Opinion/Editorial

Four Horsemen 

by James Strauss

The Bible is not a historical document per se, rather it is compilation of historical accounts that have been put together over the course of a couple thousand years of humanities existence on this earth. It is arguably not the “Word of God” either, unless it’s being presented as a handbook of fact disguised by that phrase in order to imbue a person, preacher or priest with more power over human beings by their use of this powerful tool from the past. Can expressions, quotes, sayings and more, taken from this quasi-real assortment of expressed opinions, put into print by believers first in a one god, and then the coming of that one god’s only son Jesus Christ, be perceived as divine truth?

It isn’t really fruitful to discuss whether they can be or not as they are so accepted and expressed all the time by church leaders, religious doctrine, governmental leaders and the mass media every minute of every day almost everywhere. Human beings feel a never-ending need for order and direction at all times, and turn to leaders, laws, rules, mores and doctrines to provide such leadership and direction. The social order could be better termed a social structure. A social structure is dependent upon manufactured forces to hold it all together, even when some of those ordering forces work against each other.

Can the Bible predict anything based upon what it’s collected works reveal about the past? Whether it’s called a bible, or something else, what’s collected and presented as the Holy Bible has to be considered history.   History, and all works derived from it, even video and film, are simply an assemblage of ‘facts’ yielding recorded events agreed to be true. Is there a quote from the Bible that might describe the rise of one bombastic monomaniacal leader coming up to run the world and determine the shape of the rules, the manner of the conduct and the very expression of human life over another? If a biblical prediction had been extracted from revelations to apply to the conduct of Adolph Hitler leading up to, and then through World War II, it might have been: “And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” That man lied about everything, crushed his opponents and went after every segment of the population that wasn’t lily white in skin color and following the party line.

Who can be described that way this very day? What candidate for world leadership most resembles that form of bombastic, loud, abusive and lying presentation?

If the Book of Revelations has to be opened in order to give you a good idea of what might be coming in the way of leadership, then quite possibly before such leadership is moved into power you might consider doing all it is in your own power to do to prevent his rise to such a position. That’s usually not what happens out in the general population, however, not if historical records are to be taken as seriously as things described in scripture. No, historically, such duplicitously authoritarian and murderous leaders are created, rise-up and are extolled as providing virtuous cleansing change for and by the masses, that seethe and roil beneath their candidacy. The troubles of our day are the troubles of yesterday, with famine, economic failure, unfair distribution of wealth and resources, unemployment, favoritism, nepotism, and fascism staining the fabric of every day life even for humans as relatively modern and successful as the citizenry of the United States of America. These hellish leaders are anointed, forgiven, explained away and accepted for anything but what they really are, even when they are trumpeting what they are at the top of their lungs! The American public is not looking and not listening to the outside world, other than from a brewing stewpot of mental despair over their own sadly viewed lot in life, no matter how great that lot may truly be when compared to earlier times or other human situations. Caesar, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and kings, queens and chieftains of horror too many to name, have not been swept into office on the backs of four riding beasts of obvious evil.

No, these apocalyptic horsemen of humanity have all come in because they were invited in with open arms, open pocketbooks, but closed minds.

These men have been literally sucked into the most powerful positions on the planet and the destruction and death they have caused is of incalculable enormity. They were brought in by a pervasive pernicious element of the world social order that thrives on the celebration of ignorance, destruction and violence. That America in this new century is in position to welcome another of these outrageous cultural killers is almost beyond belief, and that this welcome would be made with America’s mass media red carpet being extended from one side of the nation to the other staggers the believability of any and nearly every one of the intellectuals of the nation. But democracy does not necessarily yield intellectual results, and the fact that America is a republic and not purely democratic in nature has only buffered what may be coming.

Leonard Cohen wrote a song years ago about what he predicted was going to happen in America from what he could see. He called the song Democracy is Coming to the USA, but he didn’t really mean democracy was coming. He meant that the results of naked democracy were bringing something else entirely: “Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. It’s coming from the sorrow in the street, the holy places where the races meet; from the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat. From the wells of disappointment where the women kneel to pray for the grace of God in the desert here and the desert far away: Democracy is coming to the USA.”

Well a presidential election is coming to the USA. In November America is being given a choice. Will it elect a woman who has a long past in government with a lot of critics upset about that service? Will it reach out and grasp a venomous asp to its breast and take the hit from its very visible fangs in hopes that it will be cleansed by the venom instead of succumbing to the poison? The decision should be an obvious and plaintively simple one. However, the modern reactionary spread of deliberate ignorance, denial of scientific results and near universal duplicity of the mass media may not allow the obvious and simple decision to be the one chosen. Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
~James Strauss

Democracy is Coming to the USA

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