Immigrant on Immigrant Massacre

Last Friday, a town probably most famous for its State University was the site of a horrific massacre when a Vietnamese immigrant named Jiverly Voong went into an immigration center armed to the teeth and killed 13 people before turning the gun on himself. Authorities and pundits have used the word "coward", "lunatic", and "maniac" to describe Voong, but I wonder if these labels are used more for our own comfort (yes, I realize that there are some disturbing letters attributed to him) - pigeon-holing the young man and fitting him in a category far away from us "normal folks" to give us a false sense of understanding of a tragedy which is difficult to understand.

Not a whole lot is still known about the shooter, though an article in the New York Daily News provides us a glimpse into Jiverly Voong. While there are a handful of angry comments, there isn't a heck of lot that would make it evident that he would be capable of such an atrocity. He's a bitter immigrant who has been beaten down and depressed by a seemingly endless string of personal and professional failures. His wife and kids left him and he had lost his job on more than one occasion, all of which made him understandably (without excusing his actions) angry about his lot in life. As a result, he lashed out with rage towards a society that he had felt that taken him for granted, a society which he felt had failed to live up to the expectations of having an attainable American dream.

I wonder with trepidation of the the plentitude of Jiverly Voongs who are out there. In a damaged economy, how many people are out there with little support systems, little hope, and a lot of anger? How many people in our country, let alone immigrants, are going to feel that this country has failed to meet their personal senses of entitlement, and will snap in the same way that Jiverly Voong did?

I wonder if, despite the fact that most of Voong's victims were immigrants themselves, will those who promote racist ideology begin to connect dots between Jiverly Voong and Cho Seung-Hui, the architect of the Virginia Tech Massacre two years ago? Will opportunistic politicians use this to fan the fear of foreigners? Will the stereotype of "the bitter and crazy gun-toting Asian man" take its place in the hall of shame of Asian stereotypes alongside "the socially-awkward nerdy Asian overachiever" and "the exotic and eroticized Asian geisha girl"?

I wonder if this is going to lead to opportunistic hand-wringing from both sides of the gun lobby - gun-lovers who will insist if we armed the receptionists that this terrible tragedy could have been avoided, and gun-haters who insist is nobody had a gun this wouldn't have happened in the first place. I wonder if in addition to introducing legislation preventing those who have criminal records or mental health issues to carry permits, there will be an amendment forbidding gun ownership for those who are deemed "bitter and angry". As a recent analysis in MSNBC pointed out, "What's truly unsettling in America's new era of gloom and dead ends is wondering how many of those 663,000 might be deeply, irrevocably angry about it — and might have a gun."

Pray for healing for the people of Binghamton. And pray for the many people across the country who, let's be frank, don't feel a whole lot different that Jiverly Voong felt when he walked into an immigration center last Friday.

The Cost of Hope Against Cancer

An interesting editorial appeared in the Atlantic which starts of with the catchy tag: "If I lived in New Zealand. I'd be dead."

The gist of the article speaks about the authors use of the cancer drug, Herceptin, which along with chemotherapy had remarkable effectiveness in treating her breast cancer. The cost of the drug was $60,000, paid by the author's health insurer. If you ask the author, it was worth every penny.

Cancer drugs, like other pharmaceuticals are not inexpensive, and while I could go on about the economics of why drug therapies are required to recoup the massive amounts spent in research and development where the vast majority of compounds fail, I won't do that here. What I find particularly interesting is the complex debate around whether the state should determine which drugs should be made available or affordable to its citizens, even when the use of those drugs may cause economic hardship for the rest of the population and extend life for only a handful of months. Put another way, you may say that life is priceless and no expense should be spared to prolong yours, but should the rest of the population pay the price for that? Is the rest of the population willing to pay the price for that?

The editorial pointed out that in many countries, through the use of a national healtcare system, determine which drugs are worth the cost to the population. New Zealand is one of these countries, and through its Pharmac agency, has "successfully" decreased cost of overall drug coverage per capita to $303 per person, compared to $843 per person in the United States. There is a price to be paid, as that $303 limits what you get. So while an insured patient would get $60,000 worth of cancer wonder drug with a small co-pay in the United States, a patient in New Zealand would be told essentially, "Sure you can get it. Go ahead and make out a check to Genentech for $60,000."

If you're a cancer patient in New Zealand, suddenly the downside of nationalized healthcare hits you in the face. President Obama talks about independent reviews and research on comparative effectiveness which will scrutinize new treatments for effectiveness, which sounds great in theory, but at the end of the day you end of results like you see in New Zealand.

Don't get me wrong, that's not all a bad thing. I'm not being rhetorical when I ask whether it's a good thing for a society (via the healthcare system where premiums will be raised for everyone) to bear the burden of billions of healthcare cost dollars (around $18 billion to be exact) to, in many cases, increase cancer patients lives less than a year longer. It's understandable that your answer will be different if you or a loved one is a cancer patient.

An excellent article some months ago in the New York Times talked about the dilemma that cancer drugs posed in terms of costs versus benefit. No less an authority than legendary Merck CEO Roy Vagelos made a thinly veiled reference to a cancer drug, Avastin, that costs $50,000 a year and adds four months of life. “There is a shocking disparity between value and price,” he said, “and it’s not sustainable.”

But even that's a judgment call, and who is going to make that call? Are you going to ask doctors to look in the eyes of a patient and tell them, "I want you to have hope in your fight against Stage 4 colon cancer, but I'm not going to prescribe you the best drug out there because that sort of hope is too expensive. Good luck." Do you really want managed care organizations and insurance companies to make that call? The government, as it does in New Zealand?

We can all agree that cancer is horrible disease, and that the quest to eradicate it is a worthy one. It's going to be costly to do so, however, and the economics around developing the next generation of cancer therapies is complex. My hope is that the battle can be won sooner than later, until no patient will get caught in the crossfire in the debate around the cost and benefits of these drugs.

Illegal Sneak Previews

In what might raise the game of film piracy to a whole new level, a copy of the movie, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was put online and watched by thousands of people, a full month before it was to be released to theaters. The pirated copy of the film, which is missing some special effects and soundtrack finishing touches, spead through the Internet like wildfire and authorities are pretty much playing a futile game to close this Pandora's Box. It's hard not to believe that this is a phenomena which will only become more common.

I suppose that this is the nature of the increasingly digital age, that any content which is proprietary can be easily and quickly duplicated and distributed. For all of the rhetoric around digital-rights management (DRM) by media companies, I think they're going to fight a losing battle against consumers' desires to enjoy media for free. People can talk about fundamental respect for the artists and those people who make their living from the honest purchase of music and movies, but at the end of the day, people succumb to the relative anonymity of consuming bootleg media, sometimes rationalizing incorrectly that it's a victimless crime (like "punching someone in the dark" as the Simpson's Nelson Muntz would say).

Few people are going to pay money for something they can get for free. Sarah and I use the library online catalog and inter-library loan to watch all of the latest DVD's, so we don't pay one red cent, besides whatever portion of our taxes is going to library to purchase these DVD's. Waiting a few months for the movie to be available on DVD and a few more weeks waiting for the newest releases to become available at the library is a small price to pay compared to spending $25 for tickets, $10 for concessions, and $30 for a babysitter - especially in this economy.

Juror 988 at the Essex County Courthouse

Earlier this week I was tapped to live up to my responsibilities as a citizen and report for jury duty. I have to admit that I was not enthusiastic about the opportunity to serve, and it was difficult not to focus on work that needed to get done, meetings that would have to be rescheduled, the hassle of needing to borrow my parents' car and navigating my way to the Essex County Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey.

Intellectually, I knew that this was completely the wrong attitude to have. The reality is that for every group of inconvenienced jurists, there is a defendant, victim, or victim's family who care deeply about the administration of justice. What might seem like a hassle and waste of time for a potential juror could be the difference of life or death, of freedom or incarceration - a decision that will affect families and the trajectory of reconciliation. I really tried to embrace this attitude, but sadly I failed as you'll see later on.

As I drove from my suburban home to Newark, it was clear that my suburban sensitivities over the years have made me a bit soft and paranoid (I am the Suburban Family Guy, after all). So as I drove through South Orange Avenue past neigborhoods a little less, uh, cultivated, I found myself feeling like Colonel Al-Ghazi in the film "The Kingdom" driving the SUV in the unfriendly militant neighborhood of Suweidi telling his American comrades, "This is a dangerous place. We should not be here..."

I'm not proud of this per se. If anything, it reminds me of my need to break out of my own comfort zone of white picket fences and neatly manicured lawns. As I think about being missional in my neighborhood, I think that must include lower-income parts of the county where poverty and crime are more prevalent. Even though I spent a good deal of time in West Philadelphia and Morningside Heights, it's true that you can live at the doorstep, even in the midst of a less-privileged community but still be completely uninvolved and disengaged with it.

The courthouse itself was surprisingly nice. Renovated five years ago, the waiting rooms include comfortable chairs and multiple flat-panel LCD televisions broadcasting either PBS, ESPN, or CNN. A separate computer lounge has partitioned stations with outlets and WiFi and stands adjacent to a lounge where free coffee is served. All this, plus non-state employees are given a five dollar stipend to compensate for loss of wages. Yes, it barely paid for the cost of my gas, but I'm not going to say anything which is going to tempt Governor Corzine to jack up property taxes even more.

As for my own service, I was put in a jury pool and waited in the gallery as jury selection began. There was a series of questions, only one of which, "Would you weigh the testimony of a police officer above others in this court?" I raised my hand in the affirmative. The judge seated fourteen "preliminary" jurors and then the fun began.

For those of you who aren't lawyers or who haven't served jury duty in a while, both the prosecution and defense used peremptory challenges to dismiss various members of the "original fourteen" jurors, leaving a void which needed to be filled by those remaining in the jury pool (including myself). I had pretty much decided, despite my wish that to be more gung-ho about my civic duty, that I did not want to sit on a case which was projected to last through next week, so with each peremptory challenge, I felt slowly pushed towards the frying pan as "acceptable jurors" were slowly paraded one by one to answer questions about our biases, our beliefs, and our backgrounds. And with each peremptory challenge (mostly by the defense), I subconsciously was thinking, "I will be one extremely irritated juror if your challenges end up putting me in that jury box for the next seven days. Believe me that you do not want me there because though I will try my best to be impartial, my spite may very well end up getting your client implicated on additional charges."

Just when I thought I was going to be brought up to be vetted, the judge put outside the remaining eleven of us and called us back in one by one. When I was called in, the judge asked me to explain my initial affirmative response to the question of "Would you weigh the testimony of a police officer above others in this court?" I began to answer that "Well Your Honor, given that an officer takes a solemn oath to protect and serve, I... " before he abruptly cut me off and said, "Thank you very much, you're dismissed 'for cause', you can go downstairs now."

I was simultaneously relieved and jilted. Maybe the people-pleaser in me was disappointed that somehow I gave the "wrong" answer, even though it was an honest one. To add the cherry on top, the court administrators waived our second day of service, which led to a group cheer from those of us in the waiting area. I've had worst ways to spend a Wednesday. And I did mention the five dollars, correct?

The Beauty of Adoption and a Reminder of Sonship

Adoption is something which has gained some press in recent years with the "celebrity adoptions" courtesy of Angelina Jolie and Madonna. With the world waiting with bated breath around the ruling from a Malawi court around Madonna's planned second adoption from that African country, commentator Roland Martin wonders why there isn't more attention given towards the 500,000 kids in the United States who are under foster care and eligible to be placed in families. Or put another way, why aren't celebrities surrounded by paparazzi as they walk into a social services agency in Decatur, Illinois to adopt 3-year old Timmy Hunter?

As Martin himself says, the bringing in of any child in this world into a loving family is a cause for celebration. As someone who is staunchly pro-life, adoption is one of the best ways to live out such a conviction - that's why every child who is brought into a non-biologically linked family is a way we affirm the choice made by a mother not to cut a life short through abortion. Each adoption is a repudiation of the a desperate and wrong belief that "this child that I carry can never be cared for and thus shouldn't live."

I have friends who are adopted. I have friends who have adopted children. I have friends who have given children up for adoption. Something I hear in common from many of them, especially from those who are Christian, is that adoption has completely magnified, sometimes in retrospect, their appreciation and view of sonship, of the grace of God manifest in bringing us into His family. The amazing truth of being made a joint heirs with Christ, not as servants or second-class citizens within the Kingdom, but with the full privilege of someday dining at the table with our King and Father.

A Weekend Away With Jeopardy! and Kimchee Ramen

Back in college, a girl posted a message in our InterVarsity newsgroup (this was 1995, after all) something along the lines of:

"At my church we call them advances instead of retreats. Just a thought."

This girl was actually only superficially engaged in our fellowship, so I thought about firing off a tongue-in-cheek post wondering if she was planning on joining us in our next "advance".

This past weekend we went to our church advance, er... retreat at the Tuscarora Inn, and in addition to hearing a number of good talks, experienced what might have been our last retreat at Emmanuel, at least in the near future. Our church has adopted a number of nifty traditions and inside jokes over the few years, including the nearby Delaware Water Gap hike, Pastor Scott's standup routine, our annual Jeopardy! game (chock full of trivia about people in the church and random facts about our neighborhood) and styrofoam bowls of instant ramen. Another recent tradition, which I have missed out of in my advance season of life, is the marathon "Mafia" games which are played until 4 ot 5 in the morning.

Retreats are a funny thing. Somewhere along the way there was at least a rumbling of a belief that a retreat was a place where you could find some degree of physical rest, but that couldn't be further from the truth, especially if you have children. Put aside for a second the fact that your schedule is essentially dictated for you - you need to show up for meals at a certain time or go hungry, you are expected to attend a series of talks at a given time so you can't nap whenever you feel like it - trying to care for children and put them to bed in an unfamiliar environment where you might not have all of the toys and tools to make your job easier makes the weekend a little bit of work.

We stayed at an apartment off-campus which had a great pond view, but it was still challenging to figure out which of the two bedrooms each kid would sleep in and how we would work out their sleep schedules so they would least likely wake each other up. For the most part, the kids did okay, but I'm sure they were both happy to return home and the comfort of their own beds.

The main takeaways for the retreat, with talks given by Rev. David Kim from the Gotham Fellowship, at least for me, was the Holy Spirit's work in the greater world beyond the walls of the church, and the Spirit's work enabling me not just to do my work more "ethically", but more skillfully unto His Glory. I resonate with the charge for me to use every part of myself and every opportunity within my vocation to transform my company and industry in a way which reflects the manifestation of God's shalom. Where prayer will come in is in the realization that the ability to drive such transformation is not within the power of human hands, and must be driven by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Some other personal takeaways:

1. Eating more than one bowl of instant ramen before going to sleep is a bad idea. I don't think the gastrointestinal system was made for such things.
2. There are a handful of people who serve really hard in terms of making a retreat like this happen and we don't nearly recognize them as much as we should. Scott coordinated the entire weekend, and his wife Kathy made sure that we had ample food to keep us going throughout the day. Justin did a magnificent job to making sure that the kids were well taken care of, personally taking the responsibility of caring and running activities for the preschool and older kids. Thank you all.
3. I make fun of our church's love for playing Mafia during the retreat, but in all seriousness, I think there's something wonderful in seeing how some very unexpected friendships have developed because of the late-night marathons. I've had more than one person come up to me and tell me, "You know, I wouldn't have gotten to know Person X so well and realize s(he) was so cool without having the chance to play Mafia with them."
4. We need to be a church that prays more, and prays more personally for the needs of people in our congregation - something that I'll keep in mind when I lead future Sunday morning prayer meetings. When our retreat speaker wonders with concern whether breaking up into small groups and praying for people who are struggling with vocation "will work okay for our congregation", I think that's sort of sad.
5. I'm really going to miss Emmanuel.

Kicking Against the Goads

In Acts 26, the account of Paul's account of his conversion speaks of the Lord saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads." Upon closer look, the phrase "kicking against the goals" is a metaphor referring to an ox kicking in fruitlessly against a cattle prod, often causing more pain to itself. In essence, a futile and stubborn action which simply leads to more fruitlessness and frustration.

I was thinking about this as I was playing my 16-month old daughter Sophia last week. We have a toy which is comprised of blocks in the shape of stars, triangles, circles (cylinders), and squares (cubes) as well as a box with a cover with holes those four shapes. The object of one game, I suppose, is to try to fit those blocks in the corresponding holes and into the box. 

We spent a good ten or fifteen minutes doing this over and over again and while she got better at it, Sophia would continue to try to fit the block more through trial and error as opposed to spacial reasoning. In other words, she'd try to cram the star-shaped block into the triangle-shaped hole for a good half-minute or so before I would gently suggest her moving it to a different one. I grew increasingly frustrated with her so I began to call her "stupid", "lazy" and "useless". (I'm totally kidding, it's an inside joke referencing an earlier blog post.)

Watching her try to cram triangular blocks into star-shaped holes made me think of how I am often guilty of "kicking against the goads". I realize that I constantly fight this battle of who my sinful flesh wants me to be and what my sinful flesh wants as opposed to the Lord's true calling for me. This ranges from day-to-day desires of the heart to far-reaching decisions in terms of calling and character. Jeremiah 17:9 reminds us that the heart is deceitful above all things, and along with that comes a stubbornness in which we take our own self-focused desires and try to cram them in God's plan for us. That our heart would conform with that of our Father's is a prayer we should always pray.  Seems to me it'd be stupid and lazy for us not to do so.