I thought about writing a clear and concise comparison of the candidates on this last blog before the elections, weighing the positive and negative qualities of each, rigorously explaining why one candidate is more deserving. I have listened to the litany of rehearsed and repetitive promises mostly about the eminent but not too charged economic and health care ‘concepts’ of each party. John McCain and Biden, show themselves as expected, as experienced Senators, with a knowledge of domestic and foreign policy, Obama sings ‘One blue sky above us’ in a manner of speaking, and Annie Oakley, er, Sarah Palin, has etched herself forever on the American mind and heart.
Controversies have arisen though that are extremely serious if some of the allegations are true, especially for Obama, as to whether he is or was a natural citizen, or even naturalized, whether he is Islam, or whatever, because it certainly isn’t real Christianity, seeing as how he denounced as ‘impractical’ the Sermon on the Mount and thought the modern response to the Akedah, Abraham and Isaac would be to call Children’s Services. While I am supporting McCain, he isn’t on my list for Pastor, having made a living with Anheuser Busch, and having done a little ‘high rolling’ in his life, yet, of the past six or seven Presidents, its been a tough road to find any who really should teach Sunday School or Mosque daycare, ahem.
The end of McCain’s story, “Faith of My Fathers”, though, point to what is one of the most central qualifications for President, as is also implied in Obama’s bio:
Character.
I have sat today for the thousandth time, trying to edit and write my website, ‘shoaheducation.com’, which has been online for 11 years. Now, lest that seems unrelated to electing a President with character, I will turn for a moment and note what it has been like to be a writer and former college professor in the United States of America over the past 11 years, and why I am so focused on the character and honor, grace and dignity, and heart of the man we elect next. Over the past 11 years, I have experienced a tragic, non-stop erosion of basic Civil Liberties of the sort that even oppressive countries enjoy with an utter disregard for the Law. What has replaced the First Amendment and several others in that time, are ‘fun and games’, and a Machiavellian winner-takes-all attitude toward everything in life, including politics, the Church, publishing, law enforcement, social arenas, schools and education, business and every other pillar of what used to be a livable nation.
If we do not elect the critically right person for the office for the next four years, the atmosphere is already so degenerative, that I expect, along with many creative people, that we could very possibly have to find somewhere else to live. That is no small conjecture.
Look How Far We’ve Come
Now, apart from gun control, abortion, catastrophic illness and social security, which are all important topics, I would like to propose that we really consider for a moment what the world is like out beyond Walmart, Microsoft, and McDonald’s. We live as Ostriches, heads buried in the sand, expecting that American life, with its niceties , where a terrorist attack is a national emergency instead of an everyday occurrence, where wars are no longer fought, we think, is still the home of the free and the brave. Well, at least the brave. I grew up, dear candidates, in a town which was then about 100,000 in population, Orlando, where on Sundays everything shut down, and after church families went for a walk in the one great attraction the city had to offer : Lake Eola with the fountain that changed colors. Really. Before even the swan boats. Long before Disney crawled out of California.
Once Upon a Time
I remember what it was like back then. [I never though I would be old enough to ‘reminisce’ but here goes]: we lived first in a little middle class neighborhood, and my mother stayed home. She cooked, cleaned, sewed, and took care of children because she wanted to. Women worked if they wanted to almost always to supplement income, and very few people I went to school with had divorced parents. It was, well, frowned upon. Most people in our neighborhood went to church on Sundays or synagogue on Friday or Saturday. People knew their neighbors and watched after one another, even the nutcases. Nobody had ‘Neighborhood watch’ because it was implicit: if a family was in trouble, everyone helped. We went to local schools, had the same teachers who stayed for years, so brothers and sisters had the same, we were taught to be honest, not to cheat or steal, we were bought ten commandment bracelets, and our mothers read ‘Good Housekeeping’ and Reader’s Digest, and our fathers went to work at 7:30 to get there at 8 and came home at 5pm exactly on the dot every time. You could set your watch by the events in your day: or the year.
Milk was still delivered to your door in glass gallon jugs, even in the early 60s, there was a milkman, a mailman, many people even not very wealthy had cleaning ladies or ‘ironing ladies’, and a Ford , Chevy or Dodge was parked in the driveway. We were all warned of the ‘bogey men’ who were I learned later, migrant workers in the orange groves, and we had friends over after school and learned to pluck hibiscus blossoms and taste the sweet nectar at the end of the flower, or blow through split grass, or watch clouds and play in refrigerator cartons, put on plays for our parents, read, watch the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday nights, and buy school clothes new in August. I felt safe all the time. Nobody broke in houses in our neighborhood, or raped children, or murdered over drugs, at least hardly ever and if they did, it was headline news.
If you called the Police, they came and they helped you. They were respectful, and so were the people who called. I had never heard of brutal police officers until around 1968 with the Chicago riots. Teen years, kids met after dinner and made makeshift skate boards out of, well, skates and a board, and talked about boys and girls, and some guys around 16 got their driver’s licenses and we all went places like school dances, or later, teen Dems or teen Republicans, partly because of a developing social conscience and partly because your friends were going to go. We felt safe then to, whether it was true or not. And though there were broken hearts, and deaths, and financial woes and the other stuff of life, it really was idyllic to some degree, though we couldn’t wait to get older and be ‘free’.
If Tomorrow Everything Were Gone, I’d Worked for all my Life (apologies to Lee Greenwood)
Now, at 54, I don’t feel safe anywhere anymore. My ‘safe’ career which took 8 years of hard preparation with four degrees, was fraught with the venom and vipers of academics, where a few really worked hard and a whole lot played King of the Hill, ruining others work, stealing it, beating them to grants, positions, accolades etc, in what should have been met with swift legal deterrents but never were. I have since found out that organized crime has left no social stones unturned, and has its hands in Academics, the House of God, K12 Education, Politics, in short every level of society, and now even the Media. Lest one thinks this column is about the culprit of organized Crime, though, it is not: they are only one ‘Special interest’ group which has devoured that idyllic place many of us used to live, even the poor. The poor may not have shopped in the same markets or bought the same items, or always bought new clothes when necessary, but before the massive onslaught of drug trafficking in this country, you could still grow up poor and content. Now, the bad part back then was many persons of color were disenfranchised from the world I report, and no matter how hard they worked, they could not get ahead. Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and the Civil Rights movement came along, and it did make a difference in opportunity—-or did it? Now, people of all colors and races are met with what I shall call ‘The Real Bastards’ [please don’t write and tell me how Christian women should never say ‘bastard’, because it is in the Bible, used by St. Paul. It means ‘men without God as their father’1], the real B—s have basically taken over this nation and virtually ruined it, possible to the point of no return.
Now, no one is safe. No one can merely work very hard, even creatively and get ahead or even pursue a steady course. Instead you have to do it the way the real Bs say and do.
The Real Bastards 1
The real B—s come in all races, shapes and colors. They are the drug kingpins. They are the moronically unqualified in every field who got there by playing games not by skill. They are the town and city councils who sweep the Law under the table. The Senators and Congressmen who love the earmarks and under table gifts and ‘good ole boy’ politics, for whom ‘government in the sunshine’ is a real chuckle, the Police and law enforcement officers who found out they can do anything—anything and hide it for years behind a badge. They are Party officials who only let a ‘certain kind’ of person get ahead: they bosses who bring in those of their own faith or clubs only. without regard for employment law. They are the college professors who feed off others work, the hackers who empty thousands of hours of another’s labor into their own insidious little bins. They are the Big Ministries they should call ‘Big Top’ Ministries, who sell non-existing prayers and healings to the little guy and naive new Christians, offering paperweights, embroidered stockings with ‘Jesus’ written on and Celebrity CDs which help pay for their 20 million dollar jets. They are Black Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Armstrongists, Mormons, some Occultists and other ‘religions’ who are more about political overthrow than about worship. They are the MSW’s, Social Workers, who think that spanking children and homeschooling is jailable abuse, while repeatedly placing children with broken limbs and cigarette burns back in truly abusive households until they are dead.
They are FEDS and Military officials who no longer play by the book because no one else does, and who can blame them, its kill or be killed. They are the heads of Oil Companies who ran Auschwitz {look it up], and got used to the sweet taste of free labor. They are Bible Publishers who threw God’s Word to the Wind and scattered any concept that it was real and true, shattering it into hundreds of translations, paraphrases and rewrites without even the notion of authenticity. They are men and women of foreign ‘mobs’ of all nations, seeping into the US and exhausting resources while we all worry about how much jeans cost at Walmart or Shopko. The real B’s are political ‘systems’ within the Party systems who run candidates liked brand-marketed products, polling for positions instead of standing on integrity [what’s that?] and honor. They are the Nazis [the real ones] and neo-Nazis, White Aryans, the Southern Baptist politicos, the lewd skunks of the Porn industries and the Child predators which are so pervasive now that it is no longer national news when a child is kidnapped because one would need more than one 24 hour channel.
Perversions have grown so rampant and bizarre than when some groups are encountered you cannot even tell the Police and be believed. Did you know that cannibalism and beheadings have increased monumentally in the US? They are the quiet, seemingly unharmful Jesuits and Vatican presence, and lest that sound ‘paranoid’, the amount of property the Vatican owns in the US is rivaled only by that of several Sheiks. They are the bizarrely violent gang members, all of whom wish they were something else and none of whom can get out. They are men who enslave other men and women in everything from the garment to the sex industries. They are certain groups of people from the far reaches of the world brought here to do politicos whatever favor needs be, violent, torturers without conscience. They are the amoral kings of Wall Street and Big Corporations, the Giant Farm industries refusing to let independent farmers prosper. They are the Music Industry giants, (the Publishing industry as well) merchandising music until no one can stand to listen, finding out what they do. They are Walmart executives plundering small business and grocers, outsourcing and paying willing ‘slaves’ $2.00 a day. They are the big names on the Internet, who make and break businesses and careers. They are those of the ‘Hollywood’ brand, film industry giants, who decide how a war or an injustice is portrayed, whether a victim was persecuted or insane, how much porn and violence will be brought mainstream, and what self-destructive acts artists have to perform to get parts and stay in the public eye. They are the Sports Giants and industries, behind the scenes, squelching civil rights and allowing all sorts of violent games to go on in the shadows. They are those dwelling in ‘Casino land’, and those who dwell there know why I will not say more.
Free speech? Free practice of religion? Which candidate will allow me once they are elected to live without threat of assault not from gang members but some local church person who wants my work, or some well known publisher? Can I quote “I am the Way the Truth and the Life and no man comes to the Father but by me” and not be locked up in the Insane Asylums run by still other B–s to silence unpopular opinion? Can I discuss, even discuss the Holocaust and what really happened without placing my life or my children’s lives in danger? Can I choose to live a quiet, single life without being branded a homosexual, or set up by some of the B–s in that group? Can I write a Christian worldview website without law enforcement letting people listen or look in using tax paid equipment? Can I keep my own work, even if I do not look at 54 like Brittany Spears? I am wondering, far beyond the bikes, milk on the porch, friends at the mall, and safe streets of youth, whether or not I can speak freely without becoming an enemy of the State?
The Apostle Paul once asked
Gal 4:16 Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?
Can I still refuse to take a State or Federal Oath and not be seen as a terrorist? [most of them are willing to in order to meet objectives]. Am I or anyone else on the net a ‘wacko from Waco’ if I talk about the Seven Seals, or the Lamb worthy to open them? Can I practice the gifts of the Holy Spirit without being investigated as an alien or mentally ill? [kid you not].
What if I gain some following in what I write or say? Can I live in peace, or will law enforcement laugh and look the other way when I am beat up or humiliated? Can I make it to the end of my life with a whole skull, and no broken bones for doing no more than developing a successful curriculum or writing a very interesting novel? If I stand to lose 11 years and over 20,000 hours of my hard work, and someone with ‘ties’ wants to give my hard work which represents intensive research and background to a moronic child or even a functionally illiterate person, will there be a legal system which works enough that I at least, with a PhD get my day in court before someone breaks into my house and takes away everything that I am and for which I have worked? Is my quality Christian work, in danger of ruin and erasure because I do not wish to have people of different doctrines or faith ‘sit in’ because it is ‘too good’ to be just by one Christian person. Does my life and name have to be ruined or my children endangered just to exercise my First Amendment rights?
If all that I have described above, not including the two or three extant or pending wars, illegal immigration, drugs pouring over the border and the whole thing falling apart, if all the things I have described characterized a 35 year change since I graduated from High School, is there a tomorrow with a United States at all? Is there? This is no soppy maudlin diatribe, but a question everyone refuses to verbalize for fear of what might happen.
Pray Like There’ No Tomorrow
So, Christian, or Reader, or whoever happens upon this blog, between now and next Tuesday, here is the best recourse: Pray like there is no tomorrow. Pray for the right man to win. The right one. Pray for wisdom in making the choice. Pray for the US, that there be a US at the end of the next term. Pray that when the right person enters the office, that he will use all wisdom, and do not fail to pray.
No one man is sufficient to meet what this nation faces right now or in the near future, not even close. There are at least a dozen real possibilities of overthrow, or even infighting among ourselves which could cause events which happen regularly in other nations which we think cannot happen here. That, is fantasyland. Not finally admitting that we are not the America we grew up in. Pray like there’s no tomorrow, and Vote, like there is no tomorrow.
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Reference
1 Hbr 12:8 But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.
The Sedition Act 