New World 2012

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the first half of the 19^th century (1835), the thing that impressed him most about America was it's public postal system. That fact that even during the Indian wars of that time, people on the frontier (Old West) were still informed about the world, could still correspond with their family, newspapers and mail were delivered.

Even in my lifetime, we so looked forward to what arrived in the mailbox, the delivery of the newspaper. In rural areas of eastern North Carolina, and, I believe, in most of America, as I have heard my mother say, there are few vehicles on country roads, but you could depend on the mailman and the school bus going down the road every weekday.

Today, most newspapers have gone out of business, the postal service has priced itself out of business, the school bus is just a vehicle for social engineering (attempt to mix races, ethnic groups, economic classes). Eventually, the liberal-socialist Democrats, the left-wing of American society will achieve the communist system of mixing all children at the nursery as they finally achieve the destruction of the family. Because of the unreliability of the media, as in Russia, China and all communist countries print material from the government will be disseminated publicly, they will be gathered together in large groups. Associated people, for one reason or another, will become more and more isolated. You can see that already, most people living together do not know who lives on either side of them.

In this technology/computer age, you can handle most of life's needs online...shopping, education courses, advice on everything from health/homeopathy to economics, hobbies, personal interests of any type, including pornography. Most young people who have worked for me in recent years have used the computer for online dating, finding someone to share interests and eventually to “shack up” with. Young people can learn all they'd want to know about one another through facebook and twitter, they do not need to endure the expense and disappointment of dating.

Today's world is a world of information fatigue. Right in your own house, information searched from from the 4 corners of the world on everything: ailments, treatments, every area of human endeavor, professional knowledge, disciplines, hobbies, every area of personal interest. Advanced graduate degrees are affordable and available on almost any discipline. The day of the encyclopedias and reference books are over. The talking heads on the television can no longer keep up with everything. Attempting to stay up with everything happening in the world, all the knowledge of the world, one does not have time to think about anything anymore.

Great discoveries were made by people just thinking, unraveling the lengths and depths of the research that many had done before them. The most important area in discovery is that of separation, separating the true from the false, the proven from the disproven. On last count, there are currently 600 uprisings in some part of the world, insurrections such as we are witnessing across North Africa and the Middle East, usually originate in the price of food. When people are hungry and are no longer able to buy the most basic necessities of life, uprisings and riots begin. Food costs usually rise because of the increased cost of gasoline for their delivery, increased costs of fertilizer for the growing. The basics of crude oil-energy production...as the cost of energy increases, so does the cost of food, and so does the cost of uprisings, often leading to actual war.

Increasingly, we are seeing two-tiered cultures throughout the world: the small number who ride in Mercedes, the huge number who are riding on donkeys, ox carts or camels. In the oil-rich Middle East, the disparity between peoples of the same nation has been evident from the beginning of history. Because technology has reached these places (television, computer, etc.) the lower classes, those who ride on donkeys and camels, are resenting those who ride in the Mercedes, who live behind walls and gates. In America, the secular press gives a hedge of protection to the limousine liberals, the private jet televangelists/politicians/rockstars. More and more, because of television and computer technology, the common man is aware of the decadence/hypocrisy...the ones who had their pockets picked in excessive taxation and submission to provide the splendor of high living.

In the world of 2012, the country pays for patriotism...there are more contractors on the battlefield than uniformed fighters. I am told that many of these contractors are paid $30,000 a month. Your government pays for research results, always guiding by a finger in the wind, likewise your government pays for polling results. One does not need a Nobel prize to inform you that human loyalties have been dispersed and often reversed.

In the cocoon of survival, the individual has decided that neither God nor government is available. In the survival instinct, the individual has retreated from large crowds. Sports stadiums and convention centers will eventually shut down, just as will the mega-church. Crowds are too attractive to a terrorist. Finding religious spontaneity/satisfaction in the living room from the very best, the church, the fraternal clubs, the civic clubs, now with a sprinkling of white hair, will become an occasion of the past.

In my lifetime, air travel was a thing of leisure and temptation, beautiful treatment, nice food, well-dressed, well-mannered travelers; on planes, like church, people dressed up instead of down. In my lifetime, train travel was a system of leisure and comfort, comfortable dining cars, superior service. All these things are history, the people who did ride the trailway bus are now in the plane, travel to “faraway places with strange-sounding names” will mostly take place in your living room. We will study and dream about the luxury liners with nice cabins and meals, steamer trunks, gala evening, all the semblances of a past of glamor and glory. Now, a cattle-boat treatment and fast-food, drive-thru status.

The country clubs, for the elitists, will survive for awhile, inner circles among the common man will be replaced by groupings, relegated by skin color, home-schooling interests, diehard sports enthusiasts. It was relatively safe on the golf course, but the day of the hunter is over, weapons are a no-no. Even the Queen of England is afraid that she is the last ruling monarch of the United Kingdom. The UK members such as Canada, Australia, etc. no longer have loyalties to Caesar, have had all they could stomach in nearby politicians and pickpocket bureaucrats. Even in America, governors, politicians, bankers are always immaculately dressed, often a carnation pinned to the lapel.

Queen Victoria, with her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840, set the standard for weddings around the world. As there are fewer and fewer weddings anywhere, economics dictate just shacking up...unmarried households, production of children at the convenience of the unwed mother. We have probably seen our last royal wedding, the royals, like everything else in fairy-tale land, are on its way out.

There is a famous Broadway play called I Remember Mama, God help those who do not have nice memories. A few of the living still have the wonderful memory of America, when she was great.

Get A Goat

Sophocles (c. 497 – 406 BC) perhaps one of the best known Greek philosophers and playwrights (123 plays written, 7 survived), reportedly left the Greek state of Athens and went to Egypt inquiring how the fabulous Egyptian culture had been established. The Egyptians want us to know the same thing from the Greeks. He was told that the surviving Egyptian culture was a remnant of the lost city of Atlantis. Sophocles told the Egyptians that at the time of the Great Flood, some Greek herdsman had survived along with their goats by clinging to the tops of Greek mountains. He said, “with a goat, man can survive, because a goat can eat anything and nothing is better for you than goat's milk.”

In another commentary, I have described one of my heroes, a Catholic priest driving a pick-up truck; like me, waiting for a bridge to be repaired in the Congo. On the back of his pick-up truck, four dying AIDS victims with a nanny goat for nourishment, all heading toward Goma, where he hoped to find some healthcare for the victims.

If I had walked through the streets of a Japanese city, days, or even weeks, before the earthquake/tsunami carrying a sign, which on it said, “prepare”, I would have been considered a nut, telling the highest IQ people in the world to prepare for a disaster. They were evidently not prepared in any way for the disaster, even having witnessed the last great tsunami, just a few years ago when 300,000 were killed. The Japanese, like Americans, like everyone, fail to prepare for contingencies.

If I were to walk through the average American city carrying a sign that says “Prepare!” I would be considered a nut, probably a “religious nut”. You don't see them now, but when I was a child, there were “Burma shave” signs up and down the highway with funny sayings but all winding up saying, “prepare to meet God.” Every cemetery, every gravestone is a testimony that most did not prepare to meet God. Every news broadcast, every synapse of the human brain, tells anyone that it would be good to prepare for a disaster. They are coming so fast we cannot keep up with them. 300 earthquakes in the Pacific area alone, just recently. We have already forgotten about Christ Church, Haiti, Chile.

Only those who were loved, have not left those who will not quickly recover from these disasters. Only those who suffer the poverty of recovery from disaster, know the cutting aspects, the neurological leeching of hunger, thirst, need for shelter, the desire to do something for an innocent, uncomprehending child. Only a man who has experienced war, knows war. Only a person who has experienced God can know God. God always knows what He is doing. As 19 year old Joan of Arc said, just before she was burned at the stake, “I was born for such a time as this.” On the authority of God's Word, on the authority of everything I have ever read, every experience of my life, I can tell you that there is one psychological disease from which there is no recovery. It is the traumatic disease-experience of poverty, I don't care what anyone says, prophet, preacher, poet, you never recover from poverty.

Even though I was born to prominent, early, established families on the shore of America...just hard-working, land-owning farm people. As a child, there was never any doubt about my parents, grandparents, right on back, affections and afflictions, God, family, country. The church always came first, then the family, then community activity, predominately in the schools. The government was supported through paying taxes, and at time of war, records of family members who have died in conflict.

It was during the Great Depression, I had heard of inside plumbing, water coming through pipes into a building, only a few relatives had such. My mother picked out the patterns for her dresses from the hog feed sacks, she made her own so my sister could have store-bought clothes. My grandparents, old, worn-out, trying to keep large farms going with hired help, while their only son was in combat in the South Pacific. My father, all his brothers, involved in military service or the war effort, my mother and her children keeping the farm going.

I will never forget the old men of the family, and the community, who always wore shoes split, so as not to aggravate bunions (callouses from tissue and joint enlargement around the bases of the toes), this came from wearing ill-fitted shoes as children. Nothing, I repeat, nothing has gnawed at my faith like poverty, good people living exemplary lives, totally embalmed by faith, eeking out an existence.

From a small country school (13 in graduating class), I matriculated at our state university. Always aghast at those in the state elite...prep schools, fraternities, expensive sweaters and convertibles. I remember listening to these recipients of elitist state genealogy, profiteers of wealth, laugh about the “country hicks”, “country girls” they had besmirched. I thought, “they are talking about my people, my relatives, my sister.” Even today, I hear the country club generations talking about their great chefs. At Chapel Hill, I allotted myself $1 a day for food, 25 cents for breakfast, a bowl of grits and coffee, 25 cents for lunch, the cheapest sandwich and coffee, 50 cents for supper, a vegetable plate. You see, we never knew what it was to eat a large piece of meat. I still have the large cast-iron fireplace cooking pot which my ancestors used from the very beginning to cook their food in one large pot. They were still using that when I went to college, cooking in one large pan in the oven. My entire university career, eight years, it gnawed at me, night and day, as I worked every night in order to go to school during the day, economizing to survive. The question, why is God so unfair to his own? They have so little, while Satan's crowd, through his magic, have so much.

Back in the council chambers of eternity, our Blessed Lord had already made all these decisions, it is just up to us to obey. For instance, he wanted to see what I would do after living a live, such as I have lived, as a child, teenager, college student, commissioned medical officer. He wanted to see how I would react after I have lost my most precious possession next to life itself, my eyesight.

The test of man, the test of a believer, is not what he does when everything is going well, but what he does when everything goes wrong. Then, he wanted me to scurry around the world, smelling, hearing, asking questions, finding out, truly, how most of the world lives.

Surviving, preparing, everything about life involves preparation, sowing and reaping. Until you understand the sower, you will never understand our Blessed Lord's plan for the universe. I will never recover from poverty, but I am filled with thankfulness that I was shown survival on the family farm. I have also been allowed to see much wealth in the world, and I truly cannot comprehend how these individuals whether on Wall Street, “K Street” or Oxford Street, could depend on a goat for survival.

Top 8 Morons of 2008

#11

1.AT&T fired President John Walter after nine months, saying he lacked intellectual leadership. He received a $26 million severance package. Perhaps it's not Walter who's lacking intelligence.

2.Police in Oakland, CA spent two hours attempting to subdue a gunman who had barricaded himself inside his home. After firing ten tear gas canisters, officers discovered that the man was standing beside them in the police line, shouting, 'Please come out and give yourself up.'

2. An Illinois man, pretending to have a gun, kidnapped a motorist and forced him to drive to two different automated teller machines, wherein the kidnapper proceeded to withdraw money from his own bank accounts.

3.A man walked into a Topeka, Kansas Kwik Stop and asked for all the money in the cash drawer. Apparently, the take was too small, so he tied up the store clerk and worked the counter himself for three hours until police showed up and grabbed him.

4.Police in Los Angeles had good luck with a robbery suspect who just couldn't control himself during a lineup. When detectives asked each man in the lineup to repeat the words: 'Give me all your money or I 'll shoot', the man shouted, 'that's not what I said!'  


6. A man spoke frantically into the phone: 'My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart'. 'Is this her first child?' the doctor asked. 'No!' the man shouted, 'This is her husband!'

7. In Modesto, CA , Steven Richard King was arrested for trying to hold up a Bank of America branch without a weapon. King used a thumb and a finger to simulate a gun. Unfortunately, he failed to keep his hand in his pocket.

8. Last summer, down on Lake Isabella, located in the high desert, an hour east of Bakersfield, CA, some folks, new to boating, were having a problem. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get their brand new 22 foot boat, going. It was very sluggish in almost every maneuver, no matter how much power they applied. After about an hour of trying to make it go, they putted into a nearby marina, thinking someone there may be able to tell them what was wrong. A thorough topside check revealed everything in perfect working condition The engine ran fine, the out-drive went up and down, and the propeller was the correct size and pitch. So, one of the marina guys jumped in the water to check underneath. He came up choking on water, he was laughing so hard. NOW REMEMBER...THIS IS TRUE.
Under the boat, still strapped securely in place, was the trailer!

Addition by Dr. Morris: I have 3 more to add to this list.

9.For over 100 years, the people of North Carolina have been ruled by Democrats. Twice in this time, by a slim margin, a Republican governor was elected. A few times, by a slim margin, republican US senators were elected (Helms, East, Dole, Burr, etc.). Legislature always Democrats, all bureaucrats Democrat, all boards, council of state, democrat. On a national scale Highway 95 east to the ocean, if it were a state, would be the poorest state in the country. More homes without inside plumbing than any other state in the country. Fewest paved roads, poorest schools, yet, these people almost in lockstep, race to the polls to vote for Democrats. The Piedmont and western part of the state are not quite as extreme, but would you not think that people of nominal intelligence would want a change?

10. Americans love war, we have been involved in so many. If not a war with planes leaving carriers, jets dropping bombs, a war on poverty, drugs, illiteracy, now terror. In spite of being taxed to the hilt, supposedly having the most intelligent people on earth running everything, we manage to lose all these wars.

11. I live in a county in which I am afraid to walk down the street, it is not the crime, even though there is much of it, it is not the weather, although there is much of it. I live in a county where the people actually went to the polls and voted for an increase in their taxation. We have never know taxes to be reduced, always increased. We have not known a time of prosperity, always recession. The politicians in this county instructed the bureaucrats of this county to totally infiltrate this county and tell them that if they want their real estate taxes reduced they must vote for an increase in sales tax. The people in the county were actually dumb enough to believe, that very week the real estate taxes were raised.

Count Your Blessings (Repost)

#12

Addition by Dr. Morris: My parents were reared in homes that had survived the Civil war, just two miles form one another. Both houses are still standing today, still in the family, old, beautiful wood framed houses painted white, in groves of big trees.

The church, built in 1874, both sides: great grandparents, grandparents, parents, all raised in the same church. I have been blind for a long time, but I can still hear the singing at that old church, “Count your blessings”. There were years in which the crops dried up in the fields, others they drowned in the fields, old folks died, young people died of disease or accidents. There were wars, hard times, but they still sang, “Count Your Blessings, named them one by one.”

I am convinced that God wanted me to see as much of the world as possible before I became totally blind. He did not want me to complain about my blindness, the poverty in which I was reared, the bad start my relatives and so many other people had in life. We are not stuck where we start. God wanted me to see the real poverty of the world, poverty not only in things, but in ideas, and efforts in spiritual expression. He wanted me to see the pyramids, not only in Egypt, but in Mexico and South America...wanted me to see temples, cathedrals, mosques, brush arbors, the museums in communist countries which had once been churches, the areas in the holy lands where Christ actually walked.

One can never understand blindness, I tell people to not even try it. I honestly believe that most people I know think that there times that I can see. Because I am able to take care of myself: food, clothing, business, etc. Believe me, nothing about blindness is easy...nor deafness, nor crippled body, nor crippled mind.

We do not have much record of Christ dealing with perfect people, rather the blind, the lame, sinners, and those making an effort to follow Him. He preached himself, He was either the world's greatest fraud, or He was who He said He was: the Way, the Truth, the Life. In spite of everything, God wants us to trust Him, as did His Son, Jesus Christ, and He will do the rest.

There was a blind girl who hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone, except her loving boyfriend. He was always there for her. She told her boyfriend, 'If I could only see the world, I will marry you.'

One day, someone donated a pair of eyes to her. When the bandages came off, she was able to see everything, including her boyfriend. He asked her, 'Now that you can see the world, will you marry me?' The girl looked at her boyfriend and saw that he was blind. The sight of his closed eyelids shocked her. She hadn't expected that. The thought of looking at them the rest of her life led her to refuse to marry him.

Her boyfriend left in tears and days later wrote a note to her saying: 'Take good care of your eyes, my dear, for before they were yours, they were mine.'

This is how the human brain often works when our status changes. Only a very few remember what life was like before, and who was always by their side in the most painful situations.

Shad

#489


I was on the island of Tonga in the South Pacific. A family wanted me to eat lunch with them. In a pit in the yard, with hot coals, on strange looking leaves, they cooked fish using herbs known only to them. It was delicious beyond compare. Then as now, it brought back the memory of a sons devotion to his aged father.

In the community in which I was reared the old three room school house had been given to a local lodge. The rooms were large but it had been accommodated to care for an elderly couple who, during the depression, had lost everything. Devoted to the church and the community this old couple had several daughters living around but their great joy was their only son, Robert, who, after they had sacrificed everything, he had graduated from the University. This man, exceptional in every way, became a well known government parks authority. Having been superintendent of Hyde park (FDR's home and burial place) and others. He had told my cousin who owned the country store nearby, supply my parents every need and you know you will get paid. The main thing, each week when the fish man comes by, make sure my father gets a shad, the fish which he loves so well. And so it was, week after week, year after year, the fish man always made sure a nice shad was delivered to the home.

Robert left a large estate and among his bequest the building of a Baptistry in the Church in which we were all raised, built in 1874. Until then, we had all been Baptized in a local fish pond. Robert had a great love for his parents, his family, his friends, his community. I was working across the road one day when his parents, sitting on the front porch, both very old, both disabled, both walking with canes, spotted his car arriving. As old as they were, like children, they were waving and dancing. This is what parenting used to be like.

In the same community, another poor white family, educated one daughter, their only child. After college, she became very successful as a Boston lawyer. She wrote me a letter and told me how much her father was enjoying his new spectacles...he could finally read the bible. She said, “you know my mother is bedridden and I would so appreciate you going by the house and seeing if there is anything you can do for her eyes, she so enjoyed embroidery and quilting.”

I was speaking in the community and I sent word that I would be at their house at a certain time. He had her all propped up in a chair. She was afraid that since she was illiterate I could not examine her eyes. I had my opthalmoscope and retina scope which enabled me to check on the health of her eyes in case of cataracts and I could determine her prescription very accurately with the retina scope. I had the prescription made up and sent it to her via my mother. My mother said, all she could do was cry because she could see how to thread a needle and sew. Of course I had told her that the new glasses were a gift from my mother but the wonderful daughter insisted on sending me a check. This is what parenting used to be like.

Since those days, I have been totally blind. My drivers often tell me that the world has totally changed during the past 50 years. They say, “Doc, you would not believe what the world is like now...most girls with tattoos and piercings, young men wearing baggy pants, drivers making obscene gestures at one another.” A friend told me recently about going to an athletic event. One of the prominent couples in the city were seated in the stadium below him. He said they were dressed in finery befitting a global event but, he said, each time the opposing team came near their side of the stadium they would yell out obscenities and make obscene gestures. As their team was losing, they decided to leave but he said, I felt even worse when I noticed, as they passed by, he had a Christian cross in his lapel and she was wearing a Christian cross around her neck. This couple, wealthy, educated, country club members, too, have children but they are known to have addictive problems, have not done very well. This is today's parents, in today's world.

The first time I was in Russia, I stayed at the large hotel at the Kremlin directly across from St. Basil's Cathedral. Of course in Russia, large means better. The dining room, a dormitory type structure, seated 2,000 people at long, crude tables. Each hotel room had a peep hole where staunch, ugly women working the halls could keep an eye on everything going on in your room. A friend, traveling with me, a commentator on WOR radio, New York City, used the old fashioned, hard contact lenses. In his bathroom, he put some paper in the lavatory to hold some water so he could wet his lenses. This “hall woman” immediately came in shaking her finger at him. In my own bathroom, I was using a used towel to wipe off my shoes. A hall woman came in shaking her fingers at me. Big brother has not stopped at your front door either. Every day, in every way, we are losing all the freedoms for which our ancestors paid a tremendous price.

At a recent prom, when the young people arrived for this night of enjoyment, before they could enter the building, police searched their cars, searched the pocket books of the girls and the pockets of the boys to make sure they were not taking anything illegal inside. There was a time when young girls in evening gowns, young boys in tuxedos, looked upon their high school prom as the zenith of their high school accomplishment. When will today's parents realize that their children are now puppets of the state?

Without God, you cannot understand God. To the believer, no explanation of God is necessary. To the unbeliever, any explanation of God is impossible.

Those of us who knew America when parents, children, churches, communities, were livable and lovable must give those memories to children because they will never be able to understand love of home, God and country otherwise.

Golden Leaf

I am a product of eastern North Carolina. According to statistics, if North Carolina, from Hwy 95 to the Atlantic Ocean, were a state, it would be the poorest state in the union. I have traveled the world (passport stamped in 157 countries), I have seen the poverty of third world nations, peasants working in the rice fields and in the agriculture areas of Asia and Africa. In all these places, poverty of the cruelest kind, but I have never witnessed as much poverty as I witnessed while growing up in eastern North Carolina.

Most of this poverty was due to the growing of green tobacco. The marketing of that tobacco, the witnessing of seeing those who grew the tobacco, did the back-breaking, unending work, taken advantage of by the landowners, the tobacco auction warehouseman, the cigarette manufacturers who purchased the product. In the winter, the farmer began preparing his plant beds, the areas where he put the seed for the tobacco plants. Because of insect delight in tobacco products (even insects, worms of every type are addicted to tobacco), the tobacco beds were covered with plastic and poison gas used to kill infestation. From the time the tobacco seed germinated and the plant began to grow, ready for transplant in the fields, poison was used in an effort to raise plants for market. Over and over, the stomata, gummed plants were poisoned in the continued fight with nature against insects. After the plant matured, a leaf structure of about six feet in height, the leaves ripened from the bottom towards the top. Each week, young men and women (tobacco croppers), would go down the rows of the tobacco fields taking the ripened leaves to an area where, when I was young, the leaves were attached to sticks which were in-turn hung into curing barns. My tobacco growing cousins tell me that the procedure has changed completely in recent years. Anyways, then or now, the leaves, with their residue of poison, were subject to tremendous heat in curing facilities.

When I was young, the leaves were graded at home before market and carefully prepared for the auction floor where, at the mercy of the buyers, the farmer obtained whatever price he could get for his carefully prepared, months long growing of this cash crop from which he earned his living, supported his family, supported his church and kept the economic welfare of eastern North Carolina going. If lucky, if blessed by good weather (as with any plant, the farmer had to depend on soil, rain, sun and hopefully few storms such as wind and hail) the tenant farmer, and most, especially black, were tenant farmers, gave from one half to one third of his earnings to the landlord. Usually large farms, handed down from generation to generation by families who had gained control of the land early in the country's founding. Most of the landlords lived in the towns and cities where they enjoyed the life of the “good ol' boy”, caring little, if at all, for the poverty existing on the very land that they owned. These “good ol' boys” were not rich Republicans (as the media would have you believe) but rather racist, calculating conservative democrats, part of the one time solid south.

The sons and daughters of these landowners, the warehousemen, the proprietors of the country stores where the peasants were indebted for their livelihood, were the only ones in the eastern part of the state allowed within sight of a tax-supported college or university. I will despise until my last breath the hedonistic commercial owners, the hypocritical preachers, the newspaper editors, the radio commentators, who just turned a blind eye to the disparity, the absolute tyranny, toward the good people who did the best they could with what was provided to them. Once in a while, as was the case with this writer, responsible, respected educators would recognize the aptitude and the work ethic of some students and some families and help them obtain an education and get ahead. But, believe me, those from the hinterlands, the pocosins/swamps of this state, were never accepted by the “blue blood”, “big I little you” toxic-minded, incest-infected hierarchy families who felt they had some entitlement from Heaven to rule their fellow man simply because large parcels of land had been inherited or their family was fortunate enough to have an Oldsmobile franchise.

To this day, and I hate to wish anyone his roasting in Hell, I remember as a young, working university student selling books door-to-door all summer among these beleaguered people who loved me as much as I loved them. Having enough money to pay my tuition, I went to the Chevrolet dealer, where my family had done business for many years and some of my relatives were actually related to them (Blalock Chevrolet, Fremont, NC). At that time a 1952 Chevrolet cost $2,000 (this was about the time of my involvement in the Korean War) and I paid cash for the car. The owner asked my father, who had come to inspect the car, “where did this “boy” get this money?”. My father said, “he worked for it”. You see, the children of poor people were not supposed to gain anything from hard work, they were supposed to be enslaved, as had been their parents and grandparents, to the whims and welts, as white and black slaves of eastern North Carolina.

In spite of these people, the incestuous, moronic placards of the Old South bigotry, many have survived and moved on to demonstrate, to the state and to the world, that the lowly can rise, that our God of justice is still the supreme judicial authority. You are not stuck where you start. Hell would have to be enlarged to accommodate the landlords, the tobacco warehousemen, the cigarette manufacturers, the political representatives who loved these enslaved people just enough to get their votes and to use them for their greed. The public relations protagonists have run overtime in building up the Dukes and the Reynolds...just two of the families who made fortunes beyond belief from the sweat of their fellow man and who can now clamor for attention with their ill-gained gifts to universities, hospitals and, God help us, puny grants supposedly for the good of mankind.

Because China (62% of Chinese smoke) and other countries were growing so much tobacco, producing cigarettes so cheaply, a great mental barrage of concern encircled the halls of government and, supposedly, tobacco farmers were paid off not to grow the weed. A “good ol' boy” group of corrupt politicians (Jim Hunt, Bill Friday, God help us Holding, Barber, Chambers, Davenport, Worley, Penny, etc.), old time corrupt democrats who have run and ruined this state their entire lives, have taken these funds and used them for their own pet projects. One of the most interesting Congressional hearings I ever observed, John McCain was chairman, he mocked governor Jim Hunt, almost crying, as he told the need for educating the people of NC against smoking (500,000 people die in this country each year from smoking). Hunt, Friday, these other hypocrites, could care less about our children smoking. I believe more women smoke today than ever before, they say it is a sign of their liberation.

The money of the Golden LEAF Foundation is used, and everyone in the Legislature knows this, for the benefit of the “good ol' boys”, their political allies and their personal aspirations and comfort. Those who have defended the country, the returning warriors (all of whom live on food stamps), the black and white descendants of the tenant farmers and the cotton mill workers of this state, who lived in poverty, whose only friend, as Senator Herman Talmadge (another corrupt democrat) has said “is and was Jesus Christ”, are still waiting for the largess of government and the justice of God to be visited on those who besmirch the very idea of liberty.