HUMANITY HIKER

I can’t imagine greater pain and stress than from losing a loved one younger than you.  In a distant second or third place for causing pain and stress is going under from financial burden.  That is why I think the Sandy Hook School Memorial Scholarship Fund is a good choice for coming to the aid of those most affected by the tragedy in Newtown.

The seed money for the fund was donated by Geno Auriemma, coach of the UConn women’s basketball team.  The purpose is to enable those young people most affected by the Newtown tragedy to be able to go to college eventually without financial worry.  For decades education costs have inflated much faster than median family income, leading us into greater debt all the while.  For the Newtown families that struggle with unimaginable pain at least they might avoid some of the all too common pain much of middle class America now goes through.

Please consider donating now.

I led into this topic yesterday with a reference to the Waynesboro Baptist scam and head con man, Fred Phelps.  Their con is to get money from “damages” when people try to deprive them of the right to free speech; in this case protesting the funerals at Newtown as a sign of a Godless nation.  Once again, this is a scam wielded by a con man, the more we strive to stop them the more we are doing exactly what they want.  Even reacting to it in anger provides them publicity that they seek.  Hatebusters counter solution was to make donations to targets of their protests in their name.  If you feel so compelled, you might want to list Fred Phelps on the Sandy Hook form as a person you are making a joint gift with.

For the upcoming days until Christmas I plan to repost some podcasts from the journey related to Christmas.  For now I want to revisit something of a much different nature from the journey, with recent tragic events reviving the topic.

A recent post on facebook suggested that Waynesboro Baptist was going to protest the funerals and vigils surrounding the Newtown tragedy.  For those who never have heard of this group before you are scratching your heads.  Why on earth would anyone do that?  Waynesboro Baptist has a track record of outlandish protests; as we passed through Kansas we found out the real reason why.

The alleged goal of their protests is intolerance for certain types of people based on their alleged interpretation of God’s calling.  No doubt that description fits some of the participants who have been fooled into following along, but the real motivation for these bizarre protests is a scam by their leader, Fred Phelps.  Intolerance is really a means towards the real goal of making some easy money without having to earn it.  A lawyer from Kansas who was intimately involved in one of the Waynesboro cases explained how the scam worked to us.

You see, if you do something outlandish enough, like stage a protest for a fallen soldier from a Godless nation (um, that would be us), you are going to get people riled up.  They are going to prevent you from your seemingly hateful activity.  But if you orchestrate the protest correctly you have the First Amendment clearly on your side.  You can sue those who would stop you for damages, even overturning their lawsuits in the process.  Of course, the trick is getting people riled up enough to take action against you in order to pull in that easy dough.  All it takes is one charismatic leader, like the head con man Fred Phelps in the case of Waynesboro, to pull the wool over the eyes of his very followers and you can have a posse who actually believes your scam is for real.

I bring this up now because we can take a lesson from Hatebusters, an organization I also learned about during the walk, to counter a proposed protest in Newtown.  First, I must add that I could find no verification of this on the Internet, and that might be because of the intentions of an anonymous group to hack into Waynesboro Baptists computers and “bring them down.”  They may succeed, though if discovered they will unwittingly provide another paycheck of easy money for the scam man when he sues.  The Hatebuster approach turns lemons to lemonade.  You can review that approach here; tomorrow I’ll suggest how to apply it to Newtown.