Thursday, September 28, 2017

NFL whiners more interesting than attack on Christians

(The following is an article from Christian News Alerts)

The NFL players boycotting the national anthem have overshadowed the more disturbing story of a mass shooting at a church on Sunday, which the media doesn’t seem to want to talk about.
According to The Blaze, this is because the mass shooting doesn’t fit the liberal narrative many in the media are trying to promote. NFL protesters opposing Trump is “sexier and more watchable” than a black immigrant from Sudan who killed a white woman and shot at a church full of Christians before he was stopped by a man with a legally owned gun.
Sunday morning, Emanuel Kidega Samson — who immigrated to the US from Sudan — shot and killed Melanie Smith in the parking lot of the Burnette Chapel Church of Christ. He proceeded to enter the church and fire upon those in attendance, injuring seven.
His attack was stopped when Caleb Engle, an usher for the church, attacked Samson. During the struggle, Engle was pistol-whipped but continued struggling with the gunman. Engle managed to escape, and went to his car to retrieve his own gun. He used it to keep Samson — who accidentally shot himself — compliant until police arrived.
This terrible tragedy was largely ignored by the media over the weekend. Instead, the mainstream media spent countless hours covering the supposed heroism of NFL players protesting Trump by disrespecting the national anthem.
Matt Walsh, the author of the article on The Blaze, believes that liberals in the media outlets took a look at the two stories and realized the NFL protests better fit with their narrative and ran with that, burying the mass shooting story.
In Walsh’s words, the church shooting flew under the radar of millions of Americans because it wasn’t deemed important enough. “That’s because a terrorist attack at a church, which was cut short due to the incredible heroism of an usher, is a minor and insignificant event compared to political demonstrations of millionaire football players, according to the media and a large portion of our society.”
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. USA Today reports that Americans were more obsessed with the videos of Miley Cyrus twerking at the Video Music Awards than the hundreds of Syrians gassed to death by their own government. At that time, Americans decided a celebrity making a fool of herself was more important than mass murder.
Yet Americans are not the only ones to blame for fixating more on the NFL controversy than the attack on Christians. The liberal media was responsible for diverting the attention away from the terrible tragedy in Tennessee, and instead toward millionaire football players apparently standing up to the President.
As Walsh states, the media ran with the NFL story because it is “vastly more politically convenient” when it comes to promoting the liberal agenda. A story of a true hero using his Second Amendment rights to keep fellow Christians safe from a madman — who happens to be a Middle Eastern immigrant — does nothing for the liberal narrative.
This bias and cherry picking of pro-leftist stories is a prime example of why many Americans distrust the media.
It also raises the moral and ethical questions regarding why those in the media — whose responsibility it is to inform and notify Americans of important events — decided disrespectful, unpatriotic athletes were more interesting than a mass shooting at a Christian church.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Demands for minimum wage hike put jobs at risk

While many Americans spent Labor Day taking some well-deserved rest from their daily work duties, other workers across the country spent the day demanding an increase in the minimum wage. 

Dubbed “Fight for 15”, the rallies centered on raising the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. In Chicago, for instance, several thousand people rallied against Gov. Bruce Rauner’s recent veto of a bill to raise Illinois’ minimum wage to $15. The state’s minimum wage is currently $8.25 — except in Chicago, where it has been set at $11. 

“Hold the burgers hold the fries … make our wages supersized!” a crowd of fast-food workers chanted in Connecticut as they marched outside a McDonald’s in Hartford. Never mind that McDonald’s has recently raised wages and begun to offer paid vacations for its employees. 

“We hope to get the message that $10.10 an hour [Connecticut’s minimum wage] is not enough and we need more and we deserve more. That and union rights,” said Richard Grimes, who works at a Burger King in Hartford. 

Sounds good on the surface, but it seems that entry-level workers miss the mark in asking for this kind of pay raise. Don’t they realize that they could very well find themselves with lower wages when their hours are cut back because small business employers simply cannot afford them, or worse, their jobs are replaced by robots altogether? 

This is not to knock these types of jobs, but an entry level, fast-food type job was never meant to be a career in and of itself. Like anything, it’s meant as a starting point to build upon and excel, either within the original workplace, or by taking the knowledge learned there and applying it in other areas as a worker grows his professional experience, resulting in higher pay along the way. In other words, a worker should earn higher pay, not be handed it upon demand. 

If an existing job’s pay is not enough to meet financial obligations in the meantime, how about taking on a second job until things improve? I’ve had plenty of experience working a full day in an office and waiting tables at night back in the day. Nobody owes us anything, and demanding employers make things easier for us at the cost of reduced hours or the job itself is not the solution.