This is a repost, but one that has some meaning to me on the start of Memorial Day weekend. Please, all of you be safe.
Soldiers heading towards Omaha Beach.
When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence. As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us. My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America. It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area. Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily. Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before. I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.
And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did. They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade. These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal. Bastogne. Chosin Reservoir. Da Nang.
One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944. His sister was a friend of my father. As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math that I would later learn, though he was doing it decades before I was born. He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18. No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name. Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.
Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.
The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism. The value of the Constitution. The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church. Those boys who traveled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving. The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them. And sometimes die for them.
Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:
Corny? Yes.
The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when. A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built. There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms. These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.
Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years. It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.
I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.
Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.
Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens. Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population. A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American. 10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.
I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night. The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there. I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by. She spoke no English. One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?” I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.
“Es muy dificil.” It’s too difficult.
The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States. I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers. Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom. This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark. I love England. I love Denmark. I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.
If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee. Or Amerikansk in Denmark. My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English. They wouldn’t be Danish. They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.” Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish. I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.
25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria. One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060. The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.
As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp. These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity. They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.
The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government. Division is the strength of these politicians. “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?” “Abolish ICE.” “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.” “Living wage for all.” “Common sense gun laws.” Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.
These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take. They don’t get any of this from their family, either. Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did. It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.
Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.
As I said, I had faith in the Constitution. It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text. On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all. But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four. Change that number? Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.
If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything. It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it. The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.
And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?
So correct in your analysis. I know few of the under 60 generation that know anything of our history. Even history of the past 100 years. However, I did instill history into my children as was instilled in me by my parents. My in-laws were from Italy, came here in the depression, learned to read, write and speak in English and took the citizen ship exam to become citizens. They would not even teach their children Italian because they believed you were in America and needed to be an American. How times have changed. Our language has been bastardized with “woke” meaning. We work for the politicians rather than they for us. It is a sad state for this country.
A friend of mine has told me a story a couple of times, about his father taking him to visit my friend’s grandmother. She and her husband had immigrated from Poland around the time of WW1. His dad spoke to his mother in Polish, and my friend, then 8 or 9 years old, asked his grandmother to teach him Polish. She drew his attention to the American flag pinned up on the wall and told him, in her broken English, that Polish was the language of the past; the United States was the greatest country in the world, he was American, and English was the language of the future.
That was then.
That is why my generation’s Portuguese is rubbish. “Americans speak English”.
European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century were eager to assimilate, to become American, despite the culture and language and religious differences that challenged them. Ancient, grainy black-and-white photos of newly arrived citizens-to-be show them smiling and waving American flags, working menial positions while living a hardscrabble existence as they worked to find a niche in this wonderful land of opportunity.
Compare and contrast that to the hordes of surly, sulking, terminally parasitic recent arrivals who only came here for the handouts and still feel cheated, somehow, while living on our dime. The only thing remotely ‘American’ about them is their slavish devotion to the Democrat party, which promises them an endless stream of freebies in exchange for their loyalty, without even asking them to assimilate.
It is with immense sadness that those of us on the right have seen our republic devolve into a sort of perverse, ersatz monarchy, the likes of which the founding fathers could not possibly have imagined in their worst nightmare. Sorry, Ben Franklin. It appears that we could not keep that republic after all.
Technology hasn’t helped. You can successfully avoid learning any English and interacting with any fully assimilated citizens today thanks to the Internet. That leaves all assimilation to . . . government schools. And we know what they teach today.
Great post John. I agree fully. To sooth my troubled nerves, I look to history for examples, and one good source is “the Fate of Empires” by John Glubb:
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
It isn’t optimistic, but it gives me some comfort to see that the mill wheels of history are grinding on as they always have. We live in a time of the Empire’s collapse. It’s not new, and we’re not special. That’s just how it is. I can’t stop it, and neither can you, or anyone else.
I’ve also read a lot about why this is the case, and have decided that where any society is, there will be concentrations of power. These are attractive to people who would rather wield power than develop a more normal life (‘Paths, I call them). The life span of a societal organization is determined by how long it can resist the takeover of those people. Democracies last around 200 years. We’re into OT now.
I’ve written about Glubb’s prediction before. He’s not wrong. Remember Rome – they got a clock reset when they jumped to Empire. But they didn’t have China breathing down their neck . . . .
I have repeatedly asked why we need to import the vast number of ‘immigrants’ from third world cess-pools.
The answer always is that there is a decline in native births and we need those extra people to fund/pay for our social nets, pensions, healthcare etc.
However, it appears that a significant bunch of these ‘immigrants’ simply land here, go on some forms of social assistance and then lobby to bring family over, to help them draw welfare apparently.
I have pointed out numerous times that we don’t need to keep expanding the numbers as population drops have happened numerous times in the past, with no ill effects, or with economic positive outcomes.
WW 1 followed by the Spanish Flu decimated the country, but was followed by, whats known as the roaring 20s.
WW 2 resulted in millions of deaths, but was followed by a economic boom in the 45 to 60’s boom.
When you research history, you will find that a major population drop is always followed by economic positive decades. Even as far back as the Bubonic Plagues of the middle ages.
So the theory of importing third world people with no shared culture is historically and demonstrably the wrong thing to do.
Yes – the idea that we need to import people in mass numbers is based on bad economics. Japan seems to be doing fine . . . .
Thank you for that reminder on this under celebrated weekend. I will never ever stop loving my country or endeavoring to learn more of its history.
Recently caught 2 of 3 episodes of a show called my grandfathers war. Each of the two grandchildren, adults now, were female and actresses. One’s grandad commanded a British ship that was involved in the arctic voyages to supply the Russians. He was also involved in the Dunkirk rescue. Learned things I never knew that occurred and the environment in which they were done.
We will never know all the Pointe Du Hoc type stories. Maybe if those hollywood types were or are liberal they will no longer be is my wish.
I just started reading about the Arctic voyages this weekend. Some of them were disasters!
Thank you for the kind words.
The truth about the US Constitution was revealed by the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791 as ‘taxation without representation is fine if we do it’. The purpose of the American Revolution was for a new American aristocracy to push its way past the British aristocracy to the head of the tax feeding trough. “We the 1% of the 1%” doesn’t have the same ring as “We the People”, does it? Jefferson was the best of the Founding Lawyers, yet he was still serviced by the cute family slave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
The draftees you knew about having noble motivations doesn’t mean the government employees declaring war had noble motivations. Your head was poured full of fiction by government employees. War is merely the largest of big government programs. War is the health of the state. Yes, I feel sympathy and respect for the slaughter of the draftees you knew, but they were lied to from birth. The reality of government is the Pentagon Papers. Government is a protection racket, whose nature as a protection racket is hidden by a state religion promulgated by an established church. In the US, the established church is the government (“public”) school system.
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” — Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
http://www.mit.edu/people/fuller/peace/war_goering.html
Agree with everything you said, but we should remember that the Whiskey Rebellion was technically successful, as they never did pay the taxes, and in part because of their actions the whiskey tax was repealed.
They had representation. The taxes were duly voted on and approved by Congress. The farmers just didn’t want to pay them.
> They had representation. The taxes were duly voted on and approved by Congress.
Only by a technicality. Wikipedia entry: The “whiskey tax” became law in 1791, and was intended to generate revenue for the war debt incurred during the Revolutionary War.
War debt? There was no American Congress in existence to agree to that debt. Rather, some British traitors decided, hey, we’ll steal the title to tax from the British aristocracy, then tax the peasants more to repay our costs for doing it. That whiskey was being used for money, displacing a currency which was a debt to the Eastern rich people. When a country is paying bankers interest to create and manage a currency for them, that interest percentage means you are giving the bankers that percentage of the entire GNP.
https://mises.org/library/mystery-banking
Remember Burge’s Law:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respecT
Codex’s corollary:
5. Once the suit is rank and crawling with maggots, claim it was ALWAYS this way.
Regardless of the right or wrong of the Whiskey Rebellion, those people did have representatives.
The punchline:
We were the bad guys, and the nazis were the victims. Weimar Germany was a trial run for what they wanted to do to the rest of the world, and when the Germans rejected that violently, international bankers rallied the rest of the worlds’ governments to do its bidding and crush them. As it continues to do to this day.
Or, it was geopolitics. The more I read about every country’s leader in WWII (the majors) the less I like them. Churchill wanted a broken-up Europe. Stalin wanted Europe. Roosevelt was riddled with commies.
On and on.
I was born in 1960, raised in West Michigan, where I still live, by two working parents, who somehow managed to buy a restaurant, while my dad still continued to work his full time job at a local foundry. The town was less than 1,000 people, and my parents were the type who would often have people stop in and spend the night, if they were either down on their luck, or passing through, and had a car break down, which happened a few times.
I was one of 5 kids, 4 boys and a girl. All 5 of us turned out pretty decently, loving our country, and helping others, etc. I had several college offers, for a few different things, but instead, I spent over 35 years in a foundry, just like my dad. And even though I have an IQ that is fairly high, I never once regretted working doing manual labor for a living, to support my kids, from my 3 biological ones with my first wife, and 2 adopted with my second wife.
The one thing that really angers me is that while I graduated high school in 1978, I would have joined the military and went to Vietnam if the war was still ongoing. It never occurred to me that our government would lie to us, until much later, when now it is a given. While Donald Trump was in many ways an ass, he was refreshing in that he never was one to pull his punches. He knew that the media would make his statements into a lie, so he took to twitter to make his statements directly to the people. The leftists hated that, and so did everything they could do to get rid of him, or to make his administration ineffective. No big surprise there, but the Republicans did much the same thing, with Paul Ryan leading the charge.
It is best now if we just get ready to ride things out, and watch closely what happens, and try and remain calm and ready for anything.
Amen.
Because without the Constitution – anything can happen.
Born in 1952 to — I was told — Irish immigrants.
During my rare excursions — away from home-schooling by my extended family — to government schools, I experienced tough rough men teachers… and weak soft women teachers.
I vowed to never be like weak women, never associate with weak women, never allow their stink to pollute me.
During my formative years — from the tender age of three to a few weeks ago at the tender age of sixty-nine — I assimilated our Constitution on a gut level.
I believe our Constitution is a magical thing of beauty.
1964, after a funeral for one of my uncles, I visited this physical thing in a hallowed hall in a city I automatically knew to be corrupt and irrelevant.
Traveling through District Of Columbia, seeing mile after mile of the willing degradation of thousands of inner-city residents, I realized we have nothing in common.
At twelve years old, standing in that museum, I realized my secession was inevitable.
With less drama than the 1776 or 1860s crowd, I quietly walked away from ‘these united states of America’… and into a freedom and peace few in 2021 can imagine.
To those hoping for another chance to make the 1950s of ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ and ‘Leave It To Beaver’ stay a little longer, I sincerely ask:
* by holding on to the past, do we lessen our chances to thrive during the remainder of this collapse?
* by holding on to the past, do we give the BOLCHEVICS the chance to skip ahead a few squares on the game-board?
.
.
Opening this, I gave the impression I might be more than my Irish heritage.
So, I did it… I did genome testing.
Although I am significantly Keltic, I am also slightly greater than most Northern Europeans in my Neanderthal heritage.
Thirteen percent.
Thirteen percent of me is those merchants and traders, roaming from the Iberian Peninsula to the steppes of Russia.
Scientists constantly proclaim the Neanderthal folk died-out around forty thousand years ago, another of many ‘evolutionary dead-ends’.
Scientists constantly proclaim the Neanderthal folk contributed nothing of value to the all the miraculous accomplishments of ModernSociety©.
To a hammer, is everything a nail?
I am pretty sure the gentle people on all sides of Pointe Du Hoc would rather be someplace else.
Looking back, I am pretty sure they would do things different.
And I have to ask… how many of my decisions are innate, a result of my heritage?
I like/admire our Constitution at arm’s length, but how am I served by clinging to a legend?
I will see you in Valhalla!
Large Marge, since I can’t anonymously “like” your comment, I will publicly. Although you probably weren’t the eloquent speaker back in the Pleistocene, look at you now! I, for one, will be thankful when my tours of duty on this planet are completed.
To Valhalla!
When you can’t let go of the past, it becomes your prison. When you use it as a guide, it can become useful.
Hope is the biggest thing we on the Right have to face – the Hope that things will get better.
The Constitution doesn’t “provide safety” it’s a good guide though for what we must restore. We’re not gonna “ride it out” – we’re gonna ride through all of this and those of us who survive WILL rebuild our Republic, God willing.
I’m reading a lot of eulogies above, harden up and be ready when -Aesop is right, it’s “when” not “if” – we have to scale the cliffs. If you can’t scale them yourself, you can damn well help somebody who can and will. Time’s come to pick a side or slink out of the way.
Yup. Our choice to keep it. If we can.
What part of “mountains of skulls, rivers of blood, and oceans of tears” confuses people? We already lost the culture war. America is dead as a Norwegian Blue. The Marxists are now into the “looting the spoils and sticking it to their defeated opponents” phase.
We organize and oppose, or we die out. Choose wisely.
Yup. That’s where I was wrong. When I originally wrote this, I thought we weren’t quite done.
We are now. Onward!
What will supporters of the police state say when their beloved police come to arrest them for racist hate speech, to confiscate their guns, and to force them to board trains headed to the concentration camps?
Just spitballing, but they’ll probably say, “Bummer, guys. Looks like your bulletproof vests don’t work so well against black-tip AP ammo or headshots. But thanks a pantload for the radios, M4geries, shotguns, and pistols!”
After the third of fourth time that happens, they’ll be pleasantly surprised that the police have either quit, or decided to shoot the @$$clowns at city hall and the state house instead.
From your mouth…
Bang! Bang! Bang!
I used to collect US Commemorative Stamps which represented America from the first commemorative stamp issued in 1893 until I stopped collecting in 1975.
The first U.S. commemorative stamp is from a set celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492, an achievement ridiculed and cancelled by the leftists, most of whom probably wouldn’t have survived had they been required to actively participate in those voyages.
Because of this hobby I learned a lot about America and I miss this America. There were celebrations of Famous Americans in 1940, sad tributes to the overrun countries in 1943 implying a commitment to get them back (one stamp honors France), an uncontroversial set of stamps from 1968 including the Gadsden flag, and on and on.
Compare with the ridiculousness of what America holds dear today. A simple example is the set of Bugs Bunny commemorative stamps issued for 2020.
-> https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/0727-bugs-bunny-stamps-now-available-nationwide.htm
Stamps – good reference. What, indeed, have we become? I mean, I like Bugs, but . . . .
Exactly.
If you wouldn’t put it on a $100 bill then it really shouldn’t be placed on a stamp. The designs on our money represent our accomplishments, our history and what we prioritize as a country.
Of course the way things are going, maybe I’m wrong, maybe Bugs is appropriate for the $100 bill…
Well, that would the the sign that it really was funny money . . . (apologies)
It’s a good read, John. Not just your post but lots of worthwhile comments, too.
Commenters here are an awesome bunch, including you!
Thank you.