Not even the Republicans can help!

 

By Joseph Walther

 

Has anyone not heard about the tragedy involving the Amish Community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania? If you’re a hermit living in a cave on an isolated mountain peak, perhaps you have not. I’m not going to rehash it all here, but I am going to make a few comments. If you’d like to read what must be the umpteenth report of it, click here. As always, I do not know how long DelawareOnLine.com will keep the link alive.

 

            My children are grown and on their own. Even so, the mere passing thought of losing one of them scares the living daylights out of me. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to lose one so young—one family lost two! Neither am I at all sure that I’d be able to control the rage exploding within me at discovering that the mad man who murdered them may even had planned to torture and rape them first.

 

            The Amish people are deeply rooted in an unshakable faith in God. Forgiveness is one of the hallmarks of that faith. However, their believing in God and forgiving their trespassers do not render them immune to inexpressible grief. Like all of us, the Amish cry, even the men.

 

            The parents of those slain children will never forget. Yes, over time, they’ll learn to live without them, but they’ll never forget. My own mother is dead, but I remember seeing her cry, from time-to-time, 50-years after the accidental death of my youngest brother at the age of three. Loving parents never forget.

 

            The Amish Community wants to move on. Mind you, though, this is not the same as forgetting. They’ve already forgiven the murderer. They understand that his wife and young children are also innocent victims. Not only have they embraced them; they’ve grieved with them. Many of them attended his funeral in support of his family.

 

            Speaking for myself, I don’t think that I would have been able to do that. It’s not that I’m condemning his wife and children; it’s just that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the scumbag, even though he’s dead. This brings me to another point I’d like to make.

 

            I am not against the media, print and electronic, reporting the news. This was news writ big. The media had an obligation to report what happened, when it happened, where it happened, how it happened, who did it (if known), and why it happened (if known). It rarely happens this way any longer, unfortunately.

 

            The diarrhea of rhetoric from the self-aggrandizing talking head twits that follows such tragedies manifested itself as it always does. All of the usual respondent groups were present or accounted for. The God folks, the gun control advocates, the “protect all us from everything” promoters, and the usual assortment of behavioral “experts”, all chimed in right on cue. The media, print and electronic, reported all of it as though it was a matter of divine revelation!

 

            The moderate God folks, as always, blamed everything on society’s moral decay. They claimed, right according to script, that this kind of behavior is now, predictably, commonplace because we’ve turned out backs on God. Oh, let’s not forget to mention the extremist morons from the Rev. Phelps gang who claimed that these children deserved to die because of the “queers.” I admire the genuineness of the former group. I don’t buy into it, but I respect it. The latter are nothing buy hate mongers. They make me sick and are the strongest proof we have that God may not exist.

 

            From the usual gathering of gun control advocates came the customary litany of reasons for taking all of the guns away from everyone, including the police. Of course, these folks never quite explain how this will get the guns away from the criminals who habitually commit the crimes.

 

            From the “protect us from everything” crowd, came the ad nauseam stream of dissertations declaring that this must never happen again and the steps we must take to ensure its prevention. Of course, if we followed their advice, we’d have no personal freedoms whatsoever. We’d be relatively safe, but why bother.

 

            From the behavioral “experts” came the endless, blathering analyses of what “makes a person do this stuff.” Of course, even when we figure it out, if we ever do, what are we going to do about it? My first suspicion is that we’ll do what we usually do: talk, talk, talk, and more talk.

 

            All of the talk about this unfortunate, hideous episode, along with all of the proposed remedies, have one thing in common. Neither the words, nor any of the proposed solutions will prevent the “NEXT TIME.”

 

            We can’t prevent a nut case from going ballistic anymore than we can prevent a determined terrorist from blowing up a plane full of innocent people. No matter how many guns we ban or bottles of shampoo we ban from carry-on luggage, or how many metal detectors we place in our public buildings, or how many countries we invade, or however many precautions we take, or how cautiously we scrutinize strangers, or how fervently we pray, we cannot guarantee our safety. All we can do is take reasonable precautions and hope for the best.

 

            Finally, I’ve never been much on praying for things. From everything that I’ve learned over the many years of my life, God’s responsive traits seem warily similar to those of us fallible humans instead of to those of an all powerful and omniscient Deity. In other words, He can be happy, sad, and pissed off, just like us. It’s either this or His earthly experts are not as “expert” as they’d have us believe.

 

            So, perhaps it all depends on how the petitioner states the request. For example, if we were to ask a minister if it’s ok to smoke while we pray, the answer would likely be a resounding NO! On the other hand, if we ask if it’s ok to pray while we smoke, the answer will probably be a begrudging yes. It all makes me wonder, if there IS a God, would He respond the same way, or would He toss a fireball at us for asking the question in the first place.

 

            When I was a kid, no more than 8-years old, I wanted a two-wheeler in the worst way. It wasn’t any old two-wheeler, either. It was an expensive one. My father could not have afforded it, but God…ah, He could have. Anyway, I prayed and prayed for that bike. I told one of the priests in our parish (I’m older, so this was the pre-molesting era) about how hard I was praying.

 

            He stopped me in my tracks and lectured me for fifteen minutes about not praying for material things. “We should only pray for two things. First, we pray for those things that will benefit humanity and bring glory to God,” he told me. “Second,” he continued, “we pray for the forgiveness of our own sins and those of humanity.”

 

            I wonder, to this day, what that priest was telling me. Was he telling me that I should not have wanted that bike, or that it was a sin for me to have wanted that bike? Or, was he telling me that I should have stolen one and asked God for forgiveness? Of course, I would not have stolen the bike. God may have forgiven me, but my old man would not have and he had a very effective way of making my backside experience the fires of hell! Compared to him, God was a push over.

 

            I’ll be back next week. Stay safe, at least as far as it is practical. Let the kids enjoy Halloween and REMEMBER that it’s only about a week or so until we regain that hour’s sleep we lost last spring!

 

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.