0 comment Monday, June 30, 2014 | admin
During yesterday's discussion of my piece on 'fight or flight'', ''stand or fall", some of the younger commenters spoke of feeling betrayed or angry with the older generations, because those who lived before us failed to avert the disaster that has since befallen this country.
Why, it may reasonably be asked, did someone in past generations not see this train wreck coming and act to prevent it?
The short answer is: some did. A prescient few saw or sensed what the ultimate outcome of, say, the 1965 Immigration Act would be, and opposed it. A number of the older generation in the South -- heck, even in the North, warned what the outcome of ''integration'' would be. They warned that the races would mingle, with a leveling downward of social mores, and they warned that the barriers and walls which nature had created among the different races would be broken down, and a blurring of the races would begin, with unfavorable results for majority America. Carlton Putnam was one such voice of warning, and there were many others, whose names are forgotten.
It appears to me that they have been vindicated, that what they warned of actually has come to pass.
In fact, I would say that their prophecies were rather mild, compared to what has actually transpired.
And of course there were many during the 40s and 50s and even into the 60s who warned of the encroaching Communist influence, and of its plans for 'transforming' our country stealthily.
Why were these watchmen not heeded?
In part, it was because those in power in the media, in government, in academia, and even in the business world, were complicit, to a greater or lesser degree, in the transformation of our country. The 'voices in the wilderness' were increasingly ignored by those who control the flow of news and information. Where they were not ignored, they were ridiculed, called 'paranoid' and reactionary, and ultimately excluded from influential circles, marginalized, dismissed as anachronistic or 'right-wing extremists'.
Most of us, except for the most vigilant and strong-willed, become caught up to some extent in the dominant currents of our time. Most of us absorb a certain amount of the liberal propaganda which has become so all-pervasive during the last 30 or 40 years. Peer pressure is also a factor, even among adults. We tend to be influenced somewhat by the popular ideas and trends of our time. Sometimes radical liberal innovations are so cleverly insinuated into our society that they are not recognized as what they are, but are simply seen as 'progress', an inexorable process which 'just happens', which is inevitable, and for that reason, somehow good.
Then we tend to scorn the ideas of our parents and grandparents simply because those ideas were held by our parents and grandparents. Who wants to be associated with the backward thinking of fusty old folks who just didn't ''get it", having been deprived of the wonderful enlightenment of our present day?
Nationalism, or simply loving kin, home, hearth, faith, and nation are so yesterday, so 20th century. Everybody knows we are moving on to a new paradigm for the new millennium, and it's all about 'one world', unity in diversity, transformation, global villages, and so on. ''Globalize yourself'' as one cable TV channel commands us.
It's not a new thing that people are, to some extent, products of their age. They absorb, often by osmosis, the reigning ideas or buzzwords or shibboleths of the era, and of the social class in which they live and move and have their being. The media, too, are omnipresent and all but omnipotent, it seems, in shaping people's thinking. And the media, collectively, are a malevolent influence in our world.
But are we all just products of our environment? I would say, and I think most conservatives would say: NO.
We are not blank slates. And the fact that there are many insistent voices murmuring in our ears, telling us what to think and what to say and what to believe does not absolve us of the responsibility to think for ourselves.
Even in some of the more oppressive regimes in the history of our planet, there have been dissenters who saw through the propaganda and the lies, and who stood up and resisted the pressures toward groupthink. Totalitarians can try, but they can't fetter our minds, not completely.
My parents grew up in a much freer and healthier time, so they were subjected to fewer malign influences than my generation and succeeding generations, who have been steeped in Political Correctness. Still they had certain blind spots; perhaps they trusted government too much; those who lived through the Great Depression often tended to see Big Government as the dispenser of all good things. My parents were taught, as good Americans, to obey lawful authority, and to honor our leaders and our national symbols. Patriotism is a good thing, insofar as our government is a just or legitimate authority. But if carried to the extreme of blind obedience and the refusal to scrutinize our government and hold it accountable, it is a negative thing.
Again, some in the older generations were able to 'see through' things, and sift what was just from what was unjust, what was worth their loyalty and trust and what was not. It always comes down to personal responsibility, and the need to use discernment and good judgment.
I honestly feel for the younger people who have never known anything but the PC regime and the multicult propaganda. But I think that those with native good sense and a sound sense of right and wrong will be able to recognize falsehood and propaganda and reject it for what it is, rather than being swept along with the spirit of our corrupt age.
We are all ultimately responsible for the choices we make, and whether Christian or not, it's essential to do as the Bible enjoins us and ''prove (test) all things; hold fast that which is good."
Personally I don't blame my parents for not seeing into the future and trying to alter the course of things. Most of us in every generation are caught up in simply trying to make a living, tend to our families and our own little corner of the world, and we can't see the larger picture of our own time, much less project into the future and extrapolate what present trends will bring. We can't fault our parents or grandparents; I believe they did their best, just as we in our time are doing our best, for the most part.
Most of us, including myself, could not have imagined the profound changes that have come about in the last 10 or 15 years, especially. Some of us, living in more sheltered areas, were blissfully unaware of the deep changes being wrought in many other parts of the country. Until recently, maybe even until this day, many Americans imagine that the Mexican invasion is a problem only in the border states, although few areas have escaped it completely. We have to remember that there are many people who don't read the Internet, who get their ''news'' from the worthless old media, and who are thus ignorant of the larger picture. And that is the way our elites have designed it.
9/11 awoke many people, including yours truly, to the scope of the immigration problem in our country. In one of those media sob stories following 9/11, lamenting some petty harrassment of a Moslem immigrant somewhere, I learned to my shock that even small towns in East Texas had Moslem immigrants. That was, believe it or not, a real jolt to me. It seemed so wrong. I had been living in the North for some years, and had imagined that East Texas, or rural Texas generally, was as it had always been in my lifetime, populated by Texans. I could not process the idea of Moslems in a tiny Texas community. Welcome to the Brave New World of No Borders. I felt as if home would never be home again. And that feeling has never gone away.
Now, I consider myself fairly well-informed, compared to many 'average' Americans, but if I was so unaware of what was going on all over this country, I know there are many more who have no clue even now, and will never have a clue until it is on their doorstep. Such is human nature, for many people. Denial is a powerful temptation.
Past generations could, for the most part, ignore the non-American world with a degree of impunity; the world was 'larger' then, and people focused, rightly, on their own backyards. Now, suddenly, the whole world is in our backyards in this ''global century." We will never be able to ignore the world beyond our borders now.
Our elders had a much more narrow world to concern themselves with, and paradoxically they were the richer for it. We, by contrast, are burdened with being the world's social worker and savior and doctor and all-around servant. We are hated where we interfere and blamed for NOT interfering. We Americans (and to a lesser extent, Westerners in general) carry the weight of the world on our shoulders.
So who is to blame for all this? We could play the generational blame game endlessly; each generation seems to feel that its predecessors made a mess of the world, and left it to be cleaned up by the new generation. When I was a teenager, that was a common refrain, as we worried about ''The Bomb'' and nuclear armageddon scenarios. We were all sure that our parents were bunglers or misguided warmongers, and we would re-invent human nature and the world when we assumed the reins of power.
Obviously we came nowhere near improving things, and yet we were unjust in judging our parents' efforts.
I suppose human beings have been blaming each other since the days of Genesis 3, when Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent.
But at this point in our story, we don't have the luxury of fighting amongst ourselves, as seems to be happening with distressing frequency on the 'right'. Maybe it's in our Western genes, this tendency to infighting and self-inflicted wounds. Still, I am no fatalist; our people have been capable of uniting and pulling together when the odds are against us. I am counting on that to re-surface as things look bleaker.
We need, I mean absolutely need, to rebuild some kin loyalty and to put aside resentments and grievances and ideological preening (as on the 'counterjihad' right, where they are obsessed with purity and political correctness) and work together. We are all we've got.
One little postscript here: I quoted the Biblical commandment about honoring our parents. Here's the passage from Deuteronomy:
Deu 5:16 Honour thy father and thy mother, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.''
Maybe the fact that we've ceased to 'honor father and mother' in the broadest sense is part of what has brought us to the precipice. Something to think about.
Why, it may reasonably be asked, did someone in past generations not see this train wreck coming and act to prevent it?
The short answer is: some did. A prescient few saw or sensed what the ultimate outcome of, say, the 1965 Immigration Act would be, and opposed it. A number of the older generation in the South -- heck, even in the North, warned what the outcome of ''integration'' would be. They warned that the races would mingle, with a leveling downward of social mores, and they warned that the barriers and walls which nature had created among the different races would be broken down, and a blurring of the races would begin, with unfavorable results for majority America. Carlton Putnam was one such voice of warning, and there were many others, whose names are forgotten.
It appears to me that they have been vindicated, that what they warned of actually has come to pass.
In fact, I would say that their prophecies were rather mild, compared to what has actually transpired.
And of course there were many during the 40s and 50s and even into the 60s who warned of the encroaching Communist influence, and of its plans for 'transforming' our country stealthily.
Why were these watchmen not heeded?
In part, it was because those in power in the media, in government, in academia, and even in the business world, were complicit, to a greater or lesser degree, in the transformation of our country. The 'voices in the wilderness' were increasingly ignored by those who control the flow of news and information. Where they were not ignored, they were ridiculed, called 'paranoid' and reactionary, and ultimately excluded from influential circles, marginalized, dismissed as anachronistic or 'right-wing extremists'.
Most of us, except for the most vigilant and strong-willed, become caught up to some extent in the dominant currents of our time. Most of us absorb a certain amount of the liberal propaganda which has become so all-pervasive during the last 30 or 40 years. Peer pressure is also a factor, even among adults. We tend to be influenced somewhat by the popular ideas and trends of our time. Sometimes radical liberal innovations are so cleverly insinuated into our society that they are not recognized as what they are, but are simply seen as 'progress', an inexorable process which 'just happens', which is inevitable, and for that reason, somehow good.
Then we tend to scorn the ideas of our parents and grandparents simply because those ideas were held by our parents and grandparents. Who wants to be associated with the backward thinking of fusty old folks who just didn't ''get it", having been deprived of the wonderful enlightenment of our present day?
Nationalism, or simply loving kin, home, hearth, faith, and nation are so yesterday, so 20th century. Everybody knows we are moving on to a new paradigm for the new millennium, and it's all about 'one world', unity in diversity, transformation, global villages, and so on. ''Globalize yourself'' as one cable TV channel commands us.
It's not a new thing that people are, to some extent, products of their age. They absorb, often by osmosis, the reigning ideas or buzzwords or shibboleths of the era, and of the social class in which they live and move and have their being. The media, too, are omnipresent and all but omnipotent, it seems, in shaping people's thinking. And the media, collectively, are a malevolent influence in our world.
But are we all just products of our environment? I would say, and I think most conservatives would say: NO.
We are not blank slates. And the fact that there are many insistent voices murmuring in our ears, telling us what to think and what to say and what to believe does not absolve us of the responsibility to think for ourselves.
Even in some of the more oppressive regimes in the history of our planet, there have been dissenters who saw through the propaganda and the lies, and who stood up and resisted the pressures toward groupthink. Totalitarians can try, but they can't fetter our minds, not completely.
My parents grew up in a much freer and healthier time, so they were subjected to fewer malign influences than my generation and succeeding generations, who have been steeped in Political Correctness. Still they had certain blind spots; perhaps they trusted government too much; those who lived through the Great Depression often tended to see Big Government as the dispenser of all good things. My parents were taught, as good Americans, to obey lawful authority, and to honor our leaders and our national symbols. Patriotism is a good thing, insofar as our government is a just or legitimate authority. But if carried to the extreme of blind obedience and the refusal to scrutinize our government and hold it accountable, it is a negative thing.
Again, some in the older generations were able to 'see through' things, and sift what was just from what was unjust, what was worth their loyalty and trust and what was not. It always comes down to personal responsibility, and the need to use discernment and good judgment.
I honestly feel for the younger people who have never known anything but the PC regime and the multicult propaganda. But I think that those with native good sense and a sound sense of right and wrong will be able to recognize falsehood and propaganda and reject it for what it is, rather than being swept along with the spirit of our corrupt age.
We are all ultimately responsible for the choices we make, and whether Christian or not, it's essential to do as the Bible enjoins us and ''prove (test) all things; hold fast that which is good."
Personally I don't blame my parents for not seeing into the future and trying to alter the course of things. Most of us in every generation are caught up in simply trying to make a living, tend to our families and our own little corner of the world, and we can't see the larger picture of our own time, much less project into the future and extrapolate what present trends will bring. We can't fault our parents or grandparents; I believe they did their best, just as we in our time are doing our best, for the most part.
Most of us, including myself, could not have imagined the profound changes that have come about in the last 10 or 15 years, especially. Some of us, living in more sheltered areas, were blissfully unaware of the deep changes being wrought in many other parts of the country. Until recently, maybe even until this day, many Americans imagine that the Mexican invasion is a problem only in the border states, although few areas have escaped it completely. We have to remember that there are many people who don't read the Internet, who get their ''news'' from the worthless old media, and who are thus ignorant of the larger picture. And that is the way our elites have designed it.
9/11 awoke many people, including yours truly, to the scope of the immigration problem in our country. In one of those media sob stories following 9/11, lamenting some petty harrassment of a Moslem immigrant somewhere, I learned to my shock that even small towns in East Texas had Moslem immigrants. That was, believe it or not, a real jolt to me. It seemed so wrong. I had been living in the North for some years, and had imagined that East Texas, or rural Texas generally, was as it had always been in my lifetime, populated by Texans. I could not process the idea of Moslems in a tiny Texas community. Welcome to the Brave New World of No Borders. I felt as if home would never be home again. And that feeling has never gone away.
Now, I consider myself fairly well-informed, compared to many 'average' Americans, but if I was so unaware of what was going on all over this country, I know there are many more who have no clue even now, and will never have a clue until it is on their doorstep. Such is human nature, for many people. Denial is a powerful temptation.
Past generations could, for the most part, ignore the non-American world with a degree of impunity; the world was 'larger' then, and people focused, rightly, on their own backyards. Now, suddenly, the whole world is in our backyards in this ''global century." We will never be able to ignore the world beyond our borders now.
Our elders had a much more narrow world to concern themselves with, and paradoxically they were the richer for it. We, by contrast, are burdened with being the world's social worker and savior and doctor and all-around servant. We are hated where we interfere and blamed for NOT interfering. We Americans (and to a lesser extent, Westerners in general) carry the weight of the world on our shoulders.
So who is to blame for all this? We could play the generational blame game endlessly; each generation seems to feel that its predecessors made a mess of the world, and left it to be cleaned up by the new generation. When I was a teenager, that was a common refrain, as we worried about ''The Bomb'' and nuclear armageddon scenarios. We were all sure that our parents were bunglers or misguided warmongers, and we would re-invent human nature and the world when we assumed the reins of power.
Obviously we came nowhere near improving things, and yet we were unjust in judging our parents' efforts.
I suppose human beings have been blaming each other since the days of Genesis 3, when Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent.
But at this point in our story, we don't have the luxury of fighting amongst ourselves, as seems to be happening with distressing frequency on the 'right'. Maybe it's in our Western genes, this tendency to infighting and self-inflicted wounds. Still, I am no fatalist; our people have been capable of uniting and pulling together when the odds are against us. I am counting on that to re-surface as things look bleaker.
We need, I mean absolutely need, to rebuild some kin loyalty and to put aside resentments and grievances and ideological preening (as on the 'counterjihad' right, where they are obsessed with purity and political correctness) and work together. We are all we've got.
One little postscript here: I quoted the Biblical commandment about honoring our parents. Here's the passage from Deuteronomy:
Deu 5:16 Honour thy father and thy mother, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.''
Maybe the fact that we've ceased to 'honor father and mother' in the broadest sense is part of what has brought us to the precipice. Something to think about.
Labels: Globalism, Political Correctness, Societal Decay, Western Civilization, Western Decline