This Time It’s Not the Economy

 

                    This Time It’s Not the Economy

             Everybody needs a roof, food and water, and some mode of transportation to get to work. Economic needs are real. But man cannot live by bread alone. Our mental, emotional, and spiritual needs are just as important. Pity the man who thinks his body is the only thing that needs attention.

            Economically, many things are now shaky for U.S. citizens. Inflation, job loss, the U.S. dollar’s impending loss of status in global trade, and debt which Congress recently once again chose to kick down the road are all reasons for concern. But as uncertain as these matters are, there are other issues that are equally important. Feed only the body and the bank account but never the soul or the mind and you will experience one or more of the following conditions: loneliness, joylessness, fear, failure, or suicide. It appears that our economic worries have blinded us to two problems that are already pervasive and visibly destructive. I’m referring to the crime and moral perversion that are sweeping the country, and I predict that as we move closer to 2024, Middle America is going to make these two issues the primary ones.

            There are signs that the silent middle is beginning to make noise. Throughout the country parents who have been politically uninvolved are attending local school board meetings in unprecedented numbers. They are protesting curriculum choices and what amounts to indoctrination of their children and teens. More than a few have addressed their board to argue that schooling is for sound subject matter instruction, not ideological persuasion on subjects that are not the schools’ business in the first place.

            Perversion is a loaded word and is often misunderstood. Perversion is not an opposite but a twist. The Oxford English Dictionary says perversion is “the alteration of something from its original course or state to a distortion of what was first intended.” Perversion of justice is a sad matter but perversion of human sexuality is more far-reaching and more deeply damaging. Here we are moving toward the middle of Pride Month with its outrageous drag queens, its Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and its full support of homosexuality and the transgender epidemic. Of course the nation’s president heartily approves. Does anyone think Mr. Biden and other liberals would approve of the Sisters if they were making fun of Mohammed and Muslims instead of Christ and Catholics?

            Is there any guess as to what is coming next in our headlong rush toward deeper and deeper sexual anarchy? The U.N. can help us answer that. Its recent approval of a report of the International Commission of Jurists, a worldwide “human rights organization,” indicates that the U.N. is hunky-dory with adults having sex with adolescents. “Enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 to make decisions about engaging in consensual sex,” reads the report of the Jurists. Who is surprised? People whom we thought were normal have been saying for some time that even children should be honored and heeded when they claim they need to be “transgendered.”

            Bible believers – and there are millions in America – have no choice but to reject and resist the LGBQT’s perverted view of sexuality and they will continue to be criticized and slandered for it. Christians are being told by the Democrats, by corporate America, Big Tech, Pro Sports, and the military to shape up and “think as I think.”

            As for skyrocketing crime, a truth about this issue must be faced as well. Watch television. View the videos. Overwhelmingly it is young Black men who are looting the stores, beating up elderly citizens on the streets, destroying property, and accosting pedestrians at will. Thank goodness for the voices of Black leaders like Ben Carson, Pastor Tony Evans of Dallas, Texas, and Lt. Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina who fearlessly approach this issue and refuse to pamper criminals because of their color.  These gentlemen need far more support from Black citizens.

            Americans no longer feel safe. They know that crime has moved from the inner city to the suburbs and rural America. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that small town sheriffs and prosecutors are overwhelmed with violent crime cases and that violent crime in rural areas has risen above the U.S. average.

            Crime is a sin against God and man. Sexual perversion is no less. Sexual anarchists have already redefined marriage. But the gay mafia is pressing its luck in messing with our children. I for one believe that Americans are awakening to this and will vote accordingly. If we do not … go read about the fall of the Roman Empire.

 

Roger Hines

June 8, 2024        

We Cannot Escape History

We Cannot Escape History

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) June 3, 2023

Learning from last week’s Marietta Daily Journal that Marietta and Cobb County schools will graduate 8,800+ students this year, I began to reflect.

I’m not sure which group I most enjoyed teaching. Was it high school seniors, college freshmen, college English majors, or prison inmates? All four groups had at least one thing in common: their minds were on the future. Yes, even the minds of the inmates in two of Georgia’s state prisons: the twenty-somethings, the pastors, the successful businessmen and business women, nurses, lawyers, and a few former ne’er-do-wells who had run with bad company.

            Believe it or not, thinking about the future was as characteristic of the high school seniors as it was of any other group. Many people tend to think that high school seniors have their minds either on partying and “getting out of here” or on relaxing a bit their last year since after all, seniors know everything anyhow. No such attitude was held by the seniors I’ve taught in two different states and four different high schools. Most I’ve taught evidenced a sense of seriousness and in some cases worry. What’s next for me? Toward what line of work do my abilities point me? How long will Mom and Dad let me hang around? Knowing as early as the 10^th grade that I wanted to teach, I often felt sorry for seniors who had little or no clue of what they should or could do after high school. Sad uncertainty lay on their faces.

            I left the high school scene after 37 years of public school teaching. I left college teaching after 14 more years. Both experiences were equally rewarding. Over those 51 years chalk boards and dust yielded to white boards and markers, then white boards and markers yielded to computer screens and loss of the human touch, but students –whether youths or adults – did not change. In 2022 they were just as respectful, just as disrespectful, just as hardworking, just as lazy, just as inspiring, just as non-inspiring, just as engaged, just as neglectful, just as confident, and just as needy as they were five decades earlier. Modern times and technology have not changed human nature.

            To teach is to hold one’s grip on the pulse of the times. To teach is to watch history in the making. Perhaps the most exciting thing about teaching is that teachers and what they teach are essentially about the past but are for the future. Today the growing number of absent fathers, the weakening of the family, the beckoning of Hollywood’s moral poison, and the influence of sexual chaos on children and youth are all things with which teachers are very familiar. If only parents knew what teachers know about the negative influences their children face.

            It is the possibility of a brighter or, with some, a less dark future that keeps many young people and adults going these days. The same is true of the imprisoned, whatever their age or background. Better than anyone else, prison inmates know that you cannot escape history, particularly your own. Would that those who have never been in prison could realize this truth.

            But how are schools handling history? Primarily they give us political history (wars, dates, elections, etc.) and little if any intellectual history (ideas, say, of Jefferson, Socrates, Cicero, Benjamin Franklin, and others). Political and cultural revolutions, wars, and economic depressions spring from actions which spring from ideas. No political leader has influenced us more than the ideas of Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Dr. Spock. How many wars, religious controversies, and personal/family struggles can be traced to Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Dr. Spock? The answer is almost all of them. Yet, we all studied what these four opinion-givers caused rather than what they first thought up and wrote. Failing to examine the ideas behind our wars and our poor parenting, we therefore repeat our errors.

            Mississippi novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past isn’t over yet.” Indeed it never will be. What our 8,800+ graduates learned is that America in its beginnings aspired to be a different kind of nation, one that shook off the tyranny of the Old World and fought for freedoms that had never been enjoyed by any nation before. But what they face today is a nation of group identities with group grievances. Teddy Roosevelt warned us that if we lost the vision our framers intended, we would become “a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

            History has been defined by several scholars as “a rich weave of many threads.” I pray that our graduates will awaken to this fact and do their part to stop the unraveling that is now occurring in America.