libertybelle diaries

I intended to write about another topic today, but here’s what I’ve gleaned from some things I’ve seen circulating in the news media in the past few days.

1. I don’t know what information to believe about what’s happening in Ukraine, what the Russians are doing or whether they intend to invade.
2. After the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle last year, I have ZERO trust in anything the Biden White House or Austin-run Pentagon say and this lack of trust in the Pentagon leadership leaves me feeling very concerned about America’s national security.
3. I also have ZERO confidence in President Biden or this Pentagon leadership ability to wage any military action – ANYWHERE. I do not trust them or their competency. Period.
4. While I truly was repelled by many of Trump’s spin antics and petty smear campaigns, I know many Trump supporters. I voted for Trump last year out of total fear, after watching the woke crowd that was running the Biden campaign and how they kept Biden out of view, rolled him out with Potemkin-type staging and had him read prepared statements on mostly COVID preaching. His appearances had the aura of hostage videos – he was just a stage prop for an Obama-led spin con game, I thought.
5. The overwhelming majority of Trump supporters are decent, hard-working, patriotic Americans, yet the liberal media and Dems have spent years stereotyping them as knuckle-dragging, racist, stupid deplorables, who should be exiled from polite society.

Ukraine and the Freedom Convoy in Canada seem like the two top tier news stories to me today. I saw news yesterday, that a truckers protest will be starting in the US, next week.

The Ukraine situation has some foreign policy implications for the US and NATO, but I don’t see any need for the WWIII kind of alarmism some in the news media drum up. Where I am more concerned, as I wrote yesterday, is with the domestic turmoil here at home and the deepening partisan divides.

That brings me to what the Canadian Justice Minister said yesterday:

I looked for a mainstream media link, but didn’t see any. Perhaps the mainstream (liberal) media didn’t cover it much, so here’s Breitbart covering it. The way liberal media and conservative media decide what news to cover is a whole other can of worms, but suffice it say, although liberal media wasn’t covering Trudeau’s “emergency powers,” I feel completely confident in saying sleazy, corrupt Democrat lawyers, the Biden White House and the Obama crowd certainly are following every single detail, taking notes, and looking for loopholes in American law to attempt something just like that here in America.

I didn’t know how to explain why what’s going on in Canada should concern Americans when I wrote my blog post, Time to expose the wholesale public corruption, yesterday. What’s happening with the Freedom Convoy and the massive effort by American leftists and the liberal news media to smear those Canadian truckers as terrorists, Nazis, white supremacists, etc. is exactly how the American left, from Democrat politicians, to the liberal media, to big tech platforms, to the Biden WH, to the Austin-run Pentagon have worked to smear Trump supporters as dangerous subversives. Heck, even the Canadian Justice Minister is labeling Trump supporters in Canada as a “threat” and looking to freeze their bank accounts.

Honestly, Trump’s ill-conceived “Stop the Steal Election” rally, which turned into a disgraceful mob attack on the Capitol handed Democrats and the liberal media ammunition with which to paint all Trump supporters and conservatives. So, there is that one event, which has provided cover for all sorts of Dem efforts to use a broad-brush approach to identifying right-wing extremists.

There are also lots of loud, flamethrowers within the Trump pundit crowd, who are constantly reacting with rage, talk of civil war and other over-the-top rhetoric. People can say what they want, I’m just stating how I see the present situation in America.

And assuredly, the Russians have plenty to gain by throwing gasoline on the American internal divides and fueling this growing domestic divisiveness. A lot of foreign countries actively engage in a variety of info war efforts in America, to fuel divides in America.

Heck, for decades, the Soviet dream was to incite a race war in America, but now we have the homegrown BLM aspiring toward that goal… And, yes, I believe the founders (self-proclaimed Marxists) are subversives and I do not support the BLM movement. I didn’t support protests that turned into rioting to the tune of billions of dollars in property damage, several deaths, burning down a police station in Minneapolis, wanton destruction of public property and tearing down statues. I didn’t consider these actions as “mostly peaceful” nor will I ever support or make excuses for violent protests. I also don’t try to make excuses for the people who damaged property and attacked the Capitol police on Jan. 6th.

All of these things taken together make me concerned with where the continuing left vs. right divides will lead our country.

The most extreme social mitigation efforts Democrat officials and federal health officials embraced came from foreign countries, who had enacted them first. Masks and lockdowns – China, releasing prisoners – Iran when they lost control of some prisons, digitally tracking individuals’ movements – South Korea and on it goes.

There is no way Democrats or the Biden White House, which has championed Trudeau’s crackdown and joined in smearing the Freedom Convoy protesters, would pass up an opportunity to crush Trump supporters. These are the same people who had no qualms with labeling Americans who chose not to get the COVID vaccine as a threat to the public and tried to use every power possible to ruin their lives.

Trudeau’s invoking their emergency act and his government’s bare-knuckle tactics to crush the Freedom Convoy, leave me wondering how quickly the Biden crowd and other Democrats will have their liberal media friends spin up overblown narratives about the American truckers protest being planned and Americans, who support them. And all it takes is one ill-conceived or violent incident by right-wing group to provide the Biden administration cover to try some draconian measure of freezing people’s bank accounts and assets, like Trudeau has done.

Lots of people think, these sorts of tyrannical government moves can’t happen here, but the power of the liberal media spin machine to create false narratives, generate massive smokescreens and tirelessly do slash and burn smear campaigns is equaled only by their willful blindness to Democrat corruption. On the right, the conservative media runs wild with a whole lot of reactionary, overwrought, Trump-centric drivel and incitement. I don’t see much in the way of even-handed news reporting these days and the little that there is is drowned out by cable news networks’ prime time pundit line-ups and the vast amount of minute-by-minute social media melodrama – especially Twitter, where the American journalists and pundits hang out.

All I know is our right to free speech sure seems like it’s going to be put to the test very soon.

Truly, I was hoping to write a more cheerful and hopeful post today, but I must say what’s happening in Canada kind of surprised me. Trudeau decided to try to crush the Freedom Convoy protesters with every bit of power he could muster – no half-measures. Americans who are aligned with the political right and/or conservative should be sitting up and taking notice.

Long ago, in 2013, on my blog I mentioned that in 7th or 8th grade I began a new hobby that helped form some important beliefs I still hold dear to this day. In our current rancorous culture, here goes with a trip back to the 1970s.

I grew up in the Pocono Mountains in northeastern PA. Most of the local people in my area were descendants of early German settlers. I can trace my direct ancestors back to the mid 1750s, when they arrived from Germany. By the 70s, the Poconos being a resort area had begun attracting year-round residents from Philadelphia, New Jersey and NYC. With the locals, by my generation, very few younger people spoke PA Dutch, an Americanized German dialect. My father and many of his relatives often spoke PA Dutch when together. My mother understood PA Dutch, but did not speak it, so we spoke English at home. My brothers and sisters and I didn’t really pay much attention to PA Dutch, because most people spoke English in public and at home. Where the PA Dutch culture lived on mainly was with cooking.

We lived out in the country in a big, old house across the road from the parsonage, where our elderly pastor and his wife lived. He was of PA German ancestry too, although from another area of PA. He spoke PA Dutch and fit in well with the locals. His wife was a lovely lady, Jewish and originally from NYC. It’s always amazing to me how in America people from completely different backgrounds so often marry and set out to bridge all those divides and build a family.

Our pastor’s wife was a teacher, educated at Columbia, and she took me under her wing and tried very hard to expand my horizons, by exposing me to books from their pretty extensive home library, by trying to teach me how to play the piano and she had albums of classical music and operas, which she played often. She would tell me about the composers and the stories that operas told. I certainly was a musical disappointment, but I did read the books and various things she guided me toward.

Our pastor was a talented woodworker and always had many projects going, they gardened and were always experimenting with new things. My parents always had many projects going too and were always experimenting with new things too, so this seemed normal to me. I was constantly acquiring new hobbies and to this day, I still am always looking for new things to try and new things to learn.

I sat and read the World Book Encyclopedia set my parents bought for us and that spurred this burning desire to want to meet people from all over the world. While it was interesting to read about all the fascinating people and customs, I longed to actually be able to meet people from these faraway places and learn about their lives.

That long ago blog post I titled, Multiculturism My Way, and it explained how I started acquiring foreign pen pals, when my German teacher at school handed us a brochure on how to write and request pen pals from various countries. I don’t even remember how many pen pals I had, but it was quite a few. I used my babysitting money to pay for international postage.

My parents always encouraged my brothers, sisters and me to pursue hobbies and in our house there were always an assortment of hobbies, pets, and projects going on.

However, the person I rushed to tell about what this pen pal effort meant to me was our pastor’s wife. I remember she was sitting at the desk by the built-in wall of bookcases in their living room and I was so excited as I told her about my very first pen pal, a girl in India. I told her about my “Friends Around the World Plan” and how I intended to get more pen pals from other countries and how I wanted to make friends all over the world. She didn’t laugh at my plan, but she smiled at me and told me she thought that was a wonderful plan.

Once you start talking to people and trying to find some common ground, the differences start fading into the background. Everyone can find some common ground with other people, because we all have family, friends, and all the emotions of the human heart that are universal.

One thing I repeatedly told my kids as they were growing up was that they needed to focus on getting to know people, rather than about people. What we know about people whom we don’t really know is almost invariably secondhand information, often gossip and even more often swept along by malignant hot air. Getting to know people takes some personal investment of time, a willingness to listen and an open heart.

It seems insane to me that so many people in America keep beating the drum about “civil war” and how there’s no hope left for America, before even putting any real effort into turning things around. Sure, the political and cultural divides have deepened, but so much of that is driven by mass media flamethrowers, who get rich and famous by lobbing non-stop agitation propaganda and by politicians, who gain power from the polarization. Each American has a choice whether to listen to and buy into all this raging culture war or we can choose to start ignoring the flamethrowers and begin charting a different course for our country. The malignant hot air blowing in America’s political and cultural spin war threatens to burn hope and goodwill to the ground, if we let it.

Watching the growing rancor in our politics and so often in our online culture, rather than a “Friends Around the World Plan,” we sure could use a “Friends Across America Plan,” where we commit to try to listen more or at the very least to stop rushing to form sweeping judgments about people we know nothing about other than they hold differing views or some single comment or video they made sparks outrage or even worse a viral pile-on attack.

I bet it wouldn’t take very long to “fundamentally transform” America if even a small fraction of the country decided to ditch the left vs. right culture war and began to embrace a “Friends Across America Plan.” For those who say it’s impossible, well, I’ll quote Napoleon Bonaparte – “Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.”

Have a good night!