Post Election Thoughts

It's finally over. I don't know about you, but I am emotionally drained and needing a recharge.

Of course I am disappointed by the outcome. I am tempted to worry about the future of my country. But, I have chosen to trust God because He knows best. After all, millions upon millions prayed for a different outcome in this election, and it did not happen that way. To me this means that God heard our prayers (He always does), and for some reason yet unknown to us, declined to give us the outcome we sought.

What does a Barack Obama Presidency really mean? There are several roads this question might take us down. The most obvious road is that we have, for the first time in our nation's history, elected a black man to the highest office in the land. And that is not a bad thing. I join others in celebrating this historic first. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Mr. Obama is an extremely poor choice for that honor, one whose credentials are unclear, whose past associations leave many serious questions still unanswered, and whose motives appear to be very, very suspect. I am afraid before all is said and done, that many will suffer from buyer's remorse.

But right now, I do not want to go down that road. Many questions (for those who were willing to ask) were raised during his campaign. Still, we do not know much about this mysterious man named Barack Obama, where he came from, and how he came to be chosen as the one to occupy the most important office in the world. As the next four years unfold, I am sure we will learn more.

Instead, I would like to look at the meaning of this election's result from a different vantage point. And to do that, I'd like to take you, the reader, down a unexpected trail for just a few paragraphs.

It has been nearly twenty years now since my friend John Jenkins and I penned and brought to market our novel Bloodlines. In that story, a fellow named Sam MacDonald captured the angst of his own generation by writing in his personal journal. It is through the mechanism of Sam's journals that our readers were able to glimpse briefly into another tumultuous time in America's past.

In June of 1856, sitting at his window overlooking the streets of our nation's capital city, Sam recorded his concerns regarding the rising tensions between our nation's political leaders. Battle lines over slavery and states' rights were being drawn. Newspapers had reported that congressmen and senators were now bringing knives and guns into the Capitol building. And a Southern Congressman had attacked a Northern Senator on the floor of the U.S. Senate, opening his scalp and nearly bludgeoning him to death with his cane.

Sam's journal for that day also included his recounting of and reflections upon a personal message he had received from a friend in Kansas. A pro-slavery woman by the name of Mrs. Doyle had written Sam to tell of the murders of her husband and two sons in Osawatomie. John Brown, that wild-eyed lightning rod of a figure, along with a small band of violent followers, attacked and butchered these three men with their swords, leaving them to die meaningless deaths.

Both of these fictionally reproduced accounts are based upon real, historical events. Thankfully, in our current war over the nature and direction of our nation's culture, little blood has been shed. Nonetheless, Sam's words capture my own personal feelings about the state of our country following the election of Mr. Obama, and the real meaning of his victory over John McCain. Sam deftly identified the challenge of his era:

"Madness has seized the hearts and minds of my countrymen."

Why would I equate the choice of over 63,000,000 Americans with madness? To answer this very real question, I pose a rhetorical one. Why would anyone in their right mind choose slavery over freedom?

Right mind or Madness?

Biblically, "madness" is equated with insanity.

Many of them said, "He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?" (John 10:20 NIV)

And they were filled with madness and communed one with another what they might do to Jesus. (Luke 6:11 KJV)

Noah Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language defines the word the following way: 1. (n.) The condition of being mad; insanity; lunacy. 2. (a.) Frenzy; ungovernable rage; extreme folly.

Mr. Obama and his triumvirate counterparts in Congress are not our problem. They are but the latest manifestation of a nation that took a wrong turn a while back and is now careening down a road toward its own demise. No, the "madness" of which I speak resides in many of the millions who pulled the lever for Obama on November 4th. I say many and not all because of course the other "many" did make their choice out of core beliefs and an identification with Mr. Obama's agenda. But from what I have seen and heard in the campaign leading up to election day, I must conclude that countless millions do not have a clue about what they have just done.

A scant three days have passed and we already have a slight glimpse into how real power affects this man. Look at this!

This morning (Friday November 7th) a little bit more of Mr. Obama's personna leaked out. Obama is not yet our president. The electors we chose on November 4th have yet to vote. He is not yet sworn in. Nevertheless, he is already trumpeting his present position as "The Office of the President Elect."

Apparently, there is such an "office." It was created in 1963 under The Presidential Transition Act of 1963. But I had never heard of this office before now. I don't recall any press conferences by previous "presidents elect" with a sign and a seal. Maybe I just missed it. Ostentatious?

On his new website, www.change.gov, he posted this announcement:

Click on America Serves and read it for yourself.

"The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start."

Now community service is a good thing. But REQUIRE? I don't believe anyone in government has that kind of authority, do they? Did I miss something? Was a new amendment to the Constitution just passed granting this kind of authority to the president? Is this The Audacity of Hope? Or just plain old audacity?

This would be funny if it weren't so troubling.

We already have a window into this man's soul, don't we? Apparently he thinks that he can just order the everyday citizen to do stuff and that will be that. Wow.

Here is where the madness lies my friends. There are millions upon millions of our countrymen who don't even see a problem with this. They have become so accustomed to the government running our lives, telling us what we can and cannot do, where we can and cannot smoke a cigarette, what we can and cannot eat, or drink, or drive, that ordering us into community service seems perfectly OK.

This is the madness of which I speak, the insanity that has gripped our nation, the evidence that many Americans are no longer in their right mind.

The trickery is so subtle, so "under the radar." Americans are like the proverbial frog being parboiled in a slowly heating pot. We can't even see that our death is just a few more notches up that mercury-filled meter.

63,000,000 Americans bought into Mr. Obama's righteous platitudes, his slick, smooth delivery, his "coolness," his promise to restore America's reputation in the world. 63,000,000 Americans just sold themselves - nay sold every American - into a dreadful bondage to our entrenched, elected elites, and their fearsome horde of busybody bureaucrats.

Lost to most of these 63,000,000 Americans, our countrymen, are the fundamental principles that made our nation strong. I identified them here, and later here. Abandoning these historic American precepts for "required" community service, for "universal" healthcare, for mortgage bailouts, for the promise of higher taxes on the rich and those greedy businesses and a spreading of the wealth, is suicidal narcissism. How many of these 63,000,000 voters could actually explain why their values and ideas are better than the core principles captured by our founding fathers in our nation's founding documents?

Eric Rauch of American Vision calls the Obama phenomenon The Californication of the ObamaNation. Every election, America bears less and less resemblance to that industrious, independent, self-directed nation we used to be. Now, we just want our stuff. And we want it now. We appear to give little thought to the real cost of our selfishness, nor to the world we will leave behind for our children and grandchildren. Barack Obama is just the latest artfully packaged product we have been sold.

As Benjamin Franklin so deftly observed,"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

We are dancing precariously along the edge of a cliff. And so, with fear and trepidation, and with an acknowledged need of my utter dependence upon God, I am thoughtfully and prayerfully stepping slowly into a deeper commitment to my God, my family, and my country. I am making it public here.

I want to be used of God to inspire others with hope and vision, and to do what I can to provide weapons for fighting in this war of ideas, and some tools for planting, building, and restoring our Judeo-Christian American culture.

Many years ago, God gave me the following verse from the book of Jeremiah:

"See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant." (Jeremiah 1:10 NIV)

Our work is cut out for us. The ultimate battle is not political. It is spiritual. It is intellectual. It is emotional. It is cultural.

I do sincerely believe that "madness has seized the hearts and minds of my countrymen." It is the kind of madness that insanely thinks only of the now and not of the future, only of the self and not of others, only of pleasure and not of the price of liberty and freedom.

The hearts and minds of many of our countrymen are held captive by the state, the media, and the schools. But God wants these hearts and minds. Those of us with the ability to see through all this foolishness must devote ourselves to freeing our neighbors from their bondage.

Joe Biden said that paying higher taxes is patriotic. Barack Obama intimated that to equate his desire to "spread the wealth around" with socialism, was to call "selfishness" a virtue. In my next blog I will examine the basics of socialism, explain why it's bad, why it isn't Biblical, and how our next president is planning to foolishly prescribe a socialistic, bureaucratic medicine for a "selfishness" that can only be remedied on a private, individual and personal level.

Please keep me in your prayers.

Update (11/08/08 11:30 PM):
Someone re-worded Obama's statement on his change.gov website to eliminate the word REQUIRE and add the words "setting a goal." Obviously they caught their mistake. But it is interesting to note the arrogance behind their original statement.