The Tyranny of Time
Each year of our lives life brings
new truths, truths about the past (some we'd rather not remember) and truths
about the present where each of us is intertwined in a webwork known as society,
the marketplace, utilities infrastructures, controlling government, and the
daily administration of justice.
Things thought true yesterday are
now seen as patently false ... fables made to foster man’s societal
adventures, lies sold to a greedy populace by partisans of diverse persuasions
… always at the expense of individual freedom.
Freedom to choose one’s destiny is certainly
primary to any framework of government that promises to keep its people free,
yet your government educates your children through state-supported schools (or
abandons them to other institutions, e.g., church-operated schools, each of
which being regulated by the state in one way or another); through regulated
media; through the legal system itself; through military conscription (not
necessarily a bad thing in times of war or threat of war, but certainly a
limitation on freedom when practiced during times of peace); and by threats of
police power (if not in person then at least five times each night on the TV
screen).
Freedom to choose is limited by the variety of
one’s available choices. If one must choose from A, B, or C … there is no
freedom to choose Q, R, S, or T.
It’s just the way things are. One may argue
with laws and politicians, but it’s unwise to argue with truth – for,
contrary to the pretense of many who conceit themselves to be wise these days,
truth is what it is regardless of one’s view about it. Truth is what it
is. It’s just the way things are!
"What it is?" street people sometimes
ask when greeting a friend.
What it is is what it is.
Knowing what it is is part of being truly human
(saving one’s soul from the common fate of a bell-curved multitude hell-bent
on perpetuating their bell-curve mentality with worn-out fables).
Truths are what they are, yet many truths are not
discovered until later in life. There can’t be any opposition to that
statement, can there? What was seen as ultimately valuable, paramountly
pertinent, perfectly desirable, and eminently worth our most sacrificing effort
is sometimes seen in the light that later years fan brighter to be nothing more
than pretense, popular myth, or pure poppycock.
Age brings a clearer view.
For example, to look past the many corridors of
popular opinion on one subject or another (held, as they usually are, by younger
folks, fueled by the enthusiasm of people mostly under 40, supported by the
patronage of a separated class of society) in search of a possible opposing
concept brings comfort-threatening surprises. In the old books one finds that
men and women long since dead already thought ideas as those now stressing many
segments of modern society. Thoughts that stir great movements in the present
also stirred great movements in the past. The promoting personalities and their
patrons may have different names today, live in different places, and enjoy the
benefits of different technologies … but the "nature" of their
efforts and the "spirit" that empowers them to move mountains in the
name of their common polity are not much changed. Always it is the same.
Man struggles for Order … while refusing to see
it as it is.
"Always," one man wrote more than a
hundred years ago, "there will be those who hasten to the city square with
news of some discovery of truth only to find ten thousand have already arrived
with news of their own and a plan for the people to support with their labors
and their very lives."
Jesus asked Saul of Tarsus (who later became the
Apostle Paul), "Why do you kick against the sharp prongs?" The
reference was to stubborn oxen. Oxcarts of the time were sometimes fitted along
the leading edge with pointed sticks to hurt the oxen’s feet and legs if they
kicked back at the wagon they were harnessed to pull forward.
People who deny the truth should not be followed
but by fools who can know no better, yet denying the truth and gathering a
following of paying postulates to hear it exposed seems all the rage these days.
It's become a lucrative profession, a business that grows in leaps and bounds
each year as people abandon the faith of their fathers to join new movements
that proclaim a day of peace they promise will be won when society varies its
view of reality.
Yet these teachings fail to account for the
misery monolithic living brings where the fate of the powerless is left to
chance, where no plan is offered to protect peaceful throngs from the bestial
acts of those who will not read the offered books nor attend love-offering
seminars. The new teachings insist all truth is relative and promise peace to
those who will discover it "their way". These charlatans refuse to
tell us how we are to govern human behavior in the collective sense, how we are
to curb the natural enthusiasm of humans for mischief, mayhem, and the
occasional slaughter man still seems intent on perpetrating for the satisfaction
of inner demons not yet privy to the wisdom sold for massive profits in our New
Age bookstores.
Even established religions have abandoned the
burden of publishing the principles of Order.
It may be this spiritual weakness, this fatal
flaw, this intentionally omitted responsibility that perhaps in part contributes
to the modern lack of interest in walking the aisles of protocol toward a heaven
promised by well-fed men and women who derive their profit from the faith of
their followers … much like Manhattan shopkeepers smoking cigars under Fedora
hats hawking customers from the doorways of their streetside shops, inviting
passers-by to come in and try the merchandise. The irresponsibility of many
leaders who refuse to teach and preach the entire truth (for fear they
will assist their following to see clay feet) is a crime only the edict of
eternity can punish sufficiently.
Where is truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth?
Certainly not in any of the New Age
religions taught today nor in the present offerings of politicians, pundits,
media moguls, or the market.
Opinion rules the world and all its magisterial
offices.
Only a few restrain themselves from following the
unified rabble passing our window each day with their placards and their cries.
Only a few remain in their houses, so to speak, while parades of paradigms
invite them to join the dance in our streets, long lines of unhalted separate
opinions dragging their victim followers behind them in the march toward
Valhalla and the Perfect Life. Only a few measure truth by "what is".
It's easier to take up the more salable ideas of this modern age, the more
comfortable ear-scratching opinions passed to them by others.
Only a few see the light.
What of the majority? What about democracy, that
much-misunderstood daughter of republican insight? How do we rule ourselves by
majority vote if the majority is sometimes wrong? How shall we rule ourselves if
one may expect the majority to be wrong on occasion (as history certainly
demonstrates probable)? What hope do we have of passing a safe world to our
children, a place of common sense, of decency and beauty, if only the majority
is to rule without some supervening Order to prevent their mass edicts from
destroying dissenters deemed to have no value to the collective? How can we rule
ourselves safely and still allow for individual freedom?
The answer is in Order.
If Peace and Prosperity are our goals, then Order
is required.
What Order, though? This is, of course, the
question that has plagued all ages.
"Precisely!" Ned Turner would say,
"What Order, indeed? Say, fellows," he would ask, "Whose Order do
we follow and submit to? Whose Order do we support? Whose Order do we fight
for?" Fair questions that should more frequently be asked and more fully
discussed between us.
The boys out fishing know the answer. The men and
women planting corn and wheat in country fields at this hour know the answer.
The paperboy on quiet early-morning streets in New York City knows the answer.
The housewife being battered for trying to keep her husband from brutalizing the
children knows. The undertaker who sees what’s left at the end of life, the
emergency room technician, the divorced man or woman left with only pieces of a
dream, shattered businessmen victimized by invidious taxation, and every person
who’s been robbed of hope by the acts of others who "got away with
it" knows the answer.
What Order?
There is but one Order … the Plan by
which all men and women meet as equals in the square and on the commons
of their lives, the Plan where Justice knows no bank account nor civic status
nor favored physiognomy deserving preference above another, the Plan that
ensures prosperity and peace for all without robbing some to give to others in
the name of political expedience, the Plan that sees us all as mortals equally
entitled by our very being to enjoy the fruits of enterprise without
restrictions favoring our competition.
Yet this is not how things are found today. This
Plan for Order is being rejected and ignored because of Public Legal Ignorance!
Perhaps only lawyers see it clearly, but since
they make so much money perpetuating the status quo, it’s unlikely many of
them will stand up for the truth, except in furtherance of their paying clients’
interests.
Long-established and highly-venerated
organizations oppose the Order, actually fighting for favoritism … the Order’s
mortal enemy.
The Order is often ignored as unattainable,
treated as a mere ideal no longer worthy of serious effort, something to be
ridiculed by those who for profit posture themselves as wise enough to lead the
rest of us.
Others wage wars against the Order and its
proponents, sometimes actually killing innocent humans to keep the Order and its
truth away from young people who might insist on its immediate adoption. If
people required their leaders to follow the Order, many government employees
would lose their jobs, for they would be no longer needed to regulate our lives
and minimize our choices in life.
Because of organized and public-sanctioned
opposition to the Order all of us suffer, generation after generation. It
has been this way for thousands of years. Indeed, your own reflection on events
of history will show that nearly all human atrocity was performed by franchised
leaders in opposition to the Order.
All of us suffer so long as the Order and its
Plan are kept from us by partiality and faction. The Order often is not followed
in our Courts, regardless of judges’ banging gavels or armed men standing at
the door. Nor is the Order always followed in our Legislatures, where laws are
routinely passed to take from some and give to others. And, it seems clear, the
Order is not always followed in our Executive Offices (at federal, state,
county, city, or even the tiniest municipality) where officers of government
refuse to operate in older buildings away from valuable commercial property,
where even the lowest clerk sits in a chair that costs far more than the simple
cane-bottomed chair from which these words are penned to you. Everywhere we see
the power of our taxes being squandered by government employees whose jobs are
to rob the many and give to a few or to take from the few and give to the many.
This way of doing things is not authorized by the Order.
There is another way … it is the way of Order.
It is the way that gave birth to our American
States, the vision by which we became the strongest nation in the world. This
way of Order will exist (if only as a spiritual principle deleted from practice
in a world run by military tyrants wielding smart bombs and detailed computer
databases) when the excesses of our present modern rulers run their course and
at last are seen to be the murderous errors they truly are.
Let us be wise enough that time will prove our
wisdom, instead!
Promote Public Legal Education.
Lift the Lamp Higher!
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