One Tin Soldier - The Legend of Billy Jack

Here are some of my thoughts. At times maybe obtuse to many, but illustrate much.

During the mid-1970s, I was a young man, at an Air Force base in Central Arkansas. I was young, impressionable and a Christian-neophyte. Just off the base at a Christian coffee-house, where other bored teens and twenty-somethings, went for ‘answers’. But an answer to what or to whom?
Twisted crosses and a 100 or so, New Age Jesus(s) complete with their own band of followers and a guitar pick. In an act of contrition they would whip themselves into a frenzy of speech and prophecy. Everyone aspired to be the next ‘Jerry Falwell’ and who thought Jesus was calling them in to ‘a ministry’.

Perhaps it was the ‘faux tongues’, or the guys with beards and stories of drug abuse, and other sins. It was also a time of spiritual gurus, Mao Tse Tung and a ‘shoe full of rice (Verve Pipe) and cults, out the posterior. (ying yang). It was a quotidian spiral of simulactrum, where recitations and incantations supplanted logic and reason.

Collectivists escaping Communism, Socialism and our father’s spiritual Oldsmobile. We re-invented gods on mountain-tops, flung hyperbole and esoteric banter, that today, we would deny. And it was not Jim Morrison, Puff-the Magic Dragon, or sitting on the dock of a bay somewhere. We had to be somewhere dropping out. Janis Ian’s tome about loneliness and desperate girls (getting what they deserve).

Back in the day, the ‘Woodstock-era’ where hippie-lettuce, LSD and hair, seemed the way to go. But in that, we lost ourselves. The bell-bottoms, ankhs and hair was a painful reminder of narcissistic men, trying to get laid. The intent is still here today, but Billy Jack is nowhere to be found. Not even Van Gogh can paint the dishonesty and sophistry, inherent of the Wall Street crowd. And those dragons, morphing into all sorts of real and perceived maladaptations of nirvana. 72 or so virgins… ugh.

But to the word of ‘GOD’, I find myself on a spiritual nexus, a club where aestheticism and the age of reason, fall predictably short. A spirit, a man and legions of followers, all escaping floods of their own creation and the creator. No CERN experiment will accurately depict creation, any more than a rock that can create itself.

GOD is not a mill for the disaffected to glom onto, but a moral consequence of spiritual neglect and us trying to find meaning, with a box-top and a Crackerjack prize.. The bridge is, Jesus and GOD, above all, and the soft white snow of the Spirit. The end is just the beginning.

Praise God/god, as it were and will be.