Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken / Someone Gets to Sound the Alarm

By Vern Duane Porter

Let me take you back in time to simpler days when my fourth great-grandfather ran around with Daniel Boone. Some of your stereotypes may be challenged when I describe an orphaned Indian boy brought to my fifth great-grandfather by Chief Logan at the boys request so that he could be raised by whites in order to become a minister of the gospel. You will learn much about early 1900s farm life. My wifes stepfather was from the mining country in the Idaho panhandle, so I will take you deep down below the surface looking for the ore body. Some of my relatives worked in the open-pit iron mines of northern Minnesota, so they will get some attention.
After we had moved to California, we eventually bought a small house on a large enough lot to have a few chickens. When Mom wanted to have fried chicken ready for supper when Dad got home, it was up to me to chop its head off and, with Moms help, pluck it. Thus I learned that someone has to pluck the chicken, and I grew up with a respect for the country work ethic and the ingenuity of the American farmer.
My exposure to the diverse cultures of Minnesota farmland and suburban California presented me with a view of the winds of cultural change blowing across the country, which were bringing a demand for lowering standards of behavior and the lessening of punishment. My comments on the source and susceptibility to the push for change are accompanied by anecdotes from history, and the lives of relatives and my own life experiences.
I was in the Deep South during the Reverend Kings marches for civil rights. When the antiwar crowd was breaking windows on the first floor of the chancellors office at UC Berkeley, I was on the second floor servicing a mimeograph machine. The time I spent on high school and grade school campuses opened my eyes to the flow of changing standards in our culture.
There will be an effort to describe the pivotal changes in my life and destiny, which I believe came about as the result of prayer, the importance of the Southern Baptist Church in my teenage years, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as I became an independent adult. I will also describe the events that led to my leaving the LDS church for twenty-five years and why I came back recently. The challenges of raising a family in a home divided on religious belief will also be covered.
On the job, I dared to stand up for the rights of those I supervised to take their breaks. At another company I worked for, I took a stand against corporate greed. It cost me in promotions and raises and eventually resulted in AmeriGas refusing to recognize the Americans with Disabilities Act for me. Rather than sue them, I decided to leave with a two-year disability and have the California Department of Rehabilitation upgrade my clerical skills so I could get a desk job.
The promoters of compassion in this country have succeeded in creating so many categories of disability that it was nearly impossible for this middle-aged white guy to get an entry-level desk job with the State of California. The worsening of my disability and my efforts to overcome it with alternative therapies will be covered in my chapter on health.
Its just as well that I wanted to work in spite of my disability. My two-year disability policy required me to apply for a Social Security disability (SSI), so I went to be examined by their doctor. When I walked into the crowded waiting room, I was ushered right in to see the doctor. He explained that the people in the waiting room had to wait for an interpreter, so for that reason alone, they would qualify for SSI. Since I was able to walk in, I would not qualify.
I believe in climate change, but it was around long before humankind was here to influence the weather. Over a century ago, at least one scientist determined through an experiment that the concentration of CO2 was already past the point where adding more would increase global warming. The global w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781441576767

Vern Duane Porter

Born in a log farmhouse in Minnesota, my first experience with indoor plumbing came when I was six after we moved to California. We went back on vacation nearly every year and managed to hold on to our country ways. Through my high school years I worked on a small ranch caring for the animals and irrigating the pastures. My fascination with guns did not turn me into a homicidal maniac. I was tall for my age and felt protective towards my smaller classmates. I remember stepping between bully and victim to take the blows meant for one of my classmates when I was eight years old. Marginal health and serious illnesses have stimulated my interest in traditional and alternative medicine. Advice from promoters of alternative medicine has recently allowed me to pull one foot out of the grave and stop the progress of my neuropathy. Activity in the Southern Baptist Church through my teenage years kept me out of trouble. When I became acquainted with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) I knew I had found a home. My outspoken ways brought on confrontations which caused me to leave that church for twenty five years, but I am back now. My outspoken ways also caused me some trouble on the job. At least one senior vice president begrudgingly referred to me as a watchdog.

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Someone has to Pluck the Chicken Someone Gets to Sound the Alarm

Vern Duane Porter

Copyright © 2009 by Vern Duane Porter.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009906157

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4415-4871-9

Softcover 978-1-4415-4870-2

Ebook 978-1-4415-7676-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my wife for all the help and encouragement she gives me in editing and commenting on my work. I am indebted to my friends, Reed Whitaker, Janet Sylvester, and Glen Crooks for the many hours they spent in helping with the editing of the original Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken. Special thanks are due John and Marilyn Cook for their encouragement when I first began writing for a local newspaper, the Elk Grove Citizen, a few years ago. Special thanks to Keith Gebers for the help he gave me when I was writing for the Citizen. For the help and moral support given by employees of the State of California, Department of Rehabilitation when I was despondent because of my struggle with what I thought was Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, I am very grateful. To Cilia Albaracin and the other counselors and office staff at the South Sacramento office of the Department of Rehabilitation, my sincere thanks.

Most of all, I am indebted to my parents for their nurture and examples. I owe my dad a great deal. I’m happy that I learned to mimic his sense of humor. His calm, measured way of facing life’s challenges was something for me to aspire to. It would be difficult to exaggerate the debt I owe my mother. What they taught me by precept and example was more valuable than anything I learned at school.

We left Minnesota when I was five, so I received my schooling in California in a small-town setting. In addition to one-room schoolhouses, some children growing up in a rural setting learned a lot of things out behind the barn and behind woodsheds. Taking a disobedient child behind the woodshed for punishment was done for privacy and for an opportunity to grab a willow switch along the way. It was sometimes done because of what happened out behind the barn. Back in those days, if your behavior at school resulted in punishment, you received more when you got home.

Although I believe in corporal punishment, I am glad that my relationship with my parents did not require it. I honor them for helping me to establish behavior patterns that did not make it necessary.

Preface

Science offers a structured way of examining things and cataloging information that can increase understanding and bring a sense of order into everyday life. The more we learn from science, the more we become aware of the limitations of our knowledge. We still have occasion to wonder if relationships we perceive are coincidental or relevant. During a thunderstorm, we were visiting the mother-in-law of an aunt of mine. As a young child, I usually sat quietly when we visited my folks’ elderly friends. The noise of the thunder was sufficiently distracting that I began playing with the handles on the drawers of the nearby breakfront, or chest of drawers. As the thunder receded into the distance, the most obvious evidence of the storm was an occasional flicker of the lights. The handles were ornate curved pieces of metal that hung down from where they were attached on either end to a metal plate. Occasionally, I would reach over and give one of the handles a flip. When the noise of the thunder had diminished sufficiently because it was farther away, my aunt’s mother-in-law began to notice the noise made by the flipping of the handle. It just so happened that my flipping of the handle was almost instantly followed by the flickering of the lights every time; don’t ask me how I managed to do that. She was an intelligent woman, so she couldn’t keep her surprise at the coincidental timing of the two unconnected events from registering on her face.

As someone who believes that God planned and put into motion the forces that created the universe, it isn’t especially important to me to know for certain, right now, just how old the earth is or how everything we find on the earth came to be here (I believe God made the earth and placed everything here). But scientists have concocted theories supported by timetables based on the decay rates of various elements and assumptions about the concentration of those elements in the past and the conditions they have been exposed to since then. Entertaining theories is one thing, but too many of us begin to imagine that we understand how all things came to be, whether we are Darwinists or creationists, when we are really only seeing the lights blink, and hearing the flipping of the handle.

Politics and religion have long been sensitive subjects, but I will attempt to cope with both in this book by suggesting that we stop standing in awe of the intellectual elite and insist that they converse with us on the subject of purpose. It’s not about the subject of purpose in nature as seen by Darwinian evolutionists. As a starting place, I’d like them to talk about the purpose of teaching our schoolchildren and college students that Darwinian evolution is the only and final answer as to how we happen to be on planet earth.

Darwinian evolution can provide no encouragement to entertain a hope in life after death where immorality is punished and goodness is rewarded. It fails to provide any reason to avoid selfish behavior or to promote the survival of human civilization. And yet, they justify the liberal agenda with their professed humanitarian concerns for the welfare of the poor, the sick and afflicted, and the maintaining of the status quo environmentally. When I write liberal with quotations I’m stipulating political activists, not grass roots liberals.

Darwinian evolution cannot inspire the prevention of sexual harassment or rape. Naturalists enthusiastically present studies of the mating habits of animals that include some very rough, forceful behavior and some very sneaky strategies, as they promote the idea that we owe our existence to the sexual success of the fittest. But liberals make a big issue of being against sexual harassment and rape.

Darwinian evolution cannot inspire peaceful coexistence, as the wild habitat is full of life-and-death struggles. And yet, liberals side with the predatory and vicious among humans in that they don’t want ordinary citizens to be able to defend life and property from murderers, rapists, and thieves.

Evolutionists will tell you that human civilization owes its progress to the extra years of parental care given its young before they mate and start reproducing offspring. And yet, liberals are attempting to destroy the influence of parents in a child’s life by insisting that children should not have disappointments and parental restrictions regarding whom they associate with or how soon they start having sex, that there should not be any invasions of a child’s privacy, and that their parents have very limited rights to punish them. These things are only part of the liberal agenda that has been creating generations of self-indulgent, pushy, arrogant left-wingers who have little tolerance for opposition or disappointment.

There are a great many decent religious folks who believe in the principles of evolution. Some of them are associated with religions that have allowed their belief in God to become so far removed from reality, so abstract that they no longer see the Garden of Eden and heaven as part of reality. When the thought of an afterlife is pushed too far away, it becomes difficult to look forward to heaven as a place of rewards or punishment relating to how we behaved during mortality. The kind of people we are becoming loses relevance with regard to religious belief. We therefore find it easy to accept the radical atheist view of earth life.

This life is all there is in the radical atheist view, so whatever enjoyment we are going to have is in the here and now. That is the lesson of Darwinian evolution; and that is why socialists and communists, who are grounded in atheism, justify their quest for power by the promotion of equality in a social order attempting to create a heaven on earth.

Some people are psychologically prepared for a social order based on equality; many are not. The liberal agenda has been preparing schoolchildren to bring on a social order based on equality. Those who have been thus programmed will find that they have not been programmed to deal gently with those who are not ready for enforced equality.

Promoting Darwinian evolution as the only acceptable explanation of our existence on planet earth has only one purpose. That purpose is to refute the claim by religious folks that God is responsible for our being here. It destroys the idea that God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Assume the intellectual elite have convinced the majority of our children that the founding fathers were wrong in their belief in a creator and the Ten Commandments. How will they teach our children self-control or tolerance for opposition and disappointment? With only a belief in Darwinian evolution to guide them, how are they going to turn out any better than the enforcers of equality and sameness in the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea?

Liberal intellectual elitists know that as we mature, we display varying degrees of selfishness, unselfishness, and the need for someone to follow. They know that even though they promote Darwinian evolution, they can get some of the unselfish to join them with their emphasis on community activism, helping the needy, and protecting the environment. With their emphasis on live for today, they know that some of the selfish can be recruited. But one thing they do not know is what the totalitarian government they are heading us toward will eventually become. Once they have destroyed the entrepreneurial spirit in America with oppressive taxes and done away with our Judeo-Christian morality, how will they prevent a Pol Pot, a Joseph Stalin, a Mao Tse-tung, or a Kim Jong Il from obtaining leadership? Darwinian evolution will facilitate a Pol Pot. The desperation of an oppressed needy people will necessitate a Joseph Stalin, a Mao, or a Kim Jong Il. All you free thinkers will suddenly find that you are not free to think after you have driven conservative Christianity and Bible reading underground.

Please keep reading. There will be a lot of interesting information about my battle with corporate greed, historical events, mining methods, Mormonism, Sharia law, everyday farm life, and my struggles to earn a living and raise a family.

Introduction

Having been a curious child and an observer of the human condition all of my adult life, I’ve wanted to give the world a view of things from my unique perspective. To my way of thinking, our current problems are an outgrowth of problems our forefathers tried to leave behind when they left the Old World and established something new in the New World. As population centers grew, they grew all the faster as more and more people came here for opportunity when the industrial age was in its infancy. Before our legislators had learned to deal with the industrialization of America, the rich established factories and ways of extracting our natural resources, which required many workers. Men, women, and children worked long hours in the factories in unsafe conditions; and men worked deep underground in even greater danger. Meanwhile, the misery in the Old World spawned new answers to oppression. Intellectuals conspired together to discuss theories of communism and anarchy. Out of the depths of human misery, a competing social order was rising, a new order that would seek to establish itself by increasing misery and disorder to topple the old order. Those who wanted to keep the American dream alive soon found themselves with a new enemy, an enemy that wasn’t interested in fighting the corruption that threatened them, because corruption served the purpose of placing the American dream in disrepute. Replacing the American dream with something new was their goal.

I want to share with you the American dream that I lived. This is my view of the world as a workingman, as part of churchgoing America, as someone who has been disillusioned by organized religion but still considers himself a Christian. Mostly, it is about me, my living family and ancestors, my friends, and my view of history as I saw it, heard it, read about it, and took part in it.

At an early age, I learned the truth of human existence; someone has to pluck the chicken. If Mother wanted to have fried chicken ready for suppertime, the job of chopping off the chicken’s head was given to me. After the deed was done, Mother helped me pluck the still-warm corpse of my once fine-feathered friend. Years before I was old enough to swing the hatchet, I had to learn a close corollary of that age-old maxim. Yes, it fell on me to be the one to get the dumb dog. The farmhouse we lived in was nearly surrounded by a grove of trees. Shep would lead me into the grove and then run off and leave me. When Shep came back without me, Mom and Dad would say, Go find Vern, Shep. Go find Vern. But he would only tag along behind them as they looked for me. It may be as some have suggested, that it was more a matter of Shep’s jealousy of me than Shep’s intelligence; but whatever the case, Shep was not my best friend.

Learning to cope with a lot of such corollaries can incline a young lad toward bitterness or toward a contemplative life. The latter choice was mine. Perhaps something my mother told me headed me in that direction. When I was about five years old, my mother taught me to look at life as a test as she explained that life is a stage where we each play our part. Though I had high standards for myself, I was aware of the power of temptation and was willing to give a little slack to someone who didn’t live up to the same standards I aspired to. I understood that every choice has its own required sacrifices and rewards attached to it, and choices are a personal matter. When I was in school, I associated with a wide variety of kids with different standards than I had. While I was fully capable of taking sides, I also found it easy to see the other side in an unbiased light and avoid being a fanatical blind partisan. In these days of extreme polarization, I have some important insights to share with those who are willing to question the blind loyalty they may have for one side or the other. Though I consider myself conservative, I have serious issues with parts of the conservative orthodoxy attempting to influence us. As someone who has been disappointed by organized religion, I have some answers for those who question the goodness of God. In order to make it harder for you to dismiss my insights, or perhaps easier, I am going to tell you many things about my life so that you will know where I’m coming from.

Regarding the goodness of God, I’ll give you a little sample of my thoughts on that subject right here. After the several hours of pain from a kidney stone had subsided, and the results of the CAT scan showed worse to come, I started to feel a little anger toward God. Then I thought of God allowing His Son to be crucified. Jesus suffered crucifixion in order to show that there must be a separation of good and evil, because that which evil cannot corrupt or molest, it will destroy. The crucifixion of Jesus justifies the removal of the wicked so that those who repent and accept Jesus will be able to exist peacefully without the wicked oppressors to victimize them.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote and self-published a book entitled Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken. This effort contains some of the same material because I only printed two hundred copies of my first book. Because of a slightly different emphasis, I call this book Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken / Someone Gets to Sound the Alarm. I will point out things that will make people uncomfortable, in both major political parties as well as atheists and people in most churches. In the process, I will reveal a lot of interesting facts and incidents from life in the 1900s, some of them quite humorous. You will learn how traditional medicine failed me and I had to resort to self-medication; what troubles I brought upon myself fighting corporate greed; and why I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, why I left that church after standing up to racists, and why I came back twenty-five years later. Continue at your own risk.

Having been uprooted from aunts, uncles, cousins, and childhood friends at the tender age of six may have helped to accentuate my independent nature. If I didn’t feel like I quite fit in among new acquaintances in California, there were always my cousins and aunts and uncles to visit during summer vacation in Minnesota. Whatever the cause, I never felt dependent upon the social acceptance of any one group and wasn’t prone to develop that rah-rah, sis-boom-bah blind loyalty of a fanatical fan for sports.

Though I loved to play team sports, I didn’t become such a serious fan that I closely followed the tournaments. When I played church league basketball, I was uncomfortable with efforts to throw an opponent off his game by fouling him when the referees weren’t watching or trying to injure him when going up for a shot. Oh, I have felt the anger at unfair refereeing and dirty playing by an opponent, but I have always tried to view things through unbiased eyes rather than see things through a lens heavily tinted by partisan emotions.

I watched just enough football to be aware of a new emphasis, a decade or so ago, to stop the effort by tacklers to deliver serious head trauma to the ball carrier. I remember the whining by a large tackle because he would have to disappoint his fans by failing to give the quarterback a concussion. As disappointed as that made me with the tackle, it made me even more angry at the fans. That same blind team loyalty by the fans is active in politics, or crooked politicians would not get away with so much. The willingness to root for and encourage dirty players in politics makes us way too much like fanatical football fans.

I’ll tell it like it is, folks; if they didn’t know that they could get away with it because of partisanship, the mainstream news media would not be passing on leaks that warn al Qaeda about our surveillance methods; they would not have stood still for Scooter Libby being railroaded over some irrelevant testimony when Richard Armitage was the one who leaked Joe Wilson’s wife’s name to the press; and they wouldn’t sit still for so much completely unsubstantiated slander about President Bush and Vice President Cheney to be proliferated.

In their hatred for President Bush, radical left-wingers were willing to sabotage the war against terrorism because it would thwart Bush’s agenda. Some mainstream Democrats encouraged them, and many members of the press did also. They made Bush bashing so popular that even some conservative Republicans resorted to it when they thought it might help them promote their agendas.

Growing up and getting involved in the real world of adults, it became apparent to me that much of the adult world has never outgrown that tendency to prejudge or be totally partisan. It also became obvious to me that there are a lot of very greedy, power-hungry folks out there who have learned to talk like and give the outward appearance of being Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, etc.; but they are first and foremost self-centered cheats. It also became obvious to me that it wouldn’t do to just guess or assume which one is a decent human being and which one is a dirty rotten crook. And I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with folks who say they are all a bunch of crooks. It’s just another lame excuse for refusing to take a serious look at the options and voting for the best interest of our country.

Although as a child I wanted to attend a military academy and become a pilot, it became apparent to me that it would never be. Being one of the ordinary types was to be my lot. I’ll explain why I think this was not a bad thing. When I was a young boy listening to a Sunday school teacher tell about Solomon asking for wisdom, I decided to ask the Lord for the wisdom to be able to serve him. It changed my life as I learned to look at every setback as an opportunity to reexamine my life and look for new possibilities. I believe that the Lord carefully guided me in directions that would help me to turn away from that path that leads to worldliness, sophistication, greed, arrogance, and perhaps some degree of notoriety or fame. I suspect that I had the possibility of obtaining some degree of fame because of the physical attributes I exhibited at an early age.

Since the first grade, I had always been the last one out in dodgeball, and I ran the fastest. When I was in the third grade, I could still run the three-quarters of a mile downhill to school and, after school, easily run the three-quarters of a mile uphill to go home. I could also put a basketball off the backboard and through the hoop from anywhere within twelve feet of the basket without a miss. All that changed after I told the Lord I wanted to serve Him. By the time I was in high school physical education classes, I couldn’t even jog anywhere near a full mile on level ground. In spite of a great deal of physical activity, I wasn’t able to do a single push-up. Being a person of notoriety does not necessarily lead to less than admirable character, but I believe it would have in my case.

It is not my contention that the Lord turned me into a mental giant, only that He led me down a path that helped me to develop proper morals. My slowness in organizing my thoughts and memorizing things was not overcome in my childhood. A few years ago, my mom told me that when she wanted to know what happened over any particular time period, she learned to ask my sisters, because I wasn’t able to give her a step-by-step account. Approaching my middle age, my wife helped me when I was writing complaint letters and taught me to arrange my thoughts, or I never would have been able to become a part-time reporter for the Elk Grove Citizen for a couple of years. I quit my part-time job with the paper to have more time to finish a book I was writing while I was working at a permanent intermittent job with the State of California.

In claiming that the Lord helped me to develop proper morals, I don’t want you get the idea that I always made the right choices, only that I learned the value of repentance. I didn’t consider myself a tattletale; some of the time I was the one being mischievous. I remember quite well the menace I was to little girls when I was in the second or third grade. It was late spring, and the pyracantha bushes were in bloom and full of honeybees. I found it easy to grab a bee by the wings and let it sting my dampened collar to remove its stinger. Once the stinger was removed, I would toss it down some unsuspecting girl’s blouse in order to enjoy the noisy spectacle of her unnecessary panic. Fortunately for the girls I tormented, the bees never bit one of them. One should not assume that bees will never bite just because you never hear of it. All it took to end that short episode in my life was the teacher dragging me by my overly stretched ear to a room where she could read me the riot act.

About that time, I also figured out that teacher did not always have to become involved when problems arose. Teacher was taking us on a hike single file down the edge of a paved street. Two of the boys close by were poking and harassing another boy behind me. Being quite large for my age, I found it easy to put a stop to the problem by simply stepping between the harassed and the troublemakers. They tried poking me, but I didn’t let it bother me, and they soon tired of it. That worked out well because boys at that age do little more than hurt each other’s feelings when they poke and jab each other.

A few years later, when my peers were big enough to do serious damage to each other, one experience did not come out so well for me. Riding my bicycle on a canal road one day, I met up with three boys who wanted to fight me. The shortest of them was a hotheaded, mean little hoodlum who might do me some serious harm if I happened to land a serious punch, and one of his cohorts was near my height and much more muscular. I really dislike fighting and didn’t want to give them an excuse to beat me senseless, so I refused to fight and let them punch me in the midsection. This may have caused some permanent damage to my diaphragm. Recently, I had chest X-rays taken to discover the source of minimal lung capacity that was revealed in a breathing test. The X-rays showed that the right half of my diaphragm was not working, and my transverse colon appeared to be attached to it.

The beating took place in an isolated location where no one could help me. I believe in the old-fashioned definition of pacifism wherein one sticks up for what’s right or someone being picked on and accepts the consequences required by those in power or the bullies. There is a new version of pacifism in vogue today promoted by the peaceniks and the antigun crowd. If they had their way, murderers, rapists, and whoever lusted after anything in our homes would be free to break in