President-in-name-only, PINO, Joe Biden, day by day, confounds Americans. Americans who intend each morning to fulfill the obligations of motherhood and fatherhood, who intend to see that their children are educated and advanced just a little, along their paths to balanced, successful adulthood, and who intend to perform their best at work or service, providing for their families and communities, are assaulted by ideas foreign to our culture and to our fundamental legal, moral beliefs. Some of these are freshly minted, like the attempt by Attorney General, Merrick Garland to criminalize parents objecting to some of the crap being taught to their children, most particularly a parent whose daughter was raped at school by a boy claiming an identity that “allowed” him into the girls’ room where the attack occurred. As this father was being arrested for yelling at the local school committee who had participated in covering-up the attack due to their agenda of promoting “trans-genderism” ideology, the committee members, the Superintendent and the principal of the high school claimed the attack was unknown to them!
Normal citizens find this hard to process. We grew up trusting our public schools, entrusting our children to them for 5, 6 or 7 hours a day. When did we have to become fearful of everything they do?
Some of what assaults us is several months old and only lately reported upon by even some of our “media” who typically ignore issues that don’t fit within their own agendas, as untoward as the concept of agenda-driven news, is. When did we have to become skeptical of everything our “news” sources tell us? One of these issues is immigration.
Most of media – and the high-tech censors like Google, Facebook and Twitter, don’t allow coverage of the illegal actions of the Biden administration at the southern border. Millions of Americans are unaware of the ongoing crimes Biden, himself, has caused. This odd man has proclaimed that a constant flow of “immigrants,” illegal, unvetted, often disease-ridden entrants, is a source of strength for the United States. His reasoning: he was the grandson of Irish immigrants and look how great he turned out! What a scurrilous dope. His party engineered an illegal, fraudulent election to make sure he got certified for enough electoral votes to put that party and its socialist benefactors into power. Lie upon lie upon lie. And they lie about the illegal entrant invasion that they have CREATED.
We have laws, including laws that limit and control immigration. The disingenuous President swore, on January 20th, that he would “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” among his other responsibilities and obligations, not least of which by any measure, is “to the best of (his) Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” None of what he promised during that inauguration has been fulfilled: he lied, outright, to the American people. In particular, on the matter of Immigration, Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution he has sworn to uphold, there is a clear directive to the “United States” nation, as follows:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
Pertinent to the time of the writing of the Constitution, the term, “Invasion” applies exactly to the organized breaching of our defined borders, including the borders of States, by hordes of non-citizens who have NO LEGAL RIGHT TO OCCUPY any portion of those states. Now, not only has Mr. Biden directed the Border Patrol and ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to NOT ENFORCE the laws that define those agencies, but he has marshaled military and domestic transportation systems to distribute the flood of illegal aliens across the nation – without consultation with States’ governors – and, interestingly, significantly into states that typically vote Republican. One is justified in wondering why that would be so.
Surely it wouldn’t be to distort the voting patterns in favor of Democrats, would it? Despite the occasional admission of this being the purpose of rampant illegal entry, no real American, sworn to “uphold” the Constitution of the United States, would ever sink so low as to disrupt the rights, freedoms and safety of U. S. citizens, or steal their income and wealth as the result of illegal entry, would they? Say it isn’t so. You’d be lying.
The statue of Goddess Athene on the top of the famous Pallas-Athene-Brunnen in front of the Austrian Parliament in Vienna. Built by Theophil Hansen 1898-1902.
For a free people, freedom becomes increasingly harder to realize or defend when knowledge is limited by twisted education (which is to say, by the government) and by outright, calculated lying by that same government. To maintain control at the most fundamental levels, a government bent on Fascism will weaken the economic standing of most Americans and, equally as powerfully, create dependency upon the government for health care. Nearly $30 Trillion debt clarifies the former; elevating Anthony Mussolini, errr… Fauci, to prevaricating pandemic potentate, makes obvious the latter.
To whom does a citizen turn to counter a government that lies? Does he or she try to work more often with local or state government because they are more likely to tell the truth – no certainty, just greater likelihood – because he or she may know someone whose best friend has met someone working at that level? Like all contracts and covenants, only the honesty and integrity of their guarantors can give them force or value.
“Official” lies have become more creative since the Viet-Nam War. Viet-Nam exposed the mendacity of our well-respected military, whose veterans we have always revered. That period also revealed the ease with which our “free press” could be co-opted to push a leftist agenda. In the case of Viet-Nam this meant reportage of destruction and failure, terror and war-criminality, while beleaguered marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen are winning every battle of the conflict, an untold story. Trust in officialdom began to crumble.
Governments lying about, obfuscating or withholding truths from those governed is nothing new. History is a series of stories about conspiracy and secrecy within and between governments, not populations. The U. S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that gave it flight, formed a shift toward honesty between government and citizens, culminating in the Civil War, in which both sides were brutally, murderously honest about their purposes and positions. It has been mostly downhill ever since, as the forces of tyranny, the more comfortable theory of governance for government-types, rubbed and abraded the notions of citizen sovereignty and bottom-up authority – liberty, itself.
The threshold events and actors are well-known: Teddy Roosevelt; Wilson; Hoover; FDR-Cordell Hull; Johnson-Humphrey-Rusk-McNamara; Nixon-Kissinger; Carter- Brzezinski; Bush the 2nd; Obama-Clinton-Kerry-Rice-Jarrett; Biden-Blinken-MIlley, and many of their hangers-on, of whom some were/are virtual if not avowed communists. Numerous congressional leaders steadily pushed American government further and further left, now to an accelerating rate by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer-Adam Schiff-Jerrold Nadler, A.O.C., Eric Swalwell, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and other fellow-travelers, many of whom literally seem to hate the United States. Here we are in 2021.
Gently speaking, the only federal agency whose pronouncements are accepted as true is Amtrak when they inform erstwhile passengers that thus-and-such train will be late by some number of minutes or hours. We also believe the Federal Aviation Administration is truthful, we hope. But anything coming out of any Cabinet department or the White House, or the House or Senate, or the “Pentagon,” is now taken with so many grains of salt. Since the phenomenal lies told during the Summer of Hate in 2020, and through the federal elections, there is very little that is trustworthy coming from any spoken or printed communication of the federal government.
Not a whole lot from state governments, either.
To whom does a law-abiding citizen turn when he or she is governed, cajoled or tyrannized by his or her government? A church? In a few cases, yes. But even normal conversations are rare among ordinary civilians, in 2021. Until one can discern or deduce what news sources a correspondent pays attention to, conversation is superficial at best.
Most Americans achieve respect for a politician who promises certain actions or efforts when running for office, and then does those very things. Even in disagreement, honesty by an office-holder is respected. Trump, for his braggadocio, embellishments and “mean tweets,” still pursued – and accomplished many of – the things he promised to do. His fundamental philosophy of “America First” never wavered, and his foreign policy held true to his philosophy. Americans learned to love “America First.” Under the Biden regime, whomever is the leader of it, We have learned to hate “America Last.”
Biden and his strange, far-left crew, have realized one distinct accomplishment. By reducing Americans’ expectations from the President and from any of his cabinet officers and functionaries, they are now meeting Americans’ expectations on a daily basis. When the Press Secretary speaks, everyone expects her to lie on behalf of the Biden cabal and she never disappoints! When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken testifies before Congress or holds a press conference, everyone, even including Congress, where most members are well adjusted to prevarication, expects him to avoid answering reasonable questions, to provide only partial scraps of information when he does answer, or to repeat lies that the regime has already spewed. No one is disappointed!
If the reader thinks that “all politicians lie” and Joe Biden is just being a “politician,” then he or she should pay attention to the southern border, which has spawned lies so grotesque as to place political lies in a wholly separate category of simple mendacity. Biden administration words, phrases, sentences and non-answers about the border and illegal immigration, are so crooked and twisted as to fold back upon the truth! How is this possible?
It seems as though the military, Homeland Security, the President and the president’s spokeswoman stay up late – well, not the President – just thinking up how to explain or avoid explaining to the American people that what they are seeing and experiencing at the southern border with Mexico is actually NOT what they are seeing and experiencing. Every action taken by the Biden regime regarding border protection, immigration policy, public health, “Homeland Security,” drug interdiction, human trafficking, child abuse and sexual slavery, makes clear how gross were the lies Mr. Biden told when he swore to uphold the Constitution and promised to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. With nearly hourly disingenuousness from media sycophants (formerly known as fellow-travelers) Biden cruises along, seemingly oblivious to the conditions at the border. When a question is tossed to him about “the border,” he turns his back and walks away.
Biden’s Secretary of “Homeland Security,” Alejandro Majorkas is in an impossible position… at least in terms of public relations. He does face questions and is required to claim that “the border is closed” while the Border Patrol tries to keep count of 200,000 or more illegal entrants PER MONTH. On the other hand, he has dropped the ultimate truth bomb: “…things are being handled according to plan,” or words to that effect. The sad truth is, an open border and flooding the country with unskilled criminals IS the plan – a plan the most crass, cynical and hateful aspect of which is no more than to first make the U. S. a one-party nation and second to tear down the United States as a stumbling block to global communism. Millions of Americans voted for these poop-heads, who claim that we “need” immigrants to fill jobs that are not getting done by citizens. It’s as though they might actually expect most of our invited illegals to actually work.
Joe Biden has never been at a loss for some prevarication or another. The first time he ran for president he contrived an elaborate story of his father’s mining career in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Lunch-bucket Joe, father was a miner. Unfortunately the story was untrue and, worse, had been “lifted” from a speech given by a British politician, Neil Kinnock, about HIS father. It was such a good story and Joe’s mental capacity being so limited, even in his 40’s, that “borrowing” it for his own campaign just seemed the best path. Rather odd, that. But Biden was uninjured by what should be seen as a gross lack of honesty. Somehow the father-was-a-miner whopper became part of the élan of Joe Biden. “That’s just Joe being Joe.” Well.
Joe was being Joe when he voted for the Iraq war and the Afghanistan invasion, but speaks forcefully against both actions, now. He worked as Vice President to help Saudi Arabia fight Yemeni fundamentalists, but speaks against it now. He advised Obama not to attempt to “get” Bin Laden in Pakistan, but he’s proud of it, now He was opposed to busing in the 70’s and 80’s, even working with Jesse Helms on legislation, yet was offended when Kamala Harris called him out on it during the 2020 campaign. Now, as Obama was, he is in favor of eliminating single-family zoning everywhere in the country. Millions of Americans voted for this poop-head. Now his title is POTUS: Poop-head Of The United States.
So, the fundamental question remains: To whom can a citizen turn in a supposedly Constitutionally limited Republic? Federal agencies and officers, top congressional leaders and most states have been lying to Americans while generating irrational fears about the Chinese-spread pandemic of 2020-21, while denying use of effective treatments for Covid-19 infection, and while destroying small businesses in the name of “stopping” Covid-19. Federal agencies, including the White House, and several state officials and agencies are colluding with media companies to censor news and opinions about alternatives to the “party line” on the pandemic, the “vaccines” and treatments, not to mention questions about vote fraud in the presidential election of 2020 – quite arguably in contravention of the First Amendment – and citizens are wondering where to turn for “redress of (their) grievances?”
What is a greater threat, lying outright or preventing the dissemination of truth? Perhaps the President will set that straight for us.
Prudence’ closest friend mowed his “lawn” today, which is to say he mowed grass that grows amidst various other plants where the lawn has long been hoped-for, dug and raked for, struggled for, fertilized for and never really found. The pilot of that little electric mower is anticipating his cardiologist’s scheduling a visit to Massachusetts General Hospital where a date will be set for open-heart surgery to correct near blockages of at least 4 arteries. That kind of operation is a big, damn deal and carries a lot of risk, having one’s heart exposed and worked-upon while machines handle the pumping and breathing the “lawn” mower would normally handle for himself.
In any event, since learning about those blockages, every significant task carries with it the possibility that it may be an experience that won’t be repeated. “Oh, no,” friends and loved-ones say, “bypass surgery is routine, now. They do them all the time. So-and-so had it and he / she is doing great.” Probably, but contemplating one’s chest prized open disallows such simple reassurances and even remarkable records of success don’t set worries, or, better, reflections aside.
More than 76 years of good health can lull a person into planning out what a good length of life should be. First he would look at what his own father’s age got to be despite setbacks and bad habits, and then add on a number of years because of being more careful than the old man was, and more active and more something or other than one’s ancestor, and therefore entitled to a few more years. But no amount of calculation will actually place the length of one’s life into one’s own control. There’s no bargaining. Who do you bargain with?
So, the not-so-old guy begins thinking about other actions, responsibilities, habits, projects unfinished and kisses not bestowed or received, that may be the result of the probable operation. It’s automatic, and he has to decide a thousand decisions.
Am I satisfied with what I’ll leave for people to remember? That’s a hard decision. Maybe if I sell an extraordinary number of raffle tickets for the next drawing… maybe they’ll remember me better. “Yeah, we’re going to miss the old dude: he sold a lot of raffle tickets.”
Will I leave my wife feeling glad she gave her life to me, the guy who doesn’t take vacations, instead of that other kid she grew up with? Will she wish she had done something more exciting with her loyalty? “Yes, I loved him, but he was such a stick-in-the-mud, always doing some work or project or helping his Club. It was like pulling teeth to get him to take a vacation.” Hard to decide if I am satisfied with how I was as a husband and companion. But it’s too late to change it, if things go South.
Still, the neighbor down the street has a college buddy who’s 85 now and he had six bypasses 20 years ago and he’s still walking 3 miles a day and doing great. So, nothing to worry about, it’s a routine procedure, now. Maybe.
Not-so-old guy has always said he “wants to die healthy,” but it’s hard to figure what that really means anymore. The line always got a chuckle. But the concept was that he’d do whatever he felt he needed to do until all the home projects were done, new bathroom installed and the house painted, business sold, great-grandchild born somehow (the usual way, one hopes), and then keel over with his second heart attack. Such plans are mere wisps of cloud.
Did I sell enough copy machines? Obviously the answer is no, and always would be; can’t sell too many in that business. But, the ones I did enabled a reasonable life, kids through college and the ability to help people through Exchange and otherwise. We haven’t wanted for anything important but we’ve never had a lot of money, either.
Our son and daughter are wonderful, handsome and beautiful in turn, and very strong where it counts. Each created two wonderful children of their own about whom not enough good can be said. I envy them their long futures and their brains and good looks, but not necessarily the state of the United States and the world, the way my generation is leaving them. Freedom teeters on a knife-edge and many will die when it is next attacked. At least these grandchildren have their heads on straight.
The man who is starting to count his years in limited terms has been fortunate in a thousand ways, with one of the greatest having been alive to know granddaughter, Allison Paige Hawkes, daughter’s daughter and guiding light for so many of us and many dozens of others we never got to know – or meet – until her funeral. Her beauty and strength were boundless as she resisted the grasp of cancers for 20 years. What a treat it seems to me to have known her and been loved by her. She didn’t waste a minute that was granted. Me, I’ve wasted a lot of them, but there’s no regaining even one; an old person hopes that he did enough in the minutes he didn’t waste.
A lot of minutes have been spent on home projects in, literally, every room in the house. Some were big projects, like making one room out of two and leveling the ceiling across the whole master bedroom space, and like moving the kitchen into the dining room and making the kitchen into the dining room with new hot water heat, new ceiling, new French doors at the other end of the living room, like two new 24” bay windows, new picture windows in the east walls of the living room and dining room, lots of plumbing and electrical work, complete renovations of the other two bedrooms, and like new front steps and entry-way with sidelights, pillars, curved ceiling and piece-made wooden fan over the front door, new back steps, ramp and back and cellar doors, plus a whole new kitchen door entry off of a new brick patio, recently cut in half with a new 64-pounds-each landscape-block outer wall. Then there is the 8 x 10 shed and a whole lot of inlaid brick walks and aprons and stone covered, brick-outlined sections of the yard. Very early on, the main bathroom upstairs was expanded as the master bedroom was created, by eliminating a linen closet and an original small bedroom closet. Lots of plumbing and carpentry, there. There were many new windows the old guy replaced when much younger. There’s also a built-in bed platform with drawers underneath, and an under-window bureau and a built-in mirror with make-up lights in the, now, 3rd bedroom.
Unfortunately, most of it is 20 to 40 years old and needs major work the old guy can’t do, particularly as suddenly restrictive heart problems are accommodated. Now that the heart has been examined several ways, old man’s wife doesn’t want him to even tie his shoes too tightly.
More decisions will have to include how a grandson might help complete the brick-defined terraces in front of the house, where the steep drop of the yard has thwarted desires for decades. Blessed with lots of bricks from the shortened patio (see 64-pound landscape blocks, above) it makes perfect sense to use them to solve another problem, doesn’t it? Not even a little? So far the brick sculpture-terrace-what-the-Hell-is-he- building-there, looks potentially good, except there’s a huge pile of dirt on the walk near the house, which ultimately must be screened for agricultural purposes on the terraces and elsewhere. Now it’s grandson work. Tugs at the heart, don’t you know.
How many things can be set aright before the big cut? That’s another decision, linked to how much can the didn’t-realize-he-was-getting-old-so-quickly-guy get away with? Number-one son and his number-one son already got roped into moving the adjustable bed into old guy’s office / TV room, and moving other stuff the helpless old bastard shouldn’t try to do. Huh! Well, okay; can’t move it back himself, anyway. There are bushes to be clipped, again… can he get away with that?
But underlying every surface concern are the profound ones. How many normal actions have the potential of being the last time they’ll be done? Driving to the office? Selling a copier? Helping customers? Or, more importantly, kissing beloved wife or painting woodwork; or getting windows replaced or hallway floor redone. What about this, or that or the other thing that comes down to fixing up the house for the next owner? Will he get to lay out the Field of Honor again, straightening the flags when they sag from vertical? What about having lunch with Will Vercoe, one of the world’s best people, or having lunch with Dennis Galvin and Jay Gaffney, two more of the world’s best people, or bantering with Frank Allen, the world’s best person, a man without whom the old guy’s life would have been far less fulfilling or useful. The best.
Or, everything will be so wonderfully wonderful after the operation that we’ll all be joking around about why there was any worry at all. They do this all the time.
Tyranny crept in on little cat feet. You may have been too busy – or frightened – to have noticed what happened to our nation and to our attitudes over the past 60 years. So, ummnnh, let’s see… 2021 minus 60 years, well, that would be, ahh… 1961! All right! I got it. Don’t ask, it’s a white supremacist thing. Nineteen-sixty-one: Kennedy was president; the United States had achieved its pinnacle of average standard of living for all races and classes of people. Black families were making economic progress at a higher rate than whites. We were starting to tickle the edge of space and gearing up scientifically, technologically and educationally to defeat the Soviet Union. People everywhere respected, envied, the United States’ obviously superior political and economic system: Freedom… even Americans themselves!
There were rumblings, for sure. It was fairly obvious that Kennedy’s election was the result of vote fraud in Chicago among other cities, but particularly the Mayor Daley machine that delivered Illinois to Kennedy. Kennedy won by a “national” margin of about ONE VOTE per precinct. Nixon, to his credit, decided to not challenge or call for recounts, even in Illinois, believing that doing so would be bad for the country, a foreign concept in 2021.
Kennedy squelched the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Communist Cuba by denying U. S. air support for the C.I.A. –trained and encouraged army of anti-Castro Cubans. It was a project hatched under Eisenhower, possibly without Eisenhower’s own awareness. An unholy alliance of the Mafia and shadowy C.I.A. operatives, the invasion was inherited by Kennedy, who was already skeptical of the latitude of operations arrogated by that secretive agency. To Kennedy’s credit, he took responsibility, publicly, for the failure of the “invasion.” It is widely perceived that the same unholy alliance that wanted to re-establish pre-Castro Cuba ultimately had Kennedy assassinated in 1963. The slide from America’s pinnacle had begun.
Lyndon Johnson, a racist, shepherded Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act through Congress, relying on substantial Republican support and widespread sympathy for Kennedy. More significantly, he acquiesced to another C.I.A. scheme in French Indo-China where, following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May of 1954, French colonialism in Southeast Asia ended. The U. S. had helped France fight the Viet Minh communists to no avail. Truman’s policy of “containment” of international Communism was threatened. Viet Nam was divided into North and South and U. S. “advisors” attempted to build up South Vietnam’s resistance to takeover by the North, viewing South Korea as a shining model. The C.I.A., as an armed tool of the State Department, basically set policy for America’s role, there, ultimately engineering the assassination of South Vietnam Premiere, Ngo Dinh Diem and his much disliked brother and sister-in-law.
Theories have swirled about Kennedy’s assassination being linked to his supposed desire to pull away from involvement in South Vietnam, but facts don’t support such a course. Anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia leaders and the C.I.A. are the more likely perpetrators. Once Kennedy was eliminated (There were about 16,000 American troops assisting ARVN efforts against the Viet Cong when Kennedy died.) Johnson fell for the ridiculous “Gulf of Tonkin” incident report and committed major ground forces to the Vietnam “Conflict.”
With daily broadcast of bad news from Vietnam and revelation of the “Pentagon Papers,” Americans began to lose faith in our government and our military, while the existence of a “Deep State” within our own government became apparent. Politics, and the future of the United States had become clouded.
The Press and the Democrats took down Richard Nixon. In the process they had even Republicans believing that the crimes Nixon had apparently done in covering up stupid political stuff were so threatening to our Constitutional Republic that he had to go. Maybe, but there was a lot of theatre. Numerous characters saw their careers secured by working to expose the President or working to sabotage him. Some were right… about the career part. But “the press” has never been the same. No longer are journalism majors directed to learn how to report the truth; now they all intend to change the world from their digital pulpits from which they preach about others than the God of Truth. Fake news is a mark of pride, today, if the result fulfills intention.
The loss of a free press and of free speech is a key stepping stone to tyranny. An “agenda-press” will protect crimes by people whose philosophy comforts it, while it works to erode and corrode those with whom it disagrees… truth be damned. Readers, watchers, listeners are misled through misinformation, and by the rat-a-tat-tat repetition of lies spread by philosophers the organs of information agree with. Soon whole beliefs are addled and worse philosophers and philosophies, become “mainstream.”
Public employee unionism, especially applied to the education industries, public and private, has in recent decades, gained control of teacher qualification and certification, all with 90+% leftist attitudes. Students seeking a path out of poverty, often a path away from failed families, are fully malleable by prevailing philosophies in schools of education. They all seem to want to change the world, as well. Trusting parents are trusting the wrong institutions to reinforce their philosophies of life, truth, honesty, religion and responsibility.
Since the 2000 elections the concept of government by litigation has grown beyond rational bounds. When the Supreme Court ended the charade of selective recounts in Florida the politics of hate gelled into a real means of acquiring power: first, destroy the opponent(s) personally, then destroy his or her followers and supporters. “The politics of personal destruction.” It’s not an “American” thing.
For whatever reason, Republicans posted two weak candidates in a row against Barack Hussein Obama. McCain had a shot in 2008 with Palin as V.P., but her conservatism was carefully constrained by McCain’s handlers. Then the financial crisis hit. What a fortuitous coincidence for the Obama campaign. Eight or ten key money people demanded settlement simultaneously and dominoes began to tumble. President Bush was out of his league, deferring completely to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a product of Wall Street and Goldman Sachs. As the FED and emergency legislation started a flood of hollow dollars to bail out the very investment banks that precipitated the crisis, McCain appeared helpless while Obama remained simply concerned, saying little. Goldman Sachs got a goodly share. Others did less well, places like Lehman Brothers, and AIG, the re-insurance company. General Motors took plenty, as did Chrysler, but Ford declined.
As a result of it all, McCain lost respect, Obama got elected to “transform” the United States, and the financial system became more tightly controlled by – or integrated into – the federal government. The near-collapse was global, exposing the dangerous (to self-government) interconnectedness of banking, particularly of central banks. The ease of controlling populations is multiplied by control of their personal money and finances. Legislation that reacted to the 2006-2007-2008 banking crisis, like Dodd-Frank, define certain financial institutions as “too big to fail.” American taxpayers, indeed, American short-term financial health altogether is now tied to propping up what are essentially international institutions. The loss of financial sovereignty is a keystone to collapsing national sovereignty, the worst element of tyranny when that nation is the United States.
It should be growing clearer how seemingly unrelated events provide facilities for imposing Fascism or worse should a government be controlled by people who believe that top-down imposition is the best way to organize a nation or a people. Constitutional limitations interfere with that form of thinking. The American Constitution serves as an obstacle to global, transnational tyranny of every type, but its strength depends on leadership that agrees with its principles. The Constitution, itself, provides very limited tools to counter the political power of anti-American leadership. It is one of the contingencies of self government that the founders could not conceive of: that the electorate would be so twisted in its thinking that it would elect – and re-elect repeatedly – representatives who were decidedly UN-Constitutional, or anti-Constitutional – which is to be anti-American – in their thinking.
Obviously the effects of two or more generations of public education could sway enough voters to misunderstand their roles in self-government, and to misunderstand the roles of the institutions of government to be not defenders of individual rights and responsibilities and of private property, but rather dispensers of welfare in various forms so as to provide comfort to citizens. In order to provide that much welfare the government entities must take the money from those who have earned it and to whom it belongs. If people are constantly being taught, or encouraged to think that it’s not FAIR for some people to have more wealth, the political will to take more from “the rich” is easy to find and hard to oppose. Undreamed of debt, weakening the nation’s ability to defend itself or to perform its Constitutional duties, becomes a threat to everyone. As resources begin to fail, more government, and more tyrannical government will appear to be the only answer for literal survival of large fractions of the population.
Government types have encouraged media conglomerates to tilt, then embellish and finally create “news” that has political value and, now, actual control value of nearly the whole country. This has been the greatest “end-run” around representative government and inalienable rights, ever. A generation of Americans has been convinced that its country is so imperfect as to be indefensible. In effect, patriotism for the United States has been made negative, something espoused only by ”white supremacists” and other sorts of obvious racists. Even the U. S. flag is viewed negatively by some – those who are in agreement with Black Lives Matter, that the whole American culture, history and success must be torn asunder and replaced with communism, the direct route to tyranny. For shame.
The Biden regime openly colludes with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others to censor ideas and speech it doesn’t want heard. For the government to be involved with that corrupt and twisted role, assumed by those companies, is utterly unconstitutional, but the Congress is unable to convince itself that the political advantage those organs provide is not worth the damage to the Republic. With representatives like those, who needs tyrants? There are, potentially, institutions and limits that could be created to prevent this form of Fascism from becoming rooted, but we have yet to find the courage to create them. At the present time there are about a dozen courageous members of both houses combined, and 523 sheep who are most involved with re-election and not with the defense of America or even with citizenship. For shame.
The engineered diseases that result from COVID-19 have exposed the weak-mindedness of a large number of Americans , and the tendency toward Fascism of many of the rest, mostly government types and other authoritarians, even in private business. A supposedly “free” people has been exposed as unable to make thoughtful judgments about where personal sovereignty ends and government control begins. In the American Constitutional system the individual citizen is sovereign, relinquishing only enough freedom as to enable the “federal,” not “national” government to provide what individuals and local governments, even state governments, cannot. The system is virtually backwards, or upside-down, today. The supposedly federal government has arrogated powers to dictate everything from lightbulb design to grade-school curriculum, even the meaning of words and content of religious faith. Forcing free citizens to wear masks or receive injections of barely understood concoctions falsely called “vaccines,” while lying publicly about the nature of and origin of the latest, new, viral disease, was a relatively small step.
That same government has succeeded in dividing Americans against one another over relative rates of conformity to false premises – even to restricting everyday freedoms for failing to conform to federal “Covid” dictates. America, awake!… please.
Major corporations are in league with proto-tyrants in subverting Constitutional limitations and in subverting freedom, itself. While an individual artist baker or web designer is punished by the courts for refusing to employ his or her artistry for morally or religiously objectionable activities, airlines, sports team, employers of 100 or more and many others, are empowered to refuse service or entry to those refusing the injection of phony and proven remarkably harmful, “vaccines.” It’s how Hitler built the Wehrmacht.
“And you tell me, over and over and over again, my friends, that you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction…”
Vaccine is a comforting word… concept. Inject some serum, or drink it, depends, and one will become safe from a serious, if not existential, threat. What a concept. What could go wrong? Some of the most profitable industries in the world have accepted billions of dollars of “aid” from the federal government so that development of a “vaccine” that promises to protect everybody from COVID-19, could be accelerated. Numerous regulations were relaxed to permit development and testing to proceed together, there being no time to waste!
Miraculously, the first two, then three vaccines were all phenomenally effective and safe, safe, safe. Hurry, everyone, and get your shot or shots or jabs; they’re FREE! Oh, here and there some rare reaction or “allergy” to the serums was reported, but when you compare the millions and millions of doses, a few thousand hospitalizations, disabilities and deaths are a small price to pay to defeat the worst virus since the last one, regardless of how it was engineered or spread across the world in record time. Hurry! They’re safe, effective and FREE, say the pharmaceutical giants who produce the serums, as do the government functionaries and politicians that financed their development and rendered them available for “emergency” use, despite their connections to the very companies producing them.
“FREE” is a relative term in matters of emergency vaccines. Aside from the $billions to accelerate their availability, every single, damned shot and jab is being paid for by Uncle Sam, our benevolent government, on the arm, so to speak. Some of the top medical agencies of our friend, the federal government, helped to engineer COVID-19 both in this country and in China with our funding, to make it more communicable to humans, it being a virus in bats, after all and very unlikely to infect humans, it turns out, without the engineering. But, glory be, we have the vaccines! We’re saved.
Unless we aren’t. These vaccines are still experimental drugs that have received emergency-use authorization because there are no alternative treatments for COVID-19. Our thoughtful and benign government-types have made sure we are as safe as humanly possible by creating laws that protect us from being forced to take experimental drugs unless there are “no alternative treatments” available. How good of them. Not.
There are alternative, effective, inexpensive drugs available that have remarkably good effects on COVID-19 both in early treatment and even in preventive (prophylactic) uses. In many countries one or another of these drugs are readily available, even over-the-counter-available, and people have taken them and benefitted. Even some late-treatment uses have reversed “hopeless” disease trajectories.
“But, they can’t prescribe off-label!” critics and talking heads on television say. Well, duh, every friggin’ drug in the world is off-label for a brand new virus, now, isn’t it? When people are dying and standard procedures are failing to save them, why not try drugs that have worked for thousands of cases? Because it’s off label? No, because Donald Trump recommended that we try them. Shame on us. Doctors, actual practicing medical DOCTORS who had copious evidence of effectiveness of Ivermectin, for example, were not praised but cancelled. Twitter and Google suppressed their opinions. Why?
“We don’t know how safe they are!” worry the heads.
Let’s consider that we don’t know how actually safe the “vaccines” are, either, do we? In fact, let’s consider that thousands of people have died or suffered life-changing reactions to these experimental drugs – drugs the manufacturers are promoting for children and even infants! Some authorities are forcing children to be vaccinated, when there is no evidence that these vaccines afford ANY protection to people younger than 20 or 24, say, since they are at an infinitesimally small risk from COVID. Who takes a vaccine – an experimental vaccine – against the threat of a disease that is not a threat?
There are thousands of people whose effects from the vaccines will never be included in any database of pros and cons about these vaccines. As it is, if someone complains about a bad effect every medical effort seems to be to hold the vaccine harmless. Many people don’t register a complaint because they don’t connect the injection with a new physical problem. In Prudence’ case it’s shortness of breath, loss of endurance, poor sleep patterns because poor breathing interrupts sleep. After 76 years of quite good health, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has initiated an imPrudent slow, uncomfortable decline. We’ll find out if anything can be done, other than taking some other pharmaceutical(s) for the rest of Prudence’ life.
There is something – or many things – rotten about the creation of COVID-19 and these vaccines, while alternative treatments are suppressed. It is a billionaire’s game, led, in part, by the unusual Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others in the CDC, NIH and USAID, not to overlook the U.N.’s W. H. O. whose leadership helped Communist China suppress information about the new virus even while it was being spread across the world. Billionaires and would-be billionaires. Giant pharmaceutical companies and would-be giant pharmaceutical companies.
The formula is simple: create a worldwide health crisis and pop out serums that virtually every human will need to take… and damn the consequences for some. Let’s say four billion doses at $150 a jab… whirr, clunk, click, ding a ding-ding: $600 BILLION! If 5 or 10 or 50 thousand die from the vaccine, or 150,000 die from “lock-down” drug abuse and suicide, well, we’re overpopulated, anyway.
It is unhealthy, we might say, to lose trust in the medical establishment. The erosion began with the inception of Medicare and the federalization of welfare under Lyndon Johnson. Piece by piece, hospital by hospital, practitioner by practitioner, medical group by medical group, insurance company by insurance company, pharmaceutical company by pharmaceutical company, device manufacturer by device manufacturer, the entire industry/delivery system has adjusted to the political value of health care… and to the financial flows directed increasingly by government.
The politicization of medicine takes place to a significant degree by the direction and management of grant monies. Both “non-profit” universities, colleges and teaching hospitals, and for-profit laboratories and pharmaceutical manufacturers are very concerned to not buck prevailing politics. The research they do is often closely aligned with the opinions of politicians. While they may not publish “lies,” per se, they look only for certain truths – truths that keep grant money flowing. The increase in “billionaire-ships” over the last 20 years has created another source of grants aimed at fulfilling, often, a single person’s views of what is important research and what is not.
COVID-19 brings to light all of these weaknesses in medical science, as well as outright corruption, as private dollars sway the work and attitudes of “official” federal agencies that are depended upon for dispassionate truth. The World Health Organization division of the U. N. has also proven itself corrupt by kow-tow-ing to the Chinese Communist party in matters of truth about COVID-19’s origin and spread, helping to contribute to thousands of deaths, worldwide. To whom can we turn? The N.B.A.? NIKE? Not bloody likely.
There are truth-tellers out there. Hopefully, you are one, and so is your best friend and your significant other. There are a handful of people in office who are both truthful and unafraid of the truth – not always congruent conditions. Support your local truth-tellers and follow those who have the courage to proclaim and defend truth. Don’t fall victim to repeating the claims of suspected – hoped-for – truth-tellers, without confirming the truth, yourself. You will be challenged by people who believe things that aren’t so.
Truth is the right medicine for our health care and our health/medical industries. What else could be? It is the right medicine for our own health whenever we interact with those increasingly government-driven organizations. Is it not the right medicine for government and the law, too? Would truth work in government?
Is a COVID vaccine the right set of chemicals to inject into your only body? Find out the truth to the best of your ability, before you say, “Yes.”
A reckoning is surely coming. Hearing those words causes some listeners to imagine China being hoist on the World’s petard for causing so many deaths and economic losses. Won’t happen, it seems Prudent to say, at least not during the Biden-Harris administrations. They are long bought and paid-for.
No, a reckoning over COVID-19 could take the form of reduced health for millions around the world, due to widespread vaccination with serums that are effective against COVID while also being effective against good heart function, or against pregnancy and maternity. Such “side effects” have side-effected many thousands, including, as our friend, the global socialist movement in the persons of the U. S. government, God forbid, forces inoculation of youngsters. Not many have died, some merely debilitated at age 12 or so.
Americans aren’t stupid. Some are a lot more clever, or educated, or skillful, or depraved than others, however. Some, who have seen their greatest personal opportunity within a legalized government employee union environment, now tightly – and politically – protected by law, eventually gain both economic freedom and inordinate influence. Most Americans, perhaps 98% of us, never gain similar advantage and, until the Covid “plan-demic,” never grasped what we have allowed to happen. Our subservient position is becoming clearer.
There are multiple tyrannies at issue.
Not only taxpayers but every parent and other providers of product to “public” school systems, has awakened to the tyrannies of public employee unionization, made sharply clear by the machinations of teachers’ unions. We who PAY for public schools, by law and state police powers, have learned that we have no control whatsoever, personally or through our elected “representatives” or through the “experts” we have hired to “manage” “our” governments. It’s humbling. The people “we” have hired and pay lavishly to “educate” our children, are exposed as our education “rulers.” They, not we, will determine both curricula and process. No longer shall our children be reinforced in the best of life’s lessons as we impart at home; they will learn what odd theories of social reformation and anti-American psychology that they, our education rulers, agree with. No longer will the routines of school and vacation be followed if we, your education rulers, don’t like them. No longer will your children be permitted into the same rooms that we inhabit if we, on our own, decide that there may be the slightest threat to our health or safety… and you will pay us according to our negotiated contract, including scheduled raises, while we ponder our next demands.
Well, that’s a fine “how do you do?”
Suddenly, teachers have become more powerful than our elected “representatives,” so-called, and the government created by we the people, is powerless to correct this destructive imbalance. To whom can an economically assaulted citizen/parent turn for redress of grievance? Well, no one.
Let us imagine, then, an actually representative government. Can you imagine what such a rare construct might do on our behalf? Can you imagine what it might do with regards to “public” education?
First, (and one can only dream of any government in the United States today, having the testicular fortitude) such a government representing the values and interests of its citizens, would arbitrarily de-certify its local teachers union on the basis of an undeclared and illegal strike. That is, since the jurisdiction had not failed to uphold the terms, financial and otherwise, of the existing contract with teachers, it had within its inherent rights the power to suspend a collective contract and offer individual contracts to teachers who were prepared to go to work at the next earliest opportunity. That jurisdiction would also have an obligation to fulfill state laws requiring a set number of days of school attendance by every school-age child in residence. At the same time, the jurisdiction would assume the obligation to protect any individual and family thereof from retribution in any form under the guise of a negotiated “contract” that was abrogated by union-enforced action.
In the event that not enough formerly contracted teachers agree to go back to work to fill basic minimum teaching slots, the jurisdiction could temporarily open up teaching slots to anyone with sufficient background in or love of subject matters to enable a temporary fulfillment of educational minimums as part of an emergency declaration. Meanwhile students would return to classroom instruction, do homework, pass tests and matriculate as able. Between school “years,” certified teachers could be hired individually to round out the teaching staff as appropriate. A lot would be expected of a highly compensated Superintendent and his or her staff to make sure that proper education was accomplished, but, but… just imagine.
Superintendents and other supervisors who are incapable of managing the system without kow-towing to a teachers union, could be replaced.
Then, we might imagine that every student would be taught to read, comprehend, write logical, well-constructed sentences and coherent essays in legible longhand, and to calculate and reason algebraically. Simultaneously those same potential adults would learn American and World History, civics and citizenship and the truth, good and bad, about our exceptional Constitutional limits on central government.
Unfortunately, that last paragraph is a dream too far.
(Photo by JIM LO SCALZO / POOL / AFP) (Photo by JIM LO SCALZO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The once and nevermore defenders of average Americans, laborers and factory workers, and rock-solid, patriotic citizens, ready to sacrifice for their country when the call came to do so, are shedding their snakes’ clothing. With the burying of a most questionable set of elections for presidential electors in 2020, the once-proud Democrat Party has shown itself capable of undermining everything it once stood for, while actively denigrating those very principles, and of forming the most tawdry allegiances with uber-wealthy technology companies and Wall Street globalists… all in the name of “social justice” and “equity.” To make it all work, much like the National Socialists did in post-Weimar Germany, they have needed a universal hate-focus, a common enemy to the poor and oppressed for whom Democrats will fight to the last fetus.
Fairly described as the party of death, Democrats have set forth on a long march toward socialist Godlessness, convinced that Communism executed by those as clever as they will finally work to the benefit of “the masses,” with whom we all shall identify as soon as power is delivered to Democrats’ hands. There will be many deaths along the way, should defenders of the American idea stopping fighting for the life and lives of our wonderful experiment in freedom.
The most obvious, however mis-identified deaths, are those of millions of aborted babies, of which the largest losses per capita are sustained by black and brown people. “Black Lives Matter,” which are believed by Democrats to be allies of theirs, whereas the opposite relationship is believed to be the case by “BLM” Marxists, care only for headline deaths, numbering fewer than 20 each year, where Blacks fatally encounter police officers. Those events justify killing other police of whatever skin color or ethnicity, along with those killed in the course of peaceful protests. The hundreds killed each year in major cities by other blacks are of no concern of theirs: no headlines, no “racist” angle to milk.
The tens of thousands killed by Planned Parenthood (major Democrat donors, they) and a few other “clinics” each year, are invisible to “BLM.” At the same time, “BLM” is solidly behind opening the borders to unrestricted immigration, despite its clearly negative impacts on the lives of black workers and families. We should follow these boobs… question mark.
Patriotism has become the wearing of masks, the mistrust of every other human and twisted sexual identities. So-called immigrants are somehow more valuable than Americans or their ability to earn a living without government help. We are literally borrowing the so-called money to purchase our new slaveholding masters. Conservatism is being shut out of the public square as it has been for years at our institutions of so-called learning. A new administration is wasting no time in stripping away “America first” and replacing it with the American province, just one in the great big global family. Joe Biden doesn’t know whether to salute or get off the pot. We should follow that boob, too.
Our feckless “free press” can barely catch its breath between slobbering sycophancies, so caught up in their revelry over the defeat of America first-ness and that gauche making-America-greatness stuff. If they can possibly help Senator Schumer convict Trump of whatever he did that Democrats don’t like, all extra-constitutional-like, they certainly will, touting the tiny statistics of the storming of the practically unprotected Capitol, over and over, inversely to their ignorance of the Antifa/BLM riots of the past 10 months. We’ll be living in strange times for a couple of years, if not decades, boys and girls.
Every one of you, and you all know exactly who you are and what you did to make it appear that Biden won the election, will fade into history memorialized as the people who brought America to its knees, electing a crime family and a communist to the most powerful job on earth, not that it will be that for long. When China takes Taiwan and Ol’ Uncle Joe puts his mask on to mumble some crap about it always having been part of China, anyway, democracy be damned, you all can congratulate one another, you Quislings.
As the Harris-Biden administration completes its overturning of justice and Constitutionality to keep any pesky Patriots from ever gaining power again, everyone who rioted or packed ballots counts in 2020 and on January 5th 2021, can take solace, as America ceases to matter much, that you did your part.
We had a good run, we crazy Americans, believing that we could govern ourselves by Constitutionally limiting the powers of the Federal government that We the People created. You, all, don’t even recognize the truckloads of socialist crap we’ve already accepted, perhaps worshipped. That $26,000,000,000,000 debt should keep it fresh in your minds. If Democrats succeed in adding on a couple of Trillions or more to that total, everything will suddenly become better, fairer, greener and egalitarian. Anyone in the new Administration who can financially walk and chew gum at the same time, is much lauded by the “press” as a breath of fresh air compared to those awful troglodytes in the awful Trump awful administration. This doesn’t include the president or vice-president; it is Prudent that they don’t allow Good Ol’ Joe Biden to chew gum, anyway.
There is quite a crackdown on conservatives and anything they might say or agree with. Communists are intensely consistent with their plans and steps to subdue dissent: never allow it – the Party is infallible. This quaint viewpoint doesn’t allow much wiggle room for religions, scriptures or individual sovereignty. The Chinese, whom the new administration intends to emulate, have proven that society runs so much more smoothly with just one party holding power. And, none of that checks and balances baloney, either. No “power-sharing with states; no independent judiciary; no trying to set an example of honesty, freedom or democracy for other nations. That last is nearly abolished through mis-education. Society runs so much more smoothly with just one party in one country holding power. That country won’t be the United States, one party or not. Most of the “free” world has borrowed into China’s hegemony… what in God’s name are we holding out for? Bigger TV’s? Green energy?
Lunchbucket Joe from the dingy mines of Scranton, PA isn’t wasting his limited time leaving “America First” in the dustbin of history. He knows his days and weeks are numbered. They’ll retire him a hero of the working ”Joe” who always “fought” (is that incitement?) for the little guy against the big, bad, anti-union corporations like…, well, like, like Amazon! And Twitter and…, and… Google, for crying out loud! [Ahh, Joe…, umm, those are our friends… the ones that suppressed Hunter’s laptop story and gave us all that money and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of vote suppression. Joe gets that steely, hard look in his eyes, furrows his mighty brow and leans in closer. “Hunter had sex with a laptop?” he asks.]
In any event, lots of leftists / Democrats / well-known reporters and anchor-people, have been asking the tough questions – mostly of one another: “How could we start the necessary de-programming / re-education of Trump supporters?” The 60% of the United States, including the 20% that normally don’t care much, who are opposed to such gulag tactics, think we are poking fun at the jackasses who ask and ponder questions like that. But there is no fun connected to them, at all. Those people are seriously asking and Lord knows they have many sympathizers among the weirdo’s Biden is naming to various posts of power.
The Trump Impeachment Show is perfectly situated to divert attention from Uncle Joe’s daily executive orders. Technically – and legally – executive orders have force only in the arena of directing Federal agencies and employees in the means and methods of carrying out Federal laws. Legally, the President no matter how popular or senile, cannot CHANGE laws or effectively create any. These quaint facts have long been ignored, but very gingerly until President Obama. Just in the imposition of the A. C. A., Obamacare, he changed the law(s) that were passed by Congress, as they were offending various voter blocs Mr. Obama liked. He changed those laws, a big “No… no!”
Chief Justice (in name only), John Roberts, saw how easily it could be done and changed the law himself in order to keep that pile of A. C.r A.p from collapsing constitutionally.
Now Ol’ Lunch-bucket Joe has issued some 40 “Executive Orders” that one might safely assume he hasn’t read despite his wholehearted agreement with their contents. The one on rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement is 7,600 words by itself. Joe would have read a mid-length novel since taking office to fully grasp everything he’s signed. Seems doubtful.
Keeping Trump and those 75 Million or so troglodyte Republicans on the front pages allows for a lot of attention over here while the “transformation” is happening over there. Sort of like a street magician working a little sleight of hand on the credulous crowd, except it’s more likely sleight of mind.
Don’t be surprised if, along with the exhaust from right-wing lawnmowers, the smoke from firing guns at a practice range is made a climate crime, punishable by confiscation.
We wished Allison Paige Hawkes Godspeed, yesterday. Pollard’s Funeral Home, Methuen, Massachusetts, U. S. A., planet Earth, Milky Way, was very good to our family and to all who came to commiserate with us and to celebrate the wonderful and wonder-filled life of Allie Hawkes. She passed on Sunday, the sixth of December, less than a week ago. It was just after 8 in the morning. Her mother held her as she slept. She stirred enough to struggle to tell Christen that she loved her. Christen had her hand upon Allie’s heart as she left the painful, cancerous bonds of Earth. There could be no better way to finish one’s journey.
We compiled our photos, and Allie’s, and all the newspaper articles that Christen had saved. There were thousands of the former, dozens of the latter, and millions of memories. Christen, Allie’s dad, Gavin Hawkes, her sister-in-law, Kim Andon (brother Joe Wescott’s wife for 20+ years), Kim’s daughter, Sarah, “Grammie” Gretchen Wescott and I, her “Grampa” Bob, sorted and printed and distilled hundreds of photo’s to display during funeral services. Allie’s girlfriends created yet another “photo-board.” We were researching someone known more by others than by us; the breadth and depth of her people-rich life was, in part, news to all of us, even to her most-connected mother, Christen.
During Allie’s brief life, many days, weeks and months were consumed by cancer treatments and effects. Virtually all of those hours were shared, in person, by the world’s greatest mother. Christen became Allie’s primary nurse and watchful angel, more than once conveying the instructions of physicians and the applications of potent drugs, more accurately than nurses, themselves, remembered. Allie and her mother built a bond of mother-daughter love that is rare. Christen had not a burden, but an opportunity to do more mothering than most mothers have. We all tried to be involved, but it was truly a matter of learning from Christen what Allie had just gone through or, thankfully, what she had just done. She was a do-er, most effectively as a creator of friends.
At the funeral home most of the three families gathered to greet the hundreds of friends on whom Allie had left her impact. She didn’t have any casual friends, it seemed, but hundreds of good ones. They, and we, all felt a loss when her light faded out. Indeed, as her Camp Otter, YMCA, Wheelock, Marsh School, Methuen High and, so heartbreakingly, many of her nurses from the Floating Hospital, Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber explained, she was nowhere “just” another student, another friend or another patient. The “Allison Effect” is large on everyone she knew.
Ostensibly, funeral preparations included having her cousin, Sarah Wescott, speak about her lifetime friend. Sarah worked hard to get her words and feelings exactly as she wished to express them. I, Grampa Bob, was also going to say a few words, and though mine were not written in advance, I too had prepared what I wanted to say. In fact, my erstwhile comments were much modified as the afternoon of meeting so many of those who also loved Allie Hawkes. They changed what I knew about my granddaughter. So, I want to share what I had decided to say Friday evening, though could not.
Good evening and thank you all for sharing your love for Allie Hawkes. Before she died I thought I knew her pretty well. You, all, have told me so much more about her; culling the hundreds and hundreds of photos she and others took of the many places she went and events she attended, has made her even more wondrous in my heart and my memories so much richer.
When she was first diagnosed my first reaction was to tell her mother that she would be okay, and I believed it. For the following 19 years that belief was justified as she beat cancer back again, again and again… until she could not. My second reaction, as I would walk each morning, was to pray for a miracle essentially every day, and often, twice a day. I was trying to tell God what the correct miracle for Him to effect was, and exactly when to manifest it. I realize that a lot of our prayers are like that: giving God and Jesus instructions… as if we knew.
What I should have prayed for is mercy and understanding.
Each time our relatively crude medical tools brought her back to remission my conviction that I was issuing the correct instructions was reinforced. Every time cancer came back, I would feel that my miracle-instructions were flawed, somehow, or not specific enough, and I would redouble my efforts and word my supplications to be much more specific as to what I wanted God to do. I hope that what I did helped Allie in some way. I know that as the end approached she became more of a believer, ready to pass through that awesome door alone, always part of my prayers.
So, I had been praying for a miracle for most of her life rather blindly, it turns out. But I recognize, now, that the miracle was right here with us, all along.
In Methuen, Massachusetts a young woman is trying to prepare for a very early death. It’s not her fault; she’s done nothing wrong in her nearly 27 years. Indeed, from the very first she has been a bright, delightful person, quick to learn, quick to love pretty much everybody.
Inside her genes, however, something is not the same as most people’s. She can’t fight off dysfunctional cell growth. Her first cancer arrived when she was about 6, it’s not completely certain when, but she had been complaining of “back pain” for months before her mom finally got her to a “pediatric gastroenterologist” whose connections at Tufts Floating Hospital for Children found and diagnosed neuroblastoma. There can be no worse day for a mother, unless it’s the one approaching inexorably, almost exactly 20 years afterwards.
That’s a short dash, 27 years. In between those dates were 5 big battles with cancer, excellence in school, swim team, graduation from High School, excellence in college that included trips to New Orleans to help repair Katrina-damaged homes, trips to England and Ireland, visit to Paris through the Chunnel, Graduation from Wheelock College, Masters degree through Merrimack College, friends’ weddings, even one she coordinated, a trip to Peru and Machu Picchu only to run headlong into the fifth cancer struggle, now stretching into the last. Loving teaching, early childhood and special needs, was not enough. There never will be the full-time teaching position of which she dreamed.
How does one prepare for death? I don’t know. My good friend, Tony Fusco, prepared for his when an undiagnosed tumor in his brain stem proved inoperable, impossible to biopsy and ultimately fatal. I got to sit with him the last Sunday afternoon before he re-entered the hospital to try some other treatments multiple neurologists had only the faintest idea might help. I’d brought some nice scotch thinking we might enjoy a sip together but his gag reflex was so impaired he dared to sip only water. It was a good afternoon and I expected he’d be home again.
When the only option of a feeding tube was offered, Tony realized – decided – that it was a tube too far: no further treatments, thank you. His world shrank to a room at a beautiful hospice facility that was always busy with visitors and family. He had a huge heart; it took a couple of weeks for it to go to sleep.
Clearly he’d prepared for the end. He was 71. At his funeral I told him that I knew where to hide a flask for when I’d join him on a porch where he now lived, where we could enjoy a sip and analyze the world situation. He was a year younger than me.
How does one prepare at age twenty-six and three-quarters? Without an abiding religious faith it is hard to imagine. She believes in God, but hasn’t had a lot of religious education. I try to explain, but it is uncomfortable, certainly it was a year ago when the lung cancer appeared. It represented a third kind of cancer, and her tiny body could tolerate no chemotherapy. They operated and radiated, but the treatment was still a variation of repair and destroy with the overarching hope that the cancerous cells might be killed before the patient, herself. Her breathing hasn’t been very good – or comfortable – since then. Within a couple of months lesions were found in multiple places: brain, bones, pancreas and more. Now at Dana Farber, they’ve radiated as many places as possible and she’s been taking an oral chemo pill with side effects. It tended to slow down the growth, but never stopped it and now isn’t slowing it much, either.
There’s only one door open to her… to a place where the weaknesses of her body will no longer be a problem – a place where her health will become perfect. One needs a reason to hope in order to contemplate passing through that door, alone. Observers might say that she has no choice so “…she just has to deal with it.”
What does that mean: deal with it? If one has any trust in God it should be clear that trying to pass through when angry and bitter is probably not the right approach. One school of thought is that when you pass you’ll find exactly what you believed you’d find. If that is a fade-to-black scenario, and hopeless, then that is what it will appear to be. I believe that there is an eventual judgment, an audit if you will, of how well your tests were passed – tests you knew were coming when you agreed to accept the lifetime just ending. Your “you” or your soul, may or may not have aced everything. The life just ended may or may not be the last one you need to make your ascension, but Redemption is the unfailing lesson of the Bible. It doesn’t make sense that in the matter of life and death itself, that the opportunity to redeem oneself would be absent.
For the soul, the agreement to accept a new life that includes the needed tests, is the greatest act of love expressable.
Another path of spiritual guidance says that not only are we responsible for our un-passed tests, or “karma,” but also for our reason for being, our “dharma.” Both are part of judgment. The more aware we are while on this side of that door, the more likely we are to meet and exceed the reasons for this life. Life is not a knife-edge: Hell on one side and the gift of Heaven on the other; it is a path made broad by our free will. The choices we make have meaning.
When someone passes very young, there has been little time to make bad choices, which is to say, few sins have been committed. At the same time, few opportunities have presented for passing tests. Maybe a life that ends in youth is lived sacrificially so that those around you can pass their tests. Living that life is your test: a unique expression of love.
From the limited, somewhat fuzzy understandings of a human lifetime, this is my most comforting perception of the young lady’s life: one of sacrifice. Neither I nor anyone else on this side of the door is privy to the purposes of the lives of others, and barely able to grasp the meanings of our own. Still, this observer has recorded no imperfections in our young patient’s life.
Is she comforted thereby? Does she perceive the success of her life? Or does she feel she’s been punished or singled out for “bad luck?” I try to tell her to not fall into those ideas, but to approach the door with an open heart and mind, accepting of the possibilities of immense love on the other side.
Prudence has often commented on the casual mendacity of politicians, and that quality of theirs is troubling enough. New depths are plumbed, however, when hundreds of appointed, elected and hired “officials” agree to lie together for some tawdry political purpose. Many lie without knowing what that purpose even is. Suffice to say that the greatest power on Earth is unified belief, including evil belief.
Like the man or not, honest observers, liberals included, have to agree that hatred of Donald Trump inspired some of the most virulent and congruent political lying our nation has ever experienced. Virtually all of the lies have been exposed for what they were. Dishonest observers retain belief in many of those lies and have convinced themselves that because of what they perceive as true there is no possibility of compromise or even courtesy towards those who believe that the lies were, in fact, falsities. This mish-mash of lies and truths and the distrust of so many for so many others, provided the perfect breeding ground for the most widespread political lying yet: the Covid-19 pandemic.
It appears that only in the United States, where Donald Trump is running for re-election, has the Covid-19 epidemic played a significant part in the unseating of a government. Many countries have been hit hard by the initial attacks of the new, somewhat engineered, coronavirus that China spread across the world, but only in the United States has this medical threat been politicized. At the same time, and again, only in the U. S., leftist thugs have chosen the same moment to riot in dozens of cities. That resulted from a completely different set of lies from those told about Covid-19, and this isn’t the place to recount them, but the confluence of the two, essentially unique events, is itself unique and conveniently coincident in a political sense.
But “Covid” provided – and provides – a rich harvest of public policies – all left-leaning and largely unconstitutional – that are serving to twist electoral politics and sway votes based – on – half-truths – and outright lies. Everything from business and religious lockdowns, intrusions into personal properties and lives, and the enforcement of personal actions like mask-wearing, are based on half-truths at best, complete untruths at mid-range, or utter falsehoods at worst.
Americans have been misled. We hear constantly how many of us have died… DIED, from this awful scourge, now totaling some 169,000… THOUSAND(!) poor souls struck down by a disease that the Trump administration practically spread on purpose because all those people who work for Trump hate the rest of us. Remove the silliness from that sentence and we’re left with a statistic that is meaningless. The CDC counts “deaths” as people who died WITH Covid, not FROM Covid. Why would bureaucrats count such a serious phenomenon in such a flaccid way? Even people who died in accidents but who happened to test positive for Covid, are counted as Covid deaths. What good is a “statistic” like this?
Well, this half-truth serves erstwhile dictators who need to induce fear to gain compliance. There were reasons for fear in late February and March of this year. First, the virus protein was altered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, from a corona (shaped) virus that existed in weird, ugly bats! Few of us know much about bats in the first place, and most of us are a little fearful of them, thanks to various horror movies. A wonderment for the average person was: “Who the Hell cares what kind of viruses exist in Chinese bats?” Fair question. It was totally rational to be afraid of the entry of a bat virus into humans, especially from such ugly creatures as Chinese horseshoe bats. The researchers who first discovered the bat-source of the SARS-like novel coronavirus, were certainly frightened.
Another reason for fear, then, was China-caused rapid spread of the new virus around the world, especially in the middle East and Europe, areas where China had developed intensive trade relationships and to where Chinese personnel were traveling in large numbers. Scary numbers of cases. A third reason for fear… then, was that the U. S. was not sure what to do or how to do it to contain or prevent the disease, and all kinds of directives were being issued and soon abandoned in favor of other directives. People, officials, with no medical background were creating public policy on the fly upon the advice of medicos who were often wrong. But recommendations quickly became economic shutdown dictates. Americans’ private properties were being stripped from them without compensation in the hopes that stopping commerce would stop the virus.
It certainly stopped commerce.
Oddly, maybe, the most Democrat-controlled jurisdictions have imposed the tightest restrictions on business. Despite improving knowledge from Europe and Scandinavia, governors and mayors insisted on ever-tighter lockdowns. Amazingly, State and Municipal employees didn’t lose their incomes, nor were they forced onto unemployment or furloughed or, simply, fired. When a governor said “We’re all in this together,” he was really saying, “YOU’RE all in this together. I and everyone else who is paid by the state, we’re pretty much divorced from your problems, especially if you lose your business or your job. We will borrow some money – from YOU – to pretend to care about you today.”
So who is benefitting from tight, anti-business and anti-religious lockdowns? Certainly not the people who own or work at those businesses, nor the ministers, priests, choir directors or secretaries who work at places of worship, certainly not the believers whose unfettered right to worship has been soundly fettered without debate or legislation, and certainly not all the people who depended upon those shuttered businesses for their daily living, health, recreation, library services or exercise routines. So, who, exactly?
Is it all to keep healthy people from coming down with Covid? Maybe… that’s what we are told to justify forcing everyone to wear masks when outdoors at pain of monetary fines and even apprehension should we ‘fail to follow the law.’ Except that it’s not a law, it’s a gubernatorial impulse or, sometimes worse, a mayoral one. If asked, those worthies would declare adherence to “CDC” advice and the implied fulfillment of “science” because of that connection. Of course there is no science that informs us of the efficacy of masks or other face coverings, although you’d think there must be because elected officials clearly care so much about saving lives. Indeed, they care so much that they are willing to implore us to endure the discomfort of masks and, even better, to distrust anyone who isn’t wearing a mask. In fact, we should no longer trust anyone to not be about to spray us with Covid-laden spittle.
Did you know that hospitals are rewarded, in a sense, by up to $25,000 for treating a Covid-19 patient who dies in the hospital? That accident victim who died WITH Covid was worth $25 Grand if the right box was checked for C.O.D. Follow the money for the outrageous total of Covid deaths. China, our far-eastern friend who blessed the world with Covid-19, has 4.34 times as many people as the United States and about 5 times the population density. Yet, miracle of miracles, the U.S. has THIRTY-SIX AND A HALF TIMES as many Covid deaths. Ignorant governors… and malevolent ones, have been making rules to barely live by, based on BS statistics designed to hurt the President of the United States: an odd way to execute public policy.
Now the big battle is re-opening schools… because of the need to protect the children, don’t you see? School-age children, say, 5 to 17 years, are so slightly impacted by Covid that it is nearly impossible to state their Covid death rate in terms of percentage: the decimal point is too many places to the left. But despite the desire of most teachers to teach, their unions have hamstrung craven politicians into “hybrid” schooling (some education / some goofing off) for the Fall and beyond in some cases, or long delays in re-opening, as if they’d only just heard of Covid-19. Teachers are all college educated and it would be reasonable to expect them to know and follow the latest approximations of “science” in judging the safety of schools reopening with real teachers and real students. But, apparently not.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, not only did the teachers’ union force delays in reopening, they forced the county to prevent private schools from reopening, as well, all of which, essentially, were prepared to open safely. The county refused to even examine their reopening plans, citing the fact that public schools weren’t going to open, as if it mattered. Private schools are generally smaller, more lightly staffed and better able to enforce social distancing and other rules, and, it seems, more committed to real education.
The more one sees the tactics of various “public” employee unions – particularly teachers’ unions, one sees that worries about Covid are largely political and financial. Between home-schooling and private schools, the grand government school monopolies are threatened as never before, as is the hyper-sexualized, white evil oppression, bull-bleep they spend so much class time on as if educating. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
What will come of nightly riots and mayhem in major cities? Would the changes demanded by the anarchists and BLM Marxists make America stronger, fairer or more beautiful? Not a chance. If police departments closed down, incarcerations ended and white people gave up their homes to black screamers and haters, would the demands for the relinquishing of all white possessions end? No. Kow-towing to rioters or other thugs has never ended the thuggery… it simply increases the level of demands and changes the targets. In fact, changing public policy on the terms of rioters instead of on society’s carefully considered terms, is the stupidest path any responsible leader could follow. The stupidest.
How is it that so many people are holding office at this moment whose decisions to respond to public mayhem are all the stupidest of available choices? Have these mayors and governors always hated the United States or are they mere cowards? We know how several District Attorneys got elected with the help of socialist money – anti-American money, but are there no “lawmakers” who can craft legislation that will provide for their removal if they fail to prosecute criminals? Or even laws that require that EVERY case be brought to court even if unenthusiastically? Or shall public safety and the fulfillment of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments be at the whim of a single person without constraint of law?
What do we actually believe about our civil rights? It’s silly enough to wear masks outdoors, please don’t put on blinders, too.
