Today's Message: Grow Or Die

I think the message of the day is “Grow or Die”. Obama was on the TV saying that it’s silly to refer to the current stimulus package as a “Spending Bill” rather than a jobs bill. Of course it’s a spending bill. That’s the general idea. I’ve listened to all the nay sayers in the past few days. I’ve read World Net Daily and listened to the republicans in congress. I have weighed the argument about how this bill is “social engeneering”. Certainly when Thom Hartman says that population reduction is a good thing because he creates a labor shortage and raises wages, it gets me to thinking. Was the Bubonic Plague really a good thing because it produced a middle class? Is this a price we are willing to pay. If the government did limit us to two children per marriage- - I got to thinking. Suppose thirty percent of us don’t reproduce at all. This means the next generation will have thirty percent fewer children. If thirty percent of them in turn don’t reproduce this will reduce the following generation by yet another thirty percent. The math here just doesn’t work out. Right now they are going off on this woman who had fourteen children saying that psycho therapy would be cheaper. I’ve had therapy and other than their continuing to tell you white is black and black is really white- - I didn’t see a lot of point to it. They only break your confidence and broadcast what was said in confidence to people you would least want to hear it. This has happened on three different occasions in my life. Growth is kind of a natural thing to the human species. People grow physically and they grow creatively and spiritually, or else they die. They may not die that day but they’ll die. Bob Dylan said “He who is not busy being born is busy dying”. Some Greek translations of the Bible puts the Greek phrase Born Again in the progressive mode. Obama has listened to all of the republicans. There are those who say that this bill will rob capital from private enterprise. I’ve heard the argument that some greative genious may start his own business or invent something were it not for this bill that consigned him to a government job instead. But I got to thinking. In the 1930’s they weren’t short on scientific progress. We had sound movies, and improvements to electronic sound reproduction in records. There was all sorts of work on synthetic polymers and plastics going on. New vitamins were being discovered all the time and something called “alpha protein” I hear they put on dog food and servicemen’s rations. And Birds Eye and others were inventing frozen foods. Nobody who lived through the thirties would say they were short on forward progress what with rural electrification. Obama has stated that all of the bill has to be passed or the stimulus will be insufficient. A republican amendment was defeated last night that would have reduced spending. Obama said today that it doesn’t matter if you’re in a Humvee or a Honda, if you are headed tword a cliff you need to change direction. And we are rushing headlong off a cliff as each new economic statistic is worse than the one before. And there are those who say that we have to “get all the deflation out of our system and let new real estate prices establish themselves, to create a market where people CAN again afford housing. There may be merit in this argument. But the bottom line kind of boils down to what Jesus said. “He who puts his shoulder to the plow and keeps looking back is not fit for the Kingdom of God. Gingrich can lament all he wants to how Obama isn’t like Reagan, he’s more like Carter. Obama is not Jimmy Carter. But if you’re going to bring up Jimmy Carter’s name- - certain aspects of our economy were a whole lot healthier back then than they are now. I refer to the federal deficit and the trade deficit and whether we were a creditor rather than a debtor nation.

You know, a lot of Super-groups had their chance to make a real difference in music. What if the Buffalo Springfield or Cream or Supersession or Blind Faith had stayed together? What kind of music would they have made? The Beatles were doing fine till someone got this idea to “Get Back”. The White Album “Got Back” to an earlier era. The Beatles to a large extent stopped growing, and the “Get Back” sessions made it official. They had a renewed chance again at growth with “Abbey Road”. Perhaps John Lennon would not have gotten so bored with the group if they were still in their experimental mode and creating new trends. I know both with my BASIC programs and my Sketch drawings- - I always sought to “push the envelope” and do something I hadn’t done before- - or else to do it in a new way. There were lots of giant trend-setter groups in the early ‘seventies with massive sold out concerts but none of the Beatles were among them. Instead the baton was passed to groups like Procol Herem, Electric Light Orchestra, Emerson Lake and Palmer, David Bowie, Pink Floud, and Jethro Tull. These groups pushed the envelope. The past twelve years or so in music has gone exactly nowhere. It would appear nothing new is under the sun. Really a general “evolution” trend in music stopped about 1985. Before then you could tell what year it was by the sound of the music but since them- - with a few exceptions- - the music scene is nowhere.

Christianity had an original concept when it first came out. But it was the hippies of the ‘sixties that talked about “Love” and “Mind Expansion” and “Being Open to new things”. You know what God is, he’s a “Day Tripper”. To make Glen happy I was thinking “What if I decided to go to Calvary Anaheim this Sunday”. Per chance people who were there might say to me “It isn’t just chance that you decided to come this week. God has a purpose for your being here today”. I would rightly respond “Well, if it was really God who prompted me to come this far, it says in the Bible that “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it”. And I would say “God isn’t a Day Tripper, is he?” And if it turns out there was no particular grand design in my being her today, then it was ME and not God who made the decision for me to even be here in church today, wasn’t it?”