Chronicles of Diversity

13 December 2006; Volume 8, Issue 38

Our 2006 Chronicle Archives are now available for PDF download at www.wondersprings.org. It is our plan to have the whole Chronicles of Diversity Archives stretching back to 1999 in a searchable database by the first of 2007. Beginning in January we will be changing the name of Chronicles of Diversity to The Wonder Springs Chronicle posted on the WonderSprings.org dedicated blog server.

We haven’t heard much from Uncle Sam in a long time now. What has happened to the old dude? Is he living in some nursing home in Florida, perhaps he resides in a Old Soldiers home in Arizona? Maybe he bought a cattle ranch in eastern Montana.

We know that Uncle Sam first showed up during the War of 1812 and shortly thereafter quickly became the personification of the United States. Some say that he was really Samuel Wilson of upstate New York, much like Saint Nicholas morphed into Santa Claus. Come to think of it Santa Claus may have moved in with Uncle Sam, neither are politically correct individuals in the United States today.

Both Uncle Sam and Santa Claus stand for traditional American values. Values based on the Good Book and Natural Law and God’s common grace. Traditional values are not in vogue anymore, swept away as we rapidly evolve into the morass of individualism without morals, and gross materialism as our only legacy to the future.

I got to thinking about Uncle Sam, listening to a song on my way back to Spokane from my cabin on the Kettle River yesterday. What this country really needs now is not a unified North American union, that seems to be one of the Bush Administration’s secret agendas, probably attempted in pursuit of Bush senior’s New World Order. What America needs today is to return to what Uncle Sam could teach us about America, the world, and each other.

You have to give Dubbya credit, he seems to be one of our country’s hardest working presidents. The problem seems to be all that work has turned into what we used to haul out in a wheel barrow from my grandfathers dairy barn. However, if things don’t change dramatically in the next two years, historians are determined to write the Bush legacy as the worst president in the history of the country, surpassing Jimmy Carter.

Interesting, the two worst presidents, if not in America’s history, at least in recent times, are both our most outwardly Christian in their confessions of faith. Come to think of it, we really have not had real leadership from the president in a long time now. Bill Clinton after all gave us the legacy of, “It depends upon what your definition of is, is.” and “I could do it, so I did.”

Jimmy Carter is still going around the world proclaiming his Christian gospel, derived from the liberal Christian social gospel of mainline Christianity from the Great Depression until – - – about the time of Jimmy Carter, when it seemed to vanish from the Christian agenda.

That liberal gospel of social works was replaced with another much more conservative, at least in how it is spun, moral majority working toward a theocratic federal government. That Christian Right is the base that George W. Bush has placated since he began running for the office of president, at the expense of what many would consider the traditions of the Republican Party, namely limited government expressed as fiscal responsibility, and personal freedom. Could the failings of George W. Bush be the end of the Christian Right, just as Jimmy Carter was the end of the social gospel? Something to contemplate as the next few years unravel, if that is the proper verb.

Uncle Sam however, probably because he is such a wise old coot, is all about freedom. Freedom is the essence of Judeo – Christian values that made this country what it was, the freedom we have lost. Uncle Sam shares with Jesus an understanding on how a free society must function in order to continue to be self renewing. All those values are lost on the politicians of today. Those politicians, liberal, moderate, and conservative, and also their check provided in the Constitution, the judiciary, only think they know the way to the future. However, Uncle Sam knows the real truth!

Uncle Sam knows that democracies throughout history only tend to last about 200 years. One of the first signs of their demise is the fact that the citizens choose no longer to fight their wars. The founders of the United States founded this country on the premise of the citizen soldier. If one wish to truly find the cause of the Iraq war, all one needs to do is to look to the establishment of the “All Volunteer Army” (Military Mercenary Expeditionary Force).

Wars are what a professional military are trained to do. Not only that, wars are needed to keep, as President Dwight Eisenhower stated, the “military industrial complex” as a tool for continued economic growth at home. Furthermore, a mercenary military is dangerous without an external war to fight. So the military is a good thing to promote national interests abroad, rather than within the homeland. Even better if we spin it in the light of freedom and democracy. This is not United States history, this is world history of both the east and the west.

Uncle Sam knows that bigger is not better, bigger is just different in the least virulent form. In it’s most destructive form we know it as cancer. That bigger is better mind set robs all of society of the mechanisms for renewal. Uncle Sam saw the rise of the railroads, today we do not drive automobiles and trucks made by those early railroad companies, we also do not fly in their airplanes.

Uncle Sam knows that Americans, and all human beings, are not “addicted to oil,” he knows we are wired for personal transportation. It has been that way since God gave us feet. The reason we now have to drive around in infernal combustion driven automobiles, is not by market choices, but because of lack of market choices. Monopolistic oil companies and America’s auto industry provide ego fulfilling, profit making machines, their fuel, and their maintenance. Why mess with a good thing as long as it lasts. Big government also, is not through fuel economy mandates, going to change significantly the way we get around, only postpone the inevitable.

Uncle Sam knows that all man has ever done is pollute his nest. As long as there were few people on the earth, they just moved on to greener pastures and overgrazed them too. The current sustainability movement is really just wishful thinking to prolong materialism through regulation of man’s own sinful desires to be part of a powerful ruling elite. A much more efficient way to bring about the same desired effect is to give a dozen or so Islamic terrorists suitcase nuclear devices. Not only is the fallout localized, all that dust raises the earth’s albedo, overcoming some of the effects of greenhouse gases.

Uncle Sam knows, this time along with the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, that banks are really very negative institutions. They really don’t believe in any semblance of goodness either, in the common grace sense, or in the sense of revealed grace such as in Christianity, or any religion for that matter. Banks and their related evolutionary inventions seek to maintain not only monetary wealth, but also physical assets in the hands of those who already have more than they need or should desire. As evolutionary institutions they can only function in the world of like minded enterprise, which seek not the common good, but evolutionary dominance.

Uncle Sam knows the Bible. Maybe when you began your life in a time, when times did not move so rapidly, you had more opportunity to contemplate what is really important in this world. Considering back in those olden days, even Thomas Jefferson’s Bible contained the word of God except for the miracles the Enlightenment found to be beyond human reason. But even with all the Enlightenment’s desire to be humanly reasonable, they still had not evolved to such a state to believe that evolution truly existed, and atheism was definitely not a model to base your life’s future.

Uncle Sam believes that the earth was formed as the Bible says, out of the chaos of randomness in a short period of days. As such he understands that chaos is the polar opposite of true freedom. “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” John 8:36

The thought that Jesus Christ truly makes you free is the message that the world does not understand. When Uncle Sam began his pilgrimage it was a rare gift. Today you must search long and work very hard to dig through a manure pile that the church has become. To use the concepts of Francis Schaeffer, by attempting to make a relative statement to a world that does not believe in any absolutes or universal truths, the church has foregone her freedom, becoming just another particular for the parlance of individual choice.

Uncle Sam knows along with Francis Schaeffer, that the freedom that the world offers only leads to chaos, corruption, and tyranny. On the other hand the freedom offered in Jesus Christ alone, through his death on the cross for the sins of all mankind and his bodily resurrection from the dead, is the only path to true freedom. This is universally true not only for the individual, but for the formation of true community in which each individual (particular) has a unique role to play as a personality created in the image of God.

Uncle Sam knows to leave you with some inspired words, to allow you to think of grandeur beyond what you can create for yourself. In that regard the personification of freedom for the United States, Uncle Sam, as a beacon of freedom’s personality, both in the individual and their community, offers us the word’s to contemplate in Psalm 146:

Praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD, O my soul!

While I live I will praise the LORD;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Do not put your trust in princes,
Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help.

His spirit departs, he returns to his earth;
In that very day his plans perish.

Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help,
Whose hope is in the LORD his God,

Who made heaven and earth,
The sea, and all that is in them;
Who keeps truth forever,

Who executes justice for the oppressed,
Who gives food to the hungry.
The LORD gives freedom to the prisoners.

The LORD opens the eyes of the blind;
The LORD raises those who are bowed down;
The LORD loves the righteous.

The LORD watches over the strangers;
He relieves the fatherless and widow;
But the way of the wicked He turns upside down.

The LORD shall reign forever—
Your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the LORD!