If you haven't heard, The Liberty Voice torch has been passed on to a great patriot, Jason Rink. Before I describe how that transpired, I wanted to reflect and tell you about the ride.
We published the first edition of The Liberty Voice on Veteran's Day, 2007, and the effort was begun on little more than faith and I must admit, was fueled by the sheer anger I felt by the lies behind this "War on Terror". I hated the thought that so many of our brave soldiers, one of whom is my dear cousin, were off "fighting for our freedoms," risking life and limb, doing what they thought was noble, only to learn that their decision "to serve" was based upon nothing but lies. Even as many of these errors were being revealed and we learned that they were generated by "our" government as a pretext for war, people like us were called peace nuts and sometimes even worse -- truthers. As if fighting for peace and truth was an insult!
We tried in vain to inform our local printing company -- no, the Columbus Dispatch is not worthy of being called a newspaper -- about their reporting "errors." It quickly became apparent that they were not in the business of delivering truthful content, but rather approved propaganda. "News tips" were ignored and "This is a paid advertisement" headlined many of the most important news stories. Many other informative "ads" were flatly refused by many local and national printing companies across the country, and it seemed that the truth could not be purchased at any cost in America's "post 9/11à ‚¬ ³ world. I finally concluded that A. J. Liebling was right and the "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one."
Many in the movement felt that the internet was the best solution. It is a powerful force to be sure, but I believed, and still do, that the "poor man's press" only preaches to the choir, and we needed a way to reach those who were still uninformed and to encourage "the Remnant."
"The Lord commissioned [Isaiah] to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. 'Tell them what a worthless lot they are.' He said, 'Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,' He added, 'that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.'
"Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job in fact, he had asked for it but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start was there any sense in starting it? 'Ah,' the Lord said, 'you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.'"
Albert Jay Nock (18701945), "Isaiah's Job", The Atlantic Monthly in 1936.
If you're a regular reader of The Liberty Voice, you may think that's pretty much how we've "set about it" --but I regret, that just isn't the case. As much as I loath the mainstream press, my (former) Senior Editor, James Hanson once told me I would learn to empathize with them, and to an extent, he was right. While The Liberty Voice covered topics that you would never find in the AP (American Propaganda) the truth is, we did hold back. We did mince matters. Because I found that Jack Nicholson phrased it pretty well, "You can't handle the truth!"
No faith. No truth.
But why can't we handle the truth? If I were to cite one reason, I'd say we as a people lack faith, but what do I really mean by that? Some people might translate that word into "spirituality", others may think "what she really means is 'morals'." Since I am a Christian, I can really only go into a discussion about the overlap of faith and politics in those terms. I speak to Christians here, but if you can translate my own limited understanding of "faith" into your own "love language," perhaps you will be able to glean what I feel is the root of our crisis.
When I embarked on this journey, the first place I turned for help was my church, but I was told that by discussing "politics', I risked their 501 3-C status. So much as the world wasn't taking a stand for the powerless because of financial concerns, the church responded the same way. From this, I learned a powerful and important lesson: "you can not serve two masters."
We are told that we serve a powerful God who loves every one of us as His children. We are told that even one sparrow "shall not fall on the ground without [our] Father's notice." We are told that even "the very hairs of [our] head[s] are all numbered" and that we should take courage because we "are of more value than many sparrows."
If we truly understood the value of people as God does, would we still treat each other the way we do? If we acted in accordance with God's commandment to "love one another as Christ has loved us," then how can we we turn a deaf ear to the cries of our neighbors? Who are we to assign a precious value to the tears of some, while others cry rivers and the Christian response is in effect, to damn the flood!
I was devastated that my fellow Christians would be mute and thus moot on the subject of our misguided country. It was amazing that they could profess to serve a powerful loving God, while shirking their Christian responsibilities to "defend the widows and the fatherless" or to "remember those in prison as if [they] were in prison with them," and "remember those who are mistreated as if [they] were being mistreated."
Yet what have the Christians done for the children who are being orphaned and killed (by "our" country) in Iraq and Afghanistan? What have they done or said to defend those being tortured? Where is the outrage for those being held captive in prisons without access to their attorneys, their basic human rights, or their families? The Christian community's silence on all these things was, and largely still is, deafening.
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