I have never been in the military services.
After years of standing at the sidelines of that particular form of service to the world, I can say I am very grateful to those who have served.
Thank you.
I was raised in a house that was Liberal. Reagan was elected when I was 8, and I remember my father screaming at the television. He had never done that before.
My mother, on the other hand, would go through boughts of screaming at the television. We knew those times as ‘Baseball Season’, and I can remember getting woken up terrified to blood curdling screams coming from the living room, only to find out, heart pounding and making my way down the carpeted hallway slowly and silently like a Ninja in case the murderous in-breaker was still around only to find that the person who broke in was the Dodgers, and they scored the last home run of the game.
Back to my Dad. So the message was clear. I did not know politics. I was 8. But I knew Reagan was bad.
The world kept spinning though, despite my father’s insistence that with Reagan as President, it meant that we had to attend every Anti-Nuke rally or walk in the country. Which I actually enjoyed. Nothing beat the snacks from the hippies camping out at the foot of the Test Sites. Fresh baked whole wheat bread loaded with butter and jam, trail mix with chocolate in it (which was an anathema at my house), and hot coaco. It seemed impossible that such goodness could come from a trailer/RV kitchen.
After spending a year of my life living out of a similar trailer, I can say that something about camping makes food taste better.
Later that year Reagan was shot. I was sitting at the front of my classroom in a desk placed next to my teacher, Ms. Chairez. One would think that a place of honor, but my gig was chief fly swatter, and I got the gig by leaping across 3 rows of desks to tackle the school bully, Conrad. He was never the same after having been brought down publicly by a girl.
The loud speaker came on and said something to the effect that we should have a moment of silence on account of Reagan having just been shot. I heard the room go quiet as a stunned pallor filled the faces of those in the room. For me, and this was before Goonies, it was my time. In that silence I began clapping and hooting and hollering, proclaiming an equal but opposite emotion than my father had when Reagan was elected.
Lord of Flies.
Given that I was already sitting in the highest seat of delinquency in my class, the only thing left was a parent teacher conference. Most of which I have no memory of. Although I am not proud of having clapped for the injury of a man who I now admire greatly, I am, at the same time, grateful for the crack it started which broke the facade of the illusion. Like a loosed highway rock to the windshield of my little growing mind, the crack stayed small for a while. I went after the usual suspects: Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy, my elementary school Librarian.
And then as the crack got bigger, I went for bigger game. The story of Adam and Noah in the Old Testament seemed to have so many holes in it, and people were not talking about it, and did not want to. It was my first foray into the Conspiracy.
And as youngsters do, I jumped to conclusions. “They are lying to us.” “The Bible is a Scam.’ “This Religion sucks.’ “Did you learn nothing from the Crusades?!?”
It was not an enormous leap from there to conclude that God might also be an enormous scam, but something inside me did not let me go there. A little voice. We’ll crack that nut soon enough.
Hindsight is 20/20 and I have spent the last 3 years reading the Old Testament as well as the Books of Enoch, the Book of Jasher, Jubilees, the Testament of Solomon and the other Patriarchs, the Urantia Book, Josephius, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Zechariah Sitchen (who is slippery) and many other books of the Apocrypha.
If you don’t work to get at the Truth, you don’t deserve to know it. Deep Throat, and undercover agent in the Xfiles preciently said, “a lie is best hidden between two Truths”. This statement is the harbinger of Discernment.
Learning to discern the lie hidden between the truths has become my life’s work.