Minimalism

About the Book

MINIMALISM: Does God Need More Assistants? is one common man´s attempt to examine the depth and savagery of the U.S.´s current social and economic morality crisis from the perspective of some of the New Right´s passive predestination tenets, about a perfect God who needs no help. A small book, it began as a chapter in a larger work I´d planned about our abused daughter when she was very young. The essay suggests at least we begin thinking about reining in some of the economic freedoms we have now and add not only more social concerns and environmental restrictions to the engines of our capitalism system but also financial regulations as well, all as part of the cure. I wrote the short book (religious but folksy and humorous in places) prior to the economic crash of 2008, and don´t relish the fact that much of the descriptions in the book are now realities for millions more of uprooted and misplaced people around the world. The larger work I hope to someday finish and publish concerns minimalism and immigration along the Rio Grande. In the chapter I started out simply examining how the birth parents of our adopted daughter finally could have abandoned her at age 4 on the dangerous streets of Chihuahua, MX. Social minimalism, the breaking of our personal or communal bondage for the sake of greed, selfishness or self-seeking,was the culprit, I found--e.g., putting your focus on yourself rather than life around you cheapens both. Currently I´m a retired JP as well as the former longtime municipal judge for the City of Presidio, along the Rio Grande in the vast Big Bend country of the Chihuahuan Desert mountains in Far West Texas. Also I spent 20 years writing and editing (and some publishing) in the Sunbelt trenches of Texas daily and weekly newspapers, and gathered quite a number of writing awards for it. We relocated to El Paso in 2010. Presidio, considered by many a Chihuahuan Desert "hellhole," was actually a godsend. Divorced and in bankruptcy in the D-FW region with a failed newspaper chain, sick of social minimalism and jeered at even by friends because of strong editorials and opinion writings, I went into self-exile to the mountainous, hot, desolate ruggedness of this Far West Texas community in 1989. And never looked back on the decision. I found happiness that comes with a wonderful family and professional self-expression.

About the Author

While millions of frightened, throwaway children struggle daily for survival, fat cats get fatter and poor cats get poorer. It’s an age-old problem, sure, and one history and the tides of social events and changes are wrapped around it. The crucial problem now is that it’s indexed possibly to the highest point ever (certainly with the highest world population ever and our ecosystem--our very physical foundation--teetering on collapse). And meanwhile, as religious zealots in both East and West occupy more and more of our time and attention, minimalism as crept in—minimalist involvement in human affairs by the wealthy while they pull down record profits on Wall Street. For the United States, founded on benevolence, how did this happen? Why do we allow it to persist? Can it be corrected? The author is an award-winning, former journalist with an M.A. in Political Science and 20 years of experience writing and editing both daily and weekly newspapers. He believes the answer lies somewhere in tighter control on citizen activities, monitored—in America, no less—by not only people of the cloth but by non-religious representatives as well, all in a loose collusion with the state much as the old county draft boards. For any kind of course correction to occur, first we must admit we owe responsibilities of citizenship to our country. How we arrive at that level of thinking is our great challenge.