FWIW, my effort at seeing solutions contemplates three concurrent action vectors:
1- Exploit opportunity for a new system of education.
2- Exploit opportunity for a new system of inter-nation peace.
3- Exploit opportunity for a new supreme inter-nation alliance structure.
Diminish your prestige and you diminish your power. Act like a jerk and you diminish your prestige.
Three executive departments are enumerated by the Constitution: State, Treasury, Defense. These represent, in fact, the three assets of statecraft. The other departments and agencies are pass-throughs for taxpayer money going to politicians’ and bureaucrats’ families and cronies.
Eliminate non-enumerated departments and agencies, the taxpayers’ federal burden falls away and politicians and bureaucrats do not have money with which to shake down states and institutions. That is one way to handle the inevitable denial of funds as nullifications become serious.
The jerks lost power by being jerks. Now their dislodgment is necessary and inevitable. Love is the only real, effective, and lasting power. That fact should not be a news flash.
I sat through this and correlative discussions whilst at Union. I felt them then as now to be superficial and tiresome. The whole bible may have been written by Mohammed’s great grandfather’s mother’s cat for all I care (or The Buddha’s). Its effect through history speaks for itself, along with countless witnesses, to its leading on ordinary and extraordinary experience with true liberation in view as the elevating outcome of life’s struggles.
Union then had some faculty — but few students — whose inner elevation of spirit approximated that of The Bible. Many students were draft dodgers and not a few faculty were ambitious for promotion in academe. Jim Cone arrived the year I graduated, 1969, and that was that for Union. Heschel, for whose courses I sat in the Junior year, had that elevation of spirit, so of course JTS, across Broadway from Union, stomped on him later, when he spoke against continuing the mayhem in Vietnam.
That said, the churches’ memory for who did what and when is actually pretty accurate. A few errors here and there, nothing culpable, but on the big things, such as the Pauline corpus, operationally reliable. These professors who argue for this or that novelty are self-promoting, that is all. Dry bones. Woe to those who sow doubt. Doubters are destroyed.
Devotees today have some form of Divinity in their mind, but they perform rituals in a mechanical way without any consistency. All your charity and worship are of no significance to the Lord. Show your charity and wealth to the income tax department. God needs only your love. There is no tax on love. You may face any number of difficulties or hindrances. The Lord Himself may subject you to test. You should not waver because of these. All is for your good only. Do not grieve over any loss or exult over gain. Equal-mindedness in loss and gain is true sadhana. Some sit in dhyana (meditation), but their minds are in the market or in the hairdressing shop. Is this dhyana or japa? Your mind should be immersed in Krishna. Instead it is filled with thrishna (desires). What is needed is Krishna, not thrishna. Krishna will fulfil all your thrishnas.
- Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, September 3, 1999 / Daily Email, Sai Inspires: Subscription.
Donald Trump won the 2020 election for POTUS going away. He is POTUS until 20 January 2025 and presently in exile. That is the truth. Just stick to it and all will be well.