Confrontations

At my age, having traveled every continent of the world and studied most things concerning world history, very few news items shock me any more. Today, the President of the United States, just at a convenient time disclosed his birth certificate.; a matter of conjecture for many years, something he should have done long ago. Tomorrow, a future king of England will be married to a commoner with whom he has been fornicating/cohabitating for years.

There was a time when leaders of moral principles would have confronted the world on these and many other things. For instance, America and Europe played footsie with Colonel Gaddafi despite of his atrocities, but now with the 143 million tonnes of gold in his bank and the oil under his desert, it is expedient to get rid of him. Just as soon as new valuable antiquities were discovered in Baghdad, along with the known reserves of oil, the Iraq war started...and so it goes with wars and diplomacy around the globe. Much of the hypocrisy and down right lying and cheating has been revealed by Wikileaks. From one side of the world to the other, controlled citizenry confronting tyrannical leadership.

In a world of spineless politicians, spineless pastors, spineless parents, there is very little confrontation. The psychiatrist or psychologist may confront parental abuse in the home, but the professional usually takes the side of the person paying his bills. The father may be a dictator, but the mother will yield the welfare of her children to have harmony in the home. We think we are not a communist society, but we have all the authoritarian, totalitarian control features that you find in every Marxist country. In the Marxist country, your freedoms are killed from birth to death, the womb to the tomb, there is no need for ambition, dreams.

Even in America, don't expect anyone to understand or appreciate your dreams or ambitions, don't expect appreciation for productivity or accomplishment. You must get the joy and pleasure of living and giving in the good life from the One who has given you life and your ability, don't expect recognition from anyone else. My soul has ached my entire life, mostly associating with supposed Christians, to hear someone say, “I pray for you.” It is time to have the confrontation with your fellow Christians, family, friends. Ask them if they are a real believer, or just an imposter/pretender? Are our interconnections, our interfacing with family, friends, or even children, genuine, or is it just a matter of getting something we want? Is our interaction with God, if any, just a matter of confronting Him when we have a particular need?

You cheat yourself if you do not put flesh and personality with the bones of the great people of history. There is a reason that Elijah and Moses stood with Christ in their glorious reappearance...Elijah was not afraid to confront, even the hundreds of prophets of Baal. He did not care about political correctness...what the world's population of that time might think of him, he said, “in whose presence I stand.” (1 Kings 18:15) Like Moses before Pharaoh, Paul or Luke when confronted, they knew how to stand. Paul had planned to go to Troas, but God led him to Macedonia, Philippi. Think of the value of Paul's love letter to the church at Philippi (Philippians) There is no record that Joseph, a 17-year-old going through the trials of life very young, ever shedding tears in prison, or out. There is no record that he did anything but stand straight at age thirty before Pharaoh.

Today's world is bewitched with silliness, traditions and exaggerations, parents afraid to confront even their own children, much less the abusers of their own children. One of my young employees told me of how he was sexually abused by a babysitter, a friend of his mother. His mother would not believe him, would not confront the abuser, and so it continued, only more violent. I know of abuse in nursing homes, children of the abused, employers of the abusers, all are afraid to confront anyone about anything.

I hear of unbelievable abuse in nursing homes, the patient, afraid to say anything, and the abuse worsens. 79% of the people in nursing homes never have a visitor. Family members will say nothing because they do not want the responsibility of taking care of the abused patient. A long time friend, Udi (now 92), ill, in a nursing home right across the street from New Hanover hospital. An attendant came in with her breakfast, and she said to the attendant, “I need to go to bathroom.” The attendant said, “you can to the bathroom after you eat your breakfast.” My friend's son, just arriving, standing in the door, hearing the conversation, got his mother into the bathroom and when she emerged, put a robe around her and said, “you will not stay in this place one more minute!” There should have been a confrontation with law enforcement about such treatment.

My secretaries over the years have been amused and amazed with the letters I have written about abuse in the business world, the political world. Their first words, “you know that no one is going to do anything about this.” My words, always, “as long as no one says anything, does anything about these horrific practices, it will continue.” You always just hope that some concerned person will take the time to investigate. There was a time when investigative reporters had the spine to confront. In this politically correct world, no one confronts anyone about anything any more. This is the reason that so many dreams are shattered, a country that at one time enjoyed the respect of the world, it was the ambition of the world to come here in order to escape tyranny. The American dream depended on confronting everything, evil, wrongdoing, hypocrisy.

Like a withering plant, we are told that in five years that China will be the world's superpower. Contradictory to everything we believed about the American spirit, American know-how, Satan has drawn us away from God's mercy. We have too much pride to take Jesus at His Word, we should look in the mirror and confront our problems.

Twilight Zone

One of the worst nights I ever spent in my life, this was not in a war, a foreign country, aboard a ship in time of storm, and I have experienced all this. Hearing the screams of a wife, as her husband abused her.

I had a problem in my house, the construction man advised that I sleep somewhere else. To save money on a motel, I decided to stay in a furnished duplex which I owned, all I had to take with me was clothing and some bed linens. During the night, in the adjoining duplex, I heard this awful abuse going on, a man beating his wife as she screamed for help. I had interviewed the couple before they moved into the house. He was a high school football star/player, and both had responsible jobs. They always paid their rent on time, and I had no complaints from anyone else. Other neighboring houses was not like hearing through a wall. Of course I did not have phone service in this apartment, had more sense than to interfere.

The next morning, I called my friend, the local sheriff, he said, “I will look into the matter, let me handle it. You stay out of it, don't ever get involved in a domestic dispute. More law enforcement officers are killed involving this than anything else.” One other time, years later, I witnessed the same thing, a small maid's apartment under my beach house had been rented to a couple. I heard the same type abuse one night, a young man striking his wife, she crying and screaming, begging him to stop. The next morning, I put a note on their door telling them to vacate immediately. One day on the beach, together, they both yelled insults at me.

I am convinced that there are people, particularly women, who thrive on abuse. These masochistic personalities are usually attracted to sadistic personalities. I can think of nothing more evil than a sadistic person, whether the abuse is toward another human being or an animal. We have all known animal abusers, and court records are full of human abuse, particularly children. Discipline is essential in the training of children, but abuse of any kind, on anyone, is never justified.

I cannot imagine a woman, any woman, sleeping in the same bed with a mate who is physically abusive. I have known several psychiatrists and psychologists in my professional life, they have told me that I would never believe the things they have heard in their practice. Nor, can I understand people who worship in an attitude of abusive conformity, death to unbelievers, the elimination of infidels. You may not understand why someone else does not appreciate your religious beliefs, and you may not understand their religious belief or unbelief, but you can still have a good relationship, you either decide in the beginning not to discuss your spirituality or discuss it with a motive of learning.

We all have needs, secular and temporal, physical and spiritual. The German people on the Wiemar Republic were desperate, destitute. Otherwise, you cannot explain why these intelligent people would elect Adolf Hitler. Since WWI, they had been swimming in an ocean of self-indulgence, trying to reclaim the good life, hyperinflation had taken over. Strife and bigotry ruled the day. German debt, Hitler's promise to solve the problems, made socialism inevitable. Envious eyes grabbed at savings and bank accounts, many of the financial speculators were Jewish, hyper-inflated German money was called “Jewish confetti”.

As has always been the case with academic atheists, communism, the ends justifies the means, it was easy to blame the minorities, because someone had to be blamed, someone must pay the cost. So, to the death chambers went the disabled, the disenfranchised, the Jews. The same old mantra still heard at every funeral home, every case of euthanasia, “better off, would not want to be a burden, in a better place.” Supposedly, these victims went to these death chambers, projected as work camps. They worked as slaves for I.G. Farben, and other chemical conglomerates. A sign at the entrance to Auschwitz said, in German, “Work makes you free”. It was German citizens, torturing and killing their fellow citizens.

Hitler did not hire foreigners to run his holocaust operation, any more than Janet Reno hired foreigners to come in and kill 85 women and children at the Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. It was FBI, American citizens, killing other American citizens. It was not foreigners brought in to assassinate a president, blow up a federal building, or the killing of Americans at Ruby Ridge (Randy Weaver's wife and child). Locally, the sheriff of New Hanover County did not hire outsiders to shoot a university student behind his door, it was a cold-blooded killing by a law officer who killed a young man going to open his door, and they not only killed the young man, but killed his dog, because it was barking. It was Americans, for some strange reason, sanitizing an area of Americans.

Coveting wealth and power, loving the adulation of men rather than God. Trying to satisfy lusts and greed, rather than yearning for the saving graces of all souls. Men and nations do what they do because they believe what they believe. And many times their beliefs are just rotten and evil. God “backed up” his message of love by giving up His only son on the cross for the sins of the entire world, which includes the sins of all nations and all people, even killers, whether an unborn baby, or a mother in a gas chamber. Jesus Christ was the personification of love, the perfect God/man, in the three years in which we have record of his life, He loved everyone and everyone loved Him. Almost always, there was a crowd around Him. He was rich, but for us, became poor. Born in a borrowed stable, buried in a borrowed tomb, never owned anything except one robe. Faith in him has worked for everyone who has ever tried it. It is a historical fact that although his followers might fail Him, He has never failed them.

Can any religion promote killing? In Islam, if you are not a Muslim, you are an infidel, and all infidels must die. Even in Mohammed's treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a treaty he made for his followers at Mecca, and those at Medina, clauses of the treaty call for death. In the 1988 Iraq-Iran war, 900,000 Muslims were killed. Thousands of Muslims have been killed in the Sudan-Darfur war and other areas of Africa, multiple thousands have been displaced. The beat goes on, rather, and the blasphemy of everything sacred to mankind: life, liberty, happiness, fades into the Twilight Zone of religious irascibility contrasted with the verisimilitude of love and grace