Posted on 12/01/2008 5:22:24 AM PST by Jeff Head
I have been thinking back on my life and the changes I have seen in my 52+ years on this earth. Many, many technological changes have changed and enriched all of our lives, among other things.
But I was especially struck by the social changes. Many for the better, but some decidedly for the worst.
Clearly, in today's world, as opposed to the 1950s and 1960s when I was young, our nation has come to grips with itself and opened the door for opportunity to all people, regardless of race, or creed, or gender. Despite the fact that there are some people who still harbor, and probably always will, bigotry and hate in their hearts, the United States as a whole has opened the door for all people, whomever they be and wherever they come from, who legally reside here, to make the best of themselves and achieve good things for themselves and their families.
But we have also seen the pendulum swing too far in this regard. Others, who have behavioral and life style choices that are neither healthy for themselves or for society as a whole, or who are not here legally, want to push for and receive, in essence, civil right status so that they are free to practice and receive public aid for these choices that have nothing to do with race, creed, or their actual gender.
Overall, that discussion is left for another day, but let it be clearly understood, that this "entitlement" and "something for nothing" and "you must accept me regardless of my choice," attitude is neither healthy nor beneficial for society as a whole. On one hand including everyone in their ability to achieve success in life regardless of race, creed, or gender, benefits society as individuals sincerely try and obtain that success according to the principles of liberty, hard work, and the free market we enjoy in this nation...on the other hand, people who make bad life style and behavioral choices wanting to be caught up in and included in the same, or those demanding the same without working for it or using the principles of liberty, responsibility, and the free market to obtain it can be disastrous and destructive to society.
We see the seeds of both all around us.
Also make no mistake, that enablers, particularly politicians and so-called journalists and educators, who promote such trends, do so for their own personal power, gain, and benefit, and are not doing so out of any commitment to, or desire to see the general welfare of our nation and society, or of those individuals, bettered.
This leads me to the real point of this article, a discussion of what I term to be the Old School," and how and why it has been reviled and is fading in this nation, along with how and why it became the way of doing things...and what may lead to its re-establishment of it in our free society.
The Old School is typically associated with older men, who are felt to be far too severe, far too demanding, demeaning to others, and too chauvinistic in their outlook and their approach to life and life's issues.
Make no mistake, I am not speaking of the "Good Old Boy Network," which is much more akin to the enablers of what ills society today. I am speaking of the older, traditional way of doing things, and particularly of how men fit into that equation and why.
Such men are viewed in today's world as hopelessly out of touch with our modern "ethics" and ways of thinking. They are viewed as far too authoritative, and something to be ignored at best, or punished by society for their ways, using in the full force of law at worst.
Over my 52 years of life I have known many such individuals...and perhaps have been considered at times (particularly by my children when they were teenagers) to be one myself.
So be it.
I have thought long and hard about this.
I have thought about such men as "Dallas" (this was his nickname), an older gentleman who lived in a very small town near where I was raised near the Red River in Texas. Dallas was born in the 1880s. While he grew up as a young child, he and his family still feared and experienced occasional Indian raids from marauders along the Red River and its tributaries. He was raised by people who lived through major attacks, who witnessed men, woman, and children, being dismembered and violated in every imaginable way. Dallas was direct in his thought and in his action, even into his eighties and nineties when I knew him. In the 1970s there were those who joked about Dallas...behind his back.
I think of another individual with whom I am well acquainted. We will call him "The Rancher" who lived in North Texas. To this day the Rancher is thought of as too severe and opinionated. He is direct to the point of being in your face when you cross him. The Rancher never treated his wife or kids with what today's generation would consider great compassion or tender feeling. Some felt he was very demeaning to his wife...that he talked down to her...yet she was true to him and loved him until the day that she died.
I think about one of my Uncles who was considered very similarly to the Rancher, who served in World War II and was not what some called "tender", who avoided emotion and spoke directly to his wife and children...and whose wife tenderly cared for him to his dying day.
Of my father, a World War II vet of the Pacific, God rest his soul. Who also was very direct, raised from colonial day seed stock in Alabama who then moved to Texas just before the war to attend college. My Dad was direct, he was demanding, he wore the "pants" in the family and everyone knew it.
I could go on.
I will admit as a teenager that I viewed my own Dad from time to time as too harsh and demanding. He was the king of the nest, king of his home. You did not argue with or cross my Dad. I cannot tell you how many times he would say to me, "Son, I don't want any argument from you, I want you to do what I say and act like your life depended on it."
I can remember asking myself as a young man, "What are you talking about? My life doesn't depend on this stupid chore you want me to do!"
But I did not argue or voice it because I know he would treat it that way, and would deal severely with any deviation or rebellion as if though it did.
Then I grew up.
Men like Dallas lived in a time when their very life did depend on doing what they were told. In the mid to late 1800s in parts of Texas, the consequences of not doing what severe men, who acted in their way out of love for their families and friends in directing them, were aptly displayed in butchered and violated, and dismembered corpses.
Men like my father and "the Rancher" were raised by such men, who in their own lifetimes had seen such things...and passed it along to the rising generation. Men who took seriously, more seriously than emotion or the desire or need to be "liked", their duty to teach, raise, and protect their own.
Now, it has been well over a hundred years since we have experienced any large scale warfare associated with such butchery in this country...though we hear of criminal acts doing the same types of things all the time in large cities and other areas where the numbers actually exceed in total what produced the "Old School" over a hundred years ago and before. It's just that most of us do not experience ourselves or know of those who have.
The "Old School" went through a revitalization of sorts in the 1940s and 1950s because of the millions of men who experienced the same types of things in World War II and saw the results of such atrocities carried out in other lands where they fought and defeated ideologies that perpetrated such behavior.
My Dad, my Uncle, and the Rancher were some of those men. There were millions and millions of others. They were not only raised by parents with the particular involvement of grand-parents who experienced it in this nation, they then witnessed it in warfare away from these shores.
Now we live in today's world.
Today uncompromising demands of fundamental principle are mistaken for demeaning. Straight, uncompromising talk about such things is mistaken for being "mean"...or at least labeled as such by many on our "post-modern" (whatever that is supposed to mean) society.
But my Dad not only was a man of the "Old School" himself, he warned his children, all four of his sons, about what our primary responsibilities were, the providing for and protection of our families and liberty, and that those responsibilities should never be influenced by emotion, or superficial issues. He was strict, he was straight, and he was demanding, and he also had great faith in God and Jesus Christ and was equally committed to those principles of charitable giving and work. As a result I came to know that he was not mean or demeaning in the least. He simply taught directly, through word and deed, that our primary responsibilities should be guided by unyielding, fundamental principle and by hard cold logic attendant to them.
I thank him for that knowledge in this time when principle is denied and ignored...or worse, trampled on and counted for naught, and when emotions rage in the hearts of men.
Please do not misunderstand or misconstrue me here. I do not condone actually demeaning or abusive behavior in the least. But I have come to recognize that some things that have nothing to do with those behaviors are labeled as such in today's world.
Today we face enemies who desperately want to come to these shores and inflict terrible, untold harm and atrocities on all of us. On our wives, children, the aged, and each one of us. These enemies have infiltrated us and are working tirelessly at weakening our resolve, and the underpinnings of our society. Some of them are religious fanatics in nature, others are ideological fanatics...all of them hate our liberty, our traditional life style, and want to destroy it and as many of us as possible in so doing, They buy up all sorts of so-called leaders, even some religious leaders, with money, power, vice, and enticement.
All the while we have politicians who enable them, a media that lessens or hides their intentions and the things they perpetrate, and educators who would teach our very children that it is we ourselves who are to blame.
We had a fore-taste of the results of such attitudes and malaise on September 11th, 2001. We have seen it perpetuated in other countries ever since, most recently in Bombay (Mumbai), India.
Make no mistake...these enemies wish to perpetrate such evil on us. They have been hurt by the current administration who, despite the ravings of the left, has taken the fight to them in their lands, freeing upwards of sixty million of those people in the process, and causing the leaders of these enemies to cower in holes in the ground because war has been waged against them abroad, and excellent intelligence work has rooted out and foiled their attempts here on our shores.
As compassionate a conservative as the Bush administration has been on other issues, they have been tenacious and decidedly "Old School" when it came to taking the fight to the terrorists...and the left and so-called progressive elements in this society have raged in fever pitch the entire time. But we are safer and better as a people because of that old school attitude of not giving in to such emotional and false flag arguments in the face of such evil.
I pray we as a people can continue in such a vein, but the new administration and a majority of people who elected them seem hell bent on "change" in this regard.
Mark it well, such change will lead to more attacks. The enemy will be emboldened by any perceived weakness or retreat, and will take advantage of the lull.
We need the old school, and it may well take a horrible disaster, where millions of Americans become acutely aware of the hate and derangement of the enemy, and the futility of not being crystal clear, uncompromising, and unrelenting in our commitment to face them head on and protect our families, our life, and our liberty with ferocity and with strict determination. May we re-adopt the old school in this regard, somehow, someway short of that...and should we fail, may we as a people re-adopt it immediately upon suffering such a disaster because we let our guard down.
God bless the "Old School" when it comes to these issues. May we recognize and lift up such people when we see them. Thank them for their commitment and commit ourselves to being unflinching as they.
It was their attitudes, put into practice that defeated the abject enemies of German Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, and defeated them so soundly and thoroughly that those ideologies remain a hiss and a by word to this day. Those same commitments defeated the Communism of the Soviet Union...although the "Old School" was rapidly being watered down during that time, with the exception of its revitalization under Ronald Reagan....which revitalization occurred because of the misery that resulted in departing from those principles during the Carter years.
Perhaps, soon, we will see it re-emerge again. I pray that it does.
THE AUDACITY OF TRUTH ABOUT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IN HIS OWN WORDS
FYI...some thoughts on todays conditions.
Bump!!!!!
Outstanding. Thank you for putting it so well.
This is a timely message, even though so many who live in this time won’t comprehend it... yet. But I believe they will return to that understanding, and sooner rather than later... if they wish to live...
Those arrogant, evil “powers that be” who are so flush with self-satisfaction because they believe they are now in control of events will soon discover that it is the events themselves that are going to be in control...
Well said, Jeff. I always appreciate your sharing of your reality-based thoughts and observations, even though that reality is often ominous indeed. We should all remember that other, less-noted statement from Patrick Henry’s famous speech: “As for myself, I would know the worst, and prepare for it...”.
Well-said, Jeff.
Very succinct commentary on the society we find ourselves in. I hope it won’t take another Carteresque disaster to bring back the Old School ways (I call it tough love).
Thanks Jeff.
We are now involved in class warfare in this country. However the two opposing classes are not what most would expect them to be.
The two opposing classes are the working taxpayers and our ruling class.
We are no longer being governed, we are being ruled. And with ACORN we will not hae another free election in my lifetime. Both parties voted funding for this group.
ACORN gets 4.5 points for every mortgage and 100 million from the bailout bill. It wasn’t taken out as reported, they just used it’s other name.
"Hey Dad (or Husband), the car was making this awful noise, so I turned the radio up. By the time I got it home, turning the radio up didn't work anymore."
Good essay, Jeff.
I find myself having more and more of those moments, “looking back, and damn if something isn’t gaining on me!”
( Hattip: Satchel Paige )
You can see it in their naive, ebullient, inexperienced-yet-know-it-all Ivy League trained eyes.
In our dangerous powderkeg of a world, unfortunately they will make miscalculation after miscalculation, in my opinion.
Many people will suffer because of their charlatanism and inability to admit they have much to learn from "The Old School" guys.
Maybe in the aftermath, in the piles of rubbish, wrecked cars and bombed out buildings, and as the radioactivity begins to subside, they will bow their heads in their bunkers, admit they were minor league, and hand the power back to the adults, "The Old School" and there just might be enough of America to both salvage and regain our footing. I pray.
The men you describe. Those truly American men made of grit, soul and spirit. Yep, they don't make 'em like that anymore as they say.
Thanks for posting it, Jeff Head. A hundred million more such men and we’d have a nation again.
“admit they were minor league, and hand the power back to the adults, “The Old School” and there just might be enough of America to both salvage and regain our footing”
What makes you think that there wil be enough of us still around by then, we ain’t getting any younger.
I share your views for the most part, and I don’t look to the future with any degree of optimism. Several of our key guiding institutions have been destroyed, and there is little liklihood of their restoration. Schools and the news media in particular, have completely failed, and the courts are teetering on the same fate.
There are still many families that are holding the line, but their numbers are dwindling. We clearly are in the “falling away” that was prophecied by the first century apostles.
In the mid to late 1800s in parts of Texas, the consequences of not doing what severe men, who acted in their way out of love for their families and friends in directing them, were aptly displayed in butchered and violated, and dismembered corpses.
In light of the sadistcally savage attacks in places like Iraq, Beslan and Mumbai, I do believe we will experience these very things again within our borders. The Islamists have set the template and have the will for atrocities against those who oppose them.
The incoming Administration and their likely pull back from mercilessly hunting these pathological killers down will make it much easier for them to reproduce such attacks both here and abroad.
Men will be once again be forced into being men in their homes and neighborhoods. Those who won't (or can't) may find themselves and their families on the receiving end of a dismembering knife.
Discipline, duty and deference in equal measures, mix well and dose daily; the elixir of society.
Here's the URL for the article on my site:
And very, very well said yourself.
All of us must do our utmost to educate those around us so more and more people are prepared to understand and defend the true principles upon which our liberty and way of life rests.
And a very joyous Christmas wish to you and yours as well.
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