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“20-20” Not So clear

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Oh say, can you see?
Oh say, can you see?

As Minneapolis (and three dozen other cities) burns and is given over to lawless thugs because, evidently, it is politically correct to do so and politically incorrect to arrest looters and arsonists and vandals, the United States has to face some uncomfortable truths, and resolve to believe them, since they are, well… true.

Here is one: sixty years of federalized welfare has destroyed the lives, hopes and attitudes of many blacks.  It has also destroyed the black family unit which had been gaining ground at an accelerated rate for two decades prior to the Great society, and at an uneven, but relentlessly upward direction for seven or eight decades prior to that.

Here’s another:  government cannot “fix” racism, nor can it “make” people love one another, or desire to integrate with one another.  What government, through the adjudication of INjustice can do, is set standards and make clear the police, judicial and penal consequences for the mistreatment of any individual, whether civilly or criminally.

We have enough laws.  We have the most beautiful Constitution and amendments that create a legal  structure of equality of opportunity for every individual, and of equality under the law for every individual.  But the rights guaranteed on paper do not belong to the government nor do they come from government; they belong to United States citizens who have formed  governments to ensure, protect and enforce those rights.  And, when those rights are abrogated by institutions or by individuals, those same governments, who are formed by and paid by we the people, and who are obligated to defend, protect and serve US, must take correct, legal, swift action against the offender(s).

Unfortunately our political structures have failed, largely in order to serve themselves, to treat individuals as deserving of every right and freedom as sovereign individuals, but rather as members of groups – groups who can be defined by either victimhood or unfair advantage.  Identity politics is the underlying acid that has eaten away at the foundations of success for Americans.  It is the same acid that leaves us, nationally, nearly destitute, as we constantly borrow from future generations to make ourselves more comfortable or politically powerful (and wealthy) today.  For shame.

The long-term political structure in Minneapolis and in Minnesota, generated and managed the police and judicial environments that left large numbers of people so distrustful of authority that a spark like a bad police action ignited the pent-up hatreds that politicians have pretended for years have nothing to do with them.  Their reaction is to blame President Trump.  He’ll react, somehow, and almost no one will be happy with what he does or doesn’t do.  Under the Constitution, under our federal system of 50 sovereign states, and under hundreds of years of common law and morals, it is not the president’s job or duty to resolve the grievances suffered by an individual in Minneapolis, Minnesota, except  that he must direct the Department of Justice to ascertain whether federal laws or Constitutionally protected rights have been abrogated. 

He cannot override the government of Minnesota or of Minneapolis.  Yet as the office of president has become as much one of celebrity as of competence or leadership, people, and the press, expect every problem to be federalized.  Competing political forces are attempting to gain advantage by spewing their own hates and dislikes in efforts to gain power from a bad even that, under group identity politics, is portrayed as a national problem.  It is an individual problem, allowed to fester by incompetent local police management and union politics, which played out against an individual, whose family, without question, deserves justice and probably substantial compensation for wrongful death at the hands of the city of Minneapolis.

If the political “leaders” of that city had any vision, they’d be having every other police officer in that department hand-deliver notes of regret and sorrow to Mr. Floyd’s family, with promises to prevent any such event.

The problem is that the utterly corrupt political cabals that generated the equally utter hopelessness that engenders the bottomless hatred for “white” society and control systems – like police – is not the group we should expect to propose a solution for utter corruption.  Just saying.  These are human conditions, created by humans.  Humans can, if armed with the right attitudes and beliefs – philosophies, if you will – prescribe right policies and applications of law and freedom that will unleash the creative, constructive power of inner-city citizens regardless of color.  If you are unable to believe this is possible, then you cannot help form the new structure… can you?

To help the irresolute, Prudence can provide a “coral fact,” as they say in Hawaii, to wit: increasing welfare payments to anyone is nowhere part of the solution.  So, let’s think fresh thoughts.  Actually, they need not be all that fresh, since the mechanisms of success and personal independence are rather well known.  “Oh, c’mon, Prudence!  These are complex problems.  Blacks have been repressed and discriminated against for hundreds of years in this country.  The solutions will take time.”  Words to that effect will be tossed across important looking meeting rooms for months after these riots are almost forgotten by the “press.”

Some very serious person who “sees the big picture” is certain to say, “We can’t just cut people off from their EBT, can we.”  It should be a question but the speaker isn’t seeking any other answer… at all.  She (most likely a she who feels great sympathy for the downtrodden) is part of the welfare industry, not so very well paid, but paid above average, plus state benefits and pension.  And she cares a whole heck of a lot.  She always votes Democrat because they do the most to help the poor.  Ultimately the meeting breaks up after resolving to petition the state for massive reconstruction funds and new housing upgrades, and to have the entire congressional delegation file and back legislation to provide tax breaks to industries to invest in the riot-torn neighborhoods across the country.  They all feel very good about their answers to the problems.  Why, it could be 8, 9 years before there is any unrest in those cities.

People are made weaker from handouts, sympathy and low expectations.  Strength, self-esteem and purposeful living come from attainment.  Having someone tell you that even though you are a personal failure, full of hatreds and resentment for having accomplished nothing of value to others, that you are important and “entitled” to the same “equality” that others have, only weakens the listener.  He or she knows that his or her status and independence have not improved one iota since the last time a social worker told them they were just as worthy as any white person.  After a couple of generations of welfare subsistence, the “white” system is an enemy, not an example; the armed defenders of an obviously racist country and society are merely armed enemies whose actions are invalid at every police, judicial and penal level.  There is no possibility of compromise.

“Piss me off enough and I’m gonna’ burn your house down.”

It simply is not Prudent to attempt to fix the problems, now a mere membrane away, with the policies of the last 60 years that created them.  What have we got to lose?

One can observe the feckless reactions of mayors and governors to the transformation of “loving” protests into coordinated  riots across the country.  Are these failures based on political motivations?  They certainly are not based on executive decision-making.  What fools these liberals be.  Have we decided, politically, that there is more than one America?  That model has placed some of these nincompoops into power.  Do they fear losing their political influence so much that they will allow the destruction of their jurisdictions so as not to “offend” destructive mobs?  If there were ever an un-American group/organization it is Antifa, and these are the people who must not be offended?  For shame.

The neighborhoods where welfare is the largest source of income, and any family now in its second or later generation of welfare as its source of income, must be transformed.  This won’t happen by building nicer public housing, nice as it may be.  Even for those who have come to terms with never being independent of welfare handouts, they must be directed, guided, rewarded for and, ultimately, forced onto a path of attainment.  What does that mean?

First, responsibility.  This requires moral judgment on the part of the welfare industry, something for which current policies and employees thereof are incapable.  We have created a process of handing out monies by people who are just as resentful of “white” attainment models as are the increasingly hopeless clients of the system.  More welfare yields more resentment, so it’s not a solution model.  Public assistance must reward attainment, not mere acquiescence.  That is, recipients need to be taught to believe in their own ability to be responsible for themselves and, despite everything they’ve been taught or heard for 60 or 150 years, that their efforts will succeed. 

This won’t be done through “training programs,” “computer literacy” classes or voter recruitment drives.  Some form of “responsibility boot-camp” is required, operated by people who believe in free-enterprise capitalism and in “e pluribus unum.”  What have we got to lose?  Political influence?

Our existence as a nation depends on the ideas  that make us a nation.  We are not a nation because of shared ethnicity, but because of shared ideas and ideals, the main one of which is “Out of many, One” – e pluribus unum.  This is the American dream: that all kinds of people, recognizing that people are NOT all the same, but are all entitled to equality of opportunity – to make the most and best of themselves – and to equality under the law, can live as one people!  There is little else that a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” can honestly do… or should do.  The breakdown of order in multiple cities here in late May of 2020, is the result of attempting to dishonestly  do for people not because of their equality under the law, but because of their inequality  under the law.

The socialist outlook is to disperse responsibility for failure and to force sharing of success.  And, they teach this fallacy, having assumed control, politically and actually, of the government education monopoly.  Without changing the belief of all of our citizens that there is a “sub-class” of people who are incapable of being responsible unto themselves and their families, the end result will fail to strengthen society.  We cannot “pay off” people who hate the concepts of America and thereby get them to suddenly love this nation.

Every single program going forward must be designed in accord with the principles of personal responsibility and of the opportunity to attain to ever greater success and status.

Attainment is not about getting rich, although money can, with the right attitudes, be part of the measure of it.  Getting richer  in many more ways than money is the truer measure.  So far, and it’s been only about 100,000 years, so it’s not yet proven, humans have found only one way to advance: by attaining to every level of advancement, which is to say, by striving for each.  So far, and it’s been only about 100,000 years, no one has been able to give attainment to anyone, only the opportunity to reach for it.

It would seem that no government has ever been able to grant anyone the rewards obtained by striving and earning a certain level of attainment, only money – which has never made anyone a better human.  It follows that no quantity of sympathetic or even empathetic words has ever changed the outcome of pretending that a person is not responsible for his or her decisions, actions or feelings; likewise, those words cannot change a handout into attainment.  Yet every human being has the spark of attainment from birth… until taught otherwise.

Clearly it is parents who must instill the essential morals and beliefs… and decency into their children.  Clearly millions of parents have failed miserably at their duty; our governments have failed by supporting “families” that take no responsibility for themselves, and less for their children.  Financing generational resentment is not a plan.  As local and state governments finally recognize the need to stop rioters, the question of what to do with violent, destructive, anti-American thugs who are not interested in the path of attainment, must be answered.  Do we think we’re going to coddle them enough or pay them enough to change their hatred to love?  Do we intend to just send them home to apartments that we renovate to make their living conditions more fair?

Where should they go?  What kind of jobs can they do – or would they do – to support themselves?  Drug dealing?  Gun dealing?  Extortion?  House painter?  Roofer?  Carpenter?  Do we expect to incarcerate them all until they turn nice or die?  In part, their state of hatred and resentment is “our” fault and we can’t continue treating them as we have under the “Great Society.”  Do we try to be “nicer” to them?  Those willing to riot and destroy businesses and willing to kill police, are not part of American society.  They are not like you and me and our children.  Should we reward their hatred for decent society because we feel sorry for them?  Where should we let them live?  Where should they be so that the rest of us are protected from them?

Should they get to eat if they don’t work to support themselves legally?  That’s a deeper question than it sounds.

Economics, Education, Governance, Immigration, Responsibility

The Eve of Destruction

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It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get. – Confucius

History has shown that political power gained through the marshaling of hate is usually hard to maintain, and always destructive – never constructive.  The only path toward maintaining hate-based power is to identify a very large set of enemies whom hate-leaders can paint as hate-worthy, and more: threats to the peace and prosperity of the “oppressed” in-group said leaders wish to control.  It is Prudent to recognize the “hate-ees” in order to defend against the hat-ers.

Despite being consistently accused by the leftist hate leaders, of employing hate themselves, most of the hated are best described as traditionalists.  Let’s consider how the process has developed.  One large group that is cast as hateful are those of us who believe strictly in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution it spawned.  By nearly direct implication that group is nearly congruent with Christian, or Judeo-Christian belief structures.  In other words, Biblical morality is at least professed by most of those who also believe in the founding principles of the United States.  It’s no surprise, but tangent to our point.

Since Roe v. Wade the power of litigation and crafty parsing of words and phrases whose usage has obviously changed since the Federalist Papers were written – a special aspect of redefining words and meanings to control the argument – has well-served those who don’t believe in the moral structure and personal responsibility imposed by “free will,” also called “individual sovereignty.”  Socialism fills their wants, not a constitutional republic.  Unfortunately the defense of tradition now has two, new, giant weapons arrayed against it: 1) Social media; and, 2) Ignorance.

Social media allow for near-instant sharing, or spreading, of ideas… not to be confused with truth, reality and intelligence.  It spreads the last three, too, but those are not dangerous to honest people.  But ideas – “memes” in the current parlance – can be shared very quickly without filters of contemplation, research or understanding, a perfect condition for hatreds.  One person offended can rapidly become thousands and tens of thousands: a political force for the elected dishonest to take advantage of.  Social media and the handiness of cell-phones and their video cameras do great and instant damage to public discourse and the once great “free press.”  Further, it has provided for the concentration of information into the hands and biases of fewer than 100 people, of whom traditionalists – conservatives – are both suspicious and skeptical.  No system of individual liberty can stand for long without the free flow, and publication, of ideas.  An algorithm here, an algorithm there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real mind control.  The thought-police are standing by.  What will happen when governors are elected (thereby) who agree with defining conservative ideas and tradition, itself, as hate speech?

Ignorance is mostly of history and of the lessons of history, although ignorance of, say, climate science is also a large part of how socialism has gained fresh currency among young people in the United States, of all places.  We the people, who shucked off monarchy to establish freedom as a founding principle, are the last people on earth who should find socialism attractive; socialism is the same as monarchy, except that the party is the monarch, of which the chairman is the King.  What do children growing up in the United States have to do with socialism?  Ignorance: the only soil  in which socialism can grow.

Socialists, inherent enemies of individualism, not only purvey ignorance of history, they live on it like parasites.  They play a long game, beginning with dominance of education – their barely employable graduates are the result, and they all seem to prefer socialism over free enterprise and private property.  Bereft of ways to earn enough to live like people on TV… or down the street, they find it easy to blame traditionalists for their ill fortunes and to demand recompense for attempting to follow fortunate people’s rules.  “Forgive my debt,” they say, and leading (following) politicians proclaim that ‘meme’ from the rooftops.  If, as tradition and (un)common sense dictate, one disagrees with that demand, one is transformed into a hater and, probably, a racist… whatever “racist” even means, any longer.

Sexual traditionalists are also accused of bigotry, hatred, homophobia and theocracy.  Simply declaring support for “traditional” marriage can cause boycotts of one’s business and disavowal by political leaders and even by municipal governments, such that one’s business may not locate a branch within a jurisdiction because of “hate speech” by the owner.  The facts and truths associated with said “hate speech” have no bearing, as is often the case with marshaled hatreds.  It is not the truth that stirs crowds and gangs – hatred motivates in the vacuum of ignorance.  By increasing ignorance, certain people fertilize the soil where hatred grows.

All in all, the Prudent observer can conclude that those on the left end of the political spectrum are more involved than are rightists, with hate and accusations of hate.  Inevitably, of late, attempts to engage leftists in substantive discussions of (pick one) immigration, education, health care, energy, climate, gender, religion, any of the Bill of Rights, trade, economics, the Constitution, America, Mexico, South America, colonialism, Democrats, Republicans, Trump, Obama, housing or farming, and a few other topics, results in accusations of (pick one) White Supremacy, Nazism, Fascism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, or hatred.

Those on the right, it appears, tend to laugh at much of the above, or shake their heads and lament the poor state of education that enables other Americans to believe the things professed.  Conservatives and “traditionalists” are always on the defensive; leftist haters are always the attackers, and have the advantage.  To what end?

And, finally, will traditionalists, defenders of the Constitution, propriety and reason, manage to hold back leftist destruction?  Will we return to secure borders, for example?  Will reality regain sway on college campuses?  Will the federal budget ever be cut?  Will “public” education be made to include appropriate American history content, reading of books, basic math and writing skills, possibly cursive writing (so that older documents may be read), and the Constitution?  Will the subject and science of gender return to reality?  Will honor, duty, commitment and personal responsibility return to primacy in interpersonal relationships?  Will the administrative, largely hidden and secretive state apparatus be made more open and honest?  Will the three branches of the federal government return to their Constitutional bounds and purviews?  Will honesty be restored as the operating public and private philosophy?  Will e pluribus unum regain its primacy as the true “American Dream?

Education, Governance, Responsibility

ULTIMATE and PERPETUAL

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America’s accelerating trend toward denial of reality – and of codified law – is and should be worrisome.  Unfortunately, large segments of the polity see no reason to worry because the gulf of unreality has yielded political power, or comfort, and promises more.  Confronted with claims of actual, or imminent, damage linked to the rush toward unreality, those who find the unreality comforting are compelled toward hatred of the claimants, even to the point of attacking them.  One should wonder whether the trend alluded to is comprised of innocent reaction to “reactionary” opposition to “progress,” or is it the fruit of evil, aggressively transformative attack.  Why would the latter be so?

The prime question, of course, is who benefits from the disunity of the United States and following that, the discrediting and dissembling of the ideas of America?  The unimaginative can readily suggest that “the RUSSIANS” or “the CHINESE,” or “IRANIANS,”  would want to destroy us, but those peoples actually like us well enough, and respect and love us enough to come to the United States for a better life.  There are relatively small subsets of both Russia and China that definitely DO work toward our failure, but not because of their, or our, nationalities.  The forces who would revel in our spiritual  destruction are, themselves, spiritually motivated, unrecognizably in some instances, even in their own mirrors.

America is a spiritual invention.  Prudence would cause us to not call it a religious invention, given the many ways religions have so distorted the inherent purity of spirituality.  The waves of peoples who sacrificed to come to the “New World” to begin America, did so with strong spiritual underpinnings… essentially Judeo-Christian.  Were they perfect?  Clearly not, as we look back and judge them from today’s sensitivities, but at their times they were doing their level best as they strove to make a better civilization than the corrupted ones they left behind.  And religious freedom was – and is – crucial to the new form of self-government that evolved from their sacrifices, and repeatedly since.

We should wonder why Judeo-Christianity is the prime target of attack in the U. S. over the past 60 to 70 years.  As the basis of our laws and social order – conscience, if you will – its destruction is the most rapid way to destroy “America” and all of its quaint ideas of individual sovereignty and responsibility, private property, charity and sacrifice.  Who would want to do that?

If we concentrate on the enemies of America – or of our Constitution – as competitors for oil, or food, or land or military power… or competitors for limited budget resources who disagree on how to make life “better” for all of us, we will miss the point, tragically and historically.  Our misdirected concerns expose our failure to comprehend American exceptionalism.  It exposes, as well, the danger of relinquishing public education – and much of our administrative ‘state,’ and even parts of our law-enforcement and judiciary – to people who agree with our enemies.

“America” does not, and cannot, run or survive on its own.  President Reagan observed that we are only, ever, one generation away from losing it altogether.  This powerful country?  With this military?  With our wealth?  All these McDonalds?  One generation?  Surely not. 

Let’s open our eyes.

America can survive only so long as its citizens believe in it… simple.  We have to believe in our Constitution, in our founding, in personal liberty as well as personal responsibility, and in what we term, “Judeo-Christian” tradition.  Unfortunately, as more and more people are attracted to dis-belief in God, they are encouraged to disbelieve in the United States.  No one outside of the United States is going to carry the burden of believing in the ideas that sustain it for us.  It is our test of citizenship and no one’s else.

“We the People of the United States, (they were people with quite similar moral compasses, if not religious upbringings) in Order to form a more perfect Union, (consider the capitalized words to this point: We, People, United, States, Order, Union) establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, (sic) promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain (wonderful choice, there) and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  These words cannot be improved upon.

The intent of Americans, then, was incontrovertibly NOT to create a more powerful central government… or to create a new monarchy… certainly not to establish a theocracy or an aristocracy of inherited baronies and dukedoms.  It wasn’t even to create a more powerful military.  Americans wanted to live and let-live; develop their nation and prosper without wars.  Wars have always vexed the “New Jerusalem,” some completely from outside, some as would tear us asunder, but all that was desired for the first 8 generations or so was a “return to normalcy” after each conflict was over.

For a like period “we” had no interest in dominating other peoples or re-shaping their societies and governments for them.  But almost from the start, and more specifically following the second Civil War (“The” Civil War), forces – or A force – has arrayed itself against the ideas  of America, against the dream of e pluribus unum.  Why?  Who would care how we live or govern ourselves?  And even if “they” didn’t like how we chose to do things in our own country, what would prompt “them” to infiltrate us and attempt to tear us apart?  Something, apparently.

Is it not apparent that “they” are not simply envious churls?  Looked at from a position of Prudence, the impetus to destroy the first nation founded on anti-tyranny seems spiritual, not material.  Indeed, the two competing philosophies, or faiths, dare we say, if one is represented by the ideas of America, would be essentially Judeo-Christianity and socialism-communism.  Which, from a broad perspective, still begs the question: why bother to destroy America?  Socialism has proceeded on its destructive path quite well despite the presence of the United States.

In a way we are engaged in the ultimate, and perpetual, struggle between darkness and light, good and evil.  Our enemy can survive only by weakening the strong, sapping our strength.  It behooves us to acknowledge that we have the seeds of “goodness” and the strength of Light, and that it is high time we reinforced and nurtured those things, and defended them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, rooting out the latter. 

What might that defense entail?

Governance, Immigration, Responsibility, Trump

(Word)holes, Redux

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Many people worthy of trust and respect are seriously upset about the president’s crudeness.  He reportedly asked why “we” should allow people from various so-called “shithole” countries to immigrate to the United States?  For all of its crudeness, offensiveness and vulgarity, it is a very good question – one we should not be afraid to ask.

Well, the circumstance of the comment and the comment itself are both fairly straightforward, even simple.  But the inherent permutations and nuances are profound, sad, and instructive. This requires some parsing and mapping of the “splatter” that has emanated from the splat of a single word into the miasma of politics, hate, government, and the “American Dream… not to mention social media and hate.  Didn’t I already mention “hate?”  We shouldn’t overlook hate as a driver in modern… umm, modern ahhh, well… modern everything: media, news, broadcasting, ‘friend’ships, dialogue, religion, holidays, commerce, advertising, movies, philosophy and casual rumination.  Facebook, too.  Sad.

So, first observation is that every person who has talked about, proclaimed about or even thought about the description of many countries as “shitholes,” could in a few minutes, list a dozen or two dozen countries that fit the description!  Let’s change the term to “backward countries” and each could list three dozen.  What does it mean to make the identification?

It means, generally, that those countries have truly crappy politics.  Our politics are pretty crappy, too, granted, but, as Churchill observed, democracy is the worst form of government ever tried… except for all the others.  Corollary to that gem is this: The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Even those who could construct a list of “backward” countries probably cannot describe what is “wrong” with their politics – the system of leaders, laws and lies that govern their populations.  Typically, under the blanket of crappy politics, the economics of these countries are also pretty crappy… sorry, “backward.”  The result is extreme stratification, poor education, low skill levels, limited industrialization and little imagination.  Simultaneously, the BELIEFS of their citizens are likely to be very different from those of the majority of ours.

Changing beliefs is the primal tool for the weakening and subjugation of peoples.

One might reply that “America is the melting pot” and go on to predict that “we” will “make” those unfortunate immigrants “better” and therefore more like ourselves.  Seems like hubris.  This attitude sounds magnanimous and sympathetic but it was never true.  If there is an American myth, that’s it.  We have functioned fairly well as a “salad bowl,” but never as a melting pot.  Americans of every origin and kind learned to live and thrive together, yet they were never forced to change who they were, beyond learning and following our constitution and laws.  But there were very distinct differences about when America “worked” and how things are, now, when so many consider our country and institutions to be “broken.”  The key is a grand misunderstanding of what is “The American Dream.”

The real and enduring “American Dream” can be stated only thus: That all kinds of people can come together in FREEDOM, respective of one another, respective of law and reason, free to follow God as each sees fit, and responsible to themselves and others for the consequences of their actions.  This sentence summarizes the U. S. Constitution’s connection to individuals.  Not connection to groups, cliques, whether religious, emotional or political, but to individuals, much the way that Jesus described individual responsibility to the laws of God.  “America” represents the boundless opportunity offered to every individual to perfect him or her self: the pursuit of happiness.  And no less, or more.

This is not how many view the “American Dream” or “America,” itself, today.  Socialist thought perceives control of individuals as the high point of governance, the exact opposite of the teachings of Christ or of the values and purpose behind the founding of the United States.  To accomplish complete control – and different kinds of socialists have tried many ways to do so – it is essential to place people into groups, or “identities” for whom certain laws will apply, whether to control that group or apply to another group or to all others(!) in order to control THEM.  There is no clearer example than brown-skinned people as an over-group, and African-Americans, as the driving sub-group, and descendants of slaves, the most exalted of the “drivers.”  Barring descent from slaves, having marched in Selma or having stood near Martin Luther King, Jr., suffices.

As with the growth of federal welfare programs, the epithet of “racist” has become almost standard within the belief structure of many black or brown-skinned residents of the U. S.  The charge of “racist” works to control the “other group” of essentially all “Whites,” including modifying their language and actions.  This has yielded political power to the modern kind of socialists: American liberals.  This, in part, explains the immediate descent to charges of racism emanating from one participant of the immigration meeting during which the president spoke so crudely.  But, it doesn’t make it true.

Welfare, itself, is a gigantic difference, since the 1960’s, from when earlier waves of immigrants reached our shores.  Those from Ireland, for example, came to take care of themselves and their families, as did Italians, Poles, Portugese, Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Germans, Russians, Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Syrians, Lebanese and Egyptians and many others.  Did they come perfectly?  No.  We didn’t send ships or planes to bring them here more quickly, either.  They were strong and self-selected to endure the sacrifice of leaving everything behind to start anew.  This is no longer so.

Immigrants in recent decades have been encouraged and assisted for purposes of “diversity,” the opposite of e pluribus unum.  Immigrants , today, receive fundamental – and generously comforting – public support, benefits, even cash, yet are not required to meet ANY tests applied to earlier generations.  They need not learn English, they need not become citizens (refugees, asylees) they need not assimilate.  Indeed, they need not even follow laws, often being released for offenses that citizens pay dearly for committing.  One might observe that their beliefs are not those of the “American Dream,” but of taking advantage of our official guilts and sympathies… or of selling drugs, or worse.

We are stretching our capacities to accommodate immigrants, including illegal entrants, even to the point of breaking our own laws, local and federal, to make them comfortable.  Yes, we are an “immigrant” nation, by past definition – most assuredly not by the current one.  I am glad someone with authority and sensibility is asking, “Why should we welcome immigrants from the (backward) countries of the world?”  What we have been doing of late is certainly not in the national interest, which is the primary business of a president, one hopes, although it may fulfill the interests of political partisans and of those who wish America to not exist as we know it.  Ask that question again, Mr. President, louder.

A second observation instructs that the president cannot, ever, trust in the confidence or even honesty of anyone from Congress or the “press” and damned few from the executive branch.  Trump failed to take note of the many lessons of the past year and more, when he posed the question everyone in the room, except Mr. Durbin possibly, a mendacious Democrat of proven, documented unreliability, was thinking and should be thinking: Why should we welcome immigrants who are unlikely to contribute to our economy or standards of living, and whose beliefs are antithetical to the fundaments of the U. S. Constitution or of the “American Dream.”

The ridiculous process of “hating” the president (and others) for so many things of which most of us are also guilty, and so readily accusing him of racism, transphobia, Islamophobia or a dozen other awful constructs, is corrosive and intensely destructive of our “unum” for which millions have bled and died, sacrificed and struggled.  If we are seeking perfection in or from our elected leaders we are fools.  They need, like John Kennedy, only to be pure enough to set a course that is pro-American.  The conversations never disclosed, that the Kennedys had then, or that brother Ted ever had, or by ANY other president, would curl our earlobes.  The profanity and privately voiced prejudices of EVERY president, have been, until recently, kept out of the news because their disclosure would have been so destructively irresponsible.  What we didn’t know didn’t hurt us; had we known all of it we’d have been damaged and history made far different.

News outlets of every kind hope to make history by ripping away confidentiality, no matter the damage.  Their hatreds justify the damage… for shame.  Do we think – do I think – that Trump will become perfect in order to avoid that damage?  Hardly.  When I pray about him it is to cause some intercession that will abridge the worst of his impulsive communication.  It is not that he will disappear, leaving leadership to others.  I have no love for him, but no hatred.  I grasp his attitudes, and even share some, not, I hope, the worst of them.  But then, I try to live on purpose and not in comparison, as does he, I suspect.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.  For all of his flaws I believe Trump is on stage exactly when needed by this country.  I want him to succeed where his direction and intention is right and best – or at least better – than where we were heading prior, God willing.