America’s Socialist Past

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/americas_socialist_past.html
June 28, 2009
America’s Socialist Past
By Ryan Siefert

There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again, regardless of whether the results were seen on the other side of the planet or suffered through by our own people.

We’re living in a country that elected a President that believes in redistributing wealth. He’s mentioned this himself, from the “Joe the Plumber” incident[i] to his critique[ii] of the failures of the civil rights movement. Whether you call it Socialism, Communism, Marxism, or by its simpler name, theft, they are all part of the same economic system that destroys private property and puts everything in central control of the state.

The lesson we, and the rest of the world, seems to fail to learn is how socially and economically destructive this sort of system is. The problem is, these lessons don’t have to be learned from studying the histories of far off lands, for we have numerous examples of collectivist/socialist experiments here at home.

In Jamestown, there was no welfare state. Originally meant to be a trading colony, too many of the original inhabitants were adventurers or people seeking to gain wealth through the export of things they could find in the new world. Preoccupied with their own ideas of fortune, they found that in the wilderness of what was North America their habit of avoiding physical labor meant life or death. It was here that John Smith proclaimed, “He who will not work will not eat.”[iii] It worked…sort of. While success still eluded the colony, the mortality rate did go from 60 percent to 15 percent.

Imagine a politician on any level making Smith’s proclamation today. Cities would burn. Of course, when Sir Thomas Dale arrived there in 1611, he saw “where the most company were, and the daily and usual workers, bowling in the streets.”[iv] Apparently Smith’s proclamation had only motivated the people enough to do the minimum. Sir Dale had to motivate the people to fix up their houses, plant corn, and secure the defenses of the fort.

Lord De La Warr, the first official governor of Jamestown, continued with the communal storehouse practice. This meant that no matter how hard one worked; everyone was entitled to food so nobody would (in theory) starve. It only prolonged the hardship. Seeking a way around this, the administrators began using the incentive approach (as opposed to Smith’s harsh approach) and privatized land ownership. With tobacco finding a market back in Europe, the private property incentives mixed with trading allowed Jamestown to finally get over the hump and begin to prosper.[v]

The Pilgrims sought to live in a society that promoted “just and equal laws.” Their first year saw the death of half of their population through disease, starvation, and malnutrition (again, thanks to communal farming). In a story that’s getting more and more circulation in today’s internet age (and thanks to Rush’s yearly reading of the story of Thanksgiving), we learn that only when William Bradford instituted private property that people began to work harder and innovate more.[vi] Even women and children went out to the fields with their husbands, which meant more crops were planted and ultimately harvested. This led to more trade with the local tribes, earlier repayment of debt to the English sponsors, and overall prosperity of the colony.

Let’s fast forward a bit.

The date is January 1, 1816, and a man named Robert Owen proposed a new type of model society. In his plans, each of these communities of 2,500 individuals would “be self-governing and hold its property in the common.”[vii] So popular was Owen that when he reached America from Britain, President John Quincy Adams displayed one of Owen’s architectural models for this ideal community. He established his community in Indiana, christening it New Haven in 1825. In New Haven, “not only work, but also recreation and meditation were communal and regimented.”[viii] Everything was collectivized, including “cooking, child care, and other domestic work.”[ix] Ironically, at least by today’s “Liberal” standards, it was women that were relegated to these chores. The community lasted two years.

The term “socialism” was actually coined by Owen’s followers around the time New Haven failed.

Eighteen other communities were established on the Owen collectivized model across the United States. Modern Times, the name of the community established on Long Island, was the last to fail. This was in 1863.

Charles Fourier, a French social theorist, came up with the solution to the problems associated with collectivized living: It should be done on a smaller scale. He calculated that 1,620 was the ideal population and that they should live on 6,000 acres. These were called phalanxes. In the 1840’s, a man named Charles Brisbane decided to implement this idea, ultimately establishing 28 of them. All failed within 12 years.[x]

In 1804, George Rapp and six hundred of his followers came to America. They set up a community in Pennsylvania called Harmony where communal farming was practiced, but they were expecting the second coming and left for Indiana in 1814 before it could be deemed a success or failure. While in Indiana, they established another community and named it (again) Harmony, but sold it ten years later to Robert Owen (who set up New Harmony there) and moved back to Pennsylvania. These people began the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania (a move to capitalism), but eventually died out due to their celibacy and lack of recruits.[xi]

In 1841, Humphrey Noyes started the “Perfectionists”, and wrote a book on his theories titled Bible Communism in 1848. Noyes took collectivism to the next level; not only was all property communal, but so were spouses. The term for this was “complex marriage” and in practice it meant, “all the men in the Perfectionist community considered themselves husbands to all the women, and each woman the wife of every man.”[xii] Before coitus, and even conception, people had to have consent granted by the whole community. Economically, and with a hint of irony, they flourished by building and marketing animal traps. However, this particular communist experiment ended when they established a joint-stock company called Oneida Community, Ltd.

In showing what a great social and economic model Communism is, Harrison Berry likened it to slavery by stating in a that “a Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave consumes more than the master…and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of support.”[xiii]

George Fitzhugh, an influence on Berry, actually argued that slave labor was preferable because the slaves were ultimately free. It was property owners and free laborers that were the slaves. He advocated that taking decision-making out of the hands of individuals made the African slaves better off than free whites and claimed that not only all blacks, but most whites too, should be slaves.[xiv] His theory was ultimately squashed with the support and ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which not only freed the slaves but also established they had constitutionally protected private property rights.

These few examples, and there are more out there, show how American culture even before the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on your location) tried communal living and centrally planned economic models. Despite the good intentions of the people involved, they always fail because of the inherent flaws in Socialism. Unfortunately, given the reach of the federal government and current make-up of the executive and legislative branches, we are set to learn this lesson the hard way. Again.

——————————————————————————–

[i] Francis, David R., How Obama’s tax plans would ‘spread the wealth around.’ Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 27, 2008.

[ii] Calabresi, Steven G., Obama’s ‘Redistribution’ Constitution. Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2008.

[iii] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 17.

[iv] Ed Southern. The Jamestown Adventure (John F. Blair, 2004), 202.

[v] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 18.

[vi] See William Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation: Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Settlement 1608-1650 (San Antonio: The Vision Forum, 1998, 2002), 115-117,125-126.

[vii] See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 293.

[viii] Ibid. 294

[ix] Ibid. 294

[x] Ibid. 296

[xi] Ibid. 298-299.

[xii] Ibid. 302.

[xiii] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 261.

[xiv] Ibid. 261.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/americas_socialist_past.html at June 29, 2009 – 11:41:33 AM EDT

Recruitment of Muslim children to terrorism

http://www.investigativeproject.org/1072/birds-of-paradise-martyrdom-recruitment-as

“When We Seek Martyrdom” is the latest hit from a production house called Birds of Paradise. It is racking up millions of hits on Arabic and worldwide websites. Birds of Paradise, which appears to be based in Jordan, is quickly becoming one of the most popular children’s groups in the Arab world.

Witness to murder: Iranian doctor who tried to save Neda speaks

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8119658.stm

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8113552.stm

Her fiance, Caspian Makan, told BBC Persian TV about the circumstances of Neda’s death.

She was near the area, a few streets away, from where the main protests were taking place, near the Amir-Abad area. She was with her music teacher, sitting in a car and stuck in traffic.

She was feeling very tired and very hot. She got out of the car for just for a few minutes.

Grave spaces have reportedly been set aside for those killed in Tehran clashes

And that’s when it all happened.

That’s when she was shot dead. Eyewitnesses and video footage of the shooting clearly show that probably Basij paramilitaries in civilian clothing deliberately targeted her. Eyewitnesses said they clearly targeted her and she was shot in the chest.

She passed away within a few minutes. People tried to take her to the nearest hospital, the Shariati hospital. But it was too late.

We worked so hard to get the authorities to release her body. She was taken to a morgue outside Tehran. The officials from the morgue asked if they could use parts of her corpse for body transplants for medical patients.

They didn’t specify what exactly they intended to do. Her family agreed because they wanted to bury her as soon as possible.

We buried her in the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran. They asked us to bury her in this section where it seemed the authorities had set aside spaces for graves for those killed during the violent clashes in Tehran last week.

On Monday afternoon, we had planned to hold a memorial service at the mosque.

But the authorities there and the paramilitary group, the Basij, wouldn’t allow it because they were worried it would attract unwanted attention and they didn’t want anymore trouble.

The authorities are aware that everybody in Iran and throughout the whole world knows about her story. So that’s why they didn’t want a memorial service. They were afraid that lots people could turn up at the event.

So as things stand now, we are not allowed to hold any gatherings to remember Neda.

When did the lowbrows take over the culture?

From: http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/when_did_the_lowbrows_take_ove.html

Mullahs Cannot Stop the Persian Reawakening

From: http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/mullahs_cannot_stop_the_persia.html

June 26, 2009
Mullahs Cannot Stop the Persian Reawakening
By Alicia Colon

Iran is now saying that Neda was killed because she was mistaken for the sister of an Iranian “terrorist.” A photograph of Neda Agha-Soltan on CNN.com shows a beautiful young woman with shining hair and a winsome smile unfettered by the traditional Islamic garb worn by women in the Middle East. I’ve seen many women who look like Neda since February, 2007 when I met my first Persian.

I was at the office of the New York Sun when I kept getting a call from a mysterious man who insisted on meeting me in person. He told me he was referred by a writer who writes for the New York Times and that he wanted to give me an important story. I checked out the writer who confirmed that she felt the Sun would be a better fit-in other words, this was not something the Times would be interested in but she thought it was worth exploring.

It turns out the gentleman was an Iranian dissident and he wanted me to know what was going on in Iran because no one in the media wanted to publicize it. Frankly I was fascinated by what I learned and wrote:

“There are, in fact, two Irans, and the lesser known one to most Americans is undergoing a renaissance that the ruling Iranian mullahs fear the most. If the Persians are awakened to their identity as children of Cyrus the Great, who wrote mankind’s first charter of human rights, these oppressive regimes will topple domino-style. Besides Iran, the Persian heritage is embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan, and were it to be rekindled, a revolution unheard of in scope could occur.”

My new friend and former Muslim, whom I will call Babak Iran, told me that Korans are being burned in Iran, and that there is a strong movement toward the philosophy of Zoroastrianism. This man showed me the pendant he now wears, a symbol of the ancient religion (it is older than Judaism). This symbol, carried by many of the parade marchers in New York City, can be seen at persianparade.org. Slide # 24 in the 2009 parade is where one can see many beautiful Persian women like Neda.

The Persian Renaissance, known as Anjomane Padeshahi Iran, was spearheaded by a charismatic leader, Dr. Froud Fouladvand who tried to offer Iranian people the reason to fight by awakening their semi-dormant national identity, an identity that was overshadowed by radical Islam. He is believed to have been captured and executed by the Islamic government in Iran.

It has been said that perhaps President Obama’s March speech to Iran is what has fueled the current unrest, and when I look back at what my Iranian friend said in March, that may be true — not because he inspired it, but because he angered the Persians. I asked Babak Iran if the Farsi subtitles of Obama’s speech were accurate. He assured me that while the translation was accurate, the message itself had infuriated the Iranian people who are not in league with the mullahs who wish to destroy their Persian heritage. I had his permission to provide my readers with his reaction:

“I can tell you that Iranians are infuriated with the message, as am I. Iranians do not think that the Islamic regime of Iran is their government. They look at it as an occupying army of Muslim killers determined to destroy what Muhammad and his killers could not do for 1400 years. The mullahs have done all they can to prevent people from celebrating the norooz and a dozen other celebrations such as Charshanbeh soori (the fire festival) for the last 30 yeas. They hate and try to destroy the Iranian culture, like they did in all other previously known Muslim countries. But the more they try to stop the many celebrations in Iran the more the people resist.”

My friend also sent further evidence and quotes that the mainstream media and our government obviously have ignored.

“…we do not worship Iran we worship Allah, for patriotism is another name for paganism, I say let this land (Iran) burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”
Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini

“We are from the tribe of Quraysh and our supporters are Arabs and our enemies are Iranians. It is clear that any Arab is better than and has higher standing than any Iranian and any Iranian is worse than our worst enemy.” Hussein Ebn Ali (son of Ali), the third Imam of Shia Muslims – from: Safinatol bahar va madinatol ahkam va al-assar – Source: Haj Sheikh Abbas Qummi. page 164

“Alicia, Islamic Tazi Mullahs want nothing more than the destruction of Iranian culture. To call the mullahs leaders of Iran is an insult to Iranians and their culture. The term Islamic and republic are not compatible — for Islam gets its authority from Allah and Sharia law and the republic from the people. To say “Iranian election” like the western media does is an intellectual crime against the Iranian people. The prerequisite of an election is the freedom for people to choose their candidates and not a handful of fascistic Mullahs. Any negotiations with Tazi Mullahs occupying Iran, is an attempt to further defraud the great people of Iran -and the people know it. Obama, should have directed his message to the people rather than legitimizing the Mullahs by calling them leaders.” Babak Iran- March, 2009

Look at Neda’s face and you will recognize the eternal beauty and ancient heritage that is Persia. Her cruel death may be the waking up of a dormant yet powerful culture.

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The World Must Help Free the Iranians from the Terrorist/Fascist Mullocracy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.thestoning.com/

 

Sign petitions and urge your representatives to stop the Waxman-Markey $450 Billion Tax on Energy (Cap and Trade) which will cause huge job losses..

The Waxman-Markey Global Warming Tax Kills More Jobs and Kills the Economy (http://www.heritage.org/press/factsheet/fs0028.cfm)

The American people are under assault by officials in the federal government. Under the specious guise of saving the planet, they intend to fleece the people to benefit political allies, powerful money interests and a political agenda that is in direct opposition to the American way of life.

By President Obama’s own admission, with a cap and trade scheme like the Waxman- Markey Bill, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
 
The Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill, also known as ACES (the American Clean Energy and Security Act – HR 2454), is projected to impose annual energy cost hikes in excess of $2,500 per household. The total cost to the flagging American economy is projected at $650 billion to over $1 trillion and could cost our economy over 800,000 jobs.
 
Even if the hotly contested claims of carbon-driven manmade global warming were to be believed, the touted climate benefit of the Waxman-Markey bill is that global surface temperatures will be one tenth of one degree cooler than currently projected in one hundred years.
 
ACES comes with an incredible price tag and promises no significant short or long-term benefit to either the American people or the global climate. This bill is nothing but another attempt to at a massive power and money grab by Washington’s elite.
 
To enrich a few powerful financial beneficiaries, like producers of wind turbines, and carbon trading firms such as the one former vice president and climate-alarmist-in-chief Al Gore profits from, Waxman-Markey is poised to decrease our national gross domestic product by $7 trillion dollars or more and cost another 1.9 million jobs, while adding sharply to the average families’ financial burden. Electricity rates could increase as much as 90% (nearly double what you now pay), Gasoline prices could rise 75%.
 
If this cap and trade scheme prevails, a select group of the rich will get richer on the backs of hard working American families who will literally see no benefit, not even after paying for this scheme for one hundred years.
 
TAKE ACTION
 
A vote on this bill could come up in the House as soon as TODAY.  Click on the link below to call your Congress person ASAP:
 
http://capwiz.com/mnmajority/callalert/index.tt?alertid=13631481&type=CO

 
The socialist leaders of our government want to pass what will become the largest tax increase in history by taxing energy and punishing the development of oil, coal and nuclear resources.
Sign the petition to combat this at: http://www.americansolutions.com/take-action/petition/index3.php

Not convinced of it this bills punishing impact on our economy?  Read http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/tst062609a.cfm

Progressives Minimize the Importance of Fathers

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/wishing_fathers_werent_vital.html
June 21, 2009
Wishing Fathers Weren’t Vital
By Bruce Walker

My father was the finest person that I ever knew. He was the only individual I ever met whose family had been actually tortured by the Ku Klux Klan. Dad had more bad luck in his life than most people have in a dozen lives. Yet he never lied to me, even once, and he never deliberately hurt anyone. When he could have stayed home in a safe, cushy civilian job, dad joined the military specifically because he wanted to fight Hitler. People, years after his death, would tell me how smart he was, how wise he was, how noble he was.

My wife’s father was the finest person she ever knew. His youth was spent as an abused slave laborer in Hitler’s Hell. Tortured by the SS, never knowing which day would be his last, he nevertheless spent much of his six years in the ghastly regions of the Holocaust saving lives. Every living relative he had was murdered by the Nazis. Yet he spent the last sixty years of his life married to a woman he loved, working hard for many years, and then overseeing a New York park which had been overrun with gangs and drugs so that families could have a happy and safe place so conspicuous by its absence in his own life.

Fathers matter. Often, fathers make all the difference in the lives of children. Ask Tim Russert or Rush Limbaugh or Martin Luther King Jr or Pope John Paul II or Jeff Jacoby. But don’t just ask sons about fathers: Ask daughters or my wife or Ann Coulter. Mothers have a wonderful, sweet, practical, and vital role in the lives of children, but fathers often have a profoundly inspiring and ennobling role in the lives of children groping toward adulthood.

It is politically incorrect to think this way because we have confused equality of opportunity (which all decent people support) with equivalence of attributes (which is cartoon nonsense.) Men and women, of course, are very different. Their bodies are different. Those differences are reflected in separated societies from the Inca to the Mongol and from the Zulu to the Nordic. Sexual roles, naturally developed, are not the same in each culture, but the differences always manifest themselves in the same directions. Anyone who has worked on a farm knows how very different male and females animals behave. Because these differences sometimes favor men, feminists have persuaded themselves that they and all women are victims of oppression.

Fathers, of course, become expendable in this dreary dystopian reality. Impolitic facts are more often than not simply truth. Children need fathers or they lives are very limited. There is an argument, which I will not make but simply suggest, that because so much of our world is soft, cozy, warm, easy, and mild, children actually need fathers more than they need mothers. Let us just say that children need both.

It is a sad, real fact that the principle character flaw in both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton is that both men were fatherless boys who never grew up. In this, I do not blame them but pity them. Barry and Bill had no choice in the matter, but it has affected the whole course of their adult lives. This brings up an unpleasant malady of modern life: the more people who lack something valuable in their lives, the more readily these people accept theories that they have really lost nothing. So, as more children grow up without fathers, more adolescents come to believe that their life without a father did not hurt them at all. The more people grow up without real faith in God, the more people pine to believe that God is dead or, at least, irrelevant. The more couples divorce and remarry, the more men and women yearn to believe that a happy marriage is only ancillary to a good life. The more people “learn” from videos and television, the more books and text seems a waste of time.

We – all of us – at some level want to believe that those crucial elements of our lives are not really crucial at all, and so blithely swallow any pop psychology which supports a portrait of our life as fulfilled, even when it lacks something critical. There is an argument that homo sapiens has risen to the heights that he has because infants of our species began to grow up with the models of a father and of a mother. The earliest strands of our systems of belief, the Torah for example, has indispensable roles for Abraham and for Sara. The story of Genesis is not a story without fathers.

As the percentage of our population growing up without fathers in the home grows, the prospect of anything in our lives improving will continue to decline. No armies of teachers, therapists, social welfare workers, or even sports coaches can replace a good father. Even a good mother cannot replace a good father (and vice versa.) In a society in which every virtue is described as “diversity,” how odd that the only types of vitamins that some people think we don’t need in our diet come in the paternal vitamin packet. They are wrong – terribly, sadly, wickedly wrong.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

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The Murder of Civil Life

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/the_murder_of_civil_life.html

Return to the Article

June 15, 2009
The Murder of Civil Life
By Bruce Walker

The putrid comments by David Letterman about Sarah Palin and her daughter, and the dethronement of Carrie Prejean for the vice of honesty, bring home just how savagely civil life has been murdered by the Left. We no longer have a civil public life. It has been crushed between pinchers of enraged nihilism and fantasy causes. “Feminists” or the Ladies Auxiliary of Marxist Enmity (LAME) should be threatening boycotts of the CBS or demanding the de-politicization of beauty contests, but that presumes LAME cares about women: its disciples care only about venting their private fury towards an empty life.

What has happened to Sarah and Carrie has happened to our whole social fabric. Decent people relating in normal lives have traditionally been able to share values: truth, learning, amusement, family, country and faith. These have been disappearing from our social lives; each strangled and then hauled off for a clandestine burial.

Consider what has happened to truth in modern life. Barack Obama invents stories about his relatives visiting Auschwitz — words that are whole cloth — and no one much cares. The descent accelerated when Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky and almost everything else, and has continued unabated. The very act of lying, once considered evil, is now considered proof of shrewdness. How well someone can “spin” truth is considered rather like how a tennis player or a baseball pitcher can spin a ball.

If truth does not matter, then the accumulation of truth which we call learning cannot matter either. Public education and academia is simply re-education. Children and college students are taught “facts” that round out political indoctrination. There was a time when education meant exposing growing minds to a universe of facts which supported conflicting opinions and grasping the thinking behind those opinions. The myth of the intolerant medieval university or old public school systems of America is evidence of just how little our modern totalitarians actually know: debate, controversy, cognition, and schools of thought were the norm, not the exception. The very term “schools of thought,” no longer exists. In our murdered civil life, there is “the school of thought,” surrounded by barbed wire.

Amusement too has died. In its place are spite, angst, degradation, imbecility, and madness dressed up as entertainment. Channel surfing, even when the surf is as long as the Pacific Coast, shows just how empty the once bright stage of entertainment has become. We loved Lucy, but not the untalented and unfunny women who came fifty years after her. Singers like Perry Como have been replaced by puerile, forgettable nebbishes. Once films like It’s a Wonderful Life joined us into a common, happy heart, but now the vacuum we call “Hollywood” cannot produce anything better than bad remakes of old movies.

Families once were families. Fathers, mothers, grandparents, sisters, brothers, cousins, children — the glorious linkage of life which reproduction and its inventor, God, gave us. In many ways, family was the center of life. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” was true wisdom. Holidays revolved around families. People grew up in families. Houses were homes, and homes were where the heart was. Now we haggle over the meaning of words like “marriage” and talk about the lives of unborn babies in terms of “choice.” Family in our world, like in the totalitarian nightmares of Stalin and Hitler, has been crushed into a vague, weak, feeling and nothing more.

Once the overwhelming majority of Americans understood that the greatest blessing of their lives was simply being born in the land of liberty. Now vast numbers of our fellow countrymen actually view the chosen home of tens of millions of refugees as simply an ordinary nation or, depending upon how marinated they are in modern culture, view America as the primary source of misery and injustice in the world.

Faith, too, has been purged from our society. Faith in anything is considered suspicious unless it is faith in the bland materialism of the ant colony so some form of paganism with brutal, animal values. Transcendent moral ideals repel so many of us that the community of faith is almost an underground resistance in some dreary Orwellian regime. Expressing faith (ask Sarah and Carrie) is an invitation to the ugliest sort of mob lynch parties. The Shabbat candles must be kindled in the closest and the sign of the fish drawn in the dust with a stick.

Strip honesty, knowledge, amusement, family, country, and belief from communal life and nothing, much, is left. That is where we are today. That is why the blathering television set and the chattering classrooms seem so utterly empty. That is why so many young people, born after the end of civil life, accept any dream world so completely. Civil life has died. More specifically, it has been murdered by those who find no meaning in life and no purpose for existence. They wish us to live as they do: desperately alone.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/the_murder_of_civil_life.html at June 15, 2009 – 01:45:10 PM EDT

“A forty something drug addict….with several out of wedlock children. And yet enjoys a new townhouse, food stamps, free health care and methadone all funded by working taxpayers. In essence, the government is enabling and funding my cousin’s irresponsible lifestyle.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/liberals_wolves_in_sheeps_clot.html
June 15, 2009

June 14, 2009
Liberals: Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
By Lloyd Marcus

I still remember the knot in my stomach upon seeing the sea of white faces from the window of our school bus. It was the first day of school 1961. We came from a neighboring black community, about a hundred or so of us, to the newly integrated white Jr/Sr high school with thousands of students.

Everything intimidated me, the massive school building, being around whites for the first time, feeling small, seventh grade school work (would I measure up) and my stutter.

The night before, I shared my fears with my preacher dad. Dad gave his typical answer, “Trust God”.

Someone grabbed me from behind. It was an angry older white teacher with a crew cut. He spun me around and almost pressed his wart-covered nose against mine. In my haste to find my homeroom, I went the wrong way on the stairs. Stammering and scared, I tried to explain that I was lost. But he refused to listen and carted me off to the principle’s office. There I sat on my first day, a ‘problem kid’ and late for homeroom.

However, things did get better. Mr. Gomer, my art teacher and Ms. Hornet, my English/creative writing teacher recognized my talents and nurtured them. Still, I felt pretty invisible at Brooklyn Park Jr/Sr High in Maryland.

The popular black students in the mostly white school were athletically and/or academically gifted. I was neither.

Then something wonderful happened. Every month, the best four art pieces from the entire school art classes were displayed in the lobby. My paintings were selected numerous times. This was not Affirmative Action. My paintings were displayed solely based on merit.

This achievement helped me to realize I had talent. It dramatically impacted my self esteem and life. I won scholarships to art college and enjoyed an award winning career as a television Graphic Designer.

But what if my school had embraced a liberal mindset so prevalent today? “EVERY child should experience the feeling of having their artwork displayed in the lobby. It’s only fair”. If every student’s artwork was displayed, it would have robbed me of the knowledge that I possessed above average artistic talent.

Liberals frown upon individual achievement. I heard a news story about a kid banned from Little League pitching because he threw TOO hard. Rather than welcoming an opportunity to raise the game of the batters, Liberals chose to force the gifted pitcher to lower his game. Many schools even ban the keeping of score at sporting events. Typical, touchy, feel-ly, let’s not cause anyone to feel bad, liberalism.

God forbid kids learn that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and these experiences make you stronger! It’s called life! It’s how we grow. Without failure, you would never experience the joy of success.

Some of you may be thinking, “Why is Lloyd always ranting about liberalism”? Folks, I have witnessed the devastating effect of liberalism in my own family. A forty something drug addicted cousin is a serial “impregnater” with several out of wedlock children. And yet, he enjoys a new townhouse, food stamps, free health care and methadone all funded by working taxpayers. In essence, the government is enabling and funding my cousin’s irresponsible lifestyle.

American taxpayers are extremely generous, sympathetic and more than willing to help those in need of a hand up. But liberal “cradle to grave government dependency” programs kill incentive and ultimately hurts people.

Here is another example of how touchy feel-ly liberalism overrules common sense and what is best for people. Without question, to move economically forward in America, it is most beneficial to speak English. Those who do not are stifled and stuck in minimum wage jobs. And yet, ANY politician courageous enough to merely suggest that immigrants learn English is crucified for racism. This is crazy!

Meanwhile, frustratingly, Conservatism gets the bad press branded as mean and heartless.