Something is happening of historic proportions

I am a student of history. Professionally. I have written 15 books in six languages, and have studied it all my life. I think there is something monumentally large afoot, and I do not believe it is just a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis. Yes these exist, but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus.

Something of historic proportions is happening. I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes, a perfect storm may be brewing, but there is something happening within our country that has been evolving for about ten - fifteen years. The pace has dramatically quickened in the past two.

We demand and then codify into law the requirement that our banks make massive loans to people we know they can never pay back? Why?

We learn just days ago that the Federal Reserve, which has little or no real oversight by anyone, has “loaned” two trillion dollars (that is $2,000,000,000,000) over the past few months, but will not tell us to whom or why or disclose the terms. That is our money. Yours and mine. And that is three times the 700B we all argued about so strenuously just this past September. Who has this money? Why do they have it? Why are the terms unavailable to us? Who asked for it? Who authorized it? I thought this was a government of “we the people,” who loaned our powers to our elected leaders. Apparently not.

We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our economy. Why?

We have intentionally dumbed down our schools, ignored our history, and no longer teach our founding documents, why we are exceptional, and why we are worth preserving. Students by and large cannot write, think critically, read, or articulate. Parents are not revolting, teachers are not picketing, school boards continue to back mediocrity. Why?

We have now established the precedent of protesting every close election (now violently in California over a proposition that is so controversial that it wants marriage to remain between one man and one woman. Did you ever think such a thing possible just a decade ago?). We have corrupted our sacred political process by allowing unelected judges to write laws that radically change our way of life, and then mainstream Marxist groups like ACORN and others to turn our voting system into a banana republic. To what purpose?

Now our mortgage industry is collapsing, housing prices are in free fall, major industries are failing, our banking system is on the verge of collapse, social security is nearly bankrupt, as is medicare and our entire government, our education system is worse than a joke (I teach college and know precisely what I am talking about)–the list is staggering in its length, breadth, and depth. It is potentially 1929 x ten. And we are at war with an enemy we cannot name for fear of offending people of the same religion, who cannot wait to slit the throats of your children if they have the opportunity to do so.

And now we have elected a man no one knows anything about, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, let alone a town as big as Wasilla, Alaska. All of his associations and alliances are with real radicals in their chosen fields of employment, and everything we learn about him, drip by drip, is unsettling if not downright scary (Surely you have heard him speak about his idea to create and fund a mandatory civilian defense force stronger than our military for use inside our borders? No? Oh of course. The media would never play that for you over and over and then demand he answer it. Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter and $150,000 wardrobe is more imporant.)

This man campaigned on bringing people together, something he has never, ever done in his professional life. In my assessment, Obama will divide us along philosophical lines, push us apart, and then try to realign the pieces into a new and different power structure. Change is indeed coming. And when it comes, you will never see the same nation again.

And I thought I would never be able to experience what the ordinary, moral German felt in the mid-1930s. In those times, the savior was a former smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the streets, about whom the average German knew next to nothing. What they did know was that he was associated with groups that shouted, shoved, and pushed around people with whom they disagreed; he edged his way onto the political stage through great oratory and promises. Economic times were tough, people were losing jobs, and he was a great speaker. And he smiled and waved a lot. And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear that his “brown shirts” would bully them into submission. And then, he was duly elected to office, a full-throttled economic crisis at hand [the Great Depression]. Slowly but surely he seized the controls of government power, department by department, person by person, bureaucracy by bureaucracy. The kids joined a Youth Movement in his name, where they were taught what to think. How did he get the people on his side? He did it promising jobs to the jobless, money to the moneyless, and goodies for the military-industrial complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, across Europe, and across the world.

He did it with a compliant media–did you know that? And he did this all in the name of justice and . . . change. And the people surely got what they voted for.

Read your history books. Many people objected in 1933 and were shouted down, called names, laughed at, and made fun of. When Winston Churchill pointed out the obvious in the late 1930s while seated in the House of Lords in England (he was not yet Prime Minister), he was booed into his seat and called a crazy troublemaker. He was right, though.

Don’t forget that Germany was the most educated, cultured country in Europe. It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories, and universities. And in less than six years–a shorter time span than just two terms of the U. S. presidency–it was rounding up its own citizens, killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and neighbors against neighbors. All with the best of intentions, of course. The road to Hell is paved with them.

As a practical thinker, one not overly prone to emotional decisions, I have a choice: I can either believe what the objective pieces of evidence tell me (even if they make me cringe with disgust); I can believe what history is shouting to me from across the chasm of seven decades; or I can hope I am wrong by closing my eyes, having another latte, and ignoring what is transpiring around me.

Some people scoff at me, others laugh, or think I am foolish, naive, or both. Perhaps I am. But I have never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them exactly what I believe–and why I believe it.

What follows is an article written for a website called "Rapture Ready." It is one of many articles the website's creator does on a weekly basis. The article is written from a conservative protestant christian viewpoint, so if that offends anyone here please look past that. But look at what was said by Glenn Beck. It really is an eye opener.

"In the Blink of an Eye”

Working out has never been something I have looked forward to in the course of trying–as they say—to prevent the temple from becoming a coliseum. So, I surround myself with audio that helps take my mind off of the discomfort–even the fleeting pains—that come with the sweat equity one must put into keeping this flesh useable for as long as possible in striving for quality of life.

Radio talk shows are usually the format I choose to take my mind from the physical exertion I’ve never found particularly a thing of joy. So, it was with welcome surprise that I heard a week or so ago the well-known talk host, Glenn Beck, filling the airways on my radio at a convenient morning hour. I have since been listening to His syndicated show that recently was chosen to replace other programming on the station to which I’ve tuned for a number of years.

Beck’s religious belief system is Mormonism, and that system doesn’t include any of the beliefs we of the premillennial, pre-trib eschatological view hold. I preface the balance of this commentary with this because of the profound nature of Mr. Beck’s talking points on the strange, troubling times in which America and the world are embroiled.

He believes, I infer from listening to him for these past days, as do I and many of my colleagues and others, that the changes proposed by the impending Obama administration, combined with the national and international economic meltdown, portend something of an apocalyptic future for the planet, should things continue in the same direction. The talk show host seems, as a matter of fact, even more pessimistic in his outlook than many of the pre-trib Christian emailers Todd and I hear from on a daily basis. His thoughts are downright morose in some instances, while he pontificates on things of the future.

Beck was one of the few public voices that predicted (in 1999) that if Osama bin Laden wasn’t captured or killed, New York City skyscrapers would soon have dead bodies in them. This, I’m sure, he based upon the bombing of the twin Trade towers by bin Laden’s cohorts in 1993.

We know, of course, what happened on September 11, 2001.

It was with a chill running down my spine while showering after the workout that I listened to Glenn Beck talk about what he sees for this nation in the near future. While the content of his talk was on the surface disturbing, I have to admit a part of what he said–one line—confirmed in my mind that what he spoke was Holy Spirit engendered and intended to comfort. This, totally without the talk host having any idea of the astounding thing he had just said, I’m almost certain.

Mr. Beck said (I paraphrase) that America is on a track that is taking it at phenomenal speed toward the darkest hours of its history. He said further that he believed that by this time next year–by Christmas, as he refined his thoughts, America will be unrecognizable as she has been known.

He then said something that caused the chill down the spine to feel like “the Tingler” was portrayed to feel in that old Vincent Price horror movie, if anyone remembers that film. Beck said that America’s and the world’s move into that darkest time of history would not come incrementally. That is, things would not simply get worse and worse morally and economically until the point is reached that the world is irretrievably lost. He said that he believed that the country and the world would experience a great cataclysmic event that would be greater than the attacks of 9/11/01. The great, all-consuming crash into the abyss of calamity will come in an instant. I inferred that Mr. Beck was talking along the lines of the geopolitical, not the supernatural.

But, it was his next words that were the most chilling. He said he believed that the event would happen suddenly, and forever change the world for the worse. He said that it would happen–and now I quote him—“in the blink of an eye.”

The Apostle Paul gave the same prediction nearly two millennia ago. He knew nothing of stock markets that could crash, nuclear weapons that are capable of ending all human life on earth, of a nation so blessed--both materially and spiritually--that it far surpasses any civilization in history in ability to disseminate the gospel through technologies that make living life exponentially better than anything Solomon experienced...a nation that continues to degenerate morally into one over which its forefathers would weep bitterly, should they see the levels of debauchery and antithesis to U.S. constitutional governance to which it has fallen.

Paul prophesied a “blink-of-the-eye” moment of change that will disastrously alter forever life on this planet of rebellious earth-dwellers, which is what the KJV calls those who will not accept Christ and turn from their wicked ways: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51-52).

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