Shall U.S. Citizens Still Allow Government to Dictate?

No matter what reasons people may give, there really is NO EXCUSE for our Nation being led down the decaying path that it is on. In spite of poor voter turnouts at the election polls, poor turnouts that have led to some very poor choices being allowed into our government halls over the past eighty years, or so, there really are more than enough citizens available and capable of stopping the decay of our Nation. Well, ... that is, IF..., IF we are willing to stop hiding and complaining, and then to start doing the WORK of being responsible citizens these United States of America.


Being responsible citizens means getting out of shadows, or at least shedding an abundance of light where we are in those shadowy places. Being responsible citizens means exercising ALL of our biblical and constitutional responsibilities in our own lives and with respect to our families and our communities, locally and nationwide. When Cain killed his brother Abel, Cain sarcastically said to God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" God knew exactly what had happened and held Cain accountable for killing Abel, even though Cain seemed to think that he might be able to hide behind a wisecrack answer. Many of us, today, are no different, but there is no hiding from God.

Just as there is no hiding from God who sees and knows everything, there is, also, Z-E-R-O reason for any of us to fear our government, IF we are truly law-abiding citizens. We have God's spoken Word telling us to do what is right. We have the written biblical mandate to do what is right. We have the constitutional mandate to do what is right. And, we have the mandate of natural social law telling us to do what is right. With all those clear and present things telling us to do what is right, what have we to fear? Really?

While there are those who yammer on about how awful society has become, and there are those who shriek in fear of what criminals or the government might do to them, those complainers and fearful souls do not realize that by their angst they have quit the battle against evil, and thereby they have already declared themselves dead and useless in the cause of what is good. Their tendency to inactivity has caused them to quit. They have allowed their fears to paralyze them and keep them from standing up and fighting against the evils in this world. To those who fight the good fight against evil, the paralysis and laments of the first group are useless. Yet, even nature shows us that dead wood might be set ablaze and turned into a wildfire.

Take heart that the smoldering embers of godliness and righteousness have NOT been quenched by all the evils in this world. Though evil yearns to force its darkness upon all of us, yet, if we are willing to let righteousness have its own way in our lives, then biblical and constitutional righteousness can catch that spark in our lives. And, as we allow righteousness to bring us together as coals in a campfire, we can allow the breath of God to urge and stir us into a flame, and then into a bold, warming, illuminating blaze benefiting all U.S. citizens. All we need to do is let the breath of God into our lives and encourage us to choose to take one more step, one more breath, speak one more word, help one more person, resist one more evil, for even just one more moment. As such, through all our actions that resist evil and support that which is good, each of those good things benefits all of us. Those who have trusted in the God of the Bible can trust His promises. We can also count on God's Word, God's Spirit, and our laboring desire and our actions that encourage goodness prevail. We have all those things on the side of righteousness. Now it is just a matter you and me submitting ourselves to the principle of standing up for godly righteousness, instead of falling for worldly preferences, yearnings, or worldly powers.

As I think of the Second Amendment furor that is raging in our Nation, I am, sometimes, baffled by the fear and moral weakness of many citizens who say they love our Bill of Rights yet they do little or nothing other than hide from the powers that be. Too many of our citizens allow the braying of our enemies to depress or terrify them. How is such fear of lame braying possible when most citizens say, on or off the record, that they want the Bible and our Constitution to be the Law of our Land, once again? There must be some moral or spiritual fear that cripples our citizens, for surely we do not lack the worldly, physical arms with which to defend ourselves against any domestic or foreign enemy that might attack us.

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2016/01/daniel-zimmerman/383992/

Even such a socialistic U.S. president as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself". So, let's get our hearts, minds, spirits, and lives right with God, and then get busy rebuilding our Nation according to our Constitution.

Immigration Policies Have Serious Implications

Here's an anonymously forwarded photo that I received. 

I apologize that I have no source to quote. 

The sentiments stated on that sticker effectively sum up God's standards and the fact that national immigration policies have real consequences.

Equity Does NOT Equal Equality

There is much social, political, and language confusion going on in our society, these days. Citizens are being hyped up with false knowledge, by certain elements within society that claim the words "equality" and "equity" mean the same thing, or that those words should have the same effect in our culture. Their false knowledge makes as little sense as if we were to say, that, if apples and rocks were sort of the same shape or size that people could eat the rocks as if they were eating apples.

Equality is defined, in principle, in God's Bible, and by our founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, our U.S. Constitution and U.S. Bill of Rights). How many among us have read any or all of those precious documents, lately? Those four elements of Law establish the ground rules for what we should be seeking, when we talk about equal opportunity under Law: equality is NOT about what we think we deserve just because we think we are someone special for some given reason. 

God's principles in the Bible and the things written by our founders establish that everyone who is able to try should be able to try, but human history proves that equal opportunity doesn't mean that everyone has the same number of arms, legs, brains, skill set, or personal drive, and not everyone's geographical location provides naturally equal opportunity. Even if we ignore the human tendencies toward lust, corruption, or taking advantage of others, in the most equitable of societies, even skill and opportunity has never provided, far less guaranteed, anything beyond the day-to-day or month-to-month temporary success of survival, for most people. Despite all political promises throughout history, NOT even one human government, including all Leftist governments, have NEVER been able to be nor to provide all things to all people. THAT enormous task is God's job according to God's Word. Only God can promise and guarantee anything.

Many, if not most, people want and strive for uniformity and guarantees in life, to the point of boredom, and then, for their own entertainment, they start inventing things that they think can control. They fail to recognize and adapt to the fact that the life that God gives us incorporates situations, growth, and changes that we cannot control: life is NOT static, and never has been static. 

Equal opportunity, in the USA, simply means that we can all legally strive to do better in this world, whether morally, socially, or practically, according to our abilities, barring any attempt to infringe upon the rights of other citizens. We are here to meet as equals, as human beings before God, and, from this meeting point, to utilize whatever talents and developing abilities we possess to make our lives into something more than the raw material with which we began; to strive for the betterment of ourselves and our society as a whole, as we try to head in a unifying direction under godly principles and leadership. 

Equity is NOT, and never has been, the same as equality. Equity is not something guaranteed by anything. Equity is something that is earned and accumulated by one sort of work or investment, or another. Any honest banker, financier, laborer, and property or business owner can tell you that, that without YOU doing the investment of YOUR time, money, blood, sweat, tears, sore muscles or tired mind, YOU are not going to earn any kind of equity in anything in life. In the practical world, equity is the net sum market value of all that YOU have invested into a particular project, above and beyond all that you may still owe on the project. That is the rule of how one gains and creates wealth in the practical world. Some people view their formal or professional education in this manner, whether white collar or blue collar, and they recognize that IF they put no effort into their education, then they deserve to get nothing back in return.

A simplistic example of equity is that you buy a rundown property for $100,000 and put a $10,000 deposit on it. IF that $10,000 goes straight into the bank's coffers, then you have a $10,000 equity in the house. But, you still owe the bank $90,000 of principal money (plus your negotiated mortgage interest rate money). Then, because you can't afford to hire someone to work on the property, you decide to buy the materials and do the repairs yourself, over a span of time. So, five years go by. You, now, have spent $25,000 of your own, hard-earned, money and five years of your time working on repairing the house. What is your equity? 

YOUR equity is NOT related to whether or not you have a desire for equality with someone else who bought a different property under different conditions and who has different personal or financial abilities. In this situation, YOU now would have cash equity that is equal to what the market would pay for the house in the condition to which YOU repaired it. YOUR equity would be your initial $10,000+ of downpayment and any interest with the bank, plus YOUR own purchases of $25,000 worth of materials, plus YOUR five years of labor doing the repairs: all of those can and would bear the fruit of equity IF the market value of YOUR repaired house were, at that five-year mark, worth X dollars more than when YOU bought it. This relates to your neighborhood values, in the sense of the degree to which neighborhood property values may have gone up or down during that same five years. If significantly more than you paid then you may have positive equity, but, IF the bottom fell out of the market, then you could have negative equity in the market, despite all your labor. Job markets, and many other things in society, operate the same way, no matter what the culture. There is no guaranteed equity in life.

In farming, if everyone wants tomatoes, and there are not many in the market, then the price of tomatoes goes up. With college grads, if a glut of accountants, lawyers, or mathematicians graduate and compete for a few jobs, then the employers are not going to pay top dollar for their newly hired employees, at least until the employees invest themselves in their jobs and prove their worth to the employers. THAT is how people gain equity in their workplace, NOT by mandate. IF the government mandated that farmers were to be paid a set fee, that might stabilize the tomato market for a while, both in supply and demand, but eventually the subsidies to the farmers would either not keep up with inflation or the farmers would limit the number of tomatoes they'd produce, which would again shift the paradigm of the mandatory subsidy, and the whole chase for financial equity in the market would start all over again. That is, also, true of the tax money that some want to use to subsidize college loans by forgiving them. Every time that the government, in the name of equity or equality, throws money at social and financial situations to try  to "fix" or balance them, the equity is immediately removed from the scale of the social or cultural marketplace. The financial and social "equality=equity" mandates that the political Left tries to install and enforce to save society is what is kills the free market that uplifts and strengthens society. Equity-based culture is less fair to oppressed individuals than free-market culture, because equity-basing fails to allow individuals to rise to their potential, even as it seeks to stifle their God-given abilities so that everyone has and is trapped in the same living conditions.

History has demonstrated that even in the most equitable societies there are levels of service and levels of social status which are not equitable nor equitably rewarded, but that are hypocritically tolerated and managed. Free-market culture accounts for personal achievement based on ability and capability, but, we see the inequalities of the Left played out, even today, in the ways that Leftist dogma is acted out, especially in politics, with their cries for "social justice" that is irrespective of personal capability, and inequitably managed by them: the Left doesn't care how God made us, but the Left wants to mandate that any incompetent person whom the Left desires must be able to be assigned to any job or status that the Left desires, whether or not that assigned person has invested anything constructive in their own lives or not. In other words, they want to play God with people's lives: they do not care about godly principles that say the opposite of what the Left wants to do. The guarantees and mandates, demanded by the Left, are NOT equity, nor do they create social or economic equity; the Left's attitudes and behaviors are NOT morally or socially equitable, either. People who rely on such ("rob from Peter to pay Paul") behaviors have invested little or nothing of themselves into that which they seek to gain.

Those who promote such behaviors are lying to everyone about the real meaning and nature of equal opportunity (morally and under the Law). The greatest value of investing in oneself is the satisfaction of having striven to develop equity (recognizable positive value) in one's own life. People who, falsely, want to make a forced equality, by claiming that equal opportunity under the Law is the same as equity, are sorely deluded about language, godly principles, and personal moral character, for they steal the opportunity to gain equity from the very people they claim to be helping, from those who would work to develop equity in their own lives if allowed to develop their own God-given abilities and opportunities. Instead of setting people free, the equality=equity crowd is really putting everyone into one dictatorial style social slavery basket, wherein the 'equity managers' condescend toward those citizens with the least and worst abilities, even as the 'equity managers' seek to also suppress or push aside from opportunity those citizens with the best available talents and drive. The delusional or lying proponents of equality=equity are working hard to change the connotation or public usage of the word equity, that they might gain political or practical advantage or control over others, or to fill their own pockets. BUT, those, who are playing that word-game, are NOT seeking truth about equal opportunity under the Law: they seek some form of political edge from having taken advantage of the rest of society. They do not want the same kind of day-to-day advancement for which our ancestors worked, so hard, most of their lives: they care not for the equity that the rest of us value and for which we learn to respect one another's hard work. 'Playing the game' is NOT equity. THAT is avoidance of social responsibility.

In order to survive and compete with other societies, each society is constantly evaluating and re-evaluating its operational parameters, as do businesses and households. Those evaluations are based in the moral, spiritual, and legal structures of each respective society. To one degree or other, each society, business, or family compares whether the one being called upon, interviewed, or assigned, has this or that ability or skill set for a given task or career, whether one is capable of being educated to perform certain tasks,  whether one is particularly inventive in this or that field of endeavor, whether one is physically debilitated, crippled, or mentally unable to accomplish the jobs that need to be done. Society, family, or business, NONE of them can afford to arbitrarily assign incapable or incompetent people to do things that those individuals cannot effectively accomplish: any such assignment of incapable or incompetent people virtually guarantees failure of that individual at that task, within the respective context of that society, family, or business, including in government. THAT is NOT equity, nor equitable, nor is such practice of incompetent assignments safe for family, business, government, or society at large. 

For any group to try to mandate that everyone be guaranteed the exact same jobs, or mortgages, or incomes, or other outcomes in life... well, anyone with any common sense can see and understand that any such forced 'equity' attitudes and behaviors are utterly delusional. It is delusional to think or mandate that anyone and everyone might be able to physically or mentally apply for any job. THAT is humanly impossible. It is far more delusional, then, for any person, group, or any governmental entity to try to mandate that everyone who applies for a job must be given equal opportunity to try to actually perform on that that job, irrespective of how well they are qualified or how badly they are unqualified for that job. Forcing people into situations for which they are not qualified hurts families, societies, and businesses. Forced 'equality' does NOT build equity.

As with weight-rated boxing matches, legal and moral equal opportunity, in the USA, means that IF and WHEN two or more similarly qualified people apply for an opportunity, then they SHOULD be given equal consideration, irrespective of their legal rights under our Constitution and human decency. THAT puts them on roughly equal footing as contenders for the job. To attempt to mandate equity, in place of equal opportunity under the Law, is to say there is no value in individual capability, and that there is no difference between how two different people should be able to do the same job. BUT! ... though we are all human and may have the same rights and aspirations, before God, ...yet, we are all different!! ...and any party trying to force an equality=equity mandate onto society obviously has no understanding nor respect for life, society, nor for the individual.

There is a dire need for repentance in our society!