Highway to Heathenism

In traveling the world, I discovered a culture of employment which I had never considered previously. It was a cadre of travel guides, mostly men, mostly bi-sexual, mostly attractive, always multi-lingual, always well-traveled, well-educated and of upper class who spent their lives just taking travel groups, from one country to another, mostly on world wide tours. Most were acquainted with one another and would causally salute one another as they passed in crowded airports. They had the travel business down to a science, knew how to run the gauntlet of borders, knew which guards to bribe, and knew how to weasel out of any political, financial or social situation. Since I was almost totally blind and traveling alone, I always had one of these as a eating companion. They shared with me many things that they did not share with the average traveler, because they knew they could trust me; and after all, I would never be able to identify them, in case of illegalities.

The most memorable of these world famous travel guides, I met in Tunis, Tunisia. He was Dutch and originally from the Hague. He despised Americans mostly because Americans are so gregarious, loud, classless, uninformed and predictably obnoxious and arrogant. To show you how long ago it was, Yasser Arafat was still in Tunis at the time, accompanied by his covey of blond, German boys. My guide told me that he had just put on the plane to make their return to the US, the most impossible group of obnoxious Americans he had ever led. He said, “After I got them on the plane, I was so exasperated from being with them for several weeks that I just went into a stall in the men's bathroom, sat down and cried for a while.” He said, “These impossible people think that their money is all important. But they are totally classless.” Of course, when he told me of the thousands of dollars that he received from each group in tips, I could understand why he was tolerant. These guides are not only paid well by the companies that employ them, but live really well on the trip. The hotel for the group, always provides the guide, as a bonus, a room filled with gifts and liquor. These guides know the best shopping places in the world, the most economical places in the world to live and have picked out a retirement area, long before they expect to retire. One, took me in a boat on the gulf of Siam to a most picturesque village, beautiful beyond compare, where he had already purchased a hilltop vista where he would eventually build his retirement home.

You cannot force people to love you anymore than you can force people to hate themselves. In visiting the Colonial countries on the west coast of Africa, such as the Ivory Coast and the central African Republic, where the French were in power for so long, the Belgian Congo or even the British controlled India and Pakistan, you find that the natives hold onto their culture. In British controlled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and in Burma I noted the fine homes owned by British nobility had been destroyed and actual trees were growing out of some of them. The golf courses used by the British nobility and their bureaucrats had grown up. The 48 Muslim countries in the east and in North Africa, were separated and their borders decided by British authorities. I learned that these people had no loyalty for their colonizers. Even the English names given by the British to the cities in these colonies, had been changed. Most had returned to their customs and culture. This is the great problem we are encountering in Iraq and Afghanistan. They simply do not want to be Westernized. Even those who cross our borders illegally want to keep their own identity.

Slave masters learned long ago that they could not force slaves to love them. The hack politicians practicing nepotism, thought those wanting special attention would have a special admiration for them. Just the opposite is usually true.

The cotton mill owner – employer – slave master, who employs people who could not possibly find a job anywhere else thought that these hungry, God-fearing, down trodden, employees would so appreciate economic opportunity that they would have absolute loyalty. As one employee at the Borden Cotton Mills in Goldsboro told me, they never could understand why their looms did not work most of the time. It was a matter of internal sabotage. Most officers in Vietnam were killed by the fragging of enlisted soldiers who so resented the authority and so resented their military service.

When selling books, as a college student, on the dirt roads, on which tenant farmers lived in Eastern NC, I heard many stories about burning down the land owner's barn because the owner had been so cruel to his tenant worker's hardworking parents.

Patriotism in this democratic republic has been virtually destroyed by this authoritarian, totalitarian control. It is now a matter of government manipulation and exploitation. Most Americans regard the government as the enemy and not a friend. Does it bother the elected politician to know that the younger generations of Americans are maturing, despising the very country for which they may be called on to defend? I once asked a travel guide why there were so many children in each family in India. He said, “Most parents in India just hope there may be one or two children who will provide for them in their old age.”

Enslaved people always fight back. We are expected to pay our taxes willingly, to register for military service willingly, to go to the polls to vote willingly, to march off to war willingly. Go to a VA hospital and see how many veterans you can find who have anything good to say about the country or government which they defended.

For one who has spent most of his life in absolute darkness, a 100% disabled, service connected, totally blind veteran, I weep when I hear on the news of the waste and corruption of government. It kills my very ambition for life to know what is happening to my country. The elitists, both here and abroad, who have only lived their lives for personal gain, who expect the veterans and other hard-working, tax paying, God-fearing citizens to eat the scraps from their table of abundance, will surely not escape the wrath of a God of justice. (Psalm 98:9)

After 2000 years, Satan has so penetrated and taken over the Christian church, that the church is no longer effective in the affairs of men. After 230 years in the life of this once great republic, Satan has so penetrated the halls of government and justice that God and government is no longer appreciated or effective in the lives of citizens. Character determines destination. We have tainted character which is testing our destination.

Hard Times

The song “Hard Times Come Again No More” was written by Stephen Foster in 1854. It was sung both by the North and the South and became very popular in the Great Depression. I don't believe today's baby boomers, and the younger generation have any idea about the horrors of the Great Depression. Baby boomers have never seen a cheap casket, baby boomers have not yet started walking or riding a bicycle, their car permanently parked because they cannot afford repairs or gas. Overeating, fat Americans know nothing of hunger pains, children in school cafeterias are still throwing away their food, paid for by tax payers, simply because they do not like the way it tastes or looks.

One of the bitterest women I ever met in my life, her bitterness destroyed her life as well the life of her poor, disabled husband, and the people around her could hardly live because of her bitterness. They had been very wealthy before the Great Depression, the Hoods were the most prominent family in town. The couple, both he and she, came from old colonial families. He had a thriving business, but because of an early stroke, he was very disabled...could not live and would not die. Trying to save the business, trying to save farmland which had been left to them, but because of their heavy borrowing, the bank not only took the business, their farm land, but eventually their beautiful home.

They wound up living in a duplex apartment, which they owned and formerly rented to the public. They were no longer in the country club, at the top of the list of invitees to social functions, courted for their political influence. Then, on top of everything else, their only child, a son, was killed in a vehicle accident. As she said to me, “we have lost it all.” He had become increasingly unaware of everything. I had been asked to talk with them because as is often the case, they had left the church and had a toxic attitude toward God...if only Christian, the only thing that could have seen them through. God told us that there would only be a remnant of believers at the end, those that will endure.

You can be sure that we will be tested, there is only one thing that man understands completely...obedience. The first couple refused to obey, and they had to leave the garden. For five thousand years, God's chief creation, mankind, became increasingly evil so that he finally destroyed them all with water, except for eight human souls, Noah and his family. Then we have the history of the Jewish nation, a people chosen by God. A people He so loved that He chose them for the birth and living of His only Son. History just involves this one nation of people, Jews. Gentiles, the rest of us, only as we come in contact with the Jews. God had a special relationship with the Jews, from Abraham, the first Jew (4000 BC), right on until a Jewish lawyer named Paul, and the establishment of the church. Christ's disciples were Jews, all men, they never ordained anyone but men, and so it was with Paul and the church. The church, the bride, Christ, the bride groom.

It is a spiritual relationship, and where the spirit of God is working, there will be a spirit of obedience and a spirit of giving. Man is completely incapable of understanding the mind of God, we think we know so much, have made so many great advances. God knew all these inventions, advances, and we have no idea of the blessings, the gifts, he has for us, if we would only obey. Nor, do we have any idea of the methods he has for keeping us in line. Just as the Jewish nation were stiff necked, their history is that of sin's ruin, back into submission, finally dispersion. If history has done anything at all, it should have taught people to fear God. We find the admonition to fear god 365 times in the Bible. Yet, the sinful heart of man always rebels, thinks he knows best. Satan loves nothing better than the rebelling, sinful heart of mankind. Man loves deception, loves to deceive, for instance, we know that America deceives its citizens: CIA staging terrorism attacks, CIA manufacturing Bin Laden tapes, CIA involvement in torture and even the killing of leaders (Benazir Bhutto). Much of the daily news is concocted, a student with bomb in his underwear in Chicago.

The present administration was going to give people jobs, the unemployment was 7.7% in 2008, now it is almost 10%, 7 million people on food stamps, more people losing their homes than ever. The congressional budget office (CBO) states that America owes 202 trillion dollars in debt, mostly entitlements. We know that the debt at present is $14 trillion, and that the debt had increased $4.4 trillion since Obama has been in office. At least, at the beginning of the Great Depression, money was backed up by gold. At least until 1971, money was backed up by silver. Today, money is backed up by thin air. They had not learned yet, the simple elementary school fact, you cannot continue to write checks when there is no money in the bank. As more and more fiat paper money is printed, it will take more and more fiat paper money to buy something, as was the case with the Weimar German Republic, before WWII, it will soon take a wheelbarrow full of money to go to the grocery store.

In Zimbabwe, there are sign in bathrooms, “Do not use money.” Paper money is cheaper in Zimbabwe than toilet tissue, the trouble is that paper money clogs up the sewers. In the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe they have ceased to use all money including the rand, only the American dollar and Euros. At the time they stopped using their own money, the inflation money was an unbelievable quindecillion novemdecillion percent (65 followed by 107 zeros). If America had kept her industry, not shipped everything overseas with NAFTA and CAFTA, America would have jobs. At the time of the Great Depression, America still made things, at least, you could barter. Some tomatoes from your garden, for some chickens grown in another yard. Now, just as the American government knows about your savings from your bank, your retirement funds from your IRA and 401 tax program. Your government legislates gardens and the raising of animals. Like industry, the small farmers has disappeared. We cannot all be community organizers or financial advisers. How many salesmen does it take on a used car lot? How many waiters in a restaurant? The Great Depression ending in 1941 when we went to war, most businesses by that time, had closed.

In government, just as in our spiritual life, there are non-negotiables. There is nothing more basic than work, jobs to support a family. There is nothing more non-negotiable than deep religious convictions, we cannot negotiate abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, homosexual marriage, or women preachers and priests. Knowing nothing of the love of God in the heart, Lucifer not having a soul, governments and churches have been enticed to forget common sense. Just as Christ cleared up confusion in the synagogue about what goes on there: buying and selling, such as today's yard sales to support His work.

We must get back to fundamentals everywhere and in everything. Sin's ruin and Christ's redemption. Repentance for sin, the power of prayer for a sin cursed nation and word. The solution for hard times: hard work, hard discipline, hard heads.

Metamorphosis

It was not as long ago as David Livingstone, the great English missionary who opened up dark Africa, whose heart was buried in Africa, and whose body was buried in Westminster Abbey. But I thought of him when I heard the noise of Victoria Falls on my trip to Zimbabwe, the great falls between Zimbabwe and Zambia, the great walls of mist, and even the rope bridges over the outlets, a memory beyond compare. Zimbabwe, once Rhodesia, once the bread basket of Africa, now because of the ruthless, reckless rule of Robert Mugabe, a nation in absolute chaos.

There are signs in bathrooms in Zimbabwe which ask you not to use Zimbabwe paper bills because they clog up the sewers. You see, in Zimbabwe, so much inflation, fiat dollar paper is worth less than toilet tissue. The inflation rate in Zimbabwe now, is 516 quintillion per cent, it takes billions of Zimbabwe dollars just to buy a loaf of bread.

America is heading in the same direction. In the Obama healthcare legislation fiasco one section legislates that you must report the expenditure of anything over $600. This means you must send in a 1099 if you have purchased an appliance, put a roof on your house, and certainly if you have purchased gold or silver. There will be millions of 1099 forms filed each year. The civil service employees hired to do the work, along with the purchase of the computers involved.

Some think we may be coming out of the recession, but others know that it was contrived, manipulated, so that the controlled, collectivist, totalitarian processes of government will have you right under their thumb. You hear all these advertisements about buying gold or silver, when the Great Depression hit in 1929, fiat paper money was backed up by gold. In 1933, FDR confiscated all the gold. The people, poverty stricken, depending on parity and staples passed out by the government. In other commentaries I have described the government of controls on everything legislated by FDR, his communist vice president Henry Wallace, and his chief adviser Harry Hopkins. It took WWII in 1941, to give any relief to the public. It is known that the present recession will last through a decade.

Fiat paper dollars was backed up by silver until Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Richard Nixon closed the gold window in 1971 (Until 1971, dollars could redeem gold at $45 an ounce. Yesterday, gold was selling for $1,500 an ounce, the gold reserves at Fort Knox have not been inventoried for fifty years. We do not know what is there.). Now, the American dollar is backed up by nothing, except the taxing power of the Congress. The dollar has lost most of it's buying power, the dollar of my youth is now worth about six cents.

Now, you are on your own! If your outgo exceeds your income, your upkeep becomes your downfall. The metamorphosis of the last fifty years is in reverse, a nation of beauty, opportunity, prosperity beyond dreams, a wonderful butterfly of delight has metamorphosed into an ugly, decadent caterpillar just trying to survive. Healthcare facilities, reception rooms filled with white-haired seniors, there because they had a right to free medicare. Parking lots at schools filled with expensive cars, driven by spoiled students. Fashion restaurants and department stores, bending and bowing to the clicking of plastic cards will become a memory of the past.

In the documentary, War on Kids, we compare the treatment of adults in prison with children in school. There is not much difference. Like patients in nursing homes, inmates in prisons, students in public schools are now suppressed by mind-altering drugs. Social children, who did at one time, enjoyed school, playing, freedom; are now just controlled pawns of the state. Schools want their money for their 180 days of education, prisons want to be paid for incarceration, nursing homes want to be paid for supplication, and you, if you are fortunate, will have enough left for survival.

Until now, all advertisements, everything in the world, kept you discontented for not having things. You spent on everything, saved nothing. At a time when Asians were saving 10-40% of their paychecks, American families, like America, were going in to endless debt. Most felt successful if they were above water in the hole which they had dug for them. Americans could not understand that the social security trust fund is just one big IOU, only government considers an IOU as an asset. The government wants everyone on the same communist level, everyone drawing an equivalent social security check. $600 billion has already been taken from the civil service retirement fund, and Mr. Obama is lusting for all retirement funds.

A recent survey tells us that parents who worked part-time while in school are the best providers. They know the true value of money, they know discipline and self-control. The Christian knows about conservatism. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

America and Americans have been captives of the world's philosophy of self aggrandizement. We want the latest styles, designer clothes, eating and drinking, even going into professional offices, places which flatter us. Many of my professional friends have said, “I want my patients or clients to say, 'he is the highest priced doctor or lawyer in town, but he is good.'” No one brags about the cheapest doctor, lawyer, or store. One of my aunts, who worked in an expensive ladies dress shop, said, “the women in town who wore the most expensive outer garments wore the most ragged underwear.” The gossip columnist Earl Wilson said, “there are three financial types: the haves, the have-nots, and the haves who have not paid for what they have.”

Until a recession, such as we have now, does the actual financial worth of individuals come to the surface. It is amazing how many homes in gated communities are on the market, because the snobs who lived there could not pay their mortgage. There was a clamor at the banks by members of the country club, when they received their assessment for the new county club building.

700 banks have closed to date, this year. Financial institutions are caught in a bind also, the chickens have come home to roost, whether the supposed best known family in town or the least known family in town. When the house or car is worth less than you owe on it, it is far easier just to walk away and hand the keys to the lender. My carpenter told he paid $40,000 for his truck, he owes $30,000 on his truck, and he could not sell the truck for as much as $8,000. He said, “if they want it, they can have it.”

Most government actions are not seen in the evening news, problems which affect the public, happen through government agencies. It is these government agencies that have killed small businesses and small farms, once the very center of employment and opportunity. Our family farm supported several families, sent them to schools and colleges, because of government regulations, excessive taxation, after my parents death, these farms disappeared.

When workers leave the farm, when employees cannot find work in small businesses or industry. They must seek living accommodations somewhere, and they must eat. This leads to government housing projects, food stamps, thrift stores, etc. Please God, the metamorphosis has not worked, bring back the day before government bondage, when a father could hold one job and support a family, when a mother could stay at home and care for her children. Morally, economically, spiritually, family facts, we had a better community, a better country.