Category Archives: Culture Wars

October 17, 2013 · 10:52 pm

‘It never rains when I can make it pour” by David Duff

“It never rains when I can make it pour“

Honestly, I really do try to be cheerful, I mean, every Monday I give you, free of charge, several jokes to cheer you up but the fact is it is impossible to avoid the really bad news. And ‘over there’ the news is getting ‘worserer and worserer’. You might reply something to the effect of who gives a damn? Well, I do! I love the place despite its manifold faults and vices. And, like it or loath it, it looms alarmingly large on the global landscape. So for me, reading Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph and then Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator has made me even more miserable than the steady rainfall outside my garret window has already done.

Mr. Warner (such an appropriate name) warns of the imminent death of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In doing so he joins a growing chorus:

That this position – what Giscard d’Estaing referred to as America’s “exorbitant
privilege” – could so casually be put at risk by politicians on Capitol Hill is
an extraordinary spectacle that may be indicative of a great power already
seriously on the wane.

However, he suggests that it might be a slower decline and fall than some suppose not least because so much of the world’s trade is conducted in dollars. Nevertheless, he sums up the predicament, thus:

Serious alternatives to the dollar, such as a global reserve currency, are
still a long way off, but the latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill have given the
search for them renewed and added momentum. The US is recklessly throwing away its future.

All that, of course, is a symptom of a malignant disease at the heart of the American body-politic. Jeffrey Lord, in a long and detailed examination seeks to define the cause. In his opinion, and it is one I share, it is the incessant and semi-secret attack of surreptitious Marxism. If that makes me (and him) sound like born-again Joe McCarthys, so be it, but any detailed examination of the Democrat party, the higher reaches of the American academy, the civil service, the judiciary and now, according to Mr. Lord, the armed services, would convince anyone that whilst most of the participants are the usual “useful idiots” the controllers are Red in tooth and claw! Meanwhile, the stupid and stupified traditional leadership of the Republican party remain oblivious still believing that they live in the ‘good ol’ days’ of schmoozing and deal-making:

The difference — the central and critical difference — is that after decades of left-wing devotion to the hijacking of America, to the idea of transforming it [my emphasis], there are still Republicans and even some conservatives who don’t understand the nature of either their opponents or their opponents’ objectives.

They simply do not understand that the nature of the Democrat beast has changed irrevocably and thus, the war inside the Republican party between those who do and those who do not is infinitely more lethal than that between them and the Democrats. If indeed a catastrophe occurs then the benefits – oh yes, there are always benefits to someone! – will flow to the organisation that has planned it and instigated it.

The above post from October 16, 2013 has been reprinted with permission from the erudite David Duff at Duff and Nonsense, who writes about news, politics, lots of military history from a wonderfully refreshing British point of view (pssst, and he posts a lot of jokes too).

2 Comments

Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, History, Politics

October 16, 2013 · 8:17 am

March under one flag

Legends on the rise and fall of great societies permeate history with certain threads, like the demise of the common culture leading the list as one of the prime harbingers of “doom”. Yes, that word “doom” comes to mind quite frequently, presaging our presumed ineluctable fated demise. Warning signs, both large and small, abound, blaring out endless streams of our culture and Judeo-Christian value system in full retreat to the relentless moral relativist message.

Some retreat for public relations reasons, like Wal-mart this past weekend (story here). The EBT system failed last Saturday in 17 states, leading to EBT recipients debit cards showing no limits. News reports indicate that in several states Wal-mart stores were crammed with customers filling slews of shopping carts with groceries and “checking out”, swiping their EBT card, which they knew did not have the funds to cover the amount of groceries “purchased” (stolen). The corollary would be long ago when people used personal checks more often and supposing you wrote a check for your purchases knowing you did not have money to cover the purchase. There’s no difference besides the fact that media handlers will guide Wal-mart and the image of Wal-mart tracking down “poor people” for criminal prosecution over this blatant thievery might look like the giant retailer is picking on the little people. Wal-mart will likely end up eating this loss and due to American social conditioning, way too many people will use moral relativism to guide their moral reasoning in the matter – saying things like “Wal-mart can afford it” or “Wal-mart screws over the little guy all the time so turn around is fair play”. Sure, in this case some Wal-mart management in the affected states made the call to let the sales go through rather than stop the theft and they failed to follow the proper procedure in place to call Xerox when EBT cards aren’t working properly.

In this same above-mentioned scenario the more disturbing behavior is that of the crowds of people who flooded Wal-mart stores to steal food in broad daylight, with no moral hesitation. The problem with government hand-outs is the people start beginning to believe these programs really are “entitlements” and thus they never spend a moment’s notice wondering about taking other people’s money as their own, nor do they worry about stealing food from Wal-mart. Taking stuff that is not yours is stealing, no matter the twisted semantics used to rationalize it. To delve further into this moral relativist hellish enslavement of the mind I urge you to read the article Justin linked in a comment here yesterday, “Contemporary Liberal Doublethink: Welfare = Self-Reliance”. The thieves in this scenario won’t bother to “think or reason” about their thievery, no, these are pack animals – used to being led, with no will to think for themselves nor will they ponder things like civic duty, aspiring to become better human beings or much beyond their instant gratification.

PJ Media offered this truly excellent piece written by a writer who pens under the pseudonym, Bookworm, titled “The Surprising Reason Americans Are Vulnerable to Moral Relativism”, which although lengthy, definitely rates the time. This writer posits that our American embrace of Anne Frank’s idealistic belief: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”, creates a syllogism as described in this passage:

“Thanks to those words, Americans accept that “people are truly good at heart.” This belief creates a syllogism, one that sees Americans claiming that it must be a lie when someone dares to claim that another group doesn’t meet certain moral absolutes. How can there be moral absolutes when all “people are truly good at heart”?”

The author goes on to explain why Anne Frank’s simple idealistic belief was not only wrong in her own personal life, where she perished in the Holocaust, but it is simply wrong for mankind, in general. People aren’t truly good at heart – that part takes a great deal of civilizing effort, both in the home and in society in general, hence we used to call it “civil society”. Aristotle offered his definition, “a shared set of norms and ethos, in which free citizens on an equal footing lived under the rule of law”, which puts us on firmer footing than most of the opining from American academics in recent decades. We need that shared set of norms and ethos as the glue to hold our splintering, divided country together. Cutting through the leftist doublethink presents a daunting challenge, but unless we commit to “winning the hearts and minds” of Americans on the importance of being “good citizens”, where “rights” rest right next to “civic duty”, we’ll continue to drift, creating an ever-widening no man’s land, rather than to use a military metaphor and which I use as my gravatar, “march under one flag”. We must become a country under one flag again – we must become American citizens first, political partisans second.

6 Comments

Filed under Culture Wars, Food for Thought, Politics

October 15, 2013 · 3:41 pm

Michelle, Michelle, how does your garden grow…….

Who knew, with silver bells and cockle shells and ravenous squirrels all in a row. Just when you think the Obama farce hit it’s low bottom mark for cynical publicity stunts, today’s news cycle churns out sad tales of Michelle’s Potemkin garden project rotting on the vine, so to speak – here, here and here. A perfect tableau for the phoniness that is the Obamas – it’s all one sad, trashy tale of lies, pandering, pathos and to quote one of the biggest liars in America, none other than Bill Clinton, “it’s the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”…..

While many people plant vegetable gardens out of a love for gardening, understanding the basics of gardening, the basics of how to survive if the power goes out and basically to have some simple plans in place of what to do, when life’s little emergencies happen should be common sense, but instead we’ve got an entire society geared toward waiting for the government to take us by the hand and fix everything. Before I turn this into a meandering rant, let me just say, I am so sick of these people and their never ending staged political posturing. Her garden serves as just another one of their lame stage props – nothing more, and as one of those dwindling oddities, known as “taxpayers”, I sure would love to know how much Michelle’s organic garden costs us each year??? Not to worry though, because no matter the fiscal calamities, these self-anointed demigods will still have their faithful at the ready to shovel more s**t (because they sure won’t get their hands dirty)!

“Watch them flourish and fall”?

The indefatigable Justin posted two links on my October Daily Chat. The first article, from the Foreign Policy Institute,“The Crisis Of American Conservatism: Inherent Contradictions And The End Of The Road”, delves into a lengthy history of American conservatism and ends with suggesting that unless and until American conservatism can get a buy-in from a large segment of American women (particularly white women), who largely remain independent, but see issues through a gender-focused lense, it will become continually harder for conservatives to win national elections. The second article, “Is Max Hastings right? Will America shut down for REAL?”, from a British perspective on American politics, comes from David Duff’s blog, Duff and Nonsense and offers many excellent historical parallels to consider too.

Here are some links from Malcolm Pollack’s blog worth a look:

Some pictures of a deserted Detroit library (Malcolm notes the books are safe from looters – go figure).

Patrick J. Buchanan article, “Is Red State America Seceding?”, which brings the cultural divide in America into clear focus, not with some fancy psychological mumbo-jumbo, but simply by geography. That old saying that demographics is destiny, does sure seem to hold true.

Mark Steyn’s take on “public lands” vs. King Obama’s decrees”

Hopefully, today I can write something original about the sorry state of America – still mulling over all these disturbing optics and since we live in a media-driven culture, which images makes it on the airwaves, regardless of veracity, propels our culture. Ever wonder why these leftists running this cuckoo’s nest so zealously try to create “narratives” and “composite characters”, well there you have it – they know that he who controls the media controls the people…….. even in America now. Why, you might ask or even how could this be in a Republic founded to promote individual liberty……….. to quote Justin again, “anyway in whole cloth it’s a very long complicated story (1937 to now)”, definitely time to recite the Rudyard Kipling poem.

“The Gods of the Copybook Headings”

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

4 Comments

Filed under American History, Culture Wars, Politics, The Constitution

October 11, 2013 · 7:25 am

Requiem for America? (No way, no how and not as long as we can fight!!!)

I enjoy chatting with all you guys on my blog, but it’s so wonderful to have another female voice here and judging by Minta’s comments in two days, odds are she’s going to become one of those in my “treasured friend” category:-) So, Minta this post is going to start with quoting you again. Here is the poem Minta posted, which reminds her of America:

“Who Has Known Heights”— Mary Brent Whiteside

Who has known heights and depths shall not again
Know peace-not as the calm heart knows
Low, ivied walls; a garden close;
An though he tread the humble ways of men
He shall not speak the common tongue again.

Who has known heights shall bear forevermore
An incommunicable thing
That hurts his heart, as if a wing
Beat at the portal, challenging;
And yet—lured by the gleam his vision wore—
Who once has trodden stars seeks peace no more.

Gladius emailed one of his “rants”, as he calls them, about the state of America and the GOP’s complete failure to find a message to inspire Americans and counter the left’s relentless surge toward a socialistic demise. As an editorial comment, this is one of his milder rants, lol:

The problem with all of this talk about how BHOzo is killing the country is that the message is lost on the low information citizens who never read a newspaper, listen to news radio or see any internet news that doesn’t come with Huffington Post when they open their email. If information was all we needed, the invention of Google would have ushered in a state of utopia. We have to touch the heart with a good message. With 47% of the country on some form of government life support, they don’t care that the good, hard-working segment of the nation is suffering. The conservative right is not getting the message out with clear, concise sound bites that can be picked up in 140 characters or less. Being right won’t change anything until we learn how to communicate with that low information pack of ignorant 20, 30 and 40 somethings. Our national Republican leadership team (dare I call them leaders) is partly responsible for killing this country due to their own intransigence and ignorance of getting out the message. Hire a left liberal, Madison Avenue PR firm, for goodness sake, if that’s what it takes to get out the message. They will do anything for money!

So there, I’m off my soap box.

Both of the above views strike almost a”requiem for the dead” mood, but I’m not ready to concede defeat yet. As long as we can still think freely, there is hope. Saving our Republic won’t come from the politicians, of that I feel certain. President Obama and company keep accelerating the burn rate, fueling this out of control incineration of any sort of fiscal constraints and the GOP, by and large, can’t even muster a bucket brigade to attempt to quell the flames. When it comes to disaster metaphors, perhaps sandbagging, town by town, when the Mississippi floods provides a better approach – saving America one town at a time. It all starts with working hard to save yourself and your family, then helping your neighbors, and moving on to your community from there.

Certainly, trying to wrestle control of the GOP from the hands of the likes of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, John McCain would offer a stronger national platform, from which to propel more responsive and responsible federal governance, but truly unless and until, our states start pushing federalism, rather than being wimpy supplicants to the ever-burgeoning federal bureaucracy, don’t expect much to change.

So many things frustrate and disgust me about American culture, but we’ve got such a wealth of talent here and despite all the dire catastrophes Washington creates, accepting defeat isn’t an option. Actually Obamacare may be the federal catastrophe that awakens the rebellion against Washington, that mobilizes that needed grassroots effort. No one in America will be able to avoid the Obamacare disaster, not individually or our businesses. One can hardly miss the rumblings in Obama’s kingdom with his sinking poll numbers, truly horrible optics of pitting federal power against WWII vets trying to visit their long overdue memorial and disgusting theatrical talking points offensive his nincompoops keep launching. These idiots live by their poll numbers and today’s number should give them pause – 60% say fire every member of Congress and Obama hit his lowest poll number yet – 37% approval.

As a child, I remember a trip to Williamsburg, VA and my awe at standing in the very room where Patrick Henry gave his speech. I gazed around in wonder as the tour guide told us, right here is where he took his stand:

“Give me Liberty or give me Death”

Gladius is right, having a strong voice would help, but still, we aren’t dead yet:-)

Minta’s Insightful Metaphor

An astute poster, Ms. Minta Marie Morze, commented:

It is the United States that is a house divided—America, itself, is a body of ideas that awaits the reawakening that can only come through the efforts of individuals who value it. It is like the effort that was involved in building one of the great cathedrals of Europe, requiring devoted labor and a farseeing vision. (And, as a metaphorical statement, compare the magnificent cathedrals of Europe with the one recently built near me in Los Angeles by Progressive minds—the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.)

Here’s a quick link to the LA cathedral mentioned. Since this morning seems to be one of my quoting others days (much more inspiring, by far, than some of my own drivel), I’d like to jot down a few more quotes worth considering. Taping up quotes – on bulletin boards, in my locker as a teen, on my refrigerator and even cross stitching a quote for my husband to hang in his office years ago – turned into a lifelong habit. Ms Minta hit on the problem in America, it’s not only our politics which is divided, it’s our failure to strive for something higher and heaping praise on something much less, in most aspects of our lives.

The quote, which my husband asked me to cross stitch and he framed, mattered to him as a leader in the US Army:

“Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.” – Peter Drucker

For me, being of a more daydreaming nature, the following two quotes keep me striving, no matter how many obstacles lie up ahead.

I am only one.
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything.
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

– Edward Everett Hale

For the cause that lacks assistance.
For the wrong that needs assistance.
For the future in the distance.

– George Linneaus Banks

Have a nice day everyone:-)

1 Comment

Filed under Culture Wars, Education, Food for Thought

October 9, 2013 · 1:32 pm

G. Murphy Donovan: “The Decline and Fall of National Security”

With the advent of the internet, many common sense understandings about copyright protections and acceptable usage of other writers’ works seem to have flown out the window. Many times I’ve been tempted to just post entire articles or pictures from other websites, but my “following the rules” nature caused me to hesitate. Stratfor authorizes reprinting their articles, so I took the liberty of posting that, but I’ll continue writing my rather boring little pieces about great articles and offering a link. Here’s another very insightful piece by none other than the amazing G. Murphy Donovan (GMD), in which he cuts through the trendy strategic claptrap and hones in on strategic ground truth and our national security demise (from The American Thinker, “The Decline and Fall of National Security”). GMD chronicles the American intelligence demise coupled with the rampant politicization of our top military brass. I would add one other factor to his list – the complete collapse of a shared national security viewpoint among our two main political parties and amongst our populace. Many days reading or watching the news, it sure looks like each side views the opposing domestic political party as the main national security threat rather than any foreign entity. From biblical times to today, that old adage that a house divided cannot long stand presages our demise, unless we can find a way to fix our foundational damage and rebuild a more sound structure – tall order with the fractured polity and populace in America presently.

12 Comments

Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, Military, Politics

September 15, 2013 · 3:08 pm

The defining generational shift

Thanks Justin for all the kind words about my blog and for pointing out so many great blogs and sites to check out. Duff&Nonsense: entertaining, erudite, chock full of that British understated ruthlessness – love it. Gypsy Scholar: covers the gambit and not easily pigeon-holed into a particular category – a well-written, eclectic mix of commentary. Just this morning I started reading waka, waka, waka, Malcolm Pollack’s blog: plan to spend days reading through his archives – the writing is top-notch. I’m sure their blog lists contain many more blogs worth perusing. I’d like to venture out on a limb about Gypsy Scholar’s recent post.

Gypsy Scholar posted a piece, “Nonlinearity: E-Books vs. Physical Books“, which delves into the pros and cons of e-readers, when matched up against physical books and it led me to ponder this matter a bit further and after I pondered this a bit, I thought about how truly spoiled we, who bask in the modern world of luxury, are to have so many varied ways to access information, great literature, connect with other people around the globe. Certainly, anyone who has ever tried to find the index or bibliography of an e-book, knows the frustration of simply flipping through the pages of a physical book and trying to do that with an e-reader. As technology improves, my optimistic nature leads me to feel confident that glitch will eventually be ironed out.

Writer’s warning: Proceed at your own risk, the following rambling post is this writer’s “oh the demise of American culture” rant of the day.

The trickier problem seems to lie in the sad fact that there’s no cure for stupid and the handing tech toys to most of the world’s inhabitants seems to spread a “too-dumb-to-exist” virus faster than 4G access. Yes, it’s been a long time since I posted a pet peeve, but here goes. Everywhere you wander in America (even perhaps around the globe, if news footage is reliable) you see the masses, preoccupied with their cell phones, iphones, tablets, etc. Often my mean-streak breaks loose and I wonder, “these $%^#!* morons can’t even string together a coherent sentence, so what in the Hades can they be texting about all day long?” Yes, I really do think things like this and on occasion, my nice, demure self lets thoughts like this slip from my lips…….. accidentally, of course. American culture teeters toward the end of a three act play, where no one remembers the first two acts and we’re zooming to a climatic final scene, curtains poised to drop and there we slouch slurping our big drinks…….. glibly unaware.

For the bibliophiles, an e-reader offers us one more way to indulge our obsessive passion for acquiring books and just the knowledge that I’m carrying around a small home library’s worth of books in my purse makes me feel giddy. No longer am I left flipping through outdated, grubby magazines, while waiting to see the doctor nor do I have to suffer making or enduring aimless small talk, with lengthy rambles about the size of one’s kidney stones or some undiagnosed “rash”. It’s so convenient to pull out my e-reader or tablet and block out the other inhabitants, so yes, technology serves as a very useful barrier to unwanted social interaction. But for all these wonderful uses, I work and interact with ordinary people and way too often I hear people tell me they bought an e-reader and haven’t really used it yet or worse I’ve heard the following comment more than a handful of times, “I bought a kindle, but I don’t really read books” Yes, acquiring these gadgets is about acquiring these gadgets – not really expanding one’s reading options.

In the early years of owning a PC, one bright morning my children were getting ready for school and living in a very temperate Southern state, we don’t get much in the way of cold weather (although Southerners bundle in big parkas as soon as the temperature drops below 60°F). One of my sons rushed to the PC and he had to go online to find out if it was cold enough to wear a jacket. In dismay, I blurted out, “Are you stupid? Just step out on the front porch and find out!” He looked at me, affronted by my ignorance, and said, “Mom that’s not as accurate as the weather online.” Many times I’ve thought back to this as the defining generational shift in America – those who lived before computers and actually had to rely on their own brainpower to figure things out and the PC generation, where if someone wrote about it online it trumps even trusting you own up close and personal experience (even if that weather info came from several hundred miles away).

The love of books seems a more full-bodied experience than ownership of an e-reader. There’s something awe-inspiring to meander along rows of books in a beautiful old library or even to find a small makeshift library tucked into a few fourth-floor rooms on a tiny US Army kaserne in Germany. Often, I would bundle my youngest daughter into her car seat and we’d head to this library on Schloss Kaserne, after I got my other children off to school. I’d find some story books for her and some books for me and we’d find a comfy seat and spend several hours at a time reading. Very few people used that library and my husband and other children turned their noses up at this tiny library, but for me it brought back childhood memories of sitting for hours in our old pastor’s attic, where his wife kept all her old magazines and excess books stored on neat shelves, in perfect order. She had every edition of some magazines going back to the 1920s, when she had married our pastor.

The first thing I notice about any book is the binding. I admire lovely bindings and that’s before I even open the cover. An e-reader can never copy that feel of a book between your hands, but the ease of accessing so many classics, histories and information so easily offers a huge trade-off. Would that we could copy good teaching methods as easily as we copy books to digitized formats. Our pastor’s wife (mentioned in several previous posts) spent her time being a good pastor’s wife – helped in the church, helped in the community, helped us with our many reports and school projects. And yet, by training she had attended Teachers College Columbia University in the mid-1920s and I most assuredly benefited from her many years of informally teaching me. My brothers, sisters and I would run across the road to the parsonage whenever we needed more information than our books at home offered. She would stop whatever she was doing and devote as much time as needed to help us find information and offer advice. This lovely woman would bookmark passages from books, pages in magazines and write notes of things she thought I should read.

I think that the issue confronting us is lazy self-indulgence, where failing schools is just a small part of the problem – just walk into any big box store, where the majority of Americans shop. The book section rarely is crowded, yet the electronics area, particularly the gaming section usually swarms with young men. What are the girls shopping for – mostly clothes, freakish hair color, looking for “as seen on TV” merchandise. And it’s the rare shopper who isn’t otherwise preoccupied with his/her cellphone. There, I’ve said it, we have the laziest, most self-indulgent culture on planet earth and that’s what’s ailing America.

5 Comments

Filed under Culture Wars, Pet Peeves

July 26, 2013 · 7:21 am

Who are we?

While Anthony Weiner tries to spin his deviancy down, to part of the new internet age that we all need to accept, lest we too severely narrow our choices of qualified representatives for elected office, Glenn Beck reported a case about a child in America that should be splashed across the news. This child isn’t a Trayvon Martin, who can be used and manipulated to fit a political agenda. No, this is a story about a young girl, whom no one cared about – a girl who ran away from a group home for children in the foster care system. President Obama and his mainstream media followers won’t devote much attention to this story and the AP probably feels it did due diligence by reporting the rape of this little girl by 13 illegal aliens in an apartment where three of the men brought her. Some videotaped the multiple rapes of this child. When they were done with her, they dumped her off in another neighborhood and she was picked up by a woman, when she asked for help. This woman took her to an apartment, where this child was raped again by a man in that apartment (this man was a black man). This child’s attackers don’t fit any of the left’s political agendas, so we won’t be seeing any political action to highlight this case. You won’t find Hillary Clinton speaking out against crimes against children on this case or delving into why this young girl wasn’t in a loving home with her parents. This is just one child, whose name we won’t see trademarked by greedy parents, like Trayvon Martin’s . She’s a little girl who probably doesn’t think she matters to anyone else in the world, but she should matter to all of us. No one reported on her race or ethnicity and you know, it doesn’t matter really and I mentioned who her attackers are, because who they are is why the mainstream media isn’t sensationalizing this case.

Here’s is the link to Glenn Beck’s video about this case. He’s got his own small start-up media enterprise and he could manage to dig up the facts about this crime, so why couldn’t the big news outfits? No, they’re too busy with hours upon hours of coverage about the big Weiner, a pervert, who isn’t fit for public office and who doesn’t deserve even a minute of our time. This little girl’s brutal rapes should give us all pause to look at our country and wonder, “who are we?”

Good Citizen Solution Starts With You

As the race-hustlers, liberals from academia, left-wing politicos and even the Occupy Wall street and communists join hands to march for “justice for Trayvon”, I’m going to offer up a few links to some excellent commentary on crime in America and the startling facts on the real racial divide in America’s criminal justice system. At National Review Online, Heather Mac Donald penned, “The Post-Zimmerman Poison Pill”. Mac Donald brings to the table facts from a long history of writing well-researched pieces on a variety of police issues, the criminal justice system, homeland security, welfare and immigration at the Manhattan Institute think tank. Her research always deals in reliable statistics and avoids the inflammatory flame-throwing. Also on National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy, details the fine points of the legal maneuvering by the Obama administration in the Zimmerman case and now in escalating racial tensions in his latest piece, “The Obama Administration’s Race-Baiting Campaign”. At PJ Media, Rick Moran wrote a very good assessment of the big picture of this trial and how it’s being manipulated by the Obama administration, the far-left political activists, much of the mainstream media and the professional civil rights profiteers, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in a piece titled, “Zimmerman Verdict: Race, Guns, and Baloney.

Even the Huffington Post headlines a take on race relations in America by Howard Fineman titled, “Far From The Mountaintop: Black America Still Reaching For MLK’s Dream”. Fineman offers some interesting quotes from US Congressman, Elijah Cummings, who represents a district in Baltimore that has been hard hit by crime, unemployment and social decay. I know what downtown Baltimore is like, my late mother-in-law and father-in-law lived there (rough neighborhood). Fineman relates a story that Cummings told of taking his mother, a Pentecostal preacher, to meet President Obama and how this event of having a “black President” (who conveniently ignores his white heritage completely) was the best day in her life. Fineman delves into Trayvon’s death with this amazingly untrue statement -“The 2012 shooting and the 2013 verdict divided the country, but united Black America around the reasonable fear that no black child — especially no black male — is safe from the assumption that he is somehow a threat to the civil order on any street he walks.” Really, he thinks it’s a reasonable fear, when every FACT on crime in America indicates exactly the opposite.

The safest places to walk for anyone, black, white and every other ethnic mix you can name, in America are in predominantly white neighborhoods – that’s just a fact. The crime that decimates our black inner-city neighborhoods stands as a testament to the dismal failures of the liberal social experiments to make life “fair” in America, which Congressman Cummings champions. It’s always an us vs. them within the professional civil rights industry, which Cummings is a part of. Now, how they think fomenting anger, racial distrust and encouraging young black men to take to the streets of America, while they fuel more racial resentment is going to change the tenor of race relations in America or really change the grim everyday living conditions for way too many black children being raised in fatherless homes escapes me. They’re widening the racial divide.

Being the victim of injustice doesn’t give you the right to abdicate your duties as a good citizen in America. How ridiculous is it for the President of the United States of America (the leader of the free world) to stand there whining about some white women clutching their purses nervously when a black man gets on an elevator, as so horrible for black men to deal with – really some minor ignorance like that causes lasting scars? Here’s a fact, some people will hold racist views no matter what you do. This is America and they’re free to believe whatever the heck they want and if some white woman fears black men, well, then so be it.

You can’t eliminate racists, idiots, or ignorant people by more legislation – sometimes you just need to ignore some things. As long as there are laws to protect equal access to opportunity and equal protection under the law, then the little stuff that President Obama mentioned is just “rise above the ignorance stuff”. Listening to this President makes me sad for the smallness of his visions on race and yes, I think he’s a racist. He glories in pegging white people as racists, narrow-minded and intent on keeping the black man down. So much for uniting America. Instead of encouraging young black men to take to the streets to demand “justice for Trayvon”, which this President knows he can’t have a redo on the trial to get the outcome he desires, his definition of “justice” is rather murky and really he’s using this black rage to push his far-left political agenda – just a shallow political ploy on the backs of angry, young black men.

Even white people sometimes fall victim to being wrongfully accused, profiled and having their rights violated. I’ve experienced injustice in my life and I’m considering writing about something that happened to me many years ago. I never received justice, that’s for sure, because I couldn’t prove any of the crimes committed against me. In fact, I couldn’t even get those closest to me to believe me, because what happened seemed unbelievable. By sheer luck, I did win the most important legal battle, which was my freedom. I have had to keep silent, because I still can’t prove it happened. My story is about how lies can snowball out of control and how people with power can go to extremes for political survival. In the aftermath of this serious injustice I experienced, I know what rage feels like and I know what it feels like to think your rights don’t count. What helped me survive was to go get a job after being a homemaker for 18 years. Hard work helps you find a way to release some of that rage – put your anger to something constructive. And whenever I feel ready to quit, I fall back on the simple lessons that my short Army experience taught me.

Sometimes you have to just ‘”suck it up and drive on”, because other people are counting on you. And here’s the real key to persevering in life, whenever you are out of hope, and out of options, take a little time to “back up and regroup and then you can fight another day”. Life is like that too, so never forget everyone is part of a team, whether it’s your family, your school, your church, your country – we need to rebuild the American team and work together. Now, my job is just an ordinary retail job, which lots of people think is beneath them, but putting your hands to some sort of real work would better serve so many unemployed young black men – it really would.

The solution to not only black Americans’ social problems, but all Americans’ social problems is building bridges of hope, not bridges built by federal programs leading to nowhere. Strong families and dedication to individual achievement, good citizenship girded by a clear understanding of not only our civil rights, but our civic duties as good citizens will restore American communities and provide real hope and change. If you really want to help young black men, here’s the answer black men – start being good fathers and sticking around to be a good role model for your sons and yes, this advice goes to all American men – stand up and start being responsible husbands and fathers. This is the real solution to America’s social decay and to improving racial harmony too. And you know all this effort is being expended to organize marches and protests, which is of course their right, but imagine what could be achieved if all this anger in young black men was turned to doing actual work in some of the worst neighborhoods in America. The community-organizer-in-chief should be promoting civic action that gets inner-city young people rebuilding their communities.

At work I observed two women filling up several shopping carts of school supplies and I asked if they were buying for a school. They told me that their little church from a nearby very small town gives away 350 backpacks filled with schools supplies to children in need. I observed them handing empty boxes to their kids and telling them, “here count out 300 more erasers and put them neatly in this box” and “we need 100 more of those pencils.” That’s one small church and these two ladies smiled and told me they are blessed to have a very generous congregation. If you would look at the millions upon millions of federal dollars spent on ineffective federal programs to address the problems within America’s inner-cities, where people like this President gain political power and hold great sway, and instead expended that energy toward encouraging the residents of inner-cities to begin taking responsibility to help rebuild their own communities, we might see more real change, less violence and offer real hope to these young black men.

Last night I watched Bill O’Reilly talk to a black reverend and from the back and forth, it seemed to me that this black reverend doesn’t much care for white people – that was my perception. He huffily made some comment that the black inner-city community doesn’t need other people to come in and fix their problems, but he does want tax dollars and lots of federal money from these other people. I know this angry pride from growing up in a poor, rural area, where the locals looked on city people moving in with distrust and disdain. Here’s a quote for the reverend: Matthew 7:16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”

We need to move beyond the flying into fits of anger and directing our energy toward dividing people into hostile camps. Instead of buying into this distrust, perhaps we need to open our hearts a little and try to get to know each other as individuals first, strive to find that common ground. And truly that saying, success is the best revenge”, puts all those purse-clutching, racist white women in perspective – they aren’t what matters, because now here comes one of those hard lessons in life – you can’t control or change what anyone else thinks or believes, the only person you can control and change is yourself. Focus on being the best person you can be and you just might inspire a few other people to follow your lead.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”- Martin Luther King, Jr. ( I Have A Dream speech, August 28, 1963), I was a toddler and here we are 50 years later still retracing our steps, trying to realize this dream. Instead of letting our hopes be dashed over a local tragedy of two young men brawling in the street one night, we’ve got to set our sights on getting to that mountaintop where freedom rings for every American child and hope rises above being a political slogan. Hopefully, in my four children’s lifetime this dream will become reality.