Vote for Joe

As I mentioned in an earlier ‘Nineveh post,’ the airwaves these days are saturated with sexual imagery. (And here comes an invisible deadly virus into our air waves now. Hmm.) But many of us have become so desensitized to this sexual imagery that we simply accept it as normal now (unless it’s tremendously X-rated stuff). But here’s the spiritual rub… Jesus said anyone “who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in their heart.” [Mathew 5:28] While giving a talk at a moral theology class at Bluffton College a number of years ago, I said, for instance, husbands and wives spend hours sitting on a couch together watching scantily clad actors in all kinds of sexual poses, and much more — on prime time TV without thinking anything of it. During the Q & A period after the talk, the professor said that when you think about this objectively, it would be like saying, to your wife, for example: “Honey, I’m going next door to look in the window at Marge for a couple hours.” What’s more, the more we watch TV fashions getting more suggestive, and more suggestive… well, life imitates art, if you will. And all of a sudden, just as one example, we have a majority of women, teenage girls, and even young children wearing tights — and thinking nothing about it! Does any of us think, for even a second, that God condones this? In fact, He might be, oh, a bit angry about it — given what his Son said. Just sayin’. So, as president, how would I impact this? As just one example, I would vocally, and regularly, support “1 Million Moms Fight for Decency” on television. What’s more, I wouldn’t have a super-model wife modeling suggestive stuff at political events. Think loose, but fashionably fitting of course, LL Bean clothes or something. Note: The Bible’s 1 Timothy 2: 8-9… “I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety…” Uh, short shorts, tight jeans with rips all over, tights in general… I mean, c’mon. Note 2: In 1917 at Fatima (a Catholic Church approved apparition), the Blessed Virgin Mary said souls were falling into hell like “snowflakes.” And the number one reason, she said: “Sins of the flesh.” That, incidentally, is the kinds of ‘sins’ I’m writing about in this post.

The reading at Mass today was Numbers 21:4-9. The colloquial cliff note on this is… Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. God gave them manna (small tortilla bread like stuff) to sustain them. And it did. But, okay, it wasn’t Outback Steakhouse. So the Israelites started to complain. God, in turn, got angry. How angry? He sent poisonous snakes among the people. And some died. In short order, they repented (from coming off as spoiled) and eventually the snakes left. So… It’s the year 2020 in the First World. Instead of being happy with fans, we wanted air conditioning units, then central air, then… Instead of being content with your basic vehicle for transportation, we wanted two nicer vehicles, and then even nicer vehicles (with all the options), and then even… And yeah, after watching a few HGTV shows, we wanted a sun porch, then we wanted an add on den, and then we wanted… Meanwhile some 2 billion people live in slums worldwide. Many don’t even have bicycles with trailers to get their meager crops to market in town. And air conditioning? More than one billion people live without any electricity worldwide. And now here comes a virus into our First World midst that is ‘biting’ some of us, our loved ones, and so on. We need to come to grips with the fact that God, through the years, has chastised his people. But even more (and this will be a good kind of more), we need to understand why He’s doing it (Coming off as spoiled?), repent, and change. One could only wonder what would have happened to the Israelites if they hadn’t repented and changed. Note: And it won’t be enough to just scale back. We’ll need to take the savings to help all these other people in tough straits. For an overall template of how our administration would inspire this, and provide many more conduits into the Third World, see…

Yesterday (3/27/20) Pope Francis addressed the world from an empty St. Peter’s Square amidst a rain storm. The storm was quite appropriate, divine coincidence wise, to the pope’s message. He said that the world was living amidst a dark storm because of the current worldwide pandemic. Why? God is angry and is trying to urgently get our attention. Many of us, said the pope, have gone ahead at “breakneck speed”: greedy for profit, not concerned about wars elsewhere, not concerned about the plight of the immigrant… Not concerned about a “gravely aging planet” (read: global warming, vanishing species, major water pollution problems, and so on.) The pope then said we “…thought we could stay healthy in a world that’s sick.” The answer, he continued: “It’s time to choose what matters,” and get our lives “back on track.” That means, he said, we must abandon “our eagerness for power and possessions… and adopt new forms of hospitality, fraternity and solidarity.” Okay… What our presidential campaign revolves around, across-the-board, is moving Americans squarely into the paradigm the pope speaks of. We’ve researched a series of models, already in place on a small scale in America, that will get way more help to the poor of this country and the poor in the Third World. It holds out grassroots models for how to dramatically help immigrants. It champions extremely effective projects that, if replicated across the country, would go a long way toward saving the environment. And so much more. So… And all this is going to take is for Americans to heed the pope’s words. That is, most Americans will need to slow down and cut back on their lifestyles. In other words, they’ll need to sacrifice (just like they did, for instance, during World War II). The savings of money and time that are generated by this, then need to be redirected into volunteering to help, including subsidizing with money, the projects we’ve researched so they can be spread across the nation, and around the world. Note: Some 30 years ago, I started doing what the pope recommended yesterday. In my particular case, I gave up a lucrative profession, and at God’s prompting, went out into America to research the grassroots projects He seemed to be inspiring for when this shift in the country needed to happen on a wide scale basis. And that time, well, seems to be now. Note 2: These projects are thread throughout our campaign position papers and, for that matter, throughout our main campaign website in general.

It was just announced today that New Orleans is having an explosion of coronavirus cases, and its now become the most rapid growth rate in the world in fact. Experts are pointing to the extremely crowded streets of Mardi Gras there last month as the “perfect storm” breeding ground for the virus spread. And, ultimately, this could prove more deadly than Hurricane Katrina (death toll: 1,833). Let’s look at this from a spiritual angle… Catholic author Michael Brown wrote in his book The Final Hour that because of the absolute debauchery found in the Mardi Gras, found in the adult and occult shops in the French Quarter, the constant partying on Bourbon Street… with the city on the Gulf, he was surprised God hadn’t let New Orleans become the epicenter of a major hurricane yet. *He wrote that two years before: New Orleans became the bullseye for: Hurricane Katrina. We did a campaign tour along the Gulf Coast there six months after, and it still looked like a war zone. Over the years, however, everything has been rehabbed infrastructure wise, and the city, for the most part, has gone back to the same old debauchery. Now New Orleans, via Mardi Gras no less, has become the bullseye for: the deadly coronavirus. Note: While New Orleans might represent the far end of the debauchery continuum in America, most of the rest of the country is not far behind on the sin scale these days. But what’s it going to take to wake us up to that?

Some restaurants in America are in danger of closing because of the coronavirus. It might be good for a number of them to close, actually. You see, we in First World America are regularly dropping $25, $35, $45… a pop at, say, Applebee’s. We’re splurging at the “All You Can Eat” buffet restaurants just as regularly. And so on… We’ve come to accept this as just a “normal” part of our culture. Meanwhile, some 24,000 people starve to death every day in the Third World. In Haiti, to quell acute, consistent, hunger pains, people there have taken to eating patties made of mud, oil and flour. While this is apparently slowly killing them, its better than immediately dying of starvation. Americans need to look at eating as a “moral act.” And we need to even this First World/Third World thing out way more than it is now. Translated: Less eating out for many of us, more economical rice and beans meals, and such, at home — with the savings going into things like sustainable agriculture projects for people in Haiti, Uganda, Biafra… Jesus said: “Woe to you who are filled now…,” I mean it wouldn’t take a moral theologian with a PHD to figure that out, huh. Note: For a look at how our administration would work to set up a Foreign Relations paradigm that would help the American public align much more with this, see…