Rebellion

Oh, give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above
Don't fence me in
Let me ride thru the wide-open country that I love
Don't fence me in
Cole Porter, Don't Fence Me In

These lines of a popular song in my youth probably did not start the rebellion of the hippie generation. It has always been man's nature to rebel, it started in the Garden of Eden, our first parents, not content to obey one rule in paradise. This was their only rule: not to touch one tree...the No-No tree. But, temptation in any form, even a serpent, who was probably very beautiful, is hard to resist. Oscar Wilde, the great British writer, said he could resist “anything but temptation”.

Many years ago, it seems now like another lifetime, I met one of the most colorful preachers I have ever known. An author of many books, he had come to this country from Ireland, speaking in many places. He met me at one of his speaking engagements and wanted me to examine his eyes as well as talk with me about some of my writing. It is the first time I ever heard the phrase, from the Bible, “to obey is better than sacrifice.” (1 Samuel 15:22) This remarkable man, born, educated and having lived in Ireland most of his life, started his ministry as a street preacher. He had memorized most of the Bible, because in preaching on the street, there was not enough light for reading. He asked me, since you are a committed Christian, such a Bible scholar, why did you not go into the ministry? I said, “I am not sure I obeyed, if called.” That is when he used this phrase “to obey is better than sacrifice”, and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, he was pointing directly at my impending, complete blindness.

Natural law dictates compliance, laws, rules of conduct, can you even imagine a society, a country without laws? Every civilization, no matter how remote, has certain natural laws, even if they have never heard of Jesus Christ: laws against murder, laws against adultery, laws against the abuse of children, laws against one person stealing another person's “stuff”. God forbids adultery, and so does every decent fiber of the human body. God forbids murder, the sanctity of life from conception to the grave. Why does anyone, any political party, such as the Democrats, think they will escape God's wrath for permitting and promoting such. It is only in godless societies that old people do not receive decent care until death.

In Africa, old people are taken into the bush and left for disposal by wild animals. In the Arctic, old people are put on ice floes and put out to sea to be disposed of by wild animals. In Marxist, godless, totalitarian-controlled countries such as communist China, North Korea, eugenics and euthanasia as with Obama's death panels, old people will be disposed of quietly and quickly. This is real rebellion, rebellion as put forward by Planned Parenthood, the Hemlock Society, and other masters of rebellion.

How does a society, a school, a home live without rules, without discipline. In the home where I was reared, there were rules. My mother had rules at the table, rules about our general behavior, one of my favorite radio church services, the pastor asked children to behave in the building. Just before she died, one of my friends, Ann Evans Hendrick, who I knew when we were children, and whose father was a pastor, told me how her father took her into a Sunday school room and burned her behind up because she misbehaved during the church service. She said, “I will never forget your aunt Sara saying as I came out of the Sunday school room, 'I like to see a preacher who practices what he preaches'” She went on to live an important life, and I was with her last when I attended her father's funeral. Her father was a pastor for 75 years, a man of obedience, not rebellion.

Like my great grandfather, and other great, obedient, not-rebellious men. I give large cash awards in honor of these men each year. Appreciation, recognition for men who lived obedient lives, to rebel is easy, Satan is right there to help you out. To obey is difficult, often a real sacrifice. Because they rebelled against the words of God, and contemned the counsel of the most High...Fools because of their transgression, and because of their iniquities, are afflicted. (Psalm 107:11-17)

If liberals in government, the schools, the homes are trying to do everything possible to destroy government, schools, homes, they are certainly doing the right thing. If conservatives are doing what they can to restore government, schools, homes, they evidently are doing the wrong things. Many things are allowed, but we do them the wrong way. I believe God encourages and blesses in business, the professions, academia, but because of the influences of Madison avenue, “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches” (Mark 4:19), we are tempted to cut corners. To play the games of the world, rather than holding on to the exactness of a Holy God. Even Solomon, the world's wisest and richest man, had trouble with this. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

One of the great dilemmas of my life, I studying what the world thinks, what the specialists and experts think, reading all the “self-help” books, while trying to reconcile all these matters in obedience to an uncompromising God. God made us as we are, warts and all, perfect people have become an endangered specie. God has given us freedom of will, and the human mind thrives in freedom, there are 7,000 endangered animal species in the world today, among these, Tigers. Enterprising Europeans scientists set up cameras high in the Bhutan Himalayas (4000m high), they wanted pictures of an endangered species, the Bhutan Himalayan Tiger, they have their pictures, a remarkable achievement. So it is with the great Hubble Telescope or the great electronic microscopes. The ingenuity of man is not inhibited by his rebellion to cross new frontiers, he is just required to obey the One who put up fences in the first-place. Fences of safety, laws of nature, honesty.

Education (2008)

My parents were reared within two miles of each other.  My grandparents and great-grandparents and most of the neighbors in that large rural community were life-long residents.  The house in which my mother and father were reared had survived the Civil War.  The country school which I attended from first grade through twelfth grade graduation was located next to the one-room school where my grandfather attended school with NC Governor Charles Brantley Aycock, who was Governor in 1900. My father’s ancestors had founded Morristown, New Jersey and had moved to Wayne County as hard-working, land-owning farmers, and so it was with my mother’s family. There were thirteen students in my high school graduating class.

The same first grade teacher taught my mother’s four children in the first grade.  As I told Dr. Guy Phillips, one of NC’s great educators at Chapel Hill, who had taken a liking to me even though I was a science major, Miss Dickerson, the first grade teacher, was a real teacher.  The very first day, she got those first graders in line and they stayed in line. The very first morning of each new year, she marched that first grade into the auditorium for the general assembly. This was education at its best. It was never that good before and it will never be that good in the future.  A community school where all the students, the teachers, and the parents all had respect for one another and knew how to behave.  My mother had her last child, a rather rambunctious spoiled boy because the three other children (I was the oldest) were already grown and I and my sister were in college.  I asked my mother if she was going to take this young, spoiled brother to his first grade class.  She said, “I will take him as far as the door.  Miss Dickerson can handle him.”  My father was Chairman of the school board and the same principal, C.R.Lewis, had been principal most of my life (He died at age 100).  My father and Mr. Lewis said “Not one parent, not one teacher, had ever complained about Miss Dickerson.”  She knew what she was doing.

When those students left the first grade, they could all read and write and were well ready for the second grade.  The knew how to behave because from the first day, she got them in line and they stayed in line the rest of their time in school.  Today, we are just playing school, there is little discipline, most students are just socially promoted from one grade to another, and as a Massachusetts educator said recently, “We have just thrown money at the schools, it has not worked. We should close down and start over.”

I knew Senator Jesse Helms before he was a United States Senator.  Since he was in the Senate for thirty-eight years, I knew him when I was a young man just back from the war.  I sent him a news photo before he died showing he and I at a law enforcement appreciation banquet where I introduced him.  I said to Senator Helms one time, “The next time we go to war, we should just throw large bundles of money at the enemy and see if we are successful.”

My largess with scholarships and awards is well known at educational institutions. I have been very brutally honest with the administration of these institutions. I worked my way through eight years, leading to a professional doctorate. When I went to school, there were no scholarships, no Pell Grants. I went to school during the day and worked at night, sold Bibles door-to-door in the summer, covering every “pig path” in eastern North Carolina. (There is no harder work on earth than this, try selling a Bible to pagans.)

I am well familiar with the products of many schools.  I live too frugally and have worked too hard until the age of 79 to throw any money at education or anything else.  I am a 100% disabled, service-connected, totally blind veteran.  And I have had the opportunity to travel the world and know the difficulty students encounter in third-world countries attempting to get an education.  I have not forgotten speaking in a University in Beijing, China, and a group of male students begging me to send them some books such as Hemingway and Faulkner that they had been unable to read because of the regimentation of the communist system.  I have not forgotten a college where I spoke in Nigeria and the attempt made there to educate students under impossible circumstances. 

Almost half the students who enter the first grade in this country never graduate from high school.  Only about one-third of the students who enter college in this country graduate from college.  In our nation’s capital, we spend about $17,000 per year, per student, and the results for money spent are deplorable.

In traveling the world, I have found that those who value education are successful because it is profitable for them to learn to speak several languages. They have the ambition, just as I had the ambition, to make the one life which we are given a courageous challenge. Life is tough enough with a good education. What hope do our students have otherwise?

No Turning Back

Arriving at a remote south sea island, the small boat I was on was met by small boats with natives bearing spears. Once they learned that those in my boat were tourists, all was well. But, believe it or not, the natives of these south seas islands are still fighting one another, keeping territorial boundaries, by seafaring warfare, much as their ancestors did thousands of years ago. We read of Caesar's Gallic wars, the exploitation of the new world by ships from Northern Europe. America did not intend to have army, naval forces, forced to do so because of pirates.

In the naval battles of history, the flag of the country, the country's colors, could be easily raised and lowered very much like the sails on the galleons, but anytime a warring ship's captain entered a naval conflict which he intended on winning, instead of raising the flag so that in case of defeat it could be lowered, he would nail the flag to the mast...no turning back, no defeat possible...only victory ahead.

When the conquistadors (Spanish conquerors of the new world, 15th - 19th centuries) arrived off the coast of South America, as Cortez and his conquistadors sought to conquer the Aztec, when those aboard ship, now on land, looked toward the sea, they saw nothing but burning ships. Cortez's soldiers knew right away that there would be no retreat, no turning back, that it would be a battle to the end. According to Aztec and Inca history, there were never more ruthless rulers than the Spaniards who conquered most of the Americas.

In today's warfare with drones and robots, warfare has become very impersonal. Even in the Civil war, where more Americans were killed than in any other war (630,000), war was close and personal, killing one another with swords and bayonets. There were probably more killed with bayonets in WW1 than in any other way. In the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Uganda, much as the conflict in the Congo, most of the killing was done with machetes. Machetes manufactured in Mexico, shipped to Africa with the shipping boxes marked “garden implements”.

War killing is truly murder when you are looking directly at the victim, this is the reason we consider “partial-birth abortion” murder (the killing of a baby just before birth, the abortionist having turned the child so the head comes out last instead of first, the head in the mother is separated from the body). It takes a real murderer to kill an innocent child, one who never had the breath of life. Mr. Obama and his followers, those who voted for him, will answer to God, the only One who could possibly avenge this practice.

Not since WW2 has America won a war, still suffering the pangs of defeat from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. We have a supposed “war on poverty”, there are more people in poverty in America today than ever before. We had a supposed “war on drugs”, more drugs are used now than ever before, drugs have killed more people than nuclear activity. We had a supposed cold war, with the USSR, the communist warriors just went underground, and we are still facing them. With the arrest of several last week, Russian spies in this country, we know that they have just “backed up” and are getting ready to start again. Really, America is engaged in warfare all over the world.

Henry David Thoreau of Walden Pond fame said, “Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to show your [flag], and woe be to the coward. Whether passed on a bed of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play and admits no foolish distinction. Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.
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I personally get so tired of spoiled, lazy people, I was thinking recently, if only I could meet one young male, who has the same zeal for life, the want for success, the desire for knowledge, the demand for all on the alter which I had as a young man. You don't find them anymore, most are just “momma's boys”. It is no surprise that there is so much divorce, same-sex marriage is nothing new. Many women have been married to one of the same sexuality, just not the same plumbing, for a long time.

Foundations are really important, young people should learn early in life, that is the sure and basic foundation on which you will depend at old age. Throw away your health, ambition when you are young, and you will not have much to go to battle with later. Learn everything you can about everything. My mother had a very little formal education, and so did her mother and on back, same with the male ancestors. My father was a high school graduate equivalent to today's college graduate, this was their axiom: “learn how to do anything, if you never need the knowledge, good; if so, you will know how to do it.” It is as important to prepare food, as to use a hammer.

I was a military field-grade officer, I have worked my entire life, both in my chosen profession and every area encountered. Even blind, I have not found anything I could not do. The reason I promote the draft of young men into the military service, at least all are taught something about discipline, cleanliness, healthcare, work-ethic, responsibility. Many of these qualities they do not get at home, and sad to say, usually not their fault, just as small children are anxious to learn, want to read, want to do schoolwork, want to engage in controlled athletics, they must be trained...this take time. This is why is the coach is always voted the most popular teacher, because the coach has rules, the coach takes the time to train, around the coach you are dressed uniformly.

A mother who allows her daughter to act like a whore will have a whore for a daughter, and her grandchildren will have a whore for a mother. A mother who allows her son to act like a girl, never insist that he does manly things, will have a gay son, it never fails. I have known many gay males, not once did a hear a gay male speak of his father, he always talked of his mother, and that is the way his mother wanted it. A mother must really hate the biological father of her son to turn him into this awful, winless way of life. Life is a big enough battle without having to fight the battle of “mixed gender”.

If I could talk to every young person, I would speak of early training, early study habit, early education traits. I would talk about the remarkable body...the value of health, the value of exercise, the value of rest. Our ancestors lived healthy lives because they went to bed early, did not stay up late watching a filmed slop (liquid garbage), and then yawning all the next day. It is true, early to bed, early to rise, make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. No truer words were ever spoken.

The greatest men and women I have ever known celebrated youth by captivating life. They realized that the trip is short, not a dress rehearsal, you only go around once, make the best of it. Nail your colors to the mast, there is no turning back.

Not Worth the Cost

I have lived a busy life. When I returned from the military and could no longer practice my profession because of blindness, I went into two areas of investments, the stock market and real estate. In real estate, before you build anything or even repair anything, you figure the cost. Just as important as figuring the cost of a physical building is figuring the cost of moral actions. For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have [sufficient] to finish [it]? (Luke 14:28)

Many times in my life, others have come to me wanting assistance because they had not figured the cost of their actions. Firstly, I want to discuss a 20 year old man who came to me from his life of homosexuality having spent much time in the “bath houses” with a diagnoses of HIV AIDS. This was in the days before there was any treatment at all for this very mysterious disease. When it was diagnosed you could almost depend on the death nail. Terrified, his only escape from the embarrassment to his family and his own ego was suicide. But he was afraid to go through the suicide experience alone. As is the case with assisted suicide, now legal in many states, or the infamous Dr. Kevorkian, he wanted someone with more knowledge than he, standing by. He messed up. Astounded and ridden with pathos and commiseration, I tried to find an escape for him other than death. I called some authorities at the university and made arrangements for him to see professionals there. He later died but not from suicide. He had not really counted the cost of his lifestyle, to himself, to his loving family, his friends, a country and Savior who needed his talent.

Another young man worked for me. His girlfriend was very interested in having sex with him. The first sexual penetration, she became pregnant. Then, she was not so interested in him anymore. His mother, a lawyer, persuaded the young girl to have the baby. Then his mother took the baby and reared the child as his brother. In the home and in the community, this young boy, as far as the world knew was the brother of the father. The mother had already elicited a promise from the older son that he would never tell the child that he was his father. Young people should count the cost before they engage in any type of sexual activity which can involve not only themselves but their families and the innocence of a child.

A young black man who did some work for me, mostly driving, was a victim of HIV AIDS. He had a very responsible job in the corporate world. As an attractive person, he was enticed to have one fling with a homosexual fellow worker and from that one experience in the gay world, he contracted AIDS. The medical authority who made the diagnosis told him that he must tell his wife; because there could be no more sexual activity between the two of them. He described to me how she screamed and went into convulsions before she was taken to the hospital, a complete physical and psychological victim with disappointment in her unfaithful husband. He failed to count the cost before he yielded to the temptation from the one person Satan sent his way.

A university student, later married to a very fine Christian girl told me about their inability to have children. He said however, my first year at the university I paid for two abortions for girls whom I had impregnated. He said, “I paid for the killing for two of my children and now with the wonderful woman whom I love very much, we have been unable to have children.” He asked, “Is God holding me responsible for the murder of my own two children?” He failed to count the cost and the knowledge was with him every day of his life.

These four characterizations happened in a town of 120,000 people. You do not have to go to a large city or even a third world country to find examples of the cost involved in a stupid lifestyle. Several times in scripture, we have an account of God talking with someone, even with Satan. Satan told God that he was patrolling the earth seeking whom he could beguile. Job Chapter 1 Satan is always on the job. If he does not bother you, then you can be sure that you are already his.

Two great stars have died in recent years among many others, as a direct result of homicide. In each case, Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson, their attending physicians have been accused of prescribing chemicals leading to their death. Of course, doctors over prescribe chemicals to millions which lead to their death. It just so happens that with famous people, death causes are revealed. Five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Hypocrites prescribed an oath, which states among other things “Do no harm.” Most medical schools have stopped using this Hippocratic oath but it still amazes me that the most courageous course of study in the world, leading to your ability to care for the disability of others, a doctor would get caught up in overprescribing or not using the intelligence that God has given to the dumbest among us. One does not have to be in practice one day before learning that he must exercise more self-control than his patients. His patients do not know how to control the sin of illegal sex. His patients do not know how to control the sin of overeating. His patients do not know how to control the sin of addiction. If there is one metaphoric absolute in the world controlling all human activity, it is the absolute of discipline. We live in a permissive society. Undisciplined, we think we can do anything without consequence. Character determines destination. The best determination of character is discipline.

Throughout Asia, particularly in Burma, the adept knowledge of the weaving of fine carpets and tapestries is handed down from one generation to another. I went into sheltered areas, saw entire families sitting on the ground in a disciplined way, having counted the cost of silk thread and accuracy, weaving expensive carpets knotting them on the back. (The back appears ugly with so many knots.) Hand making magnificence with entwined weaving of colored threads of beauty, God given patterns...ready to last for centuries... The older these carpets are, the more valuable they are. One does not buy them due to the evidence of work found in the knotting on the back. It is the work of making a thing of beauty that determines not only a carpet, but a life. The disciplined threads from years of struggle and learning will make a carpet or a life worth the cost.