Deliverance is Nearer Than I Thought

It’s time for me to cut back on looking at the news again. I keep seeing startling indications that the world is ending, and it adversely affects my motivation. It gives me the feeling that there is no point in doing much, because there is no future for me here.

I call it “depression by proxy.” In ordinary depression, you condemn yourself and tell yourself you’re doomed to endless suffering and failure. It worries you, destroys your motivation, and can make you want to kill yourself. This is not what’s happening to me.

In depression by proxy involving the self-destruction of others, you feel that other people are doomed. You don’t see much point in interacting with them or participating in their world, because whatever you do that involves them will be destroyed along with them.

I don’t believe I can have kids and watch them grow to adulthood. I don’t think I can start a business or write more books. I don’t believe America is going to get better and that people will start to get along again. I believe hate and sin will increase faster and faster, shortages will make people all over the globe completely miserable, violence and disease will take over the world, and Christians and Jews will be tormented and murdered en masse, along with various other groups. I believe totalitarianism is a few months or years away. We’re already feeling the sharp end of the nail.

Unlike a person who has ordinary depression, I don’t feel bad about my prospects. I think my future and that of my wife are extremely bright. I don’t expect us to suffer much, and I’m enjoying life. The problem is that I feel we’re in a holding pattern in a place where there isn’t much for us to do.

It seems that the earth is washed up, but heaven isn’t ready to take us yet, so I spend my time trying to get closer to God and amusing myself with trivial pursuits.

Reading the news makes me feel there is no point in mowing my yard, watching my weight, maximizing my wealth, and so on. I keep feeling we won’t be here much longer. I can’t imagine living another 30 years in an America even filthier and more hostile than the degraded nation I see around me today. What’s happening seems unsustainable. There is too much positive negative feedback for us to achieve escape velocity later on.

The latest journalistic gem is a story about Hazard, Kentucky. Hazard is right up the road from the town where my dad was raised. It’s in coal country, in Eastern Kentucky.

Coal country is a white rural ghetto. As liberal writer Harry Caudill was heard to say, everyone who had any get up and go got up and went. People who were more or less on top of things fled the area a long time ago, leaving an abnormally high concentration of people with trashy values.

My dad’s dad, who died before I was born, was supposedly very intelligent, but he was not able to get a college education. He took a bookkeeping course and became a bookkeeper for the Elkhorn Coal Company at its Kona camp, and he went on to become a county clerk and sheriff. His wife was a cold, vacuous person who didn’t amount to anything or form attachments. He had three children.

My eldest aunt got a master’s degree, married a radiation embryologist, and moved to Tennessee, where the state university employed him as a professor. She became a highly respected, very industrious teacher. Her younger sister got a math degree, married a NASA engineer, and moved to Huntsville. My dad got a law degree, excelled to the point where he had no place in primitive Kentucky courtrooms, and moved to Tampa, where he became head of the litigation department of a large firm while in his early thirties.

They got up and went, as Caudill put it. He said the coal country had suffered a brain drain, and my family shows how it worked. When the capable people leave an area, the atmosphere changes for the worse.

A typical person living in Eastern Kentucky would likely be incensed to read what I’m writing, but it’s completely true. I don’t think I should let concerns about people’s irrational, counterproductive responses turn me into an enabler. If I tell the truth, and you can’t handle it, it’s 100% your fault. Eastern Kentucky needs tough love, not mindless pride and approval.

My relatives almost never talk to me now, and I never hear from anyone else up there. I’m pretty sure only one relative knows I’m married. I don’t expect to visit Kentucky again unless someone dies. If I make someone in Kentucky mad, it will have no impact on my life.

I miss my family, but when you become a Christian, people abandon you. On the up side, I’m much closer to one cousin than I used to be. I baptized her here in my pool.

Hazard has a high school. The high school had an event. Girls showed up wearing Hooters uniforms, and boys dressed in women’s underwear and gave lap dances to male staffers on the basketball court. One of the male staffers was principle Donald “Happy” Mobelini, perhaps nicknamed for Happy Chandler, a famous Kentucky governor (whose real name was Albert). Students and staffers also paddled each other. The name of the event is the Man Pageant, and while this year’s version was more extreme than usual, it is a tradition at the school.

Let’s not forget that “Hooters” means “breasts,” or that the Hooters logo, which the girls wore on their minor chests, is supposed to look like breasts.

So, what did Hazard High celebrate? Lewdness, homosexuality, fornication, statutory rape, abandonment of professional ethics, and sado-masochism. On the basketball court. In front of cameras.

What are we seeing here? Fatherlessness in action. No real father would allow his children to attend this event, let alone participate. God, the primary father, is not very popular among coal country people, unless unsupported lip service counts, so it’s not surprise that Perry County dads are failing so badly. The fatherless make bad fathers.

In the past, rural towns were resistant to the propagation of sexual perversion. Many were full of fornication and adultery, but young homosexuals tended to get out and move to cities so they could get more sexual action and find acceptance. Knowing Eastern Kentucky as I do, I am amazed that Kentucky boys and men would put on a show featuring boys in women’s underwear, simulating or performing sexual services for men. Is it like this all over rural America? If so, then Satan has made a huge advance and broken through an important level of resistance.

Not long ago, a country musician made a music video with a gay black rapper. I think the deranged motive was to suggest that country musicians weren’t really racists. Just guessing. The obvious point that needs to be made is that you can build bridges between races without endorsing perversion. You don’t have to choose one of the gay world’s leading evangelists. You could choose CeCe Winans.

The rapper has made a video in which he dies, goes to hell, and gives Satan a lap dance, bending over in front of him with his buttocks spread.

Is there a connection between this rapper’s acceptance by country music fans and what happened in Hazard? If so, he’s more effective than I thought.

Are men and boys doing things like this all over the rural South, or is it just places like Hazard that were already morally backward? Are male high school students in Georgia and Tennessee dancing in drag?

To me, it suggests the apocalypse is unfolding even more quickly than I thought. It’s like seeing Trump rallies break out in Berkeley. A possible sea change.

I felt very sad when I read about Hazard. I felt tears rising. Seeing the photos of these kids was like looking at the scene of an accident where a number of people had died. I felt separation.

Society is being centrifuged to separate one component from another. God’s children are being lifted away from the children of darkness, and we can’t do very much about it. Sin is now combined with pride, and pride is sin’s armor. The perpetrators of the Hazard spectacle seemed like dead people to me, because my impression was that they would never be willing to listen to the truth and be saved.

To get back to the point, I think it’s time to cut back, once again, on my consumption of news. It doesn’t seem to be doing anything good for me. God once told me to stop reading the news, and I felt better when I complied. I will pray and see if he wants me to do it again.

A person who claimed to have visited heaven said people there were not able to see what was happening on Earth. Supposedly, they had some general information about world events, but that was it. I hope that’s true. Fox and CNN would ruin heaven for me.