"If the government is really ticked at you, it wouldn't take much to shut down your car, your phone, your locks, your lights, your appliances, your mattress pad, your toilet … do you see where I'm going with this? You would become socially paralyzed."
If they take away everything, then you have nothing to lose. More likely, they will allow you just enough to scrape by, with a full workload to keep you occupied and out of trouble.
Winston Smith in the book 1984, for example, was socially paralyzed while having full-time employment, and he only broke out of it briefly before being stomped back down.
The solution is to thrive on a spiritual level, creatively deal with the physical deprivation, and wait on God.
A boomer apologizes, albeit without much clarity.
"It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs," Jesus said; Matthew 15:26.
I recently understood that I am spending my life in rebuilding spiritual and practical foundations that had been foolishly undermined by previous generations.
Several months ago I was reading a nonfiction book by Christian author Paul Tournier, and made it about three-quarters of the way through before being drawn away to other things.
When I picked it up this last week and finished reading it, I found references to about a dozen Bible passages that had come up in my daily Bible readings in the interim, mostly obscure Old Testament personages with a variety of afflictions; Tournier was a Swiss doctor famous for connecting his Christianity with his medical practice.
I also read a Christian fiction book this last week: Deadline, by Randy Alcorn. One day, what I read in the book mirrored my morning Bible reading on that same day.
"A work of creation was three-fold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly; the Creative Idea, timeless and passionate, which is the image of the Father; the Creative Energy, begotten of the idea and working in time, which is the image of the Word; the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the individual soul, which is the image of the indwelling Spirit."
-- P. D. James, summarizing Dorothy L. Sayers' description
