Yellow Brick Road,

Part I

"You can't get there from here," is an admonition that speaks not only to frustrated travelers, but to individual lives and to our national life as well. "In his book, Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning" (1997, Plenum Press), Dr. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and pioneering psychiatric doctor, describes a mass neurotic triad afflicting Western society: depression, addiction, and aggression. We treat them as if they were the disease, expending billions of dollars annually, little realizing that they are but the symptoms of the road we as a society have chosen to travel together

Studies of college students have found an inverse relationship between drug use and meaning or purpose in life. An epidemiological study conducted for the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse found users of marijuana and hallucinogens suffered over the lack of meaning of life more than had nonusers. This puts them in the same company with alcoholics, 18 of 20 who in a study Dr. Frankl cites, "looked upon their existence as meaningless and without purpose."

Finally there is aggression and violence, an addiction spread by the Hollywood and television elite who hire the writers and actors and produce the programs that we see. There is good reason to believe that televised violence, contrary to providing a way of "acting out" feelings of aggression and sparing society, actually increases aggression in real life. Frankl in which,  "children were shown films portraying aggressive acts," and it was found that "increases in aggression occurred consistently over and above the initial tendency to behave in that way." John P. Murry of the National Institute of Mental Health summarizes the results of a number of studies as follows: "viewing televised violence causes the viewer to become more aggressive."

Following that thread, Frankl cites research conducted by W.A.M. Black and R.A.M. Gregson, which concludes that "criminality and purpose in life are inversely related."

Meaninglessness; the tie that binds us together as we travel down the yellow brick road crafted by our self-appointed elites, their spirit guides, and the "child" within, whom our children are now taught to consult.  It is just what the Lord Jesus warned us of them: "And he spoke a parable to them, Can the blind lead the blind?  Shall they not both fall into the ditch?" (Luke 6:39) Dr. Frankl terms it the existential vacuum. It is a black hole of despair -- for nothing can rise out of it. Even our healers descend into it, unable to help those who turn to them. Dr. Frankl cites a letter sent to him, and another to a colleague:   I have had recurrent depressive states until two days ago a psychiatrist at Harvard University (where I am a student) told me bluntly ... "your life is meaningless, you have nothing to look forward to, I am surprised that you haven't committed suicide."

Those crafting our culture have seen fit to remove any sense of meaning from life.  Vestiges of God have been ripped from the public square.  Men and women are explained away as some cosmic accident; electrodes slipping into the primordial slime. Our existence is viewed by those who consider themselves our secular "mother superiors" as a threat to the morally superior animal species around us and the world we inhabit.  In their cloistered minds they believe that if only man could be eliminated, then the buses and trains would always run on time and the world would be perfect.  Would to God our self-anointed thought-guardians had the intellectual honesty to admit that in the face of the world they have built, depression, drug abuse, and violence are quite reasonable and human responses!

What choices do we have,  as we stare at the mud-encrusted footprints of man's answers disappearing down the yellow brick road to eternity?  Do we follow the "isms" that have plodded the path before us, crafted by the elites governing the peoples and nations they have ruined?  Do we join Stalin's frozen peasants, loaded into boxcars and left to die on the Siberian railways in the dead of winter?  Do we remake man in the image of our elites, through the re-education camps of Mao and the Chinese?   Is fascism, Nazism, or some as yet undiscovered "ism" the roadmap we want to follow?  How will we know?  Can we indeed "get there from here?"  And does God have anything to say about the myriad yellow brick roads that individuals and nations travel en route to eternity?

                                                       Author unknown

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I have had this in my files for years.