Lawless

So now that riots have exploded in pretty much every major city, where exactly are the protesters being bussed in from? Rural Nebraska? Maybe the foothills of Idaho? It’s a narrative that’s been bandied about that no longer makes logical sense, along with the notion that these riots are somehow about justice. I’m sick and tired of poor excuses and people trying to defend the indefensible. It’s not our ne’er do wells, no sir, it’s not, the ne’er do wells burning and looting are being bussed in from parts unknown. Sorry, not buying it.

We are seeing likely the worst riots on record, yet every major news outlet is still insisting that they are peaceful protests. There was even one reporter, I kid you not, saying these were largely peaceful protests, while a building was burning in the background. I’m past disgusted with elected officials telling law-abiding tax-paying citizens to die quieter, not to resist the mob trying to burn down their life’s work and to understand the mindset. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t!

You killing random people, terrorizing entire cities, burning down businesses, looting, raping, and destroying private property doesn’t bring justice for the death of George Floyd, or honor his memory. Let’s just get that out of the way. Somehow, in some upside-down universe, the people who were protesting their governors over the lockdown were deemed domestic terrorists, but people burning down police stations, looting, and killing cops are peaceful protestors.

On that note, anyone still remember coronavirus? I know, odd thing how we shifted from put on a muzzle and stay in your house, to cities being flooded with opportunists who think they can get something for nothing, even if they have to bash someone’s head in to get it. I guess rioting and looting make you immune to coronavirus. Good to know. I need a new sauté pan, and a spatula. I guess I’m going to make my cry for justice heard at the local Target. I don’t know; maybe I’ll be incensed enough at the injustice of it all to pick up some coasters as well.

All you need to know in order to understand the agenda and identify who the real enemy is, is that movie stars, actors, singers, and all manner of Hollywood types are pumping millions of dollars into funds whose only purpose is to bail out the rioters being arrested during this fiasco. That’s it! That should tell you everything you need to know.

This is not some grassroots cry for justice. This is a planned and organized attempt at overthrowing civil order. Why the cops are just packing up and moving out of their precincts, allowing them to be burned down, is beyond me. Why average citizens can’t count on those being paid by their tax dollars to protect them and maintain order, is likewise befuddling.

Lawlessness is being encouraged, glamourized, shielded, misrepresented, and fueled. Cops were being shot at in Los Angeles last night, who did not return fire because of the optics involved. Let that sink in. Rioters are being allowed to run amuck, destroy other people’s property, and even take potshots are law enforcement, all because of political correctness, and an underlying assurance, that if you dare defend yourself, your family, your business or your property, you will be demonized, vilified, and branded a racist. Even though all you did was make the choice that your survival was more important to you than that of the individual trying to light you on fire, that you dared to resist, that you didn’t just roll over and die, makes you evil to your core. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Frayed

Ever since I could remember, we’ve all been told you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the go-to cliché whenever the topic of freedom of speech comes about. Evidently, if you have a press badge, you can yell fire at the top of your lungs day in and day out, and if anyone dares point out the fact that there isn’t even smoke, you are summarily accused of wanting to do away with freedom of the press.

Propaganda isn’t news, and fear-mongering to the point that the average citizen is jumping out of their skin with anxiety isn’t constitutionally protected, no matter what media conglomerate you happen to work for. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great gig if you can get it. Every one of these smug, pampered, sanctimonious reporters are still getting paid, allowed to leave their home, and even profiting from the added exposure. All the while, browbeating their audience and shaming them for daring to ask when they might be able to go back to work. The cupboards are bare, the pantry is empty, the savings are depleted, and the landlord is coming by every other day asking for back rent. Never mind all that, says the person earning seven figures, how dare you demonstrate such shameless selfishness as to wonder how you’re going to feed your family? Sit down, shut up, put a muzzle on, and whatever you do, don’t come out of your basement!

Understandably, people’s nerves are frayed, and the longer this keeps going, the worse it’s going to get. We are witnessing a convergence of events that are building up to the perfect storm, and what we are seeing in Minneapolis and Los Angeles is only the beginning. There is an undeniable domino effect at work, and there are those both in media and in government who are ecstatic at the thought of civil unrest.

Such individuals either don’t care or are myopic as to the fact that once you let a rabid dog off the leash, you can no longer control whose throat it attempts to tear out. For the most part, those burning down and looting businesses in their own neighborhoods are just useful idiots, a means to an end, and for the most part, they do not realize they are being used. Couple that with the opportunists who just see a chance to get free stuff, and the anarchists who want to see the world burn just because they like the flames, and this situation has the potential of spinning out of control in an instant.

The rift is widening, desperation is growing, and some folks are doing their best to light the fuse on this powder keg, thinking that they will benefit from it in the long run.  These are people who care not a whit as to how much pain they inflict, as long as their agenda is implemented. As far as they’re concerned, the more pain, the better, because a drowning man flailing about, will take any help offered him without questioning the motive.

Evil has become so brazen as to declare its intent figuring that the church is either too busy hocking potatoes au gratin by the bucket, or waiting on the rapture, that it won’t do anything about it. Whether or not the darkness is right in its assessment remains to be seen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Paradigm Shift

Realizing that we went from wondering how certain things the Bible talks about in regards to the last days could possibly take place to actually seeing them taking place has a chilling, sobering, and altogether discombobulating effect. It’s not so much that we didn’t believe it. Even if I can’t see something in the physical, if the Word says it will occur, then I believe it even though my mind cannot as yet put the pieces of the puzzle together. We walk the walk by faith and not by sight, and even when we can’t see over the rise, we trust that He can. Even so, seeing it materialize so quickly, seemingly out of nowhere, and taking root even in countries where up until this point freedom was non-negotiable, is significant.

It was while witnessing a twenty-something pothead berate an elderly woman for not wearing a mask in a grocery store that I had the cold realization that everything Jesus said regarding the last days, even if it seemed hyperbolic as little as six months ago, was more accurate than any of us would have liked to believe.

We have created an alluring illusion for ourselves. It is warm and comforting to think that your neighbor has your back, that the bond of community is strong and unyielding, but all it took was a bit of pressure, and for the most part, the illusion was shattered into a million pieces.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would take for people to be offended, to hate one another, and betray one another, you got your answer, and apparently, it’s not much. The mechanism is in place, and now they know that all it takes for most people to turn their neighbor in, is a nudge, a suggestion, an insistence that by not bowing down and being a sheeple, they are being selfish. Consequently, dropping the dime on a toddler’s birthday party makes you a hero, a protector of virtue, a good citizen who is socially conscious.

They used the same propaganda in the ’40s, the 70’s the 80’s, and even though we look back on those times in horror, we no longer wonder how people could do what they did. I know, I know, we’re not talking about box cars and gas chambers, but the principle is identical.

There is an undergirding principle that if things get really bad, and we know they will, then the only surefire way to survive it is to belong to a self-sustaining community where everyone contributes their specific skill to get by. If suspicion, division, and hatred can be sown throughout, then the one bulwark against full reliance on the system is removed.

Why do you think certain individuals are so deadest against church meetings resuming? Fellowship fosters a sense of community, it bonds people together, and that is something they are actively trying to undo. The more isolated, alone, and marooned you feel, the more dependent you will be on the system. Alone together? No, just alone!

This has now become the play, and it’s terrifying how quickly most people have fallen in line. This is no longer about a virus if it ever was unless you call individualism, independence, and freedom viruses. These are the things being systematically dismantled before our eyes because if you’re spending all your time being suspicious of your neighbor, you likely won’t notice what government is doing right under your nose.

Today is Memorial Day. It is a yearly reminder that the price of freedom was paid for in blood, and lives, and unspeakable heartache. Wives have lost their husbands, fathers have lost their sons, sons have lost their fathers, all for the sake of freedom. That we would surrender due to fear what others gave their lives defending ought to shame us to no end. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Losing Steam

The law of inertia is pretty straightforward. An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion, with the same speed, in the same direction, unless acted upon by an external force. What the fear mongers never accounted for when they sat down to do the math and figured it would be loads of fun to play at being dictator were the external forces Newton refers to.

If the tyranny were uniform, then the pockets of ever-growing civil disobedience would be nonexistent. There would be nothing to point to, nothing to compare oneself to, and you’d conclude this was what everyone else was going through, the new normal for a season, and just go along. It’s the same reason Communist countries, both former and current, are sticklers about controlling what their populations see and hear.

Back in the day, people would gather around their radios and listen to radio free Europe, because it was the lone voice in a sea of misery that whispered of hope, of something better, of something more. They got a vision of the lives others were living, and it either fueled their desire to swim across rivers or run across borders, or rebel against the iron fists of impotent despots.

All those people that get on rafts, dinghies, inner tubes, and makeshift floating devices to come to America don’t do so out of a spirit of adventure. They are not a modern-day version of Christopher Columbus; they know exactly why they want to come here, and why they risk their lives in trying to get here.

There are a handful of people still trying to keep the momentum of fear going because it’s beneficial to them in some way. Either they like the newly acquired power, it’s good clickbait, and they make more money, or they just like the idea of fewer cars on the road as they drive to their essential jobs. Whatever the case may be, because of the aforementioned external force of seeing neighboring states open up without calamitous repercussions, the people are no longer having it.

The fear porn is losing steam, and it’s not for lack of trying. We went from flattening the curve to finding a cure, from two weeks to going on three months of self-imposed quarantine, from over two million dead to a fraction of it. With each new data point, the average citizen’s willingness to just shut up and take it is dissipating. Fear has given way to frustration, frustration has given way to anger, and soon anger will give way to rage if all these pretend dictators aren’t bright enough to read the tea leaves of this particular situation.

No matter how it goes, things will never be the same again in this country, and I’m not talking about the silly sheep wearing masks in their cars with the windows rolled up. The reason civil society can exist is that, for the most part, people believe that their elected officials have their best interests at heart, are there to represent them and their needs, and would never dare exceed their authority. That illusion has been irreparably shattered, and even every day, ho-hum, milquetoast, suburbanites are adopting a combative attitude toward government. The more they are pushed, the more they will resist, and if not this go-round, at some point, maybe second wave, third wave, sixth wave, it won’t be a sea of people just voicing their disagreement. 

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea Jr.

Sticks and Carrots

There’s no such thing as a good dictator. Some would go so far as saying the only good dictator is a dead dictator, but if I were to say that, I’m sure I’d get at least one e-mail correcting me and insisting that the only good dictator is a saved one. Then again, if a dictator got saved could he still be a dictator?

That said, subjectively speaking, there have been successful dictators throughout history, if the only metric one might use to gauge said success was longevity. Some despots come and go faster than you can learn their names. In contrast, others seem to cling to power decade after decade, even though they’ve got younger, hungrier, more ruthless competitors chomping at their heels, waiting for them to slip up, so they can expedite their retirement with a hollow point or a noose.

Although he didn’t have Fidel Castro type staying power, for a cobbler who had difficulty stringing a sentence together, Nicolae Ceausescu held his own. He was clumsy, awkward, and although his wife had a vicious streak a country mile wide, by all accounts, he didn’t.

There was a reason he was able to maintain control over the whole of Romania for the better part of fifteen years, and it wasn’t his leadership skills. Nicolae Ceausescu understood intuitively, what some of the governors who are having a hard time imposing their will fail to understand. You can’t give the people all stick, and expect them to comply indefinitely. If there is no balance between the carrot and the stick, if you take away people’s hope altogether, then they feel like they have nothing left to lose.

Even the most mild-mannered of men will bristle when all they get is subjugation without reprieve, or a glimmer of future hope to get them through the day. No matter how far off into the future that hope might be, as long as it’s there, there is a goal, a purpose, a promissory oasis.

Even though most Romanians lived lives of abject poverty and quiet desperation under authoritarian rule, Ceausescu was willy enough to offer things like May Day parades, national holidays, and other trifle things that were just enough to keep them subservient for years on end.

It was a playbook that worked until it didn’t, the final straw being an offer of a 5% increase in pay for everyone if they’d just stop protesting and go back home. That time it didn’t work, and we all know what happened from there.

I mention this not because I’m trying to give unsolicited advice to tyrannical governors, or show them a blueprint for success, but to contextualize why we are seeing an uptick in civil disobedience, and people no longer willing to follow the mandates of the power-drunk.

Rather than ease off the throttle, most of them seem to be doubling down, and eventually, sooner rather than later, it will come to a head. There will be a proverbial straw, and it will be enough to snap the camel’s back. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

If The Tinfoil Hat Fits

I’m not one given to conspiracy theories. I’ve read too many, seen them fail, only to be rebranded again, and it takes away from more important things left unattended. How many antichrists have there been already? My point exactly. I still feel bad for that Hungarian hockey player, but I digress. That said, it doesn’t mean I don’t have the ability to go down a rabbit trail or two once in a while.

Plus, just as a caveat, if there is anecdotal evidence to support your theory, is it really conspiratorial? I understand many so-called conspiracy theories have proven true of late, which, by definition, makes the facts. That said, the one I am about to unfurl is one I hope doesn’t turn out to be true, although my gut tells me it very well could be.

Imagine you hired someone to watch over and tend to your chicken coops, filled to the brim with immuno-compromised chickens. Your one job was to keep them safe. That’s it! Keep them alive and safe, and sheltered from whatever was going on beyond the walls of their coop.

Seeing as you took your job to protect the lives of said immune-compromised chickens seriously, the first thing you do is let a handful of foxes into the chicken coop, then make it impossible for any of the chickens to escape.

Perhaps you sincerely thought this was a good idea. I would be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, except for the fact that there was one particular chicken in the coop with which you’d bonded, and rather than leave it with the rest of the chickens, you spirited it away, and put it in a coop all by itself.

If you trusted your plan, why spirit away the chicken to which you’d grown attached? If you honestly didn’t think that letting the angel of death loose in senior care facilities throughout your state wouldn’t have a negative impact, why spirit away your mother beforehand?

This is pretty much what happened with the secretary of health in Pennsylvania. While telling everyone they were perfectly fine sitting in their room and eating their Jell-O, she spirited her mother out of the nursing home and put her up in a hotel.

The governor of New York made it illegal for residents to leave, while people who tested positive for the virus were inserted in the senior living facilities. My conspiracy theory is that perhaps they saw this as a cost-cutting measure more than anything, and if these facilities were perchance state-funded, it would be even more compelling as far as I’m concerned.

It was the perfect opportunity to cut some dead weight. Before you think I’m too cynical, too out there, too conspiratorial, even for the conspiratorial fringe, let me remind you that these are the same people who not only signed post-birth abortion into law but cheered while it was being done.

Do you think for a second that someone who has no qualms about taking a hammer to the soft spot of a newborn baby’s head would get squeamish about some old people dying?

There are two possibilities here: either these people are so mentally deficient that they need to be fitted for drool cups and adult diapers, or what they did was knowingly criminal, and they need to be held to account.

As much as I’d like to believe it’s the first, I’m betting on the second.

I’m sure they’ll come up with some creative explanation, like euthanasia by natural selection, but we all know what it was. You don’t put a fox in a henhouse expecting the fox to behave, and you don’t put highly contagious sick people in senior living facilities where most everyone has a weakened immune system. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

More Bacon!

There’s a small hole in the wall sausage house in our little town that makes some of the best bratwurst this side of Nuremberg. They also have the kind of bacon I grew up with, the thick-sliced bacon, so thick any grown adult would have a hard time finishing three slices. Earlier this week, I went in to buy some hot links and some bacon, and as I was getting ready to check out, the man behind the counter asked if there was anything else I needed.

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “I’ve had shooting pain in my left arm for the past few days, and once in a while, I get short of breath. What do you think I should do?”

The man shrugged his shoulders, and without missing a beat said, “I don’t know, eat more bacon?”

Before I get inundated with well-meaning and concerned e-mails, certain parts of the preceding story were as true as Adam Schiff’s re-imagining of the transcript he read to congress of the now-famous Ukraine phone call some time ago. Yes, I went in to buy bacon, no I’m not having shooting pains in my arms or shortness of breath. And, if I were, I wouldn’t be asking a butcher as to what I should do even though he cuts a mean slice of bacon.

As ludicrous as it might have been to ask him about chest pains, even though he is impressive with a cleaver and a butcher’s knife, it is just as ludicrous to ask the guy who came up with Microsoft Windows what we should do about global pandemics, viruses, and the such.

In this case, since we know the man has been advocating for population control for the past few decades, it would be doubly ludicrous to ask his input on what we should do regarding the current situation.

If someone’s stated goal is to reduce the population of the planet by 50%, do you think his answer as to what should be done to save everybody will do anything other than attempt to further his agenda?

It would be like the butcher telling me to eat more bacon because his goal is to sell more bacon, even though he knows a nice mixed green salad would likely be better for my overall health. I guarantee you my heart health did not enter into his equation. On the contrary, as long as I exchanged legal tender for some of his bacon, he wouldn’t have minded telling me something contrary to reason if it helped seal the deal.

Some people are under the misconception that if someone is smart, had a brilliant idea once, or has amassed a hoard of cash, they automatically become knowledgeable about everything, are well balanced mentally, and only have the best of intentions for everything they do.

If you think that, and you have a strong constitution and a few minutes to kill, you might want to look up the personal peccadillos of one John McAfee, yes, the same guy who came up with the anti-virus software. Maybe that will make you rethink the stable genius of self-important nerds who’ve concluded that playing god is as close as they’ll ever come to being a god.

Just as I’m not about to trust the future of international geopolitics to some hair-brained twit who played cadaver #2 in one episode of a procedural drama, I’m not about to put my kids’ lives into the hands of someone with a god complex who believes the only way to save the planet is to kill off half of its inhabitants. I have an idea: you first, Bill. And, if you feel you’re not enough, I have a shortlist of people you could take with you. Lead by example, you unhinged loon, lead by example. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

A Cauldron of Corruption

How consistent of a liar do you have to be to lose track of the lies you’ve told so utterly that you start contradicting yourself with the zealous fervor of a true believer? How corrupt must an institution be to allow individuals openly planning a coup and the overthrow of a duly elected president to continue to draw a paycheck even when all their machinations were brought out into the light?

We are too large of a nation to survive as a banana republic. If the rule of law is not uniform, if justice is not blind, if the life of a decent, honorable man who served his country for decades can be systematically taken apart and irreparably destroyed because some pencil pushers felt like it, we’ve got bigger problems on our hands than the Chinese flu.

We’ve always assumed a certain level of corruption. At least those of us who are not naïve and understand how the world works did. It’s like buying popcorn at a movie theater; you know you’re going to pay a premium. Oh, wait! You may not be able to relate. It’s like buying a face mask nowadays; you expect a markup because the demand outpaces the supply.

What we never imagined was the level of it. Not even the most cynical of souls could have imagined the cauldron of corruption and deceit that is the entrenched political class. Those perma-bureaucrats who manage to stay on the taxpayer dole administration after administration, growing all the more powerful and influential, while insisting they are public servants.

I realize to most of you this doesn’t matter, at least nowadays, with so many things on your mind, but it should. The reason it should is because any tenuous faith that people had in government and the rule of law has been torpedoed, and resentment is building up like bile in the back of one’s throat.

It’s not as bad as we imagined, it’s worse than we imagined, and believe you me, I have a pretty vivid imagination. By itself, this would only be something the average citizen would be incensed about and denounce, but it’s not a singular event. It’s just another straw added onto the creaking back of a citizenry that is beginning to wake up to the reality that their elected officials, those in government, those who hold the reins of power and make laws that are supposed to be to the benefit of the common working man, are nothing more than power-hungry ghouls who see the voter as an impediment to their vision.

There have been countless moments throughout history when the governed grew disillusioned with those governing them, and more often than not, it ended in violence, death, and overthrow.

What they are not yet understanding is that the status quo won’t cut it anymore. We’ve seen too much, we’ve heard too much, we’ve peeked behind the mask and were horrified at the grotesque things we caught a glimpse of, so being told that there isn’t a smidgeon of corruption, or that there’s nothing to see here and we should just move along just won’t do.

I know, I know, you’re thinking to yourself that this is out of left field, not that important, but just give it a few days, and you’ll have a better understanding. And while I’m at it, since I’m feeling a bit froggy this morning, whatever happened to all those prescient luminaries insisting that the whole Russian collusion thing would uncover sinister plots, imbedded Russian assets, and summarily end administrations?

As George Bush tried saying once, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t bother. Just saying. 

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

Stepping Stones

Whether they succeed or fail, this time is beside the point. They’d like to, don’t get me wrong, they’d really like to get this over and done with, but they’re willing to wait for a little while longer, just the same.

In case you have a hard time reading between the lines, the goal is simple: 1. make everyone dependent on government; 2. Take away the average citizen’s ability to defend himself against said government when it becomes tyrannical. Notice I didn’t say if it becomes tyrannical, but rather when.

It’s a given that it will, because it must, in order to retain the control it wrestled away from the average citizen. Eventually, given enough time and enough screw tightening, most people realize what’s just happened to them. Some are perfectly fine being bleating sheep, doing what they’re told, and not questioning the lack of logic in what they hear. Still, others will instinctively attempt to shake off the shackles because they innately discern that they are unnatural.

If the number of those bristling at the chocking off of their freedoms is large enough, the power-mad pull back and live to fight another day. They understand they cannot do what they dream of doing while people are still able to resist them. As such, they must play the long game and wait patiently for that moment of inattention wherein every plan is put in place; then, it will be too late.

Even if they don’t succeed this time out, they will not see it as a failure, but as another stepping stone toward success. The data they’ve accumulated over the past few months is incalculable. They’ve learned which buttons they can push to incite panic. They’ve learned how people react to having their constitutional rights stripped from them based on nothing more than presumption and failed models. They’ve learned how easy it is to make neighbors turn on neighbors. They’ve learned how far they can push before people start pushing back.

It’s easy to discount politicians as single-cell organisms whose only goal is more power, but it’s that singlemindedness that is dangerous. When someone in power is willing to sacrifice anyone and anything in order to accumulate more power, that is someone you don’t want anywhere near the levers of power.

Whichever way this goes, we have set a dangerous precedent in this country. However long it takes for certain states to open back up, the cat’s already out of the bag. Governors the nation over know that they can turn it off with the flip of a switch, their overreach seemingly has no consequences, and the bruised and battered citizenry will shut up and take it for the most part.

Their first time at bat and they managed to strip away almost every constitutional right, and if the pushback were not so visceral, they would have gone further. How exactly are we helping flatten the curve by fining anyone caught fishing in Louisiana $500? Even if they have a fishing license, that’s still the fine because if you get out on the lake and cast a line, you’re less likely to be at home in a drunken stupor, not knowing what’s going on. We can’t have that, now can we? How dare anyone try to feed their family by means other than going hat in hand to the government?

That they have managed to decimate in a manner of weeks what took over 240 years to construct is both terrifying and impressive. They’ve been building up to this for decades now, and even with the orange-haired fly in their ointment, they’ve somehow managed to seize upon this crisis and use it to their own nefarious ends. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

The Deep End

Other than Alaska, I’ve traveled to every state in the Union, most of them more than once. It’s been a busy forty-five years, and I’ve lost count of how many motels, hotels, bed and breakfasts, cabins, and travel lodges I’ve stayed in. When I first started traveling, I thought it was fun; I’d even toyed with the idea of getting a matchbook from each place I stayed in or some sort of souvenir to remember the trip, but it soon lost its glamour.

There are only so many lumpy beds, smelly rooms, odd receptionists, and overly exuberant next-door neighbors you can stomach before it becomes a drag. I even caught the tail end of the massage bed craze, where you put a couple of quarters into a machine on the side of the bed, and you get to experience what riding a mechanical bull must feel like for a few minutes.  Even with my excessive travel, however, I’ve never stayed at a Ritz Carlton.

Budget motels were more my speed, you know, the super 8, the motel 6, an odd La Quinta here or there, even Howard Johnsons back in the day, but never the Ritz. I figured any hotel chain they wrote songs about was likely out of my price range, but then again, I wasn’t homeless in California.

I’ve been following the absurdity known as California legislature for a while now, having lived there back in the day. By all accounts, they’re no longer wading in the kiddie pool of crazy, they’ve decided to go all out, and cannonball into the deep end.

Not only is the state commandeering high-end hotels for the homeless in California, but they are also providing them with alcohol, marijuana, and methadone free of charge because you can’t enjoy 700 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets when you’ve got the shakes or the jitters.

I guess it pays to be homeless in California. It’s not as though they’re commandeering the Lamplight Inn, or Lenny’s Budget Oasis, they’re going for the premium hotels, as though the homeless would take one look at a Budget Inn, and prefer to go back to sleeping in their own filth under some overpass.

For those of you keeping score at home, thus far hardened criminals, including child abusers, are being freed from prison, and tax paying citizens are being jailed. The homeless are residing in the Ritz with free booze and weed delivery, and the no longer working because the local government said they had to shut down are waiting in miles long food lines hoping they get a bag of beans and rice before they run out.

What about this makes any sense at all? What about this is rational, reasonable, or logical?

The average Joe is growing more indignant with each passing day, and rightly so. There is an obvious and glaring unfairness to all this that just gnaws and eats away at one’s civility, and this is just the beginning. We’re seeing the locomotive of this particular crazy train, not the caboose. With every new lunacy that gets floated by dolts in suits still getting their salaries because they’re essential, those being forced to sit home and twiddle their thumbs or run the risk of being tasered by overzealous self-important lackeys, are growing more impatient and angry.

The pressure is building, and there is no release valve. Rather than walk back some of the rhetoric, it is being amplified, and although there is nothing you or I can do to stop it, we can prepare. What that preparedness looks like is entirely up to you, but if I may offer an unsolicited piece of advice, make sure the spiritual is squared away before the physical is. If the just shall live by faith, and men’s hearts will fail them for fear of what is to come, then it is holiness unto God that we must pursue first and foremost, for only when walking in holiness can the peace of God encompass you. What have you to fear if God is on your side? What have you to cling to and trust in if He isn’t? Everything that can be shaken will be shaken. And when God says everything, He means everything!

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Casting the Die

I’m not one to be overly concerned about my wardrobe. Anyone who sees me regularly knows I give off a borderline homeless vibe when it comes to what I wear because at my age, comfort trumps style. There’s no one I feel the need to try and impress; I haven’t since I was eleven, and it was the first day of Junior High. I tucked my polyester polo into my pinstriped slacks, and even wore my grandpa’s Seiko wristwatch, because, you know, new school, first impressions, and whatnot.

This morning I grabbed a shirt out of the closet, put it on, and even after trying to stretch it out, it was ill-fitting. Maybe the dryer shrunk it, perhaps it’s the lockdown diet, but whatever the cause, the shirt just didn’t feel comfortable, so I threw it back in the closet and grabbed another one that did.

Some things are as easy to remedy as that. Changing course, walking back a decision is as easy as taking off one shirt and putting on another. There are, however, things in life that aren’t as easy to remedy as all that, and the longer it takes to try and change course, the harder it becomes.

If you find yourself standing in wet cement, you’ve got a good day to decide to step out of it and clean your shoes off before you have to lose a piece of yourself to escape it; if it’s quick-drying cement, it’s closer to twenty minutes.

Unless someone just doesn’t know what it is or understand what it does, no one wallows in wet cement in the off chance that the hardening process will not occur as it has every other time it has been poured. Predictable outcomes are predictable for a reason. When you watch a YouTube clip of someone sticking a fork into an electrical outlet, you know what’s about to happen. The only thing you have yet to discover is if the individual survives the ordeal.

If you haven’t heard, there’s a hair salon owner that was sentenced to seven days in jail for not adhering to the lockdown orders in Texas of all places. Although that’s troubling enough on its own, this morning, I read through the transcript of the exchange between the judge and the salon owner, and that’s when my stomach started churning. I’d read eerily similar words in interrogation transcripts made public between suspected Christians and Securitate officials in Romania during the Communist regime.

Just say you’re sorry, and we can make all this go away. Just admit that what you did was selfish and wrong and caused harm to the greater good. Promise you won’t ever do it again, and you can go home to your kids today. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to go home to your kids and hug them? Fall in line, and your life can return to a semblance of normalcy with the snap of a finger. Kneel, submit, obey, or suffer the consequences!

We talk about standing on principle and being principled people until it costs us something to do it. I don’t know how many folks would have taken the jail time rather than apologizing for as she put it, feeding her kids, as this salon owner did, but I’d wager the numbers would shock and disappoint.

Many things are becoming evident during this entire ordeal, some of which are foreshadowing a not so distant future for Christians, and those who believe that freedom is not just some expendable thing.

We still have time to step out of the cement before it hardens. If we fail to do so, it will take buzz saws, tourniquets, and missing limbs to do what could have been done by taking a few steps in the right direction.

Some people are willing to take the gamble that this is the one time in recorded history when the cement will not harden; I, for one, am not. I’ve seen it play out one too many times to doubt that the cement will do what it’s always done. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Heroes!

Once you slap the label of hero onto someone, they ostensibly become beyond reproach. That’s it! They’re a hero, and everything they do is heroic, and if you dare say anything, well, then you either hate heroes, are a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe, or some heretofore unseen evil such as a herophobe.

By the very definition of the word, heroes are selfless, can have no hidden motives, no selfish intentions, no vested interests, or anything of the sort. Heroes don’t get hemorrhoids or irritable bowel; they always have a cheery sunshiny disposition and are the helpers of humanity. They are all younger, less wrinkly Mother Theresas, whose selfless heroism put your selfish motivations like earning a living to shame.

If you dare point out the obvious holes in the narrative, or that hospitals are empty, or that the overworked and underappreciated heroes of the hour have enough time to put out synchronized dance Tic Toc videos with troubling regularity, you’re just trying to impugn the character of heroes, and that just makes you evil. Evil, and jealous, and callous to boot.

How dare you complain about not having any money to buy food for your kids, or verbalize your concerns about being homeless once the non-eviction order is lifted? Any attempt to inject reason into the conversation is just you keeping heroes from doing heroic things like bashing someone’s head in with a nightstick for being two inches shy of six feet apart in a public space or arresting moms for letting their kids go outside and draw with chalk on the sidewalk.

The next time you get fined a few hundred bucks for just being outside, remember to thank the hero citing you! They’re doing God’s work by golly, and if not for their making sure you don’t feel the sun on your face, why the whole world would go to ruin.

Instead of being appreciative of your constitutional rights being trampled, and your civil liberties being abused, you’ve turned into this ungrateful curmudgeon who keeps blathering on about needing to go back to work to feed your family. How dare you? How dare you put your family’s needs above the arbitrary power trips of elected officials with a Napoleon complex?

How dare you try to make sense or employ reason? Why next you’ll tell me that you’re starting to question how much of an expert the experts really are, or the wisdom of attaching a monetary incentive for declaring a particular cause of death as opposed to another. That would just be the straw that broke the camel’s back, now wouldn’t it?

There’s a reason saints are rare. Even with the libertine definition, the Catholic Church has adopted as to what makes a saint; they’re still few and far between. If we take the Biblical view of it all, then we realize even those we’ve branded saints really aren’t because the heart of man is exceedingly wicked, none is righteous, no not one, and all have fallen short of the glory of God, but what do I know, I’ve never been a hero. Apparently, the two are interchangeable, and if you’re branded a hero, you’re also a saint by default.

What if, and stick with me here, we’ve mistaken villains for heroes, and heroes for villains. What if the real hero is the dad trying to keep his kids fed and a roof over their heads, that is being called an outright murderer for wanting to go back to work?

What if the real heroes aren’t the people doing choreographed dance numbers with fake corpses while on the clock, or the tin badge that sees this as the perfect opportunity to harass and demean people already on edge, but the mom that’s trying to juggle three kids, a part-time job, an empty bank account, and a husband who crawled into a bottle a month ago when he got laid off, and never crawled back out?

What if the experts aren’t as pure as the driven snow? What if certain people trying to drive a narrative do have ulterior motives? What if our supposed heroes aren’t heroes after all, but individuals who saw an opportunity to use this pandemic to further their own ends? What if our heroes are just people, with all the baggage, self-serving tendencies, and vested interests people tend to have?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.