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I readily admit I do not have more than a passing acquaintance with Kipling, though I do admire what I have read.

In this case, I had to look at a few sources to make heads or tails out of what Kipling meant in this poem, and though I gathered the primary message, I had no idea what “The Gods of The Copybook Headings” were so I had to look it up.

But the meaning overall I think I do get: You can wish all you want that something be what you want it to be, but in the end, it IS what it IS. It might be brutal, uncomfortable, cold and hard, but wishing it were something else won’t change it.

And neither will ignoring it.

I don’t watch television, the news, read newspapers or periodicals anymore. I used to be a voracious consumer of them, but back in the late 90’s, I could no longer stomach watching television, reading newspapers like the Boston Globe or publications like Time.

They concentrate bad news, because that is what sells, and they put their liberal spins on it, because they feel they are doing a service to the country because...their statist, socialist, liberal path is the one that will lead us to salvation.

So I have been sampling the Internet for years, and have been using FR as a jumping off point for my news and current events.

Even though we are mostly (but not always) to right of center, and disagree on a huge variety of things, I find that I can usually get a spectrum of widely varying, mostly unvarnished by PC opinions on things from angles I would likely have never seen on my own.

And I get people who are complete jerks (Like the guy in this thread who stated I must be “off my medications”) because FR is covered from front to back with the insanity of men saying they are women, women marrying women and men marrying men, white people saying they are black, crime being committed by people and few people have the courage to say what they are seeing, and instead say what someone WANTS them to say, or not say. Words have no meaning, “homosexual” becomes “gay”, “gay” becomes “gay pride” and then simply “pride”, and rainbows stop being a beautiful symbol of the magic of nature, and becomes a hideous symbol of people engaging in perverted sexual acts.

The military won’t allow religion to be shown or mentioned, but is sending uniformed personnel to homosexual parades.

A Mexican flag is considered free speech, and the US flag is hate speech.

It breaks my heart. I never thought that it would be this way in my lifetime. I love my country, and both my father and I served under the American flag, and my father was buried under it.

Tradition and ritual mean something to me. To see a US Navy ship named for Gabby Giffords nauseates me. It isn’t particularly that I think she is bad, evil or whatever (though I admittedly take issue with her willing participation as an anti-Constitutional prop) but the sickening political process that resulted in a Naval ship being named after her appalls me. I view it as a slap in the face of any person who has ever served, and not just in the Navy, either. Don’t get me started with the US Navy, and the PC, emasculated organization it has become, tied with the Air Force, and followed closely by the US Army. I hold out hope for the USMC, but we know how these things go.

But not only do I not recognize my country any more, I don’t recognize as American many people who are being presented as Americans, and it has zero to do with the color of their skin, their gender, or their origins, but has everything to do with what I view as “American” characteristics. And it begins at the top with this person, this America-hating slimeball, a worshiper of Saul Alinsky, pal of Bill Ayers, confidant of “Reverend” Wright who holds the reins of power in this country.

I cannot believe he found a way into the Oval Office once, never mind twice. And the party he leads...there is not a single one of them, not one, who I would trust in any matter no matter how trivial. When Zell Miller turned out the lights on rational members of the Democratic Party as he exited office in 2005, the last patriotic Democrat left a vacuum, now fully filled by the leftist radicals of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.

I could go on, but you get the idea. And I see all this, and wonder what is going on under the surface that we don’t see, what inexorable forces, like tectonic plates grinding over each other, are at work forming our future, and how far away that future is. People I know say “X can never happen here”, where X is oppression, dictatorship, genocide, economic collapse, or war. But being a student of history, if there is one thing I have taken to heart, is that nothing is out of the question, nothing is out of bounds.

The prosperous Poles in 1939 who found themselves barefoot, with no belongings trudging on icy roads to nowhere were pretty comfortable and detatched before it all went south. In their worst dreams, most of them didn’t see it coming.

So when I see what is going on, yes. I am concerned. Very concerned. If there is any single thing at all that is reliably reproducible in historic events, it is that they are not only cyclical, but get larger in magnitude with time.

I am a subscriber to the “frog in the boiling water” paradigm. If people just 30 years ago could be uprooted in time and taken here, they would obviously find some things today that are wonderful (anyone who ever bought the unreliable, unattractive, buckets of rust we called cars in the seventies can’t help but marvel at the difference with the cars of today) but they would, I believe, be far more shocked and appalled at where society is today.

So, yes. I am very, very, concerned. And I think we have put ourselves, as a people and a country, in a very unfavorable position to deal with these things as they come at us.