Heart Trouble

The three big ones, the leading causes of death in America each year: heart attack, cancer, and stroke. More die from heart trouble than anything else, 616,000 last year. When you consider the amount of work this one muscle does each day of your life, pumping much blood through 2,000 miles of vessels, the most intricate bio-electronic system one can imagine, you can easily understand why the heart just gives out, and the first thing anyone does to determine your death is to determine blood pressure.

One of the world's greatest books, Charles Dickens' Tales of Two Cities, written in 1859, the same year as Darwin's Origin of Species, the book written about London and Paris during the time of the French Revolution. To show how recent the book, my great grandparents were children at that time, and the Civil war was about to begin. The book starts out, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” (We could easily say the same thing about this time in history.) A little known London lawyer represented a young man in a French prison dungeon, in order to save his client, whom he considered worth saving, they exchanged clothes, the lawyer took the prisoner's place in the dungeon, and the next day went to the guillotine. The prisoner went free. Here we have the famous words from the lawyer, “it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

Many times in my life, thinking of the death of a younger friend or even a person who I do not know, with family and children who need him. I have thought, “if only I could replace him, I had much rather die myself than see one of my grandsons go to an early grave.” After all, totally blind, having lived most of life with it's many challenges, there is, and I firmly believe this, a much better place for me. Grief is not for the death of an aged person, one who has lived a long life, one who is worn out. Grief in death is for the young, particularly a father or mother of children.

It was during WW2, I was just a child, my war was the Korean war, my grandfather was on the County Selective Service Committee, those responsible for giving deferments, and investigating the circumstances of those drafted for service in the war. A county which gave much in the selective service processes during WW2: Colonel John Langston of the Presidential Appeals Board, and General Kenneth C. Royall, the last Secretary of War...both from Wayne County, NC. One outstanding gentleman in the county went before the board, and asked that he be sent to the war instead of his son. I think I can remember the exact quote of my grandfather, the man, Mr. Aycock, “I was in WW1, and I know how to survive. My son would have to be trained in all the things, which I already know. Please let me go instead of him, I don't believe his mother could survive losing him.”

This week, the world observed the 65th recognition of the atrocity of Hiroshima. 140,000 people killed at one time, with one bomb...most just vaporized, men, women, children. America is engaged in it's longest war, the war in Afghanistan, I said on the radio the first day of that war, when flags were waiving, the country had come together in an attitude of retaliation, “these folks in Washington have never been to Afghanistan, have never seen the Hindu Kush. I am not a Rudyard Kipling, cannot write about these exotic places, but I have been there several times.” Every country who has tried to change that place: Britain, Russia, etc. have been thrown out. We cannot even imagine the horror story of these countries. America has more war casualties each month, after 8 years. But, on top of our casualties, think of what this warfare is doing to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with a 2,000 mile border between them. Now, in a few days, with a 900 mile border, Iran. Even thirty years ago, I witnessed people on these borders carrying large bags of their belongings on their shoulders...cruel, harsh cold weather, barefoot children. From Banyan (I saw the great statues in the mountainside before they were destroyed) to Kabul, I never saw anything but people riding donkeys and living in huts. Drones dropping bombs on people will change nothing, except make them poorer and angrier. I have been in the Khyber pass several times, still as 2,000 years ago, camel trains coming through.

I have, here in this room where I am dictating this, a cast-iron fireplace cooking pot used by my ancestors, some of the first colonists to land on American shores. I own the survey map of the first farm at Morristown, New Jersey, drawn and signed (1766) by one of the first surveyors, Adonijah Peacock (blacksmith, surveyor, killed in 1777 drying out gunpowder which he had manufactured and which General Washington had refused). Our ancestors came to America seeking freedom...freedom to worship, freedom of every type of opportunity, freedom to educate their children, freedom from the exploitation of royalty and their appointed bureaucrats.

Our founding fathers, in spite of the rewriting of history by liberal, political academics, went to church carrying their Bibles and their muskets. They went west, conquering this great nation carrying their Bibles, their muskets, and Blackstone's law book. They actually believed that they could survive in a nation without military services. The military was forced on them because of pirates, the early colonies did not have jails. This was to be a land of opportunity and responsibility. Just think of how things have changed in just two hundred and thirty years, opportunity squashed by regulation of every sort. The largest prison population (2.3 million) of any nation, including even the totalitarian communist countries. A nation which took pride in church-established universities, colleges, hospitals, facilities for the orphans and disabled, now taken over by a collectivist controlled experiment in socialism. Freedom to worship has been replaced by freedom from worship, holy days becoming holidays, playing church like playing games in civic clubs, steeples on country clubs and morgues.

But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. (1 Corinthians 15:13-14) Therefore, my beloved brethren be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58 )