Tag Archives: God

Economics, Education, Foreign Policy, Religion, Terrorism

SEPTEMBER (2001) SONG

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Credit to ABC News, 9-11-2001

Prudence recently located these comments by a well-known small-business owner. They were written shortly after the U. S. began the war in Afghanistan, following 9-11-2001. Statistics are pertinent to those days, but the heartfelt admonitions are timeless. Americans, in particular, should reflect upon them.

I believe, and could argue, that the Constitution is the best possible distillation into secular law of Judeo-Christian ethics. Indeed its very simplicity shows that without a shared moral foundation, mere mortals could not long sustain a government with so few vested powers. It is self government, raising the individual to virtually sovereign heights and it requires both free will and self-restraint: self-governance most profound.

If one believes in God’s role in the evolution of mankind from beast to gentleman or innocent creation to energetic dissembler, one recognizes the great good humor of God in providing us free will. Thou mayest choose from evil. We believe, in the world’s richest larder, that our view of civilization is part of a prophecy or destiny; somehow we have taken over from God on this leg of the relay. Now that the baton of life is ours, we decide if the unborn shall win their freedom to simply be on earth, and we, alone, should decide whether God has particular relevance or is only a super-agency to whom we appeal when, in our judgment, our stumbling arrogance delays some gilded wants.

History flows, more or less, away from savagery toward civilization, if not civility. Most societies see truth as relatively good and lies as relatively bad; charity and sacrifice as relatively good, too, with selfishness and greediness sort of bad. The birth of children is almost universally good, while murder is almost universally bad. A many-branched river, either in a torrent or a trickle, moves toward a more civilized social order where those less able are cared for by others more able. It meanders from backwater to swamp as it seeks a path toward a better human condition, but always, we like to think in our fatted West, toward a free and rewarding system very much like our own.

Those who bridle Islam with terrorism, ride its billion-plus souls into acts more heinous than war, attempting, they claim, to rid the earth of whole peoples whom they judge to be impure. Only by removing us and our open, licentious indecency can they preserve their self-perceived more pious way of life. To some of these, at least, our movies, music and overt sexuality are a terrifying rain of bombs upon their children, women and paternalist hegemony. What do we suggest is their proper defense?

The “West” is their unholiest of infidels, preaching depravity with a global, inescapable power of electronic, and cheap, media that is a new force upon the Earth. To Muslims who can renounce terrorism, but who are consciously pious and committed to the Koran – “deeply religious” we might say – there is no negotiation with the blandishments of Satan’s pit – no co-existence with perceived evil. Our only response, devoid of much imagination, is military.

History and our whole social and economic belief structure allows us no other. The President had to act, must act, did act. He has done the “right thing,” albeit with the wrong weapons, one might conclude. Bin-Laden has succeeded and succeeded again in directing our battle against the quarter of the planet that is Islamic. Our protestations of separating terrorism from Mohammedism serve to strengthen our timely coalitions, but fall upon non-believing ears in most of the Islamic world. The falling bombs are indistinguishable from America, itself. The fine points of selective targeting and diplomacy are lost on the millions who choose not to be like us, who are readily, almost eagerly, led by practiced haters. We sit in judgment of their failures to lead the world in technology, human rights and materialism. Our comforts and prosperity are not the fundament of their aspirations and our discussions of why certain fellow-Muslims must be killed are strictly one-way. We see ourselves as able to spank the errant billion, followed by immediate hugs and comfortings so they will realize we truly love them, but their bad-seed brothers had to go.

Why do they hate us so much? That is the question posed by our deepest thinkers.

“The West” has not only conquered communications, but has ringed the planet with satellites, effectively creating a sea of electronic trash through which Earth spins and rotates, year upon year. Television shows and movies that extol everything from abortion to homosexuality, murder to free sex, flood the airwaves. Books and magazines replete with same, are hawked from Zimbabwe to Mongolia. Not even China can stem the tide. We are angry at the Falwells and Robertsons who deign to point out that God can bless only the good, that His laws are completely Just, that He, Himself exists according to them with absolutely no ability to compartmentalize sinfulness. But, we say, throughout history America has been kind to its vanquished foes. Surely we can all see that this attack on Afghanistan will soon be good for them? God bless America; sing it loud. Drop the bombs of righteousness.

How will we know if the war on terrorism is won? So far we have proven that we can destroy Afghanistan’s tallest buildings as a sort of grandiose tit-for-tat. They are, of course, only a few stories tall. The political support for war, however, depends on both clarity of mission and conclusively good news about its fulfillment. There isn’t going to be much of either. We may not find Bin-Laden very quickly and already proclaim at every juncture that he is only one of many and that catching him is not the only goal. Will we, as in the war on drugs, proclaim the capture or death of some terrorist functionary to be of equal importance? Can we manufacture some interdicted tons of success sufficient to justify the whole war effort? Will Americans buy it? When the next terrorist action occurs will we accept that the need for more war-making is ever more justified? And the next?

And the next?

These questions are are not asked idly. A couple of ounces of powdered anthrax spores have place the nation on edge as almost no other mechanism might do. We readily conceive of fighting fire with fire, as it were, but with what do we fight disease? There is nothing. Cure the sick and worry. Cure the sick and fear.

Imagine a balloon-borne twenty pound tube of this anthrax stuff freely dispersing its load over, say, Chicago. A couple of square miles of city could be powdered and the ensuing panic, growing from media-spread spores of its own, would effectively shut that city down. People would flee, perhaps only to be prevented, possibly(?) from leaving until tested. Some sort of quarantine would be deemed necessary and, most certainly, travel to that entire region would cease. Talk about ripples in the economy. With the populace already so on edge as to run from spilled confetti, so many activities would cease that depression, not recession, would follow.

Not even the U. S. can absorb the costs of abject fear and still prosecute an endless war. The costs of terrorism we have only slightly begun to imagine. The politics of terrorism are also waiting to be unleashed.

The risk is greatest for President Bush. Everyone is backing him, now, in our newfound patriotism, but such high approval ratings are fleeting, in our history. George, the first, had a ninety percent rating eleven months before losing to Bill Clinton. With limited war news to prove his policies are both righteous and right, Bush will quickly be blamed by his enemies when the next big terrorist attack occurs. Every speech made includes an admonishment to prepare for more attacks and some comment about how we are preparing, nationally, for what, everything? But, when the ax falls, it is the President who will be blamed, however unfairly. Careful, methodical thinking and planning could fly out the window, then – and covert operations become overt.

Internationally, should America strike out in political anger rather than simple righteous vengeance, coalitions will fracture into alliances, neutral states and declared enemies. Then what? Terror groups will unleash everything they have; the U. S. will bomb population centers, world trade will slow to a trickle and a dozen opportunities to settle old differences, like Taiwan, Kashmir, Israel and South Korea, will be exercised by virulent enemies who are held in check now by our flexible willingness to oppose them. Like Gulliver, the Lilliputians will tie America down with a thousand tiny battles.

The most dangerous condition in the World is a lack of understanding of what the United States will finally fight for. So long as that point is not reached, we can push and pull and trade and buy a continued flow toward civilization. But when that line is crossed and should enemies in waiting decide that then is the time to fight their own battles, the possibilities of either a huge escalation or retreat into armed isolationism become real. Then the global power centers will shift. Wartime alliance or power vacuum. Either way, the future we have been hazily expecting will be replaced with another that we won’t control. A dark, sheer precipice terminates many of the paths we might take.

I see no one in the Congress who has the wisdom to advise the President better than what he is doing already. Neither do I see a happy ending for most of the right actions he might take. How I wish we, as a nation, had not been spending so much effort to turn our backs on God and His commandments. Perhaps we should have let in some of those aborted in the past thirty years. Now would be a very good time to turn to Him if He is still willing to hear us. With love, Bob Wescott.

Education, Religion

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

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AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

The flow of history is a slog through constant resistance, almost like wading through clingy mud, as it were, with progress measured in excruciatingly slow jumps: dry patches where it is possible to walk briskly a short distance until humankind’s instinctive ability to confuse and confound its direction toward some elevation of living quality or standards.  Seventy years ago we dreamed of sleeker automobiles, wrap-around windshields and ever more powerful engines.  Tens of thousands of patents have been issued for automotive improvements in the interim, but we still crash into and maim or kill one another by ignoring signals or courtesy or conditions.  Fewer and fewer of these “accidents” interfere with trips to church.  There is still trash littering our gutters, highway shoulders and median strips.  Excruciatingly small jumps of progress.

We celebrate great thinkers like Einstein, Rosen, Bohr and Susskind who seem to leap ahead of contemporary understandings, but their genius takes a long, long time to improve people’s lives, although the atom bomb provides the exception to that rule… so to speak.  Many of the “rapid” changes to humanity’s convenience and living standards have derived from weapons development as far back as history has been recorded: even the wheel and domestication of oxen and horses and so forth.  But great theoretical, mathematical thinkers don’t concentrate on creating better appliances or roofing materials; they contemplate time and gravity and quantum mechanics and black holes and such, which are all important, too, despite most people caring very little about their progress.

Now and then there is a Nicola Tesla, a Thomas Edison, an Isaac Newton, a Copernicus, a DaVinci or an Elon Musk, and thank God for them.  The greatest thinker of all, however, is God, it seems Prudent to accept, even though people are certain they can explain why He is not so.  It strikes Prudence, however, that the great theoreticians are edging, bit by bit, toward understanding how God’s creation works – physically, mathematically, honestly.  It is a matter of truth, information, reality and pure intersectionality… oh, and black holes.

The latest thinking tends to accept that the “event horizon” of a so-called black hole is nearly a spiritual place.  It has to do with quantum mechanics and the preservation of information and the “entanglement” principle that predicts that two related particles or wave-packets or even energy strings, will maintain a status of “truth” between them no matter how far apart they may be.  That is, if a quality of one particle varies for whatever reason, its “mate” will exhibit the same variation instantaneously.  This can be proven by observation if the two particles are within range of observation, and is so well established that the principle is accepted at essentially all distances.  What has this to do with the event horizon?

The “event horizon” marks the last place where light or other radiation can escape the effects of a black hole before “falling” into the black hole. Two particles that interact in this most unusual place might separate, one radiating outward as the other falls in past the event horizon.  Current thinking says that the “entanglement” of these two particles, which is to say, the shared truth of these two particles, does not end at the event horizon.  The entanglement principle holds true in both realms.  Variance in the nature / condition of one particle will be true for the other at the same time regardless of distance.  To poor, dense Prudence, this sounds a lot like “As above, so below.”

What is true in Heaven is true on Earth, in so many words.  The Newtonian / Einsteinian descriptions of reality: space, time, gravity, electro-magnetism, atoms and sub-atomic particles, can describe many relationships in the observable Universe, but it is quantum mechanics, quantum physics, that explain how the engine runs, including the spontaneous conversion of energy into matter and vice-versa… and entanglement.  The truth of quantum entanglement pretty much establishes truth as the heart of the engine.  It is also the heart of life, which seems to be everywhere in some form, humans being part of it: love, life, law, truth.

There is something true about how the Universe works and exists as it does.  As scientists struggle to think the way God does, for utter lack of a better name, they keep getting closer to fundamental truths.  As they attempt to observe with ever-greater clarity, how two particles – or FACTS – are entangled in truth, they realize that with better and better observation the particle or packet being observed – or the fact being observed – expands and expands to fill the known Universe, theoretically.  Pretty soon the theoretical master-minds are describing the Universe as holographic: an expression of truth perceived through a filter of observation and, well, meaning.

Is the hologram mere happenstance?  Can we ask, whose hologram is it?  Not a fair question?  Scientists keep sharpening their sense of truth / reality without contemplating the spirituality of truth, but it is lurking everywhere truth is observed, thank God… for utter lack of a better name.

Biden, Culture, Economics, Education, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Politics 2022, Religion, Responsibility

WHERE THE GLOBALISTS STRUCK FIRST

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No need to run for office.

A year from now, or 5 or 10 or 50 years from now, the sacrificial role that Ukraine has played in the direction history flows, will be understood far better than it is today.  The forces of freedom and integrity are fortunate that Ukraine is where the globalists struck first.  Ukrainians… not so much.

This chapter is not written, yet, but it is taking shape.  The average American is poorly informed, generally, but right now, dangerously so.  We don’t understand the Ukraine invasion no matter the details portrayed on our screens: the awful deaths and explosions.  We don’t recognize the interplay with China; we don’t recognize the interplay with Iran; we don’t recognize the “cat’s paw” role of North Korea.  We don’t recognize the far, far leftist swing of the Biden administration.  We don’t recognize the damage already done to America’s standing in the world and the inroads into our sovereignty that Covid-19 fostered.

Yet even with all of that, our greatest failure is not comprehending the expanded, vital and increasingly crucial role of the United States as the last and only impediment to global communism.  You may be shaking your head at the wild conspiracy theories that seem completely im-Prudent, but we’re working only from the statements of very powerful people who are in a position to guide and facilitate the imposition of the “Great Reset” you ought to have heard of by now.  What does that reset consist of?

The number-one component of the globalists’ plan is the end of nationalism.  Yet nationalism accounts for the greatest progress mankind has ever made in virtually every arena from health care to nutrition to family and personal safety.  Donald Trump became president on a platform and promise of “America First,” and it is an ideal that resonates with Americans.  We believe in our nation; we believe in the exceptionalism of our nation’s history, founding and divine purpose.

Barack Obama became president on the premise of a flawed and somewhat illegitimate nation, forever soiled by slavery and racism – soiled in a way that cannot be eradicated – and, specifically, as Obama made clear in foreign speeches, no more exceptional than any other nation.  We elected him out of guilt as much as anything else, as if to say that it was high time we had a “black” President, and that perhaps race relations would become even better if we did so.  Where Trump fought the leftists to secure our borders, Obama had loosened enforcement of immigration laws, the essential definition of nationhood: borders.  The Obama administration saw the rise of “sanctuary” jurisdictions, both cities and states.  The very nature of self-declared “sanctuary” status is the rejection of United States’ national authority over matters of national concern: borders, immigration, citizenship and the myriad matters ancillary to those concerns, not least of which is law enforcement and public safety.

Inherent in the concept of nationhood and of patriotism, itself, is that of abiding by true and just laws.  For citizens of the United States this starts with fealty to the Constitution and to the principles of rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, neither of which documents implies hatred for another country, particularly England, but which declare independence from England’s misapplication of rights normally enjoyed by English citizens, even under a monarchy, however tempered.  The U. S. was founded on the basis of ideas and ideals to which belief in God, or Providence, impel humankind.  Based on the Bible, and particularly the New Testament’s instructions on how individuals should relate to God and to one another, the U. S. Constitution established a framework of civil decency and authority, individual sovereignty and responsibility, and individual private property, within which U. S. citizens could and do perfect themselves.  Neither the founding documents nor the government they spawned take the place of the Bible, or of God or of the individual’s relationship with God.  A system of government like ours requires that individual citizens carry both the burden of freedom and of responsibility, and it works best, if at all, only when individuals have the moral guidance of a well-informed “conscience” such that most governance is from the self.  This means that only when both citizens and legal residents of our nation share essential beliefs in what is legally “right” and “wrong” can justice prevail for everyone.  Only then can civil society – and civilization, itself – succeed and produce progress in living standards and both individual and public safety.

Americans have both the benefits of Freedom and the obligations of defending Freedom and all that is implied under our Constitution and Declaration.  Our civic responsibilities are NOT LIKE those of any other nation.  We are exceptional.  We are not perfect.  Back to nationalism.

President Trump was often accused of being a “nationalist” as though that linked him to NAZISM in some way.  He obviously was not – is not – a leftist, which generates the abject hatreds aimed at him, and he certainly is not a NAZI, as in National Socialist, another stripe of leftism.  The fact that there are white supremacists who have adopted NAZI symbols and gestures does NOT mean that they have anything to do with conservatism, nationalism or “the right.”  To be pro-American nation is not on the left-right spectrum.  To claim that is merely a means by which leftists make it seem as though the right were evil and that, therefore, being “good” is to be some sort of socialist giving out “free” stuff from the government.  Otherwise, one is a “hater.”

Not having recognized nations simplifies the plans of super-rich oligarchs who meet in Davos every year: the WEF, or World Economic Forum.  There are two major elements of their “perfected” future for mankind: Far, far fewer human beings on the earth, and global governance and economics, such that no one will “own” anything and that will enable us to be happy.  It also requires the dissolution of organized religion, since an individual with faith in a higher purpose than survival will not accept simple worldliness.

The Executive Secretary of the W.E.F. is Klaus Schwab.  He is smart, capable and very rich, much like every other member of the Forum.  There are strange people among them, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, every major bank in the world, major industries, major securities trading exchanges, huge international companies of all sorts, particularly in energy and food distribution/production.  Also, unsurprisingly, major pharmaceutical companies partner with the forum, too.  There are heads of state or relatives, but none of the executive or managing Board members are popularly elected.  No one has granted them power: they have created this shadowy “world management system” through self-selection and financial influence.  It is more than Prudent that we grasp what the existence of this “Forum” and its growing bureaucracy means to the residents of Earth.

We have seen in the United States, for all of its magnificent founding, how government types congregate in the “deep state” where their full-time jobs are developing and enforcing tens of thousands of regulations, most of which are unknown even to our elected representatives.  Almost to a person, this invisible “state” believes in its ability to “run” things better than individuals… right down to whether babies should be born or weird gene therapies should be mandated for all humans.  To this group, elections are side-shows.  The “voice of the body politic” is not loud enough to affect their far-more-important-work-than-that-of-any-elected-official’s – representative, senator or president.

We have about 150 years of experience with how inefficient and often criminally so, the process of “federalizing” problems is.  One need consider only health care – a most personal problem – as it becomes increasingly “federal” and politicized… one of the base principles of communism.  The nearly immeasurable waste of resources and the dishonesty connected to the NIH, the CDC and the NIAID agencies, and even the “independent” FDA, should be a lesson to Americans that dumping problems onto federal bureaucrats is the same as foregoing our fundamental rights.  We think we are a “free people,” but our freedoms have been diminished faster through federalized health care than by any other mechanism.  There are hundreds of federal mechanisms.

Our Constitution is under assault almost daily; the morality that enables it to guide our national identity is under assault almost hourly.  The process is made worse as rapidly as our shared beliefs crumble, our shared morality dissipates, our institutions shift leftward and our shared freedoms are politicized.  We have become a nation of rules rather than of law.  Yet our Constitution is still defended in the courts to a great degree, and it still protects individuals to a great degree.  However, as the globalist W.E.F. inserts itself into governance in almost every nation, the erosion of our very nation accelerates.  The Constitution will simply be collateral damage.  We need only observe the elimination of the southern border and the laws that ought to be protecting it, to realize that there are people in our “elected” government who are accelerating the dissolution of our nation.  Nationalists have their irreplaceable place.

The United States of America, then, in its exceptional position and DUTY, is the only significant stumbling block to a global, uber-socialist government.  That anti-nationalist, W.E.F. oligarchy will not be bound by the quaint rights and responsibilities of our famed Constitution.  It will govern more closely to the habits of Communist China.  “You won’t own anything and you’ll be happy,” said Klaus Schwab.  Think about that.

The concept of private property, owning the fruits of one’s labor, having rights of possession even under rental or lease agreements, has been the greatest spur to progress in all of history.  Globalism and anti-nationalism cannot succeed where capitalism – if properly regulated to prevent the effects of the worst of human nature – is allowed to flourish and fuel the dreams of billions of free people.  It is no coincidence that the nature of capitalism has been allowed to create the oligarchy we have, today.  For the success of globalism, the image and understanding of capitalism must be destroyed along with nationalism and individual sovereignty with rights granted by God.  Today’s youth, almost to a majority, view socialism as a superior economic system to our increasingly putrid capitalism.  Thank you, public education and essentially communist universities.

Thank you, also, to our socialist-infiltrated governments of the “United” States.

Can we regroup and re-educate quickly enough to stave off the globalist revolution?  Are there enough Americans left who will refuse to trade freedom for some hollow “safety?”  Has America enough courage left to throw out the snakes, eels, alligators and constrictors who have settled in to “Deep State Swamp,” from whence they are sucking from us our livelihoods and our independence?

Is resurrection possible?  God save America.

Family, Health Care

THe Allison Effect

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We wished Allison Paige Hawkes Godspeed, yesterday.  Pollard’s Funeral Home, Methuen, Massachusetts, U. S. A., planet Earth, Milky Way, was very good to our family and to all who came to commiserate with us and to celebrate the wonderful and wonder-filled life of Allie Hawkes.  She passed on Sunday, the sixth of December, less than a week ago.  It was  just after 8 in the morning.  Her mother held her as she slept.  She stirred enough to struggle to tell Christen that she loved her.  Christen had her hand upon Allie’s heart as she left the painful, cancerous bonds of Earth.  There could be no better way to finish one’s journey.

We compiled our photos, and Allie’s, and all the newspaper articles that Christen had saved.  There were thousands of the former, dozens of the latter, and millions of memories.  Christen, Allie’s dad, Gavin Hawkes, her sister-in-law, Kim Andon (brother Joe Wescott’s wife for 20+ years), Kim’s daughter, Sarah, “Grammie” Gretchen Wescott and I, her “Grampa” Bob, sorted and printed and distilled hundreds of photo’s to display during funeral services.  Allie’s girlfriends created yet another “photo-board.”  We were researching someone known more by others than by us; the breadth and depth of her people-rich life was, in part, news to all of us, even to her most-connected mother, Christen.

During Allie’s brief life, many days, weeks and months were consumed by cancer treatments and effects.  Virtually all of those hours were shared, in person, by the world’s greatest mother.  Christen became Allie’s primary nurse and watchful angel, more than once conveying the instructions of physicians and the applications of potent drugs, more accurately than nurses, themselves, remembered.  Allie and her mother built a bond of mother-daughter love that is rare.  Christen had not a burden, but an opportunity to do more mothering than most mothers have.  We all tried to be involved, but it was truly a matter of learning from Christen what Allie had just gone through or, thankfully, what she had just done.  She was a do-er, most effectively as a creator of friends.

At the funeral home most of the three families gathered to greet the hundreds of friends on whom Allie had left her impact.  She didn’t have any casual friends, it seemed, but hundreds of good ones.  They, and we, all felt a loss when her light faded out.  Indeed, as her Camp Otter, YMCA, Wheelock, Marsh School, Methuen High and, so heartbreakingly, many of her nurses from the Floating Hospital, Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber explained, she was nowhere “just” another student, another friend or another patient.  The “Allison Effect” is large on everyone she knew. 

Ostensibly, funeral preparations included having her cousin, Sarah Wescott, speak about her lifetime friend.  Sarah worked hard to get her words and feelings exactly as she wished to express them.  I, Grampa Bob, was also going to say a few words, and though mine were not written in advance, I too had prepared what I wanted to say.  In fact, my erstwhile comments were much modified as the afternoon of meeting so many of those who also loved Allie Hawkes.  They changed what I knew about my granddaughter.  So, I want to share what I had decided to say Friday evening, though could not.

Good evening and thank you all for sharing your love for Allie Hawkes.  Before she died I thought I knew her pretty well.  You, all, have told me so much more about her; culling the hundreds and hundreds of photos she and others took of the many places she went and events she attended, has made her even more wondrous in my heart and my memories so much richer.

When she was first diagnosed my first reaction was to tell her mother that she would be okay, and I believed it.  For the following 19 years that belief was justified as she beat cancer back again, again and again… until she could not.  My second reaction, as I would walk each morning, was to pray for a miracle essentially every day, and often, twice a day.  I was trying to tell God what the correct miracle for Him to effect was, and exactly when to manifest it.  I realize that a lot of our prayers are like that: giving God and Jesus instructions… as if we knew.

What I should have prayed for is mercy and understanding.

Each time our relatively crude medical tools brought her back to remission my conviction that I was issuing the correct instructions was reinforced.  Every time cancer came back, I would feel that my miracle-instructions were flawed, somehow, or not specific enough, and I would redouble my efforts and word my supplications to be much more specific as to what I wanted God to do.  I hope that what I did helped Allie in some way.  I know that as the end approached she became more of a believer, ready to pass through that awesome door alone, always part of my prayers.

So, I had been praying for a miracle for most of her life rather blindly, it turns out.  But I recognize, now, that the miracle was right here with us, all along.

Governance, Immigration, Responsibility, Trump

(Word)holes, Redux

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Many people worthy of trust and respect are seriously upset about the president’s crudeness.  He reportedly asked why “we” should allow people from various so-called “shithole” countries to immigrate to the United States?  For all of its crudeness, offensiveness and vulgarity, it is a very good question – one we should not be afraid to ask.

Well, the circumstance of the comment and the comment itself are both fairly straightforward, even simple.  But the inherent permutations and nuances are profound, sad, and instructive. This requires some parsing and mapping of the “splatter” that has emanated from the splat of a single word into the miasma of politics, hate, government, and the “American Dream… not to mention social media and hate.  Didn’t I already mention “hate?”  We shouldn’t overlook hate as a driver in modern… umm, modern ahhh, well… modern everything: media, news, broadcasting, ‘friend’ships, dialogue, religion, holidays, commerce, advertising, movies, philosophy and casual rumination.  Facebook, too.  Sad.

So, first observation is that every person who has talked about, proclaimed about or even thought about the description of many countries as “shitholes,” could in a few minutes, list a dozen or two dozen countries that fit the description!  Let’s change the term to “backward countries” and each could list three dozen.  What does it mean to make the identification?

It means, generally, that those countries have truly crappy politics.  Our politics are pretty crappy, too, granted, but, as Churchill observed, democracy is the worst form of government ever tried… except for all the others.  Corollary to that gem is this: The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Even those who could construct a list of “backward” countries probably cannot describe what is “wrong” with their politics – the system of leaders, laws and lies that govern their populations.  Typically, under the blanket of crappy politics, the economics of these countries are also pretty crappy… sorry, “backward.”  The result is extreme stratification, poor education, low skill levels, limited industrialization and little imagination.  Simultaneously, the BELIEFS of their citizens are likely to be very different from those of the majority of ours.

Changing beliefs is the primal tool for the weakening and subjugation of peoples.

One might reply that “America is the melting pot” and go on to predict that “we” will “make” those unfortunate immigrants “better” and therefore more like ourselves.  Seems like hubris.  This attitude sounds magnanimous and sympathetic but it was never true.  If there is an American myth, that’s it.  We have functioned fairly well as a “salad bowl,” but never as a melting pot.  Americans of every origin and kind learned to live and thrive together, yet they were never forced to change who they were, beyond learning and following our constitution and laws.  But there were very distinct differences about when America “worked” and how things are, now, when so many consider our country and institutions to be “broken.”  The key is a grand misunderstanding of what is “The American Dream.”

The real and enduring “American Dream” can be stated only thus: That all kinds of people can come together in FREEDOM, respective of one another, respective of law and reason, free to follow God as each sees fit, and responsible to themselves and others for the consequences of their actions.  This sentence summarizes the U. S. Constitution’s connection to individuals.  Not connection to groups, cliques, whether religious, emotional or political, but to individuals, much the way that Jesus described individual responsibility to the laws of God.  “America” represents the boundless opportunity offered to every individual to perfect him or her self: the pursuit of happiness.  And no less, or more.

This is not how many view the “American Dream” or “America,” itself, today.  Socialist thought perceives control of individuals as the high point of governance, the exact opposite of the teachings of Christ or of the values and purpose behind the founding of the United States.  To accomplish complete control – and different kinds of socialists have tried many ways to do so – it is essential to place people into groups, or “identities” for whom certain laws will apply, whether to control that group or apply to another group or to all others(!) in order to control THEM.  There is no clearer example than brown-skinned people as an over-group, and African-Americans, as the driving sub-group, and descendants of slaves, the most exalted of the “drivers.”  Barring descent from slaves, having marched in Selma or having stood near Martin Luther King, Jr., suffices.

As with the growth of federal welfare programs, the epithet of “racist” has become almost standard within the belief structure of many black or brown-skinned residents of the U. S.  The charge of “racist” works to control the “other group” of essentially all “Whites,” including modifying their language and actions.  This has yielded political power to the modern kind of socialists: American liberals.  This, in part, explains the immediate descent to charges of racism emanating from one participant of the immigration meeting during which the president spoke so crudely.  But, it doesn’t make it true.

Welfare, itself, is a gigantic difference, since the 1960’s, from when earlier waves of immigrants reached our shores.  Those from Ireland, for example, came to take care of themselves and their families, as did Italians, Poles, Portugese, Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Germans, Russians, Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Syrians, Lebanese and Egyptians and many others.  Did they come perfectly?  No.  We didn’t send ships or planes to bring them here more quickly, either.  They were strong and self-selected to endure the sacrifice of leaving everything behind to start anew.  This is no longer so.

Immigrants in recent decades have been encouraged and assisted for purposes of “diversity,” the opposite of e pluribus unum.  Immigrants , today, receive fundamental – and generously comforting – public support, benefits, even cash, yet are not required to meet ANY tests applied to earlier generations.  They need not learn English, they need not become citizens (refugees, asylees) they need not assimilate.  Indeed, they need not even follow laws, often being released for offenses that citizens pay dearly for committing.  One might observe that their beliefs are not those of the “American Dream,” but of taking advantage of our official guilts and sympathies… or of selling drugs, or worse.

We are stretching our capacities to accommodate immigrants, including illegal entrants, even to the point of breaking our own laws, local and federal, to make them comfortable.  Yes, we are an “immigrant” nation, by past definition – most assuredly not by the current one.  I am glad someone with authority and sensibility is asking, “Why should we welcome immigrants from the (backward) countries of the world?”  What we have been doing of late is certainly not in the national interest, which is the primary business of a president, one hopes, although it may fulfill the interests of political partisans and of those who wish America to not exist as we know it.  Ask that question again, Mr. President, louder.

A second observation instructs that the president cannot, ever, trust in the confidence or even honesty of anyone from Congress or the “press” and damned few from the executive branch.  Trump failed to take note of the many lessons of the past year and more, when he posed the question everyone in the room, except Mr. Durbin possibly, a mendacious Democrat of proven, documented unreliability, was thinking and should be thinking: Why should we welcome immigrants who are unlikely to contribute to our economy or standards of living, and whose beliefs are antithetical to the fundaments of the U. S. Constitution or of the “American Dream.”

The ridiculous process of “hating” the president (and others) for so many things of which most of us are also guilty, and so readily accusing him of racism, transphobia, Islamophobia or a dozen other awful constructs, is corrosive and intensely destructive of our “unum” for which millions have bled and died, sacrificed and struggled.  If we are seeking perfection in or from our elected leaders we are fools.  They need, like John Kennedy, only to be pure enough to set a course that is pro-American.  The conversations never disclosed, that the Kennedys had then, or that brother Ted ever had, or by ANY other president, would curl our earlobes.  The profanity and privately voiced prejudices of EVERY president, have been, until recently, kept out of the news because their disclosure would have been so destructively irresponsible.  What we didn’t know didn’t hurt us; had we known all of it we’d have been damaged and history made far different.

News outlets of every kind hope to make history by ripping away confidentiality, no matter the damage.  Their hatreds justify the damage… for shame.  Do we think – do I think – that Trump will become perfect in order to avoid that damage?  Hardly.  When I pray about him it is to cause some intercession that will abridge the worst of his impulsive communication.  It is not that he will disappear, leaving leadership to others.  I have no love for him, but no hatred.  I grasp his attitudes, and even share some, not, I hope, the worst of them.  But then, I try to live on purpose and not in comparison, as does he, I suspect.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.  For all of his flaws I believe Trump is on stage exactly when needed by this country.  I want him to succeed where his direction and intention is right and best – or at least better – than where we were heading prior, God willing.

 

 

Culture

The Religious Question

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Everyone seems to question religious doctrine these days… “everyone” meaning a large majority of Christians in Europe and the United States and Canada.  We think we have become “too smart” to believe that stuff.  That smartness is like an infection, similar to socialism, where our science, technology and ubiquitous governors (bureaucrats) are creating a much nicer world than “God” supposedly ever did.  The internet, gaming and pornography are meeting most of our needs; WalMart, Kohls and fast-food restaurants handle the rest.

And the rigors of marriage are so last Millennium – let the bureaucrats raise the kids.  I, mean, with pre-kindergarten, pre-school, K–12 and perpetual college, who really needs parents anymore?  The love-making part is OK, but even that’s becoming a big hassle; and courtship… forget it.  Hooking up and living together is fun but look at all the divorces.  No, that model doesn’t really work for us anymore.  If that’s the religious model, then let’s pass.  And it’s so expensive!  How much more pleasant driving around is.  Besides, my low-emissions hybrid helps to save the planet.

Oddly enough, Muslims are more serious about religion today than almost ever.  And the most serious expression of their most-serious religion is the destruction of Christianity – and of Christians, themselves, of course.  It’s as if we were in a race with terrorists to prove the unimportance of Christianity, except we’re not winning.  Muslims still want to kill us or convert us.  Jews are just as bad as Christians, in their book, so they are more than happy to kill them, too.  Jews are certainly willing to give up religious seriousness, along with Christians, so why do the Muslims care so much?  It’s a worthy question.

As Muslim terrorism has accelerated over the past 50 years there has been a parallel, mostly anti-Christian movement gaining steam in “the West:” atheism.   And this isn’t some “live and let live” form of God-less non-religion.  No.  It has become virulent… same infection, different strain.  Atheist don’t expend a lot of effort opposing Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism – mostly they target Christianity.  Christmas makes atheists apoplectic, similar to its effect on Muslims.  Why on Earth do self-proclaimed non-believers – we’re talking scarlet-lettered “A” atheists, here, not agnostics or, presumably, not ignorant fools, but serious opponents of Christianity and its slightest mention… why the Hell do they care?

The broad network of atheists concentrate on the awful record of human organizations that operate in the name of doctrines other humans wrote stories about, derived dogma from, and implemented with motivations of personal and institutional power, as well as motivations of financial security.  There are thousands of years of policies and incidents – crimes, in fact – that belie the ostensible teachings of EVERY religious tradition.  Just collating and describing every human error will always yield plenty of material.  Indeed, an entire movement could be, has been, created out of the effort.  But that story is not complete, is it?

Nowhere in the vast network of atheist websites and their aggregation of terrible acts, is there a long list of extraordinary acts of charity by other humans deeply motivated by the overarching story of Christian sacrifice.

If your intention is to catalogue human failings, you will forever be busy.  You may also become blinded to phenomenal beauty, sacrifice, love and greatness.  However, rendering judgments about the existence of “God” based solely upon the much-edited and selected stories in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, or upon the evolving catechisms of churches, will always be somewhat erroneous.

There are but two places to stand in the debate about the truth of God’s existence: He exists or He doesn’t.  The rest of arguments on either side are inevitably biased for each advocate’s personal advantage, comfort, satisfaction or smug superiority.  Barring personal experience with God, Himself, all of our words are opinion, more or less informed.  Hearsay, we might conclude.  And, in Prudence’ view, too fraught with mysteries that may be balanced only with faith.  This in no way denigrates faith.  Faith is the best glue religion provides to cause populations to share codes of morals and conduct.

Prudence tells us that God would not launch our long climb into perfection with a list of mysteries.  It doesn’t make sense that He would hold us to standards we cannot understand – there must be a logical structure to God’s Law, logic that humans can grasp and apply to our social organization.  Further, it seems reasonable to assume, following God’s Law must be good for people and for Life, itself, and, still further, and logically, for God, himself who never, by definition, acts outside of his own “Law,” since He is that Law.

So, for those of us who stand on the side of God’s reality, admittedly thanks to a measure of faith, there must be a value to God for the creation and existence of humans with the free will to choose between His law and earthly evil.  That is, there must be a BENEFIT to God to go to the trouble of creating humans.

Hinduism provides some insight to the logic of God’s existence, through the laws of Karma.  There is a near-universal understanding of what Christianity states as: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” which is to say: “…so MUST ye reap.”  Karma is more complex than that, of course, because of its connection to re-embodiment of the soul.  Western Christianity does its best to suppress the possibility of being truly “born again,” but even the Bible includes references to it.  In one view, the New Testament provides the opportunity to return, through karma, to resume self-perfection, arriving after being “judged and found wanting,” agreeing to accept the rigors of a life that will provide the opportunities to “balance” what is “wanting” – karma.  Only by cleaning up all of our negative acts in whatever lifetime, can we achieve acceptance into “heaven,” if that is our goal.  Whether we call it Nirvana or Heaven, or some other, mankind generally believes in rewards in an afterlife for good living in this life.  Is there a logic to this?

There is if God also benefits.  What if – just consider – that God’s Law that tells mankind to “go forth and multiply,” applies equally to Him.  He is the Law, by definition, so of course it does.  In other words, individual perfection is logical if God is ENHANCED by humans’ choices to adhere to His Law and not succumb to the comforts of evil.  In other, other words, God becomes happier when his “children” do right.

Oh, that’s impossible, you might say.  God is all there is.  But, then, who are we to limit Him… if we are standing on His side, after all?  After all, you get to keep only what you give away!  In those other words, it is only the ACTION of charity – or of following the Law – that stays with your soul.  The other side of that is that an evil action must be balanced in order for your soul to progress into “Heaven.”  It’s very logical.

And, it’s not a mystery.  There is a value and purpose to being “good” and not “evil.”  Part of the value is that society and civilization, itself, holds together through the application of shared morals.  Society functioning, strengthening families and children, educating them and protecting them, is a value.  Only in strong societies do people have the opportunities to worship and, one hopes, to learn greater aspects of the Law.  No mystery there.

Atheists perform an important function.  They continuously expose our flaws, particularly  human failures in the guise of religion.  And well they should.  They may be blind to some things, but they’re searchlight-clear on crucial others.  If they can recognize, as Karma describes, that life is a series of tests and that earth is the testing place, then they might accept that belief in God is a test and that disbelief is also a test.  It really doesn’t serve anyone to attempt to determine whether others are passing or “failing” a test, only whether we, ourselves are passing.  If belief in God generates hatred and death, it is reasonable to think that a test is being failed.  Likewise, if disbelief generates hatred or worse, that is also evidence of a failure to pass.

Every event, whether we deem it good or bad, is an opportunity to choose good or evil.  One can stand in judgment of God if he or she wishes, and say that this or that earthquake, flood or disease is an indictment of God, but what is the value of that except to sow hatred?  If God were to place us all in nurseries so that we would be perpetually comfy and fed, free of disease – free of choices, in effect, what value would humans have?  There would be no growth, no strength, no ability to make ourselves more perfect.

If there were no standards to meet or tests to pass, life would be useless; there’d be no horizon, no mountains to climb, no wonder to fulfill by finding out.  No, you non-believers, that there are tests is not proof there is no God but, rather, that there is.

It is our response to the test that we can take with us, not our comfort.  Still, you should keep on holding up your mirror, reflecting back at us our flaws and errors in God’s name.  The original question, though, remains.  Why do opposing religions, best exemplified by Muslims in opposition to every other belief structure including atheism, become so hateful toward others?  What do they care?  I think the only care great enough is that their chosen enemies may be right.

Culture, Education

GRADUATED CHANGE

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Prudence attended graduation at a well-known college in Boston’s Fenway section recently.  This particular school graduates no chemists, engineers, lawyers or business majors; no biologists, entomologists or astronomers; no materials scientists or agronomists or hydrologists, and no oceanographers.

Their purview is social work, and a healthy dose of “education.”  That is, education B.S. degree-recipients who, I think, they hope will teach the next generation along the lines of ultra-liberals who have been taking over education aggressively for the past 75 years. Fortunately, they sometimes fail and a graduate escapes with her (mostly hers and wannabes, there) internal philosophy intact, her understanding of reality clear, and her intense desire to educate young kids, rather than indoctrinate them, ready to run.  One such is Prudence’s only reason for attending.

Prudence’s eyes were opened, however, to the existence of this and other nests of socialist vipers, who churn out radical “change agents,” as were frequently referenced in the interminable speeches and last-second directives that made not a single reference to God, although the very last instructress managed to say, “… let the Divine …” which was amorphous enough to get through.  That tiny reference was among the last dozen words of last-second directions to the posse of Bachelors and Masters ready to change America.

The otherwise clear, May, day began with breakfast – free food, so to speak, catered in to the College’s Brookline facility.  Being observant was revelationary.  The professors are constantly professing, we noticed.  Tattoos, for example, profess attachment to the odd fascinations running rampant through society where women, sometimes grossly obese versions, have acres of “body art.”  It’s a statement of inclusion… or a test.  After all, if our campus is one of welcoming and inclusion and non-discrimination for students, then it must be for their instructors, too.  See how it works?

There seemed to be a single statement being uttered by a large fraction of both staff and graduates: There is no weirdness on OUR campus – all are welcome.  Prudence has no argument with the “welcom(ing)” part.  In other words, if you are as different and as unusual as you can make yourself, come, attend our college – we’re just as unusual as you!

Every speech underscored the same concepts of challenging the status quo; the difficulty is, today, that the status quo, having grown fairly weird itself, requires ever more strangeness from those who wish to challenge it.  This might explain, in part, the number of strange appearances of students, but it is unnerving to apply the same measure to staff and professors… at least it was to Prudence.

Sexuality is key to both protest and education, it seems.  Prudence needn’t describe sexual appearances and apparent expressions as most are indescribable and likely wide of the target.  But, unusual male-female iterations are more commonplace on college campuses than elsewhere in the world.  Perhaps it’s simply because these are the age groups where “youthful” experimentation is most likely.  Shouldn’t some adults guide these wandering – and wondering – children toward the most appropriate paths of action and belief?

Aren’t we intending to create new adults of our culture and social fabric?  Or is it our purpose to indulge every strange, interruptive feeling and treat it as if it were as valid as reality?  Reality is so restrictive: two genders… huh.  Are we kidding?  I mean, honestly!

Are there any lines a culture shouldn’t cross?  It’s not a trick question.  We used to decry drug use and numerous other forms of debasement.  Why?  Because it makes for a stronger, more nurturing society.

We used to require people to make their own way, no welfare and all the rest.  It inadvertently made for stronger people and children.  Problem free?  Of course not.  Too many fell through the “cracks,” as it were.  Some level of social support was required for simple fairness TO CHILDREN, and civil kindness to the helpless.

We used to require universal education that reinforced moral lessons, some Biblical, without damaging ANYONE, reinforcing shame for bad actions and strengthening the consciences of individuals… and their basic honesty.  These were good, strengthening-of-society kinds of structures.  Phenomenally, we have succumbed not to foreign powers but to our own cleverness, talking ourselves out of our heritage, our very culture, and of shame, itself.

We are so smart.

Murder, for example, now has shades of evil, some not so bad as to require equivalent sanction.  Indeed, abortion-at-will, deemed “murder” by half of the nation, has amorphous codified status and taxation support!  Suicide by drug overdose is a form of murder by drug-pusher, but we, the wealthiest, most sophisticated culture on earth, with more police forces per hectare than any other, has failed steadily for 60 years to clamp down firmly on drug commerce.

Now we are in a race to legalize ever purer and stronger pot despite its risks (there aren’t any, according to pot users) and to arm first responders with Narcan.  We’re smarter than we even realized.

The largest “industry” in the United States is welfare of a thousand titles.  Statists have found that the philosophies of the most rock-ribbed, self-made American stalwarts can be purchased with enough dependency, as recent “conservative” outcries against threats to Medicare makes clear.

The higher education “industry” is nothing if not opportunistic.  With TRILLIONS of dollars flowing from the Federal and state levels, colleges have justified turning out an army of social workers to soak them up.  Here and there people in need are truly helped, but the lion’s share of those dollars goes to the army of concerned, compassionate care-workers and, especially, to the army of administrators who make sure they are not wasting any money.

Somewhere, and here and there, are schools, churches and other institutions that respect and promote the concepts of self-reliance, absolute personal responsibility, honor and sublime integrity.  They must struggle against an onslaught of socialist control of budgets and information.  Is the ultimate success of the ultimate anti-God philosophy certain to overwhelm what made the U. S. great?

That future depends upon the ignorance of a majority of Americans.  How smart did you say we are?