Will Rogers started his career in the great outdoors.  He was part of several western shows designed to lure people to the unsettled country.  He went on to do vaudeville and stage performance along with some film acting in the early years of cinema.  He was best known for his off the cuff comments about things, “down home” or having to do with politics.  Like Mark Twain, his comments shed some light on how the average Joe felt about their leaders.

Today isn’t much different.  Most late night comedians find great material from the headlines of the day.  Complete routines are designed to poke fun or at least get a laugh.  Lately we’ve seen a parade of leaders in Washington that keep the coffers full to the brim with comedy.  However, there’s nothing funny about what’s been going on in our country, even though it may seem that nothing has changed in the past hundred years or more.

The news media takes delight in any misstep or gaffe that occurs on the political scene. There is no lack of entertaining material on the evening news.  Have we in fact become like the early settlers of our nation as they joked about the English king who controlled their colonies?  It really isn’t much different as it was then.  Instead of comedy routines, however, they dumped barrels of tea into the river and burned their leaders in effigy.  They did get attention though.

Where am I going with all this?  I guess I just wanted to say that time doesn’t really change us.  We often make the same mistakes we and our forefathers did.  We can’t erase those blunders from the pages of our history books, or we’ll never learn from them.  Today we have instant news and can tell what’s going on all over the world with just the tap on our computer.  Our minds are filling up at rapid speed with negative news, fear mongering, hatred and anger.  It’s up to us to make a choice.  Are we going to let those negative thoughts control us or are we going to do something about it?  What can we do?  I wish there was a clear answer to that.  I do believe that sometimes ignorance is bliss, but we need to be aware of what’s happening to our country.

I also know that I have no control over what goes on in Washington, Minneapolis, South Korea or Australia.  There are times when I have no control what goes on in my own home, but I do have a source for how to deal with it.  Turn it over to God.  Alone, we cannot fight the destruction of a system of government.  It takes more than one person to accomplish that.  It takes One God, to intervene for us, and that’s no joke.