AmerInd Nathan Phillips uses faux victimization to hurt American Indians
Victimology has a new victim all right, and it is one of the few honest to goodness genuine victims in America. That is American Indians.
No one got cheated more, mistreated more, treated like crap more, lied to more, or abused more in the European settling of America than the large assortment of First Americans, who were the first ones to widely settle the continent.
One of the attractive aspects of an otherwise pretty diverse array of American Indian cultures here was their widespread innocence. Even the most powerful, most violent, most cruel tribes (e.g. Lakota Sioux, Blackfeet, Huron, Seneca, Shawnee) demonstrated an almost child-like trust of European American promises. Even after helping the early Pilgrims gain a foothold on the East Coast, and then suffering for it as the unlimited immigration poured into the best, most fertile, most productive hunting and farming lands (the time our Thanksgiving holiday comes from).
When we use the word “attractive” here, we mean in terms of generating genuine and well-earned sympathy for the Native American situation among those who succeeded them in running the continent. A lot of Americans rightly feel bad for the Indians, for what was taken from them, for how they were officially mistreated until even very recent years. It is why so many American Indian faces appear on our early coinage. Americans have always admired Indian virtues like bravery, tenacity, faithfulness and commitment, honor, and high intelligence. You’d have to be a bigot or a jerk not to feel some sympathy for the Indians, and in fact most Americans today do support Indians in their quests to hold on to the little bit of reservation land left to them.
So along comes this American Indian Nathan Phillips guy (whose name seems to have changed several times over the years), aggressively forcing his way into a gathering of Catholic teenagers leaving a pro-life march in Washington, DC. Nathan Phillips is an American Indian who then insists on banging his symbolic drum a few inches away from the nose of a teenager who just stands there, unmoving. This is technically the criminal act of battery committed by Phillips, against a youth, no less. That kid was basically guilty of the huge crime of standing still while being white and Catholic.
Additionally, Phillips was accompanied by a bunch of violent anti-white racists assailing the young kids with all kinds of racial taunts and physical challenges.
At first the Democrat media turned this situation around into some sort of fake assault on Phillips and Indians. Everyone everywhere reflexively blamed the young Catholic kids for being the bad actors here. But then the video footage started to leak out, and it showed the teenagers just standing there, minding their own business, and actually behaving very modestly in the face of serious attempts by Phillips and his buddies at inciting violence and racial hatred.
And so in the end it turns out that Nathan Phillips was not only not a victim, but he was actually the aggressive perpetrator of genuine crimes against the teenagers. Phillips was the victimizer of innocent teenagers. He brought the conflict literally to their faces, and wonderfully they turned the other cheek.
And now, as a result of his own bad behavior, Phillips has attracted the misplaced assistance of the once-fine American Indian Movement group to back him up. Talk about a PR nightmare, AIM has misjudged the situation and thrown its integrity and credibility out the window by taking Phillips’ side in this, despite the physical evidence so clearly showing him to be in the wrong. This damages AIM and innocent American Indians everywhere.
And so the leftist fake victimology movement has claimed yet another victim, this time the American Indians. Phillips and AIM have now managed to remove Indians from being innocent bystanders into aggressive victimizers of young children. Now it’s “the Indians” who are seen as a bunch of bigoted jerks by a huge audience. News for you, my Indian friends: This can’t possibly work out well for you. Acting like aggressive jerks in the name of Indian culture is indefensible, it undermines your cause. It does not help you. It turns your allies and friends against you. All your hard work to cultivate understanding for your plight gets tossed out the window with this stuff.
And so we see now one more example of how leftist ideology eventually boomerangs back on the people who employ it, hurting them, instead of helping them. In this instance, the American Indian cause for justice and fair compensation is set back, just as politically partisan liberal Jewish groups like the ADL continue to chip away at positive images Americans have come to develop about Jews. Similarly, just when America had elected a black to the presidency through the votes of an enormous swath of Caucasians, leftists then invented the anti-white Black Lives Matter to convince the same pro-Obama whites that they had actually misplaced their trust and votes. And so on.
And at the end of all this failure and destruction of racial progress, it appears that the same old white liberals behind it all don’t bear any blame. And that would be because the white liberal Democrat media protects them.
MLK’s white privilege?
What would Martin Luther King, Jr say and do about the current racist accusation of “white privilege” against all Caucasians, especially against Caucasian men?
It is the most racist thing I have ever heard in my life, this worthless, evil allegation that skin color makes and determines if a person is inherently bad, immoral, wrong, evil, etc. Weren’t we told by generations before us, including by MLK himself, that skin color does not determine a person’s character or value?
Does this same accusation of unfair “privilege” also apply to the majority black men on the African continent, where whites are the vastly outnumbered minority? I mean, the population dynamics behind this accusation hold equally for everyone everywhere, right?
Or are “white people” (whoever that is) really, truly said and believed to be lesser humans due to their skin color?! If this is truly the belief, then those “white” people had better wake up, because they are being openly marked for genocide. Just like Adolph Hitler openly stated his goal of eliminating Jews, Gypsies, Christians, gays and others, and then followed through, when you are openly targeted for destruction, you should take the threat seriously and take concrete steps to protect yourself.
So back to MLK, as today is an American holiday dedicated to remembering him.
Would MLK today be condemned for his “white privilege”?
MLK benefited from “white privilege” more than anyone else in the civil rights movement, because he was propelled forward by whites. White money, white religion, white culture, white capitalism, and so on. He benefited personally and professionally, and he succeeded because of the participation of so many “white” leaders and institutions in his wonderful effort to eliminate racism.
So what would MLK say about this racism from the black community aimed at all white people? What would he do? I think, no, I know he would denounce this destructive movement, not only because it is immoral and wrong, but because it carries the risk of boomeranging back. Falsely accusing good people eventually alienates them, and causes them to leave those whom they once trusted.
As hard as MLK worked, along with so many white people arm-in-arm with him, he would be disgusted at how easily all his achievements could be so easily reversed by those who benefited most from him, and who evidently forgot how much effort it required to set all American people on the same plane of opportunity.
Watch here for what MLK had to say about the evil of racism. All racism. His words mean something to me, and apparently mostly to other white people, who were and who remain struck by the simple fairness of MLK’s just color-blind demand.
Gillette’s toxic femininity falls flat
If you have missed the latest in big virtue signalling and social justice nonsense, go find the Gillette razors “Be the best a man can be” advertisement.
[And here is a measured analysis of it by Matt Christensen]
This ad is directly insulting to men and basic masculinity. It tries to re-define basic masculinity into a weenie, a wuss, a pansy, a wimp, a limpwristed femi-man who doesn’t look at anyone unless spoken to and who doesn’t speak his mind without raising his hand first and asking permission.
The ad is full of straw man depictions of stupid boorish behavior that any normal person would roll their eyes at, hardly representative of actual men, but it is also really super full of and targeted at behavior that is perfectly normal and healthy. Like two little boys wrestling on the grass at an outdoor BBQ. Yes, even little kids wrestling is considered bad by the wusses at Gillette. Even Gillette is now part of the war on boys and boyhood.
I wrestled, from seventh grade into college. Wrestling is a great sport, because it gives a wholesome outlet to naturally masculine urges to fight, make war, and to win contests through strength. These are traits that humans acquired over 70,000 years of evolution. Anyone who thinks that these urges are dead everywhere except in bad old America is willfully blind to the terrifyingly brutal wars being fought all around the world. In case the people at Gillette haven’t noticed, America is actually a very safe and civilized place, but the onslaught of violent rapists from across our porous border is changing that.
Little kittens play-wrestle, too, as do puppies. Are these natural and long-learned behaviors among cute little animals going to be targeted next for eradication? Teaching the recent descendants of fearsome wolves to makey-nicey amongst themselves may well be on Gillette’s to-do list, but it will probably be as unsuccessful as their attempt to dumb-down we humans.
What is really at work here is toxic femininity, the sexist, destructive and unnatural political force unleashed by a small group of male-hating women and their weakling, feminized male enablers (who would not survive in a hunter-gatherer society for one minute, an indication of how innately unnatural they are). These people are trying to bully the rest of us — we successfully masculine males and our enabling blatantly heterosexual female mates — into adopting their pathetic approach to dying out quickly on Planet Earth.
Toxic femininity is yet another politically correct assault on the basic pillars of human civilization, just one among the many we have witnessed in recent years. But don’t worry, friends, this silliness is falling flat on its face as we speak. But even if it were ultimately successful, the true knuckledraggers down the road would eventually come knocking, kill everyone in their way because by then everyone would be weak and pathetic, take whatever they want, and burn the rest on the way back home. Toxic femininity would be the very first victim, as it is inherently vulnerable, indefensible and undefended. So even if it wins here in Western society, it will ultimately fail.
P.S. Gillette and Proctor and Gamble are now added to the ever increasing list of companies I will not buy from, like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Nike, and Levi’s. All these companies have made the carefully considered decision to attack me, demean me, mis-characterize me, and take policy positions contrary to those I hold. They are driving me away as a customer by their own choice. So I am exercising my right to choose what to buy, and I am choosing not to spend my money on their products. We shall see who wins that contest in the end.
Fake News John Micek leaves fake news “Patriot News” to create more Fake News
He is no “journalist.” Media fraud John Micek leaves political cover of old Patriot News, becomes publicly visible political propagandist
Patriot News devotes 45% of its editorial page to a Vogue-worthy celebrity photo of anti-American US Rep. Nancy Pelosi. And the media wonders why regular Americans have lost faith in the legacy media
Ever since fake news purveyor John Micek arrived at the Patriot News (now pennlive.com) about eight years ago (he had some role there before taking on the editorial page), the paper went from liberal-lean to all-out 24/7 partisan propaganda. The opinion page that Micek ran became a seething cauldron of popular notions of political correctness. Micek’s opinion page became an Exhibit A of how the establishment legacy media maintains a constant saturating Blitzkrieg barrage of intellectual garbage on trusting, good-natured Americans, long used to sitting down to read “the paper” after a day’s work.
Micek made national news several years ago by peremptorily banning all anti-gay-marriage opinions from being published on the Patriot News opinion page. When Micek appeared on national television shows where he was simply questioned about his censorious practices and intellectual dishonesty, he became a deer in the headlights. He literally could not find the words to articulate a why to his censorship. Not in a professional way. The guy was exposed as a puppet master, not a man of letters, as would be expected of a “highly educated, highly experienced media expert.” Media experts like Micek have been trained as Fascist mini Stalins, not as thinkers.
My own exposure to Micek was what free-thinkers have come to expect from official media censors across the nation in recent years. I have submitted pro-Constitution opinion pieces to the Patriot News, where Micek would eventually get around to accepting them. Weeks after the issue had left the headlines. But Micek wouldn’t just delay them, he would edit out the strongest parts of my op-eds, then post the essays digitally for about 15 minutes, and then pull them off of the pennlive.com editorial page. So he could truthfully say that he had technically published the letters, but unless a reader went searching for them using the search function on the website, they would not be visible as one scrolled down through past posts. It was a sleight-of-hand trick.
So let’s be honest about Micek: He is completely dishonest. As an editor, anyhow. Not that an honest, objective reader would be surprised at this. After all, Micek has done his misdeeds up front and in public view, where he has long misrepresented himself as a “journalist,” and therefore as a fair-minded arbiter of fact and truth, when he is so obviously the opposite.
Now John Micek has left pennlive.com to join another up-front fake news start-up. There, he will be able to more freely purvey his anti-America PC garbage and nonsense; his censorious ways will become de facto “the norm” for official media discussions. Micek is doing this to even further control the political and social narrative, to limit and shape the information and language available to curious people, and thereby, he hopes, to artificially control and shape the way Americans think about public policy issues.
John Micek embodies pretty much everything honest, patriotic Americans despise about liberals. He is a weak-kneed manipulative weasel with a feminized pseudo-intellectual affectation who hates America as it was founded, but who nonetheless enjoys and relies upon the Constitutional rights he is trying to destroy for everyone else.
If bowties were at all “in” today, Micek would festoon his entire body in them. Mister Peabody Knowitall Do-Good has now gone on to do more bad things, more often, more publicly. This move is about the most honest thing he has ever done in his career, as the cat is finally out of the bag and he is openly admitting he has been a fake news propagandist the entire time.
Congratulations, John.
Does your kid have autism, ADD, ADHD? Nope. Modern society is what’s off, not your kid
For about 70,000 years (or 5,780 years for literal Bible believers) our species Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been on Planet Earth. In that time we have proven ourselves to be not only the dominant life form capable of killing everything else, but so good at killing that we are capable of killing ourselves, as well.
Over this long period of time, humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. We spent all our time hunting and gathering food, and we spent most of our time sitting around a camp fire eating meat we had hunted and fruits and herbs we had gathered. It is a lifestyle perfected by the American Indians and known to us today because we largely ended it through mass migration into their pristine Eden.
During the European conquering of America, very few Indians became European, most resisted to the death. The few who willingly adopted European clothing and religion can almost be counted on two hands. Indian schools like the one in Carlisle were renowned for runaways and coercive methods to convince little Indian children to adopt European ways.
On the other hand, many, many, really countless numbers of European Americans “went native.” They willingly sought out and joined with Indian tribes across the continent, wore their tribes’ clothing, spoke their language, adopted their habits and customs. This happened because something innately natural about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle powerfully speaks to the hunter-gatherer that is inside every human.
Even when it is covered by the thin veneer of “civilization” like today.
This is why people today still hunt, camp, hike, fish, seek wilderness etc. Our species evolved in these natural environments doing these exact activities, and these are the activities that are most natural to us humans today.
Look at it mathematically: For 65,000 of our 70,000 years on Planet Earth we humans were only hunters and gatherers; subsequently for 4,500 years we learned to farm and grow our food; then for 150 years following we became industrialized; for 125 years after that we have been eating out of a tin can and driving motorized vehicles; then for 100 years we have lived in the Information Age. Only in the past few decades have we lived as we currently do, in a massive consumer society driven by high sedentary living and complete materialism.
So 30 years divided by 70,000 years equals only 0.00042857% of human time on Planet Earth spent as we live today. This is to point out that our technology-heavy western lifestyle today, which we take for granted, is in fact not even a blip on the radar screen of human existence on the planet.
Which is to say, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is most natural to us, it is hard-wired into us, and the iPhone-heavy digital lifestyle is totally new to our species. Our current lifestyle has a lot of costs that we do not yet understand, and yet we have embraced it in a death grip.
So when your beautiful child is “diagnosed” with autism, ADD, ADHD, etc., be skeptical. It is unlikely that there is anything actually wrong with your kid. What has happened is that our modern industrial, sedentary, virtual, digitized society has developed new standards for living and behavior, and for measuring success, that are completely at odds with how we evolved, how we are hard-wired, how we have lived most of our time on this globe, and how we need to be in order to be our most natural, most happy, most successful.
In a hunter-gatherer society, those young people who notice movement the quickest are not easily distracted. Rather, they are going to be the most successful hunters and warriors on a landscape where movement equals either food or danger, and those who see movement the fastest either live the longest or eat the most food. In that hunter gatherer environment, what we today call ADD is actually an important adaptive skill needed to survive.
So an “autistic” kid today who is obviously bright and technically gifted but socially quirky, was, five thousand years ago, probably the best flint knapping spear head maker in the tribe.
It is today’s Western society that is living at odds with our most human traits, long adapted and refined over tens of thousands of years, and only now considered to be liabilities in a physically weak, feminized, pacific, diabetes-riven technologically-based culture where food is served up by the unhealthy bucket-full with no effort required by the eater.
Got an autistic kid? Put him or her into a more natural setting, away from dominant society where they are mis-judged by unhealthy, unnatural material and behavioral standards, and watch them flourish. Even better, withdraw from it yourself!
Science Denier Chuck Todd Declares NBC a Heretic-Free-Zone
In the 1600s, the Catholic Church was on a roll with great momentum. The church’s Great Inquisition was well under way, as a money making venture and as a barbaric instrument of terror, coercing both potentially wayward believers and outright non-believers back into a dark corner, out of fear of physical torture, financial ruin, or burning alive at the stake. Due process and the rule of law were not yet concepts the church embraced outside of a small group of inner circle elitists.
This is the world that early scientists like Galileo and Copernicus stepped into, and where they met with the buzz saw of censorship. This is an old and well-known story from the church’s dark days, and it will not be repeated in detail here. It is mentioned, however, for the benefit of its irony: Today, openly partisan political propagandists like Chuck Todd of NBC “news” have set themselves up as the new church censors, deciding what is truth and what may not be said, for fear of upsetting a political arrangement of things he favors.
Chuck Todd has declared that no heretics will be permitted in his presence. His true goal is to shame and coerce non-believers into submission, out of fear of retribution and ruin.
Like the 1600s church censor before him, Giancito Stefani, the “Master of the Sacred Palace,” Chuck Todd has now declared that no person will be allowed on his NBC television show who defies or questions politically correct dogma, that being human-caused “climate change.”
Not even real scientists who have actually studied climate change are welcome! Really!
Chuck Todd and his coercive brethren today are like the 1630 church fathers; they have the same anti-science goal of control and censorship. In 1630, the church fathers were quite certain that scientists Galileo and Copernicus were way off base, that their ideas were heretical, and that those ideas must be declared haram, off-limits, unwelcome, wrong, banned, and unacceptable. Galileo was to be stopped at any cost. His ideas were dangerous.
To a certain political arrangement of things the church favored.
Similarly, Chuck Todd asserts that climate science is and has been settled, and that is that, he says. It shall not be questioned, he says. Not on his TV show, and, he hopes, not on anyone else’s TV show, either.
Chuck Todd name-calls people who disagree with the idea or claims of human-caused climate change “climate deniers.” This is a fancy name for ‘heretic’. The irony is that Chuck Todd and his co-believers are science deniers, because they deny the scientific refutations of human-caused climate change, and because there is absolutely no science behind the climate change belief Chuck Todd espouses; he and they will permit no actual science to contradict what is essentially a faith belief he and they have.
As if real science is ever settled. The whole point of real science is that it is an ongoing open, transparent enterprise of search and study, curiosity and analysis. Subjects that were once said to be dreamy fairy tales and heresy are today concrete fact.
The problem with human-caused climate science is that it is not transparent, it has been completely politicized, and it is almost 100% built on flawed computer modeling, which is something I know a lot about.
Much of the raw data fed into the computer models has been faked, and the models themselves contain a lot of sloppy methodology (e.g. certain variables are artificially heavily weighted while other variables’ importance are diminished, without any proof of why or how the decision was made).
The East Anglia University scandal is just one example of the complete corruption surrounding climate science.
Recently, Aaron Doering (see his official mugshot below), a purported “climate change expert” professor at the University of Minnesota, was charged with felonious beating the hell out of his girlfriend. Why did this saintly professor strangle his girlfriend? Why, only because she dared to challenge his views. And that right there is the summation of science-denying climate change advocates: Stand them up to scrutiny, and they will lay you down with coercion and violence, because they cannot stand to be challenged or questioned. Bullies, all of them, Doering, Chuck Todd et al.
Pseudo professor Aaron Doering likes beating up women who question “climate change”
An example of how established science changes is how the initial dominance of Einstein’s relativity physics resulted in a rejection of later quantum physics. Because for years the two were considered mutually exclusive, and scientists favored Einstein’s physics, which were already well established (the giant mushroom cloud thingy is pretty persuasive Einstein knew what he was talking about). But as quantum physics began to find its way forward with huge particle accelerators that defied what we thought we knew about atomics, Einstein’s relativity physics had to give way. It isn’t that one or the other is proven right or wrong; it is that both appear to be correct and we do not yet know enough about how that can be true, when both are operating on mutually exclusive rules.
So here is Chuck Todd, not a scientist, picking sides in an ongoing scientific debate without any scientific training himself, and without having held a scientific debate to educate his viewers, and using his position to squash dissent and ideas he does not like. This is because he is most loyal to the politics of human-caused climate change. No surprise there, but hey, let’s just say what needs to be said.
A tattered old bumper sticker my friend John Johnson has on his pickup truck says “Liberal ideas: So good they have to be required.”
The flip side of John’s bumper sticker is that totalitarians like Chuck Todd and Aaron Doering are so insecure about the truth of their views that they must censor all contrary arguments. Like almost all others in his establishment media, Chuck Todd bans his critics because he cannot withstand basic scrutiny.
But if the church is any indication, there is hope for Chuck Todd. Fast forward from the bad old days, and the church became an irreplaceable cornerstone of Western Civilization; without its Biblical values, there would be no universal truths or individual rights that make America so great today. The church just had to look inward and answer some basic questions about freedom, liberty, individual conscience, and then everything else fell into place.
And as unjustifiably confident as Chuck Todd is in public, he must have a spark of curiosity buried somewhere in his conscience. A normal person would.
Chuck Todd and Aaron Doering and all other liberals are envious of the Catholic Grand Inquisition’s ability to burn “heretics” alive
My 2019 resolution: Not going pee with the ladies
Last night we were celebrating the incoming New Year with friends at a hotel in New York City. Lot of fun, beautiful time of year and place, great, friendly people and beloved old friends.
…and then I had to pee…
Discharging excess fluid is how a healthy mammal’s body works any day, and especially after copious intake. So, I feel the urge, stand up from the table, ask a friendly staff person about the location of the toilet, and receive clear directions. So far so good.
One of Western Civilization’s chief accomplishments is ubiquitous flush toilets. They even come with sinks and hand towels. They are generally clean, tidy, and hygienic, certainly compared to a hole in the floor like you will find the world over. This particular hotel is quite nice, and had all kinds of nice little “extras” about for guests, and it stood to reason that my bathroom experience would be top quality.
Nope.
This is in NYC, a major locus of PC crazy, and it turns out that simply going pee in the homeland of PC crazy results in a crazy pee experience.
I approached the bathroom door and noticed beautiful and often scantily clad women coming and going through that door. Then a well dressed young man entered. The see-through door is labeled “EVERY BODY.”
My inner dinosaur screamed “No f*ing way!” as my feet reflexively stumbled backwards. I may have suffered a brief infarct. Maybe a meteor hit Earth or my head at that moment, too. Reality wheeled around me, and I had an out-of-body feeling.
The kindly young bathroom concierge standing nearby smiled knowingly and said, “there’s a men’s room downstairs, here let me show you,” and he accompanied me downstairs to a glittering bathroom that said “MEN” on the opaque glass and brass door.
This was what I had hoped for: Urinals for guys to stand over, breath mints and mouth wash on the spotless counter, stalls with doors giving enough privacy for guys going #2 or even amorous couples to do their business without interference or observation. A typical nice Men’s room. Natural boundaries. Privacy for men, to be men.
After emptying my body’s excess water tank, I washed up, went back upstairs, and walked past the Chaos & Bizarro anti-civilization bathroom, shown in these photos. Young men and women were still entering and exiting simultaneously, and as a result I made my first and likely only 2019 New Year’s resolution: I will not use a Chaos & Bizarro dual-sex bathroom.
Nope.
I like my high civilization and I intend to keep it. One pee at a time.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks*
In case you are one of the three people who regularly read this web site, then you have noticed that a good long while has passed since anything overtly political was posted. There is a good reason for this, and it is because weeks ago we entered the really best, nicest time of the year.
We are in Christmastime, the weeks preceding and the weeks following Christmas, a time of peace and reflection, neighborliness, good cheer and charity.
Yes, there have been a lot of politics worth writing about, but you know what? I just did not feel like writing about frustrating, conflict-filled current events. More than anything I am enjoying basking in the glow of what should be, what must be, a time of togetherness and common good purpose.
If you are a religious Christian, then you may object to all this namby pamby touchy-feely do-gooder happy time stuff. You know what I am talking about, the kind of Miracle on 34th Street feeling.
I am sorry if you feel this way, but I have yet to encounter any religion or religious sensibility that evokes the kind of generous togetherness that that particular product of Hollywood disseminated, or that the basic Christmastime in America has uniquely produced.
And so yes, I am a cheerful proponent of the old fashioned commercialized Christmas, because I am a proponent of simple happiness and brotherhood, old fashioned American identity.
Merry Christmas, friends, and may 2019 be a year of happy prosperity for you and all those whom you love. See you then, in 2019!
UPDATE: Bob Durgin died today, at noon, on Christmas Eve. Durgin was the very long time growly voiced challenger to all things Politically Correct and Big Government at WHP580 radio station here in Harrisburg. Bob was perpetually frustrated and then verbally evocative by examples of how bad government touched people’s lives in the Central Pennsylvania region. He was the last of a line of gruff and rough and tough-talking radio talk show hosts who really said what he meant and he said it in a way that left no doubt in the listener’s mind. Bob frequently invited government officials on his show to speak about their actions, and he spared no one from a serious grilling. He was often the next-day public response to the local establishment media “newspaper” Patriot News propaganda and leftwing political activism masquerading as news or real information. I was a guest on Bob’s show a number of times, for different reasons. The one time I recall best was when he got on me about being an “environmentalist,” to which I responded that I am a hunter, conservationist, and a life member of the NRA. He was openly puzzled by this, and you could feel the wheels turning in his head as he was trying to find the right words live on the air to either hit me over the head or hug me. I jumped in and said something like “Bob, I am like Teddy Roosevelt, a hunter conservationist,” which provided immediate relief and approval and the ability to keep the interview moving along without a hitch. Good gosh will I miss Bob Durgin. Rest in peace, cowboy.
Historic Harrisburg Home Tour another great success
Thank you to Historic Harrisburg.
Their annual home tour was once again a lot of fun. We get to walk around in the winter time’s crisp air, with a lot of interesting and friendly people. All of us care about our community, which is important. The homes are always interesting, and many are spectacular. The hosts are always gracious, sometimes with the aid of a glass of wine, or sometimes a bottle or two.
One thing that bears repeating from past posts about these tours is kudos to Alex Hartzler, who has invested in Harrisburg’s re-development for umpteen years. His effort has been as an investor expecting a return, yes, but let’s face it, his WCI Partners faces an uphill task. There is a lot of risk, and the possibility of very little ROI, if any. And yet they go house by house, block by obliterated, abandoned block, and breathe life into Pennsylvania’s capital city.
Another fact worth repeating from previous blog posts here is the important role of gay people, mostly gay men, in gentrification and the slow reclamation of abandoned neighborhoods everywhere, not the least of which are here in Harrisburg.
You have issues with gay people? OK, you are entitled to those feelings, as sexuality really is a private matter. And if your views are Biblical, as are mine, then again, you and I are entitled to our Biblical views on human activity. That said, in my practical observation gay men are an incredible force for economic development and neighborhood renewal, which are good things in my experience and in my view. And they make fantastic, fabulous neighbors. They tend to be neat, kind, friendly, law abiding, all of which are desirable qualities in a neighbor.
In fact, let’s face it, I am downright envious of gay men: They get to spend all their money and time on themselves.
And in that spending process they are helping rebuild Harrisburg into a prosperous and safe community. So I say Thank you, neighbors; I really do not care about your private lifestyle, and I really do appreciate your investment in my neighborhood and community. Everyone have a wonderful holiday season and a successful 2019.
Here are some photos from our tour.
A reclaimed row home in Mid-Town. 100 years ago, these homes were built of strong and attractive materials, with neat designs. These attributes are being re-discovered and appreciated by many Americans seeking close and walking communities.
My “Princess of Patience” in the Levine home in Uptown. What a woman. Until I returned from the mountains, she had been a hunting widow for many weeks.
This is why I will never have my home on the Historic Harrisburg tour: I would have to meticulously clean my lawn. Thank you to Ray Davis for making his home open.
