And Now, Back To Preserving Things Written SINCE My Old Blogs Froze Up

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WAVES AND SEAS

6 AUGUST 2007:



If I were a passenger in the foremost car of a bullet train that was traveling south at 100 miles per hour, and if I rose from my seat and began walking toward the rear of the train, would I really be moving north? No, I would be moving south at 100 miles per hour minus my walking speed. For simplicity, I leave out the movement of the Earth in space, and the rotation of our galaxy on its axis. There can be forces in life that carry an individual or a society in quite a different direction than superficial movements may seem to indicate.

I gained a greater appreciation for this truth during my Navy career, when as a submarine sailor I learned the nautical distinction between “waves” and “seas.” Ocean waves, properly speaking, are merely ripples on the surface caused by the wind, in which a momentary _shape_ moves across the water; but “seas” refers to
the water _itself_ really moving, under the influence of tides and currents. Thus, a wind out of the northeast would produce waves that made it look as if the ocean’s water were moving toward the southwest, but the real motion of the current could be in exactly the opposite direction. That’s why the traditional good-luck wish of the Navy is “Fair winds _and_ following seas!”—referring to two independent variables.

Speaking of social trends as being toward “right” or “left” is a simplification, like omitting the Earth’s movement in space from the bullet-train illustration; but as in that illustration, a simplification can sometimes correctly focus our attention on those things that actually affect our lives. Thus it is not wrong to
say that, during my entire lifetime, there have been periods of _wave_ motion in society toward the right, but the _seas_ have always kept moving left.

Forty years ago, anyone who advocated giving homosexual cohabitation the full dignity and honor of marriage would have been universally recognized, by those approving of him as well as by those denouncing him, as being on the left. Now, however, in all trendy circles, dogmatic support of homosexual “marriage” _combined_ with unquestioning approval of totally unrestricted abortion is only _barely_ enough to prevent you from being branded as an ultra-reactionary RIGHT-wing extremist.

Forty years ago, the hippie movement, powerful though it was with the help of other pro-Communist forces, was still on the fringes of American society. By now, the graduates of hippiedom have become the establishment, and have many Americans convinced beyond question that everything hippies ever wanted, including the abandonment of Southeast Asia to tyranny, was always so noble that no one but a depraved idiot could argue against it.

A politician like Rudy Giuliani, who favors both abortion and homosexuality AND is himself an unrepentant adulterer, could never have hoped to pass as a moral conservative when I was a teenager; but now he can. I recently heard conservative
radio host Michael Medved speaking on the air with a Giulani supporter, and Mr. Medved allowed his guest to get away with the weaselling evasion of calling Giuliani’s intentional adultery merely a “mistake”—the very sort of evasion Bill Clinton would use to make premeditated immorality sound like a mere accident. Medved permitted this, not because he himself or the conservative movement as a whole have begun approving of adultery, but because these days there scarcely even _are_ any more politicians of adequate prominence who have not gone even farther left on the scale than Giulani has. Much of politics has gone from good guys against bad guys to bad guys against worse guys. {How I wish Duncan Hunter had been given a fair chance!}

I have pondered how the difference between fleeting waves and persistent seas applies to President George W. Bush, a man who continues to be vilified by the hard left for showing ANY remaining vestige of conservative policies—and yet who is himself an advocate of causes which properly belong to the left, such as pressuring Israel to make suicidal concessions to absolutely unappeasable enemies in the name of “peace.” In at least one area of policy, I think that Mr. Bush in the very act of doing a left-wing thing may be trying to be _relatively_ conservative. I have in mind his endless pandering to illegal aliens, and to the Mexican government which he _knows_ is urging them forward in their parasitism upon the United States.

Mr. Bush has lived around globalists all his life. It is my opinion that he believes that the tide of world events is moving unstoppably toward the merging of nations and the loss of our sovereignty. If Mr. Bush is promoting a North American Union, it may be that he is not preferring this _over_ a free United States, but rather that he is preferring it over a single, complete one-world monopoly dictatorship. It may be that he hopes to make waves contrary to the seas, allowing _only_ a regional union as a power center that could resist the still-worse totalitarian planetary regime that the United Nations wants to impose on all of us everywhere.

If this is indeed the President's opinion and hope, I say that we should be at once more optimistic and more pessimistic than he is. Let us fight global totalitarianism as if it were still possible to keep the United States intact, AND prepare our souls for the worst as if the planetwide commune were certain to be in place next week. And as long as we have any strength and freedom left for the fight, we need to try to understand what are the trends occurring around us--as I have tried to do a little bit in this article. Even if we can't change the trend of the seas, the waves we make might nudge some people a little closer to a saving knowledge of Jesus--Whose authority is what the one-world system _really_ wishes to destroy.




Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!