Cry, My Beloved Country
If our gracious God so decrees, I shall be one hundred years old on April 3, 2021. Since I am still able to remember my name and mimic, to some extent, human walking, I am with great gratitude and excitement awaiting my birthday. I am enjoying exceedingly the 19th hole as I am showered with a life that is almost regal.
Unfortunately for some deep reason, hidden in the mind of the Almighty, I experience great upset and discomfort when asked to compare the present times with the many of my own personal history.
I remember extremely clearly the years of the Great Depression. I can remember the well dressed men selling their 5¢ apples to feed their families. I remember people being thrown on the streets with their possessions for failure to pay their rent, when my father’s hair went gray overnight from worry, when there was no Social Security.
I can remember vividly my fun filled teen years. No money. No travel. Rarely new clothes, but we were happy. How we gathered on a summer’s night at Columbus Circle, then the acme of Soap Box oratory where we listened and debated and had fun with Communists, Catholics, Evangelical, Atheists and screwball intellectuals. It was fun. Seemingly, people of all ages had the right to their own soapbox and to express any opinion without fear of reprisals. Freedom to express even nutty viewpoints was simply assumed. There was a kind of unspoken respect between passionate debaters.
I remember the WWII years ignited by a treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor when overnight a deeply divided Nation united in consummate patriotism in the face of enemies to our way of life. I remember the tone of differences of opinion in those days. It was clear. It was heartfelt. It was honest. Even if tempers flared people usually understood the meaning of “honest differences”
An exception I remember was my Irish Uncle JJ who was offended by some lout who made a salacious remark about the Blessed Virgin Mary. When this upstart invited JJ to duke it out behind the Maine monument, he was knocked cold by one punch from JJ’s powerful right arm.
Otherwise, it was usually healthy disagreement with a bit of irritation at the other’s opacity. We were the good sport type, the good loser, the gracious winner. There was little if any malice or ill will. I remember my rash and brief attempt at boxing where I got whacked around ‘pretty good’. It was understood that the loser always congratulated the winner. We were united but divided. We called ourselves “E Pluribus Unum”. It was a simpler time. It was taken for granted that we each had some kind of fundamental right to speak our minds, regardless of how loopy and uninformed it might be.
So it is somewhere in the area of the “interpersonal relationship” that I find my serious discomfort with the present times, particularly the last few years.
It has been the relatively widespread appearance of hatred. Undisguised. Open. Snarling. Vicious. Merciless. Relentless. People assume even facial distortions, far beyond their usual visage, alarming me with their uncharacteristic demeanor.
Of course I knew of Hitler, Mao and Stalin but with most of my generation, we loathed their behavior but never wished then damnation, which is implicitly always hidden deep in human hatred. This present ruthlessness smells of the demonic to me. I hear in various forms the mob in Jerusalem yelling for blood, destruction and death.
In my own simple spiritual world there is no room for hating anyone. Our Master Jesus taught us to forgive everyone and gave us the personal example: Himself.
After unbelievable, barbarous punishment, He asks for forgiveness for THEM, His tormentors, because they do not know what they are doing. To follow His example is exceedingly difficult but possible and required.
There is an old legend that when God created Adam in His own image and likeness, He commanded all to give respect to this new creation. One of the greatest of God’s creatures, the Angel Lucifer, pure Spirit, the One who carries light, refused. He felt insulted and demeaned that he should so respect a lower order. For such arrogance he was expelled forever from heaven — thereafter to be known as Satan, the Devil, the evil one. This arrogance which easily becomes hatred is intrinsically wrong. We must hate sin but never the sinner.
I am alarmed when I see this virulent hatred seeping into everything. Millions are to be blacklisted who voted the wrong way in 2020. They are to be considered sinners needing redemption or are hopeless high grade idiots. They are to be marginalized and pressured to profess loyalty to the New One World Order where difference of belief will not be tolerated. Dissidents do not deserve respect!
I am uncomfortably shifted back to my teen years when as a half Jew I knew that had I been in Munich in 1938, I probably would not be alive today. It was witch hunt time. Book burning time. Brutal stomping on the human soul time. There are hints here and there that such a milieu could be re-created here.
After writing a public essay explaining my Church’s negative view of homosexual behavior, not orientation, a reader wrote: “Soon you will be dead Ha Ha …” I do not challenge the precision of his desire, since at 100, the future in inexorably limited. That is elementary. But I do challenge his need to wish me harm. The tome of his prediction is gleeful and mean spirited. It seems to me that too much of society today is filled with such ill intent. It is not enough to win, one must crush, destroy and obliterate. It is now brutal. Nothing satisfies but annihilation.
Some ‘comedian’ thinks it amusing to hold an effigy of the severed head of a political personality, dripping with blood, on public media. Such revolting perversion was seen as acceptable by some commentators.
The drive is for total submission on every level and control is a vital part of it. Confusion is sown. What used to be good is now evil. What used to be evil is now good. Violence is condoned for some, castigated for others. Can I, a believer, be castigated because I ‘smell’ the demonic.
In my view, the worst has now arrived. A cleric, a strong supporter of the New Age, has announced that all those morons who voted for the loser in 2020 must now go to confession for absolution for following evil thinking. 73 million sinners because they are opposed to such altruistic programs as abortion at any stage of gestation; redefinition of marriage; open borders; elimination of religious conscience exemptions; redefining male and female; critical race theory; and socialism, to name a few. They have sinned. Forget about the sanctity of personal conscience. Not only are my political opinions believed beyond the pale but my very soul is up for grabs, judged by the Illuminati who do not permit challenges.
This is monstrous. God alone judges the human soul, a position which curiously was held by those very savants when they were struggling to grasp power. No one really knows the soul but God. It is His alone to judge. When man tries to play God, there are always tumultuous consequences. This is why I am afraid. It is the re-doing of the Great Battle between the Lord and the Fallen Angel.
When I lived in South Africa, a physically beautiful country, it was polluted by the iniquitous system ‘Apartheid.’ A very bright South African novelist, Alan Paton, wrote a heartrending book: “Cry, The Beloved Country”. Never did I imagine I would similarly grieve for my country, yet now I do. I weep and I lament: Cry My Beloved Country.
May Michael, the Archangel defend us in battle.