No other feeling in the soul of the human can bring the joy and happiness than that of knowing you are doing all you can to become righteous. Decision virtually fall into place when you make feelings part of the equation. We live in a time when many men and women do not prescribe morality to their actions, and so they believe that what they do has only social consequences. In this they deny God, and they also deny that things are either right or wrong. The word righteousness is a most interesting and unique word. It is an umbrella word that spreads out and covers all the attributes of God. A person, then, who is righteous is Godly or Godlike. Right and wrong do exist and ae opposite to each other. The actions of humankind do have moral consequences. There is currently an immigration debate going on in American about border security. It is relevant to look at the reality of the issue. For instance, in 1819 Harlan County was founded by eight immigrant families from the Northern regions of the British Isles. They had come to Virginia in the eighteenth century and then moved west into the Appalachians in search of land. The county was never wealthy. For its first one hundred years, it was thinly populated, rarely numbering more than ten thousand people. The first settlers kept pigs and herded sheep on the hillsides, scratching out a living on small farms in the valleys. They made whiskey in backyards stills and felled trees, floating them down the Cumberland River in the spring, when the water was high. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

Until well into the twentieth century, getting to the nearest train station was a two-day wagon trip. The only way out of town was up Pine Mountain, which was nine steep miles on a road that turned on occasion into no more than a muddy, rocky trail. Harlan was a remote and strange place, unknown by the larger society around it, and it might well have remained so but for the fact that two of the town’s founding families—the Howards and the Turners—did not get along. The patriarch of the Howard clan was Samuel Howard. He built the town courthouse and the jail. His counterpart was William Turner, who owned a tavern and two general stores. Once a storm allegedly blew down his fence to the Turner property, and a neighbor’s cow wandered onto their land. William Turner’s grandson Devil Jim shot the cow dead. The neighbor was too terrified to press charges and fled the country. Another time, a man tried to open a competitor to the Turners’ general store. The Turners had a word with him. He closed the store and moved in Indiana. Eventually the county was in an uproar because there were so many murders over insults, cheating in card games, and as retaliation. Harlan, Kentucky was not in harmony. Wix Howard killed Little Bob Turner over a game of poker. When a group of Tuners insulted Mrs. Howard. She told her son Wilse Howard, and the following week he exchanged gunfire with another of the Tuner’s grandsons, young will Turner, on the road to Hagan, Virginia. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

That night, one of the Turners and a friend attacked the Howard home. The two families then clashed outside the Harlan courthouse. In the gunfire, Will Turner was shot and killed. A contingent of Howards then went to see Mrs. Turner, the mother of Will Turner and Little Bob Turner to ask for a truce. She declined: “You can’t wipe out that blood,” she said, pointing to the dirt where her son had died. Things quickly went from bad to worse. Basically, the two families kept ambushing each other and killing them and their friends. It started off as one or two at a time and spiraled out of control until groups of six or more were being killed in rapid succession. And the rate at which the Howards and the Turners were killing one another was almost identical to clashes in other small towns up and down the Appalachians. In the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud on the West Virginia-Kentucky border not far from Harlan, several dozen people were killed in a cycle of violence that stretched over twenty years.  And there were several other well known feuds such as: the French-Eversole feud in Perry County, Kentucky, in which twelve were killed. There was the Martin-Tolliver feud, in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the mid-1880, which featured thee gun-fights, three ambushes, and two house attacks, and ended in a two-hour gun battle involving one hundred armed men. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

There was also the Baker-Howard feud in Clay County, Kentucky, which began in 1806, with an elk-hunting party gone bad, and did not end until 1930s, when a couple of the Howards killed three Bakers in an ambush. There were other less known feuds, but you get the point, it was violent and deadly. The Kentucky legislator Harry Caudill once looked in a circuit court clerk’s office in one Cumberland Plateau town and found one thousand murder indictment stretching from the end of the Civil War, in the 1860s, to the beginning of the twentieth Century—and for a region that never numbered more than fifteen thousand people and where many violent acts never even made it to the indictment stage. Harry Caudill reported of a murder trial in Breathitt County—Bloody Breathitt, as it came to be known—that ended abruptly when the defendant’s father, a man of about fifty with a huge handle bar whiskers and two immense pistols, walked up to the judge and grabbed his gavel: The feudist rapped the bench and announced, “Court’s over and ever’ body can go. We ain’t agoin’ to have any court here this term, folks.” The red-faced judge hastily acquiesced in this extraordinary order and promptly left town. When the court convened at the next term the court and sheriff were bolstered by sixty militiamen, but by then the defendant was not available for trial. He had been slain from ambush. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

When one family fight with another, it is a feud. When lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range, it is a pattern. What was the cause of the Appalachian pattern? The region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of culture honor. Cultures of honor have to make it clear, through their words and deeds, that they are not weak. They have to be wiling to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to their reputation—and that is what a culture of honor means. It is a World where a person’s reputation is at their center of their livelihood and self-worth. So why was Appalachia the way it was? It was because of where the original inhabitants of the region came from. The so-called American backcountry states—from the Pennsylvania boarder south and west through Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina, and the northern end of Alabama and Georgia—were settled overwhelmingly by immigrants from the World’s most Ferocious cultures of honor. They were Scotch-Irish—that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern countries of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland. The borderlands—as this region was known—were remote and lawless territories, much like a lot of South America, that had been fought over for hundreds of years. The people of the region were steeped in violence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

The people that colonized the violent Appalachia region were herdsmen, scraping out a living on rocky and infertile land. They were clannish, responding to the harshness and turmoil of their environment by forming tight family bonds and placing loyalty to blood above all else. And when they immigrated to North American, they moved into the American interior, to remote, lawless, rocky, and marginally fertile places (as California has become) like Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the New World the culture of honor they had created in the Old World. To the first settlers, the American backcountry was a dangerous environment. The territory was without established government or rule of law. This is the same direction California is going by becoming a sanctuary state. The triumph of a culture of honor helps to explain why the pattern of criminality in the American South had become so distinctive. Murder rates higher than in the rest of the country. However, crimes of property and stranger crimes—like muggings—are lower. In contrast to the South, California is becoming a culture of shame and experiencing high crimes of all kinds because people feel entitled to disregard the law and do whatever they want to do because the governor and many of the cities mayors support illegal immigration and selective enforcement of the laws. In the South, violence was not for economic gain. It was personal. You fought over honor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

In righteousness there is great simplicity. In every case that confronts us in life there is either a right way or a wrong way to proceed. If we choose the right way, we are sustained in our actions by the principles of righteousness, in the which there is power from the Heavens. If we choose the wrong way and act on that choice, there is no such Heavenly promise nor power, and we are alone and destined to fail. The light of the spirit is organized as a communication system to transmit concepts of truth into the minds of the children of God. The Holy Ghost, by the way of the spirit, will enlighten our minds and give us clarity of understanding of concepts of truth if we obey the laws which govern the use of this spirit. This is the way that our Father in Heaven teaches us right from wrong. If we are willing to learn his ways and follow them, we will never have to guess, but we will always know for sure the difference between right and wrong. In righteousness there is the fulfillment of faith and hope. Every blessings that God has promised his children is predicated upon obedience to his laws and commandments. Obedience to his laws and commandments is what makes us righteous, and that righteousness qualifies us to be worthy of promised blessings. To get beyond your pain, you have to move through—not around—it. Your feelings are a lot easier to take care of once you let them inside and make them live by your rules instead of letting them run around you in circles begging to be fed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

When you connect yourself consciously to your feelings, your thoughts and speech become anchored in your emotional experience. You are sizing up a situation in light of how you feel about it, not judging others. This approach improves your communication skills, because when you speak in terms of what you want or need, others listening without becoming defensive. Each of us lives with his or her own situation. There are challenges with health, economy, literacy, singleness, loneliness, oppression, abuse, transgression, and a never-ending list of existing conditions. The solution to all these challenges is righteousness. If we act upon God’s laws and commandments, we will be forgiven of our disobedience and become more righteous; thus repentance leads us to righteousness. Eternal God and King of all creation, who hast granted us to arrive at this hour, forgive us the wins that we may have committed today in thought, word and deed, and cleanse, Lord, our humble souls from all defilement of flesh and spirit. And grant us, Lord, to pass the sleep of this night in peace, that when we rise from our beds we may please your most holy name all the days of our life and conquer our flesh and the fleshless foes that war with us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

And deliver us, Lord, from vain and frivolous thoughts, and from evil desires which defile us. For thine is the kingdom, the power and glory, now and forever and to the ages of ages. The value of virtue has been given a symbolic color, like the other values. The color of virtue is gold because gold is pure. It shines. It is soft, not harsh or brash. It is precious. Gold must be refined. As we live pure and virtuous lives, we will be refined by our lives experiences, and as we trust in the Lord and draw closer to him, he will make our hearts as gold. In order to be virtuous and remain virtuous, we must be true to our divine identity and establish patterns of thought and behavior based on high moral standards. These standards are eternal and do not change. We are not common. We are not ordinary. We are children of God. In order to reach our sublime destiny, we need each other, and we need to be unified. We need, as the Lord counseled, to uphold honest, wise, and good people wherever they are found and to recognize that there are among all sects, parties, and denominations those who are kept from the truth because they know not where to find it. There will be a time when righteousness will come down from Heaven, and truth will be sent forth out of the Earth to bear, once more, the testimony of our Savior and his atoning mission. Wherever we live in the World, we have been molded as a people to the instruments of the Lord’s peace. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9