WHEN WILL WE SAY "ENOUGH?"
The Christmas Truce
Christmas Eve 1914 — Four Years Before Armistice Day, The End Of WWI
The Christmas Truce was a series of spontaneous, unofficial periods of peace among the combatants along the Western Front. They had been at war for only five of the 48 or so months of World War I that awaited them. Men who were simply tired of the violence and death and the brutality that they were imposing on one another a mere five months into “THE War to end all wars” and so they just stopped fighting. And for a very brief period they were at peace. They buried their dead, sometimes in joint ceremonies, sometimes alone. From time to time n occasion Christmas carols in many languages could be heard coming from opposing trenches.
And then the violence and death and destruction returned.
On March 3, 1992 in Los Angeles, Rodney King, a black man, was involved in a high speed chase. When he was finally stopped by the police he was dragged from his car and brutally beaten. The four white police officers involved were arrested and tried and found not guilty On April 29, 1992. The riots that followed lasted five days and resulted in 63 deaths, over 2,000 injuries, and extensive property damage estimated to be about $1 billion.
On May 1, 1992, three days after those riots began , Rodney King appeared on camera and said, "People, I just want to say, can't we all get along? Can't we all get along?"
That same failure to understand one another or perhaps a desire to push a political agenda beyond a reasonable place did not stop with Rodney King’s widely ignored appeal for peace and love. We have seen that moral failure play out numerous times since then. Sometimes it has been clearly organized and spearheaded by the shadowy Antifa or Black Lives Matter or other organized protest group. Most often the rhetoric that has accompanied these “mostly peaceful” “protests” has been inflammatory, and wholly contrived. Feelings and a biased media have replaced careful, factual analysis and reportage. And a penchant for a violent response to political defeat at the ballot box has grown among a segment that refuses to accept honest, political defeat.
Before Donald Trump had even taken the oath of office 2017 an April 2016 Politico article written well before the primaries were held and Trump was selected to be the Republican party’s nominee suggested that Trump should be impeached as soon has he took office should he win. Never mind that impeachment is a political act based on “high crimes and misdemeanors” committed WHILE IN OFFICE.
And it didn’t stop there. There is no point in recounting the extent of the opposition to Trump’s first term. We know it well. And we know that the conspiracies were not his and they were not just theories.
One would think that after eight years we would have grown weary of the excesses of those whose team lost an election and won the subsequent election. Unfortunately it is ramping up yet again. Joe Biden, is busily spending what ever funds he has under his control even though they belong to people, so that those monies cannot be used by President Trump. Biden has gone so far as to send border wall sections for the auction block where they will be sold for scrap to further delay Trump’s efforts to seal the Southern Border.
And then there is this:
“Food workers in Washington, D.C., pledged to refuse service and cause other inconveniences for members of the incoming Trump administration when they dine out over the next four years.
Industry veterans, bartenders and servers in the nation's capital told the Washingtonian that resistance to the Republican figures in the progressive city was inevitable and a matter of conscience.
"You expect the masses to just ignore RFK eating at Le Diplomate on a Sunday morning after a few mimosas and not to throw a drink in his face?," said Zac Hoffman, a DC restaurant veteran who is now a manager at the National Democratic Club.”
Then there is Nancy a “fine dining bartender” who opposes anyone working in the Trump administration:
"This person theoretically has the power to take away your rights, but I have the power to make you wait 20 minutes to get your entrée."
I have no idea which person or rights Nancy is worried about but she is and at the very foundation of her worry is a moral choice which was clearly expressed by “Suzannah Van Rooy, a server and manager at Beuchert’s Saloon on Capitol Hill, (who) also vowed to refuse service to Trump officials whom she felt held moral views that opposed her own, according to the Washingtonian.”
Van Rooy continued:
“It’s not, ‘Oh, we hate Republicans.’ It’s that this person has moral convictions that are strongly opposed to mine, and I don’t feel comfortable serving them," Van Rooy added.”
In other words, Van Rooy and and Nancy and their colleagues are eager to impose their individual morality on anyone associated with the incoming Trump administration.
Situational ethics and morality have become the hallmarks of the modern left and they leave no room for agreement with Rodney King, the combatants of WWI or members of the opposing party.
My wife would be quick to say that all of this is because of the absence of God in their lives. I have no reason to refute that.
I know that I have written this somewhere else before but the Messiah is one of my favorite pieces. Written by Handle for Easter but standard at Christmas, it contains one of my favorite songs with this lyric from Isaiah:
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Isaiah 9:6
The United States is unique among nations because we were established by Godly men who knew that for our republican form of government to succeed it needed to rest on the word of God - not to become a theocracy but rather a nation of people capable of self-governance based on mutual respect, love, and honor and the commands of God.
Our Founders also knew that to sustain the freedoms that they envisioned change must slow, deliberate, and the result of compromise. For too long the pendulum of change in America has swung widely and erratically. The ensuing chaos is only occasionally physical but the moral chaos is reaching a point of no return.
While Rodney King posited:“Can’t we all get along?” Christ commanded that we DO get along:
34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:34-35
Union, Kentucky
13 December 2024
Off to Oasis of Hope
Keep in mind that Rodney King was well known to cops. At the time of the 'incident', he was once again driving, although has license had been suspended for DUI. He had no insurance. He had a passenger at the time, who the police did not harm.
King was shot, a few years later, and nobody made note of the violence in that incident.
What the cops did pales in comparison to what the rioters subsequently did. Among other things, they pulled people out of their cars and beat them for no reason. That's only bad when cops do it to Rodney, but apparently not such a bad thing when rioters do it to innocent people.