2009-08-26

Tribute to Sydney Earl Allen, Jr.

2009-08-25 1800 PDT

Loma Linda University Church Chapel, Loma Linda, CA, formerly free united States


My name is Earl, and I have a few karmic failures to cross off my list, most notably my recent lack of honor for the man whose genetic code I share with my siblings.


My father was a heretic. Heretics are necessary. Heretics are important. I’m speaking, of course, of heretics like Lao Zi, Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, Galileo Galilei, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, Ellen White, Mohandas Ghandi, Ayn Rand, and my father, Sydney Earl Allen, Jr. He followed in the footsteps of that civil heretic, Desmond Doss, the conscientiously objecting medic whose beliefs did not allow him to be enslaved by the force and violence of the un-Constitutional draft imposed on him by his political masters in their attempt to override his conscience.


Paradoxically, my father was a believer in force and violence. He agreed with Chairman Mao's little red book dictum that "Political Power grows out of the barrel of a gun." He never used a gun on us children, but he never spared the belt or Uncle John's strap as negative re-enforcement against our annoying or rule-breaking behavior. If he had been born 60 years later, we children almost certainly would have been wrested away from him by Social Services, to be placed into several foster homes by the benevolent State. Oddly enough, none of his children could be called “spoiled.”


My father was never constrained by a foolish consistency. He was a teacher of Boolean logic, but the excuses and rationalizations by which he lived were anything but logical. He ferreted out the injustices caused by church leaders who made profits off the weak and gullible, but he turned a blind eye when his country’s political leaders did exactly the same thing "for the good of the people."


Never was the aphorism, "take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye," more aptly applied than to my father. He was permanently behind in his tax payments, but advocated ever-higher taxes, thus enabling our misanthropic enslavement by the National Security State.


Despite his heretical objections to the political controllers of the church he loved, he consistently supported the most tyrannical political controllers of the country he lived in. He lionized America's second Great Dictator, FDR, for having solved the problem of the Great Depression by nearly bankrupting the country through ruinous spending. My father's fiscal policies, or lack thereof, followed FDR’s model throughout the time I knew him.


My father believed, along with many other deluded Americans, in the malignantly misanthropic prevarication that the breath of life that you and I exhale, pollutes the pristine planet. I hope he would be proud of my environmentally heretical belief that the planet's ultimate resource is the freedom-enabled individual making informed choices on her own behalf. I could never understand his embrace of the hubristically fabricated fallacy of human-caused climate change.


And, in the end, he showed exactly how Leviathan's bureaucratic tentacles prevent Americans from becoming healthy and staying healthy. When he suffered the spiritual blow of losing the one job he truly loved: that of spreading the gospel and knowledge to our petite brown brothers and sisters in the Philippines, he began to drown his sorrows in binges of overeating. Because he was never burdened by the true costs of this unhealthy behavior, he continued to feed his skin cancer and ignore his diabetes and blood pressure problems until almost the very end of his 80-year-long life.


Near the end of his life, my father was embraced by coercively subsidized state health care, allowing his children, including myself, to ignore his pathetic helplessness, letting him slip away in his sleep, by himself, in the quiet anonymity of a hospice bed.


You and I, the family and friends of my father, Sydney Earl Allen, Jr., can learn from his life and his death. Let us be proud heretics amongst our witlessly indoctrinated fellow citizens,

lest we end up,

like my father,

in the land of the enslaved and the home of the gutless.

[for further information, see http://mises.org/story/3657 ]