The Forgotten Humans
30/December/2009 13:18 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Volume 11, Issue 51
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Well fellow humans 2009 really was quite a year. As we are continually being reminded by the political spin-doctors, when we entered the year, total financial catastrophe was just a needed bailout away, and now things are much, much better and all would be surely wonderful, except for the fact that they, the real politicians, inherited such a pending disaster.
Humpty Dumpty didn’t fall off the financial wall – yet, but Humpty does seem to look sort of like a handsome bald headed guy with a beard (Ben Bernacke), and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men look strangely like Goldman Sachs investment bankers; just like good old Humpty himself. So lacking a similar event in American history we should give them credit for keeping the wall from collapsing completely. There are still some questions yet to be answered, mostly around the fact that the wall, in its present condition, is completely unsustainable and would we be much better off in the long run, to build a new wall and let the old one crumble into history?
As I was thinking about a title for this final episode in 2009, things are still not that different than the Great Depression. Leaving financial and employment considerations out of the argument, the title of Amity Shlaes’ book “The Forgotten Man” still seems to fit very well. The problem for the twenty-first century however is that the title is so politically incorrect. “The Forgotten Man and Woman” really doesn’t have a good ring to it. So we are pretty much stuck with “The Forgotten Humans.”
That title also fits well with the prime religion of today, evolving atheistic humanism. The Forgotten, by whatever handle, are no longer created in the image of God, but rather consumption machines of a global plan to bring a fictitious heaven to earth. Probably a better with it, term is Utopia, but many are beginning to call it socialism, or communism. Those many however are just troublemakers who don’t understand their place as evolving animals that the more highly evolved will use to fix all the unnatural things of the world. Of course the evolved elite really wants nothing to do with real nature and reality, because that wildness is really a scary place that doesn’t accept their elitist credentials and treats them as not superior to other animals and even lowly plants.
As this year comes to an end it is becoming apparent that some changes are in the offering, for things are beginning to get complex as we move forward in time. Today we hear in the United States, talk about our Founding Fathers and the U S Constitution. That was just an impossible dream just a year ago. Those Forgotten Humans are realizing that they are just not bred to be consuming stuffers, but they are real men and women, with families and hopes and aspirations beyond making a million dollars over a lifetime, by doing a boring job, so you could retire undefeated. Of course much of that awaking was driven by the reality that many of those prosperous investments have disappeared along with the job. If it didn’t happen to you, it is happening to those you once considered your friends.
As I wrote last week one of my goals in my pilgrimage through this last quarter century was to bring some harmony between my spiritual life and my secular life. As things are now shaping up this is quite similar to the struggle we are beginning to see within America, but these transitions are very difficult as we broaden our perspectives and become aware of the tensions between the two. Saint Augustine called these tensions the “City of God” and the “City of Man.” The difficult, is to understand the proper context of how the secular and the religious can work together to form a moral secular society and culture. This is the miracle of the Founding of the United States and her Constitution. It was a God thing back then, and the way out of this morass will be a God thing also.
Therefore in the New Year The Wonder Springs Chronicle will renew or reemphasize the uniquely Christian perspective of God’s grace offered to men and women, and how those humans can become better leaders by serving God, not only through church but also in the civil or secular arena. As the New Year unfolds we will be developing the separate secular viewpoint with a more creation-focused understanding of how success in the human ecosystem must follow the scientific reality that you find in nature or creation.
Ester 4:14 states: For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"
For such a time as this! We are all here on earth for such a time as this, that is truly a scary, but God centered reality. We will again learn that God is real, and that reality will come in such a way that we will confess that this whole new unity in diversity is way too complex for human knowledge and wisdom to accomplish within our confining sinful depravity.
Exodus 23:30 states: Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land.
Deuteronomy 7:22 states: And the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you.
So that we again will truly understand God centered humility 1 Peter 4:17 states: For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? (ESV)
So let us try to look forward into 2010 and see what might be on the horizon for that year and beyond.
The biggest pending reality that we can now understand relates to Humpty Dumpty, that is Humpty Dumpty in the financial sense. There underpins all reality energetic and informational components that allow everything to work together to create a stasis or equilibrium. Both of these in general terms follow the Natural Laws of Thermodynamics and entropy. If either one of these attributes are ignored, eventually not only does Humpty Dumpty fall off the wall and breaks, but the wall itself falls down. This is what is known as a catastrophe or a disaster because the cohesiveness of everything falls apart.
President Obama was elected on the promise of “Change We Can Believe In.” This is to be accomplished by hopeful thoughts and rhetoric. But hope is not an energetic or informational force. Hope is simply a God given attribute of humanity to cope with difficult circumstances. But in an environment devoid of God, hope is really self-righteous vanity, and even in a Godly worldview it is always subject to the Divine historic will of God who alone understands and sees the whole of reality.
We hope we have fixed the financial meltdown by creating a bailout Band-Aid for institutions, which we have defined as “too big to fail.” We have done this, we are really cool. However a pending Humpty Dumpty fall and wall failure has been a slow but progressive lack of financial husbandry for a century. Adding money as thick wallpaper may delay the wall collapse, but does nothing to rebuild or energize the wall structure and Humpty himself is becoming an old codger. The problem currently in the United States is that we generate very little new wealth, and we borrow against what wealth exists to maintain an opulent lifestyle that cannot be sustained under current or status quo economic conditions.
Glenn Beck has talked about how the Cloward – Piven strategy, in conjunction with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, may be the means by which the Progressives in this country collapse the economy and reestablish their atheistic communist agenda. Communism is almost totally devoid of either sustaining information or energetics, so it can only be established and maintained by coercive force even for short periods of time. The seventy year history of the Soviet Union was instituted and maintained to maturity by those who truly eliminated all opposition.
Furthermore without an outward renewing of energetic and informational circulation within the culture, collapse is only a matter of time. The best or worst intentions of mankind do little to change that reality until such a time when natural entropy takes over. Personally if I had to make a pick for the catalyst on how the American culture would outwardly collapse it would come from jihadist Islam.
The primary reason for this is because they consider all of Western Culture, especially the United States the Great Satan. They believe that our materialistic atheistic culture is really just a materialistic atheistic culture. Americans just don’t realize that all their positive thinking about how great and good we are, is really just a mask to hide the true nature of way too many of our institutions.
In “Cabaret” there is a song “Money, Money, Money” in which “money makes the world go around.” Wall Street and the Humpty Dumpty bailouts believe this. This might have been true at one time but now with a world flooded with funny money, money is in the process of becoming meaningless as the means of commerce. You might want to exchange one type of electronic money bits and bytes for another type, or even a piece of paper, but the truth game that gives value to money is being seriously eroded not only as the dollar, but all national currencies.
Money in our current world makes the stuff go around, but none of that provides the energetics or the information to push or pull the stuff from nothing to the stuff in your home. Energetics is coupled with news information through the world of media and advertising. That too is centered in New York City, actually Manhattan, not all that far from Wall Street.
After the 9-11 attacks there was a lot of talk about what would happen if terrorists would set off a suitcase nuclear device or a dirty bomb in New York. Even with all of that, this concern has faded into the Hudson River and New York’s love affair with itself is just as centralized as it ever was. What would America do without the superstars of political commentary?
Even if you do not believe that New York City is referenced in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 18, the Babylonian discussion does not directly focus on money except in its classical medium of exchange format. The focus of the chapter is really about fancy goods that people no longer wanted to purchase.
So for years, news organizations have claimed some sort of neutrality in their reporting. Some of this has degenerated into groups passing around warm fuzzies for sharing redundant schmooze. Sadly even fair and balanced has come to mean extremists from one political pole rudely interrupting someone from the other side of the political spectrum. Within the last year added to the mix is a high dosage of Libertarian views, which tend to indicate that borderline anarchy is superior to either extreme and those who do not hold to their particular concept of freedom and liberty are out of touch with reality. Thankfully everywhere all these segments only last slightly longer than the three to four minute commercial breaks required to pay the bills. The old saying surely fits, “If you are part of the problem, you surely are not part of the solution.”
In light of that illumination, Humpty Dumpty is still sitting on a propped up wall just waiting for the calamity that brings him and the wall down. Then we will quickly learn that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put either the wall or Humpty Dumpty together again. For now continue to check this dress rehearsal thru the Obama Administrations treatment of the Christmas Day terrorist attack in Detroit.
In 2010 we will continue to drive on socialized roads. Fly much more slowly hither and thither from socialized airports. Too bad we can’t take the train like they do in real socialist countries, because capitalist robber baron America oil and auto companies bought up the private mass transit services and shut them down. True free market human rail transport just can’t compete with socialized transportation (or healthcare). Therefore you need a couple of somewhat specialized infernal combustion machines to live almost anywhere and to do almost anything outside the extreme urban core.
The price of oil will continue to be manipulated to the maintain prices at the highest level possible, just under where alternative energy can become economically profitable. So we will continue to learn that our form of capitalism really has nothing to do with free markets, and much of it really has become a racket to continue to provide federal taxpayer subsidies to corporate oligarchies. Since federal taxes currently in no way cover the deficit spending that day of reckoning is becoming a closer real economic sunset. Jobs and credit will continue to be hard to come by. But through it all we will begin to again understand that there is a God and even our best-intentioned efforts lack the wherewithal to even maintain the status quo.
Once we gain that wisdom, something significant can begin to be done about recreating true wealth in this country through small business entrepreneurship. Risk taking will again become a reality, because in reality there is no other alternative. And the unique God granted miracle that brought about the American Republic will again see the fruit of our Divinely coordinated efforts.
We close this year with a selection from the Yale Book of Quotations that even predates the American Revolution and speaks to change that politicians and special interests cannot foil. The Bible calls these Psalms, the quotation goes as follows: “If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.” Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, “An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Government for the Good of Mankind” (1704).
Podcast
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
Well fellow humans 2009 really was quite a year. As we are continually being reminded by the political spin-doctors, when we entered the year, total financial catastrophe was just a needed bailout away, and now things are much, much better and all would be surely wonderful, except for the fact that they, the real politicians, inherited such a pending disaster.
Humpty Dumpty didn’t fall off the financial wall – yet, but Humpty does seem to look sort of like a handsome bald headed guy with a beard (Ben Bernacke), and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men look strangely like Goldman Sachs investment bankers; just like good old Humpty himself. So lacking a similar event in American history we should give them credit for keeping the wall from collapsing completely. There are still some questions yet to be answered, mostly around the fact that the wall, in its present condition, is completely unsustainable and would we be much better off in the long run, to build a new wall and let the old one crumble into history?
As I was thinking about a title for this final episode in 2009, things are still not that different than the Great Depression. Leaving financial and employment considerations out of the argument, the title of Amity Shlaes’ book “The Forgotten Man” still seems to fit very well. The problem for the twenty-first century however is that the title is so politically incorrect. “The Forgotten Man and Woman” really doesn’t have a good ring to it. So we are pretty much stuck with “The Forgotten Humans.”
That title also fits well with the prime religion of today, evolving atheistic humanism. The Forgotten, by whatever handle, are no longer created in the image of God, but rather consumption machines of a global plan to bring a fictitious heaven to earth. Probably a better with it, term is Utopia, but many are beginning to call it socialism, or communism. Those many however are just troublemakers who don’t understand their place as evolving animals that the more highly evolved will use to fix all the unnatural things of the world. Of course the evolved elite really wants nothing to do with real nature and reality, because that wildness is really a scary place that doesn’t accept their elitist credentials and treats them as not superior to other animals and even lowly plants.
As this year comes to an end it is becoming apparent that some changes are in the offering, for things are beginning to get complex as we move forward in time. Today we hear in the United States, talk about our Founding Fathers and the U S Constitution. That was just an impossible dream just a year ago. Those Forgotten Humans are realizing that they are just not bred to be consuming stuffers, but they are real men and women, with families and hopes and aspirations beyond making a million dollars over a lifetime, by doing a boring job, so you could retire undefeated. Of course much of that awaking was driven by the reality that many of those prosperous investments have disappeared along with the job. If it didn’t happen to you, it is happening to those you once considered your friends.
As I wrote last week one of my goals in my pilgrimage through this last quarter century was to bring some harmony between my spiritual life and my secular life. As things are now shaping up this is quite similar to the struggle we are beginning to see within America, but these transitions are very difficult as we broaden our perspectives and become aware of the tensions between the two. Saint Augustine called these tensions the “City of God” and the “City of Man.” The difficult, is to understand the proper context of how the secular and the religious can work together to form a moral secular society and culture. This is the miracle of the Founding of the United States and her Constitution. It was a God thing back then, and the way out of this morass will be a God thing also.
Therefore in the New Year The Wonder Springs Chronicle will renew or reemphasize the uniquely Christian perspective of God’s grace offered to men and women, and how those humans can become better leaders by serving God, not only through church but also in the civil or secular arena. As the New Year unfolds we will be developing the separate secular viewpoint with a more creation-focused understanding of how success in the human ecosystem must follow the scientific reality that you find in nature or creation.
Ester 4:14 states: For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"
For such a time as this! We are all here on earth for such a time as this, that is truly a scary, but God centered reality. We will again learn that God is real, and that reality will come in such a way that we will confess that this whole new unity in diversity is way too complex for human knowledge and wisdom to accomplish within our confining sinful depravity.
Exodus 23:30 states: Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land.
Deuteronomy 7:22 states: And the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you.
So that we again will truly understand God centered humility 1 Peter 4:17 states: For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? (ESV)
So let us try to look forward into 2010 and see what might be on the horizon for that year and beyond.
The biggest pending reality that we can now understand relates to Humpty Dumpty, that is Humpty Dumpty in the financial sense. There underpins all reality energetic and informational components that allow everything to work together to create a stasis or equilibrium. Both of these in general terms follow the Natural Laws of Thermodynamics and entropy. If either one of these attributes are ignored, eventually not only does Humpty Dumpty fall off the wall and breaks, but the wall itself falls down. This is what is known as a catastrophe or a disaster because the cohesiveness of everything falls apart.
President Obama was elected on the promise of “Change We Can Believe In.” This is to be accomplished by hopeful thoughts and rhetoric. But hope is not an energetic or informational force. Hope is simply a God given attribute of humanity to cope with difficult circumstances. But in an environment devoid of God, hope is really self-righteous vanity, and even in a Godly worldview it is always subject to the Divine historic will of God who alone understands and sees the whole of reality.
We hope we have fixed the financial meltdown by creating a bailout Band-Aid for institutions, which we have defined as “too big to fail.” We have done this, we are really cool. However a pending Humpty Dumpty fall and wall failure has been a slow but progressive lack of financial husbandry for a century. Adding money as thick wallpaper may delay the wall collapse, but does nothing to rebuild or energize the wall structure and Humpty himself is becoming an old codger. The problem currently in the United States is that we generate very little new wealth, and we borrow against what wealth exists to maintain an opulent lifestyle that cannot be sustained under current or status quo economic conditions.
Glenn Beck has talked about how the Cloward – Piven strategy, in conjunction with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, may be the means by which the Progressives in this country collapse the economy and reestablish their atheistic communist agenda. Communism is almost totally devoid of either sustaining information or energetics, so it can only be established and maintained by coercive force even for short periods of time. The seventy year history of the Soviet Union was instituted and maintained to maturity by those who truly eliminated all opposition.
Furthermore without an outward renewing of energetic and informational circulation within the culture, collapse is only a matter of time. The best or worst intentions of mankind do little to change that reality until such a time when natural entropy takes over. Personally if I had to make a pick for the catalyst on how the American culture would outwardly collapse it would come from jihadist Islam.
The primary reason for this is because they consider all of Western Culture, especially the United States the Great Satan. They believe that our materialistic atheistic culture is really just a materialistic atheistic culture. Americans just don’t realize that all their positive thinking about how great and good we are, is really just a mask to hide the true nature of way too many of our institutions.
In “Cabaret” there is a song “Money, Money, Money” in which “money makes the world go around.” Wall Street and the Humpty Dumpty bailouts believe this. This might have been true at one time but now with a world flooded with funny money, money is in the process of becoming meaningless as the means of commerce. You might want to exchange one type of electronic money bits and bytes for another type, or even a piece of paper, but the truth game that gives value to money is being seriously eroded not only as the dollar, but all national currencies.
Money in our current world makes the stuff go around, but none of that provides the energetics or the information to push or pull the stuff from nothing to the stuff in your home. Energetics is coupled with news information through the world of media and advertising. That too is centered in New York City, actually Manhattan, not all that far from Wall Street.
After the 9-11 attacks there was a lot of talk about what would happen if terrorists would set off a suitcase nuclear device or a dirty bomb in New York. Even with all of that, this concern has faded into the Hudson River and New York’s love affair with itself is just as centralized as it ever was. What would America do without the superstars of political commentary?
Even if you do not believe that New York City is referenced in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 18, the Babylonian discussion does not directly focus on money except in its classical medium of exchange format. The focus of the chapter is really about fancy goods that people no longer wanted to purchase.
So for years, news organizations have claimed some sort of neutrality in their reporting. Some of this has degenerated into groups passing around warm fuzzies for sharing redundant schmooze. Sadly even fair and balanced has come to mean extremists from one political pole rudely interrupting someone from the other side of the political spectrum. Within the last year added to the mix is a high dosage of Libertarian views, which tend to indicate that borderline anarchy is superior to either extreme and those who do not hold to their particular concept of freedom and liberty are out of touch with reality. Thankfully everywhere all these segments only last slightly longer than the three to four minute commercial breaks required to pay the bills. The old saying surely fits, “If you are part of the problem, you surely are not part of the solution.”
In light of that illumination, Humpty Dumpty is still sitting on a propped up wall just waiting for the calamity that brings him and the wall down. Then we will quickly learn that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put either the wall or Humpty Dumpty together again. For now continue to check this dress rehearsal thru the Obama Administrations treatment of the Christmas Day terrorist attack in Detroit.
In 2010 we will continue to drive on socialized roads. Fly much more slowly hither and thither from socialized airports. Too bad we can’t take the train like they do in real socialist countries, because capitalist robber baron America oil and auto companies bought up the private mass transit services and shut them down. True free market human rail transport just can’t compete with socialized transportation (or healthcare). Therefore you need a couple of somewhat specialized infernal combustion machines to live almost anywhere and to do almost anything outside the extreme urban core.
The price of oil will continue to be manipulated to the maintain prices at the highest level possible, just under where alternative energy can become economically profitable. So we will continue to learn that our form of capitalism really has nothing to do with free markets, and much of it really has become a racket to continue to provide federal taxpayer subsidies to corporate oligarchies. Since federal taxes currently in no way cover the deficit spending that day of reckoning is becoming a closer real economic sunset. Jobs and credit will continue to be hard to come by. But through it all we will begin to again understand that there is a God and even our best-intentioned efforts lack the wherewithal to even maintain the status quo.
Once we gain that wisdom, something significant can begin to be done about recreating true wealth in this country through small business entrepreneurship. Risk taking will again become a reality, because in reality there is no other alternative. And the unique God granted miracle that brought about the American Republic will again see the fruit of our Divinely coordinated efforts.
We close this year with a selection from the Yale Book of Quotations that even predates the American Revolution and speaks to change that politicians and special interests cannot foil. The Bible calls these Psalms, the quotation goes as follows: “If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.” Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, “An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Government for the Good of Mankind” (1704).
Podcast