Jul 8, 2020; Orlando, FL, Orlando, FL, USA; MLS players participate in a black power salute before the game between the Inter Miami and the Orlando City at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
More correctly, will we leave them or did they leave us?
Corporate America and our professional sports franchises are surrendering to a malicious assemblage of half-literate, quasi-Marxist fanatics and a similarly ill-educated brood of young middle class, mostly white malcontents. Take your spoiled college snowflake and mix them with incendiary black Marxists and you have the crowd that Big Sports wants to ingratiate.
The NBA will paint “Black Lives Matter” on their courts and permit the mob’s sloganeering on player jerseys. The NFL will denigrate the national anthem with a prior performance of something referred to as the “black national anthem”, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. “Lift Every Voice” has been weaponized by extremists, and has no place as a prelude to our consecrated national anthem. Expect a scourge of kneeling at every game, not just the opening ones, from now on. MLB and MLS will have their own radicalized displays to mar the joy of athletic competition.
Recently, Premier League Football players sport Black Lives Matter endorsements on their jerseys.
I’ve had enough. How about you?
The most disgusting aspect of our current moment is that the perpetrators are zealots for a pack of lies and disastrous notions. “Systemic racism” is a fabrication to be peddled to the truly ignorant, in spite of – or because of – trillions of dollars of national treasure devoted to K-to-grad-school. Disparities aren’t due to some mysterious, skulking “man” but have an origin in social factors such as lifestyle choices and government efforts to subsidize those personal wrong turns. You won’t hear that coming from our over-priced millionaires in team uniforms and the mandarins in the NFL’s New York City headquarters.
Black lives do matter, as do all lives. And black voices matter, especially, as with all voices, the ones who have given these issues more thought than your pampered social justice warrior wrapping cables around a statue. Thomas Sowell is one important voice … and a black one at that. Rather than watch another gaudy season of Big Sports, pay your dues as a citizen by tuning into the antidote to the shouts of the radicals in the streets. Watch other black voices who put to shame the chants and grotesque behavior that parades across your tv screen.
ESPN’s ESPY awards show co-hosts Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird and Russell Wilson wear t-shirts endorsing the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter.
Sowell in this video puts the blame for the leftist mania squarely at the feet of an unexamined vision. The vision requires you to believe that bad things are corrected by a new army of government employees peddling more dollars. The vision is rooted in a disparagement of traditions, morality, and institutions such as marriage. The results are horrifying to the most vulnerable, the poor of every stripe.
Check it out, get a cup of coffee for the 53-minute presentation, and be prepared to have your mind stretched. Oh, more videos will follow. Enjoy.
Statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., after state’s governor announced plans to remove it. (photo: Ryan M. Kelly)
Here’s Tom Payne’s full quote from his tract, The Crisis, in 1776:
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
America is under assault from a small mob of neo-Marxist firebrands rampaging without restraint. We bred this ill-educated, semi-literate horde in our families and schools and now we face the full fury of their ignorance and folly. Now is not the time for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. Now is the time for resolve.
The weak-kneed in elite and influential circles are buckling to the temper tantrum. The hissy fit commands that adults seize the moment and impose discipline. Instead, we get tech giants and other Fortune 500 leaders giving support to the outrageous. We see sponsor-boycotts of conservative oriented programs and flagrant censorship of those who disagree. And even more troubling, the schools will put the heinous thought-molding on steroids. Watch that space when schools reopen this fall.
Read Jeff Bezos’s (of Amazon) response to a customer complaint and the mass of illogic that emanates from one of America’s leading corporate leaders. The “disproportionate risk” is utter nonsense. Black crime victims are reporting black suspects that show in the “disproportionate risk” of run-ins with police. Could the “disproportionate risk” have something to do with the disproportionate share of blacks (70%) raised in single parenthood, school dropouts, and violent crimes? Bezos is proof that a person can be good in one thing (online retail) and completely foolish in other things (public policy). He’s another ignorant buffoon when out of his lane.
The KIPP charter school network, for instance, has promised to incorporate the spittle-laced fulminations of the brats into its curricular and pedagogical design. Go here for Frederick Hess’s (of AEI) account if you’re interested. .
Mom and dad, the “transformation” of America is coming for you and your kids. The poison pill of destroyed futures in socialism, Stalinesque purges of the new kulaks in the form of “systemic racism”, and an end to civic order is about to be foisted on you and your children. Never before in recent memory has the country faced such a dire threat.
Where are the adults in the room? Parents, this is not a time to hide. March to your school board; march to the voting booth; flood the automated message system with our demands; boycott businesses, schools, and organizations who play footsie with the delinquents. Now is the time for you to rediscover your spine and demand “Clean it up!”
Back in March at the peak of the virus panic, I posted my dismay at the onset of the intentional near-strangulation of human activity from coast to coast, ocean to ocean, border to border. I reasoned back then that we couldn’t and shouldn’t lockdown almost everything and think that we can get away with it for very long. Well, we were beginning to come out of it and, lo and behold, our power-hungry czars are pushing us back into it. This re-strangulation is an affront to reason, prudence, and humanity.
It’s happening across the country. Our potentates of commissioners, mayors, governors, and army of zero-risk utopians hiding under the moniker of “scientific experts” – albeit in contradiction to other “scientific experts” – are re-imposing masks, re-shuttering businesses, and coming as close as they possibly can to making America a sputtering ghost town once again.
A man walks past an apartment building bearing signs of joblessness and worry. (photo: ANDREW HARNIK/AP)
This morning, I learned that the Board of Health of Missoula County has issued a decree for the mandatory wearing of masks in public. And once again, another deep blue urban node (yes, we have those too in Montana) is spearheading the way back into the straitjacket. What’s this with the Left-liberal attraction for the totalitarian temptation (to borrow from Jean Francois Revel’s 1977 best-seller, The Totalitarian Temptation)? They get an erotic giddiness when they sense an opportunity to control the comings and goings and doings of an entire people. This will flounder and fail like the previous bout of authoritarianism.
The totalitarian temptation as an affection for Marx: Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz, Germany. (animaflora | us.fotolia.com)2016 election map by precinct: blue for Cinton, red for Trump. The greatest enthusiasm for lockdowns are in those blue dots, places of significant sympathy for the ends and means of Marx.
It’s a twisting in the wind in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. No collection of commissars can control the lives of tens of thousands of people, let alone millions. Somebody will deviate despite their newly minted dictum and out goes the virus. You can “bend the curve” in the short run as you extend the “curve” into the long and longer run … or until the magical elixir of a vaccine is concocted which, as in most viral vaccines, won’t be a silver bullet. Or, better yet for our power-hungry ninnies, they experience the joy of a Biden victory speech on November 4.
The prospect of a vaccine pushes out the government-manufactured misery for at least the next several months, long enough for a depressed electorate to accede to AOC-inspired governance. Biden will be irrelevant since he is nothing but a floating piece of wood in a rampaging river.
Biden in his basement.
We must get away from the strangulation and do what we were getting around to doing as we were opening up: therapies for the infected and isolation for the vulnerable. The development of natural immunities is the only path to health, as opposed to the slow suffocation of life and livelihoods by government dictats leading us into the world of decay and despair for as far as the eye can see.
Stop the madness. If deep blue districts want to smother their societies, those disinclined to that existence should … Move! No society can thrive with an off-and-on switch in the hands of newly empowered despots.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joins fellow Democrats from the House and Senate, June 8, 2020.
In 1904, Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, a Moroccan tribal leader, took hostage Ion Perdicaris and his grandson, Cromwell Varley. President Theodore Roosevelt quickly dispatched warships to Morocco. Secretary of State John Hay put the case very succinctly when he declared, “This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”
US newspaper cartoon on the Perdicaris Affair.
The incident is enticingly analogous, though not perfect, to our current situation. Today, the Perdicaris role could be filled by the American people and Democrat eminences are playing Raisuli. I’m waiting for the American voter to take up the mantle of TR.
In reality, could anyone be so calloused as to hold an entire people hostage in the service of a cold and calculated power grab? I am loath to think so. On the one hand, my fellow citizens with a “D” after their name can be just as good-hearted and well-meaning as those on the opposite side of the aisle. On the other, never has their public statements and policy ideas been more sinister: the caress of socialist revolution in the form of wealth confiscation (the “eat the rich” mentality of “D” politicians); the spread of central planning into more areas of life (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, cementing the monopoly of the government schools, et al); the enthusiasm for totalitarian lockdowns and controls on public and private behavior in response to the virus; the coddling of the Marxist Black Lives Matter and Antifa; and the willingness to unleash criminals on their citizens (no bail laws, refusals to prosecute, the withdrawals of police from riot zones, the slashing of law enforcement budgets).
29-year-old Anthony Robinson of East New York, Brooklyn is seen walking with his 6-year-old daughter in the Bronx Sunday, June 5. The little girl is watching as a car pulls up beside them and her father is fatally shot in the chest.
The contemporary Democratic Party appears to be very ambitious. Could a person be excused for entertaining the idea that the party of Mayor Jenny Durkan (Seattle and CHOP) and AOC has a more utilitarian purpose in mind: namely, the Party desires the creation of as much pandemonium as possible to make Trump impotent and win in November 2020? If so, a nationwide emotional and economic depression would suit their purposes quite nicely.
The most heavy-handed clampdowns and inexcusable sanctions of wanton violence occur in deep blue jurisdictions. Trump has offered help and cajoled governors, mayors, and school superintendents to protect our heritage, end the anarchy, and get the kids back into the classroom. They not only rebuff the assistance; the secessionists – for that is what they are – revel in it. They have resurrected the Party’s historic love of states’ rights, something to warm the heart of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” George Wallace … if it was still beating today. Could they be holding the livelihoods of millions, the safety of multitudes in our cities, and the education of our children hostage to their demand for a Biden presidency?
Do you think for a moment that this government-fabricated misery would continue much past November 3 and a Biden victory? Don’t surprised of its magical disappearance if the American people turn over the reins of power to a person of diminished mental capacity and his coterie of socialists and cultural revolutionaries. Consider it ransom paid.
Biden with the “thought-leaders” – the socialists AOC and Sanders – of today’s Democratic Party.
What other conclusion is possible given the promiscuous smear of the Founders, the mayhem on the streets, and the arbitrary shuttering of the schools? It’s so egregious that a person could be forgiven for concluding that some ulterior, insidious purpose is being served – like political extortion. Could anyone be so stupid as to “abolish/defund the police”, unless something more cunning is afoot?
Our time is rife with wacky conspiracy theories. The nuttiness of the alt-right’s QAnon and the left’s Zinn/Black Lives Matter/the Squad/Anifa/college snowflake roils the minds of folks as far afield as Trump to DC’s Russia-collusion hawkers to the Dem grandstanders mouthing the vaguery of “systemic racism”. I wish not to be in their company.
Yet, the thought of manufactured mayhem for political ends is not unknown (excuse the double negative). The Jacobins and Lenin were up to their ear lobes in it.
Mass killing of more than 200 prisoners in the Châtelet on September 3, 1792.Bolsheviks condemn and execute a dissident worker.
Sherlock Homes admonished, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” For me, there are two possibilities for the Dems’ leveraging of ruination: cunning or stupidity. The Dems might be cunning as they play chess to the Republicans’ checkers. Or they are just plain stupid in mistakenly believing that the shutdown of life and assaults on police departments will lead to a summer of love. I am reluctant to believe that somebody could be so brutally calculating. Since there is no cure for stupidity and the symptoms are so widely apparent, my money is on stupid. Still, hostage-taking is a favorite on today’s racecard.
The scientific method begins with a hypothesis. You notice something happening in the world and ask why. You combine prior experience and facts to stitch together a possible answer. Call it an educated guess as opposed to a mere guess. Then, it must be tested and either confirmed, rejected, or reformulated for further testing. The rules of logic apply at every step along the way. So, I hear the cry of “systemic racism” from agitated marchers in the streets and ask why, why are they saying it? More to the point, is it true? They assert it, but historically speaking, mobs are seldom the founts of goodness, truth, and light.
And mobs they are, if you notice the charred remains of entire blocks in our major cities and vandalized monuments. The angry protesters went right from the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy (this therefore that) to the illogic of the general-and-particular confusion (rule of logic: what is true of the particular isn’t necessarily true of the general and vice versa). The angry protesters qualify as mobs not only because of the violence. It’s also because of their track record for irrationality.
Let’s engage the mind of your typical acolyte of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, or your run-of-the-mill college snowflake. The constant pounding of “you (or they) aren’t responsible for your (or their) condition because it’s really the racist man holding you down” is the only truly systemic thing about the mania. The mobsters are voluntary inmates of a reeducation camp, thanks to our schools. They are primed for illogic.
With the unsupported conclusion in tow, they go right to the streets and statues. The only factoid in their cognitive miasma is some number in relation to a group’s proportionality – like police stops in relation to a subject group’s portion of the population. From there, they jump to the “racist man”. Post hoc ergo propter hoc anyone? But could there be any other possible explanation for the factoid other than the racist man? Don’t tax their minds with that question because you will first be met with a pause of blank stares to be followed by spittle-laced shouting in your face or a beating.
A rage-filled protester in Minneapolis.
They’ve turned themselves into Leftist street thugs. As such, they gloss over any alternative hypothesis that might show the blame to lie with the same policies that they hold so dear. It might come as a shock for them to learn that their beloved idea of massive new social programs has already been tried and found wanting. LBJ announced the War on Poverty and proceeded to bulldoze entire neighborhoods and call it “urban renewal”. Welfare budgets ever since have exploded into mountains of cash and new ways to distribute it.
In the meantime, single parenthood became the mainstay in the black community, swelling from 24% in 1965 to over 70% today. In many cities, it’s worse. Alongside of it came increased dropout rates in school and the workforce. Crime rates soared. The litany is too well-documented to deny. Is it more logical to indict a shadowy “racist man” or recognize the fact that a Sherman’s March has been conducted through the families of the poor, many of them black, aided and abetted by the nanny state? Skin color isn’t the cause of these circumstances, but upbringing can be. The little platoons of civilization – the intact family – is an endangered species. How about that possibility?
There is no room in the mind of a late teen or twenty-something for the possibility after the non-stop pounding of tendentious curriculum, teachers, and profs from K to 16 and beyond. I should know. I was witness to it as a functionary in the Education Borg for 30 years.
The indoctrination created a new default position in formative minds. They are ready to plug single instances like a viral video of individual misbehavior into their preset dogmas. Thus, a single bad cop morphs into a cabal of Klansmen in uniform in all police departments and the hair-on-fire protester-run-amok. One or a few cops says little about all cops in much the same way as one shoplifting shopper fails to say anything about all shoppers. The foolishness of the particular-and-general confusion anyone?
Officer Chauvin with his knee on the back of the neck of George Floyd.A sample of police officers killed in the line of duty over the course of 2018. At that time, from 2018 to the start of 2019, the number of gunfire deaths of police officers was up 67% from the previous year. Violence against police officers had been escalating since Ferguson 2014.
Many of the adults in positions of authority aren’t any better. They are the equal of the mental midgets in the streets. If you wait to get your wisdom from Pelosi, Schumer, AOC, the Squad, Lefty mayors and governors (of which there are legions), and the army of mercenary and partisan pundits on CNN and MSNBC, you are setting yourself up for a fall. They similarly jump, for instance, from black over-representation in the crime statistics to the breezy scapegoat of “systemic racism”.
It never crossed their minds that the crime numbers come from black victims. This is supported by stats for victims and suspects by race. Looking at the numbers for violent crime, 45% of assault victims are black while 53% of suspects fit the same bill. The same is true for murders – 56 and 62 – and shootings – 71 and 74. The vast majority of complaints are brought by victims who overwhelmingly are black. Pelosi and company can only square this circle by mimicking Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”
Suspect in the murder of two teenage boys in South Chicago, June 21, 2020.
A wild claim of supplanted and delusionary memory on the part of black victims would fall into the same category of illogic as the hoax of “systemic racism” – unproven, unprovable, and demagogic. Still, it is enough to enrage the inmates of the reeducation camps when they are freed to spill out onto our streets. I don’t blame the dupes. I blame the opportunistic adults, many of them with D’s after their names, many of them in tenured teaching positions, and some with R’s after their names who mistake the mob for the voice of the people. Shame on them all.
Remember that scene in “Singin’ in the Rain”? You know, the one of the switch-a-roo when the audience learns that Lina Lamont’s (Jean Hagen) singing is a fraud because the curtain is drawn to expose Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) as the real voice.
Lina was faux singing in much the same manner as we experienced a faux Fourth in PBS’s A Capitol Fourth. It was a desultory performance of retread performances strung together with satellite social-distancing recitals and no audience anywhere. When it came to the fireworks spectacular at the end, it was spectacular but proved as empty as Lina’s voice because the Mall was a ghost town. A celebration needs a crowd, period.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth 2020 hosted by Vanessa Williams and John Stamos.
Similarly, is this what is meant by the “new normal” for our schools: an hour in front of a computer monitor with the occasional writing prompt and textbook assignments? Some schools may open but your kids will enter a classroom of everyone masked, kept far apart, and wearing gloves, as in a sci-fi horror movie. If so, parents pull your kids out of these schools and away from the silly distance-learning, and run as fast as you can with the kids in tow to more reasonable locales. The tactic is to real learning what child abuse is to proper parenting.
This year’s July Fourth was also Jekyll and Hyde affair. I went from the insipid PBS production on the tube (Hyde) to outside and the vibrant popping and the wonderful flares of explosions and light from skyrockets (Jekyll) all around me. Just knowing that people were gathering with friends and loved ones to ignite the display added so much more to the electricity of the moment. John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, “It [the Fourth] ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Exactly.
The choice of songs in this year’s PBS edition were suspect, especially in light of the ongoing anarchy in city streets. The producers seemed to be keen on a theme of social healing. The show opened with the song, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”. Nothing wrong with that, but rioters, looters, and vandals don’t need love; they need to be arrested. The angry marchers in our Democrat-run cities and states were exploiting George Floyd’s body to advance a series of lies in pursuit of an overturning of America. A socialist revolution is an afront to the America that we love. The cries of “systemic racism” are as easily disproven as “defund/abolish the police” could be shown to be deadly. Our times don’t call for a “healing” but demand a complete refutation of the movement’s falsehoods. Our times don’t call for “healing” but demand the re-imposition of decency through arrests, convictions, and incarceration.
People loot Hot Topic at The Pike in Downtown Long Beach, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Photo by Brandon RIchardson)Protestors demonstrate outside of a burning fast food restaurant, Friday, May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
This mangling of our July Fourth was brought to us by policy proscriptions corrupted by politics. The longer that we make our public spaces ghost towns and mar our faces with masks and treat each other like lepers, the more we destroy economic life. The more livelihoods are smashed, the more resentments grow toward the man in the White House. And that’s the ultimate goal: remove Trump, takeover the federal government and impose high taxes, feverishly pursue a quixotic crusade against a shadowy “systemic racism”, foist the totalitarian Green New Deal on us, and straitjacket us in a quicksand of red tape, thanks to a growing army of the administrative state. The Democrats will succeed in producing the results of a lockdown without a virus, to the detriment for the vast majority of Americans – but not for them since they’ll be the new Soviet nomenklatura.
Heck, the Democrats even want to disarm us by turning the Second Amendment into dead letter as they try to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Neither our livelihoods, our persons, or our children’s future will be safe. Every time somebody’s bad actions goes viral, out comes the angry marchers, looters, rioters, and vandals and up goes the torching of businesses, beatings, killings, and another wave of erasures of the symbols of our national heritage. You can do nothing but run for the hills – and maybe not even that if they succeed in criminalizing the oil industry.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a news conference after several dams breached in Midland on Wednesday, May 20, 2020. (photo: Rebecca Cook / Reuters)
Why else the resuscitation of the Democrat’s enthusiasm for secession, if not as part of the full court press to get Trump? Since Trump’s inauguration, blue-state governors, county commissioners, school boards, and mayors have done all in their power to nullify federal immigration law in their zones of authority. Public health isn’t immune to their designs. While Trump is consigned to the role of helpmate, the blue-state neo-Napoleons in governor’s mansions strap the lives of their residents. They keep a boot heel on the neck of the people’s comings and goings. They gamble that a depressed people will turn against the man in the oval office.
And when it comes to mayhem in their streets, blue-state suzerains turn a blind eye as Trump is made to look bewildered. Pardon me for suspecting that they harbor designs to make Trump appear impotent.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth symbolized the worst of our times in both form and content. The program’s musical content, in some instances, was the wrong message for the wrong time. And its form was an implicit sanction for the continued suppression of American social and economic life. I turned to the antidote of a DVD of James Cagney’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.
The run of the mobs in our cities and campuses has made this July 4th more significant than any other of recent vintage. These hordes are more intent on a disfigurement of our historical memory in the pursuit of horrifying goals, whose dastardliness they are so unaware. For the rest of us, please celebrate the birth of our country, and if you need a boost for those mystic chords that lie deep in the hearts of most Americans, here’s Madison Rising and their rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.
Perhaps we need to be reminded of all the blessings that God has bestowed on us as Americans. Sadly, for others among the young in particular, their mystic chords have gone missing. It’s as if a pedophile has shanghaied the trajectory of their life story and an alternative and scary meaning implanted. A youth’s attachment to the country of their birth has been co-opted by a tale of unrelenting torment. They are primed to be the shock troops of a new and sickening revolution.
It begins with a blanket condemnation of anyone not like them, or not in full agreement with their vision. Easy targets are those no longer living. They can’t fight back. Stalin had his government ministries constantly manufacture a past to fit his preferences. For today’s version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers (communist youth), their targets are most conspicuously the DWM’s – Dead White Males, formerly known as the Founders. All of their storied contributions are mangled to fit an indoctrination that could be traced to such screeds as NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, the foolishness of Howard Zinn, and the mental trash that came off the pen of John Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Antonio Gramsci. Too young and ill-informed to question the rubbish, they deface our great leaders and seek to impose their warped version of reality on the rest of us, and thereby destroy our country. It’s totalitarianism on the march.
Anti-fascist demonstrators gathered in protest at an alt-right rally in Portland, Ore., 2019. (photo: Stephanie Keith)
George Orwell had it right when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
You see, following their ill-logic, nothing and no-one can be honored. The fact is, all of us are flawed, and have been so since creation. If a person, past or present, isn’t an exact mirror image of the activists’ beau ideal, statues are torn down at the same time as curriculums are mutilated to match the new zeitgeist.
But the same holds true for their heroes. Marx was a bloodthirsty and despicable human being, and not much of a loving husband and father. The people that ran the publishing empire that gave us “The 1619 Project” also managed a pipeline for pro-Stalin propaganda in the news feeds of Walter Duranty. Duranty helped to hide the crimes of one of history’s greatest monsters. Martin Luther King probably had a personal history of extra-marital affairs. But MLK stepped up to lead an end to a vile wrong. We are a collection of mixed bags. I could go on.
People don’t live lives of unalloyed virtue from cradle to grave. And things change on us. Some notions that were once considered reasonable and proper are no longer seen in the same light. Notions of racial superiority was once as natural to popular wisdom as the 4 humors of Galen’s writings or the earth-centered universe of Ptolemy. Racial separation for the purpose of social harmony was at one time an acceptable view in polite conversation. Thank God that we outgrew them. But those people, like us, were a product of their time. To condemn them for not having read Marcuse and Howard Zinn, or to have benefited from the musings of Antifa thugs, is the height of folly.
Howard Zinn
And remember, you, the young, are setting yourselves up for defacement as a new worldview grips a another future’s young. Maybe, just maybe, you will be considered as despicable as you hold Thomas Jefferson. Don’t be so confidant in your self-righteousness.
Sen. John Stennis (D, Miss.) was a committed segregationist but would later come around to campaign for Mike Espy to be the first black congressman to be elected from the Old South since Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln pondered what to do with the freed slaves at a time when the “peculiar institution” was a going concern in 15 of 32 states. He quickly dropped the idea and would later lead the nation in a war to end slavery at a cost of 2% of the population dead on the battle field, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and got the passage of the 13th Amendment. Not a bad record, and one far more significant than idle musings. The same holds true for all our real heroes. They may have subscribed to some popular and faulty ideas, and possessed flaws like all of us, but their virtues far outweighed the weaknesses of being human.
Judgments are a weighing in the balance. There may be a number of righteous acts, or just a single big one, to compensate for the wrongs. That’s the reality of a world filled with flawed human beings. James Madison was right when he opined that people are not angels. It’s a lesson that our young snowflakes would do well to consider.
For the rest of us, don’t let them spoil our joyous July 4th.
As you watch the video below please keep in mind that these protesters may reflect another lost generation, or, more accurately, a lost portion of another generation. We are breeding highly confidant, overly opinionated know-nothings. They are coming out of our comfortable homes and families and out of our resplendent public and private schools. Why? Below is my attempt to wrestle with an answer.
Fads infect nearly everything. Trendy grand theories takeover many fields. Academia and its professional appendage – teaching – are especially prone to it. I remember a conversation with a principal many years ago over the voguish pedagogy of HOTS, or “higher order thinking skills”. He believed that the idea held great promise. I was more skeptical. He saw it as a way to constrain the leftward bias in the schools. I viewed it as ongoing cover for more bias, just another rendering of the usual indoctrination with a new twist.
The notion of honing good “thinking” skills in the young, on first blush, has some appeal. But strip away the glossy veneer and you’ll find the same cognitive emptiness and ideological spin. For one, educators never established a good factual and conceptual basis for the students’ logic. A biased rendition of human experience and complete ignorance of history’s contrasting frames of reference makes the entire enterprise nonsensical.
The K-16 academic core – Science, Language Arts, Math, History – remain primers for the making of good little Progressives (maybe less so with Math, but the “experts” are making inroads). Reason or revelation; objective or relative truth; spontaneous human organization or central planning; the positive notion of human nature or a negative one; nature or nurture; humankind as animal or “in God’s image”; collectivism or ordered liberty; and the “scientific” or organic forms of human social development are some of the dichotomies that’ll be absent from their understanding. Chances are, the kids won’t be acquainted with them because the staff never was. The rot is preordained from college on down.
I maintained that the kids already “think” and have been doing it since they first mouthed “I want” to mom. If you doubt it, establish a dress code and watch them devise ways to subvert it. Kids are quite ingenious at playing hooky and avoiding homework. Ask any parent. It’s not that kids don’t “think”. We just don’t give them much to properly think about. And we aren’t about to accomplish that end when we smear “thinking skills” over a deep layer of half-witted indoctrination.
Add a dollop of narcissism in the form of a frenzy of self-esteem instruction and you’ll have all the makings for an opinionated ignoramus. They have opinions but are manifestly ignorant of much of everything outside the dogmas of the Left. They speak in empty rhetoric, so dialogue never happens. It deteriorates into a flinging of accusatory epithets. Insults that they mistake for deep thought are their stock-and-trade.
We brought this on ourselves. If the home is responsible, it’s child abuse. If the schools are liable, it’s child abuse. Either way, this is no way to rear a child. People don’t get this bad by accident.
