Our vanishing culture

Our Constitution gets no respect!

“Who old was she? I’ll tell you. She was so old, that when she went to school,
they didn’t have History!”
– Rodney Dangerfield

Rodney played that joke for big laughs, perhaps not realizing how close to the truth it was in another sense. Somewhere along the line, our public school curriculum went from actually teaching the history of our country, to indoctrinating students in the evils of America.

This warped view of history is perhaps best expressed by the 1619 Project that claimed that all of American History was tainted by the introduction of slaves into the country. The Project was released in 2019 to mark the 400th Anniversary of the first slaves being brought to Virginia in 1619.

According to its principle author, NY Times journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution of 1776 was fought by colonists to preserve their right to own slaves, thus turning our revered Founding Fathers into a bunch of racists, (even though England did not ban the slave trade until 1807 and slavery itself until 1834.)

The Project included the development of an educational curriculum for schools to use in spreading this new view of our history. In fact, this was merely codifying a view that had been gaining traction since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Many seem to feel that was the decade when American History started, and anything that happened before that was just racist white men acting badly.

Since reaching the milestone age of 75 at the end of last year, I have become more aware of how rapidly the world of my youth is vanishing. I suppose this is true of all people who are lucky enough to reach an advanced age, but I can’t escape the feeling that the pace of change is accelerating, and that that is no accident– that our past and our culture are being deliberately destroyed by people like Hannah-Jones and her ilk.

To put things in perspective, the year of my birth, 1950, was closer to the 1880s than it is to today. In fact, if I should live another 15 years, to the overripe age of 90, my birthday will be closer to the start of the Civil War than the 2040s, (unless we have another one before then, which seems about even odds at this point!)

But of course, it is not just in the teaching of history that our culture is vanishing, that is just the heavy artillery being used to soften up the front lines. Once the people lose knowledge of their real history, they will not be able to understand what other things are being taken from them.

Chief of these are the so-called “Inalienable Rights” that Jefferson claimed were give to us by God in the Declaration of Independence, penned 250 years ago.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

It is generally understood that these inalienable rights were incorporated into the Bill of Rights which comprise the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution, which protected Freedom of Speech, Religion, the Press, Protest, Bearing Arms, Due Process, Jury Trial and to be Free from Unreasonable Searches without a Warrant, Double Jeopardy, Self-Incrimination and Seizure of your Property without Just Compensation, to name just a few.

Those rights were also designed to be preserved by the Federalist structure of Republican government that was set up in the Constitution itself. The federal government was limited to certain enumerated powers, and all powers not specifically granted to it, were reserved to the states or the people, a point that was reinforced by the 10th Amendment. However, just as you can boil a frog by slowly raising the temperature of the pan, you can strip people of their “inalienable” rights by slowly encroaching on them, while at the same time removing people’s understanding of these foundational principles.

This process is of course greatly aided by bringing in immigrants (both legal and illegal) who do not share those cultural values and claiming that their often shitty culture is entitled to equal respect. These problems are compounded by allowing them to form a critical voting block in certain jurisdictions where they concentrate. (See Somalians in Minnesota!)

It’s true that we are a nation of immigrants going all the way back to the first colonists who landed in Virginia and New England 400 years ago, (and even further back if you include the so-called Native Americans who crossed over from Asia about 15,000 years before.) In the not so distant past, however, those immigrants came here to assimilate into our culture, learn the English language and become productive citizens. Today, not so much!

We can perhaps see this more clearly in other countries, such as England, France and Germany which, after allowing an invasion of 3rd world people, seem to be quickly jettisoning centuries of freedom for an increasingly restrictive society where dissent is criminalized. Every year, thousands of those who dare to question the current narrative are being investigated, fined and in some cases jailed for the crime of thinking for themselves.

Things have gotten so bad in England that even displaying the British Flag can be seen as a hate crime if you do it in the wrong neighborhood, and complaining of immigrant grooming gangs raping young girls is seen as racist. Today the battle for control is being waged online, where England is attempting to impose a new rule that adults must provide their identity to prove they are over 16 before they can use social media.

It is claimed, as always, that this is being done to protect young children from dangerous content, but of course, the real content they fear is that which threatens their political control. We look at what is happening in England with disbelief, but we are probably only one election from seeing the same policies here.

As we celebrate the 250th year of our Independence, let us re-double our efforts to insure that these precious rights remain inalienable!