Christmas Gift

Sheffield, MD
Christmas Eve

They were on their way home from the Christmas Eve service at the little nondenominational church he had frequented since his graduate work … and that was years ago already, before the first few gray hairs had appeared in his still sandy–blonde hair. Jon Anthony turned down the main street of their town, which was home to the acclaimed Britteridge College where he now enjoyed tenure.

“Oh, the lights! Can you see, girls?” Mary, beside him in the front seat of their Honda Accord, asked, swiveling toward the back.

“Yeah, Mom.”

He saw Gracie was enjoying their tour of the light shows across town. Some neighborhoods did better than others, but Sheffield’s main thoroughfare was known for the work the town businesses put forward in a yearly contest of outdoing themselves and each other in a seasonal display of illuminated decorations. Her sister, however, seemed less enthused.

Jon glanced in the rearview to confirm Faith was strapped in her riser seat. No, she was not happy. “What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” Fay attempted in her usual stoic monotone that was a dead giveaway she was holding something back.

“Kiddo, you know that’s not allowed. We talk. Remember the rule?” Mary reminded their daughter.

Jon glanced at the mirror again. Faith was getting That Knowing Look from her sister; one they shared when busted.

“It’s not Christmas, Daddy.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Mary cock her head and glance his way. This was his territory. For a decade, he’d been teaching Comparative Religion up on The Hill, not to speak of the books and speaking tours and regular television appearances as a commentator that were offshoots of this life he had somehow been gifted. To parent was to teach, and its return was tallied in a currency far beyond a salary. “What isn’t Christmas, sweetie?” he prodded in a gentle voice.

Fay pointed. “Look, on the light pole. It’s a penguin.” She picked out another decoration on the other side of the street. “And that’s a snowman. And there’s a wrapped present ….“

Yes. Jon saw the problem that was growing in his daughter’s young mind.

“At school you took us to a Holiday Party. “

Yes, I did. Mary had a look of concern on her face now, but this conversation was still his, and though he saw Gracie was paying attention as well, both of them were staying on the sidelines. “You’re not wrong, Fay.”

“It makes me sad is all.”

“And that’s okay, honey.” Jon drew a contemplative breath. His daughters’ questions about the season were answered early in their lives, as he and Mary made clear the hierarchy ordering their existence and the expectations their children were to follow through what certainly could be a maddeningly disappointing world.

Britteridge College, regardless of the lengths the institution had gone through to keep him on board after events early in his career, remained a liberal arts college. The hints of woke activism of a few years ago had blossomed into what was becoming a philosophical pathology Dr. Jon Anthony knew he would confront sooner or later on campus, if not in his own classroom. Yet, as ever, today’s the thing.

Jon glanced back to Fay again. “I have a question.” He met her eyes in the mirror when they returned, then gestured at the light displays hung up, down, and across the business district. “These aren’t always here, are they?”

“No.” his daughter answered in an unsure tone of voice.

“And even when they were hung up there they weren’t what they are right now, were they? What had to happen first?”

“It had to get dark.”

Not what I was getting at, but isn’t she right, though? Jon smiled. “And then what happened?”

Fay thought for a second as Gracie looked her way and smiled too. “Someone had to turn them on.”

“There you go.” They reached the end of Main Street and turned toward the Historical District, where the same little house they’d always known waited for all of them. Soon, the secular influences of practical people overly concerned with diversity and inclusion and avoiding offended seekers of lame advantage gave way … first to a star, then a creche, and then the bright red and white “MERRY CHRISTMAS” that always marked the house Dean Mills lit up for the season.

“It can be a dark world, honey. Be a worker in light,” he encouraged, checking the mirror and his daughters again. “And you both know how to do that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Daddy,” they said together. He knew they meant it. He caught Mary settling back to grant him another approving look, as one more lesson was deposited into his legacy. He knew—in the conscious awe of appreciation—how he and they had been blessed.

The world was what it was. It was the reason Jesus had been here, and remained here with them, just as He’d promised, even to the end of the age. For the Anthony family at least, Christmas was the gift.

Choose to love, and Merry Christmas! -DA

Midterm Retrograde Souls

“Peering through reverent fingers, I watch them flourish and fall.”
-Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Nothing is so imprisoning as self-imposed confinement inside walls raised around a false premise. The thralls of a deficient political ideology—one composed of nothing other than an amalgamation of retrograde societal and spiritual influences—daring to label themselves Progressives might comprise the height of irony.

Confirming that the state of affairs consistently falls apart under leftist leadership is a matter of observation. Determining why is an exercise in critical thinking that keeps one out of the barriers raised around embraced (and afterward doggedly institutionalized) folly in the first place.

It wasn’t always like this. In the days long before the Internet enabled the viral spread of absolute idiocy, established norms regulated behavior through social constructs that had endured for millennia. The natural human tendency to point out displayed stupidity and apply appropriate ridicule imprinted a necessarily brutal lesson:  obviously bad ideas are to be quashed rather than granted undeserved respect out of a sense of fairness. Thereby, the weak are chastised and observers edified.

We began our school days with the Pledge of Allegiance instilling the essence of ideological Americanism. What is the prevailing philosophy now?

I pledge allegiance to myself
In a perpetual state of indulgence
One concern, namely me
Unaccountable
With inherited grievance and social justice for all?

By now, mere days away from Joe Biden’s first and—hopefully last—midterm election, the stark contrast between effective leadership and wishful thinking has become painfully obvious … akin to staring into a sun lit by the fires of consequence. A corrupt and failing Democratic Party committed interstate conspiracy and dared to subvert the electoral process to install him as doddering political figurehead.

It had to be Joe Biden. No politician with full cognitive health could have withstood the humiliation of knowing how history would view him in retrospect after being elevated by blatant fraud.

Afterward, hubris acquired by the man over the course of decades revealed a would-be tyrant with the diseased mind of a reprobate: one approaching the demented and incoherent end game he’s earned throughout his pathetic, pandering, posturing and plagiarizing career.

I have subjected myself to the playbook of derp that comprises The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret. I found it to be a wish list for an alternate reality and remain amazed that its publication has not provoked Ayn Rand to rise from her grave to claw out the eyes of the authors. Schwab’s World Economic Forum has been behind the grooming and installation of indoctrinated figureheads across Western society for the expressed purpose of advancing globalized government and weakening national identity. What is lacking in the thesis is any data from the real world where these consolidated brainstorms have produced anything but economic ruin and social dysfunction.

In elitist minds such as occupy the WEF, a dystopian hellscape will only produce a more compliant population. Scared and hungry people, to their ruling class mindset, will tend to do as they’re told instead of revolt and hang them from lampposts.

This is how The Way Things Are points out the worst of us: the ones possessing both the compulsion to assume control while lacking the innate ability to deliver the fruits of competent leadership. It’s no wonder their spectrum depends on election fraud and censorship directed at countering narrative rather than their ideology’s ability to prevail in the arena of ideas. Critical thinking is a survival skill, and the motivations propelling of the ego-driven WEF comprise nothing but the fuel for history next ash layer.

They call us Christian Nationalists. That’s how faithless globalized socialists identify their enemies: by identifying and disparaging their virtues.

What the cabal who installed Joe Biden as an alleged president has accomplished thus far into his tenure can hardly be termed progress if he was ever intended to fulfill his Oath of Office in the first place. If their goals are otherwise, yes, progress indeed has been made.

If their goal is to maintain power through perpetually inflating their vote totals via the manipulation of rigged machine counts, they’ve made stellar progress. If they intend to create and leverage societal dysfunction through inherited grievance and groomed intersectional victimhood complexes, they’ve not only made progress, but emerged as the preeminent beneficiary of the elimination of personal responsibility and utter rejection of pursued reverent wisdom.

They’ve built a high castle of wretchedness on a foundation of sand. The results are inevitable and effortless to predict even without bestowed prophecy.

Today’s Democratic Party is beyond pity. Jesus, when he allowed the demons in Luke Ch.8 to enter the herd of pigs, knew they would cast themselves into deep water and drown. The recent departure of Tulsi Gabbard has followed a virtual exodus of conscience from the Democrats. Act upon act of fiscal irresponsibility, resulting economic damage, and faithless treason has exceeded the affiliative capacity of countless Americans who can no longer move with those marching toward the precipice directly in the path of their former party.

What once could pass as ideology on the Left has crossed the boundary between rationality and mental illness. Mental illness needs to be confined and treated, not enabled and affirmed. Otherwise, it progresses until the life fueling the journey is expended, and death wins again.

It’s not the business of the living to allow death another victory. The exception, as the doctrine of Christian warfare decrees to the detriment of the unrighteous, is where preservation of what we defend outweighs the toll extracted by the battlefield.

Today’s Democratic Party, if the Republic is to be preserved, needs to be disempowered to the point of political irrelevance at every level of governance it defiles. The sin nature cultivated in their sphere of influence—the retrograde forces preying on the spiritually dead, irresolute, morally weak, cowardly and otherwise vulnerable—progresses in the same sense of pathology whereby we track the course of any other disease.

There is a cure for every ill. Sometimes the course of treatment is painful. In the worst cases the condition has progressed past the point of no return, which is why avoidance in addressing any serious health concern is unwise.

America isn’t past the point of recovery yet. God willing, should a tidal wave of resentment and dutiful attendance at the polls have an ideologically American resurgence sweep the electoral landscape in November, the ruins of the political Left will stand as a warning to others that no one should ever, ever attempt to assume power through dishonest electoral measures again.

The resulting repudiation might be difficult for Joe Biden to bear. It will be nothing less than the man has earned.

Choose to love, -DA

Worth It

Third quarter 2022 arrived, and as increasingly happens in life, did so before we knew it. While the Editress and I are not old—not yet—certainly more years are behind us than in front of us, and time together now seems ever more precious.

This year is a decade past events marking major milestones in my life. January 30, 0001 hours: the first cat to choose me, our dear G. Gordon Kitty, departed from our arms to join his brother TR at the New House. May 18: The Year in the Chair dedicated to a lifelong ambition to write fiction began. July 4: Mother, like Gordon, finished her race, ascending to life in Christ and to find my father after ten more years of missing him than they’d had together in this world.

The Editress, of course, was not always so designated. She had a distinguished thirty-year career designing, supporting and maintaining venues for the edification of the public through the appreciation of history, while mine has been largely spent in public service trying to keep the world running to the best effect at any given time.

Somehow we’ve traveled from being those kids who met very nearly forty years ago to an inseparable couple beginning to think about retirement planning, and we did so in what seems the space of a heartbeat, a yawn, and a blink. Now, on this plane of existence at least, there are more years to remember than to anticipate, and, as they are designed to do, the markers we pass increasingly motivate assessment.

Motivation and assessment are the engine and fuel of accomplishment; they feed each other in a process of living deliberately. An effortless life is stagnant, lacking one of the pillars of happiness. Those were defined elsewhere as something to do, something to love, and something for which to hope, and the premise has stuck with me. Standing back, doers may assess the worthiness of their own efforts, and observers may decide for themselves. “Worth It” is always a judgment call.

I’ve been accused of being intense by people who know me well enough for their opinions to register. The mile markers of my journey were made stark by losing Dad when I was ten, and the lesson that time seems to teach best—its being in limited allocation—settled in immediately. Goals, like assessments, arrive out of perspective. Both are defining and testify to who we are, for good or ill.

If one dares to so broadly characterize humanity, it seems there are two major divisions proceeding down the same road in entirely different fashions. One camp looks, decides, and proceeds, while the other observes, references, and considers before moving forward. In my observation at least, these respectively correlate with those who fail and those who succeed. Only the latter group is leveraging the benefits of a wider perspective by taking into account the experiences of others. They are the thinkers, the contemplative souls who consider first and act last and best. They are the readers, set separate and apart from those who are missing an essential advantage in connecting to the abyssal depths of the human experience. They are the scholars of natural law and the suitors of wisdom.

To say we presently are a polarized society is understatement, as it’s difficult to imagine the catalysts of conflict withstanding much more agitation before an unfortunate reaction occurs. Those playing with the chemistry set of social engineering would be well advised to set aside their dependence on shared delusion in favor of better attention to The Way Things Are … but then again history is offering something on the order of ten millennia of action and consequence they’ve been content to ignore for this long.

June—thankfully again past—in particular now offers an annual lesson on character and vapidity arising from choices proceeding from perspective, as if the news fails to delivers enough each day throughout the year. The month once known for the launch of natural marriage is now a showcase of reprobative thinking of unlimited diversity … largely because there have never been limits on the number of ways to do anything incorrectly. The consequences of perverse sexual hobbies arrive without calling ahead, and once they hit one wonders if the victims of poor decision-making then think their hijinks were worth it.

If I have a defining motivation throughout my catalog, it is in attempting to portray the essential differentiation continuing to shape the world around us. June put us past fifty-five thousand extant copies “in the wild,” which by any standard makes the effort that went into them “Worth It.” The current contest is between conservatism and radicalized self absorption, and while the immediate outcome is always uncertain, over the long term history favors those who take its lessons into account. Premise by premise, we remain in the fight, and every time a novel sells our prayers for the reader go with it.

I’m no prophet; I only pay attention. Prophecy is the gift of the Spirit. Wisdom is bestowed on those who live well enough to appreciate the edification of concepts such as faith, humility, service, and the benefits of loving connection to elements of the human experience that will survive us, and the soon-to-arrive Fourth is a time to remember all the history of people who felt just such dedication.

Their part is over, and ours continues. We arrive, proceed and depart. The world goes on in a different state than we experienced, but operating on the same set of fixed actualities and governed by the same laws of cause and effect that bounded the generations who produced us.

We’re seated at a table of bounty, able to reach back via our minds to the labors that spread the setting before us. Whether we appreciate those long years bringing the present from there to here defines us as cognizant or ignorant, alert or asleep, living or existing, spiritually alive or feeling our way through darkness complaining all the while.

Living, faith says, is worth enduring what happens along the way. There is no other way to develop character—nobility in the face of adversity, strength to endure, empathy for those that suffer, courage—than through undergoing difficulty. There is no mechanism for compassion to exist without the reality of suffering. Whether we find worth in the fleeting flourish and folly of living—in doing, loving, and hoping while gaining appreciation of strengths made perfect in weakness—has its dependencies. So much hinges on the seeds of character finding good ground in us and taking root rather than being crowded out by wind-sown seed giving rise to an invasive overgrowth of vice.

In short: find the peace of your soul in Christ, dear child of God, and then mind your mission. It’s my hope you then find life was worth it.

Have a safe and joyous Independence Day. Choose to love. -DA

 

 

Remember Them

It was a hollow voice. Such a cold voice I barely heard carried across the veil between us. Even in faintness, it arrived as the crisp sound water makes in the stream of a cave.

“You stand at the foot of my grave,” it whispered, “but I cannot determine what I see. I have played my part and can ask this same of you, in whose charge now the country I served falls: Do you dwell on your duties as I attended mine?

“Do you elevate men and women who deserve to command my loyalty? Is this America where I rest, made yet today from many into one, or has it fallen to division and wretched selfishness? Do you build on the sacrifice I have sown into this hallowed ground?”

Then came another, as if from even greater distance: “Are you instead content to only lap up the gravy of liberty? That, you know, is your freedom mixed with the blood of heroes!”

The first returned, now more solemn: “My part is done and yours remains. I know the price of what I bought. Generation by generation here in this silent earth they came as I have now. Row on row, in death as we stood in life: together.”

“We are watching,” more and more of the voices agreed. They all murmured their accordance: “We are watching. We are watching.”

*****

May it be for you a peaceful Memorial Day Weekend and an observant Monday.

Choose to love, -DA

Two Years With Master Quan

“Did you have it planned this way all along?” The Editress asked when she finished her work on Boone 7, Novel 15, Two Years With Master Quan.

Planned? I plot, yes. I think about the lives of my characters, where they came from, where they are and where they’ll go. I think about how they get there and why. Then I write novels for readers who like to think as well.

Boone’s first and last adventure takes place before all her others, as an origin story that explored the questions to which I needed the answers. We met her at her worst, and say goodbye to her here on the threshold of the life she envisioned, pursued, and afterward endured.

Along the way, I learned to love her just a little more, and by its end pitied her as youthful enthusiasm sets her on a path to what Jon Anthony’s ancient Arab poet declared to be The Anvil of the Craftsman. It’s already been called her best yet. See what you think, and then let me know. Today it is in effective full release.

Here’s the blurb:

“It is 2004. After earning a PhD in Physiology, academic prodigy Rebecca Boone Hildebrandt, drawn to Vietnam by her lust for adventure, nears completion of another two-year course of study. Here, her instructor is a master of martial arts and former wartime-era associate of her father.

After drug traffickers expanding their operations force a confrontation with the righteous old man, operatives of the West draw him into another covert war. Thrust from a study of martial arts into their most serious application, Boone joins a face-off against a hardened criminal organization backed by local communist beneficiaries.

In their frustration, an opposition seeking to prevail proves desperate enough to kidnap an honored patriarch of his village. Boone, one French DGSE asset, and an agent of the American CIA stand as the last hope for his release from the center of a trap set just for them.”

– Kindle – Apple – Nook – Kobo – paperback –

Choose to love always. -DA

The Unserious

Christians and conservatives are often accused of wanting to tell others how to live. Most often, those accusations come from demographic sectors where the least idea of how to go about doing just that is rarely in evidence.

Living proceeds from being alive in the first place, and as such, thwarting the process occupies much of the mind of the enemy to whom the work of Life is antithetical to his established goals. Dysfunction in living is delight to the spirit of anti-life. It’s at once a sick passion, an indulgence, and exemplifies in cosmic scale the short-term gratification abounding in lifestyles dedicated to diversity in the various deadly sins.

A truly vital perspective necessitates embracing the concepts of a personal God and a personal enemy, something else the dark patron spirit of the lost obscures whenever possible. Right and wrong are inseparable in clarity from the duality of life and anti-life, just as are love and hate.

Attempts can and have been made to separate morality and valid faith, of course. Doing so, however, requires a perspective convoluted enough to ignore historical realities preserved in the context and accounts of Scripture. Unfortunately, the ignorance of history is also as much a factor in the malevolent strategies now so prominent in current events as it is for the purveyors of spiritual death.

Much of human history—driven by human nature—revolves around conflict. History is a synthesis arising from the dynamic between the ambition of tyrants and its antithesis, that being the will of free folk to oppose subjugation. It’s no surprise, then, that tyrants husband the ignorant, encourage the dependent delusions of their enablers, and enfeeble intellect wherever possible. One cannot repeat history against the self-sufficient, grounded, and aware.

That’s why I left Facebook, and so should you. But again, I digress.

The political Left, absolutely the camp of anti-life on this plane, encourages thinking otherwise wherever possible. Lefties live in a house of cards built on the sand of shared delusion, which is why opposing voices there are ruthlessly silenced by any means necessary. Deconstructing a premise is more work than leftists care to undertake, and in the case of a valid premise is impossible in an arena of ideas where the ground is level.

The combined weight of woke opinions, irrational expressions of adopted identity, acculturated inherited grievance based on covetous envy, and unnatural sexual indulgence affect the actual state of being not at all, of course. The state of actuality, referenced here often as natural law, is as unaffected by consensus as it is unyielding in pronouncing its judgments of prospering initiative and collapsing folly. Natural laws incorporate their own enforcement mechanism manifesting in life or death.

So it might be that the whispering voices promoting wisdom, rather than wanting to tell us how to live, are actually interested in steering us to where life may be found. Those “stray thoughts” and “moments of clarity” are the subtly beneficial influences worth attending and the main benefit of embracing and incorporating personal faith.

Life is a serious subject, reflecting directly the Will of the Living God. Unserious people are its understandably poor students. Once one comprehends the distinction, it cannot be unseen.

Tyranny is a serious problem, enabled by unserious people. The aforementioned unserious, having been groomed to their purpose, have since been elevated to strategic positions in leadership roles well beyond their native capacity in order to promote predictable dysfunction. It’s no accident that the long supply lines of a successful economy are being broken down, that a universal and digital means of exchange is an increasing subject of discussion, and that fiat currency is being inflated past the bounds of responsible policy.

When people who have no idea how the world actually works are put in charge, it occasionally catches fire and partially burns down. Such is to the delight of both the dark patron spirit of the lost and his enthralled arsonists.

Serious problems are being fomented so that the unserious, being unable to govern to good effect in prosperous times, will absolutely clamor for effective leadership once we encounter systemic collapse. In the eyes of secular government, the more power consolidates, the more satisfying the temporary satiation of its addicts. None of this will be a surprise to those who’ve absorbed the warnings in the Revelation of John.

Does that statement tick a checkbox in your mind? Some, excessively grounded in the apparent, consider an eschatological perspective to be irrational and cultlike. Granted, until its fulfillment prophesy is a premise of theory, and like many premises vulnerable to unfounded extensions due to its sometimes intentional vagueness and often subtle context. There’s no shortage of folk, particularly on the Internet, seemingly willing to dig themselves a rabbit hole and then jump clear down to the bottom of the thing.

It could be a complete coincidence, I suppose, that after nearly four decades jointly spent in paying attention to both scholars of approaching end times and current events, I’ve not seen society do anything but march toward the days in John’s vision. Did human nature progressing to universal governance and coinciding with enabling advances in technology seem that predictable in the first century A.D.? Faith whispers otherwise.

Biblical foresight isn’t the purported secret knowledge claimed by the occult and those addicted to conspiracy theory. Judging by the fruits of life and death found in each, which we’ve already established as the universal standard of good and evil, it’s more apparent prophesy exists as a gift of wisdom and foreknowledge to those who in faith will look and listen.

Angels whisper their advice, and if you’ve heard them, you understand. If there’s a lesson I can relate after having been the conduit for fifteen novels, Ritter’s short story, and enough content here to fill another book, it’s this: dedicate yourself, and the Spirit flows. My advice is to be part of that work of life afterward, wherever it is you find it. It’s serious business, after all.

Choose to love, -DA

*****

In production news, the Editress has completed her work on Boone’s seventh title, Two Years With Master Quan, and the novel is now undergoing external proofreading. April, God willing, will see the completion of my catalogue, growing as shall all things green and good, with Boone’s origin story as prompted by a little girl who asked. News, as always, will be heard here first.

More Than Being Here

You’ve heard it more than once: “We’re all Americans.” The phrase is a standardized rhetorical tool, and it’s used often by those attempting to foist another questionable narrative on bystanders surrounding the arena of ideas. Premises dubious and solid comprise political discourse in this county. Mere embrace of this particular canard is prima facie evidence of civic illiteracy at best in the current environment, where granting such benefit of doubt is often tantamount to willing denial.

No, we’re not all Americans. Not even close.

America is an ideal, a construct of interrelated ideas. America formed in the minds of men and women at a time where the capacity for deliberate thought was the valued measure of intellect, and whose survival of rational criticism led to its adoption and proliferation out of a sense of morality, and destiny, and shared benefit.

America, as an ideal, stands as a bright shining inspiration and aspiration set as a goal pursued by those who understand it. As such, this apex philosophy of human governance—proliferated through its ideology—rests in the premise that just powers derive from the consent of the governed. It was a radical concept at the end of the age of the supposedly divine right of kingship, and it endures here in opposition to the tide of globalized homogenization those who presume to be a ruling class envision for the future.

America was founded by folk who understood the concept of a ruling class not only reflects base instincts of humanity’s sin nature, but denies the actual divine bestowment of human rights they attempted to delineate in our founding documents. Thought, remember, was a valued process at the time, refined and arrived at through an established regimen of construction and examination.

And when the founders were finished, they went to war against those who thought otherwise. That, too, reflects a state of affairs, again due to the aberrations of will manifesting in human nature, which will never be otherwise. It’s our Constitution. Come and take it, mother lovers.

No, we’re not all Americans. We’re all citizens, a status conferred at birth (to those whose parents are not under the authority of a foreign government, but that’s another discussion). As such, we as a body of citizenry are Americans, or victims of the divisive politics of envy and identity, and/or globalized socialists, communists, reprobates, and/or outright traitors. As in the LGBTQ∞ lexicon, the listing will never be complete, because there are innumerable ways to do anything incorrectly.

“Do you think we don’t love our country?” I was, once, posed that question by a state district court judge whose politics reflected her ignorance, not treason. She herself declared wards of the state children loved by their parents, who were endangered by their continued custody. Likewise, applied ideological Americanism is going to disenfranchise those whose ambition far outstrips their common sense, capacity for servant leadership, or patriotism.

Accountability is the prime mover of representative democracy, which is why the current administration is struggling after the short-term gains reaped from an obviously and undeniably fraudulent and stolen 2020 election. The Democratic Party is a potentially terminal illness putrefying the body of American governance, and their excision is their nation’s route toward healing. They did it to themselves and will do more and worse.

Here, and in the truck-choked arteries of Canada, and in the streets of European capitals filled with citizens who have had enough presumption from the self-appointed “ruling class,” political ideologies embracing liberty under the consent of the governed are undergoing resurgence. The maintenance of freedom, as our founders intended, is the realm of an engaged and involved citizenry. Tyrants thrive under the delusion that the people will do as they’re told, when the natural state is quite the reverse.

The principle has been stated here before: the extension and institutionalization of a false premise eventually leads to systemic collapse. It will be so for the Democratic Party, their doddering, unnaturally elevated and demented figurehead Joe Biden, for Big Pharma’s COVID narrative, and for the intransigent moral weakness of Justin Trudeau.

There is an ordained order of loyalties to The God Who Is, and to one’s nation, descending through the institution of natural marriage and resultant family and community. All follow the delineated virtues whose embrace forms a stable foundation for the life to follow. The benefits of faith, fealty and dedication to that beyond our immediate self result and manifest in strength emanating from the inside out and produce a personal effect an order of magnitude beyond self interest.

The effect is that of a fulfilled soul. That store of wealth is eternal: the compounded interest of investment of talents Jesus declared essential.

We, invested with free will as well, embrace or reject each virtue and vice in the matrix of character and are measured as loving or evil, intelligent or limited, cognizant or ignorant, servant or enemy. The results will be evident in our personal lives, our communities, and our countries. Faith says we shall, at the end of our days, be called to account for how we have lived.

We, here in the States at least, are for or against the tenets of ideological Americanism, and being so is the measure of whether or not we deserve to claim the title of American. The unifying inclusiveness of the ideology crosses national boundaries and may bear other titles. But as the current surge in populism reflects, those who presume to lead in disregard of the consent of the governed have sufficiently cautionary examples in history to conclude that the age of tyrants is over, and that freedom, like water, may crash as well as flow.

There is, as Paul implied, above a certain level no male or female, no one enslaved or free, none Jew or Greek. We in our ideal state are souls cognizant of the rights granted to us at our Creation, for a purpose designated therein and under a duty to edify and elevate one another toward a common noble destiny. As ever, we have love, hate and indifference beckoning along the way … and it never was any more complicated than that, really.

Choose to love. -DA

*****

In production news, the Editress is approximately three-quarters along in her processes of editing the seventh title of Boone’s File, Two Years With Master Quan. Boone’s first adventure and final novel appears to remain on track for a second-quarter publication date and before predictable summer doldrums descend on the industry. More updates as we  may!

Dr. King’s Dream in 2022

I arrived in Chicago via train on April 4, 1968, as a preschool child traveling with his family to visit an aunt who was recovering from surgery. I have only fleeting memories of that trip: the sounds of the tracks and diesel smell of the engine, and the odd configuration of the onboard restroom toilet. I don’t remember the anxious rush of relatives who met us at the train station wanting to get us away from the downtown area.

That was the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. My cognizant life has been lived in the man’s legacy.

Mid-1950s Southern Democrats, ninety years after losing the Civil War, continued to cling to acculturated race-based tiers of society. As society progressed and those outmoded ways of thinking encountered the same sort of ideological headwinds which ended slavery in the previous century, it fell to Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks to spark the formative challenge of Alabama’s racial segregation. The result was the Civil Rights movement lasting another decade, in which Americans of African descent demanded equal footing in their nation and in which Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the prominence that eventually cost him his life.

Shortly afterward, it was the same Democratic Party—who lost ownership of their slaves a hundred years prior, and who vehemently opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act—formulating a controlling strategy only slightly less abhorrent than presuming to categorize another human being as property. Blacks, unable to be kept in place through intimidation, were now introduced to the more subtle bondage of family-destroying dependence on social welfare programs. Black Americans, having only just overcome the shackles of segregation, became Black Democrats and began voting for their political masters in rates invading the ninetieth percentile.

The battle for equal footing in the pursuit of excellence and of the American vision—and Dr. King’s dream of defining quality of character—has been replaced on the political Left by the pursuit of lame advantage. It happened first through empowerment conferred by the aforementioned engineered monolithic voting bloc. Via leveraging divisive politics of racial identity and evolving into the ongoing woke culture, the Democratic Party descended into our modern day’s last harbor of the slave-owning mentality in a nation they innately despise. Steering the vulnerable into the morass of a cultivated victim mentality has been the Democrats’ primary strategy since, comprising a continuous tug on loose strings in the fabric of American society.

To abandon economic morality and seek gains outside the rewards of excellence requires confiscating the fruits of the more capable. Doing so by wile rather than force requires such to be handed over rather than taken. Acquiescing to such assumption also had to be engineered, and so we arrived at the second great strategy of the political Left: the assignment of unwarranted guilt, again on the basis of race. Nothing more is required to acquire the label of racism than refusing to accept the undeserved accusation, and deconstructing the underlying premise as indefensible only causes one’s accusers to increase their volume.

No one living today’s American society has ever experienced institutional slavery here. Outside of the scourge of communism and the doctrinal servitude continuing to be practiced in Islam, the incongruity of slavery was reconciled with my nation’s founding principles within a lifetime of their establishment and with the greatest cost of life in our military history. Dr. King’s dream embraced nothing of inherited grievance. To do so is bondage imposed by the same spirit of envy driving the increasingly sputtering engine of the political Left.

The pursuit of lame advantage might indeed result in advantage. The lameness, however, will be more consistently enduring.

Dr. King’s dream that his children would be assessed by the content of their character was an ideologically American dream. It’s one currently making inroads in the fracturing Democrat voting blocs who, being as capable of intellectual influence as any other demographic, continue in increasing numbers to realize the intentional limitations of the victim mentality. There is an essential humanitarian disconnect in those who profess concern with their supporters’ state while actually pursuing a lame advantage of their own: in valuing sustained political empowerment well in excess of any benefit conferred to their enabling constituents.

There is no racial component to ideological Americanism. Rally under the red, white, and blue banner of my tribe. Stand for the Anthem and you’re in. Appreciate what history is available to teach us all how to comport ourselves going forward. We may do so edified by the experiences of our forebears and by the rational criticism of premises that drove their striving in days gone by, whether we view them in the present day as points of light or shadow.

This fragile American experiment is an anomaly in humanity’s long history of governmental tyranny. The dark spirit of despair holds slaves of its own, chained by the deception that little else matters beyond our selfish concerns, that justice is synonymous with confiscation, and that the whispered choice between love, hate and indifference matters less than the braying voice of covetousness driving its victims to take what they’re told they have inherited the right to snatch away.

Be the people, and Martin Luther King, Jr. will be proud.

Choose to love – DA

*****

In production news, the Editress is now working in the second half of the seventh and concluding novel of Boone’s File, Two Years with Master Quan. God willing, the title will appear in the second quarter of this year. While we wait for Boone’s origin story, as told to a little girl who asked, pick up her first novel, Absinthe and Chocolate, as a free download or priced inexpensively as allowed wherever your eBooks come alive.

Resolve

As I write this, we are not even a week into what is considered inside the Perimeter to be the cruelest month. Dear kitteh TR, often the first one up to the top as a kitten, ascended to the New House on New Year’s Day in 2009, and his brother Gordon on January 30 three years later. Today, January 6, is Gato’s Day, when we miss and remember a good cat—strong, brave, and levelheaded—on the second anniversary of losing our beloved orange stepchild.

That’s the way of things when committing to love someone not likely to outlive you. It takes an essential sort of courage to do so regardless, and dealings with what comes next comprise life lessons purposely bestowed as subjects of contemplation. We would not have them any other way, which is good, considering they will never be any other way.

This year, January 6 is also the anniversary of losing something, if only temporarily, that was supposed to far outlast us: namely the bestowment of just powers, derived from the consent of the governed, via the treasured institution of free and fair elections. Worse, we didn’t lose this through any progression of natural process. It was taken from us quite unnaturally by traitors and criminals who think they know better how things should be than did America’s Founders.

Over the course of the past year it’s become painfully obvious the current administration and legislative branches are populated on the political Left by individuals elevated through obvious and undeniable interstate fraud. That none of those usurpers have been shot or hanged to date speaks well of the level of civility remaining on the right side of the bell-shaped curve of distribution defining the spectrum of American politics.

Today, hand-wringing commentators more devoted to narrative than integrity will decry the protest at the Capitol of January 6, 2021 as testimony otherwise. Those who have examined the footage and evidence know the unfortunate events of that day were planned and orchestrated by instigators for the exact effect achieved: a coup unopposed by the only strategy which would have prevented the embarrassing debacle of the Biden administration.

Despite conducting the national election in ways that were unconstitutional and illegal at the federal and state levels, corrupt state executives and legislatures allowed their respective electors to present the bounty of Democrat fraud to the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, then presiding over the Senate. His inadequacy was the last ditch that could have decided the election in the House of Representatives, where a preponderance of Republican-majority state delegations reside. For reasons that are equally incomprehensible as his decision to forgo courage, he has since been allowed to appear in public wearing trousers rather than the Swamp Skirt (Pence-ill skirt?) he earned one year ago today.

Mike Pence thinks he’s going to be the Republican candidate for President one day. The Hindenburg was once considered the future of air travel, as well.

Anyway….

The Democrats’ political machine, simply dying to rule, is also killing to rule. Besides Ashli Babbitt, who was shot to death without reasonable justification by Capitol Police officer Lester Holt, Rosanne Boyland died after being beaten during a brutal assault on protesters in a tunnel on the lower west side of the Capitol building. Since those losses, patriots who vented their outrage at a stolen election have been hunted with facial recognition and cell phone network identifiers, interrogated, imprisoned without trial, and harassed by federal authorities, while entrapping instigators such as Ray Epps walk free.

I ditched Facebook before the current regime took power in Washington, recognizing the site would only become target designators in a brave new world dominated for a time by the unelected and unaccountable power-mad in D.C. Prior, I was acquainted with the head of the South Carolina Tea Party, Pressley Stutts, who was invited onto the Capitol steps by its police officers, and whose selfies posted there earned him harassment by the TSA (“We know where you were on January 6^th”) that he feared would last a lifetime.

COVID treatment protocols killed Pressley when he was hospitalized with the virus later that same year, but that is another story.

We have endured the Biden administration for twelve months now. A showcase of exemplary inadequacy, as a result of their wrongheaded policies the country’s economy has suffered, sixty percent of respondents now see Joe Biden as a weak president, and nearly every appearance by the man generates more speculation on what his neurological future holds. Spoiler: it holds as little promise as do those determined to ignore The Way Things Are.

Attempting to wish away consequence is a dead-end road traveled by childish minds and the distinguishing characteristic of the political Left. The delusion promising that sin brings profit is eventually set right for liars, thieves, plagiarists, and the perverse and corrupt. Joe Biden is demonstrably all of those things. His son Hunter is further testament to the deficient character of the man who produced him, and his historical legacy will only be that of a doddering figurehead elevated via fraud by a controlling cabal of opportunists, traitors, reprobates, and idiots. Their temporary advantage can and should have only one result:  the desiccated political viability of the Democratic Party smoldering in the ruins of the midterm elections of 2022 and the presidential contest conducted under reforms to be put in place between now and 2024.

Today’s Democratic Party is living in a Matrix-like construct engineered entirely by their own aversion to wisdom. And as in the most recent installment of that cinematic franchise, they are also dedicated to the deliberate dismantling of what came before.

No person of normal sensibilities embraces their own destruction. Doing so has been an indicator of mental illness since our species has been sufficiently self-aware to detect those thus afflicted. Degrading the moral and ideological fabric of one’s society roots in self-hatred spawned by the dark patron spirit currently dominating Hollywood. In the same venomous vein driven by colluding inner voices, producers, directors, and politicos seem determined to tear down the institutions that edified and inspired their adherents in favor of agendas that cannot stand against rational criticism.

I have a degree in psychology, and none of the theories I studied for years explains such a state of dedicated and demented human evil as this: their patron spirit wants them (and us) dead.

Individuals locating on the left half of the bell-shaped curve have a common pathology. As the political Left sees government as the summit of authority promising the license to impose their will, the immoral Left (seldom apolitical) holds the apex of the human experience to be indulgence in abyssal depths of depravity without criticism or apparent consequence. Both are manifestations of captivity in the deadly sin of lust.

Politicians currently exploiting the engineered optics of January 6, 2021 have been frustrated in their agenda of overreach over the past year. They rushed into their wish list of tyranny, forgetting that governance in the United States is bounded by Constitutional limits. Those powers not specifically granted belong instead to the States, per the Tenth Amendment’s stipulation.

In the case of the immoral Left, The Way Things Are stymie every plan to escape consequence, consigning transgressors to the judgment of natural law. In both cases indefensible actions, once institutionalized, will inevitably result in systemic collapse rather than being accepted as “the new normal.”

And it doesn’t matter whether that system is the Democratic Party, fiscal irresponsibility, or the terminus of the gastrointestinal tract. Matters there don’t end well when pursued past their limits.

Government manifesting servant leadership rather than oppression roots in the self-governance of a responsible electorate elevating like minds to the righteous authority free and fair elections allow. Since the current cabal found themselves empowered by other means, it was to be expected that the following months would see things go from bad to worse. Natural law is by design a teacher whose harsh lessons impart to those at a distance lasting comprehension of why certain behaviors should be avoided.

It’s the time of year to set goals and pursue aspirations, as we look forward while holding close the lessons of the past. The challenges ahead of we patriots and folk of valid faith require more than resolutions, though. They require resolve to embrace strength rather than weakness. Being strong, we can legitimately demand and cultivate strength in others. Holding ourselves accountable, we can apply the same standards of accountability elsewhere. Believing, we are empowered to propagate awareness of the state of actuality lending an appreciation for the levels and planes of governance beyond the apparent. Having grasped eternal constructs in The Way Things Are, we may proceed to meet the challenges of a new year without fear of tomorrow.

We are meant to live as free folk, not livestock, and in courage, not trepidation. Those who think otherwise might need to be convinced in 2022, but it has never been and never will be otherwise.

Choose to love, -DA

****

In production news, the Editress is midway through Boone’s seventh and concluding title, Two Years with Master Quan. Current progress is hinting at a late spring/early summer release, God willing. Boone, Thibaut, Quan and others you’ve not yet met will be worth the wait, I promise.

Christmas Is

Christmas is fast approaching as I write this. The thirty-fifth deployment of the Perimeter’s little tree is complete, and it again stands guard over both artfully and man-wrapped gifts. Its accompanying stuffed Christmas Moose and Penguin are intermittently on station when not being abducted and abused by Kitteh Leo, who is also responsible for one of the Editress’s ceramic ornaments not being quite what it was last year.

Music by Elvis, Mannheim Steamroller and others pervades the ambiance. Die Hard has been viewed already, featuring the annual Dropping of the Hans and remembrance of those lost in 1988 at the Nakatomi Tower. The Season is here.

There are many answers one might garner when asking others what Christmas is. Some will be hostile and defensive, projecting a spittled tirade shot through with the false premises guiding those who revile this time of year. As with every good thing, there are those who just don’t understand.

It’s a federal holiday, a long weekend, and a time for family. It’s the medieval institutionalization of the pagan observance of the Winter Solstice rebranded in a new paradigm by the early Church as Christianity gained dominance via western civilization’s governing hierarchy. Yes, Christmas is all those things. But it’s more.

Christmas is rooted in the historical appearance of the Christ Child. The birth of Jesus is celebrated at the end of December out of tradition, though Scripture hints of His arriving during the Feast of Tabernacles occurring in the fall instead. History is what it is, and all of its distracting errata cannot overshadow the fact that He arrived, just as it cannot hide the truth that He Was, and Is, and Is To Come. Without Jesus, it and we are emptied of what matters most.

That foundational premise comprises a hard stop for unbelieving souls: the Holiday Season crowd, happy to partake in days off and satisfied to celebrate materialism, themselves, or whatever else in the human experience they feel should occupy our attention instead. The Christmas Spirit is a Christian Spirit, being an outgrowth of the essential orientation of faith, as are many other attributes of life being lived as it should. We proceed, faith says, in a binary system of ones and zeroes, with every aspect of our existence being within or in opposition to the Will of God.

My writing started with my character Jon Anthony, in whose theology he espoused a “reduction to essence” which, as such luminaries as Lao Tzu and Winnie the Pooh agreed, begins at the beginning. Our essential orientation defines us, being a set of unavoidable and existential questions we answer in our actions if not contemplation. In those, we have two patron spirits vying for our affiliation; their hallmarks are vitality or decay, nurture or predation, connection or isolation, love and hate, and many other opposites. Every choice made is dominated by a spirit of light or darkness, with valid faith being the determinate factor of each turn toward fulfillment or folly. It’s not much of a mystery which patron benefits us most: it’s the one Who wishes us at each juncture to live rather than die.

History is a resource presenting us the opportunity to grow via the life lessons of others rather than relying on our own limited experience, and as such attending or ignoring the opportunity is another of the binary choices we all must make. And the history of the Christian experience, an appearance which was delayed into historical times, is one on which we can rely.

We can reference, through Roman historians long passed into eternity, confirmation of the Census of Quinirius in the years of Augustus that prompted the travel of Joseph’s new family to Bethlehem. Likewise, the later ministry of the Christ Child grown into manhood would be documented by Josephus in his tome The Jewish Wars. Christmas Is because Jesus Is, and we who have looked into the subject have rational assurance of all these events rather than needing to take any of them on blind faith, as the faithless accuse. But to see these things one must look, while the distraction from that search is the goal of every effort of the enemy. Every experience derives from the victory of one or another of the two competing spirits who vie for us all; spiritually, politically, and personally.

Observance is telling once one understands. The Spirit bestows the gift of what the Greeks called Diakrisis, the discernment of spirits. It can be a burden to see people from the inside out. There you’ll find inflamed, self-inflicted wounds, the fever of guilt, and addiction to premises that poison the mind before they infect the soul. But the joy of recognizing love’s driving force is there to discover as well, and the hope of healing one to the other is what keeps our walk of faith vital and relevant.

To live as we’re meant, we need to understand all we can, and there’s no better time of year to begin. Christmas presents, you see, cannot compete with Christmas Presence. Understood in its fullness, the season never has to end. There is strength there to be had through simple recognition of The Way Things Are, blinding as its initial insight might be.

Your inner eye will adjust. Trust me … and then trust Him with everything.

Merry Christmas. Choose to love. -DA

*****

In production news, the Editress is somewhere in the vicinity of forty percent through production editing of Boone’s concluding novel, Two Years with Master Quan. Our favorite redhead’s first and last adventure, set during her postdoctoral studies in Vietnam and featuring Thibaut, Quan, and others, will appear next year as God is willing. If you’ve not yet been, her previous six novels are a trip worth the time.