"The Righteousness Of Our Cause"......Has Departed

                The speech was composed....probably by Ted Sorenson....and typed out on a sheet of paper. The young president with actual ideals....had looked it over....enough that he could stand before his audience in Dallas and....glancing down every few sentences....give it with his usual flair of Harvard and Camelot. Almost exactly twenty years earlier this man was towing by way of a rope in his teeth....a wounded sailor....in shark infested waters of the south Pacific.
                Of course he would never give that speech....but the paper surely is filed somewhere in the archives of this 35th President of the United States. Sorenson....or whoever....constructed the last sentence as a poetic Judeo/Christian benediction. It came from the 127th Psalm of the King James Bible....and was the second half of the very first verse...."Except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
                 It's odd....but understandable why only the second part of the verse was in the speech....for the first part reads...."Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it." The latter....the second half....or the part that the young president was to say....acknowledged that God protects the city....something that all Americans refer to when they say...."God bless America"....but the former....or the first half of the verse....was a little too personal....a little too specific....inferring that God is actually building America....implying that it is His design....and something is required of us.
                 That is well enough though....and we can be satisfied with a half verse of God's word....but it is the words that President Kennedy was to lead into the Bible verse....that are the courtroom charges against us today....for those words never spoken were...."The righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength....for it was written long ago...."
                  These last 250 years have been a struggle with our conscience....in the way that we treated the inhabitant of this land mass before us....and in how we kidnapped....murdering many in the process....a weaker race of people....to build our 'city.'
                   Similar to the conviction of the people of ancient Nineveh....after seeing and hearing the fish belly and sun bleached-out prophet Jonah....who repented with mortification....we also showed signs of mortification in the middle of the carnage of the Civil War.
                    It took Nineveh about....(we do not know the exact dates)....about 150 years before Belshazzar saw the fingers writing on the wall of the grand feast in the....what could be described as a ballroom....with a thousand present....and it has taken roughly 150 years for us in America to shuck off the smelly husk of mortification....to become what we are today....for we have little to no righteousness in our cause anymore....as our president has been for seven years now dreaming of billions of dollars in oil....sitting right there....next door to us....and how we today have little to no concern at all for the alien in our midst....as if we had no part in this....but scoop them up as in a vacuum cleaner....the good and the bad....anyone....to be dumped somewhere....anywhere that we do not have to be reminded of them....or in how we demand every penny that is perceived to be owed to us....no matter who suffers in the collection process.
                     The mother called the child's name....Ichabod....which means....'the glory has departed'....for the rotten sons of Eli thought that merely saying in effect....'God bless Israel'....would cover their sins. The handwriting is on the wall for us also....as we have been weighed in the balances and found wanting....and our kingdom has been divided and given away!