Can confirm. I lived in C. Springs in 98-99, and sporadically for years after that, when fate brought me through.

Focus on the Family had its claws DEEP in that town, at every level, and especially in the military families stationed there.

For years, including my own military service, FOTF was my yardstick for crazy, over-the-top evangelical conservatives.

Until I met a particularly memorable Air Force chaplain, who opined that he felt Rev. Dobson didn't go nearly far enough.
And I grew up in Indiana, a hotbed of Christianity-motivated murders and mutilations.

Like, parents cutting off their own kids' hands to keep them from masturbating. That kind of crazy.

But back home it was individuals going off the rails. Not massive, organized megachurches.
The Air Force Academy is a place where people enter as children, are immediately thrust into a deeply traumatic environment, their personalities assaulted and broken down from all sides, then built back up to be leaders.
Anyone going through that experiemce--ANYONE--will reach out for any emotional lifeline they can find.

And a lifeline of unconditional love and salvation sounds mighty good when the rest of your life is people screaming at you for being a worthless failure.
The community gets into people, becomes a habit. A foundation. A rock to stand on when their whole world is blood and chaos. It gives them the strength to do what they could never do alone.

But when the foundation of your personality is poisoned, you have no defense against it.
I was an Army chaplain assistant. In summer/fall of 2000 I was the ONLY U.S. chaplain assistant stationed in the Middle East.

I was flown around, loaned out to every branch, every religion, even allies from other countries. I heard confessions that still keep me awake at night.
And the common thread running through it all was a simple need for acceptance.

People. Flawed, scarred, terrified people, needed to know that somebody loved them, despite everything they'd done.

And if you're the one selling acceptance, you will have no shortage of customers.
Community is a powerful force. Maybe the most powerful in human experience.

If you can sell someone an identity, you can make them do anything.

ANYTHING.

And none of us are immune.

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.