…Instead of Minding Other Peoples’ Business
(This is just a Prelude)
OK, you’re among the 77 million who voted for Trump and you’re 55 to 65, probably with grandchildren, and most of you have been with Donald Trump since 2015 or 2016, and probably the Tea Party Movement since 2010.
You actually kicked all this off.
You run the full gamut from successful businesspeople, mostly your own business, doctors, lawyers, veterans, (retired, like my brother as well as one-hitchers like me), factory workers, farmers, ranchers, even a few writers, and a lot more wage-and-hour folks than you know, although they’re mostly off at work today, with no time to read what I have to say here.
You can all take a bow. Your hearts have always been in the trim and just by voting you’ve spanked a lot of fannies that were long overdue in feeling the back of someone’s hand.
But as the title says, this is a letter, followed by a series of what-is-to-be-done’s-next, especially to that age group not only with more time on their hands but also with longer memories, which are much more valuable asset than you may know, (which this letter will outline), and will serve as a basis for re-sealing our government in fresh, new concrete from the grass roots up, as originally designed, making it able to go on for another century without any major repairs.
This is what you need lay out the blueprint for next steps, for it will all be done in your (our) lifetime.
For instance, you have to bring Congress to heel through your power to set standards from your state, bottom up, rather than the top-down approach taken by big money and corruption the past 60 years, since you were kids. (You didn’t know that then. Nor likely did your parents.) This election has proved where that top-down approach eventually leads, and it arises from members of Congress who no longer fear their voters back home, and bureaucracies (deep state) whose sole duty is to the institution (again Congress) who pays it. And of course there are your home state’s institutions, especially education. And as you’ve noticed lately, a lot of state legislators are even beginning to act with the same arrogant contempt as many in Congress. They behave as if they are immune to the wrath of voters. And being red-states no longer matter if you find it’s run by the likes of McCainiacs in Maricopa County, Arizona.
That said, from reading many of your comments on Twitter, where many of you like to advertise yourselves, you probably don’t realize how much you really don’t know about how things work, or were “designed to work” by the Founders, especially as vent about what some peckerwood mayor in New York or Portland allowing to happen on their streets, or in their schools, or in their Planned Parenthood baby-parts mills, and yell to the top of your voice, “Where’s the goddam FBI? Where’s Barr?”
Age and generation matters in these things because I went to college in a state where abortion was illegal before Roe v Wade (1973), but still I don’t recall a single letter to the editor of our state newspaper-of-record or any mention of a march on 5th Avenue demanding that New York stop providing abortions. If there were any Kentuckians minding New Yorkers’ business, I never heard heard or saw them.
It’s everywhere now.
This aggravates me for a lot of reasons, mainly because I hate whining; it serves no useful purpose. Moreover, it signifies a lack of understanding in the true meaning of federalism, that serves as the backbone of our Constitution. The snide Obama was correct in his comment about the Constitution, that it was a document of “negative freedoms” of the Government (Can I hear a “Thank God!”, anyone?), which, after all those paragraphs listing what the Government can’t do, in Art X of the Bill of Right in very few words, it reserved “all” other powers and rights to the states. No one ever counted them, but those powers run into the millions, all under the direct control of the citizens of those states.
Yet here we are still whining and wanting to know where the FBI or DOJ is, and what are they doing about what some corrupt mayor is doing in Minneapolis.
What saddens me more is that these are the same people who carried this “People’s Movement” on their backs from 2010 thru five years and two major elections, taking both the House and Senate away from them the Democrats, without any real results, but then still kept the faith and found Donald Trump….he didn’t find you…and then ploughed the ground for him to win an election he was supposed to have lost…big..
…only then to come to this point now, where it appears Donald will win again. And you think you can kick back and let the youngsters carry the load?
What’s going to happen if you do that? I’ll tell, beginning here.
Need to Know
Maybe in a private moment the thought has occurred to you that you really don’t know as much about American History or Government as you let on. The last book you’d read on this subject was likely in high school. Or maybe your freshman-sophomore year in college when those were called “core subjects” required for a bachelor’s degree. The first was when you were 16 or 17 and you had to return the book undamaged. The other book you had to buy, when you were 19 or 20, and you may even have kept that one, only it’s in that plastic tub up in the attic. Still, I’ll bet you can’t remember what that textbook looked like or who wrote it.
You likely never asked yourself why the university would require you to repeat after just 2-3 years subjects like American History of Government? Well, at one time state institutions were still driven by the citizens who deemed these subjects were important. I recall a man who stormed a PTA meeting because his son, and my best friend, was still saying “ain’t”. 1960 I think. People don’t do that anymore.) With this sort of guidance from the veteran community the states made the common sense assumption that we hadn’t really been paying much attention the first go-around because at 16 our mind was more focused on a drivers license, pop music and sex. Freedom and the Rights of Man isn’t a big deal to that age group.
Why I know this from those days was because my dad, who was in high school in the 30’s, had the “luxury” of learning those history lessons as he was getting decked out to hit the beaches in North Africa in 1942. Almost every able-bodied American in those days learned to appreciate that portion of American History in that manner. Being a part of a significant span of history threw a whole new light on history, not to mention patriotism, since they watched almost half a millions of their mates die, and many more come home without limbs or other injuries. (Virtually every veteran today can tell you the same thing, which is why I feel they are still the most under-used talent pool we have in America for teaching American History and Exceptionalism, which is why we started the “Vets in Class” program a few years back at VeteransTales.org.)
My dad never had to study books to know what it meant to be American. But he did start reading them and he kept them on shelf, where I could read therm. And he became involved in civic affairs.
Mostly, his generation controlled how his children and even grandchildren were taught in the public sector for two generations. And those “learn about America” requirements in colleges lasted through two generations and are still around in a lot of state universities, though likely watered-down by modern textbooks and methods of teaching.
So, one of the first things you need to know as we progress in this series of lectures is that this “law of generations” is immutable, and that every generation passes along “something” to its next generation, even if it’s laziness, selfishness, self-centeredness, and especially here, a lack of knowledge about the “shoulders we all stand on”, going back to our beginnings. (There is a flip side, too, as to how the wealthy class passes a sense of privilege along to its children in the same manner.)
That is a key to survival of every people who call themselves a nation. What this series will also discuss is the fact that there are also systems designed to erase those “memories”, and that our current level of resistance is far too passive. The first step to remedying this is to learn just how deeply that intent to erase our past and control our future really runs. When I was in the old USSR at the time they were freed (1992) I was taken by how much the thrill of the new freedom to go out and make money, real money, consumed those people, only without any moral restrictions. They also never knew, beyond 75 years, their own family or country’s history, which had all been erased and rewritten.
As an example, you probably didn’t notice who wrote your History textbook. Mine was a retired Navy admiral from World War II. But if you Google “Best American History textbooks” today you’ll find at the top of their list a fellow named Howard Zinn, who published “A People’s History of the United States” in 1980, not coincidentally 35 years (a generation) after World War II ended. Zinn’s book is now a standard text in thousands of school across America…but still, unbeknownst to the parents of kids in Norman, Oklahoma, is that nowhere is it mentioned that Zinn was also a radical communist. Today Wikipedia only says he was a “socialist thinker”, but with the implied understanding that in 2020, 40 years later, socialism is now largely considered to be a good thing.
By inference this suggests that everything you thought you ever believed about America; our creation, our declaration of the Rights of Man, imbedded in our Constitution, is considered by the educational intellectual community to be really bad, bad, bad for the People to believe. Their theory of education, which has largely worked out, is that don’t teach kids in anything positive about America, and their parents will eventually die out…only here’s the kicker…without those parents ever having passed onto their children anything positive about America either, on the assumption the schools would do that for them. By the late 1960s, this had become a reality, with places like New York and Massachusetts years ahead of Missouri and Arkansas.
Today, history is generally taught with the goodness of socialism in mind, although Schweikart & Allen’s Patriots History of the United States, published in 2004 with several updated editions, and spin-offs by Larry Schweikart, have sliced into the power of Zinn’s radical history. If you’re going to start a home library, start with these.
But the goodness of America and its Founders have officially fallen out of favor in our school systems since at least the 1990s. It is so deep after 30 years not even the teacher needs to be told that they are teaching a lie. It’s sort of like a 21-yr old Sunday School teacher sneaking “Arabian Nights” into the Sunday School lesson and not telling anyone about it.
So even if you live in Norman, Oklahoma don’t take for granted that your local school systems aren’t up to their eyebrows in this sort of thinking, for there is a “thin blue line” directly from state university education departments that reach directly to K thru 12 in local school districts, all because parents today are just like you, in all likelihood, never knowing what Johnny learns in school today, and not really asking either, and sadder still, possibly not having enough background knowledge to even gauge it any longer.
No matter. After all, that rat-bastard in Portland is letting Antifa burn out its department stores, and William Barr hasn’t done a damned thing about it.
Lesson: If you really want to understand things to the point of being a part of fixing them, you have to think multi-generationally, and you have to re-educate yourselves about the depths of the evil darkness you’re confronting. Otherwise, you’ll be like that old construction worker, who, every time I visited that site for over 10 years, he always had his foot on a shovel muttering something like “One of these days I’m going to run this construction company.”…while the new-hire who showed me around my first visit there, ten years later was running that site. But Ol’ Mutt was still over there muttering, “One of these days….”. Don’t be Ol’ Mutt.”)
If you’re in your late 50s or 60s, Zinn’s book came out when your own children were in high school. So it should dawn on you, that while you were taught the right things about America but never paid much attention in your generation, your children since the 1990s were taught all the wrong stuff about our country, and the state, county and school system got away with it because you still weren’t paying much attention then. Look at the operative clause here. It’s not their evil, but our passivity.
Thus endeth this lesson.
