Bad news and true views

All we hear is depressing news anymore.  The city council figures if I can afford rent raises, gas tax increases, and get screwed on raises because humans get sick occasionally (guess what? I can't), then they can dig their fingers 1.3% farther into my pie.  Republicans are making deals with the Russians  and Democrats are serving up secrets on unprotected servers TO Russia.  The number of cities wanting to protect illegal immigrants are climbing almost as fast as crimes committed by them.  Even the very depressing search for a meme like the one above just continues to point out what a hellish mess we are making of this world, where racial hatred, woman abuse, and religious bigotry are okay unless practiced in America, and climate change can only be caused by American coal, but not Chinese coal.  Whine whine bitch bitch etc etc ad infinitum.

I have something- well two things- to say about all that.  And they both come from things in the excellent book I just finished- Iron Curtain: The Crushing Of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum, whom I just learned (germane to my tale) she is married to former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.  I'm going to pull two things out of this book for you to think on.


First, from page 414:

"Organized protest was relatively uncommon but it was not unknown, and young people sometimes paid a high price to join it.In 1950, twenty-year-old Edeltraude Eckert was arrested for distributing pro-democracy leaflets.  She received a 25-year prison sentence, which became a death sentence after an accident in an East German prison factory turned into an infection that killed her.  From her cell, and then from her hospital bed, she sent hopeful, optimistic notes home.  "The world is so beautiful, you just have to believe in it,"she wrote to her mother, a few months before her death."   Emphasis mine)


This is what we have to hang onto, that somewhere past all the stupid crap we mess up, there is a pure, unspoiled, undefeated creation that proves that God loves us.  Some people are in spots that require harder squinting to see it than others, but it is there for the seeing.

The second piece is in the notes, page 479:

" A few years ago, my husband received a letter from a German, born in the Baltic region, whose family had been given what is now are Polish country house to inhabit during the war (note: her husband's family, the true owners, were removed during the Nazi occupation).  Enclosed was a photograph of his smiling German parents, dressed in jodhpurs as if about to go riding, sitting on the front steps of our house, which is situated in what is now central Poland.  He remembered the property being very run-down, and noted that his father had worked hard to put it back in working order.  He hoped his family was remembered positively by people living in the area.  In truth, they are not remembered at all."


And that is the gall of the evil heart, wanting to be remembered well because they had improved a home that their government stole from its rightful occupants, and likely caused the damage in the taking.  Two wrongs, no matter how well intentioned, do not make a right.  And the lives of people are more important than any physical legacy you can leave.


I imagine this is the principle behind Satan's "creativity" in this world.  A hard focus on what I did, what I accomplished, what is MY legacy.  The theme permeates the book- our ideology is right, being ideologically correct is all that matters, and why is it that nobody seems to like what we are offering?

While good hearts focus on God's mercy, His grace, the beauty of His love.  A soul that believes this can never really be crushed.  Which is why Marx had to remove religion and God from his vision.  And yet, despite this example, we are being overrun by people that want to eradicate God as "completely" as Marx and Lenin and Stalin did.  You can't sell on the basis of your good conscience, you can't pray where anyone can see or hear you, you can't want people to better themselves without being a bigot, and you must NEVER do anything that might save an innocent from Judgment.


Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are gone, and faith endures.  Nero, Julian the Apostate, and Christopher Hitchens are gone, and faith endures.   Nietzsche is gone, and God lives on.  And in a few moments, I believe I shall go out and see the world.