Flapping Wings

First Published Tuesday, December 30, 2003. The Following link

will not work at this late date.

We're all supposed to be dead by now - The Washington Times: Pruden 

on Politics: " Here's what my Internet correspondent reminded me of 

(and if you see it on the Internet, it must be so): 

'According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who 

were kids in the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s probably shouldn't have 

survived. Our mothers put us in cribs covered with bright-colored 

lead-based paint.

'There were no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, 

and when we rode our bicycles into traffic (bike paths were unheard 

of), we had no helmets. If we didn't feel like pumping a bike up the 

hills, we could always hitch a ride with strangers. There were no seat 

belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day 

was particularly special.

'We drank water from an old garden hose, not from a bottle. One 

bottle of bellywash could be shared with up to four friends, drinking 

from the bottle, and no one died.

'We gorged on cakes, pies, candy, bread and butter, and anything 

we could find with lots of sugar in and on it, and we were never 

overweight because we were always running through the 'hood. "

I can add that I have lived through the frights over nuclear holocaust 

with backyard bomb shelters [a must item in the 60's], fears over the 

coming ice age cause by global cooling, the Red Scare focusing on 

Ike who was a conscious member of the communist conspiracy

according to Robert Welch, the dread of a silent spring where no 

birds would sing because they would all be dead by pollutants in 

the air and water, overpopulation so that there would be no room 

for us to stand on this cold and polluted and starving planet, global 

warming evidenced by snowstorms and hurricanes so that we would 

all fry, and worry about lesser matters like meteor or planetoid 

crashes into the earth or the sun burning out or exploding. 

Guns were an especially evil and needed to be confiscated--or 

at least licensed and tightly controlled before they ganged up on 

humans and spread death and misery everywhere. But the scares 

sold newspapers, magazines, and provided jobs for people who 

couldn't find anything useful to do except scare people. 

The scare-mongers wanted a monopoly on the scare business so 

they warned about preachers who spoke of divine judgment and 

hell fire. The scare-mongers only feared personal hells, not 

collective ones. In the churches the trouble was with the organs 

and long sermons--these were replaced by guitars and women 

giving "devotionals." After all, doctrine divides good human beings 

and brings war and hatred. Let's see who can show the most love 

by believing as little as possible. 

After all, the world is a stinking place, and the only way to postpone 

the Horror, the Horror, is to catch a little love somewhere and to 

have someone who is easy on the mind. It wouldn't matter where 

you found the love, because true love will be willing to let the bird 

go, so you can have her if you can catch her. The greatest fear of 

all is to entangle your life with "commitments" for they just drag you 

down and get in the way of what you might want to do. How can I 

be true to myself if I constantly make commitments to others? 

A person did not fear the disgrace if he was a liar, an adulterer, a 

sodomite, or a prolific producer of bastard children. The f- word 

gained respectability, but if a person used the n- word you were 

dead, which you also were if you called a football player a little 

monkey, a term used by Howard Cosell, a term which he also used 

with respect to his grandchildren. The greatest fear was not to 

conform to the prevailing standards of non-conformity and social 

correctness, which imposed a societal strait-jacket worse than all 

the landed gentry of Europe in the last five centuries.

The only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and there were a great 

many people who made careers by junk science and phony "studies," 

financed by government, to make us afraid of things we had never 

thought of before. We wouldn't listen to our mothers who tried to 

make us put our galoshes on, but we meekly surrendered to seat 

belts and other meddling from the Nanny State. See my article on 

the Nanny Church in the Nanny State.

Yep, it's a wonder any of us is alive. Some of us aren't. I remember 

a boy I went to school with who burned himself up about 50 years 

ago while stealing gasoline from a farm vehicle. Another boy drank 

himself to death. They didn't listen to their mothers or fathers, but 

that generation seemed to surrender without a struggle to the Nanny 

State, buying into the propaganda that bureaucrats know what is best. 

They hated their mothers and fathers and surrendered liberty without 

a peep to governments. After all, they were an enlightened bunch who 

were assured that they were the first to walk the earth who knew what 

was wrong with the world and that they would fix it up to be safe for 

everyone, especially for those who didn't seem to care much about 

the Ten Commandments.

Solomon said it best, Proverbs 12:10 "A righteous man regardeth the 

life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel." A 

good man will be recognized even by the animals he owns, but the 

tender mercies of the ungodly unhinge everyone around them. If we 

have many more tender mercies from this crowd who are experts on 

what we are to be afraid of, none of us will survive. Let us follow the 

example of Nehemiah and "chase them from us." Nehemiah 13:28

Don't despise small things. That butterfly flapping its wings in Moldavia 

might very well cause a hurricane in Miami. I, for one, will keep my 

wings flapping as long as I can.