Musings on morality and civil unrest

A lot of people are unhappy with our Congress with the shenanigans pulled to force the so-called health reform act down our throats. "Deemed as passed" in the House, without even a vote--clearly unconstitutional, and the IRS, heavily armed, our own answer to the KGB, it seems, to be the enforcement arm. I myself have no health insurance and don't want any. I will pay my own way, and if I can't make it, then no one else is obligated to take care of me, and certainly not at the point of a gun. I am dismayed, if not despairing, over the corruption in government, at all levels. I see it here on the local level, at the county level, at the state level, and blatantly at the federal level. In the midst of all this, I exchanged emails with a good friend who is about as angry as one can get. In his words, the ballot box is dead. Electronic voting machines are easily manipulated, and elections are a fraud. He sent me this quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! 

I’ve been pondering this all morning.  I don't want to be part of a bloody revolution, yet I don't want to be a slave.  Our country has been sold out, our Constitution destroyed.  The people of the United States have chosen the road to destruction.  It's easy to say that the Congress did it, but that ignores the fact that we sent them there!  Most people just "don't have time" to be "involved in politics", which means, they are willing to let someone else run their lives.  I'm torn.  I can't see any way out except the hand of God, and even that won't save us unless we as a nation return to his precepts--which are embodies in the Ten Commandments. 

Funny thing about those commandments.  Thou shalt not steal seems to have been changed in the minds of the people over the years.  Thrown out, even.  And all these wars?  Thou shalt not kill (slay), seems to have many exceptions now.  Thou shalt not commit adultery?  Gee, that's pretty old fashioned, too, isn't it?  Why not whore around with this one and that?  As long as you never get married, or get married and divorced a few times, it's still okay, isn't it?  Thou shalt not covet?  Why, if we all had the same as everyone else, then we wouldn't be able to covet, so we should just share the wealth and then all would be well.  Remember the Sabbath?  Too old-fashioned.  Too much money to be made by carrying on business 7 days a week, and we'd lose our competitive edge if we did that.  And a little lie here and there doesn't hurt anything.  Sometimes we need to stretch the truth or make promises we can't keep in order to do more good.  Gotta get that foot in the door, y'know.  That's not bearing false witness, that's just playing it smart.

As for the rest, well, why should we have only one God?  We can have government as our god, or money, or whatever we choose.  God is whatever we make it, right?  We don't have to make an graven images--that one we'll keep--we'll just pick and choose our god from day to day.  Take the name of the Lord in vain?  Where would we be without a good epithet to express ourselves?  "Mickey Mouse" or "Golly darn" just doesn't cut it when I'm really ticked off.  I'd honor my father and my mother if they weren't so...so...so HUMAN!  They have FAULTS for goodness sake!  I can never forgive them that! 

There's always a "good reason" to turn our backs on morality, and our founding fathers warned us that the Constitution would never suffice except for a moral people.  They told us we needed to be involved.  They gave us a federation of individual republics and told us to beware of factions that would tear us apart.

We've ignored both God and his emissaries.  We are reaping what we have sown.  I don't think even a bloody revolution would help without a change in the hearts of the people, and I wonder if that's even possible now.   As a nation, we're neither brave nor moral.  The military consists of the mindset that will fire on its own citizens, and the citizens are either too cowed or too apathetic to get involved politically.  How do we take our country back, and restore the Constitution, if no one wants be involved?

I think we have a lot more to go through before this is over.