The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1291324
The Press-Dispatch Wednesday, September 23, 2020 A-9 Trump East ship. I had the privilege of at- tending the opening of the new American embassy in Jerusalem. On Tuesday, I had the priv- ilege of attending the signing of the historic Abraham Ac- cords ceremony at the White House. Let's hope this great mo- ment will serve as a learning opportunity for the Palestin- ian leaders. Peace comes through cre- ation, not destruction. Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renew- al and Education and au- thor of the new book "Nec- essary Noise: How Donald Trump Inflames the Culture War and Why This is Good News for America." Readers can respond to Star's column by emailing star-parker@ur- bancure.org. MIDDLE EAST Continued from page 8 ELECTION Continued from page 8 ton Chief of Staff John Podes- ta played Biden. There were roles for former RNC Chair- man Michael Steele, neocon- servative editor William Kris- tol, former Kentucky Secre- tary of State Trey Grayson, Al Gore's 2000 campaign chair Donna Brazile and for- mer Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. The Deep State was well represented with "former career officials from the in- telligence community, the Justice Department, the mil- itary and the Department of Homeland Security," accord- ing to Brooks. She wrote that there were roles for political strategists, polling experts, tech and social media ex- perts, as well. In the Biden victory sce- narios, the simulation was a vehicle for attributing the most sinister intentions to "Team Trump." There was considerable inoculation, as it preemptively accused Trump supporters of the foul- est prospective misdeeds in such detail that it almost cer- tainly is planning to commit those deeds. It rehearsed the partici- pants in dismissing any sug- gestion of voter fraud as a baseless right-wing conspir- acy theory. The accusation of voter fraud will be especially potent, according to the TIP report, in states where there is an apparent election-night Trump victory that is re- versed in due time by late-ar- riving mailed ballots. Democrats will rely on al- lies in the news media and so- cial media, in that case, to as- sure voters there is "nothing nefarious" about it. There was, of course, no brain fog for Podesta's Joe Biden character, no petu- lant meltdown or challenge to fisticuffs. He was a model of decorum and sober judg- ment in the make-believe situations in which he pre- vailed. Then they ran the scenario in which Trump won. Podes- ta stunned fellow role-play- ers by refusing to concede. "I don't think my party will allow me to concede," Podes- ta explained. A fter collecting their thoughts, the role-play- ers went to work brainstorm- ing ways that he could pre- vail despite losing the elec- tion. It was a walk-through of a plan for a coup d'etat against an elected American pres- ident. According to the re- port, this crisis would not be settled in the courts but in the streets. Leftist mobs would pour into the streets to set the stage for high-lev- el hardball negotiations to win concessions from the besieged president. Democratic governors and legislatures would send un- elected delegations of chal- lengers to disrupt the Elec- toral College. California, Or- egon and Washington would threaten secession. The in- surgents might demand Con- stitutional amendments. Podesta forecasted that if conservatives rally to Trump and take the streets, he (Biden) would let the mil- itary "handle it." Quiet alli- ance-building could ensure that the Secret Service will forcibly escort Trump out of the White House during a disputed election showdown. This is not the halluci- nation of a Berkeley stu- dent between bong hits. It is dead-serious contingen- cy planning by seasoned po- litical elites who think it can work. Brooks writes that we need to discard the obsolete concept of "election night." Election outcomes in the fu- ture will be determined over a longer period, perhaps stretching 11 weeks beyond election day. Kamala Harris has already enthused to an interviewer (Stephen Colbert) that the current street chaos will not and should not stop on Elec- tion Day. She apparently sees it as part of the Progressive repertoire from now on. Once such operations lurch into motion, they take on a logic and authority of their own. It won't be possi- ble to talk many people out of it after it starts. Now is the time to chal- lenge Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to disavow any threats of secession, to assure us that they will not leverage street violence to demand any Constitutional amend- ments or fundamental reor- ganization of our republic. Ask them now, when ra- zor-thin victory margins are at stake. The incentive to moderate their views is ephemeral. A fter the elec- tion, their incentives shift irreversibly toward extrem- ism. PLACES Continued from page 8 some research he hopefully had diligently made. He factored in cost of liv- ing, schools, health care, housing, crime, raising a family, parks and recreation- al facilities, etc. So, here's the ten best places in Indi- ana from the best to the very best: Indianapolis, Colum- bus, Dyer, Westfield, Fort Wayne, West Lafayette, Mun- ster, Zionsville, Fishers, and the best: Carmel. You can disagree and that's fine. Here's his opin- ion on the ten safest towns in Indiana from the good to the best: Lowell, Zions- ville, Nappanee, Westfield, Dyer, Crown Point, New Whiteland, Fishers, Carmel, and the best: St. John. Sor- ry, no mention of Evansville. • • • Wisdom of the week: "In my opinion, home is where you make life. You can be in a good or best place and still be miserable, or you can be in an unranked place and be happiest. It's all in one's atti- tude and heart. Factors like relationships, family, friend- ships, faith and Church, one's health, jobs, peace and order impact happiness." Do I get a yes? • • • Humor of the week: When Rose and I started to live in Pike County, I was fre- quently asked how we chose and ended up in the area. My standard answer was: "We rode the wrong bus. And the driver of the bus said, "Folks, this is the final stop. And then we got out." And truly, it's been a great journey. Court Report FORGOTTEN GOD Continued from page 8 FELONY Pike County Circuit Court Sarah Jeree Hammock charged with count I dealing in a narcotic drug/hero- in at least 12 grams, a level 2 felony, and count II dealing in methamphetamine, a level 4 felony. Matthew Eric Cronin charged with count I possession of methamphetamine, a level 5 felony, and count II possession of methamphetamine, with an enhancing circumstance, a level 4 felony. Nathaniel J. Evans charged with count I criminal confinement where a vehicle is used, a level 5 felony, count II domestic battery and count III interference with the reporting of a crime. Bobby Gene Baker charged with count I unlawful possession of a syringe, a lev- el 6 felony, count II possession of meth- amphetamine, a level 6 felony, count III possession of marijuana, count IV pos- session of paraphernalia, count V operat- ing a vehicle while intoxicated, and count VI unlawful possession of a syringe, pri- or, a level 5 felony. Joshua Michael Taylor charged with possession of methamphetamine, a lev- el 5 felony. Jamarcus Laroy Carter charged with count I possession of methamphetamine, a level 6 felony, count II possession of marijuana and count III possession of methamphetamine, a level 5 felony. Dalton L. Cundiff charged with count I operating a vehicle while intoxicated, count II operating a vehicle while intox- icated, endangering a person less than 18 years old, a level 6 felony, and count III possession of a controlled substance. Jason Eugene Hammock charged with neglect of a dependent, a level 6 felony. TRAFFIC AND MISDEMEANOR Pike County Circuit Court Oscar A. Mercedes Cruz charged with knowingly or intentionally operat- ing a motor vehicle without ever receiv- ing a license. Ryan N. Marcum charged with driving while suspended, prior. Eric Lance Carter charged with pos- session of marijuana. CIVIL Pike County Circuit Court LVNV Funding, LLC sues Shelley Truelove on complaint. Citibank, N.A. sues Blake Lamb on complaint. Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance, Inc. sues April Rice and Unknown Heirs on complaint. Janell Lynn Kemp files for a name change. Thompson Insurance sues Mary Ha- thaway on complaint. Anna Yates sues Zackery Yates for dis- solution of marriage. SMALL CLAIMS Pike County Circuit Court Paul White sues Dustin White and Shandi Loveless on complaint. INFRACTIONS Pike County Circuit Court Robert P. Snyder charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Jacob D. Norrington charged with seat- belt violation. Heather D. Majia charged with speed- ing, exceeding 70 mph. Jesse L. Nixon charged with seatbelt violation. Jeffrey L. Baldwin charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Jessica R. Nowark charged with speed- ing. Dakota A. Jochem charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Cynthia E. Boyd charged with seatbelt violation. Joshua J. Sanders charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Luke A. McGiffen charged with seat- belt violation. Dustin A. Stafford charged with seat- belt violation. Jacob E. Mason charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Levi E. McCarter charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Brandon R. McCutchen charged with seatbelt violation. Daniel P. Abel charged with speeding, exceeding 55 mph. Steven S. Givens charged with speed- ing, exceeding 70 mph. Lauren M. Terrell charged with speed- ing, exceeding 70 mph. Brittany M. Pease charged with speed- ing, exceeding 70 mph. Billy F. Smith, Jr. charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Aly B. Alfaro charged with speeding, exceeding 70 mph. Sherri L. Steapleton charged with speeding, exceeding 70 mph. Emily S. Mincey charged with speed- ing, exceeding 55 mph. Jade N. Browning charged with speed- ing, exceeding 70 mph. Amy M. Sisk charged with speeding, exceeding 55 mph. Ariel D. Rivera, Jr. charged with speed- ing, exceeding 70 mph. Oyumba N. Emile charged with speed- ing, exceeding 70 mph. the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our peo- ple, the forms of daily life, the work cal- endar, the priorities in every undertak- ing, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and uni- fying force of the nation. But in the 17th century Russian Ortho- doxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shak- en by Peter's forcibly imposed transfor- mations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlight- enment, Russia felt the first whiff of sec- ularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educat- ed circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened. It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that "revolution must necessarily begin with atheism." That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a god- lessness as organized, militarized, and te- naciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical sys- tem of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamen- tal than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not mere- ly incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the cen- tral pivot. The 1920's in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox cler- gy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chek- ists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswerv- ingly to their deaths for the faith; instanc- es of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into pris- on, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies… For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the strug- gle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopt- ed a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of show- case publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most lib- eral leader, Krushchev: for though he un- dertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultane- ously rekindled the frenzied Leninist ob- session with destroying religion. But there is something they did not ex- pect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant athe- ism has rampaged uncontrolled for two- thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all in- dependence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our coun- trymen have been corrupted and spiritu- ally devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecu- tion and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acute- ness and profundity. It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Commu- nism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seiz- ing the planet, it is doomed never to van- quish Christianity. The West has yet to experience a Com- munist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West's own historical evolu- tion has been such that today it too is ex- periencing a drying up of religious con- sciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and ran- cor, to say nothing of the tide of secular- ism that, from the late Middle Ages on- ward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is per- haps even more dangerous than any at- tempt to assault religion violently from without. Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as any- thing more lofty than the "pursuit of hap- piness," a goal that has even been solemn- ly guaranteed by constitutions. The con- cepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from com- mon use, they have been replaced by po- litical or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is inelucta- bly slipping toward the abyss. Western so- cieties are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to athe- ism. If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States, re- putedly one of the most religious coun- tries in the world, or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what further evidence of godlessness does one need? When ex- ternal rights are completely unrestrict- ed, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts? Or why should one refrain from burn- ing hatred, whatever its basis–race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corrod- ing many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger gen- eration in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we for- get that the defects of capitalism repre- sent the basic flaws of human nature, al- lowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does in- deed attain "equality"–the equality of des- titute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broad- er the personal freedoms are, the high- er the level of prosperity or even of abun- dance–the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The con- temporary developed West thus demon- strates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the pro- fusion of material goods nor in merely making money. This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embit- tered art of the twentieth century is per- ishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempt- ing to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God. Here again we witness the single out- come of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God. With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire moun- tain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the pri- mary key to our being or non-being re- sides in each individual human heart, in the heart's preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bank- ruptcy, leaving us at a dead end. The free people of the West could rea- sonably have been expected to realize that they are beset-by numerous freely nurtured falsehoods, and not to allow lies to be foisted upon them so easily. All at- tempts to find a way out of the plight of today's world are fruitless unless we redi- rect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain. The resources we have set aside for our- selves are too impoverished for the task. We must first recognize the horror per- petrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and within every soci- ety. This is especially true of a free and highly developed society, for here in par- ticular we have surely brought everything upon ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our daily unthinking selfish- ness, are pulling tight that noose… Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for wor- thy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the lad- der. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Cre- ator constantly, day in and day out, par- ticipates in the life of each of us, unfail- ingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour. To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twenti- eth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlighten- ment amounts to nothing. Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the hu- man spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Godless- ness: the First Step to the Gulag." Temple- ton Prize Lecture, 10 May 1983 (London).