By the time this article appears, I will be 92 years old (as of July 11). It’s a much different world today than it was when I was a youth.
In my youth, I never dreamed of becoming this old or still having a sound mind when I reached this age. I also did not envision what our country or the world would be like in the year 2023.
When I was born, many households still did not have electricity. As I recall, many families did not have refrigerators, phonographs, toasters, mix masters, or washers and dryers. Most families did, however, have radios.
My family had an icebox and a Victrola. My mom used to make toast in the oven, boil coffee grounds in a coffee pot, and use a strainer to separate the grounds from the brew.
Back then, we all came from families ruled by parents who taught us the skills of living and imbued in our hearts respect for God and country. The world today is far different in many ways.
Thankfully, family units of husband, wife, and children are still the norm. But today there are many single parent families and many of these are families headed by unmarried people. A very small number of families are also headed by two people of the same sex.
My early fascination with toys
The Victrola was a wonderful machine. It was powered by a coil spring, wound by hand. It was a marvelous contraption. The Victrola captured a voice or music within scratches on a rotating disk and played them back through a needle attached to a mica disk at the entrance to a horn that magnified the sound. I thought, as a child, what marvelous things man can make.
We children used to have different toys to play with. I remember there were many small windup toys, like toy tanks that I used to wind up with a key and run on the floor. Many of these toys were made in Japan.
Eventually “Made in Japan” became a derogatory term. We did not appreciate that the toys really worked, even though they were obviously cheaply made.
I had a lot of fun with those cheaply made toys. I also had a toy that allowed the owner to cast lead soldiers and I cast many lead soldiers with them. As I grew up, I wound up using the toy to make sinkers for fishing.
But little did our country know that we were supporting the industrialization of a backward nation. Japan was manufacturing toys to accumulate wealth while, behind the scenes, they were building the largest navy in the world. Eventually, they attacked us.
Our whole country became galvanized after Pearl Harbor. After all, it was a sneak attack. They tried to destroy our naval power when they were in negotiations with the U. S. over many problems.
My Parents taught me religion
But behind all of this I picked up from my parents that there was a purpose to life, that there was a God who created us and wants us to join Him in heaven. But there is a catch. God expects us to live righteous lives that resemble Him in all we do, especially in how we treat our neighbor.
That’s where my first experience with religion came from. And I saw it confirmed by many other Americans as they lived out their lives.
All of us are familiar with the comic strip hero Superman and other comic book heroes like Green Hornet, Captain Marvel, Batman, etc. Those heroes were all conjured up by young Americans just like me. Superman was conjured up in 1938 by Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster when they were sixteen. They were Clevelanders in Glenville High School. I lived in the same neighborhood.
I resonate with those writers, and they had a very big influence on me. We are all vulnerable to being bullied by stronger kids, even robbed or murdered by them. The idea of a powerful superhero who went around righting every wrong and turning the culprits over to the police for trial and justice really captured my imagination.
Fostering the right stuff
I started saving Superman comic books. I think I bought the first copy myself. Then I found a used books store that also carried used comic books. I had the first eight issues of Superman, but then I just stopped collecting them. If I had saved them, those eight issues would today be worth thousands of dollars.
But the real value of those books is not the monetary value. It is in what those books did to my character and the character of a great many impressionable young Americans. The idea of going around and correcting the wrongs they saw and turning the culprits over to the police is, I think, invaluable in any society.
Old movies fostered this same sense of character, and I knew the movies very well. My mom used to send me to the local theater every Saturday with enough money for admission and some candy and popcorn,
I loved The Lone Ranger (and Tonto), Tom Mix, and actually almost every western movie where the hero rectified some wrong people were suffering from and quietly rode off into the sunset without expecting any reward from the people he helped. I also liked The Green Hornet and Bat Man.
Proud to be an American
These traits became very deep-seated in my character, and never left me. I saw this attitude big time during world War II when the Americans liberated Europe from the Nazis and went home without plundering those they liberated. The U.S. even flew food and provisions into Berlin to keep people from starving during the first Berlin crisis in 1948.
When I hear the words of the song “Over There,” I still burst with pride over my fellow American men. “Over there, over there, send the word, send the word over there. That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming . . . And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”
Religion is disappearing from America
Over my long life, I have seen much of that righteousness and zeal disappear. Many Americans, it seems, are no longer proud of our Christian backbone.
I remember the shock when I first discovered that some Americans no longer wanted America to be identified as a Christian country. It happened during the Clinton presidency when a Bill Clinton pushed through his “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy saying recruits should no longer be asked if they are homosexual. Up to that time I had always voted Democratic, Since then I have never voted for a Democrat.
I think God does not want men to chase after other men to have sex with them. God has warned humans all through human history to avoid such disordered behavior. People are apt to be placed in hell for such a defiance of God.
Prior to the Clinton presidency homosexuals were deemed unfit for military service. After Clinton, homosexuals became more and more combative, insisting that they be accepted into every aspect of our society. This caused great discomfort to men not addicted to sexual misconduct.
I think we are headed for trouble
But it’s not only homosexuality, it’s everything that was considered wrong in the past that people are clamoring to be accepted today. I view this with dread. I know this level of defiance against God is going to be bad for our country.
When God identified Himself to Moses and the Israelites, He said “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall not have other gods beside me.” He then gave Moses the 10 Commandments. And God really did command our obedience.
I think the Israelites understood that if they defied God, like the Egyptians did, God would destroy them just like He destroyed Pharaoh’s army. I think, if we continue to defy God, He might destroy us also.
In today’s America, sexual excess has totally permeated American lives. Sex outside of marriage is endemic. Sex between members of the same sex is also accepted as normal by a huge percentage of American people. Americans have even fostered belief in multiple avenues of sexual pleasure, predicating sex not on the biological makeup of the body but on the sexual practices of people in their pursuit of sexual pleasure.
This has caused me great concern during my senior years. It made me wonder why God is so insistent that His will must be obeyed and why is He so willing to confine those who defy His will into hell.
Conclusions
I have come to realize that the possession of free will is a priceless gift given to man, but it carries a huge price. A human with free will must sacrifice everything not to defy God through his or her free choice. And God knows how difficult that is. I think that is why God promises us to confirm the righteous in absolute fidelity to adherence to His will in the next life, if we are lucky enough to escape damnation.
In the next life, we will love God so much that the appeal to defy Him will never again grasp us. Nobody in Heaven will ever defy God. Nobody in heaven disobeys God. God is thoroughly good, and disobedience is thoroughly evil. Disobedience would destroy the peace and harmony in heaven.
I understand this so thoroughly that I want to convince all my fellow humans to choose to obey God and never choose against God.
I guess that has become my mission in my senior years, while I still have the ability, to spread the good news of Jesus Christ.
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