Category Archives: Family

Culture, Education, Family

Do You Believe in Magic?

Leave a comment

It’s all a matter of belief. We strive for truth, or, at least, we tell ourselves that truth is our highest aspiration. But truth among people is the subject of much argument, if not battle. Our beliefs tell our internal selves what is “true” and what is “false.” Likewise, we have internal judgments about who is trustworthy and who is not. Over thousands of years we have created deep belief structures that “work,” in a sense, to organize societies and to increase, however fitfully, general prosperity and defensive strength. Religion is often a significant basis for progress, but has just as often been a limiter, even to this day.

Prudence suggests that the Judeo-Christian ethical platform has been, ultimately, the most successful of historic belief structures, yet it is assaulted daily as “unscientific” since it accepts “truths” that cannot be proven or tested in a laboratory. When are unshakable beliefs imparted? How is it that some kids prefer gang membership while others become Eagle Scouts? Do we think it happens from a conversation with a 5-year old? From Sesame Street? Pre-school?

Speak to a pre-school teacher and she can describe the wide range of attitudes among 3-year olds, some quite destructive. Where did they form those personalities? Well, at home, obviously, but when? At age two and a half? Age two… or earlier? Somehow very young kids are “empatterned” such that anti-social actions, even pathological actions, are the automatic reactions to stimuli. When are those patterns implanted?

Our suspicion is that the process commences in the womb. Ask an expectant mother about the reactions of her pre-born baby and she can describe how her moods and feelings coincide with movements. When she is stressed and when she is calm and happy there are noticeable differences in the baby’s kicks and turns. Do we think the baby is completely inured to its environment until the moment of birth?

Imagine a baby in the last couple of months of gestation in a home where revenge is the common reaction of the parents – and others – to every slight or act of disrespect. Every source of irritation between husband and wife yields a reaction that the offended party must “get even” with, or get the better of, the offending party. The baby, innocently, will mature with a comfortable reaction toward opposition or disrespect that virtually requires that he or she obtain revenge against the offender. It is what he or she “believes.”

What a different path of human interaction that child will be on; what a different interpretation of what love and hate may be. Think about the “differently socialized” children you’ve known. By the time they enter kindergarten such children are already “marked” for special handling. By the time they are teenagers, some of these revenge-comfortable kids are gang members, either organized or in a company of local “bullies.”

Now, place these boys in a position to enthrall girls who grew up without rational father figures, never knowing how a man should treat a woman, respect her and care for her, along with their children. Such an, in effect, fatherless girl would perceive the feral sexual attentions of just as possibly fatherless boys, as true compassion. Now there are two ill-socialized children having their own children, who gestate and begin post-natal life amidst discord, resentment, poverty and, almost inevitably, vengefulness.

Is urban destruction like Ferguson, Missouri or Baltimore, Maryland at all surprising amidst populations that our own social policies have generated in far less than ideal pre-natal and post-natal family conditions? By foregoing social mores related to marriage and family and child-rearing, have we commenced a process of social disintegration? Most likely. Given this, where do we expect our dishonest politics to lead us?

Because individual power and status is the most vital of purposes for elected “representatives,” the misfortunes and dysfunctions of populations have become sources of political, personal, power. We could not have tolerated, and funded beyond reason, via hundreds of overlapping social-service agencies, social dysfunction for literal decades, unless those expenses served the purposes of Congress and others made powerful thereby. It is not possible to consider our history since the 1960’s and conclude that the trillions of dollars expended on basically failed welfare theories, resulted in failure and explosive government expansion, accidentally!

We are destroying the most successful form of social organization the world has seen, insofar as its basis is individual opportunity, freedom and growth without tyranny. Worse, we have brought ourselves to a political point where we are arguing and fighting about how FAST the Judeo-Christian heritage may be dissolved.

We are maintaining the propagation of new citizens who will not have the opportunity to grow in personal character and integrity. They will not enjoy two-parent, loving nuclear families, nor the reinforcing institutions of church and morality-based education.

We are racing not to the Brave New World, but the Craven.

Family

All we need is Pot

Leave a comment

Brain Food
Brain Food
One of the least productive efforts a thinking society could engender is the legalization of marijuana. Now that we have failed, miserably, to control the entry of drugs into the United States – not because we can’t control them, but because we have not the collective will to do so – pot-heads are using that failure as a reason to legalize.
Then there is the old saw, “Alcohol is even worse, so give us our dope.”
Liberals and other statists can’t wait to, quote, “regulate it,” unquote, and tax it… ohhh, my gawwd… tax revenue. Ohhhh. Wow.
Dopers and those who will profit from their pot habits, point to traffic accidents tied to booze and say that those statistics “prove” that pot is less harmful, so let’s party, man. To them it’s also proof that we long-ago relinquished our societal right to limit anything people want to do for pleasure. Besides, since those who most want to restrict pot don’t use it themselves they have no right to limit those who do.
Clearly if your skin is not brown you have no right to pass judgment on a brown-skinned law-breaker; if you’ve never raped a girl you can’t understand or condemn a rapist; if you didn’t grow up poor you can’t criticize rioters.
So I can’t criticize pot users, but a few facts are still pertinent. I was going to say timely, but the irony would be lost… eventually.
Like any psychoactive substance, marijuana messes up mental function. It has its own set of effects, but its common effects are well-known and the subject of much humor. Today it’s politically incorrect to joke about alcohol problems and drunkenness. Marijuana’s effects, on the other hand, are still funny, still mocked, still mimicked… and we laugh.
As marijuana gains popular legitimacy through various forms of disingenuous ballot initiatives (you know “medical marijuana” is a giant lie; if it were “medical” it’d be sold at CVS) prompted by looming profits and the intense desire of pot-heads to gain permission as it were to do something “wrong” and slightly stupid, politicians – social leaders, they – are finding ways to gain votes by helping to destroy the social fabric. The fact that we appear to have “lost” the war on drugs is proof only that we have never truly fought it, not that widespread drug use is “inevitable.”
Despite what you may have heard, pot use does often lead to use of stronger drugs. Pot that will soon be “recreational,” or, better, “de-creational” is 10 times stronger than what the great leaders of the ‘60’s messed around with. And the euphoria of toking comes from interaction with the same pleasure receptors as do cocaine and opioids, which we still, sort-of, think are bad.
That child development is severely messed up by pot use – as is their future success and mental balance – should lead us to make it harder to get the stuff. Not so according to great pot-conflicted, or pot-afflicted, political “leaders.”
Pot, I believe, has a lot to do, pre-natally, with the rapid increase in ADHD and autism-spectrum disorders. Not to worry, we have renamed amphetamines to help some of those, and other drugs may come along to counteract other drug downsides – like Narcan.
It’s all depravity but repackaged to be rational because alcohol is bad for some people. To the degree that some drinkers become alcoholics, so do pot smokers become addicted and / or strongly habituated, suffering withdrawal reactions when cut off from it. What a victory for society. You think the Constitution protects license as much as liberty? Is there a line you won’t cross in that descent? Why not this one?

Prudence Leadbetter

Family

Mothers and Fathers, oh, my!

Leave a comment

American society (and civilization) is dissembling, which we like to blame on religious flaws, drugs, video games and e-mail, but it’s due as well to modern feminism – the kind that hates motherhood, fatherhood, marriage and the unique civilizing roles of the females of our species.

This in no way is an attempt to justify keeping women “down,” or to relegate them to male-defined positions in society. Quite the opposite.

Humans are animals – mammals – which means there are sperm-bearers and egg-bearers, and the egg-bearers conceive internally, gestate internally, give birth to live offspring, and suckle them with mammary glands until able to eat gathered or prepared foods. The sperm-bearers have it all too easy in this process, since their commitment to the physical acts of procreation is over in a matter of minutes, depending on what is required to gain the egg-bearer’s acceptance, following which they are not physically tied to the rest of the biological imperatives to which egg-bearers most definitely are. As animals, then, the sperm-bearers are “free” to impregnate other egg-bearers, and many do or try to. This process works for musk-oxen and cattle.

For male humans there are other, overarching obligations than just providing sperm, although popular culture has succeeded in convincing many to ignore them. Crappy politics has a role here, too.

Like it or not, human beings are more than animals. We are sentient – at least most are – which requires very large brains and crania, which means that our gestations are lengthy, rendering females weak and vulnerable for a period of time, during which caring males are obligated to protect them and their newborns, who, themselves, are weak and vulnerable for years after birth, requiring fathers to protect and care for both mother and child until maturity and independence are attained by the child.

There are stresses within these relationships that threaten continuity (success) for the father’s sperm, as it were, and, equally, for the mother’s egg. As societies became civilization, formal rules developed to maintain fathers’ commitments to mothers and to children.

Today we’re too smart for these concepts. Feminism first taught us that women don’t need men except for fun, when permitted. “Progressives” immediately latched on to this new voting bloc and determined that a well-funded governmental, unemotional, non-judgmental, morally neutral, quasi-paternal socialist structure of “free” support for single mothers, could be sold as somehow creating equality for women, and therefore part of the “American Dream.” This perverse outlook invaded and took over education, essentially, as the most effective way to marginalize boys, boyhood and manliness in the name of “equality.” That the breaking of the most critical bonds of civilization was also a result of this weird, new “feminism,” matters not at all to those who have won a great political victory.

There are wise, somewhat reviled mothers, who recognize the importance, indeed, essence of mother- and father-hood. These are they who can see the plain truth of family disintegration virtually at the hands of our own government. They can see that single-motherhood creates the greatest likelihood for poverty and for the development of failed men and, literally, subjugated women! Why does this happen?

It is a result of both boys and girls growing up without fathers, which, most unfortunately, often means almost without mothers, too. Boyhood without proper fathering means a population of feral males who have no concept of how a man should treat a woman, no concept of commitment, compromise or responsibility, no understanding of sacrifice for one’s family, including actively working to provide the best possible environment for one’s children. Consequently, any girls who will succumb to their feral blandishments, will soon be “known” by one (or more) of them, and often impregnated thereby, only to produce children who are likely to fail (or be jailed) in modern society, or an abortion – a statement of complete social failure.

For the fatherless girls’ part, they grow up never experiencing how a man is supposed to treat a woman, or experiencing marital commitment of a man (and woman), or understanding chastity and retention of a woman’s sexual favors / powers as part of the bonding with a husband and father for protection of her progeny.
These girls, tragically, accept feral sexuality as real emotional attachment. Soon their lives are on a downward path that government agencies can never, ever, ever, fix. Their barely wanted children will experience the hatred of other, feral boyfriends and, with predictable likelihood, painful abuse and death. We claim, as all-caring citizens of the world, that child abuse is wrong and should be more illegal than it now is, but we expend more love on abused animals than on abused children.

Our response? More government quasi-responsibility for our erstwhile “happiness,” and less personal responsibility for our actions. What folly.