THOUGHTS

Unpleasant thoughts on my birthday,
June 29, 2020

I have been isolated here in my humble abode since after the first week of March.  I have gone out and sat in my car to take my dog to the vet, I have gone to Urgent Care to get antibiotics but came home with a terrible flu bug June 2, went to the ER (not Covid-19), and I went to get my blood drawn.  I am still sick with nausea and live on Jello, mashed potatoes, a half of a gluten free blueberry muffin.  I've had a taco a couple of times this past month which were my biggest meals.  I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.  Wah-Wah.

But it's given me a lot of time to think in this crazed world we are living in now.  I remember when sporting events were just sporting events, stores were just stores, restaurants were just restaurants, tennis shoes were just tennis shoes, statues were just lessons in history, etc.  

I do believe all black lives matter but not in Black Lives Matter.  That is straight out of Marxism, and their founders are not ashamed to proclaim that.  Just follow the money to find that very little is given back to the people while millions are reserved for the leaders.  That's how Marxism works. This isn't really about race, but it is anarchy, violence, terror and  destruction to topple our government.  If they really cared about black lives, they would stop black on black crime and abortion clinics. Planned Parenthood's purpose from the beginning was to eliminate primarily blacks and Jews.

Yes, racism exists and it needs to be addressed.  It is evil.  I have worked in the inner city and witnessed it in action.  But we need to realize it was the Democratic Party who was formed to keep slavery, who began the KKK, who were opposed to every Civil Right legislation the Republicans offered in post-Civil War.  The Republicans are the party of Lincoln, who opposed slavery and discrimination.   Now Democrats are race baiters and are using racial divide to further divide our country.   

So I did dig a little into the Socialism-Communism-Marxism dominoes.  I do know that millions were killed in the social revolutions in China, in the Soviet Union, and North Korea as well as in the third world countries like Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Angola, Mozambique.  By 1980, one third of the world population were under Communism.  It is a threat.  Anarchism is one of the tools.  Supposedly classless, stateless, social organization is really led by dictatorship of the proletariat, non-democratic fashion.  It is also opposed to religion.  Communism is the atheist way.  In each of these countries, the people are oppressed and have led to extreme poverty of the masses.

Sadly our institutions of higher learning have been infiltrated by the Marxists, Socialists, and Communists.  Our tax dollars help to fund these universities and colleges and pay those professors exceedingly well.  History is being rewritten.  For example, most now teach that the Civil War had little to do with slavery.  Recently I have read the account of one previous plantation owner in Virginia after the Civil War who was grilled by the legislators concerning Reconstruction, and he said he and all those he knew understood that the Civil War was due to the issue of slavery.   Parents have spent tens of thousands to send their children to these colleges and universities.  Others greedily want all their student loans forgiven.  We are seeing the products of those institutions in the streets now, and sadly some in our legislators.  We even had one run for president.  Our previous president promised to radically transform our country, and we see those results as well.  (The one who painted his official portrait also painted black women holding a bloody knife in one hand and a beheaded white woman in the other still dripping blood.)

I'll admit that my research into my ancestry has revealed many slave holders, but also those who fought against slavery, some who were wounded and some who died in the Civil War to free slaves.  I also come from an early slave in Jamestown.  Even then he was allowed to have ownership of land, crops, horses and cows which he sold to buy freedom for most of his children.  Some of his children sued and were sued using the courts even as slaves.  Sometimes they won and sometimes they lost and were fined and lashed.  Through intermarriage from that first slave Emmanuel Rodriguez (which later was shortened to Driggers), there came a long line of those who were called Mulattoes.  In some cases in the same family, they were counted in the census as White, Black, and Mulatto.  Many were mistreated and fled, even as free slaves, some escaping to live in swamps like the Great Dismal Swamp in North and South Carolina (Think Pilgrim's Progress).  A couple of these Drigger kin led gangs along the Pee Dee River in North and South Carolina which terrorized the countryside.  Our relative ratted out his cousin's rival gang, and that cousin was caught and hung.  Some of these Mulatto kin became slave owners themselves, generation upon generation.  

Likewise, I had many relatives who were in the Indian wars, several of whom were massacred.  My great-great-great grandfather was scalped as a 4 year old and lived while most of his family were killed.  Supposedly I have some Indian blood as well from Pocohontas and from tribes.  Some of my kin, along with other early settlers, made their own form of government in Tennessee before the Constitution 1776 and made their own treaty with the Cherokee to lease land from them.  Land grants to Indian lands were given first by England, then by our government to soldiers from the Revolutionary War and onward as part of their pay.  Missionaries along with Christian Cherokees who had Bibles in their own language were rounded up in the Trail of Tears.  Those with mixed marriages were rounded up as well and many of theses Cherokee were given blankets contaminated with small pox along with their families while their prosperous houses and lands were taken over.  Some Cherokee were slave owners as well.  Gold had been discovered in Georgia and elsewhere nearby, and so the Cherokee had to go.  Atroscities were committed on both sides.  I have read the earliest accounts, and it is horrendous.  

Nevertheless, we are all a mixed bag coming from one woman, Eve whose name means the mother of all living, who scientist now discovered had all the combinations possible in her DNA.  Race is a color, a pigmentation.  Racism is when one color deems themselves better than an other.  

There has hardly ever been a generation without war.  The second generation of man, sons of Adam and Eve, one brother murdered the other.  The Arabs are descendants of Abraham's son through his concubine, and the enmity was promised which would exist throughout the generations.  Most of my kin immigrated to America being pushed out of England, Ireland, Scotland, and France in religious persecution or from famine and starvation due to discrimination.  Yes, there were battles on the frontier, from the first settlers in Jamestown to French-Indian Wars and wars against England.  Jesus promised peace, but not as the world gives us peace.  But He did teach us to pray, "Deliver us from evil."  

Just a niggling thought in my mind, did John Calvin's widespread teaching on predestination have a widespread effect on many who gladly accepted their salvation while denying those who they determined could not be saved to justify slavery and in an effort to eliminate Native Americans?  Many thought they did not have souls even.  Jonathan Edwards was a well known early preacher of predestination (of sinners in the hands of an angry God fame).  He went so far as telling his congregation to rejoice that many babies who died were condemned to hell because they were not of the select.  Most Baptists and Presbyterians embraced that teaching of predestination.  Even Whitfield, famous English evangelist, bought slaves to run his orphanage in Georgia. Though John Wesley the founder of Methodists helped bring the end of slavery in 1833 in England while working with Wilberforce, the Methodists in the United States eventually caved in support of slavery.  That's when Wesleyans became separate, in part to take a stand against slavery.  What we think of God does matter. 

My favorite protest sign says, "Just so you know, there isn't a white or black heaven.  If you have hate in your heart for another race, heaven is not for you!"  How true.

I love God.

I love my family.

I love my church.

I love my country.

I love my flag.

I love our Constitution.

I love history.

I am a proud Republican.

I am a patriot.

I support all the good police.

I will not kneel for anyone,

 but my God.

I will not support those who do.

"Red and yellow, black and white,

they are precious in His sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world."

This is how I was raised.