Are you a roadie, a dead head, a parrot head or simply part of the cult?

“Men spend their time in following a ball or a hare; it is the pleasure even of kings.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées

(image of a roadie loading band equipment /Arts hub Australia)

I can remember back in the day…back in the early 70’s when, as a teenager,
I began going, with friends and dates, to concerts.

A typical teenager, I loved music.
It often spoke to my young angst-ridden self.
So when Atlanta finally built her very first enclosed sports venue,
I was excited. This meant that not only did the arena become home to both basketball
and hockey teams, it also became a much larger home for concerts—beating out the
usual little intimate and smaller local theaters, bars, and civic center.

This meant more kids were now able to go to concerts.
And the whole idea of living a “band” life was reborn into a new generation
of daydreaming teens and young people.

Previous musicians and singers had already had their fair share of tagalongs
and groupies…but in the early ’70s, the idea seemed to boom alongside
a now booming music industry.

Dreams of being discovered sprung forth from many a garage and basement band.

The idea of following in the shadow of a band or singer seemed glamorous and even romantic…
for both girls and guys.
How awesome would it be to travel and see the world with one’s favorite band?

Think one generation wanting to run away with the circus while a later generation
wanted to run away with a band.

Young teenagers were finding the idea of being a roadie and or groupie
both fun and exciting.

But first, let’s back up a minute…
we need to stop and think about this groupie thing.

We need to stop and think about cult followings.

Mindless and dangerous worship from afar…all in hopes of entering the inner circle.
Why does Charles Manson now come to mind…

So think of those who actually quit life in order to become ‘Dead Heads’ following
the Grateful Dead from city to city
Or Mr. ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise’ and his own following flock known at
Parrot heads.

Folks who follow/ed Jimmy Buffet from city to city…living the
half drunk beach life all over the country.
Sounds nice but…

And so I got to thinking about this whole notion of groupies, roadies and cult followings.
which in turn got me thinking about how these types of folks seem to mirror the various
groups of folks we are seeing today.

Think traveling troublemakers.

Think Antifa.
Think, yes, even Black Lives Matter…
groups who prefer fights, agitation and violence versus a level headed protest
movement.

Trouble makers, provocateurs, anarchists all traveling from venue to venue,
aka city to city, in order not to entertain or to be entertained,
but rather to wreak havoc while causing catastrophic harm.

Riding the bandwagon of pandemonium.

There are the die-hard cult members.
And there are the die-hard cult leaders.

Those card-carrying types.

The ones who hop in cars to travel halfway across the country hoping to insert their own
signature of hate within a city or town.

And then there are those who are the wannabes.
The ones who secretly hop on the hate train just for the momentary rush of angst.

Think of a Clark Kent antithesis— that mild-mannered reporter by trade and superhero at heart…
mirrored by folks we’re seeing in these riots who are probably mild-mannered without their masks
yet turn into super hate-thug adversary once the masks go on and the lights go out.

See this photo?

It’s a photo a friend of my son’s sent him from downtown Charleston of an incident
which took place near his office this past week.

Whereas I hate to ever see any American burn their own flag,
it wasn’t so much the flag burner that caught my attention.

See this close up of the guy in the back left on the sidewalk…?
See the sign he’s holding?

It’s a poster with a hammer and sickle along with the word solidarity.
A communist hopeful watching a comrade burn the flag.
Gotta love a secret anarchist at heart.

Does this young man, who is white, care about George Floyd or does he care more about
dismantling the nation with a communist manifesto?

I wonder.

And so when I was reading Citizen Tom’s latest posting on the Prince William-Manassas Family Alliance
regarding Parental Rights being in the Crosshairs…I thought, oh boy, here we go.

We already have the masses of minions to the madness…
those who I wonder about their roots of upbringing.
And now we hear government leadership wanting to make becoming a minion much easier
by officially taking away the right of parents to parent.

No mentoring, no nurturing, no guidance, no discipline.

I think we already know that the nuclear family is in crisis…in jeopardy of being
destroyed…and we, in turn, are watching a society implode upon itself.

Tom offers the following observation:

We’re in a war that is very serious and dangerous.
We must protect our freedom, we must practice our freedom NOW or our neglect will seize
it from us.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” (Edmund Burke).

When good men do nothing, the opposition has opportunity to move in and steal.
We cannot afford to let down our guard!
I was taught, perhaps you were taught, that there is a separation of church and state,
and Christians ought not be involved in politics.
WRONG!

Is it because too many of us have believed the lie that our nation is being usurped from us.
No longer!!
We are rising up to take control of our freedom!
NOW!
Visit the Parental Rights web site and get involved.
NOW!
(https://familyallianceonline.org/2020/06/03/your-parental-rights-are-in-the-cross-hairs/)

And so when we lose the ability to parent…
When we lose the authority within the family…
When Christianity is deemed irrelevant…
When lawlessness becomes the norm…
When the masses cry to abolish law enforcement…
When children are left to “govern” themselves…
a vast and dangerous void opens up… and that void must be filled.

Disrespect.
Selfishness.
Violence.
Hate.
Thuggery.
Cultism.

The death of the nuclear family will be the death of a nation.
There will be no roadies, dead heads or parrot heads, but there will be a myriad of
cult followers.

There’s not much time remaining.

bits and pieces

In designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.
Pope John Paul II

You can’t sacrifice truth because some people will suffer because of the truth.
Ben Shapiro

(shelf fungus deep in the woods / Julie Cook / 2017)

Slowly a Nation is learning the bits and pieces of the unimaginable horrific puzzle that now makes up the small Texas town of Sutherland Springs.

A town shattered…along with families shattered…
as a Nation shatters just a little bit more.

The stories of a madman now percolate to the surface as fact is sifted from fiction.

People have raced to conclusions—be they true or false, mainly because people
want to validate their own thoughts, fears and notions of the hows and whys.

But as I said yesterday, the real how and why is simple.

Satan.

Satan, Evil, demons exist and it is all very much real…
all because you and I live in a fallen world.

So believe and argue as you may, there is no other rationale or
understandable explanation but for where we fall into the world of
the Creator as His created.

Evil is evil and will perpetuate itself throughout the course of all of time
while human beings walk this planet…until Salvation returns….

Yet people will blame everything and anything else, the this and that of things
because they refuse to accept that the root of all the blame is simply Evil’s
product…with that being hate.

Hate for people…
Hate for self.
Hate for God.

The Scottish Pastor David Robertson offered his own take yesterday in an article
written for Premiere Christianity:

In June 2015, when Dylan Roof, who was a militant racist, killed nine church members
in a church prayer meeting in Charleston South Carolina,
there was justified outrage which highlighted the continuing poison of racism in
US society and even led to the removal of several Confederate monuments throughout the nation.

So when a professed atheist goes into a church and kills 26 Christians,
why is that not even considered as a possible factor?
Where are the demands to remove all memorials of famous atheists?

….I have already seen several comments which mocked Christians who have prayed for the situation. “They were in church. They had the prayers shot right out of them. Maybe try something else.”
Even the BBC news report on it this evening signed off with a snide gibe that Americans seem to think the answer is in guns and God.

https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/The-Texas-Christian-Massacre-and-the-man-who-committed-it

Hate.
It was a word growing up as children we were told never to use.
We were taught that ‘hate’ was not to be a part of our language,
let alone a thread in our fiber as a human being…
If you were good and decent, you didn’t hate…rather you cared for, you loved,
you were empathetic, you were compassionate…you were to be anything but ‘hate’

And yet we subconsciously saw and heard it in its nuanced guise hidden behind our
fears, phobias and our sense of both right and wrong…
and when those bad unimaginable things happened,
we allowed ourselves to finally speak and feel the full fury of the word..
as the full level of our hate was unleashed under our own sense of self righteous
indignation.

Just as we now see how easily it rolls out of our mouthes and emerges ever so freely
from our own actions.

As the one glaring fact remains…that hate indeed begets further hate.
As in a perpetual state of a hate filled continuum.
And it is a continuum that we have bought into and adopted as our own.

Yet our Faith constantly admonishes us…Do Not Hate.

But how hard, how difficult that all is when Evil kills children at point blank range.

My thoughts and tears are now there in Sutherland Springs for the Holcombe family
who lost 8 family members Sunday morning to Evil’s hate.

Sons, daughters, husbands, wives, unborn babies….all gone, all taken…
as prayers were being said and hymns had been sung.

In his book Lessons in Hope George Weigel shares the tale of his personal
time spent over the years with Pope John Paul II—
Weigel recounts the assassination attempt on the Pope’s life by the assasin Ali Agca.

“In salvation history—that inner core of world history in which God’s purposes are
worked out through the action of divine grace on individual lives—there are neither happenstance nor coincidences. Rather, what appears to be sheer happenstance or coincidence is an aspect of Providence we don’t yet grasp.”

So here we now are…feeling alone, vulnerable and reeling from what seems to be
an endless march of madness against humanity….
We are left grappling with our own emotions and fears and lack of security.
We are left struggling while sorting out our disbelief, denial, acceptance,
forgiveness and even our hate…

All the while we wrestle with what is to be our reaction to Satan

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.
For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen,
cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love
their brother and sister.
1 John 4:20-21

Reverence, Revered and Respect

“Let parents then bequeath to their children not riches but the spirit of reverence.”
― Plato

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(how pure is white / Julie Cook / 2015)

I was driving to town today when the cars in front of me suddenly began pulling over to the side of the road.
I wondered if an ambulance was approaching as I also began rapidly slowing down while making my way to the edge of the road.

The lead car of the approaching procession was one of the local police.
Following close behind was a solemn black hearse and behind that was a long line of cars with their hazard lights all flashing.

Those of us on the opposite side of the road, the now growing yet stopped line of on-coming traffic, waited patiently and respectfully until the funeral procession passed us by.

I am always greatly moved when I happen to find myself on the road when such a sad and somber processional of cars rambles by—well wishes and prayers are silently sent to those passerby’s on their way to a rite of passage full of difficult farewells.

Incidents like the one this morning always bring to mind a memory I hold of a similar time of respectful observance. It was several years ago when I was visiting Cortona, Italy. My aunt and I had wandered into the local Pharmacia. Italian pharmacies are truly experiences steeped in decorum and order. . .which is such a contrast in a country known for its unexplainably chaotic traffic as well as its passionate and unrestrained emotions.

As we were wandering about the store, looking at a display of the cutest sandals of all things, the lights in the store were suddenly turned off as the sales lady reverently crossed herself as she moved toward the door in order to shut it. She held her finger up to her lips, hushing the now curious patrons inside, before turning her attention back to what was soon to be passing by the store.
And that’s when we all saw it.
Along the ancient cobbled stone road a white hearse slowly made it’s way through the small medieval town followed by a long line of mourners who were marching silently behind.

As soon as the funeral caravan had passed, the door was reopened, the lights popped back on and it was business as usual.

When it comes to our dead and dearly departed, it appears that both respect and reverence are deeply rooted and widely universal.
And yet I am bewildered by the lack of such which we woefully fail to show, demonstrate or deliver to the living, our fellow human beings.

Sitting on the side of a small town’s road, as a local funeral procession snakes its way to a countryside cemetery, my thoughts turn from this current scene of respect and reverence to one of tragic disrespect. . .to the very real and raw emotions, coupled with the agonizing questions now swirling around a signal sinister act, in a sister state’s colonial coastal city. . .

A gunman walks into a church in Charleston
A gunman walks into an elementary school in Connecticut
A gunman walks into a youth camp in Norway
A gunman walks into a museum in Tunsia
A gunman walks into a classroom at Virginia Tech
A gunman walks into a publishing office in France
A gunman walks into a synagogue in Denmark
A gunman walks into a mosque in Wisconsin
A gunman walks into a hospital in Germany
A gunman walks into a school in Colorado

On and on and on it goes.
The disrespect of the lives of those who are innocent, fall away one by one.
Lives disregarded as easily as discarded trash, taken for granted and considered expendable.
Lost in the chaos of twisted, broken, evil and hate filled minds. . .

Sterile
Immune
Safe
Exempt
Sacred
Off limits
Protected

Nothing seems to remain as it appears we have lost all respect for the sacred, the holy, the young, the old. . .even losing our reverence for both life and death. . .

Show proper respect to everyone, love your fellow believers, fear God, honor the emperor.
1 Peter 2:17

Give to everyone what you owe: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
Romans 13:7