Helter Skelter

Helter Skelter has been used in many ways, mostly as the name of a ride at an amusement park, but also as a song by the Beatles and Motley Crue. A book by this name was written concerning the Mansion murders. The last 100 years could easily be called Helter Skelter, public opinion mostly molded by news media who are not known for intellectual honesty. As my good friend, Dr. Walter Spearman, head of the department of Journalism, UNC Chapel Hill, said, “It is not the job of the journalist to be the historian but rather to entertain with some factual evidence.” During WWII, public opinion was radicalized with comic book type characters appearing in newspapers showing the Nazis as black-booted thugs; showing the Orientals (Japanese) as slant-eyed, myopic villains, all these axis powers as caricature enemies which we should despise.

Today's young people, most of whom have never known but one or two presidents, a time in history of excess, never having been deprived of anything, most have never heard the word “no” to any of their wants, never having known the need for anything.

When I hear of the money spent just on athletic shoes, obscene telephone bills, high school parking lots full of expensive cars, backpacks full of electronics, hard times will hit these youngsters very hard.

One man who drives a public school bus tells me that he can barely get his bus into the school ground because the highway is so crowded with mothers in expensive cars, with just one child in the car, too good to ride on the public school bus. He says, “The only children on the school bus are those from the housing projects and the poor homes of poor working people.” Those of us who walked several miles to school knew how to appreciate a beat-up, unheated school bus.

I have been quoted several times and it is true, nothing will improve the physical and spiritual attitude of this spoiled generation more than a biting depression. And, my friends, it is here. Those of us who remember World War II, who remember the rationing of everything, who have heard the screams of parents and wives whose loved ones were killed and buried on foreign soil (now all deaths are returned to this country, not so in past wars), who saw gold stars in the windows of most homes, who were willing to give up everything for the war effort know patriotism.

I was just a teenager during WWII; my wars were Korea and Vietnam, in which I served as a medical officer. The family farms, the homes in which both my parents were reared and which had survived the Civil War, were kept going by my mother and grandmother. Old people, such as my grandparents, along with hired help which they could find, kept the crops going, raised hogs, chickens, anything which town merchants were glad to obtain.

The cash crop, money necessary to pay taxes and keep the repairs and equipment going, was tobacco and cotton. Our farms lay in between the large Air Force base in Goldsboro, where a large prisoner of war camp was located, and Wilson, the world's largest tobacco market. The history of the tobacco markets, auction warehouses, is a NC story in itself. The farmers would transport the tobacco, carefully cured and prepared for market sales, and like any auction, the representatives of the large cigarette manufacturing companies would buy the tobacco. It was a large financial operation which built such great universities as Duke (Methodist) and Wake Forest (Baptist), and the entire economy of North Carolina was built around farming.

The prisoners of war, mostly German, were hauled from the camp to the Wilson tobacco warehouses and worked just as those hired by the companies. They were hauled on cage-like trucks and each wore a shirt on which PW was printed.

I remember so well, the day I heard my grandmother say, as she watched these young, tall, blond, German, white men, get out of these cages to work, “They are some mother's sons and they are loved by a mother somewhere. They are not here because they want to be here, no more than my one son is in the South Pacific when we need him here.” (My grandmother had six daughters and one son. The one son was in the South Pacific; the husbands of all her daughters were away at war, including my father.) My grandmother said, “I am going to pray for these boys just like I pray for our own because it is only a God of love and peace who can mend a mother's broken heart.” It is interesting that a relative, supervisor on the tobacco markets, observed the German PWs were “the smartest people I've ever known. They got the entire process organized and got the work finished in just a few hours, work that some of the hired help took all day.” There was never any problem with these PWs. Most felt fortunate that they were alive and treated well, compared to the German soldiers who were in the front line snow drifts in Russia. (When in Leningrad, I was told that during the German-Russian campaigns of WWII, the people of Leningrad were so hungry that they were eating rats.)

This supposed “Christian” nation often forgets that the least of us and the worst of us have eternal souls also. “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 3:35)

My own mother, with the same Christian heart as her mother, would often speak of the souls of the convicts who were hauled on trucks from the state prison to do road work in the area. You would see them pass in the back of a large state truck with a smaller vehicle attached to the truck, in which a guard with a rifle, pointing towards the convicts, was seated. If one ever ran and tried to get away, if not shot, he wore chains from then on.

Once, I had a driver take me to a prison camp (these prison camps were always located in a swamp) so that I could deliver some Christian reading material. I shall never forget on this Sunday afternoon, the prisoners standing around the exterior fence talking with their parents, wives, children, on the other side of the fence. I thought then, as now, what does it do to the spiritual psyche, the neurosis of a child to see a father confined as a prisoner?

I was in a magistrate office one day, when a young boy was brought in for some type judicial appearance. He was probably a child of his parents old age, because the parents were there and both were aged. I could tell that it was almost more than they could endure, to see this young man, almost stripped naked, being charged with some crime. The parents were trying to make arrangements with a bondsman who was there, using their home as collateral. Who was shamed more? The parents who had reared this young man, probably enduring much hardship to do so, or the young man who knew the sorrow he had brought to his elderly parents?

We have failed as a nation and as a world. Since the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, until this present one, number 44, we have endured promises and pretenders in the White House. In my lifetime, 535 actors (representatives and senators) have been in a life boat taking care of themselves while the ship of states sank. Almost like Chechnya, Russia, where the revolt occurred and the Russian army moved in and almost totally destroyed the city, to the extent that most of the city residents were living in bushes and trees that surrounded the city. Premier Putin would sweep in in his helicopter, having destroyed their city, killed their families, destroyed their lives, seeking their vote in his reelection.

The 126,000 Americans buried on foreign soil who had the patriotic love for country, so dedicated that it was like marrow in their bones, expected their sacrifice to give a better world, a world of love and understanding towards one another, knowing that some will never have a relationship with Christ through God's redemption.