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Peter Wehner with a post that will make you reflect.

A recent interview in Relevant magazine caught my attention. In it, the journalist Peter Hitchens made this observation:

“This is a period of great material wealth and the worships of economic growth and the century of the self, in which religious belief is going to be in trouble. The best metaphor for the state of mind in which we find ourselves is this is the first generation of the human race which doesn’t generally see the stars at night. It has blotted them out with street maps and car headlights and everything else. You simply can’t see the stars in most places where human beings are concentrated, and, in the same way, the triumph of consumerism and growth and the temporary joys of pleasure as a substitute for happiness blotted out the metaphorical stars of religious faith. It’s very hard to expect people who can’t see the stars to examine the significance of the stars or see their beauty.”

This is an insightful and eloquently stated point. In acknowledging that, I need to insert a couple of qualifications, the first of which is that I believe wealth is better than poverty for all the obvious reasons – from mitigating human suffering to creating the conditions to foster human flourishing. (Among many other good things, wealth allows people to participate in uplifting cultural experiences, provides assistance to the needs of their children, supports worthy charities and funds college educations.) And my own situation qualifies me as wealthy, at least relative to most of the rest of the world and to those who have lived throughout history. Let’s just say no one will confuse my lifestyle with that of St. Francis of Assisi. (There is no record of him owning the 13th century equivalent of a plasma TV, at least after his pilgrimage to Rome in his early 20s.)

Still, one can appreciate the truth of what Hitchens is getting at. It’s no secret that often the danger posed to Christians over the millennia is less persecution than worldliness; that it is wealth and power that often undermine spiritual discipline and draw our affections away from the Lord; and that riches can be distractions, averting our gaze from what matters most. …

Salon reviews a book about how the country of Denmark saved its Jews from the German occupiers.

It is “one of the oldest and most sticky humanistic dilemmas,” wrote George Kennan in 1940, referring to the choice between “a limited cooperation with evil in order to alleviate ultimately its consequences” and “an uncompromising, heroic but suicidal fight against it.” Kennan, quoted in Bo Lidegaard’s “Countrymen” (translated from the Danish by Robert Maas) was in Prague, contemplating the Czechs’ response to the Munich agreement, but “his observation,” writes Lidegaard, “is equally true for Denmark during the German occupation.”

We all know that 6 million European Jews died in the Nazis’ campaign of genocide during World War II, but the degree of slaughter was not consistent across borders. Ninety percent of the Jewish population in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Baltics was murdered. In Yugoslavia and Ukraine, it was closer to 60 percent, and in France it was 26 percent. In Denmark, a nation occupied by Germany from the spring of 1940, less than 1 percent of the nation’s Jews were killed by the Nazis. (There’s also a legend that the King of Denmark wore the yellow Star of David himself to protest the label the Nazis forced on Jews, but Denmark’s Jews were never compelled to wear it.)

“Countrymen” is the story of how Denmark’s Jews survived, and one of the more inspiring narratives of the war. Despite occasional rough spots and repetitions, Lidegaard, a diplomat turned newspaper editor, delivers a skillful braiding of two threads. The first is an account of intricate realpolitik among Danish officials, German administrators and the fanatical regime back in Berlin. The second centers on the diaries — published for the first time — of several members of an extended family forced to flee Denmark for Sweden in the autumn of 1943. Lidegaard fleshes out this closer-to-the-ground tale with other first-person stories by and about the many Danish citizens who helped their Jewish countrymen to safety. …

The Atlantic writes on people who use check cashing stores rather than banks.

The alternative financial services industry—check cashers, payday lenders and the like—is growing rapidly, largely among low- and moderate-income people. Industry studies estimate that there were more than $58.3 billion in check-cashing transactions in  2010, up from $45 billion in 1990. Payday lending has grown from $10 billion in 2001 to nearly $30 billion in 2010.

As part of my research as an urban policy professor at The New School, I recently spent four months working weekly, eight-hour shifts as a teller at RiteCheck, a check cashing business in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. I wanted to understand how and why the people who frequent these “alternative” financial institutions use them. Like the majority of my academic colleagues, I believed check cashers, with their per transaction fee structure, and payday lenders, preyed upon the unbanked. But I learned quickly that many RiteCheck customers have made a conscious choice to be unbanked.

Policy makers, consumer advocates and academicians, are troubled by the numbers: 17 million nationwide are unbanked, and 43 million have a bank account but also continue to use alternative financial services providers.

In poor areas like the South Bronx, the statistics are starker still. The South Bronx has only one bank per 20,000 residents. In Manhattan, one bank serves every 3,000 residents. More than half of the residents of Bronx Community Board 1, which includes Mott Haven, have no bank account. Almost three-quarters of Bronx residents have no discretionary income, which often provides the impetus for establishing savings and other commercial bank accounts.

When I arrived at RiteCheck in mid-November, I spent weeks training at the elbow of Cristina, a veteran teller from the Dominican Republic who has worked at RiteCheck for more than ten years. Like the more experienced waitresses I worked with at a greasy spoon during college summers, Cristina often knew what her customers needed before they reached her window. Indeed, the relationships I encountered between tellers and customers at RiteCheck were much more like those I had witnessed as a child at Pulawski Savings and Loan than what I currently experience at the multinational brand name bank I use. …

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The president said we’re not ”some banana republic.” Mark Steyn reacts.

This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”

He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.

Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque. …

Joel Kotkin says there is bipartisan distrust of the government. Is this a glimmer of hope?

Much has been written and spoken about the deep divide between “red” and “blue” America, but the real chasm increasingly is between Washington and the rest of the country. This disconnect may increase as both conservatives and liberals outside the Beltway look with growing disdain upon their “leaders” inside the imperial capital. Indeed, according to Gallup, trust among Americans toward the federal government has sunk to historic lows, regarding both foreign and domestic policy.

The debate over Syria epitomizes this division. For the most part, Washington has been more than willing to entertain another military venture. This includes the Democratic policy establishment. You see notables like Anne Marie Slaughter and the New York Times’ Bill Keller join their onetime rivals among the neoconservative right in railing against resurgent “isolationism” on the Right.

Yet some people, like the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, who pushed for our disaster in Iraq, now insist that turning away from a Syrian involvement would be “disastrous for the nation in very clear ways.”

Yet, out in the country, where people, even those who (like me) supported Iraq initially, know that that war was not worth the price, in blood, treasure or damage to national unity. The citizens are not remotely interested in getting a second shot of neoconservative disaster in Syria. A recent CNN poll found that seven in 10 would oppose attacking Bashar al-Assad’s regime without congressional approval, which about 60 percent think Congress should not give.

This is not a partisan consensus, but an outside-the-Beltway one. Liberals, who might be expected to rally behind their president, have remained deeply divided. At the grass-roots level, both left-wing groups, like Moveon.org, and those on the right, notably Tea Party factions, have opposed entering the Syrian quagmire. One liberal writer, utterly confused by the new alignment, admitted he was looking to the “far-right fringe” with its “abominable” nativist and racist views, to “salvage our Syria policy.” …

Juan Williams of Fox News asks why the administration wants to send poor black kids back to failing schools. Because they’re owned by the teachers’ unions, Juan.  And the teachers unions have no interest in serving the students.

The Obama Justice Department filed a civil rights lawsuit last month to stop Louisiana from giving vouchers to poor students in failing schools. The Justice Department claims that the vouchers disrupt racial balance in schools.

School integration remains important. But the Justice Department’s argument is weak at best.

At the two schools cited in the Justice Department suit there is no evidence that racial diversity has been hurt because of the voucher plan. 

One is a school in which a white majority school lost black students. In the other example, a black majority school lost white students. But in both schools the use of vouchers resulted in less than one percent difference in the racial make-up of the schools.

In addition, 90 percent of the students receiving the vouchers are black students from families with incomes less than 250 percent of the poverty line. The voucher plan is not a return to the days of white flight from public schools.

And there is an even more important issue than school integration at stake: How can the Justice Department justify denying poor black students, the people with the lowest achievement record in U.S. schools, the rare chance to get out of failing schools and go to better schools? More than 80 percent of students in the voucher plan had attended poorly performing schools, rated ‘D’ or ‘F.’ …