In the Hands of an Exacting God

I watch Joe Biden speak – eyes squinting as he tries to remember where he is – and I I see a pathetic old man, but I also see evil. As I look at his menagerie of a cabinet I see the same thing – “Rachel” Levine peering out at the camera from under very masculine brows, Pete Buttigieg staging a bike ride to work every day, John Kerry still seeing climate catastrophe around every corner, and I see lies; I see evil. I listen to yet another babbling report from Fauci and there it is again – that glimpse of the diabolical.  From drag queen story hour to closed schools to caged children at the border we see evil.  We need to administer the antidote to this poison. 

We can no longer respond benignly to the people who have clawed their way to power – power the Constitution rarely allows them, but power they have awarded themselves, never mind the fact that few are capable of bearing the responsibility they’ve grabbed.  We can no longer look at our national predicament and pretend that political solutions will fix this country.  We’re way past the point of purely human problem solving. This is going to take divine intervention, supernatural involvement. The sooner we realize that the better.

The struggle we’re facing now has origins much deeper and darker than mere human malfeasance, though heaven knows there’s plenty of that to go around. The 21st century is a battleground seething with unseen-but- actual demonic activity. I’ve never been much impressed with conspiracy theories – if a conspiracy is big enough to matter, it has to involve a lot of people and eventually someone will mess up, tie a slip knot, and the whole thing will unravel like an old sock. But we’re dealing with something more sinister here – with intelligences that far exceed human brains and with malignity far beyond what we can imagine. 

Some of this activity wears human faces, true. I think of Bill Gates and his “One Wish” push to rid the world of a billion people, to sterilize our young (via vaccines?), and to bring on another ice age.  Just look at the super-human power gathered by Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook, Pichai; there is preternatural evil behind those faces, an evil that wants to erase humanity and its God-given freedom. They show no recognition of their standing as mere creatures of God’s design – they’re Nimrods all, thinking they can build towers to Utopia and we all know how that turns out. 

So what can stop this? There is hope; there is a way, but we’re rarely permitted to say it out loud, which is odd for a country built on the idea of religious freedom.

Several times in the history of America we have been nationally revitalized not by a change in policy or administration, but by a return to our faith in Almighty God, to faith in His Son, to the intensive absorption of His infallible Word. Such a revival took place in the mid-18th century under the leadership of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and it was on the wave of that movement that our forefathers gathered the courage to fight the War for Independence, and it was on the foundation of that surge in Bible knowledge that the formation of our nation occurred. We need such a movement today. 

America was heading that way, I believe, before Covid hit, but way too many pastors just obediently closed up shop (Only 2% of churches stayed open.), set up their cameras and ignored the command to “forsake not the assembling of yourselves together,” (Hebrews 10:25). That has left decimated, demoralized congregations, which goes to my point about demonic “principalities and powers”(Ephesians 6:12) – Covid isn’t just a disease; it’s a weapon. 

Many forces may be aligned against America right now, but we also have many forces stepping up to fill the gaps in our front line. Science, for instance, is wielding a battle axe on the side of good. That sounds surprising given that the left is always worshipping at the feet of “science,” but progressives are really bowing down to science-for-hire, to prostitutional science. I’m talking real, investigative science, and right now all the hard sciences plus history, plus linguistics, plus mathematics are discovering the validity of the Bible. Darwinian macro-evolution is disintegrating before our eyes. Anyone paying attention now finds himself in a world where God is right in front of us – in the beautiful complexity of a single-cell organism, in the delicate balance of natural laws and parameters that make life possible here, in the clear indications that this planet not only suffered a catastrophic, world-wide flood, but is probably only about 6,000 years old. God is right in our faces – whether we like His rules or not.

We’re also beginning to see how badly we need Him. We need the redemption He has provided through Christ. We need the assurance that He has everything under control. We need to know that we aren’t in this alone. We need purpose, direction, hope. We need divine love. 

We can’t get that from BLM or Antifa. We can get only anger and mayhem from that mindset. All the collectivism in history can’t offer what Christ can offer – eternal life, forgiveness, direction, joy.  All the drugs on the planet can’t give us that deep relaxation of soul that knowing the truth can provide. All the sex one can possible conceive of (pardon the pun) can’t bring with it the love that a close connection with the living Christ can produce. The American people are starting to see that. 

Twice in recent days I’ve witnessed a beautiful thing – fathers being dads to their sons. At the park yesterday I watched a tall, athletic, black guy tossing a football with his little boy, and today at the gym I watched a young Hispanic man coaching his son on the weight-lifting machines. I could just feel those boys soaking up the loving attention of their fathers. I’m hoping that, as God so often does, this year of isolation has brought with it some blessings and I hope that one of those blessings is the reconnection of fathers and sons. 

We also have the recourse of approaching God with prayer. God deals with nations as well as with individuals and He hasn’t always done so benevolently. Some nations were so evil that He had to demolish them – look what happened to Egypt, to the Amalekites, to Northern Israel.  He has every reason to be angry with the United States; we’ve turned against Him, but we can be the returning prodigal son who was greeted by his father with open arms. We can drop to our knees and pray daily for the salvation of the greatest, most benevolent, most productive nation ever.  We can pray for individual leaders – for their protection and success. We can pray for the professional and amateur folks who are spreading good thinking online, on TV, on radio. We can pray for all those folks who have been hurt by the evil that has grown so powerful. We can pray for the mending of our educational system, for the untangling of our medical system, for the stability of our economy. 

It is true that history hasn’t been kind to nations and empires that went astray, but the world has never seen a nation like this one, so we can live in hope, and in action, that one day we will be America again. 

The Thing with Feathers

Recently a friend of mine posted an Emily Dickinson poem – the one with the sentence, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches on my soul.”  It’s one of my favorite lines of poetry – “things with feathers” can lift themselves up into the air with grace and confidence and fly off to warmer climes. Ever since January 6th it’s felt like Hope has done just that – flown off. We need to hang onto her. Life without hope isn’t life; it’s dread. 

But there is hope – I keep sweeping the feathers up off the floor – some of it is national hope, but most is divine confidence – God knows what He’s doing. 

I find it heartening on the national level that no one is rallying around our imposter of a president, that he feels the need (or his puppeteers feel the need) to hide behind razor wire and national guardsmen. It’s good to note that rumblings about a stolen election can still be heard, though I doubt anyone will have the spinal steel necessary to face the repercussions if anything were done about it. But we never know.

I am much encouraged to see that so many millions of my fellow Americans are as desperate to get America back as I am. That solidity reminds me that the core of this astounding country is good. No matter how much calumny the left heaps on her for the dark spots on her history, we all know that she has given the world far more than she has taken and has opened wide all doors – she has let the thing with feathers roost here for 400 years – even before we became an independent nation. America is the nation of hope, for wherever there is a chance to pursue one’s own happiness there is optimism and confidence. 

But I am also painfully aware of the apparent hopelessness of our political and social situation. In this chess game America is cornered and in January we all heard the left shout “Check!”  But -- Gavin Newsome and Andrew Cuomo are both on the ropes. Trump is looking good and working hard. Some governors are doing a fabulous job of balancing freedom and safety – Noem, DeSantis for instance.  Lawsuits are flying and in the right direction. And, America is God’s country – He built her, His name is embedded in all her founding documents and God protects His own. 

And it only takes a few peeks into the past to see the hand of God on history, moving the pieces, setting up the board, moving that first pawn. Of course we think of His opening the Red Sea after He decimated Egypt with the plagues. We think of the walls of Jericho, of the Angel of Death wiping out the Assyrian troops surrounding Jerusalem, of the re-forming of the nation of Israel and the miracle of the Six-Day War. But we can also see Him work in gentile history. The combination of the Battle of Stamford Bridge and William’s landing on British soil just three days later, and the arrow that somehow found the little eye-slit of King Harold’s helmet. We think of the weather at Waterloo and at Dunkirk, about the Angels of Mons. 

More pertinent to our current predicament, look at the folks God put into our history 250 years ago – not just the big-name founding fathers, but all the courageous, resourceful, tenacious people, men and women, black and white, who formed this nation without a reasonable hope to be found.  I doubt that the thing with feathers was perched on the souls of the men freezing at Valley Forge, or with Paul Revere the night he watched the British sail into the harbor. And yet, God smiled upon Washington’s soldiers and on the people of Boston who eventually forced the Redcoats back to their ships. 

My point is that history is not just a string of willy-nilly events. It’s well organized because God is omniscient, and omnipotent, and He has a plan and we know that from the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Archeologists’ discoveries of ancient documents at Qumran demonstrate that God knew ahead of time all that would come to pass. The prophet Isaiah wrote, 700 years before the birth of Christ, of the details of His death – long before anyone was being crucified (Isaiah 53).  The Wise Men knew Christ had been born because they had studied the prophecies.  And today we’re looking at the prophecies of things to come and we see the stage being set again.  (I hear the flutter of wings.)

We don’t know what God has in mind for America – she doesn’t appear in these Last Days prophecies – but we know that He is interested in this country and His name is deeply carved into our history. Just look back on Abraham bargaining with God over Sodom – God was willing to save the city if there was one good man there. Of course in that case, there wasn’t, once Lot left, but there are millions of us here who know God, who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who are righteous people.  So we’ll see.

And why Trump? Why just four years before January’s body blow would He insert Trump into our national narrative? Perhaps it’s been part of the stage setting for the Last Days. Trump’s peace treaties in the Middle East have opened up the possibility of rebuilding of the Temple on its original location.  We know that the Israelis have everything ready to construct that building, so it’s just a matter of the Muslims letting go of the Dome of the Rock. Could that be happening? 

If we’re moving toward that “time of Jacob’s trouble” America can’t be the power she has been. Something has to give way so that the Tribulation’s one-world government and religion can happen – a strong America wouldn’t let that come to pass. 

And we need to remember that when the Bible speaks of “hope” the Greek word is elpis. That word does not mean a whimpering “Oh, gee, I hope so…” It means confidence, surety. It means to look forward to some greater day, some better situation, some pending joy. It means waiting for a promise to be fulfilled.

That brings up the “blessed hope.”  This is a large, white bird that perches on the souls of all knowledgeable Christians and spreads its comforting wings over us. It is the Rapture of the church. Paul’s two missives that are the clearest narration of the prophecy (1st Thessalonians 4:16-18 and 1st Corinthians 15:51-53) describe a sudden sounding of a trumpet, a shout, and then all believers are lifted from the earth – “in a twinkling of an eye.” Believers (both already dead and those still alive) are to meet Christ in the atmosphere and then be transported to heaven in brand new bodies. Talk about hope! 

This lovely, glorious, “blessed” hope has been available to all Christians since Jesus first mentioned it to His disciples during the Last Supper. He went to “prepare a place” for his people so that we can, when He comes for us, be with Him, riding out the Tribulation, safe in heaven.  It could happen at any moment. Some douse the hope by pointing out that it hasn’t happened yet and it’s been 2,000 years since it was first mentioned, but au contraire mon frère , it is therefore closer now than it has ever been.  It is the loveliest “thing with feathers that’s perches on my soul.”

The Play’s the Thing

Not long ago we were going off to work or school in the mornings, having coffee with friends, enjoying a beer, eating in our favorite restaurants, taking in a play in the evening. Life was pretty much as it had been. Yes, technology had made life both easier and more complicated, but we were adjusting.  We went on playing our parts, “strutting and fretting” across the stage of our lives and, though we could see that the tension was building and the climax of the play was about to arrive, we didn’t break character; we marched on resolutely into Act 5. 

But the final moments were not just exciting; they were devastating. The backdrop against which we had played our parts for over 250 years came crashing to the floor, as did the stage lights and the very stage itself started to crumble. We’re still out there, trying to keep our footing on a tilting stage, stepping gingerly around the shattered fresnels, rewriting our lines as we speak them so as not to offend our angry audience.  

We all know – don’t we? – that we can’t really run a country of 350,000,000 lives this way. At some point we’ll have to admit that the America that formed the backdrop of our lives is gone. All of our institutions have been ravaged by the change – no relied-upon, usual method of rectifying the tyrannical and unjust behavior of our governments is available to us. 

So we must pull rank to fix this, to repair the stage, and we must do this quickly. But how? First we must remember that we Christians may be Americans by birth, but we are citizens of heaven by our second birth -- we’re just temporary residents here. We will eventually be citizens of Christ’s kingdom; we are already members of the royal family of God. 

Our freedom was given to us by God – and it wasn’t just bestowed upon believers – He gave us all free will. How else could we choose to believe in Christ? It is one of our responsibilities as believers to help preserve that freedom for our fellow Americans who haven’t yet made the decision to believe, but it is also God’s concern as well. “Be still and know that I am God.” Yes – we must remember God and remember that history has been, all along, directed by His perfect power, and that this world’s play has a climax and a fabulous resolution – even if this country does not. 

So, first we remember that we are God’s children, and second we take the responsibility to help our fellow Americans realize the truth, the goodness, the confidence that comes with recognizing Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal, blissful life. That recognition, which is proceeded by a realization of one’s desperate need, pulls us together, pulls us away from evil, pulls us into God’s blessings. 

Thirdly, we need to learn to trust in His watchcare over us. Our backdrop is gone. The stage is collapsing, but our joy, our stability, our productivity does not come from the play; it comes from the Director and the closer we are to Him, the more at ease we are regardless of the circumstances. After all, He built the theater and He can do it again. But we have to know Him, and the only way to do that is to soak up His Word as deeply and as quickly as we can. We have to understand His absolute perfections – His love (which gets all the air time), His perfect goodness, His justice, immutability, and veracity. (He isn’t just the arbiter of truth; He is truth.) We must grasp His omniscience (He knew all this would happen before time began.), His omnipresence, His omnipotence --He has always known, is always here, is always able. He is eternal. He is sovereign – what He says, goes. Period. 

But we have to know that, deep in our souls. We should be memorizing psalms, studying theology, “putting on the whole armor of God.” We are blessed to have available a plethora of amazing Bible teachers – YouTube, for all its perfidy, is filled with them. Thousands of hours of Bible teaching have been recorded and are just waiting for you to check them out. (Contact me for a list.) Interesting, isn’t it, that God has provided that for us right now when we need it so badly. If we fail to “rightly divide the Word of Truth” it won’t be God’s fault. 

But I failed to mention God’s creativity. So fourthly, we must tap into that divine inventiveness to find ways to save this nation. All of the usual methods of redress have been twisted and broken. We can no longer count on our votes carrying any weight. The courts are more interested in being woke than in being constitutional. Our churches have become rock concerts. The American family is in tatters. Our education system has been poisoned. Our police force has been neutered. Our military is being treated like slaves. The time-honored right to assemble has been both abused and curtailed – how can America, a free country, put up prison fencing around the Capitol?!  If we are to hold on to this country and our way of life, we need new ideas, we need to think outside the box. 

We need to localize power, break up mega-corporations, regain control over our schools, stabilize the family, add a few constitutional amendments, clean up our elections, and penalize those who break our laws no matter who they are, but Trump notwithstanding, we can’t do this without God’s active involvement. God, however, is a gentleman and won’t step in unless we want Him to. 

He knows, because He knows everything, who here wants His help, but He also expects us to humble ourselves enough to actually ask for His intervention, so prayer must be our daily, intense activity. And we need to know how to pray effectively – back to His Word. If you can’t learn anything in your local church, study online, read, attend Bible classes. 

It was Christ Himself who declared, “I am the way the truth and the life – no one comes unto the Father except by me.”  Without coming to the Father we won’t survive and that will depend on each and every one of us – no one can force it. No new law will change the nation’s relationship with Almighty God and only a change in that relationship will secure a new theater so our play can go on. 

Of course, those of us who have chosen to learn our eschatology know that God may just choose this for the right time to come get His people and leave the rest behind to endure the machinations of the Anti-Christ and his minions.  Either way time is wasting – the play is almost over. 

Now What?

Now what? Isn’t that what all clear-thinking Americans are asking themselves? Now what? I have spent the last decade writing my own blog and writing for American Thinker hoping to encourage any audience I might have had to do a little more thinking, a little more learning. I still think that’s a valid trip to set out on, but my destination has changed. I’m no longer going to write about social commentary, or about political doings – all of that is over. Our society has officially accepted the Lie, therefore our politics are no longer viable. If there is no truth, there can be no justice, and if there is no justice, there’s no point in government. So. 

Our only opportunity as a people is to reacquaint our selves with the God who made this country great in the first place. Our nation was built to run on the high-octane fuel of connection with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with the Father of Jesus Christ. It can’t run on the watered-down pabulum of the health & wealth gospel or on the very thin gruel of elitist humanism.  We need a huge infusion of biblical thinking, of truth, of backbone, and that only comes from constant contact with the Word of God. 

Even the most cursory expedition into the Bible provides us with a sense of wonder. Science, despite the overwhelming antipathy toward the scientists making these discoveries, is beginning to admit that what we’re now able to observe shows that Darwin’s “simple cell” is anything but simple, that the Grand Canyon was more likely to have been formed quickly in some cataclysmic event than over millions of years of erosion, that the Cambrian layer disproves the gradual development of species because they all seem to have arrived at once. I mean, what if a lot of what we’ve been taught in history and science courses has been hogwash? What if Genesis is an accurate, if astounding, account of human history? What if those Ten Commandments in Exodus really are the best way to run a society? Let’s explore that idea…

Imagine living in a community where most people not only believed in God, but both loved and feared Him, respected His commands, understood that He wants our well-being. 

What if He were, for a lot of us, our highest priority? What if we put doing His will above getting a promotion, or building a bigger house, or being accepted at the country club? That might be nice. God designed each of us with the talents and brains and the drive to make the most of our lives, but we’re not meant to do so without Him. We’re not designed to build our own gods – doing so is empty, unsatisfying, and dangerous. 

What if we were, for the most part, unwilling to swear on God’s name unless we really meant it? What if our word was as sure as His? This “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain” commandment isn’t about expletives; it’s about not using God to further our lies. 

Suppose most of us, with gratitude and peace in our hearts, took a day each week to remind ourselves of God’s grand work of creation, to rest both for ourselves and to honor God’s accomplishments, to celebrate the fact that we have something larger than ourselves to live for. What if most of us understood how broken human beings are and that we need saving. We have at least 2 generations that have been taught to deny the existence of God and to think that they need nothing from Him; we have quite a challenge there. 

I suspect that the failure attend church, and the church’s failure to teach the Word, has resulted in our failure to follow all the other commandments as well. We no longer honor our fathers and our mothers, which ruins our schools, forces us to warehouse our elderly in nursing homes, and produces adults who have no idea how to parent their children. Every society that functions at all functions in direct proportion to the strength of its families and when those families stop fulfilling their duties the whole civilization starts to crumble. 

Case in point: the murder rate in New York City has gone up 70% in the last year, to say nothing of the fact that we have since 1973 killed almost 62 million unborn babies. God specifically told the citizens of fledgling Israel not to commit premeditated murder. (“Ratsach” in the Hebrew doesn’t refer to the act of killing, as in war or self-defense, but to what we would call 1st degree murder.) Yet one look at Chicago’s murder rate demonstrates that, at least in our big cities, we have ceased to take that injunction seriously, even though murder is the most violent and appalling of the verboten acts mentioned on those stone tablets Moses brought down off that burning mountain.  Just think on those millions of lives cut off before they even got started – who would those people have been? What could they have done for America? We’ll never know.

We’ve been told not to steal as well and yet in many of our liberal cities theft is no longer a punishable offence. This commandment is important because private property is important. Without it we have no security, no privacy, no freedom. This injunction applies to government as well, but you’d never know it looking at the tax burden we all carry. We are supposed to be nation that prizes freedom, but if we are not allowed to choose for ourselves what to do with the wealth we build, the wages we earn, there is no freedom. How confusing to realize that we have a government in order to protect our property and yet it is that very government that is stealing so much of it.  

When we are confused – which is most of the time anymore – we are more likely to believe the lie – any lie the media wants to feed us. The importance of truth in a society can’t be emphasized enough. Without truth there is no trust, and without trust nothing can be made, sold, repaired, or resold. The signing of contracts protects us very thinly. Time was when a man’s word was his bond. No more. Lying is now an acceptable way to reach one’s goals and “truth” is a personal, fairytale idea that can be customized at will. If truth is malleable then thought can’t happen because all good thinking is based on facts – the hard, cold ones. I was once told by a leftist with whom I was discussing something that, “facts aren’t important.” Well then, nothing is. 

And we’re not to “bear false witness.”  Well, that’s going to cramp our style – how can Washington function under that injunction? What would the media do? How can we advertise? Hold elections? Isn’t everything that’s amiss in America today traceable back to low esteem we have for truth? Just look at the mess of this last election. 

We’re not to commit adultery – for the sake of family stability, for the sake of truthfulness, for the sake of health, for the sake of happiness. I take “adultery” to mean any kind of sexual malfeasance and we are swimming in that stagnant pond. We can hardly find a TV drama that doesn’t expect us to watch X rated content. We now seem to be knee deep in child porn and sex trafficking. And all that brings us right back to killing babies and worshiping idols. 

Last but not least at all is coveting. Most of our governmental fiasco has been generated by the greed and jealousy of much our population. This whole “social justice” thing is nothing but naked envy. As is “white supremacy” and “Christian nationalism.” These are just phrases that really say, “I want what you have, and even more important, I want you not to have it.” Nothing rots the soul like that kind of bitterness.

I thank God that Jesus came and boiled all this down to two commandments that, with the help and teaching of the Holy Spirit, we can live by:

1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and,

2. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Wouldn’t that be a lovely country to live in? We have to start by living this way ourselves, and we must start urging others to head that direction. We must talk, write, demonstrate, and teach. Those commandments must be present everywhere.  America matters, but she won’t if we don’t fix her and we can’t do that without God’s direction for He provides the sign posts and the power. 

My Hallelujah

I have always found the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s haunting song Hallelujah disturbing and cynical and have often daydreamed of writing new lyrics. I wanted to match the tension between the joyfulness of “hallelujah” and mournfulness of the minor key. It’s a sad melody laced with a determined hope. This may not be the final final version, but pretty close and I’m too eager to share to hold off any longer. So…..

My Hallelujah ---- to be sung to the tune of

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah

I pray to God the time will come

When love will smile and planets hum,
But no one wants to hold the light out for you.

I pray for this --

For love, for good, for saying truth, doing

                           what I should;

My thoughts I tune for answered prayers  

                            sent to Ya.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I know You’re here, You’re everywhere,
But darkness seems to hide your care.

The weight of fear and terror, they can fool ya.

Yet light can shine and hope can blaze
And dawn can come and our sight amaze
And a rising sun can whisper Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I hear Your voice in words You wrote;

They lift me so my soul can float.

They tell me that You loved me ‘fore I knew Ya.
They tell me that this war’s been won;

You’ve a place for me in the faithful sun --

It’s a long way off – I’m waiting, Hallelujah.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I pray and pause to hear your voice;

There’s really not another choice.

I bend my knee and send my pleadings to Ya.

Your love for us mends every flaw 

And with Your grace I stand in awe 

I feel your spirit moving, Hallelujah!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah     

Orcs and Dragons

OK – here we are face-to-face with Christmas and we’re still struggling to stay above the waterline in the flood created by COVID hype and this watershed election. I’ve put up my tree and ordered gifts, but it doesn’t feel all that festive. The chestnuts aren’t roasting – in fact at my age I shouldn’t even risk going out to buy any. So what is it that we’re celebrating? Are we actually commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ? Is there room in this mess for Him? 

Are we even remembering who He is? Are we recalling that He made this world (John 1)and as the second person of the godhead, actually controls history? He holds the universe together; He controls the weather and all the workings of this giant machine called Earth; He decides who comes into this world, where and when; He decides who leaves it, where and when. (It isn’t just happenstance that Ginsberg passed when she did.) He is omniscient and knew in eternity past that we’d be in this muddle today. In all this control, He still allows us to make our own decisions about our lives; He even allows us to accept or reject His free offer of eternal life. His Word has declared what will happen in the future, and right now, watching the news is more and more like watching the movie of a book I’ve read. 

For instance, this “Great Reset,” one-world movement is part of the prophecies for the not-too-distant future – a worldwide empire led by the ultimate evil person, the Anti-Christ. Though we must resist this evil, it is destined to happen regardless. All of the biblical prophecies that could have taken place by now have come to pass, and  in breathtaking detail. A person can check that by reading Isaiah 53 and comparing it to the accounts of Christ’s crucifixion in the Gospels. (Remember that copies of Isaiah were found in the jars at Qumran, which date back to a couple of hundred years before Christ’s birthday.) And here we are -- hurtling toward that final showdown described in Revelation.

I don’t know what part this terrible election and the specter of COVID plays in all this. I think it entirely possible that this nation still enjoys the mercy and grace of God – His name is written all over our most sacred documents, and He always backs His name. It is entirely possible that President Trump will be allowed to lead a revival and renewal of this great country before the final act.  

It is entirely possible that the “blessed hope” of the Rapture of the church will be what undoes this nation. I know that the doctrine of the Rapture seems preposterous to people – even to many who are Christians, but a close look at anything in this world and we have to conclude that the whole universe is preposterous. The more science discovers about the make up of creation – quantum theory, molecular structure, the remarkable complexity of what Darwin mistakenly called “the simple cell,” the migration patterns of birds and butterflies, the function of gravity in the universe – we are astounded at this magical place we call home. If hummingbirds can exist, Christ can come and snatch us (harpazo) off the earth when the time comes.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the war rages on. Not a war of guns and bombs – not yet – but one of “principalities and powers” of “unseen forces in the heavenlies. “ Nastiness is rampant, and lies are so thick a person could choke on them. Sneakiness and power-grabs are no longer frowned upon by a sizable chunk of our population. The Chinese are evidently fully embedded in our government. The Father of Lies is frantically busy; he sees his days are numbered and whatever this world is supposed to accomplish appears to be getting done despite his efforts to steer it in his direction. Those of us paying attention can feel the desperation in the air and it isn’t on the Trump side of things. 

Christmas this year just begs for reality. This year we’re not much interested in Santa and reindeer and presents. We urgently need to remember and concentrate on the birth of the baby who would grow from a blessed child to a perfect man, a man who taught truth in a way no one before Him had done, a man who carried in His person the power to heal the leper, cure the paraplegic, make the blind see, the demon-possessed walk free, the dead live again. His was a birth that drew the Magi from as far away as Babylon. It was a birth that so scared Herod that he ordered the deaths of all baby boys in the area. This baby’s birth was celebrated on the hills of Judea by a phalanx of angels, terrifying some local shepherds.

We think of Jesus as the Sunday school picture – meek and mild, but Jesus was a demanding man – He didn’t tolerate the corruption in His Temple. He didn’t shy away from confrontations with the legalistic Pharisees. He was not flustered by a storm on the Sea of Galilee. He was not afraid of the demons inhabiting the wild man of Gerasene. He spent His ministry without any discernable source of income, traveling by foot on the dusty roads of what is now Israel, depending entirely on the provision of His Father.

He gathered around him both men and women of all walks of life. He didn’t have a elitist cell in His body, even though He was not only a perfect man; He was also God. Not only was He God, but He was not shy about claiming that status. He publically forgave people their sins – who can do that but God? He boldly claimed, “I and my Father are one,” (John 10). He never hesitated to tell the clear, straightforward truth, and He did so even though He knew the Pharisees would kill him for it. The night He was tried in six different unfair, illegal trials, He lived through beatings and scourgings so terrible He was unrecognizable, yet He said nothing. He knew it was His day to die and that was what He had come to do – to die, to take our punishment for our sin. 

The baby whose birth we celebrate this season has nothing to do with red-nosed reindeer or jingling sleigh bells, but rather it is a semi-somber celebration – a recognition of the importance of the Virgin Birth, of a life of perfection, of love, and of ultimate sacrifice. This Christmas I perceive a more realistic mood approaching – we are being denied much of the joy and merriment we associate with the season. But maybe that’s a good thing – maybe we need to look around us and face up to the tangle we’re in and drop to our knees in supplication and reverence. We better be begging for His mercy and guidance for we are lost in an evil wood, a Middle Earth scene filled with orcs and Tolkein’s flying dragons.  That’s not Donner and Blitson up there. That thing in the sky is Smaug and we need our Hero if we’re to rid this world of evil.

Utter Nonsense

I’m at the end of my cooperative, benefit-of-the-doubt tether. I “officially” declare a monstrous national misstep and hereby refuse to believe or accept anything coming out of any anti-Trump, anti-American mouth. That means everyone from the mainstream media (including Fox News), anyone from the Democrat party, anyone who worries about this dratted virus, anyone who thinks he or she can tell me with whom and with how many I can associate, what holidays I can celebrate, and which businesses I can frequent. I have been asked to accept one too many ridiculous things. 

We are being asked to believe that a miniscule speck of protein, just because it has the audacity to set up temporary housekeeping in the human body, can determine whether or not I get to see my children and grandchildren at Thanksgiving. We are supposed to believe that a mask can keep such a critter away from us when we know that it’s too small to be dissuaded by mere cloth. We’re expected to buy into the idea that 6 feet of separation will thwart this shred of RNA. Why not five and half feet? Why not 12 feet? Do we have any clear idea how far this thing can travel? No. And even worse, we’re supposed to accept without question any statistics spouted by any government mouthpiece as if statistics can’t be used to tell damnable lies. Enough. 

Even worse, we’re not to make any connection at all between the timing of this virus’ arrival and this election. Good grief.

Furthermore, we’re expected to believe that a basement-dwelling, muddle-minded plagiarist collected more real votes for president than a wildly popular (note his rallies), highly successful incumbent. We’re to believe that a man who didn’t, nay, couldn’t campaign, could amass more votes than any other presidential candidate before him. Really? A man who has accomplished nothing in almost a half-century of public office? A man we know has enriched himself and his family by selling out America and her interests to enemy countries? We’re supposed to just go home and carry on as if nothing really important has happened? 

We’re evidently supposed be okay with battleground states just arbitrarily stopping the vote count and then later on resuming. What possible, viable excuse can there be for such a procedure? And why do you suppose it happened right when Trump was pulling ahead of the pretender? And why, when the counting resumed, were the votes almost totally for Biden? If that doesn’t sound fishy, I have a bridge to sell.  

We’re supposed to accept that dead people vote, that illegals vote, that some people manage to vote over and over again. But that is pretty small potatoes compared to the Dominion mess. We are, of course, expected to just believe the company itself when it says it’s on the up and up. Well, all righty then. No problem here. 

I gather that we’re also to be just fine with the fact that the Dominion voting hardware was designed in Venezuela for the purpose of controlling election results. We should be just fine with the Canadian ownership of its mother company, Smartmatic, and we should not be so terribly xenophobic as to object to our vote counting being shipped off to Spain and to Germany. In fact, we’re supposed to not even notice that to do so would require Internet access and therefore access to hackers from anywhere. What the heck; it’s just a presidential election, and we should know from the last 4 years that a presidential election doesn’t mean much to the deep state. What’s another president, more or less? And we’re not supposed to be irritated that the left, that has spent the last 4 years yipping about “Russian collusion” when none existed, now, with evidence galore to prove the involvement of at least 4 foreign entities, bats not an eye.  And none of that counts the puppet-strings that connect Biden to China. That’s another flabbergasting outrage – Biden and China, but we’re not supposed to find his massive wealth and his acceptance of foreign money problematic. What?! 

In fact this president-wanna-be will not even be president for more than a few weeks if he were to be inaugurated. We’re all supposed to think that’s just fine. We’re not even supposed to notice that this person the left has put forward is physically and mentally so substandard that it’s doubtful he could handle a part time job at Burger King, let alone a 24/7 uber-stress position like leader of the free world. We’re to concede that his VP will in fact be the president. Nuts to that. She got nowhere in the Democrat primary – why should she be president now?

What’s more, we’re supposed to pay no attention to our common sense. I know that common sense went out of style back in the Clinton years, but a lot of us still practice that dark art. We can compare a candidate who can draw crowds -- happy, thrilled, enthusiastic crowds --of between 10 and 50 thousand people in the midst of a pandemic, and the other can’t get 25 in one place at one time, and we can conclude from that that the first candidate will win. We can look back over presidential history and see the statistical likelihood of a successful incumbent easily winning – especially when the usurper never even attempted to campaign, and especially when said candidate has absolutely no record of accomplishments to run on, so we can deduce that the incumbent is a shoe-in. 

Of course, our common sense also dictates that we recognize three major advantages that the left’s candidate has going for him:

1. 1. The educational system, K-college, has been prepping American children to hate our constitution, our values, our traditions, our goals and accomplishments, and they’ve been doing so for at least 3 generations. That would skew the vote, I’ll admit.

2. 2. The media has been co-opted by the left and has become alarmingly willing to and adept at flat-out lying. And, since journalists are educated in the system mentioned above, when they lie, they lie left, way left.

3. 3. The left has no respect for truth and therefore is very comfortable with cheating their way to victory. They believe their selfish, power-driven ends justify the most despicable means.

So they have that going for them. 

But those of us who can still think know that what we have going for us is superior. We still, in spite of the schools’ best efforts, believe in freedom, in happiness, in success for all, in goodness, and truth, and decency, and God. We still believe in our country and we love it dearly. This is the most important of Donald Trump’s accomplishments: he has made it once again socially acceptable to be openly, enthusiastically, intensely patriotic. I don’t think America is going to give that up easily; it feels too good, too right, too honest. We are Americans and Americans do not put up with such nonsense. 

Living Without Justice

Justice may well be the very first inkling of moral law that blossoms in the human soul. Siblings at a very young age are quick to note discrepancies in parental approbation, quick to recognize any inconsistencies in rewards and punishments, quick to imagine any injustice. As I write this I’m remembering my youngest granddaughter at a mere 18 months of age, tearfully objecting to her sister enjoying a lollypop  -- “Julia lolly!” Her sister had saved hers from the night before; Violet had wolfed hers down, so she had no case to prosecute, but she certainly thought she did; her moral conviction was strong. 

That sense of moral outrage never leaves us; it is as inherent in the human character as is the love of beauty and the need for affection. Governments exist partly to protect us from outside invaders, but more importantly to dole out justice – to punish those who break both natural and cultural laws. That’s why we have police, why we have codified laws, why we have juries, lawyers, and prisons. Our internal compass demands that evil be held accountable.

Justice is the point at which we homo sapiens connect with God. We were created in His image, and God is perfect Justice, but we became twisted and malformed at the Fall, and until we agree to accept God’s arrangement for our forgiveness we are out here in a justice-deficient zone, and no amount of law will create even a reasonable facsimile. 

Law can, however, keep things semi-manageable, if – and this has turned out to be a big “if” – if those impacted by the laws of the land respect that law. If they don’t  -- well, we’re seeing the result and it’s terrifying. 

A little over a month ago, here in southern Oregon, we started seeing weather predictions calling for a strong windstorm in the valley. This was a big deal because we rarely have wind here. By the time we got to Tuesday of that week the wind was ripping up the Bear Creek Greenway at 40 miles an hour.  Simultaneously some individuals (officials have found 8 combustion sites) set fires along the creek and the wind ripped the fires northward over about 15 miles, destroying in its wake over 2,000 residences and most of two small towns. Four people died in the fires that burned over 3,000 acres of this densely populated little valley. One person has so far been arrested, but we know that BLM/Antifa had a presence here; they had set up camp in our most central public park, but the police kicked them out just days before the fires.  This fire – the Almeda Fire – was the result of a lack of respect for law, for life, for property and all of us who live here feel a strong and angry need for justice. Not for revenge – that’s different – but for accountability, for wrong to be set right. 

A drive through the affected areas brings most people to tears; the devastation makes it clear that we’re in a war, we’ve been attacked in a guerilla operation that our justice system doesn’t seem able to handle. Our news agencies don’t appear to be all that interested – we hear news about cleanup operations, but nothing about a search for the arsonists.

That’s just one example. Look now at what’s happening with our political situation. My sense of justice is appalled that Joe Biden is actually close to being elected president. I’ve been angry about him since he plagiarized that speech decades ago (As a classroom teacher plagiarism is especially offensive.), and now we have a smoking gun on his outrageous, treasonous corruption and half the country just shrugs, makes up yet another Russian collusion lie, and goes on rampaging through our cities like they were the ones being wronged.

My sense of justice is also appalled that good people who were only doing the job they were assigned, have been arrested, charged, and convicted of “crimes” that everyone knew they weren’t guilty of. I’m horrified at what’s happened to Michael Flynn, to Carter Page, to Roger Stone, to George Papadopoulos. There is nothing fair about the way they’ve been treated. If it can happen to them, it can happen to any of us; if there is no justice for them, there is no justice for us.

And there’s nothing just about the way our president is being treated. There is nothing fair about the way the “debates” have been set up, nothing fair about the ridiculous accusations made against Trump – all of which have been debunked and yet his detractors still bring up Russia and Ukraine as if those manufactured scandals were real. The media’s consistent malfeasance in its reporting on Trump’s policies, accomplishments, and plans for putting America back together again just leave me slack-jawed. 

At the heart of the idea of justice is truth –absolute truth, above and beyond human frailties. We can’t have justice without truth and this progressive idea that truth is relative, adjustable, and personal makes justice impossible. District attorneys across this country are refusing to prosecute rioters because those attorneys, who are supposed to be on the side of justice, agree with the perpetrators’ twisted view of truth. You would think that justice needs to be served by punishing those who have destroyed lives and businesses and property, but if untruth rules the day, it will rule over “justice” as well. 

If the left, which consistently denies truth, wins in these upcoming elections, we will see the final death throes of both justice and truth. Already, when the Hunter Biden laptop surfaced we witnessed an almost instantaneous denial not only of the truth but of our right to decide for ourselves. The left censored that information so quickly that they couldn’t possibly have taken time to research the allegations themselves. They took no time to analyze signatures, watch videos, look at photos, or read the emails. They just clamped down on the story, locked it in a cage hoping that the story will die just as the Benghazi story slipped quietly away, as Hillary’s email scandal dozed off to nothing, as the Russia hoax has gone unpunished.  And perhaps this Biden mess will also fade, but we’d better hope not.

The moral outrage that’s boiling up all over this country is reaching a flashpoint and whatever this election brings, the lack of truth and justice in our government – the government that’s supposed to be protecting truth and justice – will bring about a conflagration that’s really hard to think about. We must walk a narrow path edged on one side by the Constitution and its limits on government and on the other side by the necessity of cleaning out that government at the local, state and national level. We can’t break the Constitutional limits, but we have to weed out evil that’s sprouted because of the disdain for that Constitution. Our personal, and national, inherent demand for justice must be met, and if it is not, our society is doomed – not just doomed to live without fairness, without protection, without freedom, but a society without those essentials will eventually collapse. 

We really can’t live without justice. Trying to do so makes us crazy – witness the spokespersons for the left; they’re nuts. We can’t even sustain life without justice, for without it there can be no production, no commerce, no society at all. God had good reason for making us with a strong hunger for fairness, for fidelity, for justice that is as close as possible to His own. 

What Has 2020 Taught Us?

This has been quite a year and it shows no signs of letting up. Given my belief that 1. God controls history, and 2. He has a reason for allowing the things He allows, I look for His purpose. Usually, His purpose is tied to our enlightenment, so I’m compelled to take an inventory – what have we learned, what should we have learned, from the pile-up of awfulness we’re experiencing?

In my valley over two thousand homes have burned to the ground, the landscape littered with lonely chimneys standing forlorn amidst the ashes. Neither the Shakespearean theater nor the outdoor Britt Theater opened this summer – and that’s a chunk of our revenue. The wine from this year will no doubt have a smoky taste. This kind of disaster is repeated all over the country. What is this about? 

It doesn’t take long to arrive at a God-is-punishing-us conclusion, and well He may be – our debauchery and corruption certainly deserves a come-upance. But that’s not my point.

My point is that we should be much wiser than we were on this last New Years. I hope that we’ve learned at least some of the following:

The first lesson was an embarrassing one – we learned that of all things, toilet paper was at the top of our list, our foremost requirement for deliverance. We didn’t rush to buy Bibles, or to go to church to pray. Instead, we stood in long lines at Costco to purchase  a Charmin facsimile. That should have told us that something was really wrong with our thinking. 

The second lesson is about fear. We’ve had a belly full. Fear is not, should not, be a constant state. Our bodies are built for surges of adrenalin, but not for an everyday, chronic condition. Some of us tossed it off preferring a state of belligerence to a state of anxiety, but many of us continue in paralyzing fear. Some of us live in financial fear, in parental fear – how are parents supposed to work from and home school their children? -- in fear of more fear. Way too many of us gave up and committed suicide. Then the riots started. Then the fires, the hurricanes, the election. I do hope that with all this practice we’ve learned courage, and that we’ve learned we must depend on God and His infinite mercy. We cannot fight this on our own. 

We also should have developed an antipathy towards the media. They have been culpable in spreading and stoking these fears. They have twisted statistics, adulterated the language, slung clueless accusations, and propped up asinine excuses for the violence. “It was a mostly peaceful protest,” he said with buildings burning behind him. 

Next, I certainly hope that most of us have realized that we live in an economy that is so interconnected, so interdependent, that we can’t safely just shut it down and we certainly can’t shut down just part of it. We are all absolutely essential. If schools shut down, parents can’t go to work. If parents don’t go to work, they don’t earn money to buy things, and stores don’t have customers, so they don’t buy from the suppliers, who end up having to slaughter their herds and plow under their fields. Everything is dependent on every other thing and if you pull one string, the whole fabric starts unwinding. We need each other-- in full capacity, and at our best.

And, we can no longer turn a blind eye to ideas being taught in our schools. For one thing, we know what school curricula contains because we got to peek into those classes when our kids were “distance learning,” and because we got to see first hand the product these schools put out when BLM and Antifa began torching cities. Who are these people? Where did they get the idea that America is the world’s boogey-man? How much did we spend to teach our children this hogwash? I hope we’ve learned that turning our children over to the government for their education is not a good idea. Maybe we’ll no longer want to spend $70K a year for a college education since we’ve discovered that our kids have majored in throwing Molotov cocktails and shouting obscenities. Education has consequences.

I also hope we’ve learned to question “the experts.”  Up until COVID we cow-towed obediently to anyone with any kind of fancy degree, anyone with an important-sounding government position, anyone wearing a lab coat. I suspect that after nearly 7 months of Fauci and Birx and their contradictory attempts to sterilize the world, that we take to questioning the so-called experts a little more carefully. We should have learned that from the climate change nonsense, but it evidently took a second dose for the lesson to sink in. What is the lesson? – When an “expert” opinion contradicts common sense, common sense has more clout. Let’s not forget that. 

Then, we should have learned that careful, precise thinking is far more valuable than all the emotion in the world. We cannot make public policy according to how angry or guilty or scared we are. We need to make policy according to the mainstream culture, not according to the outliers. We can make exceptions for the fringes, who may be outliers through no fault of their own, but we cannot risk building the culture around the exceptions. If there are occasional police who are cruel or unfair or corrupt, then we should get rid of them; such people who conduct themselves in such ways, have no business policing the rest of us. But you don’t then vilify all cops, fire all police, and then send in batteries of social workers – a profession that, if truly successful would have eradicated criminal behavior before it even started. 

Next, I hope that we’ve learned that we can’t just quit living. I hope the irony of trying to save our lives by shrinking our lives to mere existence is not lost on us. I hope we’ve learned how precious freedom is – for a free people to be suddenly told to stay home, to always wear masks, to try sterilizing everything we touch should have been a major alarm bell to us all. What? We can’t go to church? We can’t have weddings? We can’t have funerals? We can’t sing??  Government control of everything is NOT what any of us want to live with. It’s counter to human nature, stifling creativity and accomplishment. We were, I believe, put on this earth to choose, and government can’t take that away from us without provocation. But they have and we can’t let that happen again. 

Lastly, I hope against hope that we have learned that we are all Americans first, and that Americans pay attention to God’s Word, to His mandates for how we should live our lives and that straying too far from that is very costly indeed. We’ve turned our backs on God’s instructions so long that we’ve bred a couple of generations filled with people who have no core conception of right and wrong, no compassion, no sense of divine purpose or guidance and they run amuck because they lack good guidance and good family support. We’ve made a form of nitroglycerin and the lockdowns served as a good shakeup, and this generation exploded. That also should not happen again.

I don’t know that we’ve learned these lessons, but I pray we have. The election will tell. Meanwhile, I’m stocking up on toilet paper. 

What's Real?

 I’ve been indulging in a little fantasy these last few days. Here’s what I’m imagining: Picture a virus invading the country, so we shut down borders, but since we don’t really know right away what the virus is likely to do, we realize that we can’t yet know what to do about it. So, the health department makes suggestions about maintaining a healthy immune system, about sanitation – hand-washing, sterilizing public surfaces, avoiding large gatherings. And we wait. We watch children’s health, and take extra care with the elderly because historically we know those populations are vulnerable. We use whatever medications we have reason to believe will work. And we wait. Just wait. As we learn more – like the fact that children are not susceptible – we act on the new information without any political concerns. 

In my fantasy I picture us as Americans, and therefore more resilient and inventive than the average bear, going about our business, taking some extra care, but bravely resisting hysteria and carrying on. Now, my fantasy includes a media that just keeps us posted, but doesn’t work at scaring us. In my scenario everyone still has his job, schools stay open, and we only quarantine those who are actually ill.

There would still be people who die, but since we wouldn’t house them with our elderly, few would perish. Can you just imagine how much better we’d all feel? Our stress levels would be only slightly above normal.  We’d all be healthier – our gyms would still be open, we’d be outside moving about more, we’d be distracted by our daily activities and our lives would not revolve around disease. 

Take this another step further. In Minneapolis one night a black man resists arrest and dies in the scuffle. In this fairytale world I’m imagining the media would have published the police camera footage right away – the entire videos, not just the inflammatory shots. George Floyd’s rap sheet would be part of the story right away. Isn’t it amazing how healthy a dose of truth can be?  This event would have gone by in a blip. Nothing else would have happened. George Floyd would still be dead, but the amount of fentanyl in his blood would have killed him, even if the police had not arrested him.

My point is that none of the crises we’ve suffered this year have been true disasters; they’ve been, at one level or another, manufactured. Here’s the formula: 

1 case of a new, Chinese virus (of dubious origin)

+ massive, contradictory, confusing government involvement 

+ feverish, misinformed rhetoric from the media

+ impending election

— common sense 

= maximum stress. 

Enter catalyst in the form of the George Floyd arrest 

+ the COVID lockdown stress

+ 2 generations of heavily propagandized (and bored, and unemployed) young people

+ the long-term planning of BLM and Antifa  (George Soros)

+ more media hysteria

+ widespread TDS and its attendant hyperbole

+ impending election

= destruction of law and order and even more increased stress.

We all know that some stress is a good thing, but the level we’re experiencing right now is not helpful at all – other than to make us all aware of the danger our nation is in and how far from God we’ve come. I keep thinking this is winding down, but that may be more of a fantasy than a reality. 

Example narrative: Last Thursday a friend came over to play pool with my husband. The next day he called to tell us that he’d had a COVID19 test and that he was positive. Not good. So, this week we got tested and the next day we found out we were negative. Good. Right? Not really. Two days later we got a call from – we think the health department, but the woman didn’t identify herself – telling us that the test was only good for 48 hours, that we had to consider ourselves infected for 14 days, that we should sleep in separate rooms, wear masks when we’re in the same room, etc. If all that was so important then why didn’t our doctor’s office tell us any of that? And if the test was only good for 2 days, why bother? If the test often produces false positives, or some people test positive who are neither sick nor likely to pass it on then what in the world is the test for? It evidently means nothing statistically or personally. 

This is just one of the many ramifications of the confusion that surrounds this disease. Yes/no. Up/down. Dare I say,”black/white? You can drive people nuts by abruptly and frequently changing the imposed parameters, keeping them confused and unsure of what is real. You can intensify that effect by isolating people, lying to them, inducing fear, controlling the information they receive, making them feel dependent, and shaming those who try to think for themselves.* Any of that sound familiar? It should. 

So. Are we going to take this lying down? No. We’re Americans. We think and we fight and we can do this fighting in the privacy of our own thoughts by holding those thoughts accountable. How?

1. By making sure the thoughts we entertain are our own. Are we saying, “Trump’s an a—hole,” because the evidence is plentiful and we can cite the sources? Or have we just heard that said so often that that’s how we see him?

2. By consciously separating our emotions from our thinking. A thought has a rational basis -- emotional reactions do not. Thoughts fit together in non-contradictory ways – emotions are all over the place. Fear is an emotion that, when nursed and allowed to boss us around, can be as deadly as any virus, especially this virus, which has an over 99% recovery rate. 

3. By talking to people. I read the other day that 67% of Americans are afraid to express their political opinions.  Of course we are – people are getting fired, expelled, and ostracized for doing so.  But here’s where we have to suck it up and do so anyway – calmly (see #2) and kindly, but forcefully. Our president does this, and yes, the left hates him for it, but we all know he tells the truth and truth is the only thing that will hold our minds together.  If we can’t tell the truth, we can’t avoid lying, and if we must continually lie, we can’t stay sane. 

4. Speaking of truth, we hold onto our thoughts by connecting them always to our Creator, who is the author of truth. As all this evil swirls around us, we must remember that His goodness will prevail; it always does. If we can’t figure out what the truth is, we can know that He knows and is in control. 

5. We can also counter the untruths by being more studious. We must learn history – our angry young people think slavery was an American invention and that only blacks were enslaved – dangerous misunderstandings. But we can fix this by learning civics – knowing our constitution; by learning science and knowing how off Darwinian theory really is; by learning what the Bible actually says, and not just what some false prophet claims it says. 

A free society is a prosperous society, and it is also a responsible society. It takes its freedom seriously and recognizes from whence it comes and why it is so important. A free society is strong and determined to keep its freedom. That is what’s real and had America been operating on these ideas this year, my fantasy could have been reality. 

*https://www.learning-mind.com/brainwashing-techniques/

*https://lifehacker.com/brainwashing-techniques-you-encounter-every-day-and-ho-5886571  

*https://exploringyourmind.com/brainwashing-coercive-persuasion-techniques/

Sooner or Later -- A Warning

 It’s taken a while – six decades that I can actually remember – for this society to dissolve, but our freedoms are now circling the drain and we may not be able to stop the vortex without major, horrifying turbulence. Those of us who have been on this earth for a while remember what actual freedom felt like, and how a clear hope for the future enlivened us. But the younger generations really haven’t had that experience. 

These young people have grown up in a culture that is becoming more anti-freedom, anti-America year by year, and we haven’t made it clear what exactly is lost when we lose liberty. The word sounds like one of those abstract, pie-in-the-sky, schoolish ideas that really have no meaning. So let’s take an enlightening look at what we lose when we lose freedom, for it is one side of many precious coins and if you lose one side of a coin, you lose the other. We should have that clearly in mind, because if the Democrats win in November, our freedoms will be gone and it will happen fast. We have already lost many of our liberties in just the last 4 months – if the left grabs all of the power this is what we’ll lose:

We’ll lose goodness. Only a free people can be a truly good people. For goodness to prevail we must be able to know God, to learn love, to be free to become all that God designed us to be. If we are slaves, we cannot control the evil we may be forced to do.  If we are slaves we will have no recourse.  We are already so far gone that we are wallowing in evil. The Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislane Maxwell case is shocking enough, but it involves dozens of powerful, influential people, people we elected! Yet we doubt there will be any insistence on justice, we doubt Maxwell will live long enough to bring retribution to all the abused girls. For we all know this mess is just a ripple in the pond. We are oozing evil -- a sure sign that many of us are no longer good and only good people can be free. 

We’ll lose justice. Nothing will be fair -- not even close. Justice is the flip side of goodness and if judges and juries can no longer be good, they can’t possibly be fair. We will see evil go unpunished – we’re already seeing that. We can’t understand why the Clintons and the Obamas aren’t already in jail. We will also see the good punished. Note the couple in California who have been charged with a hate crime for trying to undo some of the vandalism committed by BLM during the riots. We are seeing people ransacking our major cities because a cop in Minneapolis treated a resisting man too severely.  (I don’t mention the respective race of these two men because with justice it shouldn’t matter.) Yet race was the trigger that set greed and anger and evil loose and killed 19 people – how is that justice for the death of any man? 

We are losing the law already. It doesn’t seem like law should be an important component of liberty, but without it we have no order, no clarity, no bottom line. And without those, we aren’t free to do anything but protect ourselves. This year we have had a good taste of what that will be like – those guilty of terrible wrongs suffer no consequences, so they are obviously living under a different set of rules than the rest of us. Already we find we no longer know what the rules will be or who has the right to declare them. The advent of the virus has demonstrated for us how frustrating and infuriating that can be. Human nature requires restriction, but so does the restriction itself. Without it we lose civilization.

When we lose law, we lose security and violence envelops us. BLM and Antifa have made that clear. Freedom is based on a sense of security – we can plan for tomorrow. We can relax enough to invent, to work toward our dreams. When the thugs took over a section of Seattle they killed the freedom of those who lived there, but there was no law to come save them, no law to protect them. Two young boys died there. No freedom, no law, only chaos.

When freedom goes, so does prosperity. A casual look at Venezuela’s recent history is enough to demonstrate that. Without freedom, no one cares to work. Work is self-expression, pride, a sense of self-worth – if, and only if, one gets to choose one’s work. But if the rewards of work aren’t there because taxes are too high, or the work is slave labor, production slows to a trickle and soon there are no jobs, no construction, no money, no food. One can’t be free when one is starving. 

Starvation can happen, for without freedom there is no private property. We’re already hearing leaders and college professors denouncing private property. These people want to redistribute the goods and services of us all without understanding that private property is an extension of our souls and without it we are no longer separate distinct individuals. We no longer have boundaries others can’t cross. We are just herd animals. 

Without freedom we lose family – one member rats out another, betrays another, and trust between family members erodes – already we’re seeing children turned against parents, and we’re also seeing children pulled from the protection of their families to serve as sex slaves. We’re seeing the freedom of babies taken from them before they’re even born. The freedom to care for those we love most is essential to human existence and yet we’re seeing children being killed in this violence – sometimes right in front of their parents. Once we’ve lost our children, we’ve lost all.

Without freedom we lose love. Without love we can only hate, and we’ve seen recently where that leads. If we are free to choose our friends, our clubs, the people we associate with at work, the church we attend, we can connect with folks who become dear to us and we learn to live and let live, to accept folks for who they are; we learn to forgive. But if our connections to other people are controlled by political correctness and ever-changing, nonsensical social constructs only anger and misery are left.

Without freedom, art dies, science becomes corrupted, history is erased, and clear thinking shrivels to nonsense. Without freedom truth vanishes, for tyranny is created out of lies and the two – truth and falsehood – cannot coexist. Something deep in our souls is repelled by the lie, and we know that too much fakery leads to insanity; reality doesn’t go away, yet once freedom is gone, we are made to swallow the lie and we are punished for speaking truth. This is happening now.

Once freedom goes we can no longer connect with God – not in public, not so that anyone knows about it, and a relationship with God does not flourish in a vacuum. God created free will so that we can choose to love Him, to follow His guidance, and to ultimately know joy. But without freedom we can’t know about Him, we can’t become what He designed us to be, we can’t tune into His message and find our way to completion. At all costs we must hold onto a freedom that keeps us connected to the God who made us or, sooner or later, we will all go mad.

Never Give an Inch

With the lawless events of the last few weeks (months, counting the overreach of many state governments in the COVID panic) have left me acutely aware of my own human desire for order, and I have to take a deep breath whenever I find myself wishing Trump would just whip out the military and put a stop to it all. But that’s what the desperate Democrats want -- the Rules for Radicals vindication – create so much chaos that the masses beg for someone to take control. But we can’t let that happen. So I would like to suggest a new motto for conservatives and libertarians alike. It comes from Ken Kesey’s novel, Sometimes a Great Notion – “Never give a goddamn inch.” 

We don’t have any inches left. We can’t compromise or concede anything. They’re destroying our history, our economy, our connections with God. They want to tear apart our families and they’ve already made mockeries of our schools. This last spate of riots has to be the end. We can tolerate this Mad Hatter’s tea party no longer.

“Black Lives Matter?”  Whoever said they didn’t? What does that even mean? Two hundred years ago when most American blacks were slaves – even then – black lives mattered – they were money. There’s nothing even remotely rational in that slogan. What would they have chanted had Floyd been white? It looked to me like a terrible miscarriage of justice no matter what the color of his skin, so had he been, say, Jewish, would the rioters have been stealing TV’s and torching cop cars? Would they have been chanting, “Jewish Lives Matter?” 

So what does it mean? Not much. We abort black babies more often than babies of any other race, but those lives evidently don’t “matter.” The cruelty of the abortion procedures evidently isn’t an issue to these miscreants. The black cops on the street are treated with even worse disrespect than the white cops, so it’s not their lives that matter. Republicans, ever since there were Republicans, have done everything we could to make black lives not only matter, but make them better, so what are these folks (a large percentage who are white) fussing about? 

And, since we all agree that black lives matter – as do all other lives – then what’s the point? There isn’t one. Blacks in this country are doing well – under this president, financially better than they ever have. We’d all like to see black families put back together, but that’s not anything a riot will fix. We’d like to see school choice so that black children have a better shot at an education, but the left is adamantly against that. So, what? It’s never been clearer that this has been fit-throwing for fit-throwing’s sake – and for the sake of stealing the coming election.

Which leads me to conclude that the wrong side knows that it’s losing. The left will try to cheat its way to the White House, but all they have to offer is a hollow shell of a man, who never amounted to much in the first place. So, they will have to continue throwing fits, throwing up a smoke screen so no one notices that they have no candidate. This will be a long hot summer, a marathon of ugliness and lying and danger. And we have to be up for it.

Yesterday I had a heated discussion with an ex-student – a previously sweet, pleasant, Christian young woman, but she’s gone off the edge. The discussion was set off by a meme she had posted that attempted to draw a parallel between 1960’s segregationists and Trump supporters – a totally deceptive and pernicious message. Out of teacherly habit and newfound fury I tried to get this young woman to see the duplicity of her post, but all I got for my trouble was a long list of books I should read (I’m old enough to be her grandmother and was once her professor.) and a dribble of links to articles from Huffington Post and NPR.  

I bring this up because we’re all having to face the fact that “agreeing to disagree” is no longer applicable to our national experience. I’m generally a nice person – too chicken to be otherwise, but I’m done now. These are rocks on which I stand henceforth:

— God and His commandments for both national and personal well-being cannot be 1. Denied, 2. Ignored, or 3. Twisted.  We can no longer give in to the arrogance of atheism. Darwin has had his day and now, if you’re keeping up with micro-biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, geology, or archeology you know that evolution is not a bucket that holds any water. The idea that blind, purposeless chance produced this world has cost hundreds of millions of lives. We cannot continue down this path. We must fight to put God back into public life, to support and encourage Bible study and application. This nation was built on Judeo-Christian principles and cannot sustain any amount of freedom without that foundation. 

— All human beings are flawed and any society we put together is going to have problems, but we must make sure that everyone in this country understands that Americans have built the best society in history –and that lots of trial and error has gone into that accomplishment. The left assumes that people are all basically good (if they aren’t white); it’s only society that’s at fault and if we just tear it apart, we can make it perfect. That is a lie right out of hell – and I mean “hell” literally. Only a recognition of Jesus Christ as the “way, the truth, and the life” can substantially improve living, for He is the only door through which we can connect with our creator, and with our personal destiny. 

— Free enterprise is the best economic system ever established. The freer it is, the better it works. We must stand up for it – learn, read about economics, be able to explain it to the deluded souls out there who are confused and fueled by pure envy. We cannot tolerate disdain and hatred for the successful among us. We can no longer stand by while property, public and private, is being destroyed. 

— The Constitution is without a doubt the greatest human document ever penned. Only the Bible outshines it. It is all that stands between us and utter misery, but it can’t defend us if we don’t defend it. We must insist on following its guidelines, on courageous, conservative judges, on basing all of our government on its structure. I have been proud of Trump’s choices during this time of crisis because he has, as the Constitution requires, left the states to figure this out on their own and he has, by so doing, allowed the leftists to expose their hopeless helplessness. We must push against any effort to take from us our rights to assemble, to worship, to speak, to defend ourselves and our property, to “become what we can become.” 

On Independence Day my husband and I are going to drive in a 4th of July cruise through our little town. We’ll lift an American flag up through the sunroof and join our neighbors in the best we can do to celebrate being a part of this amazing nation. And we will be armed. 

"We Need to Have a Conversation"

Continually the left treats us to a whine about, well, about everything and the complaint du jour always includes the phrase, “We need to have a national conversation,” as if just talking about a problem will fix whatever it is, and as if we can even talk anymore. 

Recently, the ability to “have a conversation,” let alone actually solve a problem, has shriveled like a piece of rotting fruit. In part, the violence of this last week demonstrates that, but the problem has been a long time developing. Any productive conversation requires certain components, and if any are missing, communication, and therefore the development of solutions, becomes impossible. 

Let me list these components:

Vocabulary: Those trying to talk to each other must have a common vocabulary that they use to mean the same things.  Terms must not only be common, but stable – the meanings can’t vary or morph into something else at a moment’s notice. A colleague once raked me over the coals for using the word Hispanic to refer to our south-of-the-border immigrant students. Latino (or Latina) was okay, but Hispanic was offensive.  Who knew? 

I’ve lost any understanding that I ever had of what racist means and I have no idea at all what is meant by systemic racism. What system? Are there racist policies in the post office? Do police departments have black arrest quotas? If there are policies at fault (I think of the welfare system, the easy availability of abortion services, or the deplorable condition of schools in black neighborhoods), those affected need to address those issues directly. Stealing Rolex watches isn’t likely to be helpful. 

I think of words like justice, which used to delineate one of the most foundational concepts in any functional society. But we add the word social and suddenly we’re saying that killing one cop for what another cop has done qualifies. In the name of social justice burning a building in Omaha atones for the death of a black man in Minneapolis. What?!

Social justice brings up the issue of slogans. So often I hear discussions in which the left can only repeat the latest talking points. It’s almost like these folks are just vending machines with maybe a dozen options and you can put in as many quarters as you want, but all you get are the same twelve lines. Push for clarification and you get nothing but mindless repetition. 

Language is one of the greatest gifts God gave us and if the best we can do with it is create confusion and produce propaganda, then shame on us. We cannot connect with each other in the face of such linguistic malfeasance. 

Common Goals: There needs to be some common goal before two parties can talk fruitfully. Time was, Americans were in favor of America therefore, any differences of opinion involved differing methods we might use to make America more successful.  No presidential candidate promised to, “fundamentally change America”.  Now we have two opposing goals: Make America Great Again or Punish and Kill America (by ridding us of cops and Donald Trump). There is no common ground between the two. We used to be able to maintain a balance between laissez faire economics and a more controlled approach, but today we have only polar opposites – capitalism or communism. No middle ground there – we’ve tried a middle ground and look where it got us. 

It appears, as these race riots continue, that we no longer have blacks wanting to be included in American society, which they have every right to want, but we have blacks and illegals and Islamic radicals and sexual deviants and drug addicts wanting to tear down America. There’s no talking when death and destruction of one party is the goal. 

Shared Values: Some common ground needs to exist. We need to operate on a mutual moral foundation. Do we agree that murder is wrong? Or is it only wrong when it’s a white person killing a black person? Is it okay when the black victim has yet to be born? Is it wrong to steal? What with cities refusing to prosecute thieves, private property may no longer be a community value. With massive stealing during these riots, and no repercussions happening, it appears that some new nuances in our understanding of theft have happened without our notification. When a Seattle city councilwoman can say, “I don’t know why people are upset about looting,” then what is there to talk about? 

America was built on the common urge to create a free society, one in which the needs of the individual and the needs of a smooth-running community were in balance. People shared a reverence for dignity and decency and productivity. But what happens when a large and loud faction of the society sees no value at all in these things? When people parade down the streets of a city in various states of undress, performing various deviant sex acts as they go? When people are willing to just sit around and let others support them? When demanding respect instead of earning it becomes the norm? There’s just nothing to say. We need a common respect for personal ownership, for work, for innovation and dedication, for the innocence of children, for family, for the freedom to make one’s way in the world. That appears to be lost on a good chunk of our population, so how can we “have a conversation?” 

Truth and Logic: Of even greater importance is a common respect for Truth and for the rules of logic. If those involved in a discussion feel free to distort the facts, to outright lie, or to employ logical fallacies heavily lathered with disdain and hatefulness, how can any worthwhile conversation occur? In a recent discussion a liberal friend informed me that “facts” are no longer of any interest and another said that “logic” is not important (and this from a scientist with multiple doctorates). I no longer have conversations with these people -- because I can’t. A conversation requires that both parties approach the discussion with a curious and open mind, but when neither logic nor truth will be present, that can’t happen, because trust can’t happen and without trust, talk must be walled off and wariness replaces candidness. We end up talking to the proverbial brick wall.

Game Rules: In any contest, any discussion, any game, there are rules. Playing without those rules – “playing tennis without a net” as Robert Frost put it – is nonsense. If the goalposts keep changing, the referees (I think here of the media) are openly cheering for one side and not the other, how can the game go on? Some fundamental sense of fairness must prevail. I find it most disconcerting when the left simply barges ahead with no intention of engaging in fair play. I want to take my toys and go home. But we can’t. Our nation is at stake. 

I keep hearing the slogan, “We’re all in this together.” But we’re not. We are on vastly different teams. Reasonable people don’t want it that way, but here we are. Pick a side. God will choose who wins, so choose well. 

Lurking Behind the Statistics

Six months ago none of us could have imagined that America – and half the civilized world – would just be sitting around twiddling our thumbs and watching our worlds being mummified, and yet, here we are and few of us are satisfied with the reasons we’ve been given.  

The governor of Oregon, Kate Brown (Dem.), just elongated the COVID19 lockdown until July 6, nine weeks away.  This has us all stumped because Oregon is barely on the virus map. In my county – Jackson County (population about 200,000) – we’ve only had 49 cases, no deaths, and no new cases for the last couple of weeks. It’s been worse up in the more populated Portland area, but still nothing compared to our neighboring state, Washington. So one wonders why. What’s up? 

Instead of slogging through huge national numbers, let’s zero in on just a few communities – that are, I’m sure, much like thousands of other towns across this nation. Let’s see what’s happening in such places. 

Jacksonville, Oregon, is a tiny tourist town nestled at the base of the Siskiyou mountains. It is an old gold mining town of about 3,000 souls. Gold mining no longer sustains its economy; tourism does because Jacksonville still looks much as it did in the mid-19th century. The old Beekman Bank still sits on the corner of California and 3rd Street. It looks just like it looked – inside and out -- on the day old man Beekman walked out and locked it up. He walked up the street to his house, which, like his bank, is open in the summers for tours. He never went back. 

On the other side of town stands the Jeremiah Nunan House, which belonged not to a miner, but to the grocer who got rich providing supplies to the miners. He picked out the plans for his 3-story mansion from a catalog and had it built in 1891. It has since determined the architecture of the town – even new building look just like this Victorian estate. The estate now houses a restaurant and a B&B.

On the bank corner a tourist can get a peek into one of the mineshafts by leaning over a railing and peering through a glass dome. (Every now and then a street will open up in a rainstorm and reveal yet another of the shafts that lace through the subterranean “basement” of the town.) 

If you walk west along California you can stop at a delightful little shop where you can sample their homemade fudge and poke through their collection of all things quaint and farmy. Or you can stop in at the Carefree Buffalo and drool over their butter-soft leather jackets and thousand-dollar Damascus steel knives. There’s the Pot Wrack filled with every kitchen gadget you can imagine, and farther down the street you come to the Bella Union, which occupies the building which once housed the town saloon. The floors are still mended with tin can lids and you can eat out on a patio sheltered by a 100-year-old wisteria. Across the street from the Bella is Terra Firma – a shop that smells of the artisan soaps and candles they sell along with amusing little books, costume jewelry and bizarre toys. I could go on and on. Scheffle’s Toys, and the Good Bean coffee shop, clothing boutiques, and the real saloon, the J’ville Tavern. There are dozen more of these places – art galleries and antique shops. Don’t forget that these shops are all selling things made by local artisans. And all of these businesses are closed. That little town was alive because of these tiny, but amazing, enterprises. Note the past tense. 

Up on the hill on the west edge of town is the Britt amphitheater where we spread blankets on the side of the mountain, drink wine and listen to world-class music. Britt’s 2020 season has been “postponed until further notice”. There goes another income stream. 

Down the road about 15 miles you come to Ashland, Oregon, home of Southern Oregon University and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is made up of three theaters, one a replica of the Globe. That theater compound, along with winter skiing on Mt. Ashland, just to the south, is the life-blood of the town. The Festival has postponed its season (which usually starts in February) until September 8th.

Ashland, which is a bigger town than Jacksonville, but just as historic and quaint, is filled with 5-star restaurants, dinner-theaters, high-end boutiques, Victorian B&B’s, a grand hotel, art galleries, wine shops -- all closed. 

Quite a ways north and east of these towns sits Joseph, Oregon.  Joseph perches in the high desert and is home to a multitude of art galleries and foundries. If a sculptor wants to do bronze castings, Joseph is the place to go. If things weren’t all shut down. 

Bend, Oregon is also in the high desert and sits at the base of a series of volcanic peaks, one of which is Mt. Bachelor where the Olympic ski teams practice. Bend is where you want to be for all things outdoors – skiing, rafting, canoeing, mountain-biking, hiking, fishing, and the outdoors hasn’t been closed, but in order for people to come to Bend to do these things, the restaurants and hotels need to be open. Bend lives off what these vacationers bring to their beautiful town, a town which has grown to over 100,000 in the last few years. 

This virtual tour has a point. You see, here in Oregon we make wine, we cut down timber, we grow pears, but ever since the spotted owl shut down much of our lumber income in the 80’s, Oregon has relied on tourism to stay afloat. And now our governor wants to keep everything closed until after the 4th of July, and by doing so she has sentenced this state, and its small, lucrative towns, to economic ruin. These communities will become ghost towns; our livelihoods gone. 

But we have to stay safe, they say.  What for? If you can’t pursue your dreams, if you can’t preserve your history, if you can’t fulfill your responsibilities, what for?  These little towns are the essence of this country; it is in these little towns that we store our history, our culture, and our hopes for our future. This is what we sell here in Oregon – we sell history; we sell hope. 

Yet, some are so concerned for our physical well-being that they’ve forgotten that there’s a lot more to a human being than flesh and blood. A person is a complex bundle of plans and goals, of memories and sorrows, of wishes and dreams. He’s not just a unit of DNA that needs a government handout every now and then to feed himself.  People need to create, to remember, to invent. And we need to see the results of our labors. No one person should be able to just rip that away.

The residents of these little towns have built beautiful communities that each provide a venue for the creativity and action that we all crave. Ashland sells theater, Jacksonville history, Joseph art, Bend adventure. They all sell hope. They sell dreams, the American dream. But these towns and those just like them won’t survive unless something changes soon – long before July 6th. 

Taking Stock

I doubt if I’m the only one who is looking around me and wondering what just happened. No one really knows how many people have died from this virus – here in the U.S. we’re over-counting; in China they’re under-counting. We have no idea at all how many people have actually been infected. We’re reading conflicting analyses of the function of the disease. We’re astounded that there’s a controversy over an apparently curative drug. And we do know that in most of the country not much has happened. People, however, die from all kinds of things – the flu, car accidents, heart disease. COVID19 was billed as the second coming of the Black Plague (when a third of Europe died inside a year.) So far we’ve lost a little over 39,000 people here, while the plague would have killed 110,000,000. So pardon my ho-hum attitude. I feel like I’ve been in a coma and am just now coming to. Where am I? Where is my car? 

Actually, as a nation, we have weathered this unexpected attack quite well. We’re coping with what appears now to have been a media over-reaction. We’re even handling the over-reach of some governors and we’re doing it in a characteristic American fashion – Don’t tread on me! Our president and his task force have been able to present a careful balance between health concerns and economic worries; their daily press conferences have provided an unprecedented transparency and candor. 

All this is well and good, but millions of us have taken a beating. The loss of jobs, and even more importantly, the loss of small, marginal businesses is heart-rending. That’s not just a monetary loss. It’s a loss of identity – Americans are producers. We make things. We invent things. We meet demands. We serve each other. And we love doing that. Our sense of usefulness, of creativity, of helpfulness and purpose has been damaged. 

In 1990 Mihaly Csikszentmahalyi, of the University of Chicago, published the results of lengthy and broad-based study of happiness. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is a most readable and enlightening book about what makes us happy. He designed his study to use a small recording device that thousands of his subjects wore. They were to use it to record moments when they were happy and what they were doing at the time. Csikszentmahalyi discovered that happiness was closely connected to being in a state of what he called “flow.” He described a person experiencing “flow” as being so engrossed in what he is doing that time ceases to tick away, that his problems evaporate, and he is only vaguely aware of his surroundings. In fact, Csikszentmahalyi found that Americans were happiest when we were working. That’s right. Working. Not on the weekends. Not at football games. Not sitting in the movie theater, but working, being useful, being caught up in being productive. 

Happiness is a funny thing. It doesn’t fit in with evolutionary thinking. I mean, if we are nothing but proteins and water, DNA and fat cells, what’s with the drive to be happy? Happiness isn’t survival. People can survive on very small doses. It has little to do with fitness – though it’s easier to be happy when we’re well, it’s also easy to be miserable when we’re healthy. Joy comes from somewhere other than our chemistry. 

The left has never understood that. They measure everything by income, by equality, but that means very little. Which kind of gift do we appreciate the most? It’s the one that shows a close observation of our own uniqueness, not the one that’s exactly like everyone else’s. Which things in our lives do we love the most? The things someone impersonally handed us, or the things we worked hard for? The left is seizing this moment in our history to force their heavy-handed equity on us – not by giving, but by taking the things that matter the most to all of us – our freedom of movement, of assembly, our freedom to work. 

My work is teaching. I have been doing it for over 40 years. Nothing makes me happier than watching the light catch in the eyes of my students. Nothing is more fun than the challenge of fielding difficult questions, of thinking fast on my feet. Nothing is more rewarding than the lasting friendships that are forged in the classroom. This year the finishing weeks of my spring semester were cut short; I didn’t get to bring my classes to a suitable closure, to see my students through to the end. We’ve thrashed about this last month online, but it isn’t at all the same. And this story isn’t tragic at all compared to others. 

People who have poured their hearts into businesses they built from scratch are watching them die. Farmers are dumping their harvests. Restaurants are closing forever – and haven’t we all, at one time or another, imagined owning our own restaurant? I can barely wrap my mind around the suffering many must be experiencing. America is about dreams, about fulfilling them, not about letting them shrivel.

Now is when we have to decide if we are going to continue hiding in our homes, obedient and docile, or start standing up and taking our chances out there like we’re used to doing. The way the stats look now I’m more likely to be killed in a car accident traveling to the campus than I am to die of the Wuflu. I’ve faced that danger every day of my adult life and thought nothing of it. I’m more likely to struck by lightning or bitten by a rattlesnake in my own bathtub than I am of getting COVIDly ill. 

Now is when we have to choose whether we’re going to become a nation of anti-social, cootie-phobic, toilet paper hoarders, or are we going to pull up our grown up britches and go back to work. We can make that decision because this is our country – our government is designed to serve us, not to restrict us from lawful activity. 

When the government starts to encroach on those freedoms, which are our God-given rights, it gets distorted and twisted out of shape. What sense does it make to arrest people for merely being outside? Why were we told to stay inside? Was it some medieval idea that fresh air carries bad humors? Why fine people for sitting in their cars in the church parking lot? How was that going to help? Governments see an opportunity to grasp, here and there, another bit of power and some dive for it little kids batting at a piñata. 

This event in our history will change this nation in some profound ways, but it will not kill the American character. Most of us want nothing more than to be left alone to do what we do and most of what we do is worth doing. We will keep shaking hands – touch is too important – but we may be more careful about washing our hands, at least for a while. We will go back to attending baseball games, going to the movies, working out at the gym, eating at whatever restaurants are left. We will go back to church and we hope this experience will encourage others to join us. We will quit buying things from China. Bats will still give us the willies. We will be more aware of those tiny businesses that make our communities unique and charming places to live. We will pray more often since we now realize how a small event, once lied about and hidden, can kill, can ruin lives on the other side of the world. We will, in the future, keep on hand an adequate supply of toilet paper.