Category → Family
The personal cost of political correctness
Political correctness is a political and social orthodoxy whose adherents behave like caricatures of religious zombies.
Having captured government schools, academia, and the mainstream media, PC constantly reinforces a seamless far-Left brainwashing from most Americans’ earliest memories through their college education and into adulthood. Constantly told that they are correct on the laundry list of PC issues, questioning, even contemplating an alternative, is impossible.
Rigid, inflexible, out of the mainstream, followers of political correctness can inflict tremendous damage not just through failed laws and policies, like ObamaCare, the “War on Coal,” and “global warming,” but also through an inability to communicate with people who don’t share the same beliefs.
Unable or unwilling to share ideas, to have what philosopher Martin Buber called the I-Thou cross pollination and consideration of ideas, PC people have become both political Brown Shirts and personal martyrs.
Because the PC cause is so just, in its totality, no deviation is acceptable. Because no deviation is acceptable, no friendliness with other humans who are deviating from PC is acceptable. This has deeply personal consequences for old friends and families alike. PC is like old religion: Step out of line, burn at the stake. End of friendship, painfully strained relationships, hard feelings, rejection, loss of meaning and special value. Not good.
But because PC followers are “tolerant,” ha-ha, their intolerance is justified.
So many of my friends and acquaintances have experienced corrosive and destructive PC both in their professional and personal lives that I cannot keep count. But if I can’t keep count, I can keep a general running tab. The body count is getting higher, the PC Brown Shirts commit cruelty after cruelty, and then they turn around and claim martyrdom when they are challenged or when they hurt someone.
While it is tempting to brush aside this PC excess, it has a cost that demands a response. Commitment to the PC cause must meet limits. Or else, political and familial divides will appear increasingly like those seen leading up to the Civil War.
Please be friendly, be understanding, listen, and reflect when talking, writing, or debating. The lack of reflection and contemplation among PC believers is a challenge we all must be up to helping with, and each small firm kindness extended to a PC believer may contribute to their eventual awakening.
Our nation cannot afford PC, and we must be patient in turning it back.
Fathers are important
Thank you to all the fathers and father figures out there, working to hold together a family, to provide a voice for kids to rely on. There’s no substitute for family. Happy Father’s Day.
D-Day remembrance & thank you to Vets
Today is the 70th anniversary of “the” D-Day, a combined allied assault on France’s northern shore then in the grip of Hitlerian Germany.
Our family watches the movie Saving Private Ryan every year to help us appreciate what those brave men did that day, clambering through freezing waves into the teeth of bombs and bullets.
For those Americans inclined to disavow and disrespect the military, how do you otherwise explain the heroism that created America in 1776, and which has been a force for good ever since? Without a military to extend our safety, we’d now be speaking German on the east coast and Japanese on the west coast. Apparently empty slogans matter more than practicality in a comfortable society, protected as it is by brave warriors.
Thank you to all our Veterans, for all you have done to keep us free, and for preserving all of our rights. For keeping America, America. God bless you all.
Veterans’ memorials are often the most beautiful workmanship
–Josh First
Some societies place plain wooden markers to mark their dead.
Most American Indian groups built death platforms lifting the deceased closer to Heaven. After a couple of years, they collapsed, their wooden skeletal remains reminiscent of the human skeletal remains once upon them. Such visual starkness says ‘Hallowed Ground’ more powerfully than most grave sites.
Like the European Celts and Picts, some Indians built small to incredibly large burial mounds, and we have two small ones on our hunting property. Small or huge, they are still just plain piles of dirt. Seven large mounds in a neat row line a remote hillside on northcentral State Forest Land I hunt, an evocative but peaceful reminder of who hunted there before me. Yes, it is clearly a cemetery, but I feel very comfortable there.
Most European countries, and America, place great emphasis on ornate mausoleums, statuary, and finely detailed headstones marking the deceased. Chiseled of hard granite, these are testimonies to either lots of money or lots of love among those left behind, but a big sign of respect, nonetheless.
In a nod to the less-is-more aesthetic, the United States military places simple marble crosses and Jewish stars on the headstones of fallen warriors. While these appear plain, plain, plain to the careless eye, more scrutiny reveals careful craftsmanship; beveled edges, hollow grinds, stippling, and more. Attention to refined details elevate these markers to the level of real workmanship, but avoiding ostentation.
And that is the fitting and well-thought-out purpose to our military cemeteries: Quiet, humble valor that even in death commands respect and appreciation. Subtle statements that go beyond the initial visual “grab.” In their austerity, reminders of sacrifice and loss, and in their subtle details, the best, most careful workmanship for the best of our citizens.
Memorializing these fallen citizens requires us to do more than salute the Flag, eat a hotdog, or buy a new mattress at a low price, although these days saluting the Flag is a pretty bold statement (surely someone will call you a ‘racist’ for doing it). Instead, go by a public cemetery and find the veterans markers, sit down at one or two head stones, and do an internet search (on your smart phone etc.) of the occupant in front and center of you. See if anything can be learned about this person. Or, if you lack a smart device, have a chat with the inhabitant, and thank them for their service. Without their service, none of us would have the smart phones and hot dogs we now take for granted.
This is truly memorializing someone. That is a worthy Memorial Day.
Limbaugh wins award, “open-minded” educators show their best censorship
Last night, Rush Limbaugh received the Children’s Choice Book Award for author of the year, for his book “Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.”
Limbaugh defeated big-name writers Veronica Roth, Rick Riordan, and Jeff Kinney, who wrote “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” which my kids have all enjoyed for years.
Enter the “open-minded” educators across the web, who have much to say about this award going to Limbaugh.
The hate-filled, bigoted comments about author Rush Limbaugh say everything about the commenters and zero about Limbaugh.
“Hate-monger,” “fear – monger,” “foul-mouthed,” “bigot”…
From where do these folks get these ideas about Limbaugh? They have nothing to do with Limbaugh, but they sure appear to describe the commenters, who on every website seek censorship of Limbaugh and his political ideas, because they disagree with them.
Hey, folks, have you actually listened to Limbaugh or actually read his books? Are your opinions about Limbaugh based on what others have told you about him, say, political ideologues who oppose his beliefs? Why don’t you develop an opinion about Limbaugh that is based on your own experience?
And to the lady who wrote that kids are not rushing into her book store to buy the Rush Revere book, but rather it was adults buying it, let me ask you a question: How many kids actually buy their own books? Most children’s books are purchased by adults for the kids in their lives, a well-worn tradition by both the liberals and conservatives in my own family who want kids to enjoy reading.
Why are so many liberals so intolerant, and so incapable of allowing other people to speak? Congratulations to Rush Limbaugh, a guy I agree with and disagree with.
Love your mother, love America
It’s Mothers Day, and you should love your mother. America is our mother. Show her love, support her, fight for her. And if you don’t like her the way she has been taking care of the American family since 1776, then guess what, she’s not your mom and you should probably go find a different place to call home, a different country to call the Motherland. She doesn’t need to be transformed and you aren’t appreciating her.
The trouble with racial double standards
If you are troubled by racism, and if you are feeling fired up about the Don Sterling episode, do an Internet search on “black on white violence.”
The search result you will be treated to is a seemingly endless parade of cell phone videos of white people, many of them children, being beaten into unconsciousness or violently harassed with flagrantly racist language.
You will see lots of sickening violence associated with this racism.
What you will not see is anyone really standing up and calling it out.
Jay Z wears a huge anti-white medallion around his neck. Spike Lee is a Bigot par Excellence. Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and Jesse Jackson have perverted what it means to be a “man of God.” But there are no consequences for these men. Nothing. Zero.
The problem with double standards is that they have a way of quietly really pissing off a large majority of people, who quietly simmer until they have had enough. That is now happening in America. Many of the great civil rights triumphs of the 1940s – 1970s are being overshadowed by a slowly awakening American awareness that things did not work out the way most people envisioned.
In fact, despite the great civil rights triumphs, including the election of a black US president, perfectly good people are being called racist, old fools like Don Sterling are being used to falsely impugn entire groups of Americans, and black-on-white violence is being deliberately swept under the rug in order to protect a false narrative about America’s supposed faults.
Meanwhile, the really blatant racists like Spike Lee, Jay Z, Jackson, Sharpton, and Wright are feted, elevated, and paraded before an audience that increasingly sees them wearing no clothes.
Today’s Public Service Announcement: Headlights
Pennsylvania law and common sense require headlights to be ON when the car’s windshield wipers are working. This is not so the driver of the car in question can see better, but rather so other drivers can see the car more easily. Seeing the car more easily means safer driving conditions, fewer accidents.
While we are on the subject of highway safety, another reminder is in order: Left lanes are for passing, not cruising.
Pennsylvania law (gees, what’s with all these laws?! Other states have the same law, too) requires motorists to get out of the Left Lane (AKA Passing Lane) as soon as possible, as soon as they have passed the vehicle(s) in the right lane. Few acts create road rage faster than a driver determined to camp out in the Passing Lane, thereby keeping faster traffic bottled up behind them. Drivers do not play the role of traffic cop; it is not the role of drivers to slow down other drivers they think are driving too fast. That just leads to conflict.