Opus 2020-278: Levels of Liberty

America has just about every type of topography you could ask for and some you wouldn’t.  The people are different too.  It is interesting to see how they respond to the government overreach for the China virus.  My observations only cover a part of the South but I would imagine the principles can be applied everywhere.  Everywhere we go there are signs up demanding compliance with face masks.  Some places you see most people covered.  Other places they just ignore the signs and get on with life.  I am surprised to see that the people of Alabama are more willing to ignore the government mandate than the assumed rebels of Texas.  Americans are trying to get on with their lives.  The government goons are trying to bring us to heal.  The timid sheep are so full of fear that they actually believe there is a plague and the State is going to keep them safe.

It ain’t gonna happen.  The government does not want you safe, it wants you compliant.  If you go online away from the MSM sources you have come across the Fauci expectation:  We need to do what we are told.  I don’t know about you but that probably stopped in my teen age years and definitely got ignored after I turned 21.  Even getting drafted, going to Vietnam and spending one year, seven months and four days in the military didn’t drive the resistance to being controlled out of my system.  

If you are living in an area where the jack boots are stomping mandatory masking into your life you need to realize that it is not that way everywhere.  There are states where the people are still practicing their freedom and living their lives.  There are states like Texas where the response is mixed and the political leaders are going to have a serious wake up call in two years if they don’t back down.  Of course we have the Democrat swamps like California, New York and Virginia.  If you live there I would suggest that you start with local elections like city councils, sheriff, school boards, municipal judges and library boards and start working to clean house.  

The longer we wait the harder it will be to preserve “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.  In case you don’t recognize that it is from the Preamble to the Constitution.

homo unius libri

Opus 2020-277: On the Street: America Is Latin for Diverse

I am on the road.  It is interesting to see America in the midst of the health panic and political crisis.  It is still America but I wonder if it will be for long.

A road trip is a good way to remember how and why I love this place so much.  America is big and it is full of variety.  It took us a day to drive half way across Texas and a little ways into Louisiana.  The next day we were in three states.  The next day we hit four.  Texas is a big place with a lot of variety.  While just in Texas we went from the semi-arid areas around San Antonio and to the swamps in the east.  

America is huge and people who get out of town realize that.  One of the things I noticed about the students I taught was that they never left the metropolitan area of Southern California except for a quick run to Las Vegas or a trip home to Mexico.  The Progressives* take advantage of this limited living to sell things like overpopulation and deforestation.  People who live in the densely populated areas of the country think we are crowded.  Even the ones who have driven over the vast empty spaces on the way to Vegas seem to have been on Facebook the entire way and didn’t notice the lack of people.

Relax folks.  We will not run out of room and we will not run out of trees.  The funny thing about trees is that they keep growing back.

What a wonderful country, or at least it used to be.  That could all change if Biden manages to steal this election.

*(Liberals, educators, socialists, communists, elites, Rinos, Democrats, leftists, Never Trumpers, Antifa, etc)

homo unius libri

Opus 2020-276: Be Careful What You Wish For

The Supreme Nine are back up to strength.  As of now that seems to be something to rejoice about.  Barrett is as close as humanly possible to what we want in a Supreme Court Justice.

But we need to gird our loins for what is to come.

The fear, of course, is that she will join the drift to the left.  How many times have we thought we had a true believer in the Constitution only to have them move left.  It could happen again.  That is why I only put a limited amount of confidence in government agencies.  With the election results the concern is real.  Sin in real.  Sin is seductive.  In Star Wars terminology, the dark side has a lot of attraction.

The caution is that we don’t get into the “die heretic” mode.  Conservatives have a tendency to be so focused on their primary goals that they throw anyone under the bus if they are not in total agreement.  If you are old enough to vote you have at least begun to understand that no one will agree with you totally.  I have already heard people expressing concern that she will be too “rigid”.  If it comes to following the law and having a strict interpretation of the Constitution, then I can live with rigid.  

What we often mean by “rigid” is that the person will not have the nuances that we have.  We tend to be people of principle except in those few areas that concern us.  Thus everyone will agree that Social Security is in trouble but they don’t want any solutions that will cost them money.  Everyone is willing to cut the budget as long as their line items are not eliminated.  On the left we have all those people willing to raise taxes on the rich because they don’t realize that the Progressives* define the “rich” in third world terms.  If you have air conditioning and flush toilets, you are rich.

So get ready to be disappointed.  I hope we are disappointed because she is rigid.  We need a little bit of backbone in our view of the law.

*(Liberals, educators, socialists, communists, elites, Rinos, Democrats, leftists, Never Trumpers, Antifa, etc)

homo unius libri

Opus 2020-275: Crickets

I am not a big reader of Max Lucado.  I have now read two of his books and in another ten years I might be ready for another.  In my latest, In the Grip of Grace he writes an analogy using a cricket.  He was picturing how a cricket that he had seen in the church sanctuary would view the world.  At one point he wrote,

“Perhaps the best question is, who does a cricket worship?  Does he acknowledge that there was a hand behind the building....Does he assume that since he has never seen the builder there was no builder?” p. 26, emphasis in original

He then goes on to make an application to human beings and the large group that deny God.  He calls them hedonists.  I never thought of the word in that way, but there it is.

The way these people deny God is not by saying no gods exist.  The problem is they cannot envision God.  When I say they can’t envision God, I don’t mean they can’t imagine a god.  They are good at that, but man-imagined gods tend to be limited by our vision.  As a general rule pagan gods are just people on steroids.  What they can’t comprehend is the God of the Bible.

I say this after reading a lot of science fiction/fantasy where people try all their ideas about gods.  Most of the results are little more than entities with strange powers and weird ideas about right and wrong.  They can be injured and even die.  Usually, if you read carefully, you find that they are the kind of being that the author would become if they had the ability to morph.  All of their fantasies get played out.

We saw this in ancient Greek and Roman mythology.  The gods were just spoiled children in adult bodies with some kind of super power.  They bickered and got involved sexually with anything that caught their eye.  They lied and cheated.  They were a lot like politicians today.

The God of the Bible is almost beyond our comprehension.  What do I mean, “He is beyond our comprehension”?  We cannot understand infinity, let alone holiness.  We cannot understand the kind of love that is driven toward the incarnation and the cross.  I have not been able to find the quote so I will paraphrase and make no accusations of the writer but a Christian who was a scientist said that the thing that drew him to the God of the Bible was the way in which understanding Him required a grasp of multi-dimensional space and even that wasn’t enough.  He said that in his dipping into other religions he found no ideas that were big enough to come from beyond the human mind but the Bible was different.

I worship a God that is so far beyond me that He has no problem balancing the creation of the universe with being aware of my every thought.  He is God, not a human construct.

Lucado, Max.  In the Grip of Grace.  Dallas:  Word Publishing, 1996.

homo unius libri

Opus 2020-274: Coyote Clicks

I am still puzzled that anyone who knows which way to turn the steering wheel for a left turn would vote for Joe Biden.  I would wonder the same way for a devout Catholic who votes for the party of abortion or a hunter who backs a Democrat.  A recent bit of humor did give me a clue, one that I have been rejecting.

I am coming to believe that they are just stupid.  What convinced me?  Coyotes.

I hope you have been getting smiles out of the memes produced to reflect the broadcasted ignorance of the left at the comment by President Trump about coyotes bringing children across the border.  They actually believed he was referring to four footed canines.  I know it is hard to believe, but there it is.

When someone says something that causes cognitive dissonance in my mind I will spend a little bit of time doing research.  So I decided to see what they would see if they Googled “coyote”.  It seems that Google is just as confused as the average liberal.  I got an entire page of references, all about the animal.  I told myself that can’t be it and kept looking.  Finally, down at the bottom, over on the right I saw a tag for Coyote, person.  I clicked and there it was.

“Colloquially, a coyote (this usage originating from Mexican Spanish) is a person paid by migrants to illegally guide or assist them (migrant smuggling) across the U.S — Mexico border.”

I guess there are a lot of people who never take that second click.

It has been good for a lot of laughs but it explains why they don’t understand things like “shall not be infringed”.

homo unius libri

Opus 2020-273: Whither Privilege?, part 6 of 6

Let me explain to you what my white privilege consists of.  The earliest particle of my white privilege comes in my DNA.  I inherited a unique personhood based on the physical contributions of my father and mother.  I had nothing to say about it.  The next big contribution was the example and training coming from my parents.  What did they demonstrate?  Hard work, honesty, self-sacrifice, love of God, the list could go on.  I had the privilege of having a father who worked with his hands and had a need to be self-employed.  I had the privilege of getting up before school to push a wheelbarrow of concrete he was having delivered.  I had the privilege of always having a job if I could not find anything better.  I had the privilege of watching my father be penalized financially because he insisted on giving fair value.  I had the privilege of watching him love my mother and work six days a week to support his children.  

I also had the privilege of having him force me to get up on Sunday morning and go to church.  He didn’t cram it down out throats.  There were special days we would sneak out to the car after Sunday School and go for a long drive.  Because of that I had the privilege of coming to know God the Father through Jesus the Son.  I had the privilege of listening to some great preachers, sitting under great teachers and being surrounded by friends who were worthy.  Most of all I had parents who modeled it.

You might ask where the “white privilege is”.  Glad you asked.  Notice that everything I mentioned is available to people of every color and nationality.  My biggest privilege is knowing that and knowing not to blame everyone else for my success and failure.  Success in America used to be available to anyone who would keep working for it.  Were there barriers?  Yes.  Is there discrimination?  Of course.  Does that mean you cannot prosper and do well?  Not unless the Progressives* manage to brainwash you into being a victim.

*(Liberals, educators, socialists, communists, elites, Rinos, Democrats, leftists, Never Trumpers, Antifa, etc)

homo unius libri

Opus 2020-272: Whither Privilege?, part 5 of 6

What concepts do the prosperous areas of the world embrace?  One is the idea that all men are created equal.  The Bible has kings and class structures but it also says that all are equal before God.  How about what has become called the Protestant Work Ethic?  It is in the Bible that everyone could now read.  One of the constant conversations I have with people is “What are you?”  Recently our painter told me he was Mexican.  I asked him where he was born and when he said in Texas I told him he was an American, not a Mexican.  The strange idea we have in this country is that you are not a member of an ethnic group, you are the embracer of an idea.

The maturing Christian view of God led to the acceptance of the scientific method and the Renaissance that went along with it.  Advances in the technology of sailing ships and firearms made the philosophy and religion of Europe overpowering around the world.  Non-European areas of the world hired the Irish, Scots, Germans and anyone else to come and teach them how to do things the European way.  It was successful because it made them stronger.  It is not white privilege when anyone can have access, it is human privilege.

To be continued...

homo unius libri