The War for Children's Minds
“They are forcing you to think the way they want you to think." North Korean defector Yeonmi Park on "Wokeness" gone wrong in US colleges.
There was once a young man once named Dan Eldon.
Dan was a traveler. An artist. And an African. He grew up in Nairobi. He believed he could change the world. He wasn’t interested in what academics could teach him. He started taking photos of the famines in Somalia. Even though he was in his early twenties, he became highly regarded for his photography.
On July 12, 1993, Dan and three colleagues were called to a horrific bombing by UN forces of a house believed to belong to General Aidid. The photographers began shooting the terrible scene. The crowd, already enraged by the deaths and mutilations of over a hundreds of people, turned on the journalists. They were stoned and beaten to death.
As Dan’s mother reflected: “In a moment of horrific irony, Dan and his friends were murdered by the very people they were trying to help.”
Nowadays, Dan would have been accused of “white savior syndrome.” But he wasn’t that. He was a human being who felt called to do what he could to show humanity’s crimes against itself. He was a hero and children should learn about him.
How did we come to a place where we make snap judgments without content? Surely, we should have learned to do better by now.
My grandsons are all under the age of five. They are Flemish, Norwegian, Russian, Jordanian Arab, English and who knows what else. They look very white. At what point are their parents supposed to tell them they and their ancestors (except the Arab ones?) are/were oppressors of people of color? I have two granddaughters. Same white (although what does that even mean?) mother different fathers. My son is white, his daughter is blond and blue-eyed. The other father was Puerto Rican but he was gone before my granddaughter was born. She has dark hair and brown eyes. We are united as one family. They are both equally my granddaughters. Will they be divided in school, the younger, white one told she and her race oppressed her older brown sister and her race?
How are adults putting the weight of this madness upon our children’s shoulders? Just like masks and vaxx’s, adults are using children as pawns for their agendas. It is unconscionable. We must refuse it.
Once upon a time there was no childhood.
It’s hard to imagine, but throughout most of history, childhood was not a cherished time of innocence. They were, in fact, not considered as any different from adults. In the Middle Ages, children were considered “miniature adults.” Mostly, children lived in the same rooms as the adults and slept in the same beds. All things were seen, nothing was hidden. Children were born easily and died easily. They were a commodity to be bought and sold. They had no rights.
It was the invention of the printing press and its subsequent development in relation to the dissemination of information in the 1600s that first brought about the idea of a separation between children and adults. Suddenly, information was available to all. But not everyone could read it. As literacy expanded, the question was raised, at what age should certain information be allowed? And so, the idea emerged that children should be protected from certain information. From there, grew the concept of childhood innocence and that it needed to be protected. But it would take a long time for this idea to fully develop.
The Industrial Revolution from around 1760 to 1840 was not a friend of childhood. Children were cheap labor to be exploited in the workforce. Education reflected this as a place where, as Lawrence Stone said, “the penal and disciplinary aspects of school …were seen by some largely as a system to break the will and to condition the child to routinized labor in the factory.”
We see remnants of this today. Children being forced to sit for long periods of time, eight hours a day, sometimes more. And not only that but wearing horrible masks impeding their ability to breathe.
I taught for a time online in China and the discipline of the children was astounding. They listened and obeyed, there was little disturbance. When I asked what they do in their spare time, they had no spare time. They did homework. When I asked what they would do if they had spare time, they answered sleep.
But now, at least, there is a common belief that children should be protected, and that education is important. We like to think that the horrors of childhood before the last hundred years or so are a thing of the past. The concept of protecting children grew ever stronger in the nineteenth century. By the time De Maues wrote “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only just begun to awaken,” in 1974, we really thought we had.
Yet it was during the years that childhood was being created and nurtured that it was simultaneously being disassembled.
In 1844, Samuel Morse sent a message by telegraph to a friend of his that said, “What hath God wrought?”
As with the invention of the printing press, it’s doubtful he realized the far-reaching implications this would have on childhood. Still, within his message is an acknowledgement to the mysteries that are beyond our understanding.
Thoreau seemed to understand the implication. It is said that when he heard that two people on either side of the country could communicate with one another, his response was “but what do they have to say to each other?”
Where once communication was personal, sitting on your porch in the evening, talking, in a café, it became impersonal and global. Rather than ruminating on information over time, relaying information became immediate--endless amounts of it. With photos and videos, information became about conveying emotion rather than facts. Instantaneous impressions are flashed at us with the intent to make us feel things rather than think about them. The entire concept of reality has shifted.
Some 120 years after Morse, Marshall McLuhan would write:
“When man lives in an electronic environment, his nature is transformed, and his private identity is merged with the corporate whole. He becomes ‘Mass Man.’ Mass Man is a phenomenon of electronic speed, not of physical quantity. Mass Man was first noticed as a phenomenon in the age of radio, but he had come into existence, unnoticed, with the electronic telegraph.”
As information became more accessible, we lost our individuality in the quagmire of the ether. With the latest fad, the latest viral tweet we are all swayed this way and that.
The natural outcome of this loss of individuality was that the State became an ever more trusted, benevolent force. Without even realizing it, parents have been steadily giving up control of their children to the State over the past fifty years or so. In many ways, this had been a lazy decision that we are only now, since the start of the pandemic, waking up to regret. I know many parents have said how they used to not really pay attention to politics. They didn’t know who was in their local government or on the school board. They were too busy. It was too difficult to absorb all that information when they had other more pressing matters to attend to. No longer.
Parents are beginning to understand there is a battle for the minds of our children. The State, in conjunction with massive corporations and Big Pharma, wants complete control of molding young minds.
To many parents, this is okay. They believe the State is benevolent. They believe what mainstream news outlets are telling them. After all, they argue, if a surgeon is an expert in brain surgery, you would trust that expert to operate. Why wouldn’t the same be true of all the psychological experts who have sprung up, telling us what is best for our children?
Other parents are pushing back against the concept that experts know better than they do when it comes to teaching their children. Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter and transgender studies are some of the ideologies parents are taking issue with.
When my sons were in elementary school in the early 2000s, they attended Woodland Hills Elementary School, in Los Angeles County. Parents moved to this area in order for their children to attend this school. It had the highest test scores and rave reviews. But all was not as rosy as it appeared. The principal, Anna Feig, ruled with an iron fist. Feig was a tiny woman with flaming red hair who loved wearing leopard prints. She claimed to fight like a mama bear for “her” kids, which most often meant fighting against the parents.
Feig’s real goal above all else was to maintain the school’s position as number one in test scores in the district. I’m not against test scores. What I am against is adults forcing agendas on children that promote their own goals above the wellbeing of the children they are supposed to represent.
The responsibility of maintaining the highest test scores in the district put a terrible pressure on the teachers who needed to satisfy the ambitions of the principal. Children who did not do well on standardized tests were discriminated against.
As a result, dissatisfaction grew amongst parents whose children didn’t fit the mold. In 2006, it became so bad, Los Angeles Times writer Bob Sipchen wrote an article about it called When Principal’s a Grizzly, Campus Life Can Be a Bear. The article starts like this:
Nidi Lifshitz tells the story of her unfortunate introduction to the Los Angeles Unified School District like this: She answered her cellphone on her daughter’s first day of school and was greeted by a scream -- “This is the worst-behaved child I’ve ever encountered in my life!”
Only later did the caller identify herself as Woodland Hills Elementary School Principal Anna Feig, Lifshitz says. The kindergartner, Feig told her, had crawled under a table and refused to come out. It seems her teacher, new to the job, had called the principal for help and Feig hauled the child into the office. The little girl spent three of the next four days outside the principal’s office -- once, Lifshitz swears, for refusing to use the correct crayon color.
In later meetings, the mother says, Feig shouted that their child was not welcome at her school unless she started taking Ritalin -- an allegation the principal denies.
The atmosphere at the school became one where certain parents and children felt almost terrorized by the system. Parents were yelled at, one parent told of how Feig slammed the gate in her face—barely missing her as she jumped backwards. Parents took to demonstrating outside the school.
But it was the parents who, if they complained, were accused of “not understanding boundaries” by the school system. I’ve written more about this is in my piece Trouble in Paradise: raising sons as a single mother on the violent streets of American Suburbia, which I will publish at some point.
The system and those who fed off of it looked down their noses at parents as ignorant fools when it came to their children. This attitude has only gotten worse. Now, with parents wanting their children back in school, multiple videos have emerged of teachers mocking parents, saying they “want their babysitters back.”
For all these years, it was the rare parent who stood up and fought against the system. No more. Now, parents are finally learning to fight for our children. Whereas in the past, parents meekly acquiesced to the State, we now rebut their declarations that they know what is best for our children. We have watched the State reduce our children down to statistics. We are tired of being told “but the experts say…”
The experts have put labels on our children at such young ages and this seemed to be okay.
You can go online and see if your child fits any of the CDC’s labels. You are sure to find plenty since, which one of us is without anxiety, or depression, for example? Check out the CDC's list of children's mental disorders. It’s frightening.
Not to mention developmental disabilities, autism, and risk factors like substance use and self-harm. A mammoth industry has been built around these disorders. Thousands upon thousands of experts earn a very good living off of our children’s disorders. That is not to say that children do not suffer from these problems. But has it gotten better since we started obsessively pointing out to children how screwed up, they are? I think not.
And now look at what the experts are telling us we must do. We must adhere to Critical Race Theory, a curriculum that puts the burden of guilt on our children for the color of their skin.
Critical Race Theory is the new fad. At the expense of critical thinking.
I don’t know any parent who wouldn’t agree to the value of teaching their kids about the history of racism in this country. I also don’t know any parent who thinks their child should be made to feel the weight of responsibility for that racism upon their own shoulders. Nor should other children be made to feel as if they are oppressed because their ancestors have been so treated.
This is disturbing to say the least.
Going back to the history of childhood again, we have gone from no childhood, to the attempt at making childhood something innocent and sacred by protecting them from certain types of information until they reached certain ages, to now, taking their childhood away again, by telling them they have lifelong disorders from which they will never recover, only mask with medication, and they are no longer innocent, but they carry the sins of their forefathers on their shoulders.
The backlash against CRT has not been welcomed by the Establishment. Obama criticizes parents who are upset by kids being taught a divisive ideology that creates two classes: that of the oppressor (Whites) and the oppressed (Blacks.)
If you dare to disagree with Obama you are a racist—which you are anyway if you are white. “Right-wing media” like Fox News is “stoking the fear and resentment of a white population that is witnessing a changing America.”
Changing into what?
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is defined as a school of thought meant to emphasize the effects of race on one's social standing. It arose as a challenge to the idea that in the two decades since the Civil Rights Movement and associated legislation, racial inequality had been solved and affirmative action was no longer necessary. It puts all the emphasis on race—who you are on the outside instead of who you are on the inside.
There is a huge backlash against this and it isn’t just parents. John McWhorter, a black linguistics professor at Columbia University, says that parents who truly believe themselves to be anti-racist need to yank their kids out of schools that implement critical race theory into their curriculums.
McWorter praised a teacher who quit in protest over CRT in a tweet:
"All hail Dana Stangel-Plowe, who has resigned from the Dwight-Englewood school, which teaches students 'antiracism' that sees life as nothing but abuse of power, and teaches that cringing, hostile group identity against oppression is the essence of a self. Truly antiracist parents, in the name of love of their kids, should pull them from the Dwight-Englewood school as of next fall. This is the only thing that will arrest these misguided Elect parishioners from their quest to forge a new reality for us all."
In school meetings across the country, teachers, parents and students are speaking out.
Xi Van Fleet - who fled China at the age of 26 before settling in the United States -made headlines after she slammed CRT at a Loudoun County School Board meeting on Wednesday, saying it had striking similarities to theories pushed by communists in her native country.
'CRT trains children to be social justice warriors and to loathe their country and their history... It is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,' she declared during her speech at the meeting.
Vanetsyan, who teaches in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, also spoke at meeting in Loudoun County.
'Parents, the longer that you wait and don't have your child's schools accountable, gives these guys more time to dictate what's best for your child's physical, mental, and emotional health,' Vanetsyan declared.
Regardless of what Obama says as if he is the be-all and end-all on racism, (ironic since he as a Black man was elected twice as president even though Blacks make up only about 13% of the nation, which must have meant a whole lot of whites voted for him), parents have the right to object to their children being indoctrinated with Marxist ideology.
Forget Critical Race Theory! Let’s teach critical thinking.
Let’s stop the hypocrisy. While our schools indoctrinate our children with CRT, BLM, the imminent end of the world due to climate change and dirty energy, and the joys of Transsexuality, they hide the real problems that would expose the corruption of government in collusion with massive corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon and the Bill Gates empire.
In 1814, legislation was introduced in England to make stealing children an offense punishable by the courts. We have progressed so far beyond that, right. Wrong. How about child labor? It must be better now than it was in the 1800s. Wrong again.
In our world right now, 27% of trafficking victims are children. Many of those children are brought across our borders, as we have seen an escalation since Biden’s disastrous border policies—or shall we say—nonpolicies were implemented. Children are four times more likely to be trafficked for labor than for sex. 66% of child trafficking victims are girls. There are an estimated 168 million child laborers around the world.
Small family-owned businesses have been eaten up by mega-corporations that use child labor. Within the United States, this is a 32 billion dollar a year industry, and rising.
How about child labor in relation to “green energy?”
This video exposes the complexities of green energy, showing the hell from which, our cell phones come. More than half of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Congo, and it is children who do the mining.
Maybe children should discuss this in class. How for every “good” that our government claims, there is also “evil.” At what point do we make compromises? Are our cell phones worth the lives of these children? As long as we use our cell phones do we have the right to talk about “clean energy?” Children should listen to AOC and other’s statements about the merits of clean energy, as they stand there holding their cell phones.
Yes, of course, we need solutions. But if we only feed children propaganda from one side, for example, demonizing all the fossil fuel companies while elevating “clean energy” to some kind of saintly status, we are infecting our children’s minds with lies instead of nurturing their natural, free-thinking inquisitiveness.
Why not teach children the truth about drug companies?
How we got to the point of allowing Big Pharma to control our lives. How those who make money off of our illnesses don't really want to cure us but rather to control us. How it is in their best interests to perpetuate the problems, or they will lose their consumer base. Students should learn about the history of drug use and talk about their own experiences because this is a huge issue amongst young people.
If we want to teach our children about inequities and injustice, why not have them talk about the real truth—that all humans do this to one another regardless of skin color.
Have a woman who has lived under Sharia law come and talk to the class about what it’s really like for women in every single Arab nation. I lived for three years in Luxor, Egypt and I never saw a single white man in charge of anything. Yet, as a woman, I have not lived in a more oppressive place. This idea of White oppression is so small-minded, so obviously a con used to weaken our connection to one another. It does absolutely nothing to create unity nor does it make children feel better about themselves, except at the expense of others. That's what bullies do: put someone else down so you can elevate yourself.
Maybe talk about the pros and cons of capitalism and socialism. Look at the real history of both.
What does it mean to live in a democracy? Maybe it isn’t perfect, but it is the best we’ve got. Read the real-life stories of those who lived under communism. Talk about our bad wars, like the Vietnam War. Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction. Yet, he is now treated like a grandfatherly figure. Why is that?
Why do we have such a strong alliance with Israel? Maybe Israel isn’t perfect, but what would happen in the Middle East if it wasn’t there? I mean really, think about it.
Talk about racism and its history. Is it the same now in the United States, or is it better? It is most certainly better.
Are Whites oppressors due to the color of their skin? What make one person or group of persons oppress another? Read or tell stories of what African tribes have done and continue to do to one another. Talk about the Boko Haram massacres in Nigeria. Talk about the Rwandan genocide that took place between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. Within one hundred days, between 500,000 and 800,000 mainly Tutsi minority were slaughtered. Estimates of the total death count are at 1,100,000.
Why did one group kill another? Was it because they were White? Obviously not. Both tribes had the same skin color. They found other reasons to hate one another. We are flawed humans. If you are Christians, you would say “We all fall short of the glory of God.” For reasons that perhaps it is too difficult for us to face, one group always wants to lord it over another. Once the oppressed overcomes the oppressor, they assume power and do the same. Can we ever eradicate this trait from humanity?
Talk about what happened in Yugoslavia after Tito died and how the country broke apart.
Old wounds resurfaced, based on religion, just as we’ve seen happen between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. People who had been living in peace next to one another suddenly became enemies.
Talk about freedom of religion and how that is one of the most important rights of Americans, how so many came here to escape religious persecution.
Talk about imperialism and how one nation invaded another. The British Empire. The good and bad they brought, because there is both. The United States involvement in Central and South America and how we brought the drug and gang plagues upon ourselves.
Then, talk about what is going on in the United States right now. How does our present situation compare to past atrocities or those currently committed in other countries?
Any honest evaluation will reach the conclusion that we can all be thankful to be American, no matter the flaws. We can be proud. We can be patriotic. But even to say you are a “Patriot” now is synonymous with being a racist. Recently, a NYT editorial board member, Mara Gay, described her dismay at seeing in some cases, just dozens of American flags, which, you know, is also just disturbing, because essentially the message was clear, it was:
“‘This is my country.’ ‘This is not your country.’ ‘I own this.’ That is the real concern,” Gay added. “Because, you know, the Trump voters who are not going to get onboard with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them, long-term.
How concerning is it knowing that mainstream media is intent on demonizing an entire group of people like this.
Which brings one to Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
Talk about the brilliance of both names and the history of Antifa, which would be shocking for most. Andy Ngo’s informative book, Unmasked, gives an excellent account. Talk about BLM and how it became only about certain Blacks, those killed by Whites and in particular White police officers. Talk about black-on-black crime and white on white crime. Talk about the kids’ own experiences with police. How could police do better in their own communities? What would happen if there were no police? Why do we need police in the first place? How are groups like BLM used to create division? How do you think they have created unity?
Most often, ideas start in a good place. How do good ideas become corrupted? People gain power. Look at the leaders of BLM, how they lined their own pockets while black neighborhoods were destroyed by riots. BLM raised over $90 million yet the ten BLM chapters have complained that “To the best of our knowledge, most chapters have received little to no financial support from BLM since the launch in 2013.”
Listen to the parents of those killed who had harsh words for BLM, saying they did not use the millions they raised to help their neighborhoods. Breonna Taylor's mother Tamika Palmer called out Black Lives Matter Louisville and using the word 'fraud' to describe the organization in a Facebook post last April. Samaria Rice, the mother of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot dead by Cleveland police as he played with a toy gun, accused BLM founders like Patrice Cullors of 'benefiting off the blood of our loved ones, and they won't even talk to us.'
How has this all helped our country? Not much.
Yet, during the pandemic, when people were locked down and fearful, BLM and Antifa came out as saviors of the oppressed. Almost all my friends on social media immediately made their profiles black in solidarity. In solidarity with what? From one day to the next, most people had not ever had a thought in their heads about these groups. It was just the latest fad, and everyone was doing it. I didn’t, and when I refused to say Black Lives Matter as if I lived in some communist totalitarian state where I had to repeat propaganda or else, I was labeled as racist. Random people sitting in restaurants were attacked and told they had to say these words. Even if people thought it was wrong, they were now fearful to speak out.
Now, everyone is silent as if those days never happened. But they did happen. BLM and Antifa are still around. BLM is moving into schools with its own curriculum. Should this be allowed?
Talk about the assault on the capital on January 6 and how Biden Claims the January 6 Capitol Riot Was the ‘Worst Attack on Our Democracy Since the Civil War.’
Okay. Why would he say that? Have someone whose family member died during 9/11 video chat with students about how Biden’s statement makes them feel. Have two teams debate this issue. See what the students discover on their own.
The end result of all of this should be that children learn to think for themselves. They should be forewarned never to jump on a bandwagon, no matter how great it may seem. This is called critical thinking.
Take a moment to consider that no government really wants its schools to teach critical thinking skills. Especially not this government. They have an agenda of a “new world order.” The lockdowns, the wearing of masks, the perhaps soon-to-be vaccine mandates all could well be simply a dress rehearsal for more draconian measures to come. A fourth wave is coming. A new pandemic.
Climate change will be the next crisis.
Right now, we are being given a reprieve. We are so thankful. A return to some semblance of normal.
But really, we have no reason to suppose there will ever be a return to “normal.” They have statistics and experts to interpret everything for us. Free information is an illusion that can at any moment be shut down.
Those of us who wish to do so can still complain against the government online. Yes, some are censored, but that is a small portion of us all. There are media outlets that have sprung up. Pundits such as Ben Shapiro, news stations such as Newsmax, who can give their viewers the news they seek. You can’t say the right hasn’t benefited from the pandemic as well. The pundits who speak to conservatives have become powerful voices in their own right. Sponsors have taken notice. We saw that in a hot mic moment where Ben Shapiro tells staff to ‘cut’ pansexuality comments from video, or ‘I’ll get boycotted.’
Children should learn about this, too. They shouldn’t just hear one side. They should hear the reality of what happens when a person starts to become successful, the hard choices and ways they justify compromises.
If we are aware of this reality, we will not close ourselves off from listening to varying perspectives.
If you send you children to a Christian school, it’s because you want them to be taught those Christian values that are important to you. Just as a Muslim would want the same. But it’s also important not to gloss over the truths about what people have done in the name of Christianity or Islam down through history. Wouldn’t it be great if Islamic and Christian schools became sister schools and held debates and had events together.
This is critical thinking, not Critical Race Theory. It is being courageous enough to look at all sides of the argument and seek the truth—or at least as close to it as you can come.
Is there then hope, if we do this? First, we would have to do it. It’s great to see parents rising up, but we have a lot of time to make up for when we were complacent.
We must face the reality that we could be living on borrowed time.
It isn’t pleasant to know that at any moment, these massive corporations can shut us all down. They can at the drop of a hat silence every single dissenting voice. They can make it so Patriots, and thus white supremacists, are unable to go to a restaurant, attend a football game, even go to a market to buy food. They can take your children away from you because you are endangering society and your children by teaching them ideas contrary to the good of the State. Or by refusing to vaccinate them.
We the people still do have the power to vote change at a local level. We still have the power to take our children out of schools and start our own neighborhood learning centers, modeling critical thinking. This is how schools should always have been. They should never have morphed into massive, fenced institutions with thousands of children. This is unnatural. Children should be in small groups with individualized attention. They should be around grandparents and other adults, not forced to form cliques that become essentially gangs like on the prison yard.
Meanwhile, let small children be children. Let them be innocent.
Don’t expose them to ideas about gender that they are not ready to think about. Let those things develop naturally. I would be equally offended if schools took it upon themselves to indoctrinate my daughter that her role in life was to get married, get pregnant and be a good wife. This isn’t what school is about.
Maybe one day far in the future, just like in some science fiction stories, genders will be a thing of the past. Maybe, one day, the thought of a woman physically bearing a child will seem barbaric. Maybe the idea of actual sex will seem barbaric. Babies will be grown in dishes in a laboratory and sex will only be performed online. Who can say? We only need to look to the past, when many things that are now accepted as normal would have been thought of as witchcraft.
It’s hilarious to me now but I wanted to be a clown when I was a teenager. I was very serious about it. 100 percent sure this was my calling. I made a clown outfit, practiced my juggling, even made my best friend wear a clown outfit and we would walk down the grocery store to buy candy and books, dressed like that. At age sixteen, I started filling in the application to Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Clown College, at which point I finally lost interest and moved on to something else.
No child has the personal awareness to decide that they want to, for example, change from a girl into a boy, any more than they can change into a horse or a bird.
If my child declares they are a bird and insists on jumping out of a fifteen-story window, I am not going to agree and say, “fly free little bird” opening the window and helping her to climb onto the sill so she can exercise her rights and jump out—all for the sake of affirming her fragile mental health.
No. I am going to lock the windows, even if she screams bloody murder. I am going to protect her from ideas that she does not yet understand.
I am going to do my best to protect the wonderment of childhood for as long as possible, allowing her to dream, while maintaining the boundaries of safety.
All else is not only an absurdity but it is child abuse. When we add the additional weight onto the shoulders of a child that they suffer from myriad mental illnesses and are either an oppressor or they are the oppressed, this is beyond child abuse. This is what really damages our children, not “White Supremacy.”
The State has a nefarious agenda to manipulate and indoctrinate children, using them as pawns in a game of power.
We need to stand up and say no. It is not the school nor the State’s responsibility to teach perversions of truth in order to frighten and control our children. It is up to schools to teach math, language, history, the basics. Leave the moral teachings to the parents. Most importantly, teach children to ask questions fearlessly, accepting people of all faiths, no matter their race or gender, no matter their outward appearance.
I do love the Dune books by Frank Herbert. Science fiction has such a way of hitting us where it counts.
Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and you find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson. —Leto Atreides II, The Stolen Journals, God Emperor of Dune
Those who rule can always find ways to justify their “new” ideas. They promise to help the little people but what they really want is to parade about as aristocrats and enjoy all the benefits thereof. As obedient consumers, we’ve been programmed to get excited by new ideas, like BLM and Antifa, just like we are excited by a new cereal or the latest hairstyle.
I’m hopeful we are waking up to the realization that more is at stake than merely following the new fad. And I’m hopeful that it isn’t too late to turn the tide.
Thank you for reading. I know I am long-winded! Please comment and share if you so desire.
I just discovered your writing and love what you say and how you say it - it’s so great to read intelligent and thoughtful words about current affairs and offering the reader other points of view from other sources that connect the subject. Thank you so much!
You say it well and speak from the heart. It's okay to write at length (nobody is gave Tolstoy or Dickens grief for that!) Some of us don't think in small sound bytes and condense material to be phone friendly. I've just discovered your writing and am SO glad I did--speaks truth to me (I've been labeled too for speaking frankly). Thank you! Looking forward to more!