Worsening Conditions in the United States
The handwriting is on the wall for the United States and Great Britain — NOW! Not only does the frightening specter of the starving millions of the many "have-not" nations rear its ugly head on the horizon, but increasingly, crop damage, drought, flooding, severe temperatures, and shifting markets plague the average stockman and farmer.
How does one KNOW? How could I make such a statement? Where do I get my FACTS?
First — from the same source as anyone: newscasts and newspapers. Secondly, from the world's finest and most up-to-date news magazines. But MOST important, from sources that are in many ways even superior to THESE!
Here at Ambassador College, in Pasadena, California, we have our own wire service, ticking away 24 hours a day and night! At our Ambassador College News Bureau several full-time men are carefully sifting through the most respected news sources from around the world! They receive inside information in the form of private business letters which go only to huge corporations; economists' reports; printed reports from government agencies; newspapers and periodicals from other nations (and our multilingual department translates them all). Each week, the head of that department, Mr. Gene Hogberg, whose articles have appeared in The PLAIN TRUTH, distributes a weekly news report. These weekly reports represent only the most vitally important points of news which relate directly to the PROPHECIES of the Bible, and the most significant events occurring in our time. In addition to these weekly reports, certain SPECIAL reports are compiled from time to time.
As the months and years go by, all of the hundreds of thousands of clippings, papers, letters, articles, or Photostats of microfilms of them, are carefully stored and filed.
At these extensive "central files" of information, it is possible for our News Bureau staff to gather the most pertinent information on a subject such as drought and weather conditions for the past decades!
But what I want you readers to understand is that all this is STILL only a PART of the news data at our fingertips!
Hundreds of thousands of letters per year come flooding into our Headquarters office at Pasadena, through Box 111. And multiple THOUSANDS of these come from farmers in every state of the union, every territory, and every part of this vast, sprawling, broad earth!
Farmers are concerned about their farms. They talk about the weather. They talk about their crops. When they hear me make certain statements on the radio concerning weather, or mention the prophecies to which I refer in this article, MANY will write in their own PERSONAL EXPERIENCES!
We receive literally HUNDREDS of letters every single week from Maine to Florida, and from Washington to Southern California, telling us of the local conditions in their areas.
It would take you literally MONTHS to read them all! But if you COULD, as our staff does, and has — your hair would stand on end — your breath would come short — your face would take on a grayish pallor — your flesh would stand up in goose bumps — and you would begin to KNOW, as you have never known before, the really SERIOUS conditions of our lands — just as they really are!
When I began this article, I asked Mr. Hogberg for a file on the most current conditions. Here are just a few of the facts he gave me.
Current Conditions
The United States Government has designated as disaster areas 306 counties in fourteen states! Continued drought in key growing areas has meant fall harvests will be seriously below normal — in some places nonexistent. Corn plants wither and are earless in northeastern Iowa. Yellowed soybean plants in southern Illinois bear less than half the normal number of pods and these contain only buckshot-sized beans. Cotton is deteriorating in Texas and Oklahoma.
At Alma Center, Wisconsin, thousands gathered for a gala strawberry festival — only to find a wasteland instead. The community suffered a vicious hailstorm of up to fifteen inches which obliterated all crops. Hailstones the size of golf balls turned strawberries, hay, grain, corn, tomatoes, sweet corn into a slushy quagmire. Damage was 100 per cent to crops in the area, and windows were shattered in nearly every home in town. A deputy sheriff said, "A lot of the roofs look as if they'd been chewed off — the hail perforated them like sieves."
And in New York, the U.S. Weather Bureau reports the worst drought since 1826 — and this at the same time as unusually cold and wet weather in other parts of the nation!
And this violently different weather side by side was definitely PROPHESIED.
Notice what God inspired Amos to say about it. "And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered" (Amos 4:7).
God said, "So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied . . ." WATER RATIONING!
In town after town, during the summer of 1964, wells simply dried up. Water rationing was in effect in many communities.
Think about it. What WOULD your life be like, if your water supply were suddenly CUT OFF? If you housewives walked to your sinks and suddenly found no water — what would you do?
Probably, you would first try all the other faucets in the house. Then, you might try flushing the toilets to see if they "worked." (C.D. officials and conservationists say the average per son would panic in this way, and, in so doing, would completely drain the home of the one or two small "reservoirs" of water left in it!)
Then, you would probably reason that the water was only cut off at YOUR house. You would go next door — or call the neighbors — to find out what had happened. At their home, the story would be the same. Then you might try to call the police. But the police department would have no water, either! Then you may turn on the radio — to hear that ALL water has been shut off as an emergency measure because the city's reservoirs and water supplies are down to almost NOTHING, and only the hospitals and fire departments can have any water.
What do you do? It's a good question. It will happen to you, where you live!
You should think about it now.
Can We Feed the World?
Too many a citizen in the United States has the fanciful notion that we are so rich, so blessed, given so much abundance — that we can right every wrong; solve every problem; feed every starving person; lead the world onward and upward into a glittering Utopian era of American-made prosperity!
If so — they're due for a surprise!
If the existing food supplies (and this means not just reserves, but continuing capacity to produce food based upon present production reports and projected increases!) were equally distributed among the nations on this earth at this present time — then every human being on the face of this earth would be living at a bare subsistence level, with just BARELY enough to stay alive!
You would be fortunate to eat a small piece of meat once every week or ten days. You would be fortunate to EVER see an egg! You would be fortunate, indeed, to ever lay hands on any vegetable, fruit, or delicacy, which came from SOME OTHER COUNTRY — since all international commerce would break down, and people would find themselves living on a diet dictated by what is produced in their own local areas!
We assume our CARE packages, government surpluses, or Christmas dinners for Korean orphans will feed the hungry. But a full belly this noon means an empty one tonight — an even emptier one tomorrow morning — and a really gnawing hunger by the next night. In three days? That hungry and empty belly has influenced a mind to the extent that it will do almost ANYTHING to get food!
Wake up, America and Britain! Wake up and FACE THE FACTS!
People have literally EATEN each other, they have cut off and eaten portions of THEMSELVES in a depraved moment of crazed starvation! And your Bible predicts STARVATION IS AHEAD!
One reporter said, "We are living in a small anteroom in time where the threat of war is a daily tension. It is with us all the time. So much so that we are becoming numbed to fright. It will not go away and so, like children at a horror movie, we sit wide-eyed, just watching. . .
"If there are no accidental wars, then my guess would be that one will be started by design no later than 1970.
IT WILL BE A FOOD WAR. The populations of the nations are increasing so swiftly that some of the big ones will begin to feel the pinch of starvation within ten years. When that happens, either the people revolt or the government goes to war. . .
"If you locked ten men in a room, and there was no way out, and enough food was sent in for six, do you think that you would have trouble? No matter how peaceable the ten would be, the craving for sustenance would overcome the men and they would have to fight to the death."
Dr. Georg Borgstrom of Michigan State University's Department of Food Science said, "The 'food gap' is a bigger threat to civilization and peace than H-bombs, germ warfare, and intercontinental missiles."
He said, "If all the food of the world — including surplus stores — were distributed equally and each human received identical quantities, we would all be malnourished. If the entire world were fed on the U.S. level, all available food would be only enough to feed less than half the human race! The world as a global household knows of no surpluses — merely enormous deficits.
"Yet every month we are adding to the world the population of a Los Angeles (four and a half million) and every third year more than an entire United States (nearly 200 million)."
Think of it! The world's population explodes upwards at a gigantic SIXTY-THREE MILLION PER YEAR!
Dr. Borgstrom has pinpointed one of the most brain-chilling and frightening facts of today! He worries about a "hunger curtain" dividing the world. The exclusive food 'club, he said, consists of Americans, New Zealanders, some 200 million well-fed Europeans, and some 15 million persons in Oceania. On the wrong side of the hunger curtain are TWO BILLION HUMANS with 600 millions perched on the fence. And, further, partly from hunger, half of the one billion children alive at this moment throughout this earth will never reach adulthood!
Dr. Borgstrom is an expert. Dr. Borgstrom deals with the "food gap" every day of his life. But Dr. Borgstrom says he sees NO HOPES of conquering hunger unless world population is controlled, and even that "will be a close thing."
He said, "Mankind is facing the alternatives of extinction or survival!"