Energy

One of the most used words, vocally or in-print, is the word “energy.” If, when I was in Zimbabwe, about 25 years ago, I had accumulated $10,000 in Zimbabwe fiat currency, and hid it in the ground, today the sum would be worth pennies, if anything. If I had bought $10,000 in gold coins, and hid them in the ground, today they would be worth many times what I paid for them. If I had enough ground to hide $10,000 of crude oil, it would be worth many times what I paid for it, almost as much as the gold, because oil is truly liquid gold. We realize this every day as we witness the Middle East aflame, sending up the price of crude oil, sending up the price of gasoline at the pump.

I was reared at a time when there was little need for oil, gasoline. I remember my cousin's service station had a hand-pump gasoline tank into which he pumped gas for the few cars in the entire area. My family, everyone in the community, depended on animal power for turning the soil and crop production. We had mules on the farm, my favorite mule was Nell, she taught me to plow. Even today, in most of the world, donkeys, horses, buffaloes are used instead of the combustion engine. The world's economy depends on oil, food, plastics, transportation, warfare. I remember the first plastic, we never thought it would so monopolize our lives. I saw a water buffalo pulling a small lawnmower, cutting the grass at a Maharaja's palace in India. Oxen walking a circle all day long, pumping water. As a child, I remember water running under the grist mill, turning the wheel to grind corn, entire buildings built without a power tool of any type. Ferry river crossings using mules to pull the line.

In books and later in movies, we saw slaves rowing Greek ships in time of warfare and in commerce. You never heard the sound of a boat motor on a lake or even the ocean, boat paddling was some of the best exercise in the world. Students actually walked to class, families walked to church. At the beginning of the 20^th century when 90% of the American population lived in rural areas, obesity and diabetes were almost unknown because people worked, gardening, care of grounds, raising crops, etc.

Today, the sissy-prissy politicians, academics, spoiled walmart-aristocracy, resent dispelling energy anywhere except at the gymnasium. God, please help the man who must ride a golf cart in order to get his golfing exercise. God, please help the woman who must have an electric beater or blender to prepare everything in the kitchen. God, please help young men and women, who find it hard work to push a lawn mower, and probably hard work to push the buttons on a video game. With all the new technology, laptops, iPads, the television set, please don't tell me I must push buttons on a remote. Let me just think, and the cameras on the iPad, and the channels on the television will change, without any energy on my part. Slowly but surely, we have become a lazy, spoiled, extravagance of human existence.

The greatest energy conceivable to the mind, was expended when God created the universe, the world and everything in it. He placed here, everything that mankind would ever need for living...the gold in every mountain is his. Every mineral, every element, every herb, we would ever need for living or healthcare, was placed here. God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, large lakes and rivers of water, lending to such energy producers as the Hoover Dam, the Aswan Dam, most of the crust of the earth filled with crude oil, natural gas, coal. With the dependence on the combustion engine, great reserves of oil near the surface of Saudi Arabia, we have become spoiled to the use of oil.

With the gulf oil spill, we have discovered just how much oil is available right on our own backdoor. The ludicrous theory that oil was produced by dead animals and dead plant life (how did they all get down there?). Questions are asked, with the abundance of cheap, plentiful natural gas, why not liquify it and use in so many places. Coal was the main stay of industry for a long time, and we know about smoke stack cleaning.

America's greatest problem, a Marxist Sunni Muslim in the White House, who knows nothing at all about energy or anything else. His only experience with energy is perhaps bouncing a basketball. Supporting him, “pea-brained” politicians who cannot face the reality of energy, they had rather talk green...production of energy meeting present needs without jeopardizing the needs of future generations: renewable, solar, wind, wave, experimenting with equations which will not balance such as electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels, all these things costing more energy than they will ever produce or save.

These people who know nothing about conservation in their life habits or their nation's survival need to experience humiliation before jubilation. Bomb shelters are being built around Moscow, China is training 10,000 carrier pidgins to deliver messages in time of war, if as expected, all electric utility grids are wiped out. Purveyors of ignorance, Washington and the state-controlled news media have not realized that if Saudi Arabian oil is cut off, every financial system in the world will shut down...we are that dependent on Saudi oil. Everything we buy or sell because of the stupidity of world leaders, particularly Japan and Europe, dependent on oil, energy from oil. Saudi Arabia's princes, royal family got richer than Midas when crude oil was $5 a barrel. Wikileaks states that the Saudis have overestimated their reserves by 40%. King Abdullah and all his brothers (successors) are old and sick.

The height of stupidity, we should be accustomed to such from Washington, putting ethanol in the gas tank, producing food shortages and empty stomachs. One of the saints of long ago said, “God is more anxious to save us and help us than is a mother taking her child out of a burning building.” When will we learn that every thing we do is spiritual? We do what we do because we believe what we believe. I believe it time to end “stinking thinking” about energy.

A Great Story (2009)

When my father was a young person, he knew a young man in the community who cared nothing about the church, or the school, or his family, or his neighbors, or anything else except himself. His selfishness got him into some real trouble and so he left the state and went down to Texas and became an oil field worker, really became a wildcatter (a person who drills oil wells in areas that are not in advance known to be oil fields), and by the time I was a child he had returned to the community for visits showing off his millionaire success riding in a large stretch limousine with a wife of questionable advantages.

I say this because one morning in the Quaker church, of all places, where as a child, I was with my parent who were visiting there, where Quaker women are conservative in every way. She evidently thought she was in a night club and pulled out her compact and lipstick and did her face while the sermon was going on. Anyway, he shared his wealth with his long estranged family by first going to the family cemetery and replacing all the tombstones with far more expensive ones, putting a nice fence around the cemetery, and building a roadway from the highway to the cemetery, buying all the land around the cemetery and much other land in the community, remodeling his relatives homes, and generally, “spreading his wealth” (a familiar term). Mr. Mitchell is long dead, but the stories of his largess to the church which he never attended in his youth, and to the relatives whom he hardly knew, persist.

Perhaps the greatest story in all of literature, is the so called “Prodigal Son.” It is a story of a young Jewish boy with a remarkable father and less remarkable older brother, who took an early inheritance and went far from home, probably Babylon-Vegas. Where he wasted his inheritance and when this Jewish boy had to resort to feeding pigs the scriptures says, “he came to himself” (Luke 15:17). How many days did his loving father stand looking in the distance thinking about his lost son. The scripture says he recognized him, probably by his walk or something and he ran to meet him. The remarkable part of this story is that the older brother resented the festivities of the homecoming. But, the remarkable father said to the resentful brother, entreated him and assured him that his remaining property was his.

I have sympathy for both the son who wanted to get away from home (because I had a real strict father) and I have sympathy for the older brother who had stayed at home, worked hard, and did not have as much empathy for his younger brother. Our Lord gives us these parables such as the man who went and hired people to work in his vineyard and paid the ones who came to work first the same as the ones who came to work last. This helps us to better understand death bed conversions or even the repentant thief on the cross.

It helps me as a blind Christian (I am a totally blind 100% disabled service connected veteran) to show some benevolence toward healthy, wealthy men in this very community who went to Canada to escape military service ,but returned to become the leading politicians and some of the wealthiest party givers and party goers at the country clubs of the community. They are the “good time, good ole boys” of the community and they and their wives look down their noses, particularly at church, at those of us who were foolish enough to live committed lives directed by the holy will of God.

We can be sure that God will discipline his own. These good ole boys already belong to Satan and they will have their enjoyment, “here and now.” “That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 1:7)

We who live in the darkness of blindness, who have given our best to our country, have values some will never understand outside of a spiritual conversion. 

Character determines destination, Our values are set by home and school. We cannot prevent birds flying over our heads, but we can prevent them from building nests in our hair. It is the anti-Christian home and the anti-Christian school system, that permits the building of the nest of socialism, admiration for political corruption, and disdain for nobility of human life that has brought down individuals and governments. Right now, the worlds largest democracy, Indonesia, a country of 5,000 islands, is making the decision of either continuing as a democracy or becoming the world's largest Muslim theocracy. We pray that the secular movement in this country that has permeated the home, government, school systems, universities, media, and even the largest corporations will not be over taken by this cancer.

The story of America, the success of America is based on free enterprise, capitalism, and constitutional rights that include everyone, even the minorities. A democratic republic established by a magnificent constitution, gives to every citizen the freedom to fail or to succeed. Bill Gates, a man of wealth and intelligence, in his rules for success in business, states in the first rule, there is no such thing as fairness. We are just given opportunity along with responsibility, whether at home, or wildcatting in a foreign place.

Abraham Lincoln, said he was not afraid of this country being conquered by another country. His fear was that it might implode from the corruption and the anti-American curse from within. 125,000 men who lie buried in foreign cemeteries attest to the fact that this country is worth defending. It is the greatest story of a successful nation in history. And the story is resplendent with men and women of faith who are responsible for the success. They had faith in the promise of America and faith in the decency of one another.