Observations@

by: Donald S. Conkey

Date: December 4, 2008 - # 8848 – Remembering Pearl Harbor (822)

The number of us, especially those of us living in Cherokee county, who remember Sunday, December 7, 1941, continues to dwindle with each passing year. Yet for those of us who do remember that day 67 years ago next Sunday, the day President Roosevelt called “a day in infamy,” it was a day not forgotten by our generation. But it is now largely forgotten by the succeeding generations. But that is true for all wars. I could never fully understand World War I, my father’s war, nor do my children understand the Korean War, my war, nor do my grandchildren understand the Vietnam War, or the Dessert Storm War, my sons and grandson’s wars.

Nor do many Americans fully comprehend the Iraq War where some 4200 Americans have given their lives and where our granddaughter former Sergeant Amy Karski Voils was scheduled to go before her orders were changed. Yes war is hell - and people do die in war. Many in my family have given their lives fighting for the liberties we have enjoyed during my lifetime. A member of my family has served in uniform for at least four generations, with grandson, Kyle Jones now serving in the Coast Guard, helping preserve America’s liberties.

The hope for world peace was strong when WW II ended in August 1945. But peace was as elusive then as it is today. We long for peace, we pray for peace, but it still eludes us, and the world. Whenever I yearn for peace I remember the words of Christ in Matthew 24 which states “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diver places. All of these are the beginning of sorrows.” Does this sound familiar? It should.

His words are restated elsewhere with “And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations,  . . . And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn . . . and [the people] shall be made to feel the wrath of God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of the nations.” All prophets down through the generations have repeatedly reminded the world of what is to come. There are those of us who have witnessed the “wrath of God” on nations first hand - Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Korea - know what His “wrath” can be like. It was not pleasant to watch, yet many today seem indifferent as America turns its back on the scriptures and the Laws of God and turn to the secular teachings of man.

Every generation, beginning with Cain, has had those who sought to rule over their fellow-man unrighteously. Some, like Stalin and Castro, succeeded for many years, others, like Hitler, only for a few years, but at a terrible cost. Recently, while pondering the beauty of my family, after feeling the joy of being in their presence while performed the marriage of another grandchild, I asked myself why liberty has so much opposition. The answer received: “Liberties greatest enemies are ignorance and indifference, ignorance of what all Americans have been given by the Founding Fathers, and God, and indifference to the cost of citizenship in a nation where the government is “We the People.”

America learned during the Cold War, 1946 to 1989, that liberties greatest enemy was Communism. The Communists have never given up their efforts to destroy mankind’s freedom worldwide, boring away like termites from within, and installing their own form of tyranny wherever possible. Communism, like terrorism, still remains a real threat to America’s liberty. It was Plato who first advocated Communism where the elite rule in a police state. Tyranny has been around a long time.