Topsy Turvy

I often wonder what our ancestors would say, even those who passed on just 100 years ago. If they could miraculously return and see what is going on in this country today. They would never believe the filled grocery (and other) stores, self-help shopping carts, restaurants with buffets piled high with food and electronic existence. Perhaps the most basic change in culture would be our staying in a hurry all the time, a rapid topsy-turvy existence.

I will never forget the grief, just one couple, who had one child. They were doing very well, beautiful home on acreage out in the country, she, chief clerk at the courthouse, he, at the top in auto sales, one precious son, nine years of age. The mother had already gone to work, and the boy had missed the school bus. The father always in a hurry, angry because it was necessary for him to take his son to school, still fussing at him, speeding down the highway, he passed one slow car, with his truck, the door on the passengers side came open, the son fell out and the slow car behind hit and killed him.

One of the best cartoons I ever saw, a farmer, standing with a blow torch in his hand, the huge barn, still smoking from the fire, his wife saying to him, “I hope you got the hornet's nest.” Our attempt to solve a problem so quickly often ends in distress, we all know the feeling. The get-rick-quick bug has bitten all of us, and we have all scratched the itch many times, “if only I could win the lottery”, “if only I could find a letter written by Abraham Lincoln,” “my problems could be solved by getting a big win.”

My doctor friend supported the vote on the state lottery, which I was against. Like the state-controlled liquor stores, I did not feel the state should be involved in gambling. He said, “I cannot take hope away from people.” The only people in the world who have reason to hope, many of them pretending Christians (baptists, methodists, pentecostal) ran in lock-step to the polls to vote for gambling, believing it would help educate their children, after all, it was called the education lottery. The legislation had passed because of the votes of two local Republican Christians (Rep. Justice and Rep. Stiller), Satan is such a deceiver. A state that runs its own lottery and is home to a Native American tribe that runs a casino can hardly claim the moral high ground when it comes to regulating gambling, but if we value our communities, the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Much of the last session of the legislature was taken up trying to regulate video poker machines found in internet cafes. The town in which I live, Wilmington NC, there are 53 “cyber-gambling” cafes with over 300 video-poker machines. These private businesses employ thousands, the state is in a topsy-turvy quandary. The state does not get the profits from these machines like it does from the lottery and liquor stores, after all, it is the job of state government to make money from sin.

As one communist official told me in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia at one of the world's largest gambling casinos, “if the people have any money left, we want it one way or another.” This is the attitude of communist Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, and we can see how quickly Marxism has taken over North Carolina. Sgt. Morgan of the Sheriff's Department told me that a woman called him crying because her husband had lost all his paycheck at a video poker establishment, he told her that all he could do was arrest him for gambling if he would turn himself in, the county cannot afford to enforce these laws.

The next big thing in America is internet gambling, this is more addictive to children than to adults. The officials know they can make 70 billion a year in this form of taxation, you can already play poker online. The US Congress Bill H.R. 2906 amends the Public Health Service Act concerning gambling, among many things it requires the President to consider the National Gambling Impact Study Commission's recommendations. It will take 14 billion to initiate this study, I can tell them what to do for one dollar: “close down all casinos, all forms of gambling.” The great hotels in Las Vegas and Atlantic City were built by losers. One of my employees, ex-husband, spent his money on lottery tickets while his children were at home hungry, could tell you about the chances of winning in gambling. My great grandfather, prominent, wealthy land-owner, horse and buggy preacher of the gospel, wrote 100 years agoe that he traveled throughout eastern North Carolina, impassable paths, rivers at a time before telephones, bathrooms, combustion engines (he never saw a car), because he could hear the cries of people in hell. It is only when politicians can hear the cries of hungry children, food money used for gambling that changes will take place.

The Geneva Conventions, 1949, just after World War II, gives rules for the behavior of nations in time of war. The Ten Commandments, books of the law written by Moses, give the rules for the lifestyles of the Jewish people. The American Constitution, and indeed, the Constitution of all 50 states, give the laws and statutes, behavior based on sanity, not the insanity of irresponsible behavior. Destroy your immune system and your body will not have defense against disease. Destroy the morality of a nation, and we are left at the mercy of our enemies. Abraham Lincoln said, “when people have the truth, the people and the nation will survive.”

In the Looney Tunes cartoon series, the coyote was always chasing after the roadrunner, the roadrunner had the ability to stop right on the edge of the chasm, but the hurrying, rushing coyote would go right over the cliff. Take time to smell the flowers along the way.