When You’re In The Devil’s House …
When You Are In The Devil’s House, You Will Know It
Chapter 1: Knowing yourself… and where you are
When you are in the Devil’s house, you will know it. There is no doubt.
There are no telltale signs posted, but there is no doubt where you are and you are woefully alone. Your preceding life is a faint glimmer and the house is dark… pitch black, so that you may not even see your own thoughts or recall who you are.
You are in the present only. A thought from your past is noticed as a rapid glance, as quick as an express freight train blurs by a local station. You see it, or you think you see it. You don’t dare turn your head for a look back because you are in the Devil’s house and he is playing with your head. He wants to see what you’ve got inside… what you are made of and what is left that he can toy with.
That you lost control is evident when you bump into a phantom table or trip over the edge of an imagined rug. Just keep searching because there has to be a way out before you lose any hope or recall. Where are your loved ones? Did you ever have any loved ones… a wife, a lover, children, a best friend? The Devil doesn’t care. You are his. You may lose everything. You must find your way or you will be his forever.
You can’t see him but you know the Devil is all around you. You can feel him. There is no hiding. You are in his house, perhaps to pay for some transgression in your past, or it may simply be that he’s been watching you and wants to see if you can handle yourself… alone in his blind house.
Your eyes adjust somewhat to the darkness, or what the Devil wants you to see. It may be nothing or it could be crammed with symbolic pieces to test what you are and where you will go next. How much can you handle? Time is lost. It is an hour, or a day. It slips by unnoticed, or it crawls along like a tiny snail in the sand until you scream with frustration.
You are in his house. How did you get here? How long are you staying? Are you sitting or standing? How do you get out of here? Questions floating by are lost in space. There are lots of questions, but no answers. You don’t care. You just want out, but you are not going anywhere because the Devil is in charge and it’s his house. He knows where everything is and what everything means. You have to make sense of it… enough to escape. He knows you are trying. He’s played at it before with an endless progression of wretched, frightened souls… and now you are one of them. How are you doing?
You don’t know yet and to make things worse… you have been drugged. The clouds in your mind haze over your thoughts and you are trying to see through them, but it’s tough because the Devil wants it to be. The doubts are forming, as you move on.
Chapter 2: Wading through the Devil’s swamp
Shaking your mind from the cob webs isn’t easy. Is this a dream or reality? You don’t know, but you have no time to think about it. You stagger past your options as you stumbled through your life. Try to make sense of what is. Grab onto something. There is no stability. No apparent safe place. It is lost, much as you are now. Exhausted and scared, you finally fall down where you are to sleep, a brief escape from consciousness, a respite from feeling and making decisions. It doesn’t last.
You awaken, stressed. Has it been an hour or a day? Time is lost, as lost as you are for the moment. After all, you are in the Devil’s house. Lost souls float by now and then. Some stop to speak, others glide along some obscure path that is hidden in the darkness, just like the one you are on, searching. You try not to stop or be deterred by all of it. Sometimes you succeed.
You must keep faith in God, Yourself and Love to make it through the darkness and the maze of clutter. The dark house seems endless. These are the tools you must use against the Devil and his house. Little else matters.
Frequently, you doubt yourself. Your mind may not be your own. It’s easy to get paranoid. Your thoughts may scatter and your actions reactionary. You keep juggling what you can. Whatever may happen, you are in it for the long haul. You are in and out of consciousness. The drugs carry you along, even when you are missing. Your reality is a dream and the illusions are your reality. The Devil’s house is a mixed bag of nuts that you must sort through, usually without thinking and more often with a price to pay. You must struggle through it.
Chapter 3: You are what you are… and you are lost.
Hard to tell… are you awake or asleep? In many ways it doesn’t matter. The struggle knows no time. You need to buy a map of the place, but you have no money on you and there is no map anyway. Bearings! You need to find them, but there are no signs or stars to follow. You are on your own. You strain in the darkness to see, to make some sense of it. The Devil has you in his clutches and you are alone, scared and lost. He is chuckling at your dilemma, but you can’t hear him.
Periodically, he sends some disciples to ask you questions that you don’t understand. You try your best to respond and to ask some questions of your own, but the answers are not what you are looking for and the clouds remain. You force yourself to plod on.
The sounds you hear are varied. The whirs and clicks of machinery distort your mind and progress. Sounds are of a toy train moving along some tracks and also there is some sort of clicking or ticking, much like a clock. Whatever they may be, they are hidden from your view and after stopping for a minute or a day, you move on. You realize the sounds are to get your attention and to divert your thoughts. So you try not listening too long, but just enough to keep you safe from any potential danger. After all, you are in the Devil’s house and you are very lost and confused. Still, you hang on to your faith in God, Yourself and Love because they are the only way you can hold onto your life and find a way out of this hell you are in. It continues…
Terrell: Do Not Elect Incumbents
To The Editor:
It’s about to happen again. Nation-wide, Congress has only a 10% approval rating yet we are about to RE-ELECT 90% OF THE INCUMBENTS! How can this be? The only explanation: 90% of us approve of our own representative but want everyone else to elect someone different.
If this continues there will NEVER be meaningful change in Washington. Things will always be the same; right up until our country collapses under the weight of debt and corruption.
Fellow Americans, we must do something different now. You can only vote for/against, and possibly replace, one of the 435 members of the House. Is your representative really worthy of being sent back to Washington? If he/she has been there for 8 or more years it’s very likely he/she is part of the problem. If one of your choices in November is an 8+ year incumbent, seriously consider voting for the challenger. But you say, “The other candidate is a member of the other party and he’s pro this or that.” A freshman representative of either party will do less harm than an entrenched incumbent. In two years it will be easier to elect someone different and the country gets a new congress now!
Submitted by: Glen Terrell, Arlington, Texas
Fiesta Fronteriza 2012 Set For Oct. 5
Celebrating Six Years of Work in El Paso, Paso del Norte Civil Rights Project invites the public to its Fiesta Fronteriza 2012, a “Night of Civil Rights Stars.”
Featured keynote speaker will be Dr.Irasema Coronado, University of Texas at El Paso professor, Department of Political Science.
Tickets to the Friday, Oct. 5, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. event are available online at https://texascivilrightsproject.ejoinme.org/MyPages/PCRPRegistrationPage/tabid/196974/Default.aspx.
Festivities will be held at El Paso Community College Administrative Services Center, 9050 Viscount Building A, Auditorium, El Paso, with emcee Don Williams, president, El Paso Black Democrats.
Several individuals will be honored.
RSVP to Sandra at (915) 532-3799 Ext. 15.
Joffe: ‘Romney Follows His Own Rules’
Dear Editor,
It is despicable that Candidate Romney issued a preemptive criticism of President Obama even as American Ambassador Chris Stevens was being killed in Libya. Not only was Romney misinformed and misguided, but he failed to adhere to a basic rule of American politics: politics stops at the water’s edge. When our country is attacked, we stand behind our President, no matter what political party he belongs to. Romney’s statements demonstrate how corruptly he values partisan politics over uniting around our country. He showed greed for power instead of patriotism. Romney seems to think that he is exempt from our common rules of decency.
Another common convention that Romney thinks he is exempt from is that of candidates releasing past income tax filings during their campaign. If you want to see a person’s character, look at his finances. You’ll see what values he really believes in. We voters have come to expect such transparency from our candidates; it gives us one opportunity to objectively see the real person behind the paid advertisements. Again, Candidate Romney fails.
Yours truly,
Bruce Joffe, Piedmont, Calif.
Remember the Alamo and the Smith Legacy
Erastus “Deaf” Smith is remembered as the eyes and ears of the Texas Revolution. Smith, nearly deaf, also relieved the survivors of the Alamo and was the man who cried, “Remember the Alamo” at the The Battle of San Jacinto, which took place April 20, 1836, in the aftermath of the Alamo massacre. He was Gen. Sam Houston’s most trusted scout and spy.
The right words, heard at the right time, can change history.
History comes to us through time, carried in memory. Erastus Smith rests in an Episcopal cemetery in Richmond, Texas. His blood runs through the veins of W. Leon Smith.
It was the on-point words of Smith’s 2004 editorial, endorsing John Kerry over then-president George W. Bush, in Bush’s hometown paper in Crawford, Texas, which became the framework for the Presidential debates between Bush and Kerry in October.
The editorial, published September 29, 2004, focused on violated promises made by Bush during his campaign in 2000. The reader was reminded of the promises as we lived the reality.
Among these were: The war in Iraq, carried out through deception. The assault on the Social Security trust fund; cuts in Medicare by 17 percent and reduction pf veterans’ benefits and military pay; 50% rise in oil prices; offshoring of American jobs, encouraged by Bush policies; billions spent on government contracts without competitive bids; converting a budget surplus to the worst deficit in history.
The editorial also cited elements of a hidden agenda which only surfaced after Bush took office, including the “dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding terrorism and Iraq.”
The editorial changed the political roadmap. Over the next days the servers which hosted the Lone Star’s website went down several times due to overloads caused by as many as 10,000,000 a day. Americans had been deceived by political rhetoric. Worse was coming.
The flagging Kerry Campaign received a surge of support. On election day, long lines of voters queued up, waiting for hours to cast their votes. Kerry was ahead until all polls has closed. Suddenly, the numbers mysteriously changed. Bush was re-elected.
An election will take place in November. The evidence indicates this election will change nothing about our present trajectory, being already decided.
As we remember the past, distant and recent, we see patterns which instruct, allowing us to change those patterns and so the future.
Fiscal Cliff Could Cost Texas 160,000 Jobs
AUSTIN, Texas – A looming budget battle in Washington could cost 160,000 jobs in Texas. Lawmakers last year gave themselves until the end of this year to reduce the federal deficit by more than a trillion dollars over the next decade. If Congress can’t agree on a plan, automatic cuts will kick in. Known as “sequestration,” the cuts were designed to be unpopular and painful to all sides, as an incentive to compromise.
But tax-policy analyst Ali Mickelson fears partisan politics this election season could prevent a more productive solution.
“That’s sort of the reason that this sequestration is looming. It’s because of that partisan divide. Nobody’s been able to agree, and that may continue to be the case.”
Republicans accuse Democrats of being willing to gut the defense department, while Democrats say the GOP is trying to protect tax breaks for the wealthy. If lawmakers can’t avoid the “fiscal cliff,” Texas is likely to lose more jobs than any other state except California and Virginia. That’s according to a recent George Mason University report, which also calculated that the reduced federal funding would remove about $16 billion from the state’s economy.
More than half of the Texas job losses would come from defense cuts. Much of the rest, Mickelson says, would affect education. But as tough as that sounds, she thinks sequestration might actually be preferable to some alternatives.
“If we have, in response to avoiding sequestration, sort of a rushed one-sided budget that goes through, that could potentially cost more jobs, more services, that could be bigger cuts.”
The automatic cuts were a provision of the Budget Control Act of 2011. They would go into effect in January, and could send the country back into recession during the first half of next year, according to the George Mason University study, with 2.14 million job losses nationwide.
See report at www.aia-aerospace.org.
