Black Death

The Black Death, 1347-1351, wiped out half the population of Europe and over one hundred million of the world‘s population. Scholars question and debate much of the details of the Plague but it is believed to have started through the fleas of rats. It led to the morbidity of the most innocent of the population including the poorest and contributed to the ruin of many religions including decimation of the Catholic Church. There have been recurrences of this Plague in other places in Europe, and indeed around in the world such as in Spain and Italy.  Much later America was affected by the Plague mostly in San Francisco where there was much death and rats which could be seen running down ropes of ships being tied in the port facility were a scourge on the city. It was a horrible form of death and like all pandemics tested the social fabric of health and commerce.

Europe again, is in a state of despair mostly due to their own inattention to immigration and border control by an influx of Muslims, mostly African, who risk life trying to find a better existence in European countries.  Most, like refugees from Cuba, are trying to get to America on makeshift floating devices or refugees from Mexico and other Latin American countries trying to get to America through tunnels, over or under fences, the exploitation of the human psyche and the determination for finding a better life, has led to untold hardship and death. Just last week, a ship carrying many Africans sank. A container carrying many was discovered with most of them dead. The risk involved in trying to find a better life here on this earth can be compared to the risk of eternal damnation for the unrepentant soul.

Much of Europe’s trouble is self-imposed because of the desire for cheap labor from the Muslim countries of Turkey and those in North Africa.  Instead of going back home, they stay.  One of the largest mosques in the world is now located in Cologne, Germany.  The Muslims’ have many babies and they do not abort their babies.  Among Westerners, more caskets are manufactured than cradles.  Women in Western Europe have stopped having children, so the Muslims have rapidly taken over.

So many Africans have died trying to cross at Gibraltar that there is little burial ground for the dead. Almost the same situation has happened in the Canary Islands, off the Coast of Africa. With all the problems of colonialism, at least the colonial powers, England, France, Germany, Portugal employed natives in their own native country and introduce housing, streets, social and commercial systems which improves their living standards. I will not go into the sociology of white-owned black rule or black-owned black rule but using South Africa, the wealthiest African nation as an example, matters have not improved, only deteriorated with Black rule. More blacks are unemployed in South Africa now than before Mandela. Living conditions of blacks are worse now than before Mandela.

The African country of Somalia is without government, so terrible that the military from other African countries, who had tried to give some relief, have withdrawn. I remember my absolute consternation when in the Sudan and Ethiopia as I saw the tragedy’s already existing there (nothing compares to present day Darfur) and one of the Sudanese officials saying to me, “ You must go back to your country and try to get us some help. This is a place of complete decimation.”

Of course, as always, in every trip around the world, some reporter was anxious to interview me about the trip. How often, do you find a blind man traveling the world, able to report on conditions? But, as always, until my series of commentaries on my travels, reporters just like to romanticize and talk about the insignificant, such as my crossing one river in Nigeria on an ancient rope bridge. Even my description of the peace corps worker, who I met, along with a British ambassador, who had escaped Charles Taylor’s Liberia with the machete deaths was of no interest.

I described in detail my escape from Kigali in Rwanda where the genocide had just begun (1 million Tutsi were killed by the Hutu’s), where even the United Nations representatives were expelled from the country, and one accompanied me to the airport where we had to fight our way through gangs of young black “head hunters” to get into the airport where we were kept in the superintendents' office with what dire police protection was available. Facilities at the airport, the only one in the country, was behind barbed fenced, the taxi drivers who drove to the airport in a caravan for protection, drove right up to the gate where they formed a gauntlet of protection, as much as possible, for us to get inside.

To this day, just as fresh in my mind as the day it happened, I remember my camera bag hanging around my neck, my white cane and 2 suitcases, being swung side to side trying to protect myself along with the drivers and my guide and the UN officials as we escaped Rwanda into the airport, eventually on the last plane out. I have heard the hatred in the voices of these black people. I know something of the black death and only in the “echo chambers” of hell itself will one hear the cries of the women and children who have fallen victim to the desperation and desolation of the black continent.

Books have been written on the genocide in Liberia, the hell of a 27 year war in Angola, the horror stories of Somalia, the beheading of non-Muslims and the stoning of Muslims in Nigeria. Just this week, photos were shown of a 17 year old girl, held down by adults receiving 39 lashes, for sexual activity against Muslim law.

The world's greatest navy seemingly cannot detect or prevent the hijacking of its flagged ships, but untrained pirates operating from failed boats out of the harbors of a failed country. Have we become so “drugged” that we do not have the mental ability to comprehend what is happening, not only in our own country, but around the world? It does not take a disease such as bubonic plague, the black plague or malaria (from rats and mosquitoes), or starvation. (At the Nigerian airport, the British ambassador said to me, “You stupid Americans send food, why not metal garbage cans for these people to protect their food from rats.”). When will a world of wealth recognize the cries of babies and small children or their desperate mothers in these countries facing black death.