Reload

April 16 2024

The minutes ticked by, matched in frequency by the sound of droplets of water hitting the ceiling, one two three. Drip, drip, drip.
Filly looked up at the ceiling in the dark and could make out the faintly widening circle of a water stain on the ceiling. Water she had discovered the day before when she went upstairs to do the laundry, make the beds and vacuum.
She had not noticed anything strange up before that. But in the morning after coffee, when she went through the pink bedroom to the bathroom, the floor under her foot felt damp.

“Oh” she thought, “the girls must have spilled some water when having an imaginary tea party here”. She reached into the bathroom and grabbed one of the bright and colorful clean towels hanging there for guests to use, and dropped it on the floor by her feet.

She stepped on the towel and saw how it immediately became saturated. The beige carpet did look darker than normal. She leaned against the door frame to the bathroom, next to the bedroom and that was when she noticed that the paint on the door jam was rippled and peeling and wet to the touch.

The air conditioner man had been scheduled to come the very next day to clean out the lines and prep the AC for summer. Just one day too late she thought. The lines must be blocked and the drip pan must have overflowed. No one was home except her and Tater who was visiting for the day, but outside, busy collecting rolley polley bugs at the moment.

Filly walked back to the bathroom and collected all the towels hanging and dropped them in a circle on the floor and stepped on them. They all immediately got saturated as well as the first towels she had placed on the floor.

Realizing that she could not fix the problem right then, Filly decided to just vacuum the rest of the rooms upstairs, and at least get that part of her chores done. She had already put away the sheets and made the beds and cleaned out one whole closet, which was part of her plan. She was not someone to just sit and procrastinate.

She grabbed the Dyson vacuum hanging in the laundry room and went back up the stairs, vacuuming the far side of the house first and moving towards the pink bedroom last. Second to the last was the bohemian styled bedroom, decorated with all the blues and oranges and reds given to her by her sister in NC. She loved how bright and colorful the room was. That room had the closet that was second on her list to clean.

She stepped into the closet to see how much work needed to be done…. to plan how long it would take to clear everything out of it straight away. As she stepped, her feet squished on the carpet, which was soaking wet. Oh no…maybe the hot water heater had broken, this was much more than just an AC leak…

Danny was busy trying to get work done in his apartment building miles away in California. He had been restrained from evicting tenants because of the covid regulations, protecting these tenants, even when they were no longer paying the rent; rent they had agreed to pay, in writing.

He thought back to when he first met Evelyn who was one of the tenants. She was young, in her early twenties and bright and seemed to be someone with a good head on her shoulders who originally was working and who originally made the rent payments as she should. She was not a huge income earner, but she was clean and neat and Danny thought she would be a good tenant.

Then covid hit. Danny heard from Evelyn just a few months after covid hit and heard that she would be late making the payments as she had lost her job. About that time, a guy moved in with her and supposedly the flow of payments would resume. It never did. To his dismay, the tenants had become “squatters” of a sort, people who did not legally own the property they were living in but who took advantage of a broken system, in order to take advantage of their landlord.

They were intentional in their blatant disregard for the property and in their refusal to honor their obligation to make payments. Evelyn no longer looked neat, clean and smart. She looked stoned.

Danny wanted to get this couple out of his apartment but they were getting government funding and government protection. It should be illegal he thought. He was sympathetic, indeed he felt sorry for the girl. But she was making bad decisions. She and the guy would not work.

First they had one baby, and then they had another. Danny believed that they did not have any legitimate income including what the government was giving them, as even though they had demonstrated the ability to work, up until covid, at which time they had pretended to be incapacitated.

Because they now had children, getting them out of his property was taking much longer and was becoming even more difficult. Danny, a fair minded and hardworking individual, was thousands and thousands of dollars in the hole with no relief in sight.

Neighbors were reporting to him that drugs were moving in and out of that building and apartment. Years went by and still no payments. He was not allowed to evict the tenants even after years of mistreatment of his property and failure to pay rent, and not even partial payments had been made. Then he got a call from the police. The newest baby in that apartment born to Evelyn, had been found dead from Fentanyl poisoning. She was not even a year old. The police called Danny to notify him as he was the owner of the apartment.

The newspapers that day said that “The county wanted to take action” and “children’s protective services needed to get more involved”, saying that they needed to do a better job taking care of children. Danny groaned inwardly. He knew that the problem was much deeper.

He knew that the same government agencies who were calling for “improvements” were facilitators, just like the ones in government who had given the parents, (who were obvious drug users, maybe even dealers), money for years, turning a blind eye to the drug problem, while failing to require the parents to have jobs or to make payments for their housing. By doing so, the parents could stay inebriated on illegal drugs.

That behavior by government was called “enabling”. The drugs were coming in from Mexico. The fentanyl precursor was being made in China and was a huge income source for the 14 K triad which had global involvement. The drug dealers, were not being deterred and were coming over the border in droves, supported by the president, the congress, the senate and the judicial system, to the endangerment of all American citizens. Then the mother Evelyn died, also from Fentanyl poisoning. Then two more people moved into the apartment with the man who was left, all still using drugs. No one seemed to be morning the baby, the mom, or the other children who had been removed from the home. Where was the justice?

“What was it that Reagan said” Danny thought to himself about not bowing down to evil doers?…and then he remembered… it was part of his inaugural speech…

“As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it, now or ever.
Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of never having to use that strength.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.

And let us renew our faith and our hope.
We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we’re in a time when there are not heroes, they just don’t know where to look…”

Danny knew that the problem he was seeing in just this one unique circumstance, was widespread and he saw how the problem grew when the parents were made dependents of the government. Children, he knew, should be dependents of parents, and parents should be earning an income.

A government which made parents dependent, allowing them to subsist without any meaningful contribution, could not sustain itself. A society dependent on drugs, was not a healthy society. And when it came to heroes, Danny knew where to look. Danny picked up the phone and dialed a number in East Texas…where he had been just a few days ago.

Filly had answered the phone call because it came from a recognizable number and listened intently. She heard about one more baby gone. Millions of babies had already been sacrificed not just in her country but in many countries, because of corrupt administrations, unjust laws, concessions to evil and fear. This last baby was the “straw that broke the camels back”. The infant’s name was Phoenix. Dead because of Fentanyl. As she finished listening, Filly had hung up and had called Cam. But before she did, she prayed… for the baby, for the people who cared, for the people who did not care.

Cam was ready. He had anticipated the call. He had already deployed after meeting with Filly a few days earlier when he gave her the redemption cards. The cards were representative…that redemption was not just for some but was for everyone who wanted it. It was time for him to document, with his specific style of shooting… and trust in the inner workings of good to demonstrate itself.

Cam was assembled with his equipment and his field crew. Not only that, he had teams strategically situated from the Texas and Arizona lines all the way to California and all the way north to New York. He would not be just a bystander… he would find the leaders who were ready to do good and provide a safety haven for those who needed it when he saw a problem. His teams would see, head on, the problems before they were arriving at the border… or in the major cities, or on the coastlines.

Filly hung up the phone. She, in contrast, was not going anywhere physically, because she was upstairs, still in her home, still standing in the closet, her feet squishing on the saturated carpet. Was this what was meant these days for people who were expected to have to “walk on water”. She smiled. She understood that there was a message in small things like this. There was comfort in knowing that the bigger picture was good. She paid attention to orders from the most high and apparently in contrast the government was not listening, or making good decisions.

There was a message on her phone from the high commander.

This was the message she had to translate and pass on to Cam…
“The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery. They have oppressed the poor and needy and have exploited the foreign resident without justice. I searched for a man among them to repair the wall and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, so that I should not destroy it. But I found no one. So I have poured out My indignation upon them and consumed them with the fire of My fury. I have brought their ways down upon their own heads.”
That which was happening was seen and heard and there was a response. She could trust in the good as it was already in motion.