Oh, When Will WE Ever Learn?

One of my favorite songs, written by Pete Seeger (1st 3 verses) and Joe Hickerson (making it a circular song). I listened to it yesterday (by Peter, Paul, and Mary) on the way home from a band gig and decided that it needed to be shared for its thought-provoking message.

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?

Where have all the flowers gone?

Young girls have picked them, every one

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?

Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?

Where have all the young girls gone?

Gone for husbands, every one

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the husbands gone, long time passing?

Where have all the husbands gone, long time ago?

Where have all the husbands gone?

Gone for soldiers, every one

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Gone to graveyards, every one

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Gone to flowers, every one

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?

Where have all the flowers gone?

Young girls have picked them, every one

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Pandemic of Cruelty

There is a pandemic in the Western world — especially, but not only, in America — that few are talking about, let alone addressing.

This pandemic doesn’t actually kill people. But it does destroy people, ruin lives, crush families and cause permanent, debilitating pain — far more than have the vast majority of cases of COVID-19.

This pandemic consists of adult children who have decided never again to speak to one or both of their parents. The vast majority of these people were never sexually or physically abused. In fact, nearly all were loved by their parents. ....

In our post-biblical age, there are no Ten Commandments. In fact, there are no commandments, period. That’s what “no shoulds” was all about — no Commandments. Instead, you do what you feel is right. If you don’t feel like talking to your mother or father, you don’t. My father, governed by the Ten Commandments and many other shoulds, called his mother every night despite the fact that he rarely felt like doing so. 

Though the Bible commands us to love our neighbor, love the stranger and love God, there is no commandment to love our parents. On the other hand, there is no commandment to honor anyone except our parents.

Dennis Prager, A Pandemic of Cruelty

They Ruin and Don't Care

 

George Orwell Saw the USA As It Is Now

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process continues day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell, "1984" (written in 1949)

Public School Tyrants Push Identity Politics

Teachers and administrators in those institutions are pushing sexual identity politics on children as young as two years old not just because it’s a current leftist fad, but because eliminating the family wipes out any competition. The gradual transitional elimination of the family is rapidly picking up speed. Now the plan is to destroy the family by destroying the children.

Children have an inherent need for a family. Totalitarian regimes have fought the family in the past by turning children against their parents. And yet even in the face of the monstrous propaganda of the USSR, Communist China and Nazi Germany, the family has persisted. The Left has come to realize that the only way to destroy the family is to destroy the children.

Daniel Greenfield, Whose Children? Our Children

Nanny Government Parenting Our Children

Such children raised by the state become adults who want the state to go on raising them. When they’re hungry, the state feeds them, when they’re cold, the state shelters them and when they’re unhappy, the state tells them whom to blame. When their relationships fall apart or when their feelings are hurt, they turn to the state to soothe them with a dose of revenge.

Daniel Greenfield, Whose Children? Our Children

Our Children Are Indoctrinated in Public Schools

The shift from the single-income family to the two-income family with preschool encompassing children as young as 18 months and then to an ever more intensive chain of state educational institutions happened gradually enough that most parents thought it was their own idea. But what the Soviet Union and Communist China had failed to accomplish, happened in America.

Children, from even before they could talk, were being raised either directly by the state or by the institutions that it closely regulated. The unintended consequences of that, emotional fragility, a lack of healthy models for interpersonal relationships, and an obsession with ‘snitching’ on others that persists well into adulthood, were only the collateral damage.

Daniel Greenfield, Whose Children? Our Children

Government Take-Over of Children

Democracy had come to mean not a town meeting and a free press, but the state determining its own future constituencies, rigging elections a generation ahead by controlling demographics, education and all the elements of the lives of children. By controlling children, the state had become a next generation tyranny in the guise of a multi-generational democracy. The Left always looked to the “future” and the “children” because they had already brought it into being.

Daniel Greenfield, Whose Children? Our Children

Family vs Government

The great struggle between human beings and the state was always going to come down to the question of whether the system or the family would be the central unit of social organization. In a little over a century a question that once seemed as basic to the understanding of humanity as the differences between men and women was muddied. The government took charge of education and demanded oversight of all the nation’s children because the indoctrination of the citizenry was a vital national interest. But so was the existence or non-existence of the children.

Daniel Greenfield, Whose Children? Our Children

Good Opportunities Abound

 

Sexual Identity Politics

At the heart of sexual identity politics is an obsession with dismantling the family. The embrace of transgenderism by the state is no accident of politics. The family, like race and religion, is the chief rival to the state. The state set out to neuter its rivals through identity politics, using race, religion and finally sexuality to define new identities and use them to make the state supreme.

Daniel Greenfield, Whose Children? Our Children

America's Leadership is Horrid

Based on their actions, the beliefs of America’s leaders today are so far removed from where we started as a nation that it’s incomprehensible.

Samantha Koch, The White House — From Honorable to Obscene

Bad USA Leadership

Based on their actions, the beliefs of America’s leaders today are so far removed from where we started as a nation that it’s incomprehensible.

Samantha Koch, The White House — From Honorable to Obscene

Our Republic Has Fallen

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.

Joseph Story (1833)

"Pride" Month

The ultimate message of Pride Month is that God -- if He exists at all -- is a liar, and that you can do whatever you wish in the sexual realm without consequence. This is why no Christian should have any part of it.

Trevor Thomas, ‘Pride’ is Nothing to Celebrate

We Are Destroying Our Nation

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. 

Abraham Lincoln

A Violent Culture

When a society glorifies violence on our streets, violence against our police, and violence against our children (and I view the sexual mutilation of children as acts of violence), it stands to reason that there may be individuals influenced to act out on their own that which they are exposed to.

Ever seen one of the video games your children play?  Points are scored by how much mayhem you are able to inflict on the enemy, with graphic blood and body parts flying off in all directions. ‘Action’ movies produced by Hollywood regularly include gratuitous violence and explosions that seem to get larger and more destructive with each cinematic release. 

D.W.Wilbur, Want to End Gun Violence? Change Society, Don't Ban Guns!

Upside-Down Culture

There is no ‘right or wrong’ anymore. How’s the old saying from the Woodstock era go, “if it feels good do it.” That philosophy has returned to rear its ugly head.  Drag Queens are now in libraries performing for small children. Gender dysphoria is being promoted instead of treatment and counseling being given to help individuals deal with their confusion.

Rainbow flags and LGBTQ lifestyles are being celebrated with month long parades in cities across America, oftentimes sending confusing messages to the young and impressionable who are being exposed to social issues in schools that should be left to parents to discuss with their children.

And unfortunately in many cases youths are being subjected to what can only be described as ‘grooming’ by pedophiles masquerading as something other than what they truly are, sexual predators who target children and young people.

D.W.Wilbur, Want to End Gun Violence? Change Society, Don't Ban Guns!

No Hope For This Culture

It may be possible to fight intolerance, stupidity, and fanaticism separately, but when they come together there is no hope.

Albert Einstein

Identity Supremacy

White supremacy isn’t the issue, identity supremacy is. Generations have been told by the Democrats, by their educational systems and entertainment that they are defined by identity politics and that positive change will come when they narrowly fight for the interests of their group, while suspecting the worst of members of other groups, especially white people.

Non-white people are taught to believe that white people are hoarding power. In San Francisco, black people are being urged to demand slave reparations from the Asian population. Women are encouraged to resent men. Transgenders are told to hate women. Within the LGBTQ movement, gay men have become scapegoats. California just passed a ban on “caste discrimination” among Indians. This is what the utopia of the perpetually aggrieved looks like.

This isn’t white supremacy: it’s identity supremacy. And if we don’t move beyond it, there will be no nation, only one long endless civil war across the fractured territories of what was America.

Daniel Greenfield, THE MYTH OF WHITE SUPREMACY

History Repeats--Often

 

Children of the Party

Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it… 

 

All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.

George Orwell, 1984

Ignorant People Easily Submit to Government

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

George Washington (A Founding Father and 1st President of the U.S.; 1732-1799)

REAL Men and REAL Women Needed

Masculinity means creating a family, protecting and defending your wife and children, providing for that wife and children in a responsible way, and building up and defending your community. These are masculine qualities. And societies are infinitely better when men endeavor toward such ideals.

Feminity means a woman who takes care of and comforts her husband, her family, and her children and nurtures the social fabric that binds communities together. 

Unfortunately, As a culture, we've decided that masculine women and effeminate men are amazing, but overtly masculine men and feminine women are terrible. 

When the boundaries that define these traditional roles are blurred, when men take on feminine qualities in droves and women are encouraged to be more masculine, toxic traits emerge that erode the social fabric and lead to cultural decay.

Ben Shapiro, 5/13/23, Facebook post.

Demokrats Are Bigoted Against Firearms

For Democrats, overturning the Second Amendment and outlawing the private possession of guns by Americans is the default position they run to every time gun violence strikes a community. For them it’s the easy answer. It's much easier than to have to really put forth the hard work necessary to come up with genuine solutions to the problem of gun violence in America.

By just blaming guns and demanding bans and other legislation, they don’t have to work very hard.  They can then run back to their constituents and claim to have taken action to stop school shootings and other gun violence. It's a false declaration since the problem of gun violence will continue as long as they continue to promote a sick and depraved society, which is truly the root cause of all the violence and dysfunction in America.

D.W.Wilbur, Want to End Gun Violence? Change Society, Don't Ban Guns!

Insane Society With "Transgenders"

In a sane society, people do not pretend to magically transform into the other sex (and yes, there are only two categories of reproductive sex for humans), nor do we allow people to dictate their “preferred pronouns.”  Sexual identity is set at birth, and barring medical anomalies or a doctor's faulty vision, that is our actual sex until we die.  At least that was the case until recently when the justifiably mentally ill and the radical Left (and those categories often overlap) demanded that we play along with their twisted game of make-believe and agree that men and women can somehow scientifically “transition” to the other sex.

Of course, the fictional notion of transitioning to the other sex is complete nonsense, and up until 2013 it was accurately categorized as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.).  In that year, the DSM-5 downgraded transgenderism to “gender dysphoria,” and it's a safe bet that the Leftists who control the A.P.A. will erase it completely in their next edition, much as they did when homosexuality was eliminated from their list of mental illnesses.  That sleight-of-hand was accomplished not by advances in science nor medicine, but by relentless lobbying from various pro-homosexual groups and the voting body of  the A.P.A.  That was the first step in getting it accepted by mainstream society, and the issue of transgenderism is following a similar path.

Don Fisher, Jr, Transgenderism remains a mental illness.

Government Education Promotes Ignorance

In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.

Walter E. Williams 

Gun Control-- Part of a Larger Agenda

Gun control is part of a larger agenda, and that agenda is to disarm the citizens so that another power can come in and massively control the citizenship. A broken family assists that agenda, so they can’t tout the strength of a strengthening family, because it is counterproductive to what the end goal is.

Bishop Charles Flowers, as cited in “There’s a Remedy for Our Nation - and That Remedy Is Not Gun Control’: Congressman.”

Corrupted Government Leadership

Need we say anything about the lack of efficacy or morality of the Department of Justice, FBI, or CIA?

Or rather is there anything the FBI will not do?

Doctor court evidence? Hire Twitter to suppress the news? Monitor parents at school board meetings? Allow directors to lie under oath or “misremember” before Congress?

Swiping clean subpoenaed phones? Hiring fakers to compile dirt on a presidential candidate—and then using that known smear to hoodwink a judge to allow spying on Americans?

Suppressing evidence on a laptop to warp an election? Raiding an ex-president’s home with a SWAT-like team? Spying on Catholics in mass? Storming a home full of children of a man accused of a politically incorrect misdemeanor?

The more the military has been stalemated in Iraq, humiliated in Afghanistan, and dreading what China will soon do or what Iran will even sooner let off, the more it insists our priorities should be diversity, equity, and inclusion. Will that escapism ensure more lethal pilots, tank commanders, and Marine company commanders?

The mindsets of too many of our new generations of command are twofold: first to be promoted by virtue signaling woke policies that they must know eventually will hamper combat readiness, and then in the future to rotate at retirement into multimillionaire status by leveraging past expertise for defense contractors. Keep that in mind and almost every publicly uttered nonsense from our highest in the Pentagon makes perfect sense.

Victor Davis Hanson, Life Among the Ruins.

Sounds Like Biden

 

Thomas Jefferson Called It

If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. This will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reform and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is inevitable.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826).  

Young Men in Cultural Decay

Millions of young men are detached and ensconced in solitude, their indebted 20s too often consumed with video-gaming, internet surfing, or consumption of porn. Many suffer from prolonged adolescence. Many assume that they are immune from criticism, given that the alternative of getting married, having children, finding a full-time job, and buying a house is society’s new abnormal.

Victor Davis Hanson, Life Among the Ruins.

Government Rule by Brute Force

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission. This is the stage of the darkest periods of human history ─ the stage of rule by brute force.

Ayn Rand

War Against Masculinity

History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and a gift to women.

Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys.

Satan Hates Humans

The devil hates human beings and sexual difference is at the very core of human nature. The difference between man and woman, the complementarity of man and woman is right there at the heart of human nature. The devil hates humanity and so he tries to cut away at the very core of humanity.

Michael Knowles, posted on Facebook 2/12/23

Truth vs Comfort

New Religion?

LGBTQ is the new religion of worship of self. Pronouns are the new blasphemy.

Economic Security a Right?

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.

Rose Wilder Lane

Are You in a Cult?

We Need Men of Character

The Irrational Indoctrination of Our Children By the LEFT

At the time in their lives when most people are the most easily indoctrinated -- approximately ages 18 to 22 -- young Americans hear only one message: If you want to be a rational person, you must abandon religion and embrace secularism. Most young Americans are never exposed to a countervailing view at any time in their college life. (That's why you should expose your college-aged child, grandchild, niece or nephew to this column.)

Yet, this alleged axiom is not only completely false, it's backwards. The truth is that today the secular have a virtual monopoly on irrational beliefs.

One proof is that colleges have become the most irrational institutions in the country. Not coincidentally, they are also the most secular institutions in our society. In fact, the former is a result of the latter.

Dennis Prager, Who's More Irrational -- The Religious or the Irreligious?

Success Must Be Worked For

A person is charged in this world with using whatever skills, gifts, and opportunities he or she has with a personal drive to get as far along in life as possible. There is no question that for some the road to success is longer and harder than for others, but pulling down one group will not help others to succeed. I once heard an interview with the daughter of a very famous musician. She said that her last name automatically got her auditions, but if she could not perform on the piano at the highest professional level, her father’s name and reputation would not help her land a job. America needs to focus on encouraging and supporting those who wish to succeed, regardless of skin color or starting point. Success must be seen as what you did with yourself and not where you started.

Alan Joseph Bauer, The Falsehood of White Privilege.

Discrimination Against Caucasians

One reads now and then of Whites being punished for no other crime than the color of their skin. Whether it is a sign-language translator fired from his job on Broadway or teacher candidates denied jobs because of their skin color, Whites are being told that because of a supposed privilege they inherited, they do not deserve to work or to benefit from their skills and efforts. United Airlines has made much noise about wanting to have a more diverse flight crew. My only concern as a passenger in the back is having the best pilots at the front of the plane; I could not care less if it is a man or a woman, or what color he or she is. Not for United. Will they sacrifice pilot quality to reach their minority pilot quota? Will anyone take responsibility if something goes wrong in the air? Of course not. In business and government, nobody takes responsibility for failure.

Alan Joseph Bauer, The Falsehood of White Privilege.

Blacks Must Fix Their Families to Succeed

Accusing Whites of having unfair advantage will not help “people of color” succeed. That which is needed is a focus on the family in Black communities. Black births out of wedlock in the US are greater than 50 percent. The most important factor in success is not money but rather family. Children study, learn to take risks, and push themselves because they know that their families have their backs. Stable and successful Black families will do more to advance Black men and women to success than all the efforts to punish Whites for being white. Tiger Woods’ son is already playing golf with his dad. There is no question that he has an enormous advantage over future golfers of his age. Should he be punished? Should he be accused of privilege and denied a professional golf career? Of course not. He should be encouraged to push himself to become an amazing athlete and golfer like his dad if he sees golf as his future.

Alan Joseph Bauer, The Falsehood of White Privilege.

Destroying Merit Among "Races"

There are two ways to get more even outcomes—help those in need to get ahead or to punish those who are successful by pulling them down. The Left’s goal of leveling the playing field by pulling down those who took that which they were given and made something out of it will not help the poor. Denying Whites admission or advancement will not make non-Whites more successful. Harvard admitted in court that without their denying many Asian students acceptance to the undergraduate college, the Black population on campus would be much smaller. Harvard’s goal should have been to help Black students become more competitive prior to applying. Harming Asian applicants who threw themselves into their studies and activities to be worthy of admission is a sign of a failed admission system. The lawsuit brought by Asian student organizations against Harvard was recently heard by the Supreme Court.

The goal of throwing white privilege at people who of no fault of their own were born Caucasian and of means or backgrounds not of their choosing will not help Blacks, Hispanics and others to succeed. The goal is simply to pull down those who strive so that we can all be mediocre together. Rather than demanding that rigorous standards be met for college acceptance, joining the SEALs or being accepted for pilot training, standards are lowered—even the SAT is being abandoned. Those who succeed are not lauded for their efforts and determination but rather are accused of being recipients of gifts and background conditions that were unfair as if their personal efforts in maximizing the usefulness of their starting conditions were meaningless. Claims of white privilege are based on the destructive idea that we should all have equality of outcomes (“equity”) rather than allowing each and every American to succeed according to his/her abilities and personal efforts. By demanding equality of outcomes and accusing Whites of having some privilege that gives them an unfair leg up in all of life’s activities, those on the Left are demanding mediocrity; they are effectively telling students not to push themselves, not to try their best, because whatever they do, the results are not theirs and that their successes have been at the expense of others.

Alan Joseph Bauer, The Falsehood of White Privilege.

Victimhood Is Destroying Our Culture

A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.

Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.

Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.

USA Becoming Communist

In the COVID-19 era, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and virtually every other national medical and health agency largely abandoned science and even elementary decency (recall all the Americans who were forcibly deprived of any visitors and left to die alone in hospitals) and became tools of the Left. They and America's Sovietized teachers' unions ruined millions of American children by closing schools for nearly two years. In addition to the doomsday hysteria over climate change, the imposed gender confusion and the absence of religion, this has led to the highest rates of adolescent depression and suicide ever recorded in America.

Dennis Prager, Could It Happen Here? It Is Happening Here.

Victimhood Is Narcissism

Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.

Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.

Science?

Current “science” is now synonymous with ideology, religion, or superstition. Lockdowns, mRNA vaccinations, masking, transgenderism, “climate change,” and green power brook no dissent. They are declared scientifically correct in the manner that the sun used to revolve around the earth, and any dissenting Galileo or Copernicus is cancel-cultured, doxxed, and deplatformed.

Victor Davis Hanson, Life Among the Ruins.

Victimhood Means You Never Have to Say You're Sorry

Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.

Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.

Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.

Victimhood Destroys

Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.

If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.

Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.