#1928 Spasmodic Indifference

#1928

Spasmodic Indifference

“God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.”  - Alexander Pushkin

This writer's ancestors, fleeing the harsh religious injustices of England, landed on the shores of New Jersey in the year 1611.  They came over on the good ship Kent and founded the town of Morristown, New Jersey.  Beleaguered by the hard life, beaten by the weather, the poorest of the relatives finally became dirt farmers in Eastern North Carolina, where I was raised...bringing with them their zealous Freewill Baptist religious faith.  This is my spiritual heritage: they were never involved in slavery, from that time to this, hardworking, God-fearing, taxpaying, patriots.  This inheritance is probably worth more than the money which some of the other family members took with them North, such as Robert, who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, or Louis, once wealthy but died in a debtors prison.

In recent years, one of my cousins, even older than me, decided to investigate an old graveyard, in one of his fields, ever since any of us could remember this area of "grown up" vegetation (vines, briars, old trees) had been there, plowed around year after year, a place to throw old stumps, implements, etcetera.  And all anyone ever said was, "It is an old graveyard."  When he cleared it out, he found marvelous headstones at two graves.  Both graves of Confederate dead...two ancestors, Nathan and, probably his brother, Jordan Morris...no one knows.  But, evidently with the political antagonisms with many families in the community, my ancestors decided not to bury them in the regular family graveyard.  Only those who have endured such trauma can know the suffering involved in any military conflict...even the Civil War.  Fifty years later, one of my grandfather's brothers, an assistant to President T.R. Roosevelt, died and he was brought back to the old family church.  All my mother remembered, she was just a small child, was all those horses and the guns firing at this Army officer's funeral.  We just don't know what these tough people went through OR how devoted they were to the land and families who sent them off to war.  But we do know how much we lose when we decide and then slide into our indifference about such matters as their devotion to God, family, country.  We have all heard the advertisement, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste", we so prize, even covet those we know and study, who have such good minds.  I have been a student of the human body my entire life: so cherish God's creative ability.  In every way, God revealed to us that the human brain was his greatest creation, and the greatest distance on Earth, just fourteen inches away, the human heart.  Just think, one organ, one muscle, pumping blood, the miles across the United States...two thousand miles of blood vessels, transporting the physiology necessary to keep the body alive.  Scripture tells us, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul" (Leviticus 17:11).  After all these years, caring for patients, observing life activities around the world (Dr. Morris has made eight round the world trips including both poles, passport stamped in 157 countries) I still cannot understand or fully appreciate the magnificence of the human body....God's chief creation.  And to think, that there are those who put poison in the well: abuse their body with the toxins of drugs, other impurities, even overeating, or not showing care about what they eat-rest-exercise.  Your heart, that magnificent muscle, your body, depends on two things for life, essential nutrition and water.  In other blogs I have thoroughly discussed all these things.  Everyday, we hear ambulance sirens-read obituaries-pass by graveyards, yet, "It is not going to happen to me." 

I was talking with an Apologetics minister this very day, "If I were an atheist, the first thing I would throw in your face, why God did not place all of us on an even playing field."  Many of our fellow mankind never have a good mind, others, lose theirs.

One of the worst memories of my childhood, my father had a friend who worked at what is now called Cherry Hospital.  At that time it was called, The North Carolina Hospital for the Negro Insane, it was later named in honor of NC Governor, Greg Cherry.  My father stopped by there to visit his friend, who worked there.  At that time, the place was segregated, only black people.  Those with any intelligence at all were working in the fields, a man on horseback riding around with a whip making sure they picked beans fast.  Others, were tied on the porches which surrounded the buildings, tied up all day in their defecate and "madness".  Can one even imagine the people who worked at such a place, what they endured just to keep these people alive?  The cruelest hoax at the place, they removed all sex organs from the inmates (from this very city, Junius Wilson, a black man was castrated because he was deaf), more or less, fed them like hogs.

It was very much the same at the Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, the hospital for white demented people.  I remember my father visiting one of my aunts there, my grandmother's sister (Aunt Lizzie had never married, one of twelve children, her father, my great grandfather, was a wealthy landowner but he had left Aunt Lizzie the largest farm because he wanted to make sure she was well cared for.  Her siblings wanted her land, since she acted a little peculiar, missed a few notes when she beautifully played the piano, they put her in the asylum and took her farm).  I was just a child but I still remember the fright in Aunt Lizzie's eyes, a woman who should never been placed there but probably what she had endured as a patient there.  I remember that my father took her a bag of candy and you would have thought he brought her a bag of gold.  One of my doctor friends, worked at that facility for many years.  He told me that he could not understand how patients ever survived early mental institutions before the modern time of mind-altering, tranquilizers drugs. 

A totally blind veteran, I have been particularly interested in the treatment of blind people, especially blind children. At the time of separation of races for mental illness, blind children were separated.  There was a school for the blind in Raleigh, now called the Morehead School.  There was a school for black blind children in Garner.  People today do not believe this but I have verified it by people who were at both schools.  The blind black children were brought over to the school for the blind white children to do the hard work, such as raking leaves.  No, it will take more time, many generations, for human minds to forget the inequities brought on people by their fellow man.  Even our ancestors, claiming the promises of God's word and knowing right from wrong, did not want to be DIFFERENT from their unbelieving friends who were indifferent about inequality.  It is time for those who claim the name of Christ to DECIDE to be DIFFERENT instead of SLIDING into the indifference of the world.  The reason the church has lost its power is because people attending church do not want to be DIFFERENT from their unbelieving friends or who have a spasm difference one day to the week....eleven to twelve on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in the history of the world.