#1948 Featherbed Warrior

#1948

Featherbed Warriors

Don't you wish you had purchased Microsoft stock when it came out 30 years ago, Microsoft stock has gone up 89,000%: $1000 invested then would be $1million now.

There are one billion people of the seven billion people on the face of the Earth now on Facebook.  Why are these social media sites so valuable?  This writer remembers the time when you could send a message on a one cent postcard...that was all we had; I was raised in impoverished Eastern North Carolina on a dirt road without power-phone-waterlines.  AND, we doctors wonder why aged people of that time in history possessed such clogged up insides: filled with toxicity.  Whatever the weather they had to go outside to an outhouse for elimination and they suffered with the toxicity of lack of elimination which poisoned their bodies...led to their deaths. 

I am saying all this because there is a difference in people.  Bill Gates, world's richest man, founded of Microsoft-operating out of a car garage.  Would present himself to anyone as just an ordinary man, but in his 10 Rules for Success, his first rule is that there is no such thing as fairness. 

Most of those on Facebook are just ordinary people but you never know when one is going to stand out.  Our Puritan forefathers ALL used outhouses; such was the case at the White House until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.  Today, all over the world in a bottomless ocean of technology ordinary people use a handheld phone which contains more technology than the module which landed on the Moon.  Were these ordinary men?  Was John Glenn an ordinary man?  Men, who were willing to be blasted off the face of the Earth with power equivalent to an atomic bomb...perhaps to never return.

The first telephone was placed in the White House by President Hayes in 1877.  Its number was number one.  Hayes did not think it was very useful.  This writer was raised in a community where there was only one telephone for many miles: at my cousin's country store.  But, very ordinary people live life, did the best they knew without inside plumbing, telephones, or computers.  All this has happened in my lifetime, can we even imagine what the future holds...everything invented-produced-used by ordinary people? 

I so remember, as a small child, helping my grandmother "make-up" the feather beds in our house, there were no sophisticated mattresses with programming for softness and hardness.  Much birdlife had given their feathers, one of the most intricate of God's creations in order that one could sleep in comfort on a very soft bed.  The bed, filled with feathers was fluffed and smoothed to give the tired worker some measure of sleep.  Today's spoiled young people cannot imagine the hard ground on which soldiers slept while fighting for the facilities-pleasures which they enjoy in this country. 

I am a rare book collector, own a collection of thousands of antiquarian books, there are books about everything.  I once had two young college intellectuals-millennials who were shown the pictures of a farm outhouse, they had never seen such.  They had no idea what a slit trench or other facilities soldiers had to use could not even be imagined.  They looked at a book showing the butchery of animals, hogs and cows, which they enjoy eating but the pictures of the butchery process mad them ill.  Most children have no idea about the origination of the eggs which they find on their plates...that the shells of eggs are the most intricate processes of God's creation.  Yet, ordinary people, all over the world, know about the fowl-gallus species-bird with their intricate feathers, egg shells-a marvel of physics, hollow bones which make them lighter in flight.  This writer, at the North Pole, saw the hills blackened with birds called terns, with all our knowledge of physics-geography-physiology we still cannot understand how this bird life can fly continuously from the North Pole to the South Pole in a resolution of tracking (those at the front moving back, everyone taking their turn at the front in order.)  The most sophisticated zoologist attempts to explain how the baby chick knows when to peck himself out of the eggshell, knows immediately how to hold his head in order to get water down this throat, and knows his own mother's clucking pattern from any other hen.

Many years ago, I heard Dr. Margaret Swanton, professor in the UNC-CH medical school make the statement that I have never forgotten, I don't think she realized at the time what she had said, she said, "The human body does not function the way it is written in books, every doctor worth the piece of paper he holds knows the truth of this statement."  If all science were so simple, so many things, such marvels of God's creation, so easily understood...everything fitting into a design of scientific reasoning or certainly some laws of nature.  It takes ordinary people to realize that man does not have the answer for very many things...what makes some of us so different, many so indifferent, MOST SO ORDINARY.  Letters behind your name mean very little just as rank on your shoulder means little on the battlefield.  Most war heroes were very ordinary men, most people who have the mental wiring to make great discoveries have no special metabolic structure, only blessed with an innate desire to pursue and accomplish.  Young people could still be fluffing a feather bed, which would still feel so good to a tired body but there was someone who had the ability to seek-study-select a better source of sleep-rest-comfort.  Thank goodness there was someone who pursued the idea of pushing water through pipes, using the physics of airways for sound travel, the magnanimity of electronics to bring electronic messaging into a home via a talking box: the ever present television set, the completely dependent computer (every person-business-warrior now completely dependent on the computer...a system which even a small child can operate: a child which has never seen a chick escape from an egg, an outhouse, a dial telephone).  Those of you with degrees-military rank-much wealth-good looks-gravitas of every type GOOD NEWS, remember, God loves the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, the color-scent-texture of a rose as well as the plainness but essential quality of grass.