I was walking down a street in Moscow, this was when it was the USSR, a collectivist, communist superpower. (Of course, it is my conviction that the USSR was never as “frightful” as our American leaders wanted us to believe. Russia is stronger militarily and financially today, than it ever was then.) All of a sudden, huge underground doors opened, sirens started blaring, large imported cars streaked out from underground...much like pictures in a comic book. Walking down the street in Manhattan, one cold day, the same thing happened. How much of our world is hidden from view? Intrigue at the taxpayer's expense.

Thirty-three new buildings have been built in Washington DC since 9/11, more space than the Pentagon. Buildings, with false/fake windows, all involved in intelligence, with everything we hear, a misnomer in the American political scene. I understand that 864,000 people are engaged in new intelligence work, more than the population of the city.

A Washington Post article stated recently, “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work … These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. “

At a time when the national debt is increasing $3.87 billion each day, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Pakistan $7.5 billion yesterday, when the peasants in the field have been beaten down into the furrows of excessive taxation, ludicrous regulations, nanny-state tactics, abrasions from every side, just before they give up completely, many are going to shout, “what is wrong with this picture?”

People keep telling me that I am old, a member of the “old school”. I remember “wet” counties and “dry” counties, I was in a large hotel on Wrightsville Beach, when a prominent Methodist pastor came in and headed toward the dining room with his brown bag. Liquor could be carried into a bar or restaurant in a brown bag, it was called “brown-bagging”. I remember the legislative fights over “liquor by the drink” (North Carolina and Oklahoma were the last two states to legalize liquor by the drink). Like the lottery, there were some Christians who had the backbone to stand up against these sins of addiction, taxation at the cost of your weaker neighbor.

While a student at Chapel Hill, and this man had never tasted alcohol, 8 years of university, many years of military service. The “good ol'” fraternity boys would go to wet Durham country from dry Orange county to get their liquor, the devil's brew. Perhaps I missed that day of class, but I could never understand the hypocrisy of the state, making money, taxing those who least afford to pay for sin: alcohol, tobacco, gambling.

I could never understand church members (Methodists, Episcopal, Presbyterians) running at breakneck speed to the voting booths to vote for alcohol, knowing the degradation, dissolution it had brought into the lives of so many homes.

I could never understand how the Episcopal pastor, a church standing during the Civil war, could say to me, there is no more evil in drinking alcohol than in eating an ice cream cone. Do these hypocrites read the same Bible as the rest of us?

This past weekend, the Highway Patrol cited 117 drivers for driving while impaired in New Hanover and Brunswick county. They also charged 12 different underage drinkers, 98 license violations, 11 reckless drivers, 33 seat belt violations and 79 speeding tickets.

The spineless, corrupt county commissioners pretended they knew nothing about the recent ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) board's problems, they pretended they knew nothing about the incredulous salary of the local administrator. Around half a million dollars paid to him and his son in salaries and benefits for handling a shady, but profitable operation. It turns out that this type of thing goes on all over the state. Who cares, the state is making 250 million in profits from liquor sales in state-controlled liquor stores. What is wrong with this picture?

Traveling the world, I saw the inequities of the world...coming from the world's wealthiest country, seeing the world's poorest countries.

As a child, one man in the community was a “land hog” he wanted to own every farm, and the farm next to it. I remember so well, he would come steaming down the road on his big tractor, by us, while we were plowing mules. He would never speak to any of us “wee peasants”, he was the uncle of one of my aunts, my father's brother's wife. She said, “Uncle Bob is so tight, worth millions, his wife has never owned a new dress.” Recently, I asked a pastor, “please answer this question for me” I told him about Uncle Bob, “it so happened that every time there was a drought in the county, my father would gather all the farmers at the church and 'pray for rain'. This man, land hog, who never went to church otherwise, would always shows up at the prayer meeting for rain. Is this enough belief in our blessed Lord to save his soul?” Do those who vote for liquor, lottery, sin and then have our young people arrested for drunkenness, “darken” their soul”? Is there anything wrong with this picture?