Society need to have boundaries. As an interesting part of each human personality, each individual person has been endowed by creation with a collector’s instinct. We collect attitudes, skills, habits, and personality traits. “If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God,” reports President George Washington. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and the Greeks were the first to articulate the notion of natural law, the doctrine that human affairs should be governed by certain ethical principles. Being nothing more nor less than the nature of things, the principles of natural law can be understood by reason. Later, in the thirteenth century, the Italian priest and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) gave the idea of natural law a new, Christian framework. He reported that natural law and Christianity were compatible because God created the natural law that established individual rights to life and liberty. We want to live the full and abundant life that God has promised us. Most people are serious about fulfilling their destiny and daily take steps of faith to put actions behind what we believe. We want our faith to active God’s favor and goodness. Through God, we will find the power to do what we once thought was impossible and know that extraordinary things are going to happen. Only then can we derive some perspective and clarity. We are expecting our miracle. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

However, our culture is becoming a mass of wannabe rebels who live in a society dangerously without limits. The West is no longer, vast, untamed, an expanse to be explored and defined by cowboys and cowgirls, pilgrims, free people, spiritualists, gold seekers, hippies, artist, and unique characters. It has become a state of rustlers, hustler, revolutionaries, and outlaws. Manifest destiny and the myth of expansion, so intertwined with our conceptions the American Dream and prosperity, is at an end. Without a way for us to restore order, we have no way to of challenge the accepted order or rebellion and chaos. McDonald’s burns, the Starbucks window is shattered, and the people who are supposed to benefit from this wait for their lives to get better, work for pennies a day, and dream of signature crafted fresh beef, made when you order, Quarter Pounder Burgers, with cheese. As a result of taxation without representation and price gauging, one million people have moved out of California because crime is high and housing is too expensive. Laws are passed without voter consent and the gas tax and half a dollar per gallon. The result is exhaustion, stagnation, erosion, decline, and hopelessness. People feel displaced from their true time, and those old souls feel the urge to be recognized, to be known for who they are. Theirs is the anger not of the usurped but of the redundant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

There seems to be little left for traditional Americans to do but disappear. The kids are taking their cue from the adults and they are infused with ideas around rebellion and dissent. The old ways of life are gone. However, we are still trying to define ourselves using old precepts, antiquated ideas. We need a new way of understand what law and order is. Trapped between the extremes, we long for escape, a place where we are not constantly turn between unstable leadership and unaffordable lawless living. Our society is changing, as we do not necessarily have the tools to evolve with it. We seek to evoke the traditional ways and understandings, where Americans have priority and one could get a job at the supermarket and afford a house, even as we lapse into recession resulting from inconsequence, from our difficulty accessing what we have been told is our inalienable right: Justice, domestic tranquility, common defence, the general welfare, and the secure blessing of liberty to ourselves and posterity, as established by the United States Constitution. Still, we are concerned about the decline of real community and the rise of false individuality. Individuals are, essentially, powerless. Only communities can truly effect change in society. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

The more division that infiltrates our behavior and lifestyle, the less we are able to band together and reform an ineffective government, support businesses the are good for the people and the planet, or start schools that are based on creativity, achievement, and foster a commitment to learning. We are alone together, reduced to endlessly trying to replicate the feeling of community that individuals once took for granted. So what went wrong? Many have perhaps underestimated the allure, power, and sheer intoxication of blood money and the idea of becoming famous in the age of enforced individuality and collapsing community. Only when we recognize the trap we are in can we even begin to start figuring out how to get free ourselves. We need more people willing to fight the injustices and inequalities, even if it is only affecting one individual and depriving that person of their constitutional and human rights. Ultimately, what we need is a conceptual methodology that will allow us to balance happiness with duty, the need for recognition with the need for self-recognized limits on the efficacies of egotism. We need a new way to understand the self within the context of our new global system of mass production and increasing opportunities for individual creativity played out in the endless beautiful suburban communities. The future depends not on what we can do to make ourselves feel momentarily better, but on going beyond temporary happiness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

We must learn to take an active role in our own sublimated desires. We can no longer afford to settle for anything less than what we have been promised. It is not to awaken consciousness that we struggle, but to sap power, to take power. We are different in many ways, but at our core we want similar things: a society of honesty, creativity, individuality, and communality. Because of our many differences lead to such core similarity, and at the heart of humanity is this urge for new experiences new patterns, and expanded truths, it is better to fail in an attempt to exercise faith than to let it lie dormant and fruitless. God never belittles those who attempt to follow him, but he does chasten those who refuse to attempt anything for him. Lying alone in bed, we should not see destruction, but opportunity—to start our lives anew, to fix behavior and patters of self-destruction that have shackled us. The gentle excavation of our pasts can ultimately shake us free from certain unreasonable situations and them finally, set into motion a series of promising life events. If we are caring, if we are charitable, if we are obedient to God and follow his teachings, our sacrifices will bring forth the blessings of Heaven. We have to find a personal well-spring of power to overcome self-indulgence and selfishness. Remind yourself that once you weather an unusually devastating storm, all other storms are easier to bear. You will most likely recover more quickly from each of the squall that follow. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

When we remind ourselves of the truths that our suffering has revealed, we can empty ourselves of the disillusionment that weighs us down and fill ourselves instead with the wonderful experiences and insights that life has to offer. Some may ask why we as a people and church quietly and constantly seek to change individual while there are such large problems about us. However, decaying cities are simply a delayed reflection of decaying individuals. The commandments of God give emphasis to improvement of the individual as the only real way to being about real improvement of society. The Lord works from the inside out. The World works from the outside in. The World would take people out of the slums. God takes the slums out of the people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. God changes people, who then change their environment. The World would shape behavior, but God can change human nature. Although suffering is always painful, it really is easier to take if you think of it as the key to emptiness, and emptiness as the key to spiritual growth. Stop struggling with life. We receive blessings from keeping all of God’s commandments, and we will be closer to the peace and happiness we once thought our illusions would bring. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6