“All lies…from those twin towers on down!! They all after money and that oil! That’s all their wars is for!”While in Baltimore for a recent missions conference, I joined a multicultural horde that emerged from our night quarters to graze upon a free, very sparsely accoutered, and curiously named “contintental” breakfast buffet most mornings. The colorful array of hotel guests streamed in and out like cattle, as Fox News blared on the big screen TV with almost continuous depressing news delivered in the most incongruously perky tones.
We watched while chewing bagels as Pres. Bush, safely ensconced from within one of the few last refuges for American manhood on the planet – a U.S. military base — valiantly attempted to encourage a demoralized and defeatist-minded populace on the war on terrorism. He apparently did not move one hugely overweight woman, who at that moment was migrating over to the buffet table followed by a gaggle of teens. “That man is just saying lies!” she began shouting as she passed by to everyone and nobody in particular. Her smaller-sized male companion shouted even louder from the juice dispenser “Yea. That’s right! All lies…from those twin towers on down!! They all after money and that oil! That’s all their wars is for!” I wanted to ask them whether they felt that the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died a little over a century ago for their ancestor’s rights to live as free men was also a war based on money. But I kept passively quiet to keep the peace, ruminating on my bagel. The ranting continued in clinical Bush Derangement Syndrome fashion — a phenomena that I have only experienced through occasional wanderings into the swampy section of the blogosphere, but had hitherto not witnessed in the flesh. It was an awesome sight to behold. The wailing and gnashing of teeth went on until Bush’s speech had ended and the family, half-still smoldering, half-embarrassed by their emotional outbursts, sullenly sauntered out.
“I could only watch as their pain and shame increased by watching their British leaders, the new PM Brown, and London mayor and jihadi apologist “Red Ken,” in classic leftist- newspeak- appeasement- contortionism, whine once again…”The next news story went to a town in Colorado to present the sad story of the controversial unveiling of the statue of an American soldier who died heroically in Afghanistan. The controversy seems to revolve around the fact that the statue of Navy Seal Danny Dietz dared to contain his gun in the memorial to his heroic death, which apparently did not digest well with a group of enlightened Coloradan “peace” jihadists. “Like…Ewww! Guns! — they’re yucky and violent things!” seems to be the depth of reasoning of the statue protesters. As a 20+ year ex-patriot, I was quietly assuming that the motley addlebrained-leftover-from-the-60’s-peaceniks were simply an unrepresentative and pathetic anomaly of the America I know and love, when the earring-laden college-age kid at the next table shattered that illusion by piping up to his mom at the next table within my earshot, “How horrible that some people would want to honor people who kill other people. I cannot believe there are people like that.” The irony of College Boy’s last statement shocked me again into temporary stupor.
Some dear friends from England joined us for breakfast several mornings. They were also in Baltimore for the missions conference, fully aware that their nation was once the bastion of Biblical Christianity, but now was a place where once-Methodist churches now are being transformed into mosques in quaint English towns from Cornwall to the Lake District. This was where evangelical Christianity once thrived, sending out thousands of missionaries, but where now more people attend mosques than churches, and has become a mission field more for radical Islam than for Christianity. Due to the uncontrolled surge in Muslim immigration due to the inherent lack of vitality in Europeans in general, my friends’ own native “Londonistan” has been targeted by the Saudi Wahabbi Islamists to become the hub for Islam in the west and to hold the largest mosque outside of the Middle East. My embarrassment at our weak U.S tea and breakfast offerings turned to into utter anguish as the news of the latest Islamic terror in Britain and Scotland floated over our table.
Later in the week, I could only watch as their pain and shame increased by watching their British leaders, the new PM Brown, and London mayor and jihadi apologist “Red Ken,” in classic leftist-newspeak-appeasement-contortionism, whine once again that Islam is not the culprit of Islamic terrorism, and that the Muslims that commit terrorism should not be identified as Muslims. The utter stupidity and abject irresponsibility of these British leaders once again left us all speechless to the point of despair. It almost seems that Hinduism, where the cow is venerated for its catatonic, cud-chewing capacity for passivity, would be a much more suitable replacement for the Christianity rejected by its elitist European heirs, rather than aggressive, virulent Islam. But it seems Islam will take it by default anyhow.
Earlier in the week, we were reminded of a brighter story when freedom was also under great peril. I took my family and Mexican colleagues to Yardley, PA, to revisit the place where the Moon family originally came to America with William Penn. As Quakers, they had been heavily persecuted in Britain, and in the mid-1600’s had found a haven for their pacifist Christian lifestyle. We walked around the Friends’ Hall where my ancestors worshiped ten generations ago, the church burial grounds where we counted over 50 Moon gravestones, and shot photos of my kids placing their hands on the logs of the restored Moon-Williamson cabin, built in 1680. Two generations after the Moon family migration however, their peace was shattered by the Revolutionary War that soon engulfed their idyllic Hobbit Shire of eastern Pennsylvania.
“Some of us must simply come to terms that it will always take a sacrificial minority who really get it…”George Washington and the remnant of the battered Continental army quartered in the area for the next year and half, first at the famed Valley Forge and later at Washington ‘s Crossing. The Moon grandsons observed the deeply troubling situation. At night or in the fields they would ponder and discuss the dilemma — how could they remain pacifists when their very right to be pacifist Quakers was suddenly very tenuous once again? Six of the Moon boys made up their minds – they marched to Valley Forge 25 miles away and offered their services to help bring in supplies to the starving army. As local farm boys they were invaluable in gathering provisions for the Continentals. They also had to carry rifles to protect the supply wagons.
Their family and church took another view. They were “written out” of the Quaker church. Their father disinherited them. Like many Revolutionary soldiers, they paid a heavy price for their conviction that freedom was worth fighting for, that America and its ideals were worth any cost. A few years after the war a group of Pennsylvania settlers traveled in the footsteps of Daniel Boone to the new lands of eastern Tennessee. Most of the six disinherited Moon boys followed.
It seems the lesson was not lost on my branch of the Moon family. Every subsequent generation served – a son of one of the Revolutionary War veterans rose to distinction as a flag-bearer for Col. Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. The Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam, all had Moon family soldiers. Next week, we travel to Texas to send off my nephew in his training to Camp Leonard Wood, then airborne training, and then, he hopes, on to Iraq.
In the famous HG Wells novel, %%AMAZON=0141439971 The Time Machine%%, I find an ominous parallel to our times. In the story, the nameless “Time Traveler” inadvertently ventures 800,000 years into the future where he happens upon a humanity that has evolved into two classes. For the hidebound socialist Wells, the story was meant to be a metaphor for his class-divided worldview. It takes more relevant tones in our world however.
Above ground were the dissolute, pallid, physically-intellectually degenerate and childlike Eloi, living in a pseudo-utopia, in crumbling and useless buildings without needing to work or think. Below ground dwelt the bestial, cannibalistic Morlocks who maintained the Eloi as you would cattle – to be their food. At least in the old movie version I remember, “Time Traveler” somehow managed to motivate the Eloi into self-preservation and resistance to the Morlocks.
Perhaps, like my ancestors eight generations ago, some of us must simply come to terms that it will always take a sacrificial minority who really get it, so that a large portion of the population may continue to live like King Louie and his apes in %%AMAZON=0451529758 The Jungle Book%%, dancing and clowning around in a crumbling palace that they neither know the origins of, much less how to maintain or preserve it. The true patriots, and not the relativist ‘cosmic jingoists’ and their non-thinking cultural camp-followers, must become the “Time Travelers,” not of 802,701 AD as in Wells’ novel, but of our own 2007 AD. They must somehow wake up the infantile, indolent, insipid Eloi of our times, before the Morlocks come out of their holes again to devour any more of them for breakfast.
A big thankful shout-out back in time to my patriot ex-Quaker ancestors of eight generations ago, to my young, brave nephew, and to all the unbowed ‘Time Travelers’ across the world who know history, who can see beyond all the contrived ideologies-du-jour, who know how the palace got here and how to defend it
[A pacifist is] the last and least excusable on the list of the enemies of society. — G. K. Chesterton
I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. — Mohandas Gandhi
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. — George Orwell, writing of Britain ‘s pacifists in 1942
Bruce Moon is the Pastor of Comunidad de Gracia A.C. in Mexico City, Mexico.
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