Do You Miss America?

I miss the time when Hollywood produced movies that instilled pride in who we are.

I miss the time when citizenship meant something more than immunity from deportation, when the study of Columbus, Magellan, and Ponce De Leon inspired a sense of adventure, not a sense of shame.

I miss the time when the First Amendment was sacred and colleges were bastions of free speech.

I really miss Teddy Roosevelt’s America, a nation that heeded his admonition that a nation made of people who refused to assimilate was not a nation at all but simply a “ polyglot boarding house.” And I miss Ronald Reagan’s America when we had an uplifting rebirth of pride and self-confidence.

However, the political establishment’s depravity and corruption are resilient, and the historical roots and pillars of American greatness remain malnourished in our schools and colleges.

advertisement Although Obama is gone from the White House, his operatives still hold onto the reins of power and Trump’s team seems uninterested in dislodging them.

The president has some enormous challenges ahead of him, not the least of which is inspiring a rediscovery of the America our founding fathers fought so hard to establish. How will we ever recover America if we stop looking for it?

In other words, we miss the America that existed before conservatives ceded control of entertainment, politics, religion and community to liberals. Liberalism is the second most destructive force in Western Civilization. The most destructive force is cowardly conservatives.
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph......", etc.

Nothing personal, but I've had quite enough of that particular [and seemingly ubiquitous] mantra, and I'll explain why:

It's nothing more than the 'blame the victim' schtick that is popular with abusers. It's the victim's fault for not standing up, for not defending himself. It's not the perpetrator's fault, it's the enabling victim's fault for tolerating the abuser. If the victim had drawn a firm line in the sand, none of this would have happened, he could have prevented it... blah blah blah. And the people are left demoralized, blaming themselves for evil that straight out of the gate, chose to prey upon others.

As someone's tagline around here states, "Evil doesn't have a day job."

Hindsight is always 20/20 because people forget why the slope is slippery by nature. Evil slithers in because it is, by nature, duplicitous and subtle. It has its legitimate cover, its plausible deniability cards ready to play. Accuse a manupulator of manipulating, and he can show you not only why he "isn't" manipulating, but that he is being falsely accused of malevolent motives. Easy, because he lies by nature.

When he find himself exposed like that, he merely reassesses and adjusts his tactics, but he never sleeps. Plus he has plenty of true enablers and useful idiots who are the children-by-choice, content in their ignorance, shocked when every 'good' thing they support ends up destroying the world.

Reasonable people, by virtue of their being reasonable, peaceful, and just by nature, do not want to draw false conclusions, and thus give the benefit of the doubt. Predators know this, and exploit it, because they are evil.

By the time it is obvious that evil people have perpetrated evil, the roots are deep. The third-world take-over, for example.

Victims are left wondering what they did wrong, and there is no shortage of folks ready to read off a long list of the victims' failings.

The Achilles' heel of the righteous - that they are sincere, loving, and open-hearted to a fault, despising hasty judgment calls - is actually their identifying characteristic. If they had given evil a beatdown at the beginning (evil that intentionally masquerades as goodness and light), then they wouldn't be of any different character than the enemy. That's why the cycle keeps repeating over the course of human history. The righteous desire the rule of law, to give every man a fair hearing, even or especially the one who looks guilty on first glance.

A primary weakness of the nation of Israel was that they were reluctant to kill the enemies God had instucted them to kill. An evil people, on the other hand, would have jumped at the chance to have a license to kill. Balaam taught Balak how to curse the people... show them the women. The men of Israel loved the women. The weakness was their wanting to be intimate with women. Easy for an enemy to exploit. Foreign women meant that foreign gods could slip right in.

A lack of faith is in not trusting God's instructions, which are based on His eyesight, the eyes that see right through outward fake appearances. So a victim can be blamed for a lack of faith, but anyone pointing fingers is tolerating demons somewhere for the sake of peace, say at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

So are people foolish to allow evil to slither in, to not see it coming? Well yes, but why it happens is why it will always happen, as long as the righteous are righteous, and the wicked are wicked. But the fault still sits squarely on the plotters. Just because sheep are clueless doesn't give the wolf a pass. In fact, it makes him all the more guilty, because he willingly and knowingly takes advantage of the good nature of the sheep.

If the wolf knew what he were doing, he wouldn't do that. Same for the blame the victim crowd.

</rant>

How to upend the vicious cycle is to supersede it and make the entire operating system obsolete. Here we have a man named Trump (Trump!) tearing down the Establishment, because it's time. Evil overplayed its hand.

God has been paying close attention all along, and He is sick of it. I can see that because a man named Trump doesn't just end up as President of the United States, out of nowhere no less.

Wow. That is pretty depressing.

The thing that I need to remind my kids of all of the time is that news cycles must be filled. And their budget to fill it does not change with the news they can cover.

So, they focus on the easy stuff. And in order to generate a reaction from people, they need to make is reactionable.

TV shows such as the Apprentice made working in management a nightmare. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in a simple planning meeting only to have the front line staff assuming we were in their conspiring about who to get rid of next.

The left and right are so extreme, that each side thinks the other side is bat-shit crazy. I live in MA. To the people with whom normal conversation and respectable arguments is possible—it usually results in a minimal amount of disagreement.

So, you can go ahead and “miss the USA.”

But when you think all is lost, consider these things: The young men and women who ran up the stairs in the WTC represented the best of the USA.

The people who volunteered to help out during the Hurricanes represent the best in America.

The vast majority of fans who want politics OUT of Entertainment and Sports represent the best of the USA.

The people helping others get out of the line of fire in Vegas represent the spirit of helping and protecting.

The people who stop for someone broken down on the side of the road represent the best of America.

The fear mongers, war mongers, and depressing bastards that populate the TV and who troll the message boards are NOT the best of the USA. It is easy to fall prey to them. It is worth the extra effort to look past them, and see the good.

A co worker was telling me about a friend of hers that has cancer. This womans friends got together and created an “app” where they could all interact and make sure that they could focus their help where it would matter. Some people mow the lawn. Others come over and clean the house. Not one single person tries to do EVERYTHING. But many people do a little. And they do it efficiently—based on the technology at hand. That is amazing. THAT is the best of America.

Two days ago there was a man with outstanding warrants for significant crimes apprehended in a local hospital. He was visiting his “baby momma.” The entire part of the hospital was surrounded with about 30 police and FBI. When this “went down” there was a lot of shouting, a lot of running, and a lot of people looking very dangerous.

During this time the nurses on the floor did something I think is staggering. Each Nurse took a room where there was a mom and an infant. The nurse either went into the room and barricaded the door. Or, they stood in the door so that anyone had to go through them to get to the patients.

They knew they was not a drill. They did not know whether this guy was armed. They did know that he was a very, very bad man.

And they stood there. Willing to take a bullet to save an infant.

And you think the USA is not here anymore? You are not looking around.

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