Category Archives: Culture Wars

Some thoughts on being a “liberated” American woman…

The above videos show America’s oldest teacher, Agnes “Granny” Zhelesnik, who turned 102 in January 2016.  Zhelesnik didn’t start teaching until she was 80 years old, when she began teaching children cooking and sewing at a private pre-K – 5 school in New Jersey.

This video struck a chord with me on many levels.  It’s wonderful to see young children learning useful life skills in a school these days.  It’s wonderful to see an elderly person strike out on a new purposeful and meaningful course late in life.  It’s wonderful to see somewhere in America’s vast morass of education failures, efforts to teach children important and useful practical life skills exist.

My oldest sister, in her 60s, teaches adult cooking classes at a community college, but she also teaches cooking classes for kids in the summertime.  One of my long-term pet peeves, but also deep concerns is how many young adults I’ve encountered in the past 20-30 years or so, who have absolutely no practical life skills.   This concern isn’t about politicized feminist ideology vs. traditional family values, but about a society where so much opportunity, information, resources and talent withers away, never developed or fully realized.  Living in a world where information on just about any topic is accessible with just a click or touch on a screen, this lack of acquisition of knowledge, training and development of practical skills in America speaks to a crisis of the American spirit.

My oldest sister has the skills of a culinary arts school grad, although she never attended any formal cooking school.  Our grandmother started buying my sister cookbooks, when my sister was in her teens and showed an interest in cooking.  In high school, my sister was a super-star in her home-ec classes, impressing everyone with her creations.  She impressed us at home too.  She found a job as a teenager working in a local restaurant, where the owner was a very talented cook, baker and cake decorator.  This lady also ran the food services in our school district by the time I was in high school.  Our school district had very good home-cooked type lunches back then.

My oldest sister is also extremely talented at all sorts of crafts and way more talented at needlework than I am.   What she has always done is read a lot about the hobbies she’s interested in and she also observes carefully how craft and sewing items are constructed. Every hobby she undertakes, she doesn’t settle for mediocrity, but works to master it.  She has taken classes to learn many different things.  In fact, she took several cake decorating classes and convinced my mother to go to cake decorating classes.  My other two sisters decided to take cake decorating classes several years ago too.  I am the only one who hasn’t learned cake decorating yet and I still think that’s something I want to learn how to do.

Growing up in a time-warped village in rural PA, most of the people I lived around still lived in traditional families and although many women there worked outside the home, most still knew how to cook and sew.  There were two blouse factories in my village, so perhaps the number of women who knew how to sew clothes was higher than normal there and of course, with their being of PA German ancestry, where quilting and needlework were traditional pastimes for women, knowing how to sew was a common skill.  My oldest sister worked in one of those blouse factories as a teenager too.

Likewise, knowing how to cook and bake were common skills when I grew up, right in the midst of that 60s & 70s feminist revolution, but perhaps the self-reliant gene really is a part of those bitter PA clingers’ cultural DNA and not just indicative that they’re backward, religious zealots and xenophobes, as President Obama implied.

One of the great ironies of progressive career mothers, and amusing to me, is their desire to find great nannies and caretakers for their children, where something like hiring “Mormon nannies”, whose strong moral values are a real draw for well-to-do parents seeking a caregiver for their children.  However, this reality vs the progressive rhetoric always smacks of rank hypocrisy among America’s elitist Leftists.

Teaching home economics in American schools was a progressive idea, not about training traditional stay-at-home mothers or keeping women trapped in their homes.  It was about advancing teaching science and scientific approaches to domestic topics, but along with that, training women to pursue careers outside the home, beginning in the late 1800s.

My mother was a “science and math” person – she liked chemistry, she thought trigonometry was “fun” and she embraced the metric system.  Besides knowing a great deal about “domestic skills”, she was a registered nurse, who loved to continue learning about medical innovations, she could fix a lot of electric appliances and knew how to do electrical wiring in homes, she was an expert at refinishing furniture, gardening, very good at crewel embroidery.  She was a fantastic cook and expert baker.  I think she was like many (most) of the women where I grew-up, who were multi-taskers long before the word came into vogue.

Even the “traditional” farm women were businesswomen too.  Knowing how to bake cookies is not something to scoff at or mock!  Baking is a useful skill to acquire,  just like my father made me and my sisters learn to check the oil in the car and change tires.  Being “liberated” means learning to be FREE to learn as much and as many skills in life as you can, to lead a fuller life.

As I often do, I started searching about “home economics” after watching the first video of the oldest teacher in America.   A 2014 Huffington Post article,  by Brie Dyas, caught my attention:

“You don’t hear much about Home Ec courses in schools these days. Even though many voices, from Anthony Bourdain to Slate, have called for its return, there’s still the critique that teaching high-schoolers cooking, budgeting and basic household skills is like saying they should walk around in poodle skirts — a “regressive” idea that doesn’t have a place in the modern curriculum.”

Dyas continues with a history of “home economics”:

“The creation of home ec is often attributed to Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist and instructor at MIT, who paved the way for MIT’s Women’s Laboratory, which existed from 1876 to 1883 with a goal of advancing the scientific education of women at the Institution.

At the Women’s Laboratory, Richards turned her scientific attention to the study of how to make home life more efficient. According to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, “Richards was very concerned to apply scientific principles to domestic topics — good nutrition, pure foods, proper clothing, physical fitness, sanitation, and efficient practices that would allow women more time for pursuits other than cooking and cleaning.”

Richards’ philosophy — that running one’s home as efficiently as possible in order to make more time for things like, say, education — might be surprising to those who still see home ec as being anti-intellectual. To Richards, home ec wasn’t contrary to feminist principles. After all, she gathered other progressive women in 1899 to come up with academic guidelines for a fuller home ec curriculum that would “liberate” women from house work. The meetings, which occurred yearly in Lake Placid, New York until 1909, led to the formation of the American Home Economics Association. The group lobbied for increased funding for home economics programs. Richards was the president of the group until her death in 1911. (The American Home Economics Association was later renamed the American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences and still exists today.)

But let’s back up a second. Another guiding force behind the formal teaching of home economics was The Morrill Act of 1862, which led to the establishment of land-grant colleges in each state. These colleges, which offered both classical academic and practical courses, were open to women. “Domestic Science” courses were often on the agenda, specifically geared towards the wives of farmers, who were expected to run the household in addition to assisting in farm work.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/29/home-ec-classes_n_5882830.html

Definitely click on the links in Dyas’ article, because they offer more historical information into the progressive idea of teaching women domestic skills in a school setting, using scientific methods and research.  The woman who started the home economics movement, Ellen Swallow Richards, was a feminist, the first woman to attend MIT, the first woman in America to earn a chemistry degree, a scientist engaged in a life of scientific research and whirlwind of studies, experiments, advocating on behalf of science being applied to teaching women domestic skills:

Chemist, sanitation engineer, and home economist Ellen Richards opened scientific education and professions to women when she started teaching at MIT in 1884.

“Ellen Richards graduated from Vassar College in 1870 and went on to become one of the first women admitted to MIT, where she earned a bachelor of science degree in 1873. Her focus was on chemistry, sanitary engineering and home economics. Richards blazed a trail for women in the sciences by establishing a woman’s laboratory at MIT and eventually joining the school’s regular faculty. She died in 1911.”

http://www.biography.com/people/ellen-richards-9457351#synopsis

Dyas explains how home economics progressed in the early part of the last century, where some universities used real babies from orphanages as “practice babies” in their training programs, but post WWII, she explains how home economics funding decreased, with the focus being on science programs and the advent of convenience foods quelled the interest in teaching home-cooking.

In typical liberal fashion, Dyas and the Huffington Post staff recommend:

So, what now? We have a few ideas.

– Language matters. “Consumer Science” on its own has broader appeal than throwing “Family” into the mix. “Family” sounds like we’re back in the “practice baby” days.
– Timing matters, too. A high school kid can handle learning how to make grilled cheese. But the student likely won’t remember the in-depth lecture about interest rates, mainly because that’s probably not part of his or her world yet. But in college, with student loan debts averaging in the high $20,000s, it’s a great time to learn things like budgeting and basic business etiquette. Work in the “core” home ec classes from there: Managing laundry, meal planning and cooking.
– Don’t make it part of the formal curriculum. Instead, treat it as informally as freshmen orientation.
– Change your attitude. The sooner we can accept that Home Ec isn’t just for women, the sooner we can have students who have attain stronger life skills.
 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/29/home-ec-classes_n_5882830.html

As always, the first thing with liberals is always to change the words we use to describe something.   They know words DO matter, that’s why they are forever insisting we use different words – words they choose – to describe things.

The women I grew up with as mentors must have had some 19th century progressive women in their family trees, because on both sides of my family, the women are doers and not dainty flowers.  Even my great-grandmother with the 3rd grade education read the newspaper everyday, could follow crochet patterns and needlework patterns, measure out ingredients and follow instructions in cookbooks and recipes jotted down from other cooks and was supportive of women getting a college education.  I never met a woman where I grew up who didn’t want her daughters to attend school and to learn as many things as possible.

Admittedly, I mock the Hillary Clinton/Gloria Steinem type feminists, who pride themselves on knowing nothing about domestic topics, but I mock them, not out of jealousy of their “feminist achievements”, but because they are terrible role models, not only for women, but for AMERICANS.  Their “liberation” of women, keeps women chained in an imaginary, perpetual state of victimhood of evil male patriarchy.  There is no “equality” that will ever assuage their sense of discrimination, because with them its internalized and constant.  Pssst, I think they hate men…

Yes, I believe they are strident ideological harpies, who offer no meaningful lessons or model to follow on how to achieve real-life emancipation or on becoming a self-reliant, free-thinking, independent American citizen. Especially, Hillary Clinton repeats strident, boring, angry feminist boiler-plate political rhetoric, while she relies on a coterie of sycophantic fetchers and carriers, to keep her public image from shattering.

Tiny glimpses of the “real” Hillary aren’t a pretty sight, like when she goes off-script and spews her angry diatribes or wallows in her self-pitying victim-mode rants.  Her “damned” emails, as Bernie referred to them, give you a glimpse too – to a woman who orders her staff to fetch and carry, even her tea.  She relies on them to handle all the details of her paid job, while she publicly gets all the credit.  She’s a woman who relies on her husband to be her political fixer.  A woman who relied on her Filipino maid to print out her work emails for her.  A woman who is completely helpless on her own.  She’s a woman who needs her staff flunkies to stage public outings to make her look “normal” (not like THE QUEEN).

Sadly, too many young women embrace shunning all things “domestic” and by doing so turn themselves into helpless fools in the process.  Everyone, both male and female, should learn basic domestic skills, like simple food preparation and storage, basic housekeeping skills, basic household budgeting, how to balance a checking account, and if they’re planning on having children, acquiring some basic child-care knowledge sure comes in handy.  Most young people won’t be like Hillary Clinton, with her coterie of fetchers and carriers, but will instead have to rely on themselves (or their parents) to handle all the drudge work in their lives.

The video above is Alton Brown, who has dozens of videos online, and he’s my favorite food personality for many reasons, but mainly because I love his scientific approach to cooking.  Of course, he constantly asks my favorite question: WHY?  WHY is a question that will keep your life an endless adventure, as you begin each new search for the answer(s).

Watching so many young women whine and embrace frivolous, mindless feminist political causes, while eschewing putting effort into learning real life skills saddens me. Feminist icons, like Hillary Clinton, have devoted their lives to perpetuating myths about opportunity for women in America, by enslaving young women’s minds to feminist dogma, more rigid than many religious cults.

Practical information, how-to videos, reference material is only a click away – embrace the freedom to explore old and new hobbies, pick a favorite meal and learn how to prepare it yourself, ever wondered about a science issue, how something works, or how something was invented, well devote a few minutes a day to researching it.  I’ve become a fan of how-to videos with crafting and needlework, because I can pause and rewind as often as I need to, while I do it myself.

I kept urging my oldest sister to start a Pinterest account, where she can set up boards and save ideas, patterns, recipes and inspirations to refer back to and she has now done that. She’s way more computer savvy than I am, so her hesitation was about Pinterest being part of “social media”, not that she wasn’t familiar with computers.  I use Pinterest often and while it’s doubtful I’ll ever use most of the recipes or make most of the needlework and craft projects I’ve pinned, these boards are much easier to access than trying to remember which magazine or craft book I saw a pattern in and then hunting it down.

For me, knowing how to handle as many daily tasks, central to my daily life, myself, gives me not just a sense of calm and security, it gives me a sense of FREEDOM. It’s nice to be able to do many things myself, without needing to rely on someone else to do them for me.  And for me that’s what being an American is all about – personal liberty.

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Filed under American Character, Culture Wars, General Interest, Pet Peeves, ThatWitch2016

Strident Hypocrites or Totally Clueless Idiots?

Reporters actually roped off by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in July 2015, but alas now CNN’s Christiane Amanpour is all aflutter that Trump might put the media in cages:

“As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating — until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison — and then who knows?”

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/23/opinions/christiane-amanpour-journalism-in-trump-era/index.html?sr=twCNN112316christiane-amanpour-journalism-in-trump-era0112PMVODtopLink&linkId=31483038

The complete lack of self-awareness of the liberal, Hillary-loving media is so entertaining:-)

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, The Media

“Fake” news fears abound

Had to take a few days off from blogging due to a sinus infection, accompanied by a terrible sinus headache that wouldn’t quit.  A trip to the doctor and meds have me back to feeling like I’ll survive:-)

The political situation continues the same gloomy trend.  The Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines went full-throttle into Trump Derangement Syndrome, with endless liberal media collusion to hype Trump as evil incarnate.  Most of this “news” coverage does more to expose the media’s corrupt collusion with liberal politicians and ideology than to does to expose actual Trump corruption.  The media now moved past the “boy who cried wolf” one too many times and hardly anyone believes their histrionics and hysterical warnings anymore.

The above clip is liberal flamethrower, Bill Maher, admitting he went over the top demonizing GW Bush, Romney and McCain, but hey, trust him now on his demonizing Trump.

Facebook is on a new crusade to stamp out “fake” news, which should be interesting considering the “real” news media, through Wikileaks leaks,  has been exposed actively colluding with the Clinton campaign repeatedly.  CNN went so far as to doctor a photo of a Trump tweet on their broadcast media, removing the word “Crooked” from his tweet:

August 29, 2016: http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/08/29/watch-cnn-alters-trump-tweet-by-scrubbing-crooked-moniker-to-describe-hillary/

August 29, 2016: Then CNN online ran the unedited tweet, but never acknowledged they had doctored the  Trump tweet during their broadcast:     http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/28/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-medical-records/index.html

Now, the hand-wringers on the left, trying to make sense of Trump’s win, have focused on “fake news” that was “pro-Trump” and “anti-Hillary” on facebook as a big part of the “problem”.  Jennifer Palmeiri was on Twitter warning people not to trust Wikileaks, when the reality is because of decades of liberal media becoming a political tool of the Clinton “SPIN cycle”, many Americans would trust a Russian front over American news organizations.  The mainstream media lost most of its credibility, because there wasn’t just “liberal bias”, there was corrupt, deliberate media collusion.

Irony knows no bounds these days, with President Obama, King of made-up NARRATIVES, waxing on about the dangers of “fake news” and “propaganda”:

“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not — and particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in soundbites and snippets off their phones — if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect. We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/11/17/fake-news-threatens-democracy-obama-says/94045428/

Yes. Mr. President, I agree, “fake news” does threaten democracy!  And you spent 8 years spreading your NARRATIVES!

The mainstream media bought into treating  the Clinton”spin cycle” as legitimate political PR, in the 90s, rather than exposing it as:

Dangerous political propaganda that turned private news corporations into little more than party political tools to “saturate the media messaging with political talking points”.

Wikileaks, thus far, has over a decade record of reporting factual information (sure it’s stolen information, but so far they haven’t been caught doctoring the information).

The Clinton SPIN cycle advanced to the Obama NARRATIVES, where the Obama administration writes completely fabricated stories – like the obscure video causing the attack in Benghazi, like Bowe Bergdahl served with honor and distinction, like 50 military intelligence officials in Iraq complaining that higher-ups were doctoring their reports to fit the Obama narrative:

“Two senior analysts at CENTCOM signed a written complaint sent to the Defense Department inspector general in July alleging that the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts believe they are. The reports were changed by CENTCOM higher-ups to adhere to the administration’s public line that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the analysts claim.

That complaint was supported by 50 other analysts, some of whom have complained about politicizing of intelligence reports for months. That’s according to 11 individuals who are knowledgeable about the details of the report and who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.

The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/09/exclusive-50-spies-say-isis-intelligence-was-cooked.html

President Obama still maintains high approval ratings and the liberal media establishment still loves him and works feverishly to paint any criticisms of his very corrupt administration as being racist attacks or coming from “haters”.   The thing that alarmed me about President Obama is the same thing that alarms me about President-elect Trump -they both managed to defeat the Clinton SPIN cycle, with their own even more corrupt scorched earth campaigns.

With President Obama, the SPIN morphed into NARRATIVES, with the complete fawning adoration of the mainstream media, becoming willing fabulists selling the Obama administration fabricated stories.

Trump won his “GOP Insurgency” primary with billions of dollars in free media from the liberal media, who intended to help Hillary in the general, by promoting what the Clinton camp deemed the “Pied Piper” primary candidates.   He won the general with savvy social media usage, large rally rabble-rousing, massive leaking from a Russian front organization and Hillary Clinton’s terrible campaign messaging.   Where Trump goes from here remains to be seen, but I for one am not optimistic.

Trump and Obama beat the Clinton SPIN machine by being more corrupt and willing to wage no holds barred scorched earth campaigns.  Trump was willing to say anything and throw and repeat any dirt, regardless if there was any truth to it, in fact he is very comfortable to ad lib, on the spot, and make up “facts” or to repeat internet “stories”, without any “fact-checking”.  This bodes poorly for a US presidency and even more poorly for honest government.  You can’t drain the swamp when you are a monster of that swamp.  Trump has been an avid participant in public corruption for decades.

Sure, it’s fine to be optimistic and believe Trump’s going to be a transformative president, who will make America great again, but I believe that character defines each and every one of us.  While many reporters were busily trying to pin down Trump’s political ideology when he entered the 2016 race, I was busily trying to pin down Trump’s character.

Immediately it became apparent that he and Hillary Clinton have much in common, just like Trump has much in common with Bill Clinton and President Obama.  Their main common character trait is all of them are pathological liars, who will say and do anything to promote themselves.   Lots of people get hostile when terms like “sociopath” get tossed out and attacks of how that’s so wrong to use that “clinical term” without being a mental health professional are sure to follow.  Well, since this is a personal blog, not a news site, I am going to say that in my opinion, I believe that Obama is an extreme political ideologue, who will say or do anything to promote his political agenda and legacy, but I believe that the Clintons and Trump are extreme sociopaths, who will say or do anything to promote themselves.

I believe the problem with extreme sociopaths is it’s hard to predict what events and catalysts will push them over the edge to becoming uncontrolled psychopaths. That’s my opinion.  Unchecked power is poisonous to people who do not believe rules apply to them.

Back in August 2015, I wrote:

Last week I bought one of Trump’s books, as I mentioned before, and I read it.  Assuredly, Trump offered many interesting insights into, as the book’s title stated, “TRUMP: How to Get Rich”.  The pride he takes in his children comes across and he offers some worthwhile advice on investing and negotiating, but trying to get to the character of who exactly is Donald Trump, well, he’s a man who has chapters in his book like “Be Strategically Dramatic”, “Sometimes You Still Have To Screw Them”, and “Sometimes You Have To Hold a Grudge”, replete with examples from his life and his guiding principles. Here are some quotes (page 138):

“When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.  Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.”

Be paranoid.  I know this observation doesn’t make any of us sound very good, but let’s face the fact that it’s possible that even your best friend wants to steal your spouse and your money.”

The chapter on holding a grudge is even more interesting, because Trump relates how for years he had donated huge amounts of money to NY governor, Mario Cuomo and when he called Cuomo to ask for a favor from Cuomo’s son, Andrew, who was running the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Mario Cuomo refused to do the favor (which Trump doesn’t explain in detail other than to say it was an appropriate favor involving attention to a detail). Trump blew up and for any who are confused with Trump’s vendetta against Megyn Kelly on Twitter, calling her a bimbo last night or his refusing to entertain a question by Jorge Ramos from Univision this evening, well, this chapter on holding a grudge (page 142) explains it.  Trump called in a political favor believing it was owed to him, because he donated a lot of money to Mario Cuomo  (crony capitalism is what most people call this greasing of palms).  Here is how Trump describes the phone call:

“I did the only thing that felt right to me.  I began screaming.  “You son of a bitch!  For years I’ve helped you and never asked for a thing, and when I finally need something, and a totally proper thing at that, you aren’t there for me.  You’re no good.  You’re one of the most disloyal people I’ve known and as far as I’m concerned, you can go to hell.”

My screaming was so loud that two or three people came in from adjoining offices and asked who I was screaming at.  I told them it was Mario Cuomo., a total stiff, a lousy governor, and a disloyal former friend.  Now whenever I see Mario at dinner, I refuse to acknowledge him, talk to him, or even look at him.”

When you hear Trump whining about being treated unfairly, here’s what I believe he means: If you agree with him, fawn over him and puff up his ego, that’s treating him fairly.  If you disagree or criticize him, I believe, he will wage an all out campaign to destroy you.  So, I keep wondering how his character will play in the long, arduous rough and tumble of presidential politics, where being ripped apart by opposition research, pundits and reporters only escalates as the campaign wears on.  We’ve got plenty of rounds to go, so it’s certainly not going to be boring.

https://libertybellediaries.com/2015/08/25/trumps-his-own-bimbo-eruption/

For America’s sake, I hope Trump far exceeds my expectations.  I hope I am wrong.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption, The Media

Social Media Dystopia

Just saw this on Twitter and while it’s hard to determine factual information on any of the social media formats, because the formats themselves are run very corruptly, this is the sort of media collusion that CNN and other “news” networks in America ran to help  Hillary.  CNN doctored a photo removing the word “Crooked” from a screen shot of a Trump tweet, CBS edited Bill Clinton’s statement during an interview to change the context of his statement and Wikileaks has provided numerous email leaks of collusion between reporters and the Clinton campaign.  Here’s this one this morning on Twitter:

Brian Stelter liked this

This viral video claiming to show anti-Trump protests in Los Angeles is actually from Venezuela

Yes, like I said, it’s hard to get to the facts and real ground truth when social media sites also finagle with user content and censor, to promote Leftist political ideology, causes and candidates.  Even search engine algorithms are reportedly altered to change results – all to promote political agendas.

If the above photo was posted and is of Venezuela, then the intent would seem to be to promote the perception that the protests against Trump winning the election are some huge groundswell and not a few discounted, rabid, angry Leftist loons.  More of the SPIN mentality to create an illusion that this “massive” protest expresses the “will of many American people”.

Of course, in the world of the Left, it doesn’t matter if the photo really is from Venezuela, because many on the Left want anyone in the world to be able to vote in America…

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, The Media

The Post-Election Reality Check

The past week should be a short enough time span for anyone to see how the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines collude with the liberal media to SPIN (LIE) to change the public perception about issues and events in the news – it is hard-nosed propaganda to control America.

So, as I wrote yesterday, the Clinton campaign full-force Scorched Earth 2.0 to throw every slur against Trump they can is in full-swing, but there’s another propaganda move in the works.  This one for post-election and all of them, from President Obama, on down started setting the stage for that this week.

No matter who wins: President Obama will make sure Hillary & Bill Clinton and all their close associates have full pardons before he leaves office in January.  He will also fire James Comey and install someone who will crack the whip and squash all attempts to investigate the Clintons.

One week ago James Comey sent his letter to the House leaders informing them that he was reopening the FBI criminal investigation into Hillary’s email server.  That decision came from the discovery of emails stored on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, which the FBI is investigating in Weiner’s sexting with an underage girl case.  So, the initial Wall Street Journal report stated there were 650,000 emails found on Weiner’s laptop and that many thousands of them are Huma Abedin’s State Department emails.

So, the story went from that information, to more FBI leaks indicating many of these emails are NOT emails previously turned over to the State Department.  Abedin’s lawyer dismissed this as Abedin does not know how the emails got on that laptop.  Friends of Abedin, inside the Clinton camp, reported various explanations, like Abedin didn’t know her email was backing up onto that laptop and more of she did not even know those emails were there.

The Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines united with their friends in the liberal media to launch an all out SPIN blitzkrieg to shut down the FBI leaks and to discredit both Comey and the FBI.  This week it’s the FBI is out of control, the FBI is a bunch of Trump fanboys, Pelosi saying Comey needs to be fired, Comey violated the Hatch Act, there is no “investigation” (using their old parsing what words mean gimmick), etc. etc.  Abedin will be cast as a victim of Islamophobia.

This media blitzkrieg is setting the stage for the Clinton pardons and Comey’s ouster, regardless who wins.  Obama will play it off as he’s trying to set a new tone in Washington, where everyone plays by the same rules or some other bs line to turn the tables on any Republicans who cry foul and the minute the Republicans start speaking out, the SPIN, with full media collusion, will be, “those Republicans are on another right-wing witch hunt!”  Obama has higher approval than either Trump or Hillary at this point, because their awfulness makes him look better.  He will leave office pretending he tried to end the divisiveness, while assuring that the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines still control the political narrative in America.

And into the media mix we have Russian active measures – where there are Russian agents, willing accomplices,and useful idiots spewing angry right-wing rhetoric.  DrudgeReport and Breitbart seem like two likely conduits for Russian propaganda efforts to foment far-right anger, but there are more subtle ones too.  And speaking of the Russians, the Left is in full Red Scare mode, and Hillary resurrected the Daisy girl ad… isn’t that a bizarre propaganda twist.  No more bizarre than that Americans, faced with lying politicians and very corrupt liberal media collusion, are seeking the “truth” from a Russian front, Wikileaks, which is reporting on the corruption of the American government and media…  It’s all very surreal.

Angry Americans, who speak out about the WHOLESALE PUBLIC CORRUPTION, have already been set-up by Trump, the Bill Clinton DUPE, with his strong-man delusions, fomenting angry rhetoric, giving legitimacy to a lot of racists in America, and Trump’s idiotic big name enablers, who got on board with the over-the-top rants.  All of them will be cast as “haters”, “dangerous deplorables”, and “not who we are”.

Obama already is putting these poison pills into the media narrative.  The Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines know Obama has the constitutional power to make sure the Clintons remain above the law.  He can’t afford to let Hillary go down, because he will go down too – his entire administration jeopardized national security with their grossly negligent handling of sensitive information by using private email.

The FBI Notes of Abedin’s interview already exposed that President Obama used private email to discuss classified information with Clinton, using her server email. (page 93 of FBI Notes). Abedin asked how that could not be classified when shown this email and asked for a copy.  She then provided information that she didn’t go on the trip to St. Petersburg and noted that the security protocols in St. Petersburg were not necessarily the same as they were for Moscow , where they were not allowed to use blackberries.  So, the topic of the email between Obama and Hillary, which Obama was discussing using his GMAIL account, was Russia.

Since the Russians (and many other foreign intelligence agencies) still follow sane security protocols, unlike the Obama administration, I would not be surprised if they exploited the private emails accounts of EVERY top Obama administration official.

The Obama administration is a national security nightmare and a threat to America.  

That’s the TRUTH.

Although the Clintons and Obama don’t understand anything about actual military strategy or how to use military power, they have perfected a vile form of  INFORMATION WARFARE, which really is nothing more than wimpy cat-fighting that women do naturally.  Cat-fighting involves whispering campaigns, spreading vicious gossip and lies, manipulating people (especially men) to do your dirty work for you, playing the victim, blackmailing enemies, etc.  Most men don’t understand cat-fighting, although some wimpy men, like Bill Clinton and his war room, the leader from behind and Trump, have mastered it…  Of course, thatwitch2016, being a very, catty, bitchy woman is a natural at it.

I prefer real military strategy – it takes more integrity and careful planning.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Hillary's Email Scandal, Military, Politics, Public Corruption, ThatWitch2016, The Media

Constitutional Crisis on the Horizon

The liberal media- CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, Washington Post and many others are in full-blown CORRUPT MEDIA COLLUSION to take Hillary’s email scandal off the front page and make the story about “Trump is a bully”, “Trump is a loose cannon”, “Trump is a rapist”…. anything but Hillary’s emails scandal.

FOX News broke an amazing story last night that the FBI is 99% sure that at least FIVE foreign intelligence agencies have information from Hillary’s server.  Now, in July, the FBI had Hillary’s server, some of her electronic devices, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson’s laptops, but their forensics did not show the server had been hacked or that classified information was compromised.  The only thing different now is the FBI has the Weiner/Abedin laptop with Huma’s mother lode.   So, with that big news, today the liberal media is doing everything they can to avoid talking about and watching Twitter today, it sure looks like Twitter is suppressing FOX News’ twitter feed.  It looks like a deliberate effort to SPIN for the Clinton Scorched Earth.

Hillary’ server goes to way more than white-collar crime or bad judgement – it goes to seriously compromising national security, but the majority of the liberal media and some social media sites are working to suppress this story from even being reported.  That’s the TRUTH and that is why I have been railing about this INFORMATION WARFARE since 1998 – it is a real threat and antithetical to American Free Speech.  The Clinton/Obama/Dem machines have so much sway with the liberal media that they can control  and even suppress the NEWS in America.  Again:

“That strategy is a sophisticated INFORMATION WARFARE strategy introduced into American politics by the Clinton political operatives.

The mass media saturation strategy was developed by far-left Alinskyite Marxists.  The messaging wall required for mass media saturation to succeed requires the active collusion of the mass media NEWS outlets to facilitate it, by actively and relentlessly repeating the messages of the political candidate or activists using this “buzz word, catchphrase spin (talking points messaging). Mass media saturation INFORMATION WARFARE requires mass media collusion to succeed.  This strategy can NOT succeed without mass media messaging dominance to CONTROL (“win”) the 24/7 news cycle (or as the Clinton team dubbed it – the spin cycle).

It is a form of mass media brainwashing and antithetical to American free speech principles!  To succeed this strategy requires MEDIA COLLUSION.

It can NOT work without that media collusion.

Here are the components:

  • Talking points and buzz word messaging, which are relentlessly repeated by both political operatives and the media.
  • Mass media domination of the messaging, to control the 24/7 NEWS cycle, which requires mass media collusion.
  • Relentless repetition of polling data by both the political operatives and media, to facilitate the manufacture of opinion cascades (winning in all the polls)

Only Democrats had successfully used this strategy before Trump, because the liberal media never before gave BILLIONS of dollars in free media for one GOP candidate, to run a “GOP Insurgency” for 8 months straight on all three cable news networks nor did the mass media cable networks ever collude or facilitate in the mass media messaging for any Republican candidate or cause.

Just as the Wikileaks leak has exposed the MEDIA COLLUSION between the DNC and the media to rig the system against Sanders, that SAME media collusion exists between the Potemkin Trump campaign (or the Clinton operatives who were in the shadows masterminding this charade) and the media.

Those electronic trails exist!!!

This mass media saturation requires constant messaging coordination between political operatives and the media facilitators to keep the SPIN cycle moving. Trump’s “win, win, win” is exactly like Carville’s “sex, sex, sex” during impeachment. I feel sure Trump’s MEDIA COLLUSION will be exposed before November.”

https://libertybellediaries.com/2016/07/30/the-pieces-of-the-media-messaging-puzzle/

The media is hyping non-stop polling data now and because there’s a presidential election days away, America is entrenched and the partisan blinders have many Americans totally fixated on Trump or Hillary.  This national security scandal isn’t going away, no matter who wins next week – it’s too grave.  Trump’s corruption, while not Clinton level yet, is huge.  His ghosts doom a Trump presidency too.  Trump WAS using the Clinton information warfare and I remain convinced his entire GOP Insurgency was a Bill Clinton dirty trick carried off with the media elite, Friends of Bill, in the media.  I hope both Trump’s and Hillary’s corruption is exposed, BUT Hillary’s corruption ALREADY jeopardized national security.  She is totally UNFIT to ever be commander-in-chief of the US Armed Forces.

And the part that’s not out in the open, but needs to be exposed is the ENTIRE Obama administration’s gross negligence handling classified information and corruption.

What America needs is for the WHOLESALE PUBLIC CORRUPTION to be fully exposed.

I believe we have a CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS looming on the horizon (maybe even closer).

May there be a few honest men and women left, who swore the oath to protect and defend The Constitution, who will insist that no one is above the law.


For those who want to read about Trump and Hillary’s Russian connection,  John R. Schindler’s, “Media Bites on Trump’s Kremlin Ties, But Clinton’s Are Long-Standing and Deep”, explains it all.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Hillary's Email Scandal, Politics, Public Corruption, ThatWitch2016, The Constitution, The Media

Mixed potpourri

wp-1477628355558.jpg
A dollar of cheer – yep, a decorative box from the Dollar Store to hold junk on my desk.

There’s still more of Buddy’s 4th of July sermon I want to incorporate into another blog post, but first I need to do some more research, reading and pondering.  I spend a lot of time “pondering”.   While I ponder that, here are some thoughts from this election.  This post is a mixed potpourri of thoughts – no cohesive theme.

The media, popular blogs and news sites are even more tiresome than the candidates, for instance, Drudge is running the same agitprop game for Trump against Hillary, that he ran against the GOP candidates in the primary.  It’s amazing to behold.  In a change from Drudge’s onslaught of posting photos of Hillary looking demented or decrepit, today he had a collage of Hillary the guzzler/alcoholic-themed photos.

The mainstream media keeps running non-stop “news” stories about “Trump the Sexual Predator” and then you have conservative news sites hyping “Bill Clinton the Sexual Predator”.  The Free Washington Beacon has a story interviewing Dolly Kyle, a woman who claims to have had an affair with Bill Clinton many years ago.  The irrelevancy and sheer cattiness of Kyle’s attack is stunning and one wonders what the point is to print this sort of garbage:

“Kyle’s most memorable run in with Bill and Hillary Clinton revolved around Hillary’s poor hygiene.

“I picked Billy up at the airport and he had this dowdy-looking middle-aged woman with him … this woman was Hillary,” Kyle said. “Hillary, I thought was a Hillary impersonator. Because she looked so bad and she smelled so bad I just didn’t believe this was Hillary.”

Hillary’s bad odor and unkempt appearance were what Kyle claimed she remembered most, thinking Bill Clinton was playing some sort of “sick joke” on her.

“I couldn’t imagine why Billy would haul such a person in the plane with him in public. She was wearing a misshapen, brown, dress-like thing that must have been intended to hide her lumpy body. The garment was long, but stopped too soon to hide her fat ankles and her thick calves covered with black hair,” Kyle said.

“I noticed that the woman emitted an overpowering odor of perspiration and greasy hair. I hoped that I wouldn’t gag when she got in my car. The sandal-shod woman with lank, smelly hair stood off to the side and glared at everyone.””

http://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-the-warden-clinton-smells-bad/

This extremely, full-bitch mode, catty attack is from the 1970s, just as Trump’s bimbo eruption is bimbos from years ago.  This Kyle woman was having an affair with a married man,  and that decades later she’s tossing this dirt out into the public square, speaks volumes about her character.  That news sites run this, as if it’s newsworthy, speaks to their lack of integrity too.  On the other side, days ago, Gloria Allred was wheeling out another woman who claims that Donald Trump treated her disrespectfully and like a sex object… that woman is a porn star…  Here we are, subjected to the geriatric Viagra generation’s sex stories.   Along with trying to go the low road of all-out scorched earth, for the media and online sites, all of this garbage is meant to garner clicks and attention.
Sex sells.

The scorched earth campaigns being waged by both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump truly  disrespect the American people and are a national embarrassment.

I am reading some of the Pamphlet Debate from 1764-1775, which I have in a 2-volume set, because so many of the stirrings among the American people today and their discontent with Washington echo popular sentiment that brewed for the years leading up to the American Revolution.

I see some historical parallels in the rise of individual bloggers online, often writing anonymously, as being very similar to the pamphlet writers leading up to the American Revolution. This pamphlet debate preceded the Debate on The Constitution, which took place years later where the people, both for and against The Constitution, once again waged a war for the hearts and minds of the American people via pamphlets and newspapers.

These early American writers also often used pseudonyms.  So, political blogging using pseudonyms follows a long American tradition.  I actually went with my pen name as a combination of my affection for The Federalist Papers and my affection for historical romance novels.  There’s a Julia Quinn series, set in Regency England, where an anonymous writer, Lady Whistledown,  is publishing “titillating and intriguing society gossip”, which plays into the plots.  None of Lady Whistledown’s gossip comes anywhere near to this gutter politics election.

Gordon S. Wood, Brown University’s professor of history, emeritus, edited this 2-volume set and he states that the revolution was created in the minds of American rebels long before 1775.  The discontent rippling in both the outer edges of the left and right, which led to Sanders and Trump being able to gain traction, has been brewing for years too.

Military adventures, from ancient times to the present, while offering new territory and riches or securing some vital geopolitical advantage, are always expensive and almost always lead to a country incurring large war debts. In 1765, the British enacted The Stamp Act, which was very unpopular in the American colonies, but was intended to pay off war debt from The Seven Years War and fund security needs in the British North American colonies.

In the present, we have gone through more than a decade of endless war, with no real gain for America in any way – certainly no gain in national security. We have endured 8 years of increasing government programs with the exorbitantly expensive Affordable Healthcare Act, but that was preceded by an economic downturn, trillions in debt through the bail-outs and prior to that GWB doing his prescription drug program, in the midst of very expensive military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The looming debt crisis coupled with a stagnant economy and the fractured polity in Washington is fomenting widespread discontent, but even worse, distrust in our government’s ability to govern.

For the past year, the common refrain to justify the anger that feeds the Trump movement, BLM, Sanders supporters, and other Americans feeling mistreated disgusts me.   Each person railing should be asked what they have actually done to make their own life, their families’ lives and their community a better place.  People throughout the ages always look to some mystical leader to create, to borrow President Obama’s, parting the waters promise, “Change you can believe in.”

No one person or leader can “make America great again” or  turn an angry person, who feels his/her life  a train wreck into a success.  Only you can change your own life and establish order in it and only people in their own communities can establish the social structure and actions to restore broken communities.

Russelk Kirk explains social order in terms everyone can understand:

“Like many other concepts, perhaps the word “order” is best apprehended by looking at its opposite, “disorder.” A disordered existence is a confused and miserable existence. If a society falls into general disorder, many of its members will cease to exist at all. And if the members of a society are disordered in spirit, the outward order of the commonwealth cannot endure.

We couple the words “law and order”; and indeed they are related, yet they are not identical. Laws arise out of a social order; they are the general rules which make possible the tolerable functioning of an order. Nevertheless an order is bigger than its laws, and many aspects of any social order are determined by beliefs and customs, rather than being governed by positive laws.

This word “order” means a systematic and harmonious arrangement—whether in one’s own character or in the commonwealth. Also “order” signifies the performance of certain duties and the enjoyment of certain rights in a community: thus we use the phrase “the civil social order.””

Kirk, Russell. The Roots of American Order (Kindle Locations 389-397). Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Kindle Edition.

November 8th won’t resolve anything.

Washington can’t fix what’s broken in America, only millions of Americans across America, committing to change their own lives, families, and communities can do that.  However, some honorable leaders assuredly could help inspire and guide Americans in this process.  Money and more “programs” can’t fix social problems – only people can do that.

It’s highly unlikely, that either Trump or Hillary will be able to move the country toward any sense of unity or common purpose – both are clueless, corrupt, lack any historical vision, and beyond that both have narcissistic personalities, that repel people from being able to trust in their integrity. Either one bodes poorly for America’s future. Hillary will be consumed by fall-out from her emails (especially foreign blackmail) and Republicans determined to expose her corruption. Trump will be easily manipulated by America’s adversaries, continues to prefer waging war against Republicans, meaning he will never be able to unify even his own party, let alone Democrats or the country. His hubris, coupled with his disdain for actually studying policy and penchant for rash, incendiary statements, dooms him as a leader.

Two toxic leaders, who are both neck deep into wholesale public corruption,  are the choices.  American discontent and virulent factions  assuredly will continue to percolate, but I hope they don’t boil over.  Trying to keep a positive attitude is a challenge where the media and these two vile candidates have turned watching the news so cringe-worthy, you feel like you need a shower afterwards.

I kind of like looking at my Dollar Store box, with the metallic gold lettering and cheerful yellow bird.  I keep it here on my desk to cheer me up every day… and remind me to: “Be grateful for every day!”

America needs voices of hope and inspiration… but absent that we can always laugh:

There’s a whole bunch of these “epic rap battle” videos on YouTube, like Joan of Arc vs. Miley Cyrus or Dr. Seuss vs. Shakespeare, etc., etc.

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption

America: Our Ordered Liberty Roots

The Liberty Bell

The previous two posts dealt with cultural chaos and chaos in too many homes across America.  This post is going to be more a big picture of America’s founding, both political and cultural.   This will take two posts.  In this post I’d like to cover some basic American history and relate some examples of “selfless sacrifice”, an alien core civic value to probably most Americans today, but completely still understood by almost every member of the US Armed Forces.  Then in the next post, I’m going to attempt to explain some small steps, using more personal examples, that I believe, might help America become a united country again and help alleviate some of the cultural chaos.

The picture above is The Liberty Bell, located in Philadelphia, PA and considered an iconic symbol of American liberty.  In the 1830s, abolitionist societies in America adopted the Liberty Bell as a symbol for freedom too.  The inscription on the Liberty Bell speaks to the Christian faith of America’s founding fathers:

“The Pennsylvania Assembly ordered the Bell in 1751 to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, Pennsylvania’s original Constitution. It speaks of the rights and freedoms valued by people the world over. Particularly forward thinking were Penn’s ideas on religious freedom, his liberal stance on Native American rights, and his inclusion of citizens in enacting laws.

The Liberty Bell gained iconic importance when abolitionists in their efforts to put an end to slavery throughout America adopted it as a symbol.

As the Bell was created to commemorate the golden anniversary of Penn’s Charter, the quotation “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” from Leviticus 25:10, was particularly apt. For the line in the Bible immediately preceding “proclaim liberty” is, “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year.” What better way to pay homage to Penn and hallow the 50th year than with a bell proclaiming liberty?”

http://www.ushistory.org/libertybell/

Just as keeping order in your family and community is the way to assure everyone can live peacefully, the same applies to government too.  Sure, all sorts of governmental structures exist and most people survive, even under the most oppressive governmental systems, but America is unique in world history.   Our founding fathers sat down and devised a governmental system based on a careful study of history, weighing pros and cons, while determined to create a system of government that completely deviated from history, by establishing a government run as a bottom-up system, where the people control the government rather than the government controlling the people.  We have a republic, where checks and balances were carefully incorporated into The Constitution, and where the rule of law was established to protect individual liberty, while establishing laws necessary to maintain social order.  We have a system of:

Ordered Liberty: freedom limited by the need for order in society

Russell Kirk, in his 1974 book, The Roots of American Order, describes the influence of Hebraic Covenant and Law to the American social order and the thinking behind the American founding fathers when setting up The Constitution.  Kirk writes:

“Throughout western civilization, and indeed in some degree through the later world, the Hebraic understanding of Covenant and Law would spread, in forms both religious and secular. The idea of an enduring Covenant, or compact, whether between God and people or merely between man and man, took various styles in various lands and ages; it passed into medieval society through Christian teaching, and became essential to the social order of Britain, from which society most settlers in North America came. This concept and reality of Covenant was not confined to those American colonies—notably the New England settlements and Pennsylvania— which were fundamentally religious in their motive. Like the people of Israel and Judah, the Americans broke solemn covenants repeatedly; but like Israel, America nevertheless knew that without a covenant, the people would be lost.

And from Israel, even more than from the Roman jurisconsults, America inherited an understanding of the sanctity of law. Certain root principles of justice exist, arising from the nature which God has conferred upon man; law is a means for realizing those principles, so far as we can. That assumption was in the minds of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. A conviction of man’s sinfulness, and of the need for laws to restrain every man’s will and appetite, influenced the legislators of the colonies and of the Republic. Thomas Jefferson, rationalist though he was, declared that in matters of political power, one must not trust in the alleged goodness of man, but “bind him down with the chains of the Constitution.”

A principal difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was this: the American revolutionaries in general held a biblical view of man and his bent toward sin, while the French revolutionaries in general attempted to substitute for the biblical understanding an optimistic doctrine of human goodness advanced by the philosophes of the rationalistic Enlightenment. The American view led to the Constitution of 1787; the French view, to the Terror and to a new autocracy. The American Constitution is a practical secular covenant, drawn up by men who (with few exceptions) believed in a sacred Covenant, designed to restrain the human tendencies toward violence and fraud; the American Constitution is a fundamental law deliberately meant to place checks upon will and appetite. The French innovators would endure no such checks upon popular impulses; they ended under a far more arbitrary domination.

Israel’s knowledge of the Law merely commenced with the experience under God imaginatively described in the books of Genesis and Exodus. This knowledge was broadened and deepened by a succession of prophets. The power of the prophets diminished with the fall of Jerusalem to the armies of Babylon, and ended in the first century of the Christian era. Without venturing rashly here into the labyrinths of biblical scholarship, it is possible to describe the prophets’ enduring significance for modern men, and to suggest how deeply interwoven with the fabric of American order this prophetic teaching remains.”

Kirk, Russell. The Roots of American Order (Kindle Locations 777-799). Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Kindle Edition.

To understand America’s founding, it’s important to look at who the first settlers in America were and how the American colonies were set-up and developed. Originally the British colonies, who later broke off from England and the British crown, operated under proprietary colonies, royal charters, or charters:

“A charter is a document that gave colonies the legal rights to exist. A charter is a document, bestowing certain rights on a town, city, university or an institution. Colonial Charters were empowered when the king gave a grant of exclusive powers for the governance of land to proprietors or a settlement company. The charters defined the relationship of the colony to the mother country, free from involvement from the Crown. For the trading companies, charters vested the powers of government in the company in England. The officers would determine the administration, laws, and ordinances for the colony, but only as conforming to the laws of England. Proprietary charters gave governing authority to the proprietor, who determined the form of government, chose the officers, and made laws, subject to the advice and consent of the freemen. All colonial charters guaranteed to the colonists the vague rights and privileges of Englishmen, which would later cause trouble during the revolutionary era. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Crown looked upon charters as obstacles to colonial control, substituting the royal province for corporations and proprietary governments.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_charters_in_the_Thirteen_Colonies

The American colonies, in essence,  were business ventures, set-up to operate under a British legal structure, but the charter-holder had control of appointing whom would administer the law within the colony.  In some colonies, the crown directly appointed an administrator for the colony.  The colonial administrators varied widely in leadership ability, legal knowledge, experience and also administrative talent. However, the actual American settlers who embarked on setting up the colonies (business ventures) were almost exclusively Christians of various denominations and their Christian faith defined every aspect of their communities.

An excellent, although very detailed accounting of the American colonies, prior to American Revolution is in Volume 1 of the 5 volume set of The Life of George Washington, written by John Marshall, American revolutionary, friend of George Washington,  4th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and longest-serving  Justice, who shaped the Supreme Court into a co-equal branch of the American government.  So, along with his other achievements, John Marshall should have “historian” listed, because he spent 5 years writing 3,200 pages carefully chronicling George Washington’s life, but in Volume 1, he carefully chronicles the beginning of America’s life leading up to the American Revolution too.

During the last century many bizarre, yet deliberate, revisions, rewritings, or let me borrow a Obama administration term, creating new “narratives”  indoctrinated Americans into believing that America’s Founding Fathers were not Christians, but rather Deists, that Christian faith played little or no role in America’s founding and that Christianity is a threat to American secular government.  However,  many of the philosophical and political underpinnings to modern-day progressivism and modern liberalism go back to before the American Revolution, but were not popular beliefs among America’s founding fathers and were completely rejected.  America’s founding fathers borrowed ideas from ancient Greece and Rome, but the English common law and social order in the American colonies, which played an out-sized role in their political and philosophical beliefs were grounded firmly in their Christian faith.

Another often overlooked reality about the founding fathers is they had more than a century of actual, practical American experience at experiments in devising governmental systems within the colonies, from extreme religious communal control in some Puritan settlements to the scientific-type experiment, in the South Carolina colony, where  the esteemed political thinker, John Locke, helped devise their constitution (it was an unmitigated disaster).   Constitution writing was in vogue.  When Napoleon seized power after the failed French Revolution, he became the premiere constitution writer of history, as he plundered his way across Europe and North Africa.  Many of the American colonies had functioning constitutions before the American Revolution and throughout the colonial period, various colonies kept working out legal alliances, common mutual defense agreements, that often ended in disarray when one side would not provide the men requested to fight off Indians, the French or other threats.

Christian churches were a powerful social force and exerted a great deal of influence on politics in early America.  All but one of America’s Ivy League colleges had connections to religious groups, with most originally being intended as institutions to educate and train clergy. Education in early America was directly connected to Christian religious groups, because churches wanted educated clergy preaching to their flock.  These clergymen were instrumental in working within their communities to establish schools to educate American children.

 Texas State Judge, Albert M. McCaig, Jr. (Buddy), kindly gave me permission to use whatever portions of his 4th of July sermon he delivered at the Waller Baptist Church this year.  In June, Buddy was inducted into the Army ROTC National Hall of Fame. He is an Evangelical Christian, deacon in his church, author of “Praying with Passion” and a trusted friend of mine.  I’m a lukewarm Lutheran/Reformed, struggling with faith, homemaker, who gets invited to churches all the time.  In fact, last week a dear friend of mine, here in GA, invited me to her small Pentecostal church.

Despite my avoidance of joining organized churches, I firmly believe that the Christian faith was instrumental to America’s founding and to America’s Founding Fathers’ moral, social and political viewpoints and that Christian faith in America remains a potent force for good.  This is not intended to denigrate other religions or those who don’t believe,  nor is it to question the secular nature of our government.  It is, however, to make the case that America’s founding fathers and the American colonial social order were grounded in the Christian faith.

Before I discuss Buddy’s sermon, I want to relate a small true story of how sometimes you can utter a phrase, intending nothing ill, and later others point out how your words probably registered.  We were in a car heading to my daughter’s wedding.  She was marrying Buddy’s nephew.  So, I was in Texas, in the backseat of a car with my two sons and Buddy’s sister and brother-in-law were in the front seat.  Buddy’s brother-in-law was engaged in a conversation about guns, hunting and gun-related issues.  Without thinking, I made a comment referring to “gun nuts” and one of my sons bumped me with his shoulder and gave me this look that said, “Are you crazy?”.  My other son gave me this glare.  And without missing a beat, Buddy’s brother-in-law firmly said, “They’re not gun nuts; they’re gun enthusiasts.”

Once I was alone with my sons, the lectures started, “Are you crazy?  You’re in Texas and you call people gun nuts!”  My son, who is a gun nut, started his 2nd Amendment lectures and told me that at least in Texas they understand our rights.  My other son said, “Way to go to get along with your daughter’s in-laws!”  And so it went…  Perhaps, I need to cut some slack to President Obama and his, “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Back to America’s Christian history from Buddy’s sermon, Faith of Our Founding Fathers:

“For the support of this declaration,
with firm reliance on the protection
of the divine providence, we mutually pledge
to each other, our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Last line of Declaration of Independence

Those are some of the words of our founding fathers. There are many more such quotes, and our history is full of such sayings by such men. So,have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

What happened to these men of faith who stood strong in the founding of this great nation? Five were captured by the British, jailed as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

Mostly, those men were financially well off and well-educated. They were comfortable in their own lives, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing they could lose it all, and knowing that the penalty would be death if they were captured because they had become traitors to the British Crown.

They had security in their own lives; but they valued liberty more. Standing together, they made this pledge:”For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

And, fully 25 percent of them died during the war. With all they had, including their lives, they gave you and me a free and independent United States of America.

There’s been a lot of chatter in the media and in politics, and even in Christian circles, about the faith of the Founding Fathers and the status of the United States as a “Christian nation.”

I mentioned earlier the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. That was largely written by Thomas Jefferson, in 1776. Interestingly, there were 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787. And, only a few men served in both.

The denominational affiliations of the men who signed the Constitution are interesting:

28 Episcopalians
8 Presbyterians
7 Congregationalists,
2 Lutherans
2 Dutch Reformed
2 Methodists
2 Roman Catholics
1 unknown
3 Deists.

Leaders, such as George Washington, Samuel Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson were the true political philosophers of their time.

Their lives and the history they leave us give us a very complete record that shows that these men were deeply influenced by Christianity
That means that the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were almost all Christians.

We get a very clear picture of the character of those men by what they created:

• Virtually all those involved were Christian; and most were Calvinistic Protestants.

• The Founders were deeply influenced by a biblical view of man and government. They devised a system of limited authority and checks and balances.

• A fear of God, moral leadership, and a righteous citizenry were necessary for the new government to succeed.

• They structured a political climate that was encouraging to Christianity, but at the same time accommodating to all religion. They sought to set up a just society, not a Christian theocracy.

• They specifically prohibited the establishment of Christianity
— or any other faith– as the religion of our nation.

As we look at the relationship between religion and government in the United States as it was viewed in the beginning by those men, we can draw two conclusions.

First, at the founding of our nation, Christianity influenced virtually every aspect of American life, from education to our work ethic to families and to politics.

Second, the Founders did not give Christianity any legal privilege over other faith. In their view, believers were to be salt and light of the world; not the rulers of the country.

In our Constitution, the First Amendment insured the liberty needed for Christianity to be a preserving influence— the salt— and a moral beacon— the light— but it also insured that Christianity would never be the law of the land.

It is very clear that our nation was founded on the principles of Christ; but not in such a way as to oppressively rule over others.

So, to answer the contemporary question of are we a Christian nation, the overwhelming evidence says, Yes, we were founded as a Christian nation.

So, the historical record, and it is an extensive one at that, since many of America’s founding fathers left vast amounts of writings, clearly shows their Christian beliefs, character and principles they lived by.  The “salt” and “light” belief can be found repeatedly in quotes from founding fathers, warning that our American republic was intended only for a morally upright people:

“Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity.”

~ George Washington, Farewell Address (1796)

Wherever American communities sprang up, invariably early Americans set up churches. The first white settlers to the Kunkletown area (where my ancestors settled) were Moravian missionaries, who were trying to spread Christianity to local Delaware Indians.  Massacres and disease doomed the missionaries.  My direct ancestor, Abraham Schmidt, moved into the “West-End” of Northampton territory in 1762, after 7 years of watching the abandoned Moravian mission area.  He donated the land in 1774 to set up one of the first churches in that area of northeast Pennsylvania, where I grew up.  Most of these early German-American settlers were Lutheran or Reformed, but due to the only other German-speaking immigrants setting up “Union” churches, almost all of the churches became “Union” churches.  The first log cabin church,  which later became St. Matthew’s UCC in Kunkletown was a “Union church”.

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Photo: Front of recent church cookbook shows St. Matthew’s UCC church, my childhood church, in Kunkletown, PA.  The annex extending off the right side was added in recent years.

Abraham Schmidt was also the first constable and he was tasked with setting up a militia, as early as 1774, with a quota set at 82, which he easily filled. He was the captain of the militia too. The militia joined General George Washington and as the page from “The Story of Kunkletown” (records acquired through Northampton County records) shows, his militia was still active in 1780.

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From The Story of Kunkletown, a Bicentennial Pennsylvania history compiled by local historically minded citizens, like my wonderful pastor’s wife, Beatrice Goldman Boehner. mentioned in many of my posts.   Reverend Adan Boehner was the pastor of St. Matthews UCC Church from 1926-1969.

The 1976 book, “The Story of Kunkletown”, historical research and writing was done primarily by Rev. Perry L. Smith, who was born in Kunkletown in 1897, received a B.D from Franklin and Marshall College and graduated from the Marshall Theological Seminary.  Although Rev. Smith left Kunkletown behind, he spent years researching, gathering information and historical material, long before the American Bicentennial.  He even had already researched the Abraham Schmidt family tree, back to Philadelphia, when the Schmidts arrived.  Mrs. Boehner gave me a typed family tree in 1976 and told me, “Susie, your ancestor was very important to this community.”

Buddy mentioned the sacrifices of the founding fathers and  most Americans can relate to the Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot, yet never really grasp that while this story is fictional and  as Wikipedia explains, Gibson’s character:  “Benjamin Martin is a composite figure the scriptwriter claims is based on four factual figures from the American Revolutionary War: Andrew Pickens, Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan and Thomas Sumter.”

Buddy mentioned the sacrifices without grim details, so here’s a little more detail to give you a taste of how much many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence sacrificed:

“The British had a particular zeal for destroying the homes and property of the signers. Those suffering this fate included Benjamin Harrison, George Clymer, Dr. John Witherspoon, Philip Livingston, William Hooper and William Floyd. The sacrifices of John Hart and Francis Lewis are particularly noteworthy. “While his wife lay gravely ill, Redcoats destroyed Hart’s growing crops and ripped his many grist mills to pieces. Bent on taking him, they chased him for several days. They almost nabbed him in a wooded area, but he hid in a cave. When he returned home with his health broken, he found his wife dead and their 13 children scattered.”

The story of Francis Lewis was equally tragic. “When the British plundered and burned his home at Whitestone on Long Island, they took his wife prisoner. She was thrown into a foul barracks and treated cruelly. For several months she had to sleep on the floor and was given no change of clothing. George Washington was able eventually to arrange for her exchange for two wives of British officers the Continental Army was holding prisoner. Her health was so undermined that she died two years later.””

The price paid for your liberty, by Dr. Harold Pease

Once again, they pledged:

“For the support of this declaration,
with firm reliance on the protection
of the divine providence, we mutually pledge
to each other, our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

And they lived up to their word.

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, General Interest

Just because you are poor…

In my last post, I wrote about a book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D, Vance, a young man in his 30s, who vividly describes the challenges growing up a poor, “white trash” hillbilly in Rust Belt Ohio, with a drug addicted mother.  Vance’s story pulls back the curtain on not just the impact of drug addiction on a family, but also a myriad of other social and cultural problems in his poor, white working-class community. Certainly, economic factors play a large role in the escalating social decay in many poor communities, but that doesn’t even hit upon the larger negative social and cultural factors, that are propelling so many people into leading lives in endless crisis.

I’m changing the order a bit on posts, so this one will be about the things I’ve learned about America’s social and cultural problems among America’s poorer people, from my personal experiences.  This isn’t some sociological study, it’s just my observations.

Being a person who likes volunteer work, I’ve done a lot of that in my life, but most of all I like listening to people tell me about their lives and I like to help people in whatever small ways I can.  Nothing I have done is remotely as important as the major contributions many other people make toward helping people.  There are people like doctors saving lives, police and emergency personnel saving lives, people dedicating their lives to good causes, etc.  My volunteer work has been very small in the scheme of things and I know I should do much more, but that said, here goes with the World According to Me…

The Army attracts a lot of people from poor and working class America, poor black people, poor white people, and poor people from other ethnic groups.  Just like I mentioned in my previous post, it’s a way out of dysfunctional families and bad neighborhoods, for many people like Vance or my husband.  The Army does not attract many people from America’s economically-advantaged class.  Even among the officer corps, I suspect most come from middle class backgrounds, not wealthy families.

After my husband retired from the Army, I went to work at Wal-Mart in 1999, left in 2000, then went back to Wal-Mart in 2003 and left in 2015.  This is a town with a large Army installation, so many of the customers I dealt with were military, but there were also many locals, most from poor, working-class families of various ethnic backgrounds.  This is a poor county in GA, so there were also many poor people, who do not work and probably come from backgrounds of generational poverty.  Some were middle class, but I suspect few of the customers were wealthy.

As an Army wife, I did a lot of family support group volunteer work, Red Cross casework (handling Red Cross emergency messages and financial assistance) and other activities, but most of what I learned came from informal interactions like Vance describes in his book, when he was in the Marines.   He was about to buy a car, when a NCO guided him to the credit union to get a loan, with a lower interest rate.  My husband was a NCO in the Army and that’s what non-commissioned officers do – they take care of their troops and try to guide them.

As an infantry soldier, my husband spent large chunks of the year away from home training, which meant a lot of informal phone calls, where he would ask me to call one of his soldiers’ wives and check on her, or take her to the commissary or help with various problems.  I met a lot of wonderful people in the Army this way.  I learned a lot about personal and social problems too.

Personal financial problems loom large in creating chaotic homes.  “Experts” like to look for macro causes, like discrimination, lack of opportunity, predatory lenders, etc. to explain and absolve people living in perpetual financial chaos from personal responsibility for their plight and sure these macro causes do exist to some degree, but in no way explain that none of the political or social program fixes alleviate the problem.  In fact, many of the fixes exacerbate the problem.

The single most important lesson to teach people is that they are personally responsible for their decisions, their actions and their own lives.

I’ve made financial mistakes, in fact, I think everyone has, but dealing with people who live in perpetual financial chaos, the recurring excuse is some version of blaming “The Man”, as if they are a victim of forces beyond their control OR “bad luck” (both are magical thinking).

I have someone in my family who uses the “bad luck” excuse constantly.  More than a decade ago I sent her an article from a magazine about how many of life’s little crises could be avoided, if you keep at least $500 in savings.  Like many Americans, she spends beyond her means, has a terrible credit score, uses larger windfalls (like tax returns) to go out and spend bigger, rather than putting any aside for a rainy day.  I gave her Suze Orman’s book, Women & Money, because women spend emotionally way more often than men.  She always writes out budgets and plans to get on track.  It never happens, because her budgets don’t allow for the little crises that constantly occur.  Her little crises are usually things like car problems or something with the kids, but almost all of them would not be a crisis at all, if she kept $500 in savings.  She calls all these crises – bad luck.  If you have a dilapidated car, things are likely to break, kids get sick and you know what your co-pay is and that prescription medicine can be expensive, very few things are totally unforeseen.

Another young family member is the exact opposite – she has insurance for just about every conceivable “bad luck ” scenario, including, she took out renter’s insurance on her first apartment, something I didn’t even know about when I was young.  I have encountered many people who use various federal assistance programs and have told me detailed ways about how you have to word stuff on applications, how to game the system, and all the ins and outs on qualifying, yet these very same people often make impulse purchases they can’t afford, get into terrible financial binds with predatory lenders, and refuse to learn anything about better money management skills.  These people can explain complex ways to navigate the government bureaucracy, yet most have never learned to balance a checkbook and live a bad credit or no credit/cash only lifestyle.

In Wal-Mart I noticed that many young co-workers blew almost their entire paycheck  on payday, buying frivolous stuff.  Many of them had families, meaning they weren’t paying bills or buying groceries and that they would be borrowing or bumming money before the next payday.  The anger many working Americans feel about people on government assistance comes from watching people in line at check-out counters across America.

So, let me give just a few examples of people who come from a background, like my husband, Vance, or even worse family chaos.

When we lived at Fort Leonard Wood, my husband was a First Sergeant and because of that he was assigned an extra duty on our street, in our housing area on post.  He needed to check that people were mowing their grass, not piling junk all over and that sort of thing.

This meant that soldiers or their wives on our street would knock on our door to complain about other soldiers or their wives frequently.  I even had a neighbor come to the door and berate me that my oldest daughter, around 12, had beat up her pudgy son, who was the same age as my daughter, but outweighed her by at least 25-30 pounds..  She had her son in tow, and angrily pointed out the red marks on him.  I told her I had already talked to my daughter, but she kept yelling at me and telling me how I should discipline my daughter. Finally, I told her she should stop embarrassing her son by making such a commotion over a girl beating his butt.  Mothers should not emasculate their sons, is my conviction.

One neighbor, a young black lady from Arkansas, had 4 young sons and her husband was an E-4.  She had problems and she didn’t have the skills to cope with a family, but she was trying to learn.  I talked to her many times and tried to help her in whatever ways I could.  I watched her kids sometimes, I gave her clothes for the kids, I listened to her.

She had an angry pride and was distrustful of me, which happens a lot when a white person tries to help a black person or when do-gooders try to offer charity to poor white people too.  I felt that angry pride myself a few times when someone made me feel like I was poor white trash.

She had no idea how to keep house, she did not know how to cook, but she desperately wanted better for her children.  She got a job at a fast food restaurant, she was taking her kids to church, and church friends were helping her too – teaching her how to cook, etc.  Once she began to talk to me, she told me her mother was a drug addict and she never learned about how to be a mother.  One time she was telling me her husband wasn’t happy in the Army and I told her she needed to kick him in the butt and tell him to work hard, because the Army was the best thing to happen to him.  I believe that completely.  He had medical care for his kids and opportunities to advance and get an education in the Army, that he would not have back home in Arkansas.

This lady was facing a mountain of obstacles, but she still was trying to beat the odds.  She had taken an interest in needlework and a church friend had taught her a little bit, so I gave her more needlework supplies and some pointers.  She had gotten a few decorative items and we talked about decorating.  She longed for a better life, but because of her background, she had no foundation and all the time there was the constant responsibility and stress of 4 rambunctious little boys to care for.

Some of the situations with her and her sons had other neighbors commenting.  Like those boys had busted out the screens in the downstairs windows and one day, they and their dog were jumping in and out the one window.  Another time, they had the dog chained to the railing on the front porch.  One of my kids came and told me that I needed to do something because the dog was hanging off the front porch with only its back paws able to touch the ground.  He had wrapped himself around the porch railing, then slipped off the porch,

When they returned from a trip home to Arkansas, I didn’t see the dog for several days, so I asked the one boy what happened to the dog and he told me that his Dad dumped the dog off on the highway driving to Arkansas and one of my kids said the dog probably had a better chance of survival away from them.

I believed her husband was a lazy loser and that she’d be on her own with those boys in the near future, although I don’t know what happened to them.

I know a very nice young white mother with two children, who works very hard at Wal-Mart.  She has been off again, on again with the children’s father.  Several years ago, she was relying on her mother to baby-sit her kids, because she could not afford a daycare.  Her concern about that arrangement was her mother and step-father smoked weed all the time and she didn’t like her children around that.  This is the kind of dilemma many poor people face.  She did work out other arrangements and she has worked hard to advance at Wal-Mart and is a salaried manager now.  She takes her kids to church, she’s trying to make sure her kids have a better life than she had.

Her mother worked in Wal-Mart for several years too and her mother was a very good worker, but she had a lot of substance abuse issues and died a year or so ago.  Despite all the issues, this young woman loved her mother.  And her mother was smart and talented.   One time I was sick with a really bad sinus infection and the doctor had told me to use saline nasal spray several times a day, an antihistamine nasal spray and a steroid nasal spray, plus I was on antibiotics.  I told this lady about the 3 nasal sprays and she told me that she can’t put anything up her nose and then she told me a story about when she and her husband used to cook meth.  People tell me all sorts of amazing stories…  The family, except for this young woman and her two daughters, moved to Colorado, when they legalized marijuana there.

Her daughter is going to be one of the success stories though.   She’s determined to provide a better life for her daughters.

Often young people struggling to overcome chaotic family backgrounds contend with other family members constantly mooching off of them, making it even harder for these young people to get ahead.  I saw this in the Army often, where soldiers were sending money home to other family members and I saw it at Wal-Mart too.  The family ties to a family in chaos make it hard to break completely free of that lifestyle.

Young men seem to hang around the electronics department at Wal-Mart.  It’s ridiculous to see the lines for new electronic games or gaming systems, that start often a day before the release.    Years ago, there was one morning I came into my fabrics and crafts department and was furious that one of these lines had run through my department the night before and these idiots had left trash all over the place, but also folding chairs they had procured from the sporting goods department.  Another time I saw a young man with his toddler daughter in line when I got to work. Nine hours later, when I was heading home, he was still in line with that kid – all day in line with a small child  – to buy a stupid game.

Total irresponsibility among young men in America shirking responsibility to care for their children is a societal crisis and a national disgrace.  Men should be ashamed that they allow other men to behave like this, but even worse many men make excuses for this failure to man-up to taking personal responsibility for children they created.

Americans and their stuff… STUFF is the real religion in America, even more of a false god than money.

A few years back I was stuck on the patio in lawn and garden Thanksgiving night for a Black Friday sale.   My job was to manage the queue lines for large items for that sale.  It was cold that night and I noticed an older man holding a small child, who did not have a coat on and that child was shivering.  So, I took off my coat and covered the kid and the man told me his wife and daughter were on the way with the kid’s coat.  A few minutes later, a lady with three small children in the shopping cart got in line and none of her children had coats on.  Mixed emotions hit me, as I was torn between anger at this stupid mother for bringing her kids out in the cold without coats, regret that I didn’t have anything to keep the kids warm and relief that I had already given my coat to some other kid, because I worried  those grubby kids might have head lice.

Why would anyone take a small child, who isn’t properly dressed, out in the cold to wait in line to buy frivolous stuff?

Lying, cheating, stealing – these are the everyday realities of working at Wal-Mart.  Stealing time in a myriad of ways was the most common form of stealing.    As an hourly supervisor, one time I sat in with a salaried manager as he terminated this young female employee for stealing time.  She had clocked in the day before and then gone to McDonalds at the front of the store, she left there with a guy and went outside.  A few hours later she came back in the store and finally went to her department.  I doubt she told anyone she got fired for stealing time.  Usually  the common refrain is “Wal-Mart is a terrible place to work” or “they didn’t pay me enough.”

I typed up the coaching myself to terminate a young man, who had not done what I told him to do several times.  I had told him to go to the seasonal area and start zoning.  He ignored me, then left for his lunch hour and didn’t come back for a few hours.  When he returned I asked him why he had been gone way longer than an hour and he told me he had a flat tire on his car and had to fix that.  He still didn’t go to the seasonal area, when I told him again to go zone.  He had other coachings and was on his way out the door before this day.  I felt no remorse typing his coaching.  I am sure he thinks I am a bitch, Wal-Mart is a terrible place to work and they weren’t paying him enough.

The stealing of merchandise happened daily and in so many ways, that every time, I would think that I had seen it all, some new way of stealing merchandise would occur.  The thing I learned quickly was that there is no stereotypical shoplifter.  They come in all colors, ages, sexes.  We had many co-workers caught stealing, even an assistant store manager who was writing post dated personal checks and taking out cash loans from the cash office, to a co-manager who was caught stealing baby clothes, even though she could easily have afforded to pay for it.

An elderly lawn and garden people greeter was caught loading up his car with camping equipment he stole and my young cashier in lawn and garden told me she felt bad that he got fired, because he really believed that Mayan calendar apocalypse was going to happen and he was trying to prepare.  I believed he was a thief, because asset protection had been watching him for a while.  They were sure his daughter-in-law was frequently filling up her shopping cart and exiting through lawn and garden without paying for the merchandise.

Shortly after he left, another elderly people greeter started a rumor that he had died of a heart attack.  She stopped me and told me how terrible it was for Wal-Mart to have fired him.  She was sure Wal-Mart was responsible for his death.  I am sure she told many customers this story, even though our personnel manager called to check on him and he was very much alive.  I told this people greeter he had not died and was not mistreated by Wal-Mart, but she had it in her mind that Wal-Mart was the problem.

There are bad managers, there are bad things about Wal-Mart, but this revolving door work force in retail and fast food stems a great deal from the culture.  The most common thing I heard from fellow employees, of white, black and other ethnic backgrounds, often on their very first day of work, was “Wal-Mart isn’t paying me enough to do this job!”  A sense of entitlement pervades, especially with young people.

I’ve read posts at Malcolm Pollack’s blog dealing with controversial human biodiversity scientific research on intelligence, as it pertains to some of these cultural problems.  I don’t have a science background, where I can judge this research or weigh how it affects culture.  The thing about people is, being intellectually-gifted does not equate to moral behavior.  Also having money affords people more opportunities, but money alone does not resolve deeper cultural problems, as is often evident when poor people win the lottery or poor black men become sports stars.  In far too many cases, the money allows for more bad behavior,  reckless behavior, and chaos.

Vance wrote, “A younger teacher, listening intently, sighed: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but so many of them are raised by wolves.”  I have known people who have children with Down’s syndrome and other severe mental disabilities, who insist that these children learn table manners, learn to follow rules, learn to do chores, etc.  In fact, creating a stable daily routine helps all people, young and old.  Even dogs can be housebroken and taught how to behave, so assuredly that applies to almost all children.

Living in chaos foments more chaos.  And it doesn’t take any fancy studies or experts to figure this out.  In the common sense words from my late mother, “Just because you are poor, that’s no excuse for having a dirty house”, “just because you are poor, that’s no excuse for bad manners”, “just because you are poor, that’s no excuse for being ignorant”, “just because you are poor, that’s no excuse for not working hard.”

My mother didn’t believe in excuses, she believed that in America, all things are possible… and I believe she was right.

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Filed under American Character, Culture Wars, General Interest

Looking for a Savior in all the wrong places

The above MSNBC interview features J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, a book that is part, starkly honest portrayal of his life as a poor “white trash” hillbilly growing up in the Rust Belt today, and part social policy analysis. In the book, Vance mentions “learned helplessness” as a looming problem in the economically depressed town in the Rust Belt, where he grew up.  He chronicles, in a very personal way, the current plight of the families of those who were part of the Appalachian migration out of the Appalachian Mountain communities to northern industrial cities in the first half of the last century, often referred to as the Hillbilly Highway.

His story is meant to open discussions about government social policy, local community actions, but most of all, he is hoping that the American families in crisis, at the heart of the cultural crisis in America, take a hard look at themselves and begin the painful, difficult process of changing how their own families treat each other.

That change requires unlearning “helplessness”, but also learning to quit blaming big government, big business, big bankers, nefarious Mexicans and Chinese, Obama  and Muslims, and other mythical scapegoats.  Quit looking for a new big government program or an American strong man promising to make your life or your community better!   You are responsible for the choices you make, but if you have managed to get your life on track, the responsibility doesn’t end there.  You have to try to help guide your own families and communities, especially children at risk, to learning to be productive and American success stories too.

Vance writes honestly about his mother’s drug addiction and the impact it had on him and his sister, but it also affected his grandparents and extended family too.  One addict or alcoholic in a family can create endless chaos and upheaval, both emotional and financial.  These people are like ticking time bombs, ready to tear apart their family and themselves, over and over.   The news clip above offers a shocking glimpse into the opioid  epidemic in America today.

Change begins first in our own hearts and then within our families and communities.

In many posts I’ve highlighted Trump’s populist appeal, his skillfully latching onto patriotic themes, spanning the globe from Mexico to China for foreign scapegoats abroad, evil domestic “establishment” politicians at home and of course, The Left, as the cause of all the failures in American communities.  Many Americans see Trump as hearing their pain and expressing their anger, but I want to move away from Trump and this election, to delve into the state of way too many American families, like the one Vance grew-up in.

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Above is an early photo of Kunkletown, PA, the village where I grew-up.  We lived on the outskirts of the village further off to the left side of where that photo ends.  Behind where the photographer was positioned, is part of the Blue Mountain range, which is the eastern edge of the Appalachian Mountain range.  The village had a few more buildings off to the left and right, when I was growing up, but not much more.  My family was a typical blue-collar, rural family in the Pocono Mountains in northeastern PA.  In the late 90s, my husband, kids and I had gone to visit my family and as my husband drove around winding roads in the mountains, one of my sons, who was around 11 or 12 at the time, said, “Mom, your family is kind of like northern rednecks.”  My first reaction was angry pride in my family, but when I thought about his words, I knew they were true.

I love my family, I am proud of my PA German heritage, and I am especially proud of my parents, who were very hard-workers, dedicated to family, drank alcohol only at social occasions and then sparingly, ran an organized home, lived frugally and within their means, did not tolerate drama in our home, instilled values in us, but most of all they lived their values through constant example.  Sure, my family had conflicts, problems, and many flaws, because no one has a “perfect” family, but I never doubted that my parents would care for us and do their very best to provide for us.  I never once doubted that they put caring for their family over their own wants and desires – they made sacrifices constantly to provide for us.

The things that bind strong families together go much deeper than blood, they are love and respect for each other, and building trust within the family.

My parents told all six of us, my three sisters and two brothers, that in America all things are possible if you work hard.  Coupled with that complete faith in the American Dream was faith in God, but also the constant reminders that we needed to help other people and that America isn’t just about “rights”.  My parents believed being an American imposed on all of us a “duty”  to be good citizens and good neighbors. This combined message of “civic duty” and the Christian message of being “good neighbors” is what built American communities.  That isn’t to say America can’t be inclusive and respectful of other religions, it’s a historical statement of how most rural communities and small town America were built.

The anger stewing among America’s poor is very real, but the scapegoating other groups, the latching onto federal government panaceas and the complete abdication of taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families and our own communities, is destroying not only the American spirit, but also real American lives.

Vance survived a home in crisis, having a mother who had a drug addiction problem, run-ins with the criminal justice and social services systems, and whose lifestyle led to a revolving door of “father” figures moving in and out of his life.  He credits his loving, albeit dysfunctional in many ways, grandparents with saving him from ending up a high-school drop out.  He also credits the Marine Corps for instilling strong values that helped him become a stronger, more resilient person.  His story offers many insights as to what is really ailing America and it’s not just closing factories, corrupt Washington, or bad trade practices.

My husband survived a troubled childhood, eerily similar to, but, perhaps more stark than the one Vance recounts.  Interestingly enough, my husband’s alcoholic mother, grew up in West Virginia.  As Vance talked about his crazy grandmother’s rants and profanity-laced language, I kept thinking, “She talks just like my late mother-in-law.”

My goody-two shoes upbringing didn’t prepare me for my mother-in-law’s flowery language, where two of her favorite phrases were, ” Shit in your hat and pull it down over your ears.” and her version of “go to hell” was, “Up your giggy hole, bitch!”  I sat there dismayed and confused with many of her phrases, and after the first time she said that, when I was alone with my husband,  I asked him, “What on earth is a giggy hole?”  My mother considered “fart” a cuss word and we weren’t allowed to say that.  I tried to teach my children to say, “pass gas” and they told me even their teachers say “fart” and refused to believe me that “fart” is a vulgar word.

Besides all the “crazy” things and rough talking, Vance’s grandmother, instilled a belief in him that he could do anything and she also talked about her dream of becoming a lawyer when she was young.    My mother-in-law, besides the obvious problems that hit you in the face quickly, was a very smart woman and at some point in her life, she read a lot.  It always amazed me that she would rattle off the answers to Jeopardy questions on TV, before even the best contestants could open their mouths.  She would have choice words for the contestants who missed questions.  She also did the crossword puzzle in the newspaper every day, in very little time.  Occasionally, she would ponder out loud about a word she was struggling over, but invariably within a few minutes she’d have the answer.

I once asked my mother-in-law how she knew all this stuff and she gave me this confused look and said, “Everyone knows this!”  I didn’t know many of these things and I read constantly.  I’ve often wondered what my mother-in-law’s dreams were when she was young, before having 7 children, with only 2 having the same father, I believe.  My husband related that one sibling died young, so I am not sure about the paternity of that one.  My husband’s father left when he was 5 years old and he never saw him again.

Like the Marines helping Vance escape his troubled childhood, the Army provided my husband a way to escape his life, growing up poor in downtown Baltimore.  I suspect that my neck of the woods in PA was an anomaly in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up. It was the backward, west end of the county, where a small enclave of  PA Dutch people, most related to each other, were clinging to their rapidly evaporating community.  Drugs were prevalent when I was in high school in the 70s and the area has a lot of resorts and also an invasion of people from New York and New Jersey, who decided to move to the Poconos and commute to work in the city.

This urban invasion completely changed the culture in the area.  In high school, we were disparagingly called “farmers” by our rival high school team, from a more populated area of the county.  However, the dwindling family farm culture had been eroding for a large part of the last century.  Most of the people, to include my parents, commuted to other areas in PA to work, with few actually working on farms in my childhood.

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My paternal great-grandmother lamented selling their farm and moving to “town”, which was Kunkletown (a village with a church, a general store, a gas station, a post office,  and a few local businesses) and that was before my father was born in 1929.   The above photo is the post office in Kunkletown, PA, with my great-grandfather behind his horse and mail cart,  He  was one of two rural route mail carriers, when the rural routes were started in 1912.  See, not only John Kasich has a family member with claims to being a postman…   While compiling a history of Kunkletown during the American bicentennial in 1976, local historical sleuths found this record of my great-grandfather’s, January 1912 route stating he delivered 4 registered letters, 757 letters, 369 postal cards, 1802 newspapers, 538 circulars, and 442 packages.  He collected 4 registered letters, 640 letters, 206 postal cards, 2 newspapers, 10 packages and 36 money orders.  Guess reading newspapers was popular in the backwoods.  That post office was still the post office when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s.

The problems Vance relates experiencing growing up in the Rust Belt in Ohio, now are the same ones afflicting the poor white working class in the Poconos, in small towns, in rural America, but also in inner-city poor black communities too.

What is ailing America most is too many Americans started believing they are the downtrodden victims of a system stacked against them.   Much of the “learned helplessness” is the result of liberal government policies, academia and educational system indoctrination and Hollywood and media brainwashing.  Celebrities and flaky TV “experts”, televangelists and assorted “experts” exert more influence over many Americans’ lives than these Americans’ own families or local civic and religious leaders do.  Americans have bought into trusting the advice of total strangers over people in their own families or communities.  This “learned helplessness” belief rears itself in endless strings of lies, way too many people tell themselves and their families, about why their lives are an endless, downward trajectory of personal and financial train wrecks.

As one who has lived through some personal train wrecks and even spent years making excuses for some of my bad decisions, I’m not trying to judge other people who are struggling or acting like I have all the answers. All I can say is that in my life, at 56, one thing I’ve learned to do is to try to quit making excuses when I make mistakes, admit to them quickly, then try to fix them and avoid making the same ones in the future. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but in the end, I blame myself for the outcome – not the “system is rigged or against me”.  Even when I have been treated “unfairly”, I keep working at forgiveness and not letting anger rule my life.  That forgiveness part is the hardest, but by focusing on looking for positive things, it helps me move past anger.

Vance penned an opinion piece in the New York Times, “The Bad Faith of the White Working Class,” June 25, 2016, where he writes about “paranoia replacing piety” in some Christian groups in America. He states, “A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror.” Expanding on that thought, Vance writes:

“This paranoia harms the most vulnerable Christians the most of all. A few months ago I visited with a few teachers from my old high school and asked them how we might give kids in our community a better shot — at a good job, perhaps, or at least a peaceful family life. The mood grew somber. One told me that after a student, a bright young man from a “rough home,” stopped showing up to class, she drove to his house on a school day to check on him. She found him and his seven siblings home alone, her promising student too preoccupied with tending to his brothers and sisters to care much about school. A younger teacher, listening intently, sighed: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but so many of them are raised by wolves.”

In the white working class, there are far too many wolves: heroin, broken families, joblessness and, more often than we’d like to believe, abusive and neglectful parents. Confronted with those forces, we need, most of all, a faith that provides the things my faith gave to me: introspection, moral guidance and social support. Yet the most important institution in our lives, if it exists at all, encourages us to point a finger at faceless elites in Washington. It encourages us to further withdraw from our communities and country, even as we need to do the opposite.” (my highlight)

This post has run much longer than I intended, sorry about that.  In my next few posts I want to delve into the history of faith in America, where Gladius has so generously given me permission to pull whatever I want from a sermon he gave to his Baptist church this past 4th of July, to highlight the faith of our Founding Fathers.  Then I want to write a post about the things I learned about American culture working in Wal-Mart many years (leaving in 2015).

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