Randolph Harris II International

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From Him in Vain the Envious Seasons Roll who Bears Eternal Summer in His Soul!

I would define morality as enlightened self-interest. That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just is not where we are. The question of political resistance is receiving more and more attention everywhere in the World. There are many causes for resistance, and there are many forms it takes. Under certain circumstances we have a right to resist, even a duty to resist. We must have the courage for peace. Our ideas about institutionalizing the aged, psychotic, those with intellectual disabilities, and infirm are based on a pattern of thought that we might call the Toilet Assumption—the notion that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties, unwanted complexities and obstacles will disappear if they are removed from our immediate field of vision. As society’s delusions of grandeur become more inflated, the abyss between them and their actual accomplishments yawn all the wider. And from the abyss arises resentment, anger, hatred, and ever greater delusion; for the less one achieves in relation, the more one gives oneself over to fantasy. We do not connect the trash we throw from the car window with the trash in our streets, and we assume that replacing old buildings with new expensive ones will alleviate poverty in the slums. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26

We throw the aged and psychotic into institutional holes where they cannot be seen. Our approach to social problems is to decrease their visibility: out of sight, out of mind. This the real foundation of racial segregation. The result of our social efforts has been to remove the underlying problems of our society farther and father from daily experience and daily consciousness, and hence to decrease, in the mass of the population, the knowledge, skill, resources, and motivation necessary to deal with them. When these discarded problems rise to the surface again—a riot, a protest, an expose in the mass media (except for when the mass media is involved in the illegal collusion)—we react as if a sewer had backed up. We are shocked, disgusted, and angered, and immediately call for the emergency plumber (the special commission, the crash program) to ensure that the problem is once again removed. Pathological cases of narcissism can be so extreme that individuals are incapable of even perceiving what is going on in the outside World because they are so busy deluding themselves. Nonetheless, there is nothing more attractive than a kind, loving person, in whom we see that one loves not just something or someone but that one loves life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26

However, there are people who do not love life, who are more inclined to hate life, who are drawn to the inanimate and, ultimately, to death. The Toilet Assumption is not merely a facetious metaphor. Prior to the widespread use of the flush toilet all of humanity was daily confronted with the immediate reality of human waste and its disposal. They knew where it was and how it got there. Nothing miraculously vanished. Excrement was conspicuously present in the outhouse or chamber pot, and the slops that went out the window went visibly and noticeably into the street. The most aristocratic Victorian ladies strolling in fashionable city parks thought nothing of retiring to the bushes to relieve themselves. Similarly, garbage did not disappear down a disposal unit—it remained nearby. As with physical waste, so with social problems. The biblical adage, “the poor are always with us,” had a more literal meaning before World War I. The poor were visible and all around. Psychosis was not a strange phenomenon in a textbook but a familiar neighbour or village character. The ages were in every house. Everyone had seen animals slaughtered and knew what they were eating when they ate them; illness and death were a part of everyone’s immediate experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26

In contemporary life the book of experience is filled with blank and mysterious pages. Occupational specialization and plumbing have exerted a kind of censorship over our understanding of the World we live in and how it operates. And when we come into immediate contact with anything that does not seem to fit into the ordinary pattern of our somewhat bowdlerized existence our spontaneous reaction is to try somehow to flush it away, bomb it away, throw it down the jail. These types of people are described as having a “bicyclist’s character,” because such individuals bow from the waist to those above them and kick with their feet at those below them. Those people found nothing worthy of love or interest left in their lives, so they turned their energies to acquiring power over others and even to self-destruction. Perhaps that is why, in some small degree, we all feel bored and uneasy with the orderly chrome and porcelain vacuum of our lives, from which so much of life has been removed. Evasion creates self-distaste as well as comfort, and radical confrontations are exciting as well as disruptive. The answering chord that they produce within us terrifies us, and although we cannot entirely contain our fascination, it is relatively easy to project our self-disgust onto the perpetrators of the confrontations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26

As deception and delusion become apart of the seducer’s way of leading others astray or trying to hide their intentions, these types of people get others to submit to them, then they will believe whatever the individual says. An effective strategy then becomes to hold meetings in the evening when people are tired. That makes them more gullible, and they will offer less intellectual resistance to what they are told. All those factors working together allow seducers to recruit loyal followers whom one deceives because one ides one’s destructiveness from them. There will often times, depending on the size of the audience, be millions of people who do not understand what the seducer’s real goals are. And yet, they will run after individual like rats after the pied piper without realizing where the individual is leading them. This ambivalence is reflected in the mass media. The hunger for confrontation and experience attracts a lot of attention to social problems, but these are usually dealt with in such a way as to reinforce the avoidance process. The TV documentary presents a tidy package with opposing views and an implication of progress. Reports in popular magazines attempt to provide a substitute for actual experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26

 Important book and film reviews, for example, give just the blend of titillation and condescension to make the reader imagine that one is already “in” and need not undergo the experience itself—that one has not only participated in the novel adventure but already outgrown it. Thus the ultimate effect of the media is to reinforce the avoiding response by providing an effigy of confrontation and experience. There is always the danger with such insulating mechanisms, however, that they at times get overloaded like tonsils, and become carriers of precisely the agents against which they are directed. This is an increasingly frequent event in our society today. Many leaders need the masses behind them. They are not individuals who can develop and propagate an idea without applause to help the along. They need applause; they need others’ enthusiasm to feel confirmed in themselves. Their sense of power comes from the reactions of the people they speak to. Narcissists are so full of themselves that every word they speak seems to them to contain the greatest wisdom and truth. However, the need others who believe in them before they can believe in themselves. If no one is beside them, they find themselves on the edge of insanity, for their ideas do not derive from rationally based convictions. They are expressions of the narcissist’s emotional needs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26

The narcissist’s ideas are based on one’s sense of their greatness and power, but they need outside confirmation of that greatness and power. If we take away from these types of individuals the applause and success, then what is left is insane. It is the constant approval that proves to these types of individuals their ideas true, not the inner consistency of the ideas themselves. This type of individual is not interested in the true, but like another demagogue, they are only interested in what brings applause, for it is applause that makes things true. This produces a social confrontation, the desire for an incorruptible leader—a leader who cannot be bribed, who does not have a price. Once again this desire is a recessive trait, relegated largely to the realm of folk drama and movie script, but it exists nonetheless, as a silent rebellion against the oppressive democratic harmony of a universal monetary criterion. In the hard reality of everyday life, however, the incorruptible human is at best an inconvenience, and obstacle to the smooth functioning of a vast institutional machinery. Management leaders, for example, tend to prefer corrupt union leaders—“people you can do business with”—to those who might introduce questions and attitudes lying outside the rules of a monetary gain. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26

The person who cannot be bought tends to be mistrusted as a fanatic, and the fact that incorruptible humans are so often called unpatriotic may be understood in the same light. As is the case of the mass media, however, this mechanism has become overloaded so that having been jailed and/or called an unpatriotic trader is now regarded by young adults as a medal attesting to one’s social concern. Also closely related to the latent desire for confrontation is an inarticulate wish to move in an environment consisting of something other than our own creations. Human beings evolved as organisms geared to mastery of the natural environment. Within the past few thousand years we have learned to perform this function so well that the natural environment poses very little threat to civilized peoples. Our dangers are self-made ones—subtle, insidious, and meaningless. We die from our own machines, our own poisons, our own weapons, our own despair. Furthermore, we are separated from primitive conditions by too few millennia to have evolved any comfortable adaption to a completely human-made environment. We sill long for and enjoy struggling against the elements even thought such activity can only occasionally be considered meaningful or functional. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26

The cholesterol problem many Americans face provides an illustration: one theory proposes that the release of cholesterol into the bloodstream was functional for large hunting animals with primitive weapons. Since the animal was rarely killed but only wounded, one had to be followed until one dropped, and this was a matter of walking or running for several days without food or rest. A similar response would be activated today in fields such as advertising, in which a sustained extra effort over a period of time (to obtain a larger contract, for example) is periodically required. However, these peak efforts do not involve any physical release—the cholesterol is not utilized. We cross the ocean in artificially private boats, climb mountains we could fly over, kill animals we do not eat. Natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and so on, generate a cheerfulness which would seem inappropriate if we did not share it. It is as if some balance between human and nature had been restored, and with it human’s “true function.” Like the cat that prefers to play with a ball around the obstacle of a chair leg, so humans seem to derive some perverse joy from having a snowstorm force one to use the most primitive mode of transportation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26

It is particularly amusing to observe people following the course of an approaching hurricane and following the course of an approaching hurricane and affecting a proper desire that it veer off somewhere, in the face of an ill-concealed craving that it do nothing of the kind. There is a satisfaction that comes from relating to nature on equal terms, with respect and even deference to forms of life different from ourselves—as the Native American respects the deer one kills for food and the tree that shields one from the Sun. We interact largely with extensions of our own egos. We stumble over the consequences of our past acts. We are drowning in our own excreta (another consequence of the Toilet Assumption). We rarely come into contact with a force which is clearly and cleanly Not-Us. Every struggle is a struggle with ourselves, because there is a little piece of ourselves in everything we encounter—Cresleigh Homes, clothes, Ultimate Driving Machines, cities, machines, even our foods like Foie Gras Friday at Bistro Ete. There is an uneasy, anesthetized feeling about this kind of life—like being trapped forever inside a climate controlled Ultimate Driving Machine, with X-Drive and power brake with a booster, a Live Cockpit professional, panoramic glass roof and sky lounge, and only a voice-activated BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant to talk to. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26

Our World is only a mirror, and our efforts mere shadowboxing—yet shadowboxing in which we frequently manage to hour ourselves. Even that part of the World which is no human-made impinges upon us through a symbolic network we have created. We encounter primarily our own fantasies: we have a concept and image of a mountain, a lake, or a forest almost before we ever see one. Travel posters tell us what it means to be in a strange land, the events of life becomes news items before they actually happen-all experience receives preliminary structure and interpretation. Public relations, television dramas like Suits and Legend of the Seeker, and life become indistinguishable. The story of Pygmalion is thus the story of modern humans, in life with one’s own product. However, like all discreet fairy tales, that of Pygmalion stops with the consummation of one’s love. It does not tell us of one’s ineffable boredom at having nothing to love but an excrescence of oneself. However, we know that humans who live surrounded by that which and those whom they have molded to their desires—from the Caliph of Baghdad to Federico Fellini—suffer from a fearsome ennui. The minute they assume material from our fantasies cease to be interesting and become mere excreta. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26

Let us take a look at this word “resistance” for a minute. To resist means to “take a stand against” something, and in order to do that we have to be somebody ourselves. Then we are not so easy to deceive or impress. On the contrary, we are capable of protest, rejection, outrage. However, if we are to be able to do that, we have to realize what we are up against. When dealing with a tyrant, we are not just dealing with certain political views of what will best promote our community’s wellbeing but with components of character and emotion, indeed, with philosophical and religious components that run through those views. We have to look beyond the rational formulations and pay not so much attention to what a political leader says as to how one says it. We have to study the individual’s face, one’s gestures, the whole being. Only then can we see that his leader is a necrophiliac, someone whom we reject from the bottom of our hearts, someone who outrages us, someone we want nothing to do with, someone we can never befriend because all our powers are committed to the preservation of life and to the dignity of humanity, to our freedom. All the necrophiliac’s powers are, by contrast, committed to destruction, to the subjugation of others, to putting them down, to dominating them. We have to stop just listening to words and start discovering who and what this being is who speaks such words. What is one’s nature, one’s character? #RandolphHarris 12 of 26

Everyone is religious in a broad sense of the word, which is to say one has goals that go beyond the mere necessities of earning a living; one has a vision and feelings that lead one to do more than be a machine for eating and reproducing. The acceptance by another person, such as the therapist, shows the individual that one no longer needs to fight one’s main battle on the front of whether anyone else, or the World, can accept one; the acceptance frees one to experience one’s own being. This point must be emphasized because of the common error in many circles of assuming that the experience of one’s own being will take place automatically if only one is accepted by somebody else. This is the basic error of some forms of “relationship therapy.” The attitude of “If-I-love-and-accept-you, this-is-all-you-need,” is in life and in therapy an attitude which many well minister to increased passivity. The crucial question is what the individual oneself, in one’s own awareness of and responsibility for one’s existence, does with the fact that one can be accepted. The ego is a part of the personality, and traditionally a relatively weak part, whereas the sense of being refers to one’s whole experience, unconscious as well as conscious, and is by no means merely the agent of awareness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26

The ego is a reflection of the outside World alone, it is then precisely not one’s own sense of existence.  My sense of being is no my capacity to see the outside World, to size it up, to assess reality; it is rather my capacity to see myself as a being in the World, to know myself as the being who can do these things. It is in this sense a precondition for what is called “ego development.” The ego is the subject in the subject-object relationship; the sense of being occurs on a level prior to this dichotomy. Being means not “I am the subject,” but “I am the being who can, among other things, know one’s self as the subject of what is occurring.” Humans no longer act on behalf of God, on behalf of justice, on behalf of love, but in the name of evolution. Some leaders truly believe what they are acting on behalf of, and carrying out, are the laws of evolution, the laws of biology. Some neurophysiologists think that the principles of liberty, egalite, and fraternity have their origin in the structure of the human brain. Freedom is a necessity if the human organism is to function at its full capacity. The authoritarian character has a structural predeliction to submit, to subordinate itself, but it also has a need to dominate. Those two things always go together; the one compensates for the other. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26

The truly democratic or revolutionary character is just the opposite and will refuse both to dominate and to be dominated. For the democratic character the equality and dignity of humans is deeply felt imperatives, and such a character will be drawn only to what promotes human dignity and equality. Our theoretical premise is that what a person thinks is relatively unimportant. It is usually a matter of sheer chance and will depend on what kind of slogans the person has heard, on which party either family tradition or social circumstances have motivated one to join, on which ideologies one has come into contact with. One thinks more or less the same things that others think, which is a sign of the human tendency to conform and to forfeit independence. What a person thinks, then, we call an opinion. Opinion can be easily changed. Opinion remains the same only as long as circumstances remain the same. And this is the great disadvantage of all polls that determine nothing but opinion. It is beyond the scope of such polls to ask: If circumstances where completely different, what would your opinion be tomorrow? However, in politics that is what counts, and the question of primary importance is not what someone happens to think at the moment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26

 What is important is how one lives and acts. And how one lives and acts depends on one’s character. If we put our question this way, then we find we are in need of another concept, and this concept is conviction. Conviction is an opinion that is rooted in a person’s character and not just in one’s head. Conviction is a product of what one is, opinion is based only on what one hears. In other words, people do not act solely out of economic interest but also out of inner needs, feelings, goals that are deeply rooted in the “human condition,” in the givens of human existence. I think we have to become thoroughly familiar with both these factors—with the economic motives and with the specifically human ones—if we want to understand why people act one way or another politically. Both factors are integrated in “social character.” And that means we have to unlearn something first. We have to unlearn the practice of stressing what a person says, and we have to learn to look at the whole person. When it comes to our business lives, it is interesting how skillful we are at this. If we are about to hire someone or enter into a partnership with one, we are not usually so stupid as to listen only to what the individual tells us about oneself. We want to form an impression of one’s personality. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26

The more egotistic our interests are, the more cautious we are and the more ready we are to make characterological judgments. However, where our social and political interests are concerned, we do not want to take the trouble. We want to be led; we want to sit back; we want someone who tells us what we want to hear, who panders to us, and whom we then reward for doing just that. And so we do not take a close loo at one and are not interested in who one is. However, we can learn to look closely. We can learn it in the natural laboratory that all of us, whether we are children, adolescents, or adults, have available to us, the laboratory of our daily experience. We can find just about everything there. All we have to do is want to see it. And then reading can be of some help, too, thought it is regrettable that psychology, and especially academic psychology, which has booked so many great successes, have not proved very fruitful in the areas of society and politics. Characterology, the science of character, crucial as it is to politics, to marriage, to friendship, and to education, remains of relatively minor importance in the field of psychology, even though it is far more relevant to life than mist of the findings that academic psychology makes. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26

You have to have faith in yourself, to be able to think critically, to be an independent human being, a human being and not follow someone around blindly like one of Mary’s sheep because when you wake up, your fleece will no longer be as white as snow. To achieve that, to learn the art of living and dying, takes a lot of effort, practice, patience. Like any other skill, it has to be learned. Anyone whose growth takes this direction will also develop the ability to know what is good—or bad—for oneself and others, good or bad for one as a human being, not good or bad for one’s success, one’s acquisition of power or of goods. The structure of our brains allows us to do something quite unique: We are able to define our optimal goals and put our emotions in the service of those goals. Anyone who takes this path will learn to resist not only the great tyrannies, but also the small tyrannies, the creeping tyrannies of bureaucratization and alienation in everyday life. This kind of resistance is more difficult than ever today, for our overall social structure spawns these small tyrannies. In this structure the human being is reduced more and more to a cipher, a cog, a bit player in a bureaucratic scenario. One has no decisions to make, no responsibilities to meet. By and large one does what the bureaucratic machinery has laid out for one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26

One does les and less thinking, feeling, shaping of one’s own life. The only thing one does think about are products of one’s own egotism, and they have to do with questions like: How can I get ahead? How can I earn money? How can I be healthier? One does not ask: What is good for me as a human being/ what is good for us as a polis? For the Greeks and in the classical tradition those where the great questions that all thought was directed at solving, thought not as an instrument for increasing control over nature but thought as an instrument for answering the question: What is the best way to live? What promotes human growth, the unfolding of our best powers? Widespread passivity, a lack of participation in the decisions affecting our own lives and our society’s life—that is the soil in which fascism or similar movements, for which we usually find names only after the fact, can grow. Indeed, it is necessary to emphasize that the very fact that the ego is conceived of as weak, passive, and derived is itself an evidence and a symptom of the loss of the sense of being in our day, a symptom of the repression of the ontological concern. This view of ego is a symbol of the pervasive tendency to see the human being primarily as a passive recipient of forces actin upon one. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26

We now come to the important problem of non-being or, as phrased in existential literature, nothingness. The “and” in the phrase “To Be and Not To Be,” expresses the fact tat non-being is an inseparable part of being. To grasp what it means to exists, one needs to grasp the face that one might not exist, that one tread at every moment on the sharp edge of possible annihilation and can ever escape the fact that death will arrive at some unknown moment in the future. Existence, never automatic, not only can be sloughed off and forfeited but is indeed at every instant threatened by non-being. Without this awareness of non-being—that is, awareness of the threats to one’s being in death, anxiety, and the less dramatic but persistent threats of loss of potentialities in conformism—existence is vapid, unreal, and characterized by lack of concrete self-awareness. However, with the confronting of non-being, existences takes on vitality and immediacy, and the individual experiences a heightened consciousness of oneself, one’s World, and others around one. Death is of course the most obvious form of the threat of non-being. This truth on one level is symbolic of the death instinct. Life forces (being) are arrayed at every moment against the forces of death (non-being), and every individual life the latter will ultimately triumph. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26

Human beings are the only creatures we are aware of that knows they are going to die, who anticipates one’s own death. The critical question thus is how one relates to the fact of death: whether one spends one’s existence running away from death or making a cult of repressing the recognition of death under the rationalizations of beliefs in automatic progress or providence, as is the habit in our Western society, or obscuring it by saying “one dies” and turning it into a matter of public statistics which serve to cover over the one ultimately important fact, that one oneself at some unknow future moment will die. Death is, in other words, the one fact of my life which is not relative but absolute, and my awareness of this gives my existence and what I do each hour an absolute quality. Perhaps the most ubiquitous and ever-present form of the failure to confront non-being in our day is conformism, the tendency of the individual to let oneself be absorbed in the sea of collective responses and attitudes, to become swallowed up in das Man, with the corresponding loss of one’s own awareness, potentialities, and whatever characterizes one as a unique and original being. The individual temporarily escapes the anxiety of non-being by this means, but at the price f forfeiting one’s own powers and sense of existence. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26

Impotent people who evade their aggression by repressing it thereupon experience drugged tranquility and free-floating resentment. The self-affirmation of being is the stronger the more non-being it can take into itself. “And now it came to pass in the commencement of the twenty and ninth year of the judges, that Ammoron sent unto Moroni desiring that one would exchange prisoners. And it came to pass that Moroni felt to rejoice exceedingly at this request, for he desired the provisions which were imparted for the support of the Lamanite prisoners for the support of one’s own people; and he also desired one’s own people for the strengthening of his army. Now the Lamanites had taken many women and children, and there was not a woman nor a child among all the prisoners of Moroni or the prisoners whom Moroni had taken; therefore Moroni resolved upon a stratagem to obtain as many prisoners of the Nephites from the Lamanites as it were possible. Therefore he wrote an epistle, and sent it by the servant of Ammoron, the same who had brought an epistle to Moroni. Now these are the words which he wrote unto Ammoron, saying: Behold, Ammoron, I have written unto you somewhat concerning this war which ye have waged against my people, or rather which thy brother hath waged against them, and which ye are still determined to carry on after his death. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26

“Behold, I would tell you somewhat concerning the justice of God, and the sword of his almighty wrath, which doth hang over you except ye repent and withdraw your armies into your own lands, or the land of your possessions, which is the land of Nephi. Yea, I would tell you these things if ye were capable of hearkening unto them; yea, I would tell you concerning that awful hell that awaits to receive such murderers as thou and thy brother have been, except ye repent and withdraw your murderous purposes, and return with your armies to your own lands. However, as ye have once rejected these things, and have fought against the people of the Lord, even so I may expect you will do it again. And now behold, we are prepared to receive you; yea, and except you withdraw your purposes, behold, ye will pull down the wrath of that God whom you have rejected upon you, even to your utter destruction. However, as the Lord liveth, our armies shall come upon your except ye withdraw, and ye shall soon be visited with death, for we will retain our cities and our lands; yea, and we will maintain our religion and the cause of our God. However, behold, it supposeth me that I talk to you concerning these things in vain; or it supposeth me that thou art a child of hell; therefore I will close my epistle by telling you that I will not exchange prisoners, save it be on conditions that ye will deliver up a man and his wife and his children, for one prisoner; if this be the case that ye will do it, I will exchange. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26

“And behold, if ye do not this, I will come against you with my armies; yea, even I will arm my women and my children, and I will come against you, and I will follow you even into your own land, which is the land of our first inheritance; yea, and it shall be blood for blood, yea, life for life; and I will give you battle even until you are destroyed from off the face of the Earth. Behold, I am in my anger, and also my people; ye have sought to murder us, and we have only sought to defend ourselves. However, behold, if ye seek to destroy us more we will seek to destroy you; yea, and we will seek our land, the land of our first inheritance. Now I close my epistle. I am Moroni; I am a leader of the people of the Nephites. Now it came to pass that Ammoron, when he had received this epistle, was angry; and he wrote another epistle unto Moroni, and these are the words which he wrote, saying: I am Ammoron, the king of the Lamanites; I am the brother of Amalickiah whom ye have murdered. Behold, I will avenge his blood upon you, yea, and I will come upon you with my armies for I fear not your threatenings. For behold, your fathers did wrong their brethren, insomuch that they did rob them of their right to the government when it rightly belonged unto them. And now behold, if ye will lay down your arms, and subject yourselves to be governed by those to whom the government doth rightly belong, then will I cause that my people shall lay down their weapons and shall be at war no more. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26

“Behold, ye have breathed out many threatenings against me and my people; but behold, we fear not your threatenings. Nevertheless, I will grant to exchange prisoners according to your request, gladly, that I may preserve my food for my men of war; and we will wage a war which shall be eternal, either to the subjecting the Nephites to our authority or to their external extinction. And as concerning that God whom ye say we have rejected, behold, we know not such a being; neither do ye; but if it so be that there is such a being, we know not but he hath made us as well as you. An if it so be that there is a devil and a hell, behold will he not send you there to dwell with my brother whom ye have murdered, whom ye have hinted that he hath gone to such a place? However, behold these things matter not. I am Ammoron, and a descendant of Zoram, whom your fathers pressed and brought out of Jerusalem. And behold now, I am a bold Lamanite; behold, this war hath been wages to avenge their wrongs, and to maintain and to obtain their rights to the government; and I close my epistle to Moroni,” reports Alma 54.1-24. Here in the center of the turmoil of the city, I turn my thoughts to God. Beneath the buildings, deep beneath them, les the Earth of our Father, the very body of God. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26

God cannot be hidden; whenever life if found, there He is. Great Father, please keep me mindful of you as I walk through the city. Rise, O my folk, from the dust of the Earth, grab thee in raiment beseeming thy worth; nigh draws the hour of the redeemer’s birth, freedom who bringeth, and glorious days. Wake and bestir thee, for come is thy light! Up! With thy shinning, the World shall be bright; sing! For the Lord is revealed in His might—thine is the splendor His glory displays! ‘be not ashamed,” saith the Lord, “nor distressed; fear not and doubt not. The people oppressed, Zion, My city, in thee shall find rest—thee, tat anew on thy ruins I raise.” Spoiled shall thy spoilers be; banished afar, they that devoured. However, in thee, evermore, God shall take joy; as the bridegroom, what hour, blushing, the bride lifts her veil to his gaze. Stretch out thy borders to left and to right; fear but the Lord, whom to fear is delight—the man, son of Perez, shall gladden our sight, and we shall rejoice to the fullness of days. Come in thy joyousness, Crown of thy Lord; come bring peace to the folk of the Word; come where the faithful in gladsome accord, Hail thee as Sabbath-Bride, Queen of the days. Come where the faithful are hymning thy praise; come as a bride cometh, Queen of the days. May the Lord comfort and sustain you among the other mourners for Zion and Jerusalem. Amen. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26

Winchester Mystery House

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