A Christmas life

1. There are several things that have to happen in order for December to feel Christmassy to me. One category is movies. I have to see three movies for me to get to feeling in the Christmas spirit. Jimmy Stewart in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, Darren McGavin in ‘A Christmas Story’ and finally the 1938 rendition of ‘A Christmas Carol’ with Reginald Owen.

The older I get, the more I see life lessons in the Charles Dickens story. So I am going to list but a few of these lessons that are relevant today.

In the beginning of the story, we see an angry man named Scrooge. As he hurriedly hushes home, he see’s the spirit of his old business partner on the door knocker.  So we see that in the hustle and bustle of our lives, God sends us a little reminder in that the spirit of the Lord is ever present in our lives.

Now, Scrooge is alone and eating cold leftovers in a huge house. At this time, the full spirit of his old partner approaches Scrooge while bound by chains. Marley explains that it is the duty of everyone to interact and help one another. He wears the chains that he forged in life to weigh him down and torment him in the afterlife. When we don’t show love to one another, our spirit is hurt and tormented. God made us to be dependent to one another, and to accept help and to give help, and we are truly blessed when we love one another.

The spirit of Scrooges business partner then warns Scrooge that, for his benefit, he will be visited by three spirits, and that his very life depends on the ethereal visits. Our afterlife depends on three people, who are also one. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

The first spirit to visit Scrooge is the ghost of Christmas past. This spirit takes Scrooge to times in his past that was the foundation of his character. We see that Scrooge was abandoned in a school by his father. You could feel for Ebenezer , feeling unloved by his father after his mother died. But we see that it was his sister that brought him the news that he was going home. Then, his apprenticeship with ‘good ol’ Feziwig’ that taught him not only business, but a bright Christmas spirit filled with love and generosity and best of all, joy. But, then we see Ebenezer fall into the trap of greed and profit without concern for his fellow man. It cost him the love of his fiancé. Everyone has a unique past, filled with joy and heartache. But if we become so obsessed with ourselves without love for our fellow man, our soul suffers. Without love, we become selfish empty people with an emptiness in our hearts.

The second spirit was the ghost of Christmas present. Scrooge saw who and how he had an effect on people in his life. Then he saw people suffering in life’s situation but who still had hope and was still filled with the Christmas spirit. He saw how people really felt about him and how some had contempt, some made fun of him and others, like his nephew, refused to give up on him. If we only knew how our lives intertwined with others, like George Bailey in ‘It’s a wonderful life’ or Scrooge with the ghost of Christmas present, we might see just how important each of us are. How much better our lives are when we care for others the way God cares for us.

The ghost of Christmas present warned Scrooge of the two ‘children’ under his cloak. These two were named ‘Want’ and ‘Ignorance’.  The spirit warned that both were wretched and vile, but be mostly afraid of the boy names ‘Ignorance’ as it is written on his brow ‘Doom’ . We have a generation of people that are ignorant even though they may be educated. Ignorance breeds doom and destruction for all of mankind.

The third and final spirit was the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Scrooge sees the death of an innocent child, Tiny Tim. A child disfigured and cannot walk yet sees joy and life in life. Because of the love of Bob Cratchet, Tiny Tim knows love and sees love in the world. Scrooge sees how the world is not as bright without the unconditional love of a child. He also sees people pecking over his possessions like buzzards over a dead body. And he also sees his own destruction which was cold and emotionless. This is when Scrooge asks the spirit ‘are these the shadows of what will be or what might be’? You see, Scrooge was given a last chance to change his life. Scrooge had an epiphany that changed his life and the life of those around him. He finally realized how the spirit of Christmas could change his life and the life of those around him.  He learned how having joy in his heart could make his life better and that the spirit of Christ gives hope and joy to the world.

But I see an additional message. Scrooge lived with all the spirits in his heart, every day. He lived with joy in his heart and had a joyous life because he lived Christmas every day. He did not just have joy and love in his heart one day a year, the spirit of Christmas was in him. It changed him, it transformed him and life was better because the spirit lived in him. Read that again…’THE SPIRIT LIVED IN HIM’. How our lives and those around us are better when the spirit of Christ lives within us every day.  The spirit of Christmas is love and generosity. It is faith in a future filled with joy and life.

It is only a story written by Charles Dickens many years ago, yet the message that lays within it are ever so important. Without the spirit of Christmas, Scrooge was an empty man without hope. He was alive yet lacked life. With the spirit, he lived, had joy and spread joy to others.

What life lessons do you see in ‘A Christmas Carol’? Are you living a life with the spirit of Christmas every day?

OMG! America really is a nation of wussies. When I was growing up, there was a saying ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but names will never hurt me’. In college, I had a great psychology teacher and he taught that you choose your emotion and action/reaction when someone says something. Meaning, if you become enraged by the utterance of a word, you have relinquished control to that person. Words that today, the political correctness police want to bannish like; nigger, wet-back, cracker, W.O.P., spike, kike, camel jockey, rag head, gay, lesbo, fag, fat and others. If you become enraged or angry at those words, you have allowed the person that said it to control you. Think about it, you have become a slave to your emotion and relinquished control to another person. I have more respect to the person who is in control of their emotions, not that you don’t have emotions, but you are in control of them.
I heard a story of a man and his son playing nerf guns with a veteran. The son got a Nerf dart stuck on his forehead and wanted to quit playing. The veteran said ‘man up and put on your big boy pants because I am going to shoot you again’. The boy looked to his dad who said to his son ‘well?’. The boy then noticably changed and realized he could shoot his NERF dart gun back. That is when the fun started.
I want someone to say to America ‘Man up buttercup and put on your big boy pants’. We have a nation of people that have become too sensitive to their emotions. Like the flower children of the 1960’s, they are angry people who are never happy unless they are angry. Kind of an ‘oxy-moron’, isn’t it? They have to be angry and have a cause to be angry about in order to be happy. There was a scene in a 1980’s frat party movie with a bunch of lesbians marching in a circle chanting “hey hey, ho ho, this penis party has to go”. I wonder if that was art imitating life or life imitating art. Look at todays environment, people protesting the police shooting of a black man by a white police officer. Before the investigation starts, people were infiltrating a town in Missouri marching and chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” and destroying that once peaceful town. However, we find that after the police AND FBI AND independant investigation, Mr. Brown had, after performing a strong arm robbery decided to attack a police officer, officer Wilson. Mr. Brown was shot by officer Wilson, a tragidy that did not have to happen had Mr. Brown not thought he could steal property that was not his then start to beat a police officer without repricussion. The thugs then came out of the woodwork and from under the rocks to converge on the town of Ferguson and were happy being angry in a false narrative.
A student in todays America can not wear a T-shirt with an American flag on it but an illegal alien students can wear a T-shirt with the Mexican flag on it, all the while being a parisite on our society. A customer can’t buy a cake with the Confederate Battle Flag on it from a prominant chain store, but at that same store you can get a cake with an ISIS flag on it. You can not have a Holy Bible on school grounds because of a false seperation ‘from’ religion, but you are encouraged to read the Qu-ran in order to empathis with Muslims. By the way, Islam is a religion of intolerance to anything not Islam as well as a political ideology and a way of life. A Christian baker is forced out of business because he refused to bake a wedding cake for a pair of lesbians who could have gone to any of hundreds of bakers, but a gay baker can refuse to bake a cake for a Christian couple. It is alright to be unemployed, sit on your fat ass, watching your color TV, living in an air conditioned apartment and talking on your government issued cell phone all paid for by the people that drag their butts out of bed and goto work while being demonized for ‘making too much money’. Coptic Christians are being beheaded, burned alive, drowned and stoned to death while muslim terrorists are being imported into America by a president, that if not a muslim, is sympathetic to muslims yet hostile to Christians and Jews. THIS IS NOT MY AMERICA! This is a twisted view of a communist America as seen by a demented, sick son of a bitch who has embraced an ideology of hate and communism and surounded himself with like minded people that want to ‘fundamentally transform America’. Doesn’t that send a chill up your leg? Our country is being run by idiots, cowards, morons, degenerates and communist. The peace nick, flower power children, free love druggies of the 1960’s that avoided the draft are now in charge of this country and this is their view/version of America?
This country, as a whole, has chased God away. Much like the citizens of Sodom and Gommorah who not only practiced homosexuality, but allowed themselves to be succumbed to their human, animalistic desires with little or no regard to the consequences of such actions. The citizens of Sodom and Gommorah had likewise chased God from their hearts and had become so evil that God let them be destroyed. Can we expect better treatment from God after we chased him out of our schools, courts, businesses, holidays and worst yet, our hearts?
I say again, our country is a nation of wussies, cowards, celf-centered Power hungry, lazy soul-less, childish people. The greatest generation, that fought back communism, facsism and the evil of the 1940’s would not recognize their country. The frog is boiled, the swingset has fallen, the banks are empty and our hearts have gone cold. I fear for our future if it does not have GOD in it.

Trump, upsetting the apple cart

Awhile ago, I posted that Donald Trump, billionaire and candidate for republican nominee for president, was someone I was not sure I could support. it is now several days before Christmas of 2015 and I have to say that, while I still have reservations about him, he is becoming more and more likable to me.
I turned 18 in time to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. This former actor and governor turned out to be one of the most effective men to occupy the Oval Office in modern times. I learned that during 1979, the Republican leadership did not like Reagan and tried to sabotage his candidacy. You see, the establishment Republicans saw Reagan as a conservative and not an establishment republican.
Forward 35 years and there are three people that are not establishment Republicans and that scares the Republican leadership. The RNC has in the last decade, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, meaning loosing when winning is almost a certainty. The RNC does not know how to be winners, and seem to be comfortable in being loosers. Look at who has been the RNC nominees in 2008 and 2012 even though in the off year elections, the American people gave a majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. It seems that Jeb Bush is the Republican party darling even though the American people have rejected him with Jeb retaining less that three percent in the polls. The RNC even hates Dr. Ben Carson as he too is an outsider. It seems to me that the RNC, which I used to be a contributing member, has become both blind and deaf to the very people they claim to represent. A big part of me would like Donald Trump win the nomination and the presidency just so I could hear him utter those all too famous words ‘you are fired’ to Barack Hussein Obama with the added bonus of watching the RNC fall over themselves and cry like a selfish child who had the candy stolen from them.
The third outsider running for the nomination is Ted Cruz whos parents came from Cuba. I like the idea of an outsider winning the nomination much like Ronald Reagan (Renaldus Magnus) did. I think America has had enough of the Bush family NWO politics and the Clinton lies and theft (Hillary is a member of the Trilateral Commision). America needs strong leadership to put a halt to the damage that the last few administrations have created. Why else would President Barrack Hussein Obama focus on the lie of man made warming and ignore the millions of rabid wild dogs waiting to be set loose in America that we know as radical islam and radical terrorism (the same thing)
I like the idea of a fence at the border, it worked for China. Trump has made the illegal alien influx a major speaking point. Without him bringing the idea to the forefront, it would still be ignored by everybody.
The more I hear Trump, even though he seems un-presidential, the more I think we need someone like Trump to upset the apple cart because the cancer that is Washington D.C. has infected both the democrats and republicans, and it is time to cut out that cancer for the health of the country

Life imitates art, or does art imitate life?

You all may have read that I love watching the Outer Limits and other science fiction. The original series had very little special effects so the writing, acting and directing had to pull you, the viewer, into the story. Sometimes, if you looked close, you could see the zipper in the alien suit or where the glue holds the foam on the face of the actor. One of the reasons I enjoyed the show is that man himself was the true enemy. Mans greed or fear or hate was usually the real true enemy.
In the 1980’s, the Outer Limits returned to the television screen with pretty much the same premise only with better special effects. One such episode was called ‘The Haven’. Season 5 episode 15. The premise was that an apartment building was fully automated so that people could live in single occupant apartments without any interaction with people. Think about it, people becoming so reliant on modern technology that people don’t interact with each other.
(I remember when the Sony Walkman first come out, thinking people were ignoring others with their earphones on listening to music on their Personal Sony Walkmans.)
Couple that with a more modern movie with Bruce Willis called ‘Surrogates’. In this movie, people stay in their homes, hooked up to personal remote controlled robots for their safety. They experience life thru their robotic ‘surrogates’ in order to stay safe from the dangers of life. Again, people forgoing personal interaction for experiencing life thru technology.
My High School class in American history taught me a Benjamin Franklin quote that goes “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Life is to be experienced. Like the Roman poet said ‘Carpe Diem’ which wikipedia translates: ‘Carpe is the second-person singular present active imperative of carpō “pick or pluck” used by Horace to mean “enjoy, seize, use, make use of”.[1] Diem is the accusative case of the noun dies “day”. A more literal translation of “carpe diem” would thus be “pluck the day [as it is ripe]”—i.e., enjoy the moment.’
John Donne wrote in a poem entitled Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written in 1624 that ‘No man is an island’.
What happens to a person when he or she interacts with others thru technology? What happens when we become so dependant on that technology, that we loose touch in our humanity? Like the movie I mentioned in a previous post called ‘West World’ where, again, people became reliant on technology.
In the Outer Limits episode ‘The Haven’, it was technology itself that realised that to save humanity, it meaning technology, had to die. In ‘Surrogates’, it was Bruce Willis’ character that realised technology had to be destroyed to save humanity. In ‘Westworld’, it was technology that destroyed humanity in the amusement park.
And look at todays technology. Smart phones, computer tablets, smart watches, GPS chips in cars and RFID chips in our credit cards. Our government has a fleet of drones and there are digital cameras that watch our every move and report it to a government agency called the NSA. (Much like in the book ‘1984’ by George Orwell) Japan is working on robotics and the sex industry has made realistic, life sized dolls of silicon for those people that, well, (cough) you can guess what they are used for. More and more people use debit cards and credit cards than cash and our government encourages it. I have watched people walking absent mindedly while texting or reading emails or watching movies on their smart phones. I have even watched youtube videos of people falling and bumping into things while watching those smart phones.
Do you let technology control you or do you control technology. Technology should be a servant of man, not something that controls us. So, what does the future hold for humanity? Is there a future for us? The future of humanity rests in the hands of a Jewish carpenter that lived a long time ago, yet lives still.

I heard a story about a middle child. Out of 5 children, this child was the third child and was unwanted. His mother tried to initiate a natural abortion because she did not want this child.

Now, this has a happy ending as this child was born and cared for and nurtured, but was the ‘black sheep’ of the family. This child grew up, got married and had kids of his own. He made a life of and for his own, loved and nurtured his children who grew up to have kids of their own and those kids had kids. This ‘unwanted’ child has become a great grandfather.

It got me thinking about all the other unwanted children of the world. Had they not been aborted but instead given a chance to grow up, what could have been accomplished? How many would become doctors that would cure cancer? The next engineer to solve pollution? Would there have been a great Lawyer or judge. The next best writer or poet? Maybe the next great director of movies or modern day John Wayne? The new Lucy Ball or Bob Hope? Who knows, truth is, we will never know.

I don’t believe abortion should be used as contraception. As was recently pointed out, there is no ‘rubber’ shortage. It should be on the individuals to provide contraception for their actions. Government money should not be used to provide this procedure. I do not think it should be outlawed but government money is our money, because the government is us. But more importantly, think of the waste. Lives forever altered or never given a chance. It is a bad situation, but as for me, I am glad to have my children.

The “unwanted’ child from the story above is my dad. I am quite glad that my dad was given a chance to create a life for himself because I am here and my children are here and I have a grandchild. Life is like a roller coaster ride with lots of ups and downs, but that is what makes life so interesting. So it turns out that the ‘unwanted’ child was wanted after all and made a life worth living, and he is still alive and kicking and living a life worth living.