He Had A Great And Untamed Mullet
He was just 27.
So good that he was almost universally referred to as “El Caballero de Futbol” – the “Gentleman of Football.”
He went to Mass and Communion almost daily and read the Bible daily.
And he had a great and untamed mullet.
The night before he was to star in a 1994 World Cup match that might keep Colombia in the running, he stayed up comforting his best friend and teammate whose brother had just been killed in a mysterious car crash.
Perhaps exhaustion, maybe just bad luck or a reaction to the threats against the lives of his entire team…
The “cause” – if there can be a “cause” in sports – doesn’t matter here.
In the twenty-second minute of the Colombia-USA second group contest, team captain and defender Andres Escobar made contact with the ball and sent it rolling past his own team’s goalie – a mistake that would result in Colombia’s eventual elimination from the tournament.
Despite murder and kidnapping threats against his team and coaches, Escobar returned to Colombia and addressed his countrymen in a Bogota’s El Tiempo newspaper:
“Life doesn’t end here. We have to go on. Life cannot end here. No matter how difficult, we must stand back up. We only have two options: either allow anger to paralyze us and the violence continues, or we overcome and try our best to help others. It’s our choice. Let us please maintain respect. My warmest regards to everyone. It’s been a most amazing and rare experience. We’ll see each other again soon because life does not end here”
Days later, Andres Escobar was gunned down – six bullets in the back – by drug traffickers Pedro and Juan Gallon or one of their henchmen. (Who pulled the trigger and shouted “faggot” and “GOAL!” with each shot remains contentious thirty-plus years later. The Escobars had bet big on the match and lost!)
Where was God?
Terrence McCoy, writing in The Washington Post (January 28, 2015), reported:
“In July of 2006, the Russian Duma passed a law allowing the assassination of ‘enemies of the Russian regime’ living abroad. ‘This guy is a KGB guy,’ one [Vladimir] Putin critic told The New Yorker. ‘This guy issues a law allowing the Russians to kill opponents abroad. So they kill opponents abroad.’”
Alexander Litvinenko was an officer in Russia’s KGB (later referred to as the Federal Security Service - FSB) before fleeing the country in late 2000. From the United Kingdom, he was a constant Putin critic. On November 1, 2006, he met with two ex-KGB officers at the Pine Bar in London’s Millennium Hotel. That evening he began vomiting and was hospitalized for two days, before being transferred to London’s University College Hospital intensive care unit on November 17. After a chance discussion among British doctors, it was discovered that he had ingested five times the lethal dose of radionuclide polonium-210 that was traced to a teapot from which Litvinenko drank green tea at the Pine Bar. The official time of his death was 9:21 p.m. November 22. In his final statement, aired by BBC on November 24, Litvinenko declared:
“…this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition. You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women. You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”
Litvinenko was poisoned and killed in by the Russian dictator using former KGB operatives and polonium-201 in 2006.
Where was God?
Lincoln’s balcony box at Ford’s Theatre
On Good Friday morning, April 14, 1865, in the wake of the American Civil War and angered by the news that President Abraham Lincoln might grant the right to vote to African-Americans, John Wilkes Booth changed his plan to kidnap the 16th President of the United States and, when the president’s bodyguard left his post to have a drink in the bar across the street from Washington’s Ford Theater, sneaked up to the balcony and shot Lincoln point-blank in the head.
Lincoln family physician Dr. Robert King later testified:
“I proceeded then to examine him, and instantly found that the President had received a gun shot wound in the back part of the left side of his head, into which I carried immediately my finger. I at once informed those around that the case was a hopeless one; that the President would die; that there was no positive limit to the duration of his life, that his vital tenacity was very strong, and he would resist as long as any man could, but that death certainly would soon close the scene.”
The president died at 7:22 the following morning.
Hat Lincoln wore on night of his assassination
Where was God?
Under Hitler, Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children; 5,000 – 7,000 German children with physical and mental disabilities.
In 1938, Swiss theology student Maurice Bavaud, believing Adolph Hitler was a threat to Switzerland, Catholicism and humanity in general, stalked the Fuhrer across Germany, looking for an opportunity to shoot him. After running out of money, he attempted to jump a train to Parish as a stowaway but was turned over to the police by a conductor, interrogated by the Gestapo and, eventually, beheaded by guillotine in a Berlin prison.
Where was God?
Young children in the ghettos were considered unproductive – “useless eaters.”
Children too young to be pressed into forced labor were often the first deportations to killing centers or the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.
Swiss theology student Maurice Bavaud
George Elser spent 35 nights in 1939 hollowing out the pillar in which he planted a bomb next to the platform on which Hitler would deliver a November 8,1939 Munich Beer Hall address. Hitler ended his speech at 9:07 p.m. and exited the Beer Hall. The bomb exploded at 9:20 p.m., killing eight and injuring 60. After six years in a concentration camp, Elser was executed on Hitler’s orders in 1945.
Where was God?
In 1929, Hitler proposed that 700,000 of the “weakest” Germans should be “removed” from the population each year. After the invasion of Poland and under the cover of a cloud of war, he could initiate his plan.
Some of Hitler’s officials had been planning this version of ethnic purification for years and in August 1939 orders were given that every doctor and midwife in the country must register all children born with genetic defects – retroactive to 1936. The killing of these “defectives” began in September.
In her book For the Soul of the People, Victoria Barnett writes:
“For each patient, a form was to be filled out giving in detail the nature of the patient’s illness, the length of time already spent in institutions, and the patient’s racial status. The cover letter told the institutions’ directors that filling out the forms was a necessary statistical measure and that mass transfer of certain patients to other institutions might be necessary because of wartime demands for medical facilities. Three state-appointed experts would review the completed forms, select those patients to be transferred, and prepare for removal from the home institution.”
While lethal injections were initially used in these murders, carbon monoxide eventually proved more efficient. Patients’ families were told the cause of death was pneumonia or some other common illness and families were informed that the child’s cremains would arrive shortly thereafter.
On March 21, 1943, Rudolf von Gersdorff had two explosive devices with ten-minute timers hidden in his coat pockets as he gave Hitler a tour at a Berlin expedition of captured Soviet weaponry. Hitler left the exhibition after only eight minutes and von Gersdorff had just enough time to run into a bathroom and diffuse the devices.
Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorf
Where was God?
On May 14, 2024, The Wiener Holocaust Library published “Forgotten Victims: The Mass Murder of Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs) During the Second World War.” In announcing the event, The Library reported:
“On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Most historians regard this as the start of the Holocaust and the mass murder of European Jewry. SS Einsatzgruppen units began shooting tens of thousands of Russian and Polish Jews and Roma and Sinti as well as hundreds of political officers (Commissars) in the Soviet Army.
“Within three months over a million Soviet soldiers had been taken prisoner but no provision was made for their proper treatment as required by the Geneva Convention. Thousands were shot and beaten to death whilst two million were deliberately starved to death by March 1942 in the wholly inadequate POW camps provided. It is estimated that of 5.7 million Soviet POWs, up to 3.3 million died between 1941 and 1945 in captivity.
“This may well have represented the largest mass murder of a particular group in terms of deaths per day (during 1941-2) in human history.”
After Major Alex von Bussche witnessed an SS massacre of more than 3,000 Jewish civilians at the Dubno airport in today’s western Ukraine, he began planning an assassination. Tall, blonde and blue-eyed, he was the epitome of the Fuhrer’s Aryan ideal and the perfect candidate to model the Wehrmacht’s new winter uniforms in front of Hitler – an opportunity.
Bussche planned to secret a grenade in his pocket and pull the pin when close enough to Hitler. But the night before the planned attempt, Allied bombs destroyed the train carrying the uniforms. The event was cancelled.
Where was God?
Major Axel von dem Bussche
During his January 20 Inaugural Address, Donald Trump declared:
“Over the past eight years, I have been challenged more than any president in American history and I have learned a lot along the way. The journey to reclaim our Republic has not been an easy one. That I can tell you. Those who wished to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and, indeed, to take my life. Just a few months ago in a beautiful Pennsylvania field an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear, but I felt then and even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God….”
No!
That’s self-aggrandizing hagiography to the extreme and distortion of history to the point of lying.
It diminishes God, making Him too busy saving you to save fifty-year-old former fire chief Corey Comperatore, who died using his body as a shield against the bullets flying toward his wife and daughter.
Writing for Historycollection.com (October 31, 2018) Harry Holzwarth cited “18 of the Many Attempts to Assassinate Adolph Hitler by the German Resistance.”
Eighteen of the many…
Does that mean that God “saved” the German Fuhrer more than 18 times?
We believe – we declare – our God is omnipresent and omnipotent.
To declare he saved one man but was too busy to “save” a brave husband and father who died mere feet away…
Not our God, Mr. Trump!
Not our God!
Challenged more than any president in American history…”? Really, Mr. Trump? Really? More than Lincoln, more than Franklin Roosevelt, more than Kennedy???
Lincoln’s funeral procession in Philadelphia
Yes, you’ve been “challenged.” Only once recently…
Then you turned away. Then your face contorted into a scowl.
Because almost surely you missed the challenge and invitation:
“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen”