Where has accountability gone?

I don’t normally like to post news items as blog posts but this one got me fired up.  This issue of homosexuality is a sensitive one.  If any of you have read most of my blog you know my opinions.  If you have skimmed and not taken the time to actually understand my position you might think I’m a bigot.  That is fine with me, I am not a bigot and I don’t have animosity or hatred toward any individual.

I have problems with many prevailing philosophies, dogmas and tenets.

There is nothing wrong with standing on our principles.  We all need to stand up for what we believe.  Too many people today trade their values for the clamoring and whining of the weak, who fail to stand on any firm foundation.  They give in because of emotion, sensitivity and sympathy.  Empathy is a virtue we should all live by, but sympathizing with causes in contrast with our core values is destructive to our being.  There is a critical difference between empathy and sympathy.  Ignorance and lack of understanding lead people down paths of confusion and this is happening in the halls of academia more and more; at the elite universities that were once standards of greatness.

It has become very trite and cliche, but it is true that if we stand for nothing we will fall for anything.  United we stand; divided we fall; and how much proactive divisiveness do we see going on today?

The principles and philosophies that this nation were founded upon are as solid today as they were back then.  The problem is not the principles but the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of them by people today who allow their emotions to interfere with reason.

On to the new item that started this outburst.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110420/ap_on_re_us/us_rutgers_suicide

You can’t punish one person for the choices another person makes!  That’s just not right.  The news story reports that, in short, a Rutgers student who was an aspiring violinist had a gay trist with another man in his dorm room and the roommate caught it on a webcam.  According to the article it was a make-out session.

For anyone to believe that THIS one incident alone is what caused this young man to kill himself is completely short sighted.  This certainly was a catalyst, but was merely one piece of a much larger  puzzle that made up his life.  It doesn’t make sense to charge the roommate for the end result, an individual choice that another person made.  If you do that you have to go back throughout his life to all of the other factors and give them attention and blame as well.

If what was caught on camera was so shameful, that is an issue for the victim, not the roommate.   If we have private behaviors that we feel we must keep hidden from society then we are solely responsible for the humiliation we feel.  If we believe in what we are doing then we should stand tall in our beliefs, regardless of what society tells us.  If our actions are illegal or unethical or immoral then we will be judged for them, but again, if we believe in what we do we should stand tall in the face of ridicule.

Rutgers is way out of line. They brought Snookie in as a guest speaker and they’re punishing a kid for video taping his roommate?  There’s nothing illegal or unethical about rolling film in your own house.

We all know that this is an issue because it has to do with homosexuality.  If the victim had been making out with a fat chick (no offense to the overweight, but this is a valid argument) and then killed himself for shame it would have been observed as something out of kilter with his psychology due to HIS own choice.

I’m getting so tired of the over-sensitivity in this country. Pussification!! Where’s the grit and integrity gone?

OK, here I go into the realm of real offensive opinion — the world is a much bigger place than your imaginary bubble and the protective environment you wish you could live in.  The world is harsh and it WILL not change because we want it to. It is what it is, and always will be.  Political correctness is an illusion.   Politeness should be expected, not pandering.

There are rules, there are standards and there are laws that will not change due to our behaviors and desires.  Evolution does not work that way.  The changes that come about as a result of our behaviors have consequences, and those consequences will play out in time. We are all free to choose our path.  We are all free to choose our behavior, but we are never free to choose the consequences of our actions.

Freedom of Choice and the Consequences of Liberty

We all stand on the principles, as Americans, that we are a free people and that we have our liberties; freedom of choice and liberty of will.  These are rights granted to us by our constitution.  We claim them as unalienable rights, granted to us by divine providence through the laws of Nature, Virtue and common Morality.  These are the principles of the Anglo Saxon pioneers who founded this land and established our first colonies and these are the principles our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams and George Washington followed after in drafting the timeless and inspired documents of freedom and independence that we stand on to claim these freedoms from oppressive government rule locally and around the world.

When these freedoms are encroached upon by unrighteous governmental dominion we have the responsibility as citizens of this great republic to speak our minds and make our voices heard in the halls of education, administration and before the judges who stand in place to enforce our laws and interpret our constitutional rights and freedoms.  Our administrators and judges are not in place to exercise dominion over us or to enforce laws upon us without merit or justification.  And when we find ourselves being subjected to restrictions by our government officials based on the laws that they have enacted for the gain of power and control over the freedoms of the commonwealth of the people, we have a responsibility to be informed, to understand our laws, to understand our constitutional rights and to stand up and be heard so we as brothers and sisters do not fall to the tyranny of government oppression.

I find it troubling that too many people in this day and age complain about the ills of society, about what they see as not fair or what they claim as unconstitutional, or what new laws they claim should be enacted by congress and interpreted by the courts.  These are mostly based on precedents set by previous judgments by higher courts and powerful lawyers, bending our freedoms to the wills of lobbyists and powerful special interest groups who do not serve the interests of the commonwealth and only exist to increase their own wealth and fill their pockets by greed and by ruling industry and corporations, by raising taxes, by increasing costs and by controlling the supply of goods and services to the people.

I find it troubling that too many people, when they feel oppressed in any way look to the government for solutions to their societal struggles rather than looking within themselves for answers, to stand up in the face of tyranny and choose liberty and freedom of oppressive rule and excessive restriction to natural resources, jobs and the blessings of prosperity divinely granted over time as we have grown and prospered as a nation and throughout the world.

I find it troubling that too many people seek government rule as a means to an end of social problems when these problems have been created as a result of the people themselves exercising irresponsibly the constitutional rights granted them in our founding documents.

I find it troubling that rather than with reason and the acceptance of personal responsibility, too many people point their fingers in accusation against others and find fault in the actions of others rather than looking inward for solutions to the things that trouble them.

We are not responsible for the actions of our fellow citizens, but we are responsible for the actions of ourselves and we are responsible as citizens of this free republic to hold our fellow citizens accountable for the abuse of their freedoms and their irresponsible and selfish behavior when taking advantage of unnecessary government hand outs and misguided solutions to societal ills and social problems.

We are responsible to defend the freedoms and rights we are granted in the constitutions of our own states, our community charters, the rules enacted by our local administrative bodies and the freedoms granted by the constitution and bill of rights of this nation.

We are responsible to be familiar with the words of our constitutions; our state and national constitutions, our bills of rights, the laws enacted by our legislative bodies, the powers that our elected officials are exercising over us and the rules of the judges and the precedents set by them by their interpretation of the arguments of lawyers which in many cases are presented only to justify the poor decisions of their wealthy clients and to line their pockets with the money these greedy individual can afford to pay them.  To get away with their unethical acts by circumventing the rule of law based on precedents established by the twisting of words and misinterpretation of our freedoms and liberties stated in our founding documents.

Changes in our constitutional freedoms come about by the actions of the people and the special interests of those who have power given them by their status in society because of their wealth.  For no other reason than that they have the ability to reward those who will hear them because they can most quickly satisfy the greed of the bureaucrats and line their pockets with filthy lucre rather than provide and enforce our already established laws and defend our freedoms and liberties as a great commonwealth of a virtuous and moral people.

It is time for us to stand up and be informed.  It is time for us to stand up and be educated about the things that are happening in the halls of congress and the  legislative powers that we have elected, who are now enforcing greater laws, taxes and oppression on our heads in the name of correcting problems in a private society brought on by the greed of special interest groups such as the pharmaceutical companies, medical industry and insurance conglomerates.

It is time for us to stand up and solve these problems with private industry, with technology, with the bright minds of our educated youth and the coming together of people who have vision for our future and the survival of this great nation.  To never let the oppressive rule of government bureaucracies encumber our ability to thrive and progress as a nation, as a people, as families and as individuals in our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

It is time for us to come together and stand in defense of our constitution, to cast our votes responsibly and to elect individuals who have a correct understanding of morality, ethical standards and virtuous character.  To elect individuals who have their eyes and minds set on a course of healing, of progress and of constructive management of resources and who will enforce our laws as they have been established without unnecessarily enacting greater laws as some disingenuous solution to misunderstood or misinterpreted laws already passed or because of the uninformed and ignorant complaints of lazy people; to satisfy their own desires to retain the power of their offices and their status as government officials.

It is time for us to elect officials who will stand up for our freedoms to progress and to pursue life, liberty and happiness without oppressive taxation without representation, who will not encumber our progress with governmental bureaucracies established by the lust for power and for the creation of comfortable positions of status over our communities and our society.

It is time for us as a people to remind our officials that they have been elected by a commonwealth to be public servants and that they have not been elected so that they can sit in their positions of status as paid tyrants to enforce unjust restrictions over our freedoms of divinely granted will.

It is time for us to take back our states and take back our nation and take back our freedoms.  It is time for us to take back our communities.  It is time for us to take back our families from educators who grant themselves authority over our children by the mandates of the unions and the rhetoric and agendas of special interest groups who wish to control the minds of our youth to meet their ends.  To satisfy their greed and their lust for control because of their want to excuse themselves from ethical and moral behavior based on the tenets of virtue and moral character as written in our founding documents and stated by our founding fathers.

It is time for us to remind our educators and the authorities of education that we are the parents of these children and that we have given them the opportunity to educate our children and to teach them reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies, history, art, music, athletics, debate and language arts and that we pay them by our taxes and that it is our right to determine the discipline and exercise of moral authority over our children and over our families.  It is our responsibility as parents to teach our children correct principles of morality, character and virtue within the walls of our homes and to never expect our educators to be the proponents of these divine principles.

We must demand that our educators refrain from imposing their personal views of moral conduct and passive restriction on the freedoms, wills and minds of our bright and noble children and stop destroying their wills to create and express and grow into the amazing individuals who are the future generations of leadership and who will guide this country on into the future. Our children should be taught to be standards of liberty and freedom throughout the world, to spread democracy to nations around the world.

It is time!

Sources

During all the controversy I’ve created among my circle of friends and family with my thoughts and opinions I’ve come to find that they want sources for my insights.  I have failed to provide the sources of my research, therefore I am being accused of lying and making things up.

In the future I will start to cite my sources but for now I’ll say that all of what I have gathered has come from the study of a combination of sources.  Many of which will go against the  grain of many peoples comfort but these are my conclusions based on research of the best books I have found in life.  And one of the things I was taught as a child was to find truth from the best books, and I have held on to that as a standard of guidance for my life, to answer the questions I come up against throughout my trials and they have served me well as I now have inner peace and calm and I am in balance with what I believe is divine nature, God.

People in my life accuse me of many things but I have come to this by work, research, experience, living life, making mistakes, making choices, exercising reason and applying these things to my daily life.  These are all the things the people in my life who are accusing me of wrong doing are telling me to do, and I do them, and these are the results.  So why are they pointing fingers at me?  I think the confusion is with them, not with me.  I am fine and I am free.

My primary sources are the cannon of scripture from the LDS church.  The King James version of the bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, along with many translations of ancient Egyptian writings from the times of the pharaohs.  I also follow after the philosophies of the ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, coupled with the reason and integrity of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and George Washington.

Recently I have been privileged to have been enlightened by the teachings of Dr. Bruce Lipton, a microbiologist who has done stem cell research  since 1967 and who has pioneered the new bio-science of epigenetics.

Thanks for following along.  Comments are welcome,  please check your anger at the door.  This is discussion of important matters that pertain to life.  Humor is welcome always!

Give because it’s the right thing to do

Sometimes you have something to say to someone that they need to hear. It’s the answer they are looking for, but it’s not the answer they want and it’s not scratching the itch they’re feeling at the moment. So you offer it up and it’s not received in the way you hope it will be received.

What do you do? Do you get angry, frustrated, begin to point out how this person is missing the picture or missing your point? No, that doesn’t help anything. You’ve set out to try to uplift someone and if they don’t absorb what your offering, certainly don’t respond by tearing them down and giving them a dose of, “Well if you don’t take what I’m giving then I’ll put you in your place, mister!”

You’ve put it out there and it’s out there. It got to them the best it could and it will come back at a time when it’s able to fit into position within them, to settle in and be of value to them. It can’t be forced if there’s no holding place for it to settle into. Time needs to pass and experience needs to create that holding place for your words to comfortably settle in and and take their place to have meaning and fortify their being.

I once offered a homeless man a cup of hot chocolate I bought for him, specifically for him. My son Spencer, eight years old at the time told me to give a homeless man a cup of hot chocolate as a gift of compassion while we were out that day. I thought that was an amazing request and was so happy that he had been learning good things at such a young age. As his dad I was going to take the opportunity to follow through and solidify in his young and developing character the value of giving, service and compassion.

So we walked into Starbucks and I bought hot chocolate for the three kids and an extra for the sign-holder and went down to the street level and I held out the cup of hot chocolate to the man who is holding a cardboard sign, which is telling us, “anything helps.” It was winter and it was cold. He was bundled up with gloves and a hat to cover his ears and head and he was huddling up to keep warm. I thought it was a nice gesture. I said, “here’s some hot chocolate, we got it just for you.”

He just looked at me and said, “I can’t hold it.”

I repeated and said, “I just bought it for you, it’s fresh warm, and it’s good.”

He said again, “I can’t hold it.”

So, what was I supposed to do? Get upset and react in anger? Being turned down is something you don’t hope for, but it happens and it’s OK. The point is that my little guy had the heart to make this offering of compassion to someone he saw in need, and he did it without worrying about what others around him might think. He was only concerned for this man who was holding out his hand.

So we took the hot chocolate and were going to offer it to someone else but there was nobody else around to give it to. We shared it and it was good, and we talked about this experience and we were able to see that sometimes people who are in need don’t want what you have to give and that it’s OK. The important thing is to offer, and to love them. Their reaction or response is their responsibility. Our responsibility is to be kind and to give what we can. If it is not understood that is OK. Sometime in the future that guy will remember the group of people who offered that hot chocolate to him and that memory will have some meaning and value. That day it didn’t, but that doesn’t mean that the experience was meaningless. It was important on many levels, and a selfish reaction of anger or contempt because of the rejection by the beggar would have turned that opportunity into something ugly and nasty.

Let’s all rise above ourselves and make the best out of every situation, and when we are rejected or surprised by the reactions of others, let’s be grateful for the opportunity we had to make any sort of offering whether it was accepted or not.

The moral to this story is to be bold, but not overbearing.  Be compassionate, but not forceful in giving.  Do things for the benefit of others, to make the future better, to make the world a better place.  Remember that your influence is like a seed being planted.  At the moment you plant it, it is unseen, buried and goes unnoticed.  But in time it grows and nobody remembers who planted it or where it came from, but the tree is there to offer fruit and shade and beauty to countless people who find themselves in its way.  To be noticed for your efforts is not the reward.  To bring comfort to the lives of others is.

This guy’s take on ‘bury the hatchet’

I was thinking about making peace the other day with someone for whom I have created a bit of anxiety over the years; justified for the most part, but not cool and not necessary at all. In light of everything that’s gone on in my life over the past twelve months, and this amazing change of heart I’ve been experiencing (when it starts you think you’ve changed, but it keeps getting more profound), I decided to extend the olive branch or, in words I like better, bury the hatchet.

Then I started thinking about the phrase and where it originated. Obviously it has roots in Native American lore. So I did a little research and found some anecdotal evidence that some time prior to the arrival of Columbus, the Iroquois leaders Deganawidah and Hiawatha had convinced the five major tribes to stop fighting and form a confederacy, and as a sign of peace or a treaty of peace, to bury their weapons of war beneath the roots of a white pine. This tradition was carried on through history with tribes and with settlers from the east and the phrase ‘bury the hatchet’ that we use today eventually sprang from this demonstration of peace for settling disputes and conflict.

And I thought about it a little more. Just because this is one of history’s earliest recorded events of burying the hatchet it certainly wasn’t the first. Then it dawned on me that burying the hatchet is a peace keeping maneuver I’ve been taught about all my life through the scriptures in my church.

Yeah, I’m a Mormon. Throw out the word Mormon and you get all sorts of responses. The name itself evokes a myriad of images in the mind depending on your exposure to Mormonism or what you’ve heard. Ideas of polygamy, secret ceremonies, no coffee, no alcohol, for some it means family, charity, doing unto others. To me Mormonism is a culture. It’s more than a religion. It’s a way of life. But it’s far from a kooky cult or some brainwashing society of patriarchal overlords. And the Mormons have the Book of Mormon.

Now, this blog post isn’t going to be an exposition on the origins of the Book of Mormon or why I believe it is a companion to the Bible and another testament of Jesus Christ (had to get that in there), I just want to refer to a section of the book where we can read about our Native American ancestors first burying the hatchet as a covenant of peacekeeping. I said I wouldn’t give an exposition on the history or origins of the Book of Mormon but it’s important in this context to at least understand the setting I’m about to discuss, so I’ll give a very brief synopsis of the contextual setting of the Book of Mormon story.

About 600 years BC a group of Israelites, around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem during the 8th or 9th year of the reign of king Zedekiah (Old Testament book of Jeremiah 37-39), fled Jerusalem and built boats that sailed to the western hemisphere. They took with them ancient records of scripture, the books of Moses, writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah and other ancient, Old Testament prophets up to that time written on plates of brass. During their travails they experienced many things, prosperity, divisions, wars, etc. and they kept records. These records were kept and handed down from the beginning by those who had left Jerusalem and guarded as sacred, recording the dealings of God with men and the patterns of righteousness and sin so that they could come forth in the latter days to demonstrate God’s goodness and mercy in preserving his people and showing his arm is outstretched all the daylong to any of His children who desire to come unto him.

So, without going into all the detail and getting into the history of Mormonism and the idea that God didn’t just reveal Himself to the people of Jerusalem and that Christ taught that there are other sheep which were not of the fold at Jerusalem, I’ll just leave it at that. The Book of Mormon is an ancient record of scripture about the dealings of the family of men on the western hemisphere during the same time the bible was being recorded in the so called old world.

So there’s this people in the Book of Mormon, a tribe who has been uber rebellious and has committed heinous crimes and murders on the more righteous people of the land, and by the teachings of the judges and prophets in the lands round about these areas they come to the knowledge of God and find common ground with their enemies. When this happens they have incredible remorse for their murders and for all the bloodshed and destruction they have brought upon the people of the land. So they decide to make a covenant of peace with God and with the people and bury their weapons of war; or as they are referred to in the Book of Mormon account, ‘their weapons of rebellion’.

So this tribe buries their weapons deep in the ground to show that they no longer desire to shed blood and they covenant that they will never again take up arms against their brothers. And when the enemy comes upon them to fight they bow down before them in prayer to God while the enemy fell upon them and began to destroy them. At first their enemies thought they were bowing down in submission for fear but soon realized that they were giving praises to God and freely giving their lives rather than to fight and destroy. They wouldn’t take up their arms in their defense because of the horrendous atrocities and bloodshed they had committed previously. And some were slaughtered, but this demonstration of humility softened the hearts of their enemies so that they stopped destroying them as they saw that these people would not rise up in battle.

And in perspective, as the lesson of the story teaches us, those who were lost by giving up their lives were received into the presence of God and saved by their repentance, by their sacrifice to not commit any more destruction and bloodshed and by their demonstration of peace and change of heart. This seems quite extreme but in retrospect it is a priceless lesson we can learn from; the sacrifice of these dedicated people who had a clear understanding of the purpose of life, that there is so much more beyond what we can see in this mortal coil. This people did not only sacrifice their lives for their own salvation, but their demonstration carries endlessly forward to those of us who have the perspective to learn from their great sacrifice to be grateful to God for His mercies, for the gift we have of being able to truly change and be made clean after being some of the vilest of sinners.

So to me bury the hatchet doesn’t just mean to put our differences behind us, it means to put our differences behind us and to move forward with a commitment or covenant of peacekeeping. To never again take up arms, whether they are physical arms, mere words, thoughts or intentions against our brothers and work every day to create peace and harmony through compassionate service. Compassionate service, meaning to serve without regard for reward, to do it for the good of those we are serving and for no other reason, to uplift our brothers and to make the world a better place.

Of course it is extreme to think that we shouldn’t defend our lives in the face of certain destruction, but these stories serve as lessons, taken in context as they are told, to our lives that we can incorporate into who we are and who we wish to become. Once we have committed certain atrocities and have found true change of heart and forgiveness, it is critical that we don’t go back in any way, shape or form to that old behavior. To bury the hatchet means to put our old lives away, to bury them in the ground and to take upon ourselves newness, a new life, to be born again and become beings of light and goodness.

That sounds like new age, fruit pie, mumbo-jumbo especially in this day and age of the hustle and bustle of me-me-me, gimme-gimme-gimme, now-now-now, but it’s what I really believe. And it all starts with Christ, who is love and salvation, and creation, re-creation into newness of life, healing, being reborn into something great, to achieve our full potential as children of God. There are too many misunderstandings about who Christ is and what He expects of us, too much fear, too much of the fire and brimstone and not enough of the compassion and love of what He truly is and what He wants for us, and why He created this whole mortal plan for us. But once we begin to understand real, pure truth, the essence of what is real; we begin to understand who we really are and what purpose we serve in this world; that we are all one in Him and that to be healed and to be whole is to be in harmony with what science calls ‘The Field’ and what spiritualists call the powers of the universe and what I call God, my Father in Heaven, and what He calls the family of man.

There is much we don’t understand, because it’s not time for us to get it all, but it’s time for us to search. And if we search we will find, and as we begin to understand and incorporate that knowledge into our beings, into who we are, to help the world move forward into greater consciousness, greater things will be unfolded to our minds until we can comprehend all things.

Knowledge may be power, but raw power can be destructive. It matters what we do with that knowledge, how we harness it and how we transfer it into constructive creation of life and healing for progress toward the good of all mankind, never to control and subject others to our will. As we keep our minds set on things greater than ourselves, we are able to act as conduits for others in achieving greatness within themselves.

We will make mistakes. Others will make mistakes. But if we can bury the hatchet then we can love one another, and that’s when we start living.