My wife and I, one day some years ago decided to drive the 90 miles from our home in Burbank, California to Santa Barbara, CA, just for a Sunday drive, and to have a nice brunch on the pier. After breakfast we were walking along the pier, admiring the ocean and watching the birds.  There were many birds -- sea gulls and pelicans mostly.

We soon came to the bait shop.

You see that this pier, out into the Pacific Ocean, is a favorite for local fishermen. They buy bait from the bait shop, drop a line, and often catch decent-sized fish.

I noticed, too, that there were tourists buying baitfish, and throwing them up in the air for the birds to snatch in midair -- quite a sport.

So, we stopped to watch a while, and soon I was buying bait so that I, too, could feed the birds.
 

As I sat there, with bait ready, the birds certainly realized that they had found a new source of food.

I happened to sit next to an old fisherman and he gave me some advice on feeding the pelicans.

He told me that you could throw the fish, and the pelican would catch it. Fun!

But, he said you could also hold the fish in your hand and let the pelican snatch it out of your hand.

I soon saw that you could also have that pelican go after the entire hand, not just the fish, and asked him about that.

I got more data.
 

He told me that pelicans don't have teeth in their beak, but there is a sharp point on the end, and hard ridges along the sides of the beak.  He told me that the pelican would, certainly, grab my entire hand, fish and all, and would not let go until the fish had dropped down into his gullet!

So, say I, "does it hurt?"

"Not much," he said!

I must tell you that the first time that pelican grabbed my entire hand I did flinch just a bit.

But, the second time I tried it I allowed that 'ole pelican to take my entire hand (with the fish) into his pouch. He hung on because he wanted the fish.

I didn't let go for several seconds, but then did.

At that point the pelican got his fish and let go of my hand.

An interesting experience -- having this enormous bird with the long beak, and big pouch, swallow your entire hand, and hang onto it!

For whatever reason I decided this was fun, and actually went through about four bags of baitfish!

I'd hold one out about waist-height, and one of the pelicans would grab my entire hand, and hang on until I let the fish drop down his gullet.

A tourist lady came up to me and asked; "Doesn't that hurt?"

I hadn't been thinking of that question, but the answer was almost instantaneous.

"Not if you don't flinch!"

I said, "If you resist the bird, you'll probably have pain, and won't enjoy it, but if you can enjoy the experience, any pain you might have will be trivial!"

I had found this to be true. She tried with one fish, flinched, and vowed to never do THAT again!

By this time about 20 minutes, and about 30 small fish had gone by!

I then took a closer look at my hand. It was scraped and bloody!  I certainly could feel the sting, and some pain, but I was having so much fun that I didn't care.

I found a salt-water sink for cleaning fish, washed off my hands, and then started feeding the sea gulls which were flying over my head.

That's my pelican story. If you ever have a chance to feed pelicans, do it. It's fun!

Part of the moral of this story involves my bloody hand.

You would see, immediately, the foolishness of my going to a doctor and claiming that my hand got hurt by a pelican biting it!

You can't blame a nail for sticking in your foot. You can only realize that it was YOU who put your foot there.

Likewise, when you put your hand into a pelican's mouth, you can't complain that the pelican bit you!

But, there is more of a moral here than that, later, but let me tell you an-other story.

I re-cently went on a trip where I changed planes several times during the trip. I carried my ticket in the same envelope given me by the first airline.

On my return trip I got to the air-port quite early, just to be sure I didn't miss the plane.

I checked in, and the girl at the counter told me that my departure gate was 7A.

In this terminal you had to take a shuttle train to the "A" Terminal.  So, I took the train to the "A Terminal." I got there plenty early. Took time for a cup of coffee.  About 20 minutes before departure, I strolled down to gate 7A, only to find it deserted!

Oh! Oh! Did I miss the plane?  Do you know how far apart the gates are in some airports!

I urgently asked at another gate, only to be told that my departure was from Gate 74F.

That was all the way back, on the shuttle train, to the main terminal, and then onto another shuttle train, to the "F Terminal."

I ran all the way to the shuttle! Out of breath!  Then the ride, and then another run out on the F Terminal!

I still dont' know how I made it, but I did. MY plane was already boarding when I got there, and I was one of the very last to get on.

But, even though I was running, and a bit upset at the girl for giving me the wrong gate, I still had time to think about this.

I pulled out my ticket jacket, and noticed that "Gate 7A" was plainly written on the jacket! But, then I wondered, " that must have been my gate for some previous departure?"

And, I looked on my actual ticket, where, sure enough, the gate was shown as 74F!

Now, what DID that girl at the ticket counter say to me? Is it possible that she saw the "7A" on my ticket jacket, and told me that depar-ture information?

Or, having told some 100+ people, that same morning, where to depart on that one plane, and that airline not having ANY departures from "Gate 7A," isn't it possible that she SAID "Gate 74F" to me, but I didn't hear her, and that when I looked at the ticket jacket I just assumed (incorrectly) that I was supposed to go to Gate 7A?

Even though I was running, as I said, I had plenty of time to decide that the girl had NOT given me a wrong direction, but that only I could be responsible for going to the wrong gate.

By now you may be catching the drift of the message.

I was surely responsible for getting my hand bloody with the pelicans.

And, I am likewise responsible for going to the wrong gate in that airport.

It's not too hard to see the logic in these two situations, is it?

But, how about this.

I often hike up in the mountains around my home, and when I look down into the basin that holds Los Angeles, I can see the layers of smog and dirty air. It's quite well known, of course, that Los Angeles is very smoggy!

When you are up above it, you can see the smog as a low, dirty yellow layer that covers the city. When you are down inside it, you generally can't see it.

I said to myself, once, looking down on that smog, "I wonder who is responsible for that smog!"

I thought, "It must be all those people who drive to work, and all those factories, and all those OTHER people. I certainly don't create any smog!"

Well, who is responsible?

When it comes to pelicans grabbing your hand, and going to the wrong gate at an airport, you'd have no trouble seeing your personal responsibility, would you?

When it comes to smog, you might see that you share a very tiny bit of the responsibility, but not enough that you could change anything, by your-self!

And most people would probably agree with you.

Now, let me tell you another experience I had recently.
 

I was using a swimming pool in Florida some time ago (I don't much swim back in California and was experiencing the much higher humidity of Florida, compared with California).
 

After I'd been there about 10 days, I started to get an ear infection. I won't go through all the details, but I went through some self-medication, and the infection got worse. I finally went to an emergency medical clinic, and got an antibiotic shot and a prescription for more antibiotics.
 

I was in some considerable pain for many days!
 

I actually had to visit the medical clinic three times!
 

I asked the doctor, "what could have caused my ear infection?"
 

He said that changes in the pH (acid/alkaline balance) in my ear related to higher humidity and swimming might have been factors.
 

You could say that I was responsible for traveling to a humid area, and that I was responsible for going swimming, but you would probably conclude that I was mostly an innocent victim of external factors.  How could I be responsible for the pH balance of the water in my ear??
 

I think most people would agree with that!

Now, let's look at something most people agreed with, just a few hundred years ago.

You get the drift now? When we are looking at finding "who or what is responsible for some situation" we can pretty easily recognize the common reality of our society.
 

Feeding pelicans, getting a bloody hand? Well, you certainly were the entire cause there!

Living in a smoggy city?  Well, perhaps I did add to the smog.

Getting an ear infection? Well, you can say you were the unfortunate victim of circumstances beyond your control.
 

Most reasonable people in our society would probably agree with these assessments.

Now, let me tell you about an area, and a period of time, when there was a great deal of agreement on who or what was responsible for some of the situations in that time and space.
 

I'm talking about Scotland, only about 450 years ago! That's really not very long ago, is it?
 

The setting is Scotland, in the years between 1560 and 1600.
 

During the late 1500's, in Scotland, there was an active and strong government (with a King), there was a very powerful Church, and there were somewhat less than one million Scots.
 

You might say that if ALL THREE of these groups had absolute certainty on who or what was responsible for something, there would be a pretty good chance that they were right!
 

Well, there were several situations occurring in that area, during a forty-year period, and there was unanimous agreement among all three of these groups as to what caused these events to occur.

Yes, the Church, the King and Government, and the People, all agreed!

Furthermore, they all agreed that the SAME thing caused EACH of the following problems!
 

The problems which they faced, in those days, and which were ALL caused by the same thing, were:
 

Can you believe that only ONE source was responsible for each of these three problems facing the Scottish? And, that same source was active over a forty-year period!
 

The Scottish King, the Church  and the Scottish People all agreed that WITCHES  caused these three problems facing them!

This was so serious to them, that they burned alive at the stake, some 8,000 women over a forty-year period.

These were woman accused of causing bad weather. These were woman accused of forcing a "good" man to commit adultery.

When the crops died, for lack of rain, it was the witches that brought this problem onto the lands.

These were women, often accused by a child, of causing illness and even a plague!

And, so serious were these charges, and so much in agreement were the Church, the King and the People, that some 8,000 Scottish women were burned alive at the stake because they were witches, and because they had brought these various problems onto their communities.

Now, at the time Scotland was a very small country -- with less than a million in population.

Each year for forty years, about 500 Scottish women were burned alive at the stake. These burnings were usually done in the village square, and the entire town would come to watch, including the children.

Here is a quote on superstition only 400 years ago, taken from that great literary work, The Story Of Civilization:

It was a common belief that human beings could be "possessed" by devils entering them.

In 1539 there was "a terrible panic in the little town of Friedberg, for it was said that the Devil had taken bodily possession of more than sixty people . . . and had tortured them frightfully . . .Even the pastor. .. himself been seized . . preaching."  Ref

In America, with 200,000,000 people, it would be comparable to some 100,000 women being burned alive every year. If you wanted to limit burnings to just the larger cities, you could actually have one burning each week, in about 2,000 different cities across the country. You might have to travel a few hundred miles to see one, but if you missed it this week, there would be another next week!

You would go to your local supermarket mall, and in the parking lot, once a week, or so, some woman would be tied to a stake, wood piled high around her, and the fire lit!

Perhaps there would be special "inside events" where a special hall was used for the burning.

Her screams would be all the more proof of her guilt -- so they thought.

Now, recall that I am contrasting the absolute certainty the Scottish had in this matter with a similar certainty you might have about the cause of an infection in your own ear.

Here is a further quote from The Story Of Civilization:

The belief in magical arts was declining, with a bloody exception: this period was the heyday of judicial murders for witchcraft. Persecutors and persecuted alike believed in the possibility of securing supernatural aid by incantations or similar devices.  Just as the people took the initiative in asking for exorcisms, so they were the prime movers in demanding the prosecution of "witches." Fear of the power of witches was widespread. Said a pamphlet of 1563:  "To enter into relations with the Devil, to have him close at hand in rings or crystals, to conjure him, to enter into alliance with him, to carry on hundreds of magic arts with him, is more in vogue nowadays, among both high and low, learned and unlearned, than ever before."  Pope Gregory XV (1623) required the death penalty for persons convicted of causing death by sorcery.  Civil and ecclesiastical authorities, sharing, or wishing to allay, this fear of witches, subjected the accused to rigorous trials, often using torture to elicit confessions. The town council had a special set of torture instruments, which it lent to neighboring communities with the assurance that "by these means, and more especially by the thumbscrew, God has often been graciously pleased to reveal the truth, if not at first, at any rate at the last." Torture by preventing sleep was one of the milder methods. Usually the desired admissions were obtained by torture, and the judges were only occasionally disturbed by the unreliability of such confessions. 

 

A method was devised to discover the spots at which devils had entered the body of the accused: he was blindfolded, needles were stuck into his flesh, and any place where he failed to feel the injected point was judged to be the port of entry. Hoping to be pardoned, suspects accused one another. Eight were convicted, five escaped, three were burned; and spectators swore later that they had seen devils, in the form of toads, issuing from the heads of the victims.  Ref

It goes on and on!

Indeed, we live in an enlightened age, but are not the belief in the efficacy of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation just as secure in our society, and just as foolish as witchcraft?

We look back in the security of our certainty, knowing that these were barbaric times when the Church, the People and the King were all wrong.

But, at the time they didn't think they were wrong.

The message?

A simple one: It is possible for an entire society to get a wrong look at cause and effect. It is possible for an entire society to move along for many decades, believing that there is a living virus that "causes" AIDS, when the truth is that the virus is not alive, and that AIDS is NEVER caused by a virus.  (See my article on this.)

How can I say such foolishness?

How could the Scots have been so blind to the truth? If someone had spoken out against the witch burnings, that might have been enough to get THAT person branded as a witch. Sometimes men were burned at the stake too!  My good friend, Jimmy Keller, is in jail today because he dared to cure cancer.

We know, now, that these million Scots, over a period of 40 years, were just plain wrong.

Can we possibly be so smug as to think that we, too, might not be wrong about something that we regard as well-accepted reality today?

I urge on you, as the common reality of the next century, that YOU are responsible for everything and anything that happens to you -- no matter what.

It may be hard for you to figure out why or how you are responsible, but the next great truth I offer you is that you will remain healthy, or you will recover your health in exact proportion to the degree to which you take personal responsibility for your own health.

We are used to allowing doctors to take responsibility for us -- well many of us are. Most of MY readers are probably not in such a condition.

One of the largest sins of the present society is to depend on so-called "health insurance" which can do nothing more than assure illness.  "Insurance" is a game where the healthy pay for the sick.  Is that the game you want to be in?

The alternative health care movement is one made up of people who take far more personal responsibility for their health than those who depend on HMOs and insurance coverage to keep them healthy.  These brave souls may be wrong in their ideas, or right, but at least they are being responsible for their own decisions.

Congratulations to you, because the readers of my newsletters are a very different lot from the "other" Americans, who, like the Scottish King, the Scottish Church, and the Scottish people of 400 years ago, like them, there are those "other" Americans who are convinced that only the government, or a doctor, can be responsible for their personal health.

Keep it up!