Reality Check

I’m trying to take a look at the situation we find ourselves in today in regards to the war in Iraq and how that compares to the war we had in Vietnam forty some years ago.

In my mind I am thinking about how I can explain what I see to my young adult daughters. I remember when I was a young adult and faced the Vietnam War. Of course back then it was worse in some ways because we had the draft, and if you weren’t in college you were most likely going to war. If the war didn’t kill or maim you, the psychological damage of being in a war zone would take its toll.

Still, back then the war was an issue, something you could have a peace march about or a sit-in or some kind of protest. It seemed like if just a few misguided politicians could be turned around the whole thing would end and we could go back to being the land of the free and get on with things. It’s not like there was any real evil intentions there.

In fact, that seemed to be what eventually happened. Enough people didn’t like the war going on and the politicians had to get us out of there.

Today, from my Lookout post it seems so much different. The Iraq war doesn’t seem like an issue. The young people are not up in arms about it staging protests. Of course there is no draft right now. That makes it easy for the younger generation to ignore it as an issue that doesn’t affect them directly.

There is another thing different I notice about today. I can’t be sure if I have a clearer sight born from years of being on the lookout, or if there is really something more now then there was 40 years ago.

The fact is the people in the upper levels of the government seem more transparent in their evil core. They seem more sinister and bolder about their selfish agenda and lack of respect for creation. At least in the 60’s and 70’s the politicians had to give lip service, they had to make a pretense towards showing a respect for creation. Not now, not anymore, now it seems like a true dark evil is in control of things.

How do I explain to my daughters so they can see this for themselves? The training our education system gives them seems to blind people, they can’t see the dark blackness that is leading us to oblivion. Mostly they don’t even see any reason nor have any interest in how things are run. It doesn’t have any direct affect on their lives, so it’s hard to get interested in it.

That’s how the dark evil can get away with a lot of stuff, if it doesn’t have a direct affect on someone’s life, it’s easy to ignore it and pretend its not there. But it’s like the frog in the slowly heated pot of water. The slight rise in temperature doesn’t affect him directly; he doesn’t notice that anything is going on. He gets boiled alive before he ever figures out what is going on.

Nobody wants to believe a person can be evil, and sadly most people really don’t see the depth of the darkness. I don’t know if it’s because they can’t, or because they don’t want to. To really see how bad it is can be terrifying if you aren’t braced for it.

The New Age crowd shun this idea by pushing the ‘you create your own reality’ concept. I might agree with this if they said you create your own subjective reality. But I’m talking about objective reality, what good is subjective reality if it doesn’t encompass everything? It’s a formula for disaster; people that create their own subjective reality won’t see what hit them. And I do believe there is something coming our way.

People seem to equate the idea of seeing objective reality with hopelessness. If I try to explain how bad the view looks from here, they think I am depressing or see no hope in the world. But that’s not true; the clarity of sight allows one to see the challenge we are facing. The trick is to learn to take the challenges that seem impossible and face them without flinching. Really, do we have anything better to do under the circumstances?