Category Archives: Parenting

Counterfeit Love

January 30, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Pushing through the door at Arby’s last night, a hastily written sign taped on the door caught my eye. Too hungry to stop and read, I moved straight to the counter to place my order. There, prominently taped to each cash register, were more of the handmade paper signs: We will no longer accept $50 or $100 bills.

Of course, I had to ask. “Why not?”

“We were getting too many counterfeit bills,” she told me.

Who hasn’t wondered at one time or another how easy it would be to make money? It’s a lot harder than we would think.

In the first stages of the process, highly skilled engravers cut intricate designs into soft steel, known as the master-die. Separate portions of the design…the portrait, the vignette, the ornamentation, and the lettering…are hand-cut. In all, this begins a process of production that includes over 65 separate and distinct steps.

Of course, there’s an easier way. Today, counterfeiting once again is on the rise due to the ease and speed with which large quantities of counterfeit currency can be produced using modern photographic and printing equipment.

While many consider counterfeiting a minor crime, it is actually a crime that can cripple a nation and its economy. Counterfeiting of money is one of the oldest crimes in history. It was a serious problem during the 19th century when banks issued their own currency. At the time of the Civil War, it was estimated that one-third of all currency in circulation was counterfeit.

At that time, there were approximately 1,600 state banks designing and printing their own notes. Each note carried a different design, making it difficult to distinguish the 4,000 varieties of counterfeits from the 7,000 varieties of genuine notes.

The United States Secret Service is charged with investigating each and every counterfeiting case. No matter how large or small, each counterfeiting case carries the serious consequences of prison time and/or fines.

With all of the law enforcement tools at their hands…surveillance, wire taps, computers, and more…the key to detecting a counterfeit bill lies not with the agent’s knowledge about the criminal. He must start by developing a sophisticated knowledge of the real thing.

As the Secret Service website says, you must Know Your Money. What does the real thing look like? Whose picture should be on the bill? Is the green a solid shade, or is it a mixture of cyan and yellow? Does the President’s face stand out from the background, or is it flat and lifeless? Are the serial numbers uniformly spaced and aligned?

In fact, one website dedicated to helping you spot counterfeit currency offers this advice. If you think you have a bad bill, lay it next to a bill you know is genuine. Back and forth, looking from one bill to the next, real, fake…the best tool of detection is knowing the real deal.

This is advice that works for much more than paper money. An intimate knowledge of the real deal can keep you from being defrauded with counterfeit coins, checks, stamps and Beanie Babies. That’s right.

Again, another website, and more advice about separating the real from the fake…shoppers are coached. “Get to know the real deal.” Go to Beanie Baby shows, touch them, feel them, check out the edge of the tags, the points on the stars, the shine of the gold thread…in all…there are 17 ways to determine if you have a counterfeit “Baby.”

So it is with love. Abstinence educators around the country tell the same sad story about our young people. Teens are confused about sex because they are confused about love. The Real Deal…a picture of love that lasts for a lifetime has been ripped from their culture, their movies and their music….and replaced with counterfeits.

Children are learning to embrace the counterfeit. Teens today, working to build their place in a world of smaller broken families and relationships, are building their love based on images flashed at them on the big screen and pounded at them in their music. And every counterfeit picture of love they see is a picture of sex.

If it’s true about money, it’s even more true about love. While many consider counterfeiting love a minor crime, it is actually a crime that can cripple a nation and its people…. An intimate knowledge of the real deal can keep you from being defrauded with the counterfeit.

If it’s true about money, it’s even more true about our kids. A real deal thousand dollar bill is worth a lot. So are our kids.

Post the signs. It’s time to get serious. We will no longer accept counterfeit love.

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January 3, 2005 – Teen Pregnancy: What’s the Problem?

See Archives for more past editorials.

To Know Love When We See Love – Part 2

January 23, 2006

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. [1Cor 13:4-7, NIV]

Jane Jimenez

Each wedding is a day of hope. Hope stands on vows, solemnly made in front of all those we love and hold dear. And vows are secured with a promise…to love, honor and cherish, in good times and bad, in sickness and health, till death we do part.

Love is at the center of this most special day. A wedding album holds a history of promises made in pictures of love and perfection.

Pictures of love in the world abound. Our husband kisses us goodbye in the morning. A child climbs into our lap in the early morning hours. We get a birthday card from an old college friend. And huddled together on the beach, sharing hot chocolate, we watch the sun go down.

If love fails, it’s not for lack of knowing love when we see it.

If love fails, it must be for lack of committing ourselves to making it happen.

Love is patient. Has there been a moment today when someone has offended us by taking too long in the grocery line? Love has failed.

Love is kind. Did we speed up to cut off a car crowding in front of us on the freeway? Love has failed.

Love is not rude. Do we enjoy telling our friend how we chewed out the insurance agent on the phone because he forgot to file our claim? Love has failed.

Love keeps no record of wrongs. Yet, how many reasons can we recite for being mad at Aunt Linda? How many people will we tell? And how long will we hold to our promise to never speak to her again? Love has failed.

If love fails, it fails because we fail. In spite of the people who slow us down, the speeding cars on the freeway, the forgetful insurance agents and the crazy family members we have to suffer…love fails because we fail to love.

The greatest misunderstanding of love in the modern world is our tendency to equate love with warm and cuddly feelings. Perhaps mass marketing has added to the problem. We have come to expect love to look like a Hallmark commercial, complete with soft music and sentimental tears.

But love is more than a pretty picture. And love is more than a feeling.

Love…”is an action, an activity… Love is not a feeling,” wrote M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled. Describing love in detail, Peck taught, “True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.”

Published in 1978, his book sold over six million copies in North America alone and was translated into over 20 languages. The 25^th Anniversary Edition was released in 2003. First described as a “new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth,” it broke with the sentimentality of the 60s. “Love is as love does,” Peck wrote. “Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage.”

The Road Less Traveled certainly tapped into the need of Americans to re-evaluate their values and relationships. But its message was hardly a “new psychology of love.”

But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? [Mat 5:44-46, NIV]

If loving our neighbor is easy, then we haven’t stretched far enough. In truth, love fails because we’re not up to the work of love.

But this is 2006. And if we are dedicated to love, we are dedicated to work. So here it is. A job. An assignment.

Who in your life is impossible to love? And if it’s impossible, the good news…the great news… is that you have the power at hand to change the world, to make the impossible…possible. You are only one decision away from love.

This week. One decision. Just one decision and one act of love to change the world. Are we up to it?

Love is a learned phenomenon….if you don’t like where you’re at in terms of love, you can change it. — Leo Buscaglia

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The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

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January 9, 2006 – To Know Love When We See Love, Part 1

September 12, 2005 – Kiss, Kiss, I Love You

See Archives for more past editorials.

To Know Love When We See Love – Part 1

January 9, 2006

Jane Jimenez

In the winter of 1969, a California professor began an experimental class. “I did not want it to become an encounter group. I was an educator, not a psychotherapist. I wanted this class to be a unique experience in learning. I wanted it to have a definite, yet loose, framework and be of broad interest and import to the student. I wanted it to be related to his immediate experience. Students with whom I was relating were, more than ever, concerned with life, living, sex, growth, responsibility, death, hope, the future. It was obvious that the only subject which encompassed, and was at the core of all these concerns and more, was love.”

Few will dispute Leo Buscaglia’s claim that love is at the core of human concerns. Yet, his Love Class “raised a few eyebrows.” In the Faculty Center, one professor “called love—and anyone who purported to teach it—‘irrelevant!’” He wasn’t alone. “Others asked mockingly and with a wild leer, if the class had a lab requirement….”

Love Class met on Tuesday evenings. Enrollment grew quickly within a year to 100 students of all ages, experiences and sophistication. Buscaglia taught it without salary and on top of his regular teaching load. Students earned no credit.

Their first major lesson about love was learning how little love matters to people who study the things that matter. “Love has really been ignored by the scientists. It’s amazing. My students and I did a study. We went through books in psychology. We went through books in sociology. We went through books in anthropology, and we were hardpressed to find even a reference to the word love.”

Drawing from three years of teaching Love Class, Buscaglia began writing and speaking about love. He lectured often. When asked for the title of his presentation, he was characteristically direct. “Love.”

“Well, you know,” event planners said, “this is a professional meeting, and it may not be understood. What will the press say?” Tactfully and professionally, Buscaglia resolved their problem. How about Affect as a Behavior Modifier? Perfect. Acceptable. Scientific. Everyone was happy.

Love…learning love…Buscaglia never felt comfortable reducing consideration of love to a simple definition. Doing the next best thing, he wrote his 1972 book, LOVE. But in the practical sense, if we are to look for and talk about love, we need something shorter than a book, something easy to think about, something we can carry with us through each day.

Searching for agreement on what love is, there’s no better place to look than to the most quoted passage read at weddings around the country. A profession of love on the most important day for two people, it has spoken to the heart of man across the ages.

Love

¹If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸Love never fails. [1Cor 13:1-8, NIV]

If this is love, we should be able to know it when we see it.

If this is love, and if we know what we see…what does it say about the things we DO see?

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January 23, 2006 – To Know Love When We See Love, Part 2

September 12, 2005 – Kiss, Kiss, I Love You

See Archives for more past editorials.

2006: A Year of Love

Jane Jimenez

January 2, 2006

2006: A Year of LOVE

Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

Sex, sex, everywhere, and not a speck of love.

Entering a new year, taking time to reflect back and hope forward, I am struck by a growing and persistent awareness. After forty years of national focus on developing the perfect sex education programs for our children, we are still missing the key element. Each year, we teach through the sex manual, all 800 pages of it, and ignore the footnote on page 772 that contains the essential truth.

Sex education today revolves around “medically accurate facts” updated hourly with new research findings. We teach kids the long list of sexually transmitted diseases, along with their causes and symptoms. We post failure rates of condoms and devise easy-to-understand lessons to help a twelve-year-old comprehend the meaning of a 14% failure rate for condoms in preventing pregnancies.

We pass laws and increase funding to make sure students get the medical facts. We host conferences where the latest in research findings is relayed to educators. And we write and film new hip-hop videos, dressing up the facts in the latest version of “cool” so that teens might stop, listen and heed.

This is all important work. For many kids this information is reinforcement of their personal commitment to sexual abstinence until marriage, and for other kids it is the catalyst for making major life-saving changes in their sexual behavior, even to the point of returning to sexual abstinence.

But we are teaching our children with only half an answer. We are teaching them to preserve their physical health. Kids are making the connection between physical health and the ability to chase their future goals…education, career, and financial security.

As far as it goes, it is a good education. But it is lacking. And it is lacking the most important message. We know this. But we still fail to seriously address the missing ingredient.

Teri, an Education Director for city-wide sex education programs, states it plainly. The more I’m in this business of sex education, the more I’m convinced it’s not about sex. It’s about relationships. Love. Intimacy.

Dr. Diggs, a physician who can spout the statistical probability of catching any one of the most common twenty-five STDs when using a condom, agrees with Teri. Kids are not looking for sex. They are looking for relationships. They are looking for somebody to whom they can be known and who they can know at the same time. They are not looking for sex.

Sex, sex, everywhere, but who can teach our children about love? It’s the one thing we adults, like our children, long for most in our lives, yet it is one subject that cannot be boiled down into a 30-minute power point presentation.

We can teach love. But we must teach it through example. And that is not so easy in a world now rocked with divorce and family breakup and in a culture tempted by a media profiting from all acts of non-love that we can imagine.

A new year presents itself. New opportunities and new choices. At FROM THE HOME FRONT, we are charting a new course for our columns. It is a path dimly lit, but it is a path we must follow. It goes where our children most want to go, and where we would want them to end up, if we knew how to make it happen.

As writer, I know no more than you, the reader. I am beset behind and beset before with my own human weaknesses, my own frailties, and my own temptations.

But this I know, any goal so desired of mankind, must certainly merit the attention. Your insights, your experiences, your questions are all invited in a weekly consideration of love. At FROM THE HOME FRONT, in 2006, we dedicate ourselves to the consideration of what makes life…and sex…worth having. It is a year devoted to love.

September 12, 2005 – Kiss, Kiss, I Love You

Small Acts of Courage

Jane Jimenez

December 26, 2005

It was last package under the tree…DVDs…the full first year of the hit television series 24. The store clerk warned me. “Once you begin,” he said, “you won’t be able to get away from the television.” He was right.

The past 12 hours have been heart-stopping. Jack’s family has been kidnapped. Janet was hit by a car, saved by hospital emergency workers and then murdered. Torn by conflicting advice from every corner, Palmer, presidential candidate of supreme integrity, has to choose between sending his son to prison or saving an enemy from murder.

This show has it all. Intrigue, love, deception, honor, betrayal, sabotage and chaos. But above all, it has courage. Jack fighting to find his family, Kim pleading with her kidnappers to rescue Janet, Rick digging a grave for his friend while plotting escape from captors, and Teri offering to be the rapist’s victim in place of her own daughter.

Action is intense. Finally, worn out from danger and tension, we manage to turn off the television just as Jack runs after Teri and Kim into the woods, chased by men firing automatic weapons. Will CTU helicopters arrive in time?

Modern drama, amplified by special effects, has given courage a new persona. Back when courage was young, in the old black and white westerns of the 50s, it never had to outlast the last bullet in the six-shooter.

Today, courage must be teamed with the ability to speed down the freeway firing back at your pursuers while decrypting the ransom note on a palm pilot before satellite signals set on a 60-second timer fire an ICBM from Antarctica to obliterate the sold-out World Series crowd at Houston Astros Ballpark precisely at the moment the President of the United States throws out the first pitch.

But that’s movie courage. Real courage is more simple.

The world may indeed explode with one single blast of an ICBM. For a disaster of that magnitude, we need action heroes like Jack and their type of courage.

However, the world is ever more likely to dissolve in the poison accumulated over decades of human indifference to eternal truths that have been discarded in order to pursue our own momentary desires. We can turn the tide on such a disaster. But it will also take courage.

It takes courage to return to truth. Like the mythical sirens who sang to sailors, modern culture lures us with promises that we can have everything we want without a price. By far, the easiest path laid out for us today is the road of sexual permissiveness that has led to unwed teen pregnancies, an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, a breakdown in marriages and destruction of families.

Truths set aside, we have been persuaded that fidelity, honor, reverence, monogamy, and family no longer matter. We must resist the easy path before us. Only courage can help us restore the natural order of human life and dignity.

Declaring truth is an act of courage. Sex for humans is more than the animal sex act that produces a litter of puppies. In a world where promiscuity is excused as “natural” human conduct, we must have the courage to speak the truth.

Restoring truth in our homes is an act of courage. Setting standards for our own behavior as adults, becoming role models for our children, may force us to give up our own bad habits first. If we are to speak the truth, we must live it, too.

Upholding truth in our relationships is an act of courage. Seeking counseling to restore a marriage is a gift to ourselves and to our children, a decision that will challenge us to be better people at the cost of our own personal accountability and sacrificial love.

Standing apart for truth is an act of courage. Being the only parents who object to handing out free condoms at the local high school may set us up as targets for those who teach children that abstaining from sex is unrealistic and unnecessary. We must be willing to stand for truth, even if we are standing alone.

The world is in danger. The script for saving the world is already written in the eternal truths about human love. But it’s not enough to know the truth.

We have the power to save the world…one simple courageous act at a time. Real courage…in real life…is exercised in the simple decisions and actions each of us make during every ordinary day.

We may know the truth. But, courage is required to live the truth.

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December 27, 2004 – New Year’s Resolution: Another Kind of Diet

See Archives for more past editorials.

From the Home Front

DEFENDING THE FAMILY WITH ETERNAL TRUTH

Category Archives: Parenting

Counterfeit Love

To Know Love When We See Love – Part 2

To Know Love When We See Love – Part 1

Love

2006: A Year of Love

Small Acts of Courage