Truth is Fallen in the Street

In 1880 James A. Garfield was elected President of the United States, an office which he occupied for only 200 days. He was shot at a Washington railroad station by a disgruntled attorney who had sought unsuccessfully to obtain a consular appointment from the President. He is remembered as the second President to die from an assassin’s bullet.

It was not the bullet, however, that killed him. Immediately after being shot, though in great pain, the President remained conscious. It was the events that occurred in the days and weeks that followed that caused the eventual death of James Garfield. No less than 16 doctors attended him at one time or another, each probing deeper with their unsanitary fingers and surgical instruments searching for the elusive bullet. The result was that a three inch bullet wound became a 20 inch long canal stretching from his lower rib cage to his groin. The wound was now so severely infected that an additional surgery was performed attempting to remove the infection.

It was later determined at the autopsy that the bullet had encapsulated itself and was actually causing little risk to the President. He died from a heart attack: a result of the infection caused by the unsanitary probing of the doctors who were supposed to be helping him. He would have survived (just as hundreds of wounded Civil War Veterans survived with bullets intact) if they had just left him alone.

Today America has a massive wound which is being continuously infected with the unsanitary philosophy of social engineers who scoff at truth and wisdom just as Garfield’s doctors ridiculed the newly discovered relationship between germs and infection. Isaiah 59:14 accurately characterizes our condition:  “And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.”

Our country stood strong for over 200 years on the foundation established by our founding fathers.  Abandoning it for the sake of appeasing those who vilify truth will only hasten America’s death.