| If you are at all interested in the principles and practices of the country you're living in and the governmental agencies running it, you can do yourself a favor and become a bit more enlightened. You won't find this in your local video store so here's the website www.zeitgeistmovie.com. This puts renewed perspective on religion, the events of 9/11, the money system, and the founding of our country, as well as some tid-bits about the future where all you might become is a micro-chip, tracked and traced in everything you do! You will want to share this with family and friends. This could well start a revolution!
Also you might seriously consider the documentary No End in Sight, dealing with the realities of what’s happening on the ground as well as the lead-up to this declaration of an illegal war. This also should be viewed by every thinking person in the country!
Helen Thomas, Dean of White House Reporters, has had a career of over 40 years covering this nation’s presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy. Shrub (dubbed so by the late and great Molly Ivans, otherwise known to you as George W. Bush) is, in her words, the “worst president she has covered…the worst president ever.” Incidentally, he has not allowed her to ask questions of him in press conferences. March marks the 5th year of the invasion of Iraq, the first pre-emptive war in the history of this country. March also marks the 2nd inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest president this country has ever known, months after the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation. Maybe unbeknownst to the reading public, Thomas Paine would declare that Lincoln became the president embodying what the word really stands for; upholding and protecting the rights of individual people. The following is a perception of Abraham Lincoln from Nettie Maynard’s Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?:
“…I looked up, and did not need to know by any one telling me who he was. Lincoln stood at the open window.
He was looking down, yet seeing nothing. His eyes were turned inward. He was thinking of the great work and duty that lay upon his soul. I think I never saw so sad a face in my life, and I have looked into many a mourner’s face. I have been among bereaved families, orphan children, widows and strong men whose hearts have been broken by the taking away of their own; but I never saw the depth of sorrow that seemed to rest upon that gaunt, but expressive countenance. Yet there was a light in those deep-sunk eyes that showed the man who was before me as perhaps the best Christian the world ever saw, for he bore the world upon his heart. That man was bearing the country of his birth and love upon his naked soul. It was just one look; but I never have forgotten it, and through the dimness of all these years that great and patient man looks down upon me to teach me how to bear, and how to do, how to hope, and how to give myself for my fellow-men.
Lincoln was a noble representative of free institutions. He stood as the representative of that liberty which had been won by the swords of the Revolution, which had been organized by the earlier settlers of the Republic, and which has been adorned by many years of growth until the present day. The Revolution had passed before Lincoln’s day; but he was a typical representative of the freedom of heart, and soul, and life which ought to be the most priceless inheritance of every American citizen. I think this was evinced in his whole course and conduct. He was surrounded by able men.
The sword and the pen both had their heroes; but before this man every one chose to pause, and his choice was always the wisest of all. I do not know what Lincoln would have done without support; but, through all troubles, the individuality of that one man, his unflinching courage, his broad sympathy and charity, his homely common sense, his indomitable rectitude and unshaken faith ran like a pulse of fire, a thread of gold.
You may speak of the arch of honor that spans those years of struggle. You may write the names of great generals, admirals, statesmen, senators, and governors upon separate stones. But on that one stone which bound them together, without which the arch would have fallen into ruin and confusion, you must write LINCOLN’S name.
I mention a third thing for which Lincoln was great. We have had great men who were as cold as the marble in which their statues have been cast. We have had men who had no more warm blood in their hearts than the bronze tablets upon their tombs. We have had great statesmen, great warriors, great philosophers, great men of letters, all of them cold as icebergs, with no popular sympathies, no real tenderness, no heart beneath their garments.
We have had men placed as Lincoln was who had calmly written out his same gigantic campaign and could accept death, peril, or disgrace, as well as honor, with the same calm impassibility with which you might move the knight or the bishop from one square on the chessboard to another. We have had men who left behind them mighty names; and no one child sobbed when they were gone. But not a dry eye appeared amid thousands of children when the splendid, heroic Lincoln, with his wisdom, sagacity, and patriotism, was taken away. He carried a tender heart, the heart of a little child, the heart of a woman when she has given her promise to the man she loves.
Back of that rough, angular form and seemingly uncouth demeanor there lay a heart as white as snow, and so dropping with the love of humanity that, if I were to take out of one of those Christian centuries the heart of the one whom I believed to be the most loving, the most tender, I would take it from the breast of Abraham Lincoln. What soldier in his standing army, bleeding and with dusty feet, could enter the chamber of any other ruler in this world and plead his cause as to a friend? What woman, tearful because her son was in peril, when a stroke of the President’s hand would set him free, could anywhere else force her way to him through lines of senators, and then receive consolation? What man, within the memory of men, has ruled without jealousy and fanaticism, and to whom every man in the land could turn in thought, in hope, in prayer, as to a patient or never-failing friend? Was there ever a leader of the American people who got so near the heart of his generation as did Abraham Lincoln? And perhaps, with all his greatness, this is one of his greatest claims to immortal memory. The warrior dies; the honored philosopher fades away with the changes of time; the scientific man is blotted out by the record of successive thought; the poet’s sweetest lays may be folded away like a garment, to put some newer and better one in its place; but the love of the human heart is the one enduring thing in this world of ours; and where all these things will pass away, the man who is a lover of his country, who is a lover of his native land, is the man whose immortality is best secured, and that man was Abraham Lincoln.
I can say nothing, in this brief review of his great work, of the emancipation of the slave, except to say that that patience, wisdom, and infallible instinct as to the right time of doing anything is illustrated in this, perhaps, as in no other single incident of his career. And when I come to one effort it seems to me I wanted to lay my fingers on my lips and never speak another word. When he climbed that height at Gettysburg, and stood on the scene of the terrible conflict, on that ground made sacred with the bodies of our patriot soldiers, the eloquence of his lips, the impressiveness of his mien, and the words uttered by his heart through his tongue, made that oration which, in the history of American eloquence, puts culture into the shade, for it was the eloquence of the noblest American upon the noblest occasion in the history of mankind…
…How sweet is that bell of liberty! Let us not forget what makes it sweet is because men have cast sacrifices for the golden hope of manhood and life. Let us not forget that if it rings so sweetly and is to ring forever in the name of liberty, some of that sweetness comes from ABRAHAM LINCOLN; for, when that bell was in the molten furnace of war and the crucible of trial, there was cast into it the pure gold of his manly life.”
Rev. E. C. Bolles, at Lafayette Camp
May the American people, through wise decision at the polls, attract a person such as has been described above. And may what is being described as a Madhouse be returned to a White House.
Rev. Wes Bailey |
