LEST WE TRY

In this old world where we abide, fate has ordained that man must forevermore be a prisoner of three basic institutions. These institutions are the results of a joint venture with God and man. They are religious entities such as churches and synagogues, the family, and the government!

To propagate our own kind and to provide a caring, safe and secure haven, a nest where we can nurture, love and teach our children we need an institution known as a family! It starts with a thing called a marriage.

In order to minister to our families, individually and collectively, we teach them about our creator and to love Him with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We accomplish this in our churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious institutions!

You must render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and in order to maintain a cultural equipoise and mold a structured social order we must have another institution called government!

In the course of a lifetime, I have become very familiar with institutions and they have one characteristic in common. That is, that sooner or later, each and every one of them will become separate entities unto themselves and will begin to perpetuate their own image, thereby forgetting their intended purposes for their existence! I call it Barney’s Law of Institutionality!

We are embarking upon a journey into a new millennium. A journey into the unknown!

I think it is time for us to take stock of our prison! We have all been sentenced to a life term. We are all, every last one of us, destined to die here; there is no parole board! Even though we cannot escape except by death, we must remember that while we are here, we have been given a free will to always make individual choices!

Let ask our selves; how does this law of institutionality hold up with the modern day version of these three basic institutions? Our minds must serve dual purposes, individually and collectively, as we ponder these situations.

In the institution of family, is it really the means in which we propagate our own kind? Almost half our children are illegitimate! Do we really love our children; I’m talking about tough love; the kind with discipline that will last for the rest of their lives? With the divorce rate now over 50% do we think that our families are safe havens for our wives and our children? What are you teaching your children; is it a heritage of honesty, courage, bravery and other fine attributes that will not only stand up in our finest hours but will also sustain us in the darkest hours of despair? Or is it the "spin" of the moment in which we blame everybody but our selves? Our society is now contemplating same sex marriage! Has this institution forgotten its intended purpose?

This leads us into our institution of faith. Did you ever stop and wonder about what God really requires of us? It is the pure essence of simplicity, to love Him and to love one another. All the rest is commentary! God reveals Himself to all men and continues to do so up until the present moment, through divine inspiration! Look at the many ways that man has used to smear God’s intentions with ego’s tainted gloss and to consolidate individual power and prestige upon themselves! Need I say more? Has this institution forgotten its intended purpose?

Our government; a republic founded by honorable forefathers, a representative type government of the people and protected by a constitution that in my opinion that was divinely inspired! Look back over the last seventy years, where have the liberal incursions into social engineering led us? Are we now more or less moral? Is our faith weaker or is it stronger? Do we follow a prescribed standard of conduct for a civilized society? Do we expect to suffer the consequences of our wrong doings? Have we traded our liberties away, one by one, in exchange for false security? Have we come to the point where we let the professionals, political and otherwise, do our thinking for us?

Are we going to hell in a hand basket?

LEST WE TRY

We sing you not a song of beauty, lest the notes may fade away,
And the rhythmic metered lyrics fail the test on Judgment Day.
Seething thoughts of deep resentment, fear of failure makes us cry
And holds us hostage in our silence because, because we did not try!

We spin you not a yarn of sorrow, lest our lips may tell a lie,
Revealing yet a deepening sadness, deception lurking in our eye.
Coveting some secret treasure to saturate a bogus need,
Anticipating absolution, ruing not the evil deed!

We paint you not a pretty picture, lest the brush we have and hold
Will betray the mixed intentions still not ready to be told.
Waning now, a cooling ember, within these ashes we remain,
A waiting resurrection morning, preparing to take flight again!

I am not a historian, not by any means, but I do think that a nation forged in the minds of wise men began to change and these changes have came about within in my lifetime.

It started in the early 1930’s. The liberal and the left wing philosophy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration brought with it a national mentality of standardization.

Individual liberties and freedom be damned! We must conform to a national standard of conduct. We know what is best for you! Since that time, we the American people have been urged by law, or by hook or crook, to strive for a sameness. We became a nation of apers – monkey see, monkey do!

The liberal mentality of an entire nation since that era has followed the dictate of a system that has lead us now to the brink of disaster! I personally think that this desire for sameness is a misinterpretation of the word love! True love is tough love! It is not making less fortunate people into your image or dependent upon you! It is teaching them, imparting the knowledge, the skills and the tools to help them help themselves!

Somewhere along the way, we the people of this nation, accepted this mentality to the point that we are expecting everyone to accept a collective thought process commonly know as political correctness! History has never been recorded correctly, but with this sameness thing we are grossly attempting to grasp for a false heritage. We do this by purging words, symbols, events, and also our compassion and memory for things we hold so very dear. We fling them into a consuming fire like a misguided book burning!

This sameness, this clone like madness permeates our education system from top to bottom. Each student is as different as day and night. The uniqueness of each individual person should be exemplified and respected. Our teachers should be afforded the opportunity to do just that! What is the wisdom in scaring the hell out of our children while they are still in high school with a national standard ACT/SAT test? These tests are putting untold pressures, stress and worry upon our children needlessly. Our children really believe that their futures are at stake. Are we nuts? High schools should be able to reflect each student’s ability to learn with a report card. Higher education facilities should be able to discern each applicant’s qualifications themselves. This is another hazard of following a hog into the ditch!

Our misguided intentions have carried over into the courts of our country. The greatest miscarriage of justice started when the justices of The Supreme Court of the United States took it upon themselves to make and enact laws rather than interpret those that already existed!

These misguided decisions of a broken justice system permeated into every public government office throughout our land with the mistaken theory that most of us are now a nation of haters. We actually think that we need hate crimes to protect ourselves! We think that violence will disappear if we got rid of our guns! We fail to teach our children the difference between right and wrong, then wring our hands and ask why, when they kill each other at the drop of a hat.

For years I have been studying and weighing the effects of basic institutions of family, church and governmental entities. Let us, page by page, continue to explore and expound upon these institutions. Lets really get to the cause and effect of what is beginning to emerge as a gradual loss of our individual freedoms and to the definite deterioration of the role that man is playing in a continuing drama in our lives.

I have no desire whatsoever to conform to any literary form or standard. My life has been a mismatched collection of experiences and I think that I should present it to you in like manner. Many of my points and opinions will be repetitious. What you read is what I wrote!