“We hang petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

Aesop

By Dr. Jim Ferguson

Lately, I’ve been asking myself, is anything working? We live in the information age, but is it even reliable?

One of my axioms (Fergisms) is to “Read widely, consider carefully and use common sense.” I do and you should as well because truth is far more elusive than facts, which are conditional.

It’s easy to be discouraged these days. In fact, if you’re not concerned about the country and the world you might be, as Jeff Foxworthy parodies, braindead.

As I pray for the 15,000 Americans trapped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, I can’t imagine a worse scenario. But it is going to get much worse. I fear there will be an American hostage crisis that dwarfs Jimmy Carter’s Iran Embassy disaster. And many of the estimated eighty thousand Afghans who aided us in the War on Terror will disappear or be beheaded by the Taliban who carry the international designation of a terrorist organization. This is why Afghans are throwing their babies over the wall at the Kabul airport to try and save their children from the medieval monsters that iPOTUS is now forced to bargain with.

What kind of a President, General, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense or human being would abandon the major airbase in Afghanistan (Bagram) in the middle of the night in a war zone? What kind of a leader would leave the battlefield before women, children and other noncombatants were first evacuated? What kind of leader would leave behind munitions and high technology weapons such as Apache attack helicopters for the enemy to capture?

I could go on, but I won’t because the Afghanistan disaster is far from over. Instead, I will tell you of a new word phrase I learned to describe the disaster of the Wink’n media shills who gave us iPOTUS, our clueless Secretary of State Blinken and the bobble headed, Nodding, woke generals Mark Milley (aka Sergeant Schultz) and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. (You need to know the names of these people who will live in American infamy along with Dear Leader.)

Only a few neocons would deny that we needed to exit the 20-year war in Afghanistan. President Trump negotiated a conditioned drawdown of forces in Afghanistan. iPotus set a date and ushered in a Charlie Foxtrot. World War II gave us the acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR. (I refer readers to “military slang” in Wikipedia if necessary.) Charlie and Foxtrot stand for the NATO phonetic alphabet letters C and F and allude to the nonmilitary vulgar slang term ClusterF***. I was amazed to find this word in Webster’s dictionary.

To answer my original question of what is working, my marriage is working. My spiritual journey is working as is the church where I now attend worship services. However, the Afghanistan disaster has rekindled the sadness I felt after the dishonest election of November 2020.

My ennui last November led to an appraisal of the blessings in my life and the things which made me sad. In a pros and cons list I found three times as many things I could be thankful for over things which made me sad. This week I redid my list and unfortunately several issues were added to the sadness column. As a result, my thankfulness index has been reduced to just under 2:1. Arguably, calculation of my thankfulness index makes as much sense as anything coming out of the politically driven CDC (aka Center for Disease “Confusion”).

Though I am frequently discouraged, I take solace in the belief that God is in control. He/She/Spirit has not created and retreated back across the Cosmos as the Deists of the Founder’s era believed. Nor is my belief a fatalistic philosophy as imagined by Islam. I believe we have freedom of choices. If I make poor choices, consequences result which I must accept. (Are you listening, Joe?) God does sometimes actively intervene, but most of the time he allows the physics of the Universe and our choices to dictate reality. So, I hold to the notion, “I exist in Thee, You reside in me. It is a blessed continuity.”

All is not lost, despite our Captain’s manufactured catastrophe of the southern border (replete with Covid superspreading), the foreign policy debacle in Afghanistan, the destruction of our energy independence, destruction of our cities with rampant crime and homelessness, promotion of racism through CRT (critical race theory) and BLM and corporate wokeness, rising inflation through profligate spending and mismanagement by the feckless leadership class and indoctrination rather than education in our schools. I challenge you to list your blessings, including that you are alive today to sing as did the Psalmist in 118:24.

Presidents are lauded for successes and blamed for disasters which occur on their watch. It’s called the Captain of the Ship philosophy and is operative in medicine and surgery. I was responsible for my office personnel as well as my own actions, just as a surgeon is responsible to his patient for his expertise and for the operating room staff. King James did not write the King James Bible, but his name is eponymously associated with this compendium of scripture.

We derive this notion of responsibility from Plato from book VI of “The Republic.” Plato likens a city-state or country to a ship governed by a Captain. Plato felt that a wise and benevolent philosopher King should be in control.  In our Republic We the People are supposed to be in charge.

We do not have a wise leader. I reject the dictums of this incompetent King and his handlers. The current leadership class has failed us. It is time for We the People to take back the leadership role intended in our representative republic. It is our responsibility to be politically engaged and right our ship of state.

And it begins at home/locally. If you live in the City of Knoxville, VOTE early in the City Council Primary or on election day August 31. There are 5 solid conservative candidates to replace Democrat Socialists.