29 March 2019
DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP! It has become nearly impossible for the will of civilized people in the grass-roots of a nation to grow into the fertile lawn of freedom — while that grass is being relentlessly mowed down by the rusty blades of the powers-that-be in that country. Don’t give up the ship of your own state. Gravity, and miracles, happen. The corrupt shall fall — in God’s good time. In Great Britain, the word treason has been bandied about in ire for quite a while. The word is now synonymous with Government. In France, the latest pretender to the throne at Versailles owes his feckless homage to “Ode to Joy” and not “La Marseillaise”. The fermentation of foul deeds is now boiling over onto the faithful citizenry, those free men and free women who vow to go to their Maker as still free men and free women. Prenez-garde: Beware. Be careful. Don’t give up the ship of your own state while the corrupt elites sink into their own fange and drown amidst their own naufrage.
Those vile fools do not realize their ship of state has sunk with too many corpses aboard it. They keep trying to kick the ship back to life. They don’t realize the more you kick something dead, the worse it smells. It is always darkest before the dawn. I did not entitle my novel thusly because of that truism. I used the title because of countless allusions and images in the draft NOTTINGHAM that evoked THE DAWN. When losers outnumber you, and the losers wear the masks of winners —it is all too easy to doubt your own valiance, your own virtue, your own destiny as a winner. The world gets turned upside down so often that it’s a wonder the poles don’t fall off the planet. The truth shines forth through the murky haze of betrayal only when the wounded and the betrayed are ready to see that truth. Do not allow the darkness of doubt and misery to enter your soul. That darkness can quickly overtake the souls of the free men and women who then — lost in confusion — succumb to the darkness residing in the souls of the unfree men and the unfree women who have sold those souls for power and privilege and mammon.
A person cannot serve God and mammon. The headline news of any day inadvertently proclaims that sacred truth. The dawn of a new generation of free individuals is born each day. That dawn is the brand new day. Look to the light of those little redeemers. The treasonous politicians of any nation discount that light. They cannot see the dawn. They look back, not forward. Do not be tricked into their faulty vision. Do not be blinded by their myopia. The great statesman and orator, Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1797, understood well the venomous beast that hid within any coward. He stated for all the ages: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The time has come for good people to do all that they can, lawfully, to defeat the triumph of evil in their midst. They have met the enemy, and it is within their midst.
From the mists of time, of ancient time, come the brave words of a man who fought evil and paid for that battle with his life. Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus was born in Carthage, to pagan parents, in the 200th year of Our Lord. He became the bishop of Carthage and, as such, he led the Christians of North Africa during savage persecution from the Roman Empire. He became, upon his execution on 14 September 258, the first bishop-martyr of Africa.
We live in a world where martyrs are chosen and hyped by paid political hacks, and where true sacrifice is too rarely mentioned in public. The Ancients lived in the same world. The heart-felt words of this man ring as true today as they did when he spoke them during his brief but momentous life:
“It is a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world. But I have discovered in the midst of it a quiet and good people who have learned the great secret of life. They have found a joy and wisdom which is a thousand times better than any of the pleasures of our sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They are masters of their souls. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are Christians . . . and I am one of them.”
Be a master of your own soul. Yield only to the passions of your heart that seek victory over betrayal — even the betrayal of your own self — to the corrosive forces called despair and hatred. Don’t give up the ship — because you are the master of it. The leeches upon that ship of state claim only residency, and only for a while. In the vast expanse of geological time, and in the construct of time that is called mortal, those leeches are specks of dust that the winds of fate blow away. Perhaps they will be replaced by more specks of dust. Perhaps they will cede to courage and honor, embodied by the type of mortal who can become nobly immortal through virtue and valor, love of country, love of God, love of family, love itself.
Believe in the unrelenting spirit of that old English bulldog, Winston Churchill: Never surrender. Never give up. Envision the heroism of General de Gaulle: The sword is the axis of the world and its power is absolute. Remember the immortal words of the very young U.S. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry: Don’t give up the ship!