Touting the safety and natural bounty of Maine, Gov. Paul LePage is pushing for Chinese students and companies to come to the Pine Tree State. — Steve Collins in the Lewiston Sun Journal, May 24, 2018

Safety and Bounty

Paul LePage probably still feels like opening Maine for business to communist China is a good thing. During his eight years as Governor he made more than one trip to the totalitarian nation. A good friend taught me years ago that business is always a liberalizing force in a civilization. The merchant exists to make money, to sell stuff. You can figure out the rest.

Religion is always the force that preserves the vote of the ancestors. Businessmen want only their living, breathing and purchasing customers to vote.

Years ago my team at the Christian Civic League of Maine uncovered an image of a smiling Governor John Baldacci standing right next to the Priest murdering brutal Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Our work was a shot heard round the world in the media. In the image Baldacci was surrounded by a gaggle of merchants from Maine wanting to make a dollar trading with Castro’s Cuba.

The institution in the West with THE MOST consistent historical written record condemning communism as an evil anti-human ideology is the Roman Catholic Church. While the current version of the Church is muted in it’s critique, the old encyclicals and wisdom is still extant. You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned. In the wake of the global Communist Chinese Party Plannedemic, millions of people around the world will expose themselves to those old insights. They will think about them. They will learn from them.

I believe they will gain a newfound respect for the Church, even if they choose not to enter the Church or become Christian. Sadly the Church is letting this current crisis go to waste. It is uniquely positioned in the West to demonstrate courage by putting her Priests on the front line of the virus fight. That is what she has done throughout history. This current crop of leaders is like the rest of us, enthrall to worldly and secular governments/powers. And those governments/powers have proven themselves untrustworthy countless times in the past century.

Will LePage and company wake up in time to gain enough followers to continue their political careers? We’ll see. A friend emailed me a list of top dogs vying for control in the Maine GOP. I recognized all the names. They are old people, like me. Most have presided over the decades long collapse of Maine into its current chaotic condition, with commie Jezebel Janet Kills controlling the high ground.

These old people are likely to maintain power through this next election cycle. The millennials are still busy grow- ing a pair. I am curious to see if technology and abundance will be enough to give that generation a pass from stepping up and assuming responsibility. So far the superabundance of America is making it possible for them to aspire to a computer job working from home after they obtain their university degree in social justice. They are clueless about the nature of labor — the kind of work required — to maintain them in their state of superabundance. Thank God there are still millions of men and women willing to work the last mile of package delivery, the ditch digging, greasy maintenance and manual labor jobs that keep the machines functioning.

LePage touted Maine’s “safety and bounty” as a reason the Chinese should be interested in the pine tree state. Safety and bounty, along with beauty, are what goes out the window when communism takes hold of a civilization. The Soviet Union failed to create a beautiful and sustainable environment for her people. Pollution is a HUGE problem in China. Communism is antithetical to a free market. Individuals don’t exist as individual human beings. They are all part of the collective. They have no God-given rights. Communism is atheist to the core.

We’ve maintained the highest level of bounty and safety in the world by deciding not to tackle the immense challenges associated with maintaining both an industrial manufacturing base and beautiful neighborhoods. We shipped all our manufacturing to Asia, mostly China. The flip side of the communist coin is corporate and rapacious capitalism. Businessmen like LePage can never develop the intestinal fortitude to turn down a shekel. They are all about profits, popularity and power.

Bernie Sanders isn’t the answer. Feeling the Bern will merely accelerate the burn out of our civilization. No, the answer to our current dilemma is not ideological or political. It is religious. We either follow Solzhenitzen’s advice and return to the God of Christianity, or we lose our soul. I ratchet between concluding we’ve already died spiritually, or Jesus Christ is going to come back to the fore in the English speaking world. Our pathetic and fearful response to Bill’s global plannedemic has me leaning to the former right now.

I got a glimmer of hope from Joe Rogan and Elon Musk yesterday. I listened to two hours of mostly juvenile chatter between the two powerful men. Musk is selling all his possessions. Like a race horse the stud has sired another baby, I guess. He talked about his “partner.” I assume it’s a woman, but he didn’t say. Men can have babies now, right? I’m sure Musk will put SpaceX to work figuring that one out right away. He’ll probably need men to have that capability when he gets to Mars in his Tesla powered electric universe rocket ship.

Their conversation gave me hope because the hairline fractures of moral fatigue were almost obvious in their happy talk. Like the old passenger jets that require more in depth scanning every year to discover the hairline cracks in their fuselage the West is starting to tear out the upholstery of her civilization to look for cracks. We are discover- ing gaping holes hidden behind the pretty veneer of our society, and realizing that if we don’t fix the cracks and plug the holes we aren’t going to be able to keep this thing in the air.

I wish I could say Christianity was at the forefront of offering realistic solutions, but it isn’t. We have a recent example of what comes next. Think surveilling Sovietization of everything. I prefer the goodness, truth and beauty of Christian civilization, thank you very much.

Amen.