will be jealous. Mr. Buffett is buying a small piece of the trade via his Goldman Sachs investment.

This guy closes his article with this: “Over 10 years this could change the budget scenario in D.C., which can also strengthen the dollar. The next president gets a heck of a windfall. In the spirit of Secretary of State William Seward’s purchase of Alaska for $7 million in 1867, this week may be remembered as Paulson’s Folly.”

Sam’s grandfather is named Job. This is them in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, August 2008. (click image for larger version)

Heavy

The thought has crossed my mind. Peggy Noonan gives voice to the concern.

Here’s a helpful perspective, by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post, on the fall of the huge investment houses.

more links:

Technically, I leave around midnight. I’m speaking at this event. I’m looking forward to it. We’ll be just across the 495, on the Jersey side. Close enough to the carnage at AIG, Lehman, and Wall Street. And I’ll be lecturing on how free market economic thinking and approaches can benefit urban ministers.

Here’s my 8-year-old son, Samuel (light blue shirt), with his uncles (back row) and his cousin (next to him). New Jersey, August 2008. It’s so good to see him growing tall and strong, especially after his ordeal fighting leukemia.

Psalm 32:8

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you.

God is your father, for real.

New York Times: “The Great Seduction” by David Brooks:

Sixty-two scholars have signed on to a report by the Institute for American Values and other think tanks called, “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture,” examining the results of all this. This may be damning with faint praise, but it’s one of the most important think-tank reports you’ll read this year….

The loosening of financial inhibition has meant more options for the well-educated but more temptation and chaos for the most vulnerable. Social norms, the invisible threads that guide behavior, have deteriorated. Over the past years, Americans have been more socially conscious about protecting the environment and inhaling tobacco. They have become less socially conscious about money and debt….

The list could go on. But the report, which is nicely summarized by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in The American Interest (available free online), also has some recommendations. First, raise public consciousness about debt the way the anti-smoking activists did with their campaign. Second, create institutions that encourage thrift….

Raising public consciousness about debt the way anti-smoking folks did — where is Jeremy Del Rio when you really need him?

Mary Anastasia O’Grady at the WSJ reports on policy differences:

Of the two U.S. presidential candidates, one promises to expand international trading opportunities for American producers and consumers. The other pledges to raise the barriers that Americans already face in global commerce.

(Where is that memo…)

• The next 60 days will not be dull.
• Here’s our latest Harambee newsletter. If you are looking to fulfill your tithe, may I suggest you help a child receive a quality education at Harambee Prep by making a contribution today?
• This weekend I’ll be in Flagstaff, Arizona, attending the Young Life Arizona all-staff conference. They say there will be about 400-500 people there. I’m the main speaker (Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday morning) plus I’ll lead a fundraising workshop sometime Saturday morning.
• I’m twittering as we drive on I-40 through the California desert.

UPDATE: I’m twittering from the PASSENGER seat.

So says John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, in The American Interest:

George W. Bush, whatever else one might say about him, has been a most remarkable President: Historians will be debating his legacy for decades to come. If past patterns hold, their conclusions will not necessarily correspond to the views of current critics. Consider how little is now remembered, for example, of President Clinton’s impeachment, only the second in American history. Or how President Reagan’s reputation has shifted from that of a movie-star lightweight to that of a grand strategic heavyweight. Or how Eisenhower was once believed to be incapable of constructing an intelligible sentence. Or how Truman was down to a 26 percent approval rating at the time he left office but is now seen as having presided over a golden age in grand strategy—even a kind of genesis, Dean Acheson suggested, when he titled his memoir Present at the Creation.

Presidential revisionism tends to begin with small surprises. How, for instance, could a Missouri politician like Truman who never went to college get along so well with a Yale-educated dandy like Acheson? How could Eisenhower, who spoke so poorly, write so well? How could Reagan, the prototypical hawk, want to abolish nuclear weapons? Answering such questions caused historians to challenge conventional wisdom about these Presidents, revealing the extent to which stereotypes had misled their contemporaries.

So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they’ve appeared, and I’m hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I’ve found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn’t read the latest book on Lincoln, or on—as Bush refers to him—the “first George W.” I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results.

“Well, so Bush reads history”, one might reasonably observe at this point. “Isn’t it more important to find out how he uses it?” It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested—as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time—in how the past can provide guidance for the future.

Interesting.

I am praying for the Obama family. An election is grueling, and at the end of the day they are a father, a mother, and two small children. Also, Barack and Michelle are in positions that no others in American history have ever been in. I speak, specifically, of being a Black man and a Black woman in the run for the presidency. It’s a lonely place. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Great are the expectations. All that pressure can negatively impact a marriage, a family. I pray that they are strengthened in Christ and thrive through this experience.

In this photo, I really like the little girl at the podium. That blank look on the face, trying to take in the enormity of the scene. I’ve seen that look many a time on the faces of Harambee children, my own included.