No. 974 - IF I WERE THE DEVIL!

No. 974

Jim Davidson -- NEWSPAPER COLUMN

IF I WERE THE DEVIL!

The famous baseball player Yogi Berra had many witty sayings called “Yogi-isms” and one that I love is when he said, “When you come to a fork in the road – take it.”
When we think about our nation today and the road we are traveling, from my perspective, we took the wrong fork. This fact is borne out by a media giant by the name of Paul Harvey (1918-2009) who at one time was on 1,200 radio stations, 400 Armed Forces Network stations and in 300 newspapers. With the combined coverage of this large segment of the media, it is reported that his audience reached 24 million people each day. If I had some extra money I would put it on his stock any day of the week.
One of his most famous stories first appeared in a newspaper column back in 1964. Titled “If I Were the Devil,” it poses an interesting contrast back then to the way things are in our nation today. Again, to me, it makes a pretty good case for our nation taking the wrong fork with regards to our future and our quality of life. The “back then” that I am talking about is when you could leave your door unlocked and the keys in the ignition. Sadly, our young people were not around to experience what the older generation was privileged to enjoy. Now, let me share Paul Harvey’s “If I Were the Devil” and see how you feel about it.
“If I were the Devil I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world; I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man’s effort, instead of God’s blessings; I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people instead of the other way around; I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue; I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership; I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies;
“I would make it socially acceptable to take one’s own life, and invent machines to make it convenient; I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals is valued more than human beings; I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of his name was grounds for a lawsuit; I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young and I would get sports heroes to advertise them; I would get control of the media so that every night I could pollute the minds of every family member for my agenda; I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation. I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation;
“I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie scenes and I would call it art; I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled; I would convince people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agendas as politically correct; I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, the Bible is for the naïve; I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional;
“If I were the Devil, I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are.”
By way of quick summary, I have found over the years that other people pretty much believe what they want to believe and there is nothing else I could say that would make much difference. A-men!
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(EDITOR'S NOTE: Jim Davidson is a public speaker and syndicated columnist. You may contact him at 2 Bentley Drive, Conway, AR 72034. To begin a bookcase literacy project visit www.bookcaseforeverychild.com. You won’t go wrong helping a needy child.)