The Holy Scriptures tell of war and provocation.

The R A N T of G L E N N glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
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War and the Holy Word

Letter to the editor;

Why do the Holy Scriptures contain so many chapters about war?

Is it because religious people need to know how to fight wars? No, a book cannot help anyone there, because every war is different from every previous war.

Is it because religious people need to know how to keep their countries out of wars? Maybe. Wars happen. But there remains a thread of hope that people can insist that their governments not stir up wars. (I don’t know of any instance of this.)

Possibly the Scriptures go on and on about war because wars are going to happen and our nations are going to be involved in them and people of faith need to survive mentally-whole as well as physically. The scant word of comfort is that this is not the first nor only time that millions of men (and women) have practiced with deadly weapons and deliberately organized to slaughter one another with them.

Nearly everyone agrees that every people be prepared to defend their nations and their nationalities. The problem comes when politicians tell them that the best defense is a good offense – the “pre-emptive attack”. (“They’re going to attack us sometime anyway. We’d better attack them first, before they can get ready.”)

For their own nefarious and unknown reasons, many American politicians practically salivated over the prospects of getting the US into World War One.

They flaunted the passenger ship Lusitania in the German face, shipping ammunition to England in open defiance of our declared neutrality. The Germans put a full-page ad in the New York Times pleading with people not to go for a ride on the Lusitania.

That ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean with destroyer escorts, zig-zagging and laying smoke screens. However, when they got to the area of maximum submarine activity, the Lusitania was sent alone, in a straight line. The Germans sank it to keep their enemies from receiving untold tons of ammunition.

You can check this out. It was a deliberate provocation to get us into that war. (The politicians liked it so much they actually called it “The Great War”.)

Glenn Jacobs / Eagar, Arizona

Home production of food

T H E O P I N I O N P A P E R glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)

Victory gardens

Letter to the editor;

Anybody remember the yard-gardens during World War Two? (Slogan: “We will win the war with food!”) Many American women took part in the war by digging up their lawns and planting corn and peas and beans and squash from the street to the front door. (Others worked long hours at defense plants.)

Every bushel of produce they grew potentially released truck-and-tractor fuel from the farms to the battle front. Every door-garden potentially released farm-raised food to feed the troops. Every dollar not spent at the grocery stores was potentially available to buy war bonds to finance the war.

We have a different sort of war going on now, and we cannot even tell who the enemy is. There does not seem to be trouble feeding the fighters. But somehow that I cannot tell, this war is tangled up with the constantly rising prices of food and fuel. We may need to follow the sterling example of out mothers and grandmothers, raising a significant part of our food right on our private premises.

Every dollar we don’t spend on commercial groceries is at least potentially available toward paying off our obscene credit card debts. Every trip we don’t make to the store is a gallon or a quart of gasoline not bought and burned. And, who knows? It might even benefit our children and grandchildren to bring food into existence from earth, water, seeds and labor.

Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona