What's Troubling America?

By The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan | Last updated: Aug 4, 2018 - 11:59:55 AM

[Editor’s note: The following edited text is taken from a message delivered by Minister Louis Farrakhan in Newark, New Jersey on April 28, 1995 entitled “The State of America: The Recent Oklahoma Bombing.”]

In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.

A nation is no greater than its service to the weak and the poor and the disadvantaged of that nation. If we believe in the scriptures, particularly of the Bible and the New Testament, Jesus lays out a yardstick that will be the determining criterion of the Judgment of God of a nation in the last days. Certainly in a country that professes to be a Christian country based on a Judeo-Christian ethic, this criterion should be held high as the measuring stick to help us to see how far off the country is and what danger the country is in by measuring its distance from the criterion.

What is the criterion laid down by the Master, Himself, who will be judging? One of the disciples asked the Master (Jesus), when he gave them the criterion that they should minister unto the sick, the imprisoned, and those out of doors: “When were you sick and imprisoned and we ministered not unto you? When were you homeless or out of doors and we gave you not shelter? Master, when were you without and we did not for you?” And the Master said, “In as much as you have not done this to the least of these, my brethren, you have not done it also unto me.” The Master laid down the criterion.

In America, we have millions today who are homeless. We have many more millions who are sick, imprisoned, impoverished and weak, and it appears as though the conservative element of the country is moving away from care for the poor, the weak, the helpless, and the children and catering to the desires of those that have. But it is the poor and the weak who built the country. It is the poor and the weak who have fought, bled and died to maintain America as a great nation. Now America is turning her back on the weak and blaming the condition of the country on the poor, on the Black, on the Hispanic. In reality, the mismanagement of the wealth and people of this country is the fault of those who are at the top who have held power, who have manipulated the masses of the people against the good of America and the good of the world.

How will America answer to Christ, with human beings sleeping under bridges and America is spending over half a trillion dollars to bail out the savings and loan industry, but won’t spend money to bail out those veterans who fought, bled and died, who are sleeping under bridges, who have fallen on hard times, whose homes and cars have been repossessed?

What is America coming to? The cities are filled with crime and violence. People can’t walk the streets in safety. The elderly of the nation are preyed upon by wicked, unscrupulous people who sometimes rob them of their life savings and of their little social security checks. The babies of the nation are abused, murdered, drowned in hot water, even put in ovens by their parents. The stress of life in America is such that some parents can’t handle the crying of children. So babies are coming to hospitals dying of trauma, shock, their heads bashed, thrown against the wall, thrown out of windows by parents who have had enough. Young girls in a sex-mad society are having their sexual nature titillated by sick television programs, sick movies, sick videotapes, sick songs from a sick, decadent culture that is using the talent of gifted people to spread degenerate life in the name of music and art. Babies are having their sexual nature titillated. Mothers are not home because they have to work. Daughters are left to be savaged by brutal men, sometimes their own fathers and uncles, cousins and brothers. And we ask, “What is the world coming to?”

America the beautiful is becoming America the ugly. They say love her or leave her. We have no place to go. Some of us will say we will run to Africa. But Africa is suffering, too. We say we will run to Europe. Be careful. We say we will run to South America or to Mexico. There is no hiding place today. The Judgment of God has touched every nation in every corner of the globe.

This is a beautiful country, but the human beings within it are being turned into something that God Himself is angry at and sick of. To make God angry is to incur His wrath. John the Revelator said, “And the nations were angry and Thy wrath is come. It is the time of the dead that they should be judged and given justice.” Everywhere you look people are angry. You get on the subway and look in their faces, you don’t see peace. You drive your car, you can hardly find humanitarian gestures. People will kill you over a parking space; kill you over a place in line in the bank or in the supermarket. Arguments are breaking out in the home and now the schools are battlegrounds. There is no peace anywhere to be found.

Not only are the nations angry, but God is angry. He is angry at what He is looking at—debauchery and filth paraded as morality—and if you speak against it, you are considered something ugly. If a pastor speaks against homosexuality, he is called homophobic. If he speaks against lesbianism, he is not up to speed. He is living in old times. If we take a moral stand against adultery and fornication, we are out of touch with reality. If we criticize our government for its corruption, we are called un-American. If we criticize the behavior of White people in their injustice toward Blacks, and if we as Black people want to come together and find some solace and peace among ourselves, we are called racists in reverse.

So we better not even speak the truth because if you speak the truth, somebody is going to get hurt. But truth is your best friend, because truth will give us a mirror to allow us to see ourselves and how far off we are from the standard of God. Somebody has to tell the truth. Somebody has to be willing to pay the price of the truth. Truth is more important than our little positions. Truth is more important than being a mayor or a police chief or a senator or a cardinal or a pope or an imam or the President of the United States. Truth is bigger than us all.

The Holy Qur’an teaches us that Allah created the heavens and the earth with truth. This universe is sustained with truth. There is no position of power that can be sustained over any long period of time based on falsehood and injustice. What did we see in Oklahoma? What was it that had us mesmerized? It’s a wake up call. White folks have always thought it was Black people they had to watch out for. White folks have always feared Black unity as though our unity would mean that we would do to them what they and their fathers have done and continue to do to us. How much they misread Black people. They don’t mind us having guns, as long as we shoot one another. But they only give you enough to get you in trouble with yourself.

I have warned, by the Grace of God, in the past that trouble would not come from us, but America’s trouble would come from her own dissatisfied White people of this nation who are fed up with the government and the government’s misrepresentation of the Constitution and of what the founding fathers of this nation set in motion.

Terrorism is an act of desperation of men and women who refuse to believe that any avenue for the redress of their grievance will be listened to. Consequently, they feel they must take the matter of justice into their own hands. When a people are deprived of justice, their minds become imbalanced. That’s why justice is represented by a female holding a scale with a blindfold over her eyes, that she is not to see who you are, your station in life, what your color, culture, or national origin is, how much money you have or don’t have, how much education you have or don’t have. Justice should be blind to adjust the scale; the weight of facts in one hand and the weight of action in accord with facts on the other, giving balance. And when you live in a world whose very root is unjust, it is only a matter of time before the injustice carried on by those in high places reaches down to infants, and the scale becomes so imbalanced that the people lose the ability to see correctly, hear correctly, perceive correctly. That imbalance is referred to as insanity. Sanity and sanitary deals with cleanliness, and that which is unclean is unsanitary. Unsanitary leads to disease, and disease, unsanitary, unclean is the same as insane.

Brother Farrakhan, are you saying that every insane person is unclean? Every person that is insane is possessed of an unclean spirit. And when your mind is imbalanced, you do things that are unclean. You will defecate on yourself. You will urinate on yourself. You will do unsocial things, unclean things. You don’t think you are doing anything wrong because in your own mind you are all right, because you have lost the standard by which decency and sanity and cleanliness is measured. A Muslim could not be a terrorist because no Muslim is so hopeless that he denies Allah’s sufficiency that he has to kill and maim and brutalize innocent people to make a sad, silly point.

In the Bible, God says, “I will give you your own blood to drink and you will be drunk with your own blood as with sweet wine.” America is becoming a boiling cauldron of gross dissatisfaction. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said 30 percent dissatisfaction could lead to a change that affects 75 percent of the world. But when you get 100 percent dissatisfaction, it leads to a total change. What you have all over the earth is total dissatisfaction and this is why Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of wars and kingdom would rise against kingdom, and nation against nation. And this is just the beginning of sorrow. There would be famine, pestilence and earthquakes in diverse places. Is not that what you are seeing?

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said to me that Justice is a Law that distinguishes between right and wrong. It goes to sleep with you. It wakes up with you. Whether you are knowledgeable of that Law or not, it is alive and working either with you, for you or against you, regardless to what the courts do. The Law of Justice, the balance that God set up in the universe, you can’t escape it. The fool thinks in his heart, “I have gotten away with my evil.” What a fool you are indeed. God says in the Bible: “Whatsoever is done in the dark, I am going to bring it forth into the light.” The Holy Qur’an says: “Though it be the weight of an atom, hidden in a rock and the rock buried in the earth,” He said, “Yet will I bring it forth.”

The Bible teaches, “Prepare slaughter for the children for the iniquities of their fathers.” You think you are getting away? My silly little brother, you reefer smoking, coke using, crack sniffing, liquor drinking, freakish acting brother, you think you are getting away because there are no police around? The police are there. Not the city police, but the police of the Law of God. You use crack and the crack affects your brain, but not just your brain. It affects the head of the sperm, and it affects the egg. You are passing on your sin to your unborn generation. You are passing on your filth and your degeneracy to your babies, and they will be made to die for your craziness. Nobody gets away.

In the Bible, there is a creature, a monster, at the depth of the sea. The Bible calls him Leviathan. You can go in the depths of the sea all you want, you are not going to see a monster that looks like Leviathan. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said Leviathan represents the destructive force of submarines that are at the depth of the sea, and they bring destruction, but there is a way to bring those (submarines) up. He said all God has to do is bring a wind, and let the wind start coming in a circular motion, turning, whipping the waves, and as it whips and turns, the waves disturb the submarine on the bottom. The nose (of the submarine) starts coming up because the water is disturbing it. As the water further disturbs the submarine it starts getting straight. It’s coming now. Then the waters part and come back together, and when you see the waves part and then come back together, the ship is gone.

That is the same way it is with secrets. You have this thought laying on your mind, and you have suppressed it to the depth. “I know it’s there, but”—and all on the top is a false laugh, false this and a false that because you are conscious that the secret is laying there. Then all of a sudden God sends winds, turbulent things in your life that begin to swirl around you. The winds of confusion are bringing it to the surface, and all of a sudden you may see a little something, just a word spoken, but the word is telling you about something else that is laying deep under. All of us have something that we don’t want somebody else to know. The Bible teaches, “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord doth hide.

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