Bus Stop

Bus Stop                                                       August 2018

I was there the day that this 50-second story happened. The bus was climbing slowly up the hill from La Jolla Shores to UCSD. If you have driven that road, you know that at the top is a sparsely populated area with a dash of small and large eucalyptus trees.   As well, there is a beautiful view over the Pacific Ocean though at the time, we on the bus were pulling away from it and heading East. The bus driver saw it first.

To his left a man pinned a woman to the ground about a hundred feet into the eucalyptus trees.   He was holding a bread-loaf-sized rock over her and was about to bash her into eternity with a gravity-aided plummet. The bus driver sounded his horn as he slammed to a stop and opened the door all in one stroke. I am not sure that he even bothered to pull over.   We all woke up from our private thoughts, reading the newspaper or conversing with someone else and immediately saw what was about to happen.

The driver was out of the bus first, followed by a few men, myself included. He and two others put a flying tackle on the animal that was intent on killing the woman. One could tell from the guttural noises coming from the assailant’s throat that he had abandoned his humanity in his quest to destroy this poor woman. Had she caused this rage in him? Was he on drugs? What was the source of this conflict? For us, it did not matter, and our only goal was to stop his actions.   We did, and when the police arrived, we re-boarded the bus and moved on with our lives.

I have studied the disgusting behavior of a specific group of men all of my life. They are not unlike the man with the rock. Their desire to destroy, control and subjugate shows up throughout history in its most primitive form. They have never been stopped with logical discussion and a well-planned diplomatic intervention. Only one thing has ever, or will ever, stop the megalomaniacs.   Preventing them from doing damage is achieved by showing potentially overwhelming military strength from the forces of a likely opponent.   Done within a conflict, as in the eucalyptus grove event, an immediate response with overwhelming force is required.   Immediacy requires preparation.

We are listening to the Marines at Camp Pendleton practice night gunnery just now. It happens twice a year for a few days. Sometimes it goes into the early hours of the morning.   They know that the enemy of the next war will not sleep at night and so they practice at all hours to be ready.   Predictably some people in the nearby communities do not like this. Less predictably, they call the Marines “war mongers” and chat online about damage to Mother Earth.

We all want peace, and the generals want it more than anyone. Who would want to send their men into a war and be responsible for the death and the dying? Peace comes through strength, not through the desire for it. The man with the rock, Hitler invading Poland, and Saddam Hussein murdering 363,000 of his own people in one year to maintain “order” are all the same. They were not interested in peace. They wanted conquest, power, land, resources, some times revenge, and money in all its forms.

Even an atheist knows that the megalomaniacs mentioned above were not godly men. Except perhaps to the degree that they considered themselves to be god. Whther they were taught, or self educated, to believe that we are all animals, they did what came naturally – fight for what they wanted and destroy anything that slows down “progress” toward that goal.

The difference is what happens after a war. In this regard, the United States of America is unique in all the world. Here is a list of countries that have one thing in common: Libya, Mexico, The Philippines, France, Japan, Germany, Holland, Egypt, Grenada, Cuba, Kuwait, Iraq, Belgium, and Panama. America invaded with the intention of stopping a war and when things were stabilized, our military left.

The enemy of mankind – Satan – who roams the world looking for trouble, or making it, is exactly the same as those men with no rules but their own. We need to live sin-free lives in order to be covered and protected from him. We need to read the Bible to be prepared for that warfare. We need to band together in overwhelming forces for good. We need to go into difficult situations and hit hard with love and support and then go home when there is no longer a need. I pray that the Lord will show each of us when that kind of action is necessary and that we will know that He promised He would provide what we need to accomplish His good works.