God Parted the Red Sea, but the Israelites Had to WALK Through It

I read a frustrated post by a conservative today who lambasted blacks for the plight of their culture.  She was long on criticism and short on sympathy. This attitude among some of our conservative brethren (and sisteren) isn't terribly helpful and reveals a lack of understanding of how the culture became what it is.  Black culture is by no means as homogenized as the Democrats would have you believe. I watch black leaders, both liberal and conservative struggle to find solutions for the obvious problems they face - like broken homes, drug abuse, low education and violence.  What conservative whites need to do is read their Old Testament if they want to discover what we did wrong that helped create the problems faced by our black brothers and sisters.

You heard me right. I said what WE did wrong.

Read the Old Testament. In it there is the clear chronicle of what God did to help a slave race escape from slavery and stand on its own two feet.  It was not easy.  For centuries God struggled with these people as generation after generation tried to drift back into enslavement to one god or another, to one government or another.  Do you remember what God had to do to the Israelites to teach them not to be slaves anymore?  Do you remember what a tough government he set up?  It was so tough, many of us still complain about it to this day.  We refuse to read the Old Testament because it confuses us.  We think God's legal system was too tough on them. And yet, we applaud Rush Limbaugh when he says, "The law is a teacher."
The legal system God set up for the Jews in the aftermath of the Egyptian slavery is the very thing that taught them to be the fiercely independent, self-sufficient race they are today more than 3,000 years later. They fought it, surely. They whined till God let them have a king because they thought they needed an authoritarian government instead of the decentralized (essentially capitalist) system that they had.

God let them pay the price for that. He did not shield them from the consequences of their actions. He expected a high standard of behavior. While the Jews, like any group of humans did not entirely learn the lessons God was teaching, they did learn to be self-sufficient, hard-working and smart. They survived against all odds, living (and thriving) to this day in a tiny bit of land surrounded by people who want them dead and pushed into the sea. When God teaches, the lessons stick!

What we did to the black slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War by marginalizing them, refusing to give them decent education, true equal rights or equal opportunity and then by trying to buy their compliance with freebies from the government was wrong. It treated a whole race like little children. Is it any wonder they face the troubles they do today?

When are we going to acknowledge that our country screwed up in how we handled the 40 years in the desert of the former slaves in our own country. How can we when we're so afraid of a government that is truly tough and fair that some of us won't even look at the Old Testament, much less read it and learn from it.  God did a really good job of liberating one slave race and standing them up on their feet. Maybe it's time we join forces with those in the black community that wish to invite God to do that again for their own race.

The truth is, we could stand a little Old Testament discipline for all Americans, lest we allow ourselves to drift into slavery as the Israelites allowed themselves to do after they moved to Egypt. to escape the famine.

There's a lesson there too. In every handout there are the seeds of slavery. Be careful not to become dependent on them. The Old Testament style of government had a lot of other good ideas like:

1. Limited central authority
2. Tough criminal laws
3. Voluntary taxation to meet national needs as they arose
4. Locally based judicial system
5. Seven year debt holiday (how many people would be able to survive poor financial decisions if that were in place AND how many banks would make bad loans under that system?
6. Small standing army, citizen call up in an emergency

Instead of criticizing, we need to be willing to support those in the black community who are trying to make a difference.  The pastors, the teachers, the community leaders who recognize what has gone wrong and are trying to fix it are understandably confused by so-called conservatives who want to complain about blacks and immigrants, but don't seem willing to help clean up the mess we've caused.


And, yes, I know it's our father's and grandfather's mess, but does that matter.  It's still a mess. It still needs cleaned up and if we're not willing to help out, then we're just part of the problem.  It's time to quit griping about what's wrong with black people and immigrants and start helping those among them that want to improve their communities, put their neighbors to work and instill a little pride, self-respect and self-sufficiency into their kids.


We're part of the solution or we ARE most assuredly, part of the problem.


I'm just sayin'.

Tom King

Katyn II: The Polish People Fear a Repeat of 1940

The people of Poland are in shock and are worried about the Russians again. Saturday's plane crash that killed, not only the president of Poland and his wife, but practically the entire leadership of Poland's military and government, is already being called Katyn II. It is a measure of just how nervous their neighbors make them. If you don't know what Katyn I was, prepare yourself for a string of "interesting" historical coincidences. Given Polish history, the Poles can be forgiven if they find what happened this weekend in the forest near Smolensk eerily parallel to what happened 70 years ago in the forests near Katyn.

It was 1940, Europe was in turmoil and Poland was, unbeknown to most of its citizens, the subject of a secret agreement between Germany and Russia, dividing the country between them. On March 5 1940, Joseph Stalin signed a secret order as brutal as any Hitler ever issued, that led to the capture and mass murder of 22,000 Polish doctors, lawyers and military officers in the forest near Katyn. The crime was so brutal that the German (Goebbels, of all people) was able to use it as propaganda against the Russians. The assassinations decapitated the Polish Army and the leadership of its public service sector as the Germans and Russians prepared to overrun the Polish nation.

The plane crash that took the life of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 95 key Polish government and military leaders is already being publicly called Katyn II by many Poles and one can hardly blame them. The plane was carrying the president and his entourage to a Katyn memorial service on the 70th anniversary of the tragedy.

President Kaczynski and his twin brother, founding members with Lech Walesa of the Polish Solidarity movement have been less than diplomatic with either the Russians or the European Union of late. They've been less than diplomatic with the European Union about its bullying tactics. Suddenly, the troublesome leader is eliminated in a crash that ironically took place at Smolensk, not far from the Katyn Forest. It effectively decapitates the government and brings the opposition party almost instantly to power, at the same time leaving all three Polish military branches without their top leaders, the banking system and much of the Polish civil service. Predictably, the Russians are blaming the crash on the Poles. The newspapers in the states are dismissing Poles who compare the disaster to Katyn "extremists".

It's also a bit unnerving that the day after the crash, news about it is already buried in the back pages of the newspaper behind glowing headlines about how Neville......., I mean Barak Obama is bringing us peace in our time by signing a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the Russians, the upshot of which is that the U.S. is laying down its nukes with few real guarantees that anyone else will lay down theirs. With the stroke of a pen, the U.S., for all practical purposes ceases to be a superpower. Of course, considering that we've got an administration that seems intent on turning us into Albania, it's not surprising.

By the way, be careful looking up the Katyn massacre. In the first two pages of a Google search on the subject last night, more than half of the sites that showed up were fiercely virulent malware sites. I had to flip my computer off at the wall to escape having malware forcibly downloaded to my computer. Odd that the obscure term "Katyn" would suddenly be the keyword for so many malware sites. It's as though someone didn't want people reading that particular bit of history.

I have a friend in Poland. He says everyone is in shock. He mentioned Katyn right away. I think the Poles would do well to reexamine that bit of their history. If the U.S. doesn't stand with Poland on this one, then once again, Poland is all alone. Pray for Poland. They will very likely need it if history is indeed being replayed.

Just one man's opinion.
Tom King

The Progressive and the Lassez-faire Capitalist Dentist

If you just listen long enough, they always let slip the difference between ideology and reality. In this case, it was the noted progressive socialist George Bernard Shaw serving as chairman of the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English.  There was a discussion about how to pronounce canine.  Shaw maintained it should be "cay-nine" as ordinary people pronounced it who used the term every day.

One of the committee members challenged him and Bernard pointed out that his dentist pronounced it "cay-nine" when talking about the canine teeth.

"Then you must have an American dentist," the member argued.

"Of course," Shaw shot back.  "Why do you think that at 76, I still have all my teeth!"




Even a confirmed socialist like Shaw recognized the superiority of laissez-faire capitalist dentistry.

April Fool's

by Tom King

Woke up at seven this morning
To get a good start on the day.
  By nine I'd been joked
  By 5 different blokes
And my morning is just underway.

First thing I heard was Obama
Is going to let us drill oil
  It's right off the coast
  Of states that don't boast
Any offshore deposits at all.

Next Hillary came on to tell that
The Afghan war's over and done
  To insure the peace
  She granted a lease
Osama's new office is right down the hall

Then I heard from Keith Ol-ber-mann
He says Palin is being committed
  Sarah's last quote du jour.
  Was "I'm Republican for sure."
"See she's crazy," says Keith, "She admits it."

This in on the Huffington Post
Bill Maher says the planet is warming
  And there's no terrorist war on
  I must be a big moron
To disbelieve one so utterly charming.

The media is all in a cathothel
They say Christian militias are terribly awful
  Christians are crazies and fools
  It's that danged golden rule
That they live by that makes them all scofflaws.

I'm recommending that April the First
Be a new holiday celebration
  The country's run by pundits
  And straight downhill they've runned it.
April Fools are in charge of the nation.

(c) 2010 by Tom King