Posts Tagged → teenage
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.
The boys of summer
This past weekend a friend and I got our boys together, plus one of my son’s friends.
The four young teenagers ran themselves ragged, and it was a beautiful thing to see. Running up and down the river, floating downstream with the strong current, exiting downward of the rocks, sloshing back up and doing it all over again. And again.
Until one of them discovered some otter’s half-eaten breakfast of fish and crayfish, lying exposed in the strong sunshine on a rock with the water swirling around it. Inspecting that absorbed their attention, heads crowded around, someone poking about with a stick. And then >POW< they broke and ran back upstream as a splashing, sloshing pack, marking a distant boulder in the middle of the stream as their next object of focus.
This kind of outdoor joy went on all weekend.
Campfires, campfire cooking, campfires becoming scary bonfires, shooting guns, lighting fireworks, ear-ringing blackpowder cannon booming, combat SORRY! games, food crumbs everywhere, clothing smeared with mud and grass stains, pickup football games, woods walks. It was just one non-stop blur of motion.
At night we watched movies, shooshing one another when someone talked over the dialogue. Crumbs on the couches, popcorn on the floor.
It was a thing of joyous beauty to behold. Such unbridled happiness. Such carefree freedom.
Meanwhile the dads sat on the river bank, on the porch, on a log in the woods, in the living room, and compared childrearing tactics, kid behavior, learning and teaching successes and failures, hopes and fears for the kids’ futures, hopes and fears for our own parenting, for our own relationships.
Somewhere in all of this I was both a child again and a responsible adult. Watching these boys being boys as boys were meant to be was refreshing, and kind of a validation of my own untamed side. That part of almost every guy that is a kind of mostly-hidden teenager who refuses to grow up and get with the adult program. Heck, being a boy is fun, even a fifty-year-old boy. You never really stop being a boy, you just get new toys. The consequences of screwing up are no longer skinning your knee, however; now, you can lose your home, your spouse, your health.
But we are boys inside, nonetheless.
Being a dad is difficult, and fun; hard and enlightening; frustrating and rewarding. Doing a bit of it with another dad over a weekend makes it easier. But most of all I enjoyed being a part of the boy herd, and reliving some of that unfettered joy of just being a boy free to roam and run in the summer sunshine.
People ask me why
For some people, politics and political activism are their bread and butter. Politics pays their bills. With the right clients, they can make millions of dollars out of politics as a business model.
For me, politics is about personal liberty, freedom, opportunity and many other inspiring principles behind the founding of America. It is also about the little freedoms we have that emanate from the bigger ideas: The freedom to drive or walk somewhere without having to prove that you belong there, the freedom to choose where to live, the ability to select from a wide assembly of fresh food, to name a few popular ones.
Call it an innate sense of justice and right and wrong, which family and friends have said I’ve had since I was a little kid, or call it a lack of patience, an inability to watch, participate in, listen to, or tolerate BS/fluff/empty slogans/lies/self-interest, whatever it is that motivates me, I am passionate about good government.
Good government has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager, when I first got involved in political campaigns. Back then, I was horrified at the way abortion-on-demand was changing our culture, I was against gun control, and nuclear missiles scared me. Later on, watching police beat non-violent pro-democracy marchers in South Africa motivated me to put my voice behind change there (note that now the monumentally corrupt and un-just African National Congress government there is hardly better than the overtly racist apartheid government it replaced). Age, paying taxes, and work experience have a way of shaping political views for normal people, and I was no exception.
So here I am, living a life that has meaning for me, trying to shape Pennsylvania and American politics in ways I believe are healthy, necessary, and just. The citizens and taxpayers who are supposed to be served well by their government (of the people, by the people, for the people) are not being well served today. This is why I am involved in politics. That is why I will not go away, at least not until things are fixed to my satisfaction.