29.8.10

Fight or Flight?

To the Remnant,
When an animal is attacked instinct screams “fight or flight.” Humans, celestial souls in temporal bodies, are no different. There are many times when it is wise, it is best, it is right to flee the field. Pointless conflict holds no honor. 
However, there are many times in life that honor, oaths, beliefs, and our hearts tell us that we must stand and fight. 
For my whole life, as a nation, as a people, we’ve been running.
In the words of Jackson Browne: “I look around for the friends that I used to turn to, to pull me through; looking into their eyes I see them running too.” 
No generation, ethnic group, or religious creed is immune to the massive “flight” reaction our nation seems to be exhibiting in response to the myriad of problems our world is facing today. Nearly everyone is running.
What do I mean by running? I mean young adults drowning out their anxieties and fears  with cheap alcohol and cheaper sex. I mean middle-age men and women resorting to materialism and prescription drugs to allay the same fears. I mean christians sending their children to private academies and moving out of urban areas and into soulless suburbs.  I mean a government that refuses to face hard economic facts and instead feeds the indigent with the taxes of its unborn citizens.
Escape is the primary focus of our nation today. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? Why engage problems yourself when you can complain about how others aren’t solving them? 
This summer I decided that I am tired of running. I’m going to fight for the Kingdom of God, the principles of Western Liberal Democracy, honor, virtue and freedom because even if there is no God, no heaven, no point to the journey we call “life,” I’d still rather live like there is. 
If you still believe in something more than the desires within the fragile, fleeting, and weak shell you call a physical body, then I hope you’ll join me. 
Open your mind.
Love your neighbor.
Take care of your environment.
Engage your community.
Give out of the joy of your heart. 
Remember the fallen.
Care for the hurting.
Comfort the lonely.
Hold up the weak among you. 
Never give up.
Never surrender. 
These are dark, dark times for our nation and our world. 
They will get darker before the dawn.
The winds of change are swirling into a hurricane which will buffet us in ways which few people still alive in this nation have ever experienced. 
At these times we must remember that true “courage” is knowing you're probably licked before you begin but beginning anyway and seeing it through no matter what.
Everyone of us a freedom-guerilla.
We stand and fight. Back to back. Shoulder to shoulder.
We fight house to house. Street by street. We target communities, cities, businesses, and institutions. Every person, every mind, every soul is a battleground. 
We will leave no man, woman, or child behind. 
We will come home with our shields or on them. 
And they shall say of us,
“They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”