Destructive Violence

"The availability of guns has a curious and macabre relation to violence. This form of technology not only vastly increases the range and the effectiveness of violence but also has an effect - generally dulling - on the consciousness of those who use them. My having in my hand a pistol with which to shoot some living thing changed me into an entirely different person psychologically. I could deal out death to anyone since I was possessed by this instrument of death; I had become an irrational man of hostility. The gun had me rather than my having it. I had become its instrument. Seized with a dislike for the person I had become, I took the gun back into the house and put it away. We understand only vaguely the effect that technology can have on the consciousness of a person, but it is clear that the possession of guns can radically change personality. Glenn Gray remarked that, as an officer in the army, he did not feel dressed when he went out without his pistol strapped to his belt.

An extreme form of such an effect on personality can be seen in the career of Charles Fairweather, the teen-ager who went on a rampage in Nebraska and murdered eleven people before he was caught. 'I love guns,' he had said as a boy. 'They give me a feeling of power like nothing else.' It is obvious that the person on a binge of violence must become unfeeling and detached, like a soldier mowing down the enemy with a machine gun, or else he could never do what he feels he has to do. The symbol of the gun as a phallus and its relation to sex is well known. Both are long and slim, both eject a substance that can radically change the person into whom it is directed. Hence the gun has become, especially with simple people, a symbol par excellence of masculine power. Stanley Kunitz remarks, 'we hunted with guns to eat, we hunted with guns to make the land safe for our homes, and we hunted with guns to live in the pioneer period. In all these ways the gun was valuable, a laudable symbol of power, and handling it well was also laudable.' Many a person feels that when he possesses a gun that he now has a power that had been unfairly taken away from him. And what a power it is! He can now make this big explosion and hurl that projectile to kill things much larger than himself. …  The consciousness is surrendered willingly." - Rollo May

On Fascism, Nazism And Stalinism

   "Side by side with the development of the positive aspects of the matriarchal complex we find, in the European development, the persistence of, or even further, regression to its negative aspects -- the fixation to blood and soil.  Man -- freed from the traditional bonds of the medieval community, afraid of the new freedom which transformed him into an isolated atom -- escaped into a new idolatry of blood and soil, of which nationalism and racism are the two most evident expressions.  Along with the progressive development, which is a blending of the positive aspect of both patriarchal and matriarchal spirit, went the development of the negative aspects of both principles: the worship of the state, blended with the idolatry of the race or nation.  Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, are the most dramatic manifestations of this blend of state and clan worship, both principles embodied in the figure of a 'Fuehrer.' These totalitarianisms are by no means the only manifestations of an incestuous fixation in our time. … Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult."  -  Erich Fromm

Inner World

    "A chronic hatred or even a cherished grudge tears to pieces the one who harbors it.  A strong feeling of resentment is just as likely to cause disease as is a germ.  The worst thing one can do to oneself is to let resentment dig in and for hatred to become chronic.  … Fear is another indispensable element in the human make-up. Even in its simpler form we cannot dispense with it; on the streets of a modern city a fearless man, if the phrase be taken literally, would probably be dead before nightfall. And fear can be a powerfully creative motive. In a profound sense industry springs from fear of penury, medical science from fear of disease. But fear's abnormalities - hysteria, obsessive anxiety -  may tear a personality to pieces.

   Human life is full of secret fears, thrust into the dark corners of the personality.  Fear of the dark, of cats, of closed places, of open places, fear of responsibility, of having children, of old age and death; guilty fears, often concerned with sins long passed religious fears, associated with ideas of a vindictive God and an eternal hell; and sometimes a vague fearfulness, filling life with anxious apprehension - such a wretchedness curses innumerable lives. The disruptive effect of such secret, chronic fearfulness is physically based.  The adrenal glands furnish us in every frightening situation with a 'swig of our own internal fight-tonic.'  A little of it is stimulating; too much of it is poison.  Habitual anxiety and dread constitute a continuous false alarm, turning the invaluable adrenal secretion from an emergency stimulant into a chronic poison."   -  H. E. Fosdick

Please Read: "The Gettysburg Address"

  "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

   Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

    But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
  - Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863.

You Won't Be Snubbed

"If in speaking to a woman you reveal that you are primarily interested in her personally or as a member of the opposite sex, she will instantly resent it, as she has every right to do. In effect, you are insulting her by the assumption that her attention may be so cheaply won. But speak to her as one human being to another, as one interested in the same scenery, the same music, or the same social problems, and she will extend her ready fellowship. Both men and women love to use their minds, and women especially regard it as a distinct compliment to be met on the intellectual plane common to both sexes." - H.M. Robinson

A Merry-Go-Round

G. Whillikins was a writer bold
Who never lost a chance;
While good at many sorts of work,
His best hold was Romance.
He wrote a lively, stirring thing,
A tale of love and youth,
With a dashing maid and a clashing blade,
But never a word of truth.

G. Whillikins then headed home
To make another start.
He studied up psychology;
He took men's souls apart;
He learned the naïve, the morbid,
The crazy, quaint, and queer,
And wrote a book without a plot.
The time elapsed - one year.

Once more G. Whillikins set out
With economic lore
He soaked his very being full -
It oozed from every pore.
He proved all poverty a crime,
And chose a 'workingman'
For hero, one who ran a strike
Upon a novel plan.

G.Whillikins did some thinking,
And thought this time he'd wait
Until the wheel had made its turn,
Instead of chasing Fate.
"I'll bide my time," said Whillikins,
"Until Romance comes round,"
But when the cycle reached Romance,
It found him underground.
                       -  Tudor Jenks

Our World

"Yale Global Online reported that 23 nations stockpile chemical weapons of mass destruction or have the capacity to produce them: China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, the U.S. and Vietnam. The estimated number of nuclear weapons has fallen from 60,780 to 10,325. The United States is no longer in a race against the Soviet Union to produce a larger stockpile of warheads. But the U.S., Russia, China, Europe, Iran, other nations and even terrorists are still racing to produce newer, better and more effective weapons. It only takes one nuclear weapon to incinerate an entire city of human progress. And a nuclear war would not stop with one strike. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are in the hands of imperfect, flawed human beings with limited knowledge and capacities. Some of these human beings are some of the most unstable and radical minds on this planet.

Entire cities of advancements in sanitation, nutrition, health, commerce, thinking, liberty and law could disappear in a moment if Donald Trump, Theresa May, Benjamin Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron, Narendra Modi, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Vladmir Putin, Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un presses a button to deploy a nuclear arsenal. Thousands of people have died and will die in inhumane ways if Bashar Assad, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Ali Khamenei, Moon Jae-in or others launch biological or chemical weapons. We human beings have thousands of these fiendish advancements just waiting to detonate. This is a grim corollary to all the material progress." - J. Hilliker

Poverty Is ...

"The continuation of poverty is, of course, quite harmful to our society. Poverty is a major cause of crime and delinquency, it creates blight, it keeps millions of people from realizing their human potential and contributing fully to society, and it harms the economy by reducing real economic growth and tax revenues while increasing the cost of social programs. The social, political, and economic costs of poverty affect everyone and keep us from creating a more humane, productive, safe, and creative society." - Harrell R. Rodgers, Policy Analyst

Public Welfare

"Public welfare … must be more than a salvage operation, picking up the debris from the wreckage of human lives. Its emphasis must be directed increasingly toward prevention and rehabilitation - on reducing not only the long-range cost in budgetary terms but the long-range cost in human terms as well. Poverty weakens individuals and nations. Sounder public welfare policies will benefit the nation, its economy, its morale, and most importantly, its people." - John F. Kennedy

Of Squalor

"Neither misery nor squalor is inevitable so long as the people and government are one." - Lyndon B. Johnson

The Middle-Class

"One of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property, has undergone a profound change. In the older attitude, a certain sense of loving possessions existed between a man and his property. It grew on him. He was proud of it. He took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually he had to part from it because it could not be used any more. There is very little left of this sense of property today. One loves the newness of the thing bought, and is ready to betray it when something newer has appeared." - Erich Fromm, Social Pyschologist

Materialism

"Man today is fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better and especially new things. He is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. He would wander around ... in this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that his neighbors were just a little less privileged than he."  - Erich Fromm, Social Psychologist

In Society

   "We are surrounded by things of whose nature and origin we know nothing. ... We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; we live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manage or consume them. Our way of consumption necessarily results in the fact that we are never satisfied, since it is not our real concrete person which consumes a real and concrete thing. We thus develop an increasing need for more things, for more consumption. ... There is a legitimate need for more consumption as man develops culturally and has more refined needs for better food, objects or artistic pleasures, ect. But our craving for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of man. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give man a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force him into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to his economic ruin. With a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things - which enslave man." - Erich Fromm, Social Psychologist

I Am Persuaded

Romans 8:38-39.  "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

"We Have With Us Tonight ... "

"How can I tell whether I am being heard?  When Abraham Lincoln made the famous speech that he afterward said had made him President - he had posted a friend in the back row with instructions to signal if he could not be heard. ... You don't have to shout. Even a whisper , when made correctly, will carry to the back of a large theater." - Dale Carnegie

Glimpse Of Self

"Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important. The next time you catch a glimpse of yourself in a store window or a counter mirror, check up on the expression. Then decide if it isn't worth a little time and effort to exchange that look of grim determination for something a little more appealing." - Janet Lane

The Immortal

"Brook and Wind, Though They Flow
A Thousand Years,
Age They Can Never Know.
Love, If It Lived At All,
Is Young As They,
Young As The Brooks That Brawl,
The Livelong Day,
Young As The Winds That Call
The Blooms Of May.
Bright With Delights And Dreams,
Like Jewels Strung;
Still To Be Sung."  - Louise Morgan Sill

Interval Of Time

"Too late I stayed  --  Unheeded flew the hours." - Wm Robert Spencer

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a flying." - Robert Herrick

"A wonderful stream is the river of Time,
With a faultless rhythm, and a musical rhyme." - B.F. Taylor

War

"Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will purchase every foot of land upon the globe. I will clothe every man, woman and child in an attire of which kings and queens would be proud. I will build a school house on every hillside, and in every valley over the whole earth; I will build an academy in every town, and endow it: a college in every state, and fill it with able professors; I will crown every hill with a place of worship, consecrated to the promulgation of the gospel of peace; I will support in every pulpit an able teacher of righteousness, so that on every Sabbath morning the chime on one hill should answer to the chime on another round the earth's wide circumference; and the voice of prayer, the song of praise, shall ascend like a universal holocaust to heaven." - Henry Richard

War

O war ... begot in pride and luxury,
The child of malice and revengeful hate;
Thou impious good, and good impiety!
Thou art the foul refiner of a state.
- Daniels