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IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 31 December 2004 |
What a great year. I think, all up and all in, 2004 was a fabulous year for freedom and America. It started out with the Rose Revolution in Georgia, throwing out the Soviet apparatchiks to elect a free market pro-America government, and ended with the Orange Revolution doing the same thing in Ukraine. In between, liberated Afghanistan successfully held its first-ever democratic elections.
We got to memorialize for history the greatest American of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan. We re-elected George Bush and inflicted an utterly demoralizing defeat on the George Soros-Michael Moore Democrats. Inflation and unemployment are low, stocks are higher, the economy is humming. We didn’t suffer a single terrorist attack on American soil, took the fight to the terrorists and are close to winning in Iraq. And on top of all of this, Yasser Arafat gave to the world the best possible gift he could give: he died. Frank Sinatra himself couldn’t ask more from a year like 2004.
Right, very interesting, thanks Jack for yesterday’s news - what about 2005? That’s what you’re asking, yes?
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TSUNAMI SILVER LINING |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 31 December 2004 |
The coldest night of my life was spent in the Buddhist temple on top of this mountain: 7,360 foot-high Sri Pada in Ceylon. It’s named for the Sacred Footprint of Buddha, a depression in the rock of the summit around which the temple is built. Pilgrims come to watch the sunset and most have the foresight to bring a blanket. Having climbed up from the torrid jungle in only a t-shirt the afternoon before and lacking such foresight, I froze all the way to dawn.
Ceylon - or the official name of Sri Lanka, if you prefer - is one of the most entrancing lands on our planet. That such a place of gentle beauty should be visited by such horror as we have seen this week is an undiluted tragedy. For the people of Ceylon and their Indian Ocean neighbors who suffered the monumental horror of a tidal wave coming out of nowhere and washing away their lives, there is no silver lining. Life has the capacity to be utterly tragic with nothing to balance or outweigh it.
To argue otherwise would be to demean the suffering of the tsunami’s victims. Yet while there is no silver lining for them, there may be one for us. This numbing event may be humbling enough to teach the egomaniacs of the left that nature is a vastly greater destroyer and alterer of nature than the puny activities of man.
The Left is possessed with a peculiarly pathological form of egomania: We human beings are so immensely powerful and so immensely evil that we can threaten the entire earth! It is this nut-case egomania that fuels the religion of environmentalism.
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THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 23 December 2004 |
I wrote this the day after Christmas last year: December 26, 2003. We will now be featuring it every Christmas season.
Merry Christmas! Wait -- that was yesterday, wasn’t it? Nevertheless, today, December 26, is the First Day of Christmas. Ancient Christians celebrated “The Holidays,” as our militant secularists insist on referring to them now, starting with the day after the birth of Jesus and ending on January 6th, the visit of the Magi in Matthew 2:11 known as the Epiphany. Start with 12/26 and end with 1/6 and you get: the Twelve Days of Christmas.
You may be really tired of hearing Christmas songs by now, including this one, yet you may still be wondering what the heck partridges in a pear tree and eight maids a-milking have to do with the birth of the founder of Christianity. So I thought we might take a break from Serious Thoughts About World Events, and take a look at the song’s origin and meaning. |
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SAVING SHANGRI-LA |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Wednesday, 22 December 2004 |
This is Takshang, the Tiger’s Nest Monastery in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. It is as close a place to the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s 1933 classic “Lost Horizon” as you’ll find on earth today. I took this picture in 1995.
About three-quarters the size of West Virginia, wedged between China (more accurately: Chinese-Occupied Tibet) and India, the crest of the Himalayas (highest peak: Kula Kangri at 24,773ft.) forming the northern border and steamy jungles the south, Bhutan is known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon. It is almost a mystical experience to drive and trek across Bhutan, to visit its temples and dzongs (castles), to come over the top of a pass and see a village in the valley below surrounded by brilliant green rice fields, the homes with bright red roofs as they are covered with peppers drying in the sun.
Bhutanese culture is a unique mix of the ancient Himalyan animism called Bon and Tibetan Lama Buddhism. All Bhutanese men wear a distinctive robe called a gho, while women wear a female version called a kira. There are few people on our planet more peaceful and gentle than the Bhutanese. They love their country and wish above all for it and their culture to be preserved. They are thus at a loss to comprehend a vicious international campaign to destroy it. |
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A CHRISTMAS LETTER TO ANTI-CHRISTIANS |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Wednesday, 22 December 2004 |
Merry Christmas. If that offends you, why should I care? It’s your problem, not mine. Let me explain your problem a little more fully. America is a Christian country. It’s your job to deal with that, because you’re not going to change this fact. America has always been a Christian country, and - open wide now, because you’re going to have to swallow this - it will continue to be.
It will continue to be because most Americans aren’t Euroweenies. They haven’t lost the moral courage to be proud of their country and their civilization. Notice the “most” - which you are not a part of. You are anti-Christian because you are anti-American. You are anti-American because you are anti-Western Civilization. You are anti-Western Civilization because you are afraid of and intimidated by the envy of the world’s impotent. Fear of being envied defines your soul.
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