We've created our own worst enemies - and they've backed us into a corner

I was listening to a conversation this past weekend.  Two older men were discussing the current riots and unrest across America, and fulminating against the (largely) young people who seem to make up the majority of protesters.  One complained, "Dammit, we brought our kids up to know right from wrong! Where did these ****heads we see in the streets come from?"

I didn't say anything.  It wouldn't have been productive.  However, I sorely wanted to point out that "these ****heads" came from our schools and our social programs, which we'd put in place so that parents didn't have to parent any more - they could leave much of that responsibility to the "nanny state".  How many children come out of broken homes, versus stable families?  How many, from their earliest days, see Mommy and Daddy at home together most evenings, taking - making - time to do family things together, letting the kids know they're valued and wanted, instead of both parents coming home from work exhausted, cranky and just wanting to get the kids fed and put to bed, so they can have a few drinks before doing the same themselves?  How many kids get most of their understanding of right and wrong from schools (that don't teach it properly), instead of from their parents, from whom they would traditionally have learned those things?

It's one of the oldest rules in the book.  It can be expressed in many ways, but the outcome is the same.

• "As you sow, so shall you reap" (from the Bible:  Galatians 6:7)
• "You get out of life what you put into it"
• "As you give, so shall you receive" (from the Bible:  Luke 6:38)
• "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (from the Bible:  Proverbs 22:6)

If we'd listened to those admonishments, we'd have made sure to raise our children better.  Because many of us did not, our kids reflect that.  Young children are sponges, eager to soak up whatever they can, learning from everything said and done and going on around them.  If we don't give them wholesome, healthy, upright food for their minds and souls, they'll take whatever else they can get from their environment.

The enemies of our culture knew this.  That's why they launched "the long march through the institutions".  They sought to fill our children's minds with left-wing propaganda - and they've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  The chaos now breaking upon on our streets is absolute proof of that.  As Charlie Daniels points out:

This is anarchy, plain and simple and the laxity of the curriculum we have allowed to be taught in our schools and the doctrine that socialist university faculties have drummed into the heads of our young people is coming home to roost, as deceived twenty-somethings cause havoc for a cause they have no way of understanding, under the impression they are in a struggle for justice, when all along they are joining the battle to dismantle their whole way of life.

There's more at the link.

Far too many parents were too busy working to pay any attention to what their kids were being spoon-fed at school.  They didn't bother to do homework with them, or ask questions about what they were learning, or become active in the running of the schools.  No, that would be too much work on top of both parents pursuing their careers and grabbing for every dollar they could, because "keeping up with the Joneses" in our consumer society was more important - so they were told, and so they believed - than their children's future.  As a result, their children grew apart from them from an early age, and that never stopped.

Harry Chapin memorably sang about it - but it wasn't just fathers who were at fault.  Many mothers were just as guilty.  Do please take the time to watch this video, and listen to Chapin's wife and son talk about how that song has affected them - and others.

And so we poured all sorts of resources into our kids . . . except ourselves.  We were too busy to do that.  As The Diplomad notes, the results speak for themselves.

No other civilization comes close to the West in the amount of resources, praise, and devotion poured into its youth. What has all that expenditure of public and private resources and emotional investment gotten us? We have before us the most pampered, ill-mannered, and arrogant generation in Western history.  Notice how many of them seem to have no problem living in highly expensive and tony metropolises such as New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and London. Many, if not most, seem to engage in no known labor, but yet have the time and resources to preen, prance, and play at revolution, all the while, as noted, recording themselves on their expensive "smart phones." These are not the grubby sans-culotte of 1780s France. Not even close. These mobsters are well-fed, nicely clothed, quite healthy and wealthy cretins--yes, highly privileged and violence-prone cretins, bird brains, ravens.

These cretins repeat empty-headed slogans, and screech about oppression from their perches of privilege to working-class cops, many black or hispanic, and other ordinary folk who seek only to go to work to feed their families. Yes, indeed, the majority of those screaming about white racism and the need to tear down white supremacy, and who feign offense over statues, road names, and Aunt Jemima syrup labels are white kids--most notably white women full of inchoate feminist resentment and rage. They have had their heads filled with a crude cultural Marxism; they live in a world almost completely devoid of facts and historical knowledge. Violent emotion rules.

The mobsters, for example, feel tormented, even driven crazy, by the dictates of the cult of pseudo-science, eaten alive by the certainty of global climate change caused by capitalism and by the "mutability" of gender. No definition, no standard can hold up. All is fluid. Nothing is certain except that the West is evil, and our history must be erased. Back to Year Zero! Pol Pot, call your office.

Again, more at the link.

Fred Reed sees little hope for the resultant future of our society.

A liberal education was once the mark of the cultivated, being deep in languages, literature, philosophy, the sciences, history, mathematics,. Universities once had, at least among the better students, a love of open minded curiosity, thought, and debate. No more. Future historians will notice the shift, but those within it will not. We are left with a nation of morons who will not know they are morons.

. . .

We have done what Marx couldn’t: Achieved communism, a true dictatorship of the proletariat, of a rabble jacquerie of much noise and no wit, the rule of the unfit. It is a rule only of the culture. The moneyed would not grant it power over anything else. Yet rule it is. We shall hear much of the authenticity of the illiterate, the purity of ghetto urges, the wisdom of the people, the need to lay low the pretensions of the mansion.

. . .

As a philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.

More at the link.

I know many readers by now are shaking their heads and saying, "But I didn't do any of that!  I tried to bring up my kids in the way they should walk, just like the Bible says!  They don't have any of those problems, and they aren't out on the streets rioting!  Why are you saying I'm responsible?"  To them I can only say, we're all responsible for the kind of society we allow to grow up around us.  Actions speak louder than words - and inaction is, by definition, an action in itself.  If we did nothing to stop the creeping paralysis of our education system, to halt the gradual indoctrination of our kids by iniquitous and pernicious Marxist propaganda, then we're as guilty as those who perpetrated and supported those atrocities.

So the question becomes, what are we going to do about this?  Charlie Daniels again.

Already the signs of pushback, the serious kind, are showing up.

. . .

Gun sales are through the roof and America is locked and loaded to protect their families and their neighborhoods.

If things are allowed to fester and spread, in my opinion, and at least amongst the people I am familiar with and the area I live in, they will not allow their cities to be occupied, their businesses destroyed nor their lives interrupted without a fight and almost everybody I know has guns and knows how to use them.

I hope and pray that cooler heads will prevail and bloodshed can be avoided, but, as things stand, that’s exactly where this thing is headed.

So, America, in the next few months you’re going to have to make a choice, about how far you’ll be pushed, the priorities of your vote, the kind of world you want your children to grow up in and which side of this debacle you stand on.

Stand tall or crawl, those are the choices.

What do you think?

More at the link.

I think we have one last chance to stop this peacefully, at the ballot box in November this year.  If we elect Congressional representatives, Senators and a President who will take strong, direct action to stop this nonsense in its tracks, there's still a chance that we can remove the worst of the agitators from our midst and begin to restore order and balance to our society.  However, if we don't, all bets are off.

If the progressive left wing of US politics takes control, they'll do nothing to stop the present anarchy - in fact, they'll whip it up even further, because fear is a weapon they can use to force our society to obey their edicts and dictates.  What's more, they'll stop the rest of us from protecting ourselves against it.  Ask yourself - who wants to disarm citizens, defund police, and spend billions upon billions of dollars on the same progressive, socialist, Marxist nonsense that we hear proclaimed on our streets every day during the current unrest?  Not conservatives.  Not the right wing of US politics.

"If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it."  Those are the exact words of Hawk Newsome, Black Lives Matter leader in New York City.  What clearer indicator could we want of what these protests are all about?  It's not about police brutality as such, or racism, or anything else.  It's a power grab, pure and simple.  Progressive forces have not been able to take power (yet) through the ballot box - so they're trying to do so through intimidation and violence.  They hope they'll literally scare enough voters into supporting them that they'll take power in November.  If they do, I doubt they'll ever again let go of it by peaceful means.  We've seen that in every left-wing revolution in history, from France to the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany (yes, Nazi was an abbreviation for the National Socialist Party - something the left would rather we forgot about), to Cambodia under Pol Pot, to China today.

If the left takes control, they'll ride roughshod over the desires and beliefs and aspirations of anyone and everyone who won't get with their program.  Don't believe me?  Consider that under the Obama administration, dozens - scores - of groups and individuals were considered "potential terrorists" in official US government classifications.  Were/are you among them?  Consult the full list, follow the links to the source documents, and see for yourself.  You might be unpleasantly surprised.  Basically, if you're a God-fearing Christian, and/or a supporter of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution, you're in the lists somewhere.

I fear Charlie Daniels is right.  Under a far-left-wing progressive government, there'll be only one way to stop those things from happening again, and even worse.  That way will lead, inexorably, to another civil war - unless we take action now to re-establish civilized control, while we can still do so without too much bloodshed.  There are no signs that many of our pusillanimous, left-wing-dominated city and regional governments are prepared to do that.  They're kowtowing to the demonstrators, not dealing with them as the law requires.  In so many words, they're setting the table for the revolutionary feast they see coming.

I'll let Aesop have the last word.

That stinging sensation for some folks just now is the bear trap jaws of Reality closing on their tender bits ... You're watching the Cold Civil War heat up, as intended.

As the election approaches, it'll get worse.

If OrangeMan wins, it'll get worse.

If OrangeMan loses, it'll get worse.

Nota bene the lack of other options there, according to our Magic Eight Ball.

Plan and prepare accordingly, and hope for better times eventually, but for some reason, the phrase which keeps coming up in most contexts is "Rivers Of Blood". The open question is whether we're talking on a timeline of fruit flies, or geologic strata formation.

But that which cannot continue, economically, politically, socially, or any other which way, won't.

"How did you go broke?"
"Gradually. And then all at once."

If you would not be a puff of smoke at the bottom of a canyon in the Painted Desert, do your best not to follow Wile E. off the cliff to the point that gravity is about to kick in wickedly.

Safety. Shelter. Water. Food. Medical. Energy. Allies.

This is the Do Re Mi of those who intend to see the other side of where things are headed.

That's good advice for all of us.

Peter