Our lives are like a fabric woven thread by thread through time, year by year. Sometimes the fabric feels like burlap and sometimes like the finest silk. The length is indeterminate as is the width and breadth.  But whenever it shall end, it will tell our story to the One who lives eternally, the master of the loom. The collector of all fabrics adds to and builds this tapestry, the unending warp and woof of the universe.

Let us return to living with respect for other people, places and property.  And let us add to this our own discipline and resulting responsibility for passing along these tenets to our young who need the guidance and experience of their elders.  Let us think of someone other than ourselves, with their friends and families and their living spaces. Let us replace our negativity with lasting positivity and renew our commitment to faith and hope and love.  Let us occasionally meditate.  Why are we here?  We live and we die. Is that all there is?  What’s next?  When our bodies are gone, what’s left?  Do we survive as a soul?  Will someone ask us “Did you live with respect?” Do our lives have a purpose? Did we live with each other with respect?  Is eternity real?  Did we use our time wisely or waste it away?

Is there still time to wake up or are we deaf to the signs and warnings and exhortations to shape up and come together in love for one another, and with whomever we may meet who is traveling along the same path with a crutch or in an airplane?  Do we see?  Will we finally see?  We need to learn to live together and realize that the foundation for this is respect.  Respect…!

Idealists are a lot like frogs who, when put into a pot of slowly heating water, will stay there rather than jump out before the water boils and they die.  In the present political situation, the idealist would rather stay put while everything gets worse and worse and pulls everything down with them in a resounding crash rather than admit to a failure by jumping to safety.  I weep.  I fear.

I weep for the times gone by that took with them our freedom of speech and left censorship in its place.  I fear for the times to come when we will figuratively or literally die because of a misspoken word or even an implication however innocent that will spell our doom as a society. Can no one look ahead?  Is there anyone who can communicate the danger that awaits us around the next corner of our lives?

I weep for the young, our unknowing descendants who will inherit evil embodied as the solution to all of our problems.  I fear for the survival of our ability to think and express ourselves freely and unfettered by a government gotten too large and gone too wrong. Is there a messiah, a savior, a champion to save the common sense and the gentility of civilization? Or are there only liars, thieves and multibillionaires who support a mass stranglehold on a media which has become only a tool of these evildoers?  Not knowing, I weep.  I fear.  But enough…!

There are four solutions that I can see that will always be with us even if they are temporarily hidden.  These are faith, hope, love and …?…

Faith that enough citizens will wake up and put a stop to the election of mentally unsound leaders in government whether it is local or national.  Hope that we can retain the ability to communicate information accurately with or without our ruptured media.  And, love of one another.  This is the most difficult because it involves dealing with personalities that may be goodhearted but ostensibly unlovable.  And finally we need to begin again to ask questions.  Too often we forget to ask questions or have them blocked by someone with a crooked agenda who is in charge.  When we can no longer question anything or anybody, we are doomed to follow whomever or whatever wishes to lead us blindly into their den.

The bottom line to all of the above is freedom.  Freedom is not free.  Freedom takes constant vigilance and stewardship to keep it intact and to protect it.  Freedom is unique in our world.  It is not guaranteed and it is not universal.  We need to be very careful of the seduction of globalism.  To participate, each nation must give up something in order to blend in to the whole.  We must be aware that this could be a weakening of our precious freedom.  This freedom contains our common sense and our ability to think and express ourselves freely.  It is worth fighting for.  Semper fidelis. Semper paratus.   May God bless us, and may God bless these United States of America.