Western Civilization Culture and New Generations

Recently a friend lamented the fate of the generational culture in many countries. His remarks eerily described what is happening to the culture of current American society.

The number one complaint was the lack of respect and violent outbursts of young generations. Raised in an atmosphere where anything goes and nobody tells them no, young people injure the elderly, drive their cars as if they are in a race, park their cars in front of your house, in your yard, sometimes even close to your front door and, if you protest, they smile draconically. They defy and disrespect the police all the time when stopped for vehicular infractions.

These young generations live in an altered reality which defies any norms established by centuries of western culture and civilization. Somehow, in the last thirty years, kindness, generosity, and goodness have disappeared, replaced by anger, violence, and hate.

The media has helped destroy any semblance of decency, reality, and truth. Music has become a bizarre cacophony of jungle beat and vile language, and normal language has been transformed into the realm of the Twilight Zone.

Depraved people have become stars, high school dropouts are role models and champions of justice while they are flooding the waves with bad manners, terrible upbringing, lack of education, bad music, and self-appointed righteousness. The dumb and the low have money and power, are promoters of hate, and soap-box inexplicable authority.

Stupidity has money, power, influence, tarantula eyelashes, Neanderthal eyebrows, and welfare-entitled queens. It is visible and evident on every social media platform. Some are subtle but most are loud and screechy.

Generations since 1989 brought back the repackaged and rebranded communism under the umbrella of globalism.

These individuals, supported by trust funds, stolen wealth, NGOs, Instagram and TikTok videos, are reckless but trendy youth, with no life experience or knowledge of the past, in a hurry to find something defining, or an element that would give meaning to their empty lives they spend surrounded by blue screens.

After the 1989 coup, when communism was repealed by so many Eastern Block countries oppressed by their respective Communist Parties, George Soros and his NGO cohorts inserted themselves into those countries with his army of young writers who assembled the curricula and the textbooks for the indoctrination of the new generations into the rebranded form of communism called globalism. The main goal was and still is to turn western societies into globalism and the young generations into global citizens at any cost. And it worked in all of them at the same time.

Cultural symbols, history, religion, monuments, historical artifacts were replaced in public life in the name of freedom and of woke conscience by people who have no idea what freedom is or how to be conscientious.

Patriotism is dying among these generations because they don’t know how to be patriotic, how to preserve their language, their history, their country, their borders, their traditions, their monuments, their culture, national institutions, Christian religion, and the most basic of all, the family. They became empty humans without history and faith.

Courtship and civility are disappearing as well, replaced by a hook-up mentality heavily promoted by the new statist society. Fewer get married and have children in western cultures. They prefer to push strollers with cats and dogs. Those who do believe in matrimony and have a family, are waiting longer and longer to get married. The lack of desire to procreate is obvious in the declining birth rates in all developed nations. U.N. supplements the low birth rate in western societies by moving people from around the world into Europe and the United States. It is forced and illegal migration.

Young generations want to be sports stars, performers, influencers, social justice warriors, hoping for instant stardom and wealth. Few choose trades over worthless college degrees then whine on TikTok videos that they cannot find jobs and are thus oppressed by the capitalist system and the “fascist Donald Trump.” These generations take no responsibility for their actions and choices in life.

Going woke in a collectivist (communist) fashion is promoted everywhere including in the uniformization of buildings, restaurants, ugly clothes, drab colors, identical model cars and colors, etc. Bauhaus communist ugliness is replacing everything that was American tradition, color, happiness, even symbolism in restaurants names, buildings, and products that our parents and grandparents enjoyed and recognized everywhere.

The idea of wokism/globalism/new communism is to alienate people from nostalgia, from happiness, and from what they recognized as their daily American life. You can no longer live as you want, you are forced to live as the statist globalists tell you – drab, suppressed, uniformed, controlled, simple, poor, collectivist, and compliant lives. You achieve woke happiness and “you will like it.”  

The same woke globalists scare new generations that global warming/climate change is likely to destroy civilization if we do not accept the drastic actions they are forcing upon us. But western civilization is destroyed by the few, the extremely rich and influential who control every facet of our lives with help from the United Nations, NGOs, WEF, and other “civil society groups” with schemes and abundant money from our own federal government. And they are never held accountable for what they do to our lives and to new generations.

 

The Technology of Yesteryear

1950 Leica IIIf-600 series

The world around us is changing vertiginously. It’s not that I am getting older and my perspective has slowed down; technology and the way we live are being fundamentally transformed under our own eyes, but we are too busy to notice.

We seldom ponder how far and how fast technology has forever altered our lives and who we are as people because of it. We have become the automatons we’ve been warned about decades ago when we thought it was just science fiction designed to entertain us. But here we are.

In my six decades on earth, my life went from riding a rickety, smoke-spewing Diesel bus with holes in the floorboard, a bus that took one hour to transport us six miles to grandma’s house, a wagon full of grain or hay pulled by oxen which took me and grandpa to the corn and wheat grinding mill, a pink Pegasus bicycle with a white banana-shaped seat and a basket, and a soot-smelling train that stopped in every little village and took all day to go 100 miles, to fast-speed trains, supersonic airplanes, fast boats, trucks, SUVs, eighteen-wheelers, and fast cars.

And Americans went from wagon trains in the American West, cowboys and settlers who made their slow and deliberate journey through the harsh landscape of the new world, to Ford’s Model T which helped eventually create the vast network of highways and interstates that crisscross America from “sea to shining sea.” With them came freedom, mobility, and a new way of life that cannot be matched anywhere else in history.

But the global elites are socially re-engineering this new-found culture of freedom into a controlled environment that would be given back to nature and re-wilded, while humans will be crowded into huge urban settlements, all with the idea to save humanity from itself, from climate change Armageddon.

From the humble communication beginnings of the telegraph and the beautiful gas-lit streets in Europe, we eventually got electrified, no more candles and oil lamps, but wood-burning stoves and charcoal-burning outdoor pits remained.

People bought rotary-dial phones but service was hard to get and expensive; often four customers were assigned to a line and we had to ask nicely the other three parties to get off the line if we wanted to make an emergency call or to call at all. And we had to listen for the clicks to make sure they were not listening in on our conversation.

The female operator, and it was always a female, would assist us in dialing an international line. We had to wait for hours before she would call with a connection to a number in a country across the Atlantic. And it sounded like the phone cable was swimming underwater and the voices were garbled as if they were drowning in the ocean. The call was very expensive, $10 the first three minutes and then $3 each additional minute, depending on the country called. A loved-one’s voice which did come across thousands of miles of underwater phone cable was very precious. And then one day phone connections were made via satellites deployed into space.

Now phone calls are cheap or free, but most of my relatives, the ones I really cared about, have passed away or are lingering in nursing homes. In 1989, I spent over $1,000 in a three-week period talking to strangers who were taking care of my dying father. I never got a chance to speak to my dad, but I was stuck with a phone bill from South Central Bell that was very hard to pay. As a college student, finishing my doctorate, it was way more than I was making in a month. And my babies needed that money for food and shelter. But, the bill was paid after my Dad passed away. I would give anything to be able to talk to him again.

When my children were small, I could not afford the very expensive camcorders, thousands of dollars, to film my precious babies. Today, a relatively inexpensive smart phone can videotape anything and everything and people take it so for granted. The social media is inundated with selfies and videos from wannabe photographers and videographers.

When the first cell phone came out in the 1990s, they were bulky, grey or black, expensive, often tethered to the car, and the minute-plans were very expensive. Only really well-to-do people could actually afford the luxury of owning one or the service. Within a decade, cell phones got smaller, more colorful, and minute-plans a bit cheaper. It was relatively easy to run up hundreds of dollars in phone bills each month and many people did get in trouble. And then cell phones became smart phones.

In high school, we were taken to a data processing center in my hometown. One large computer occupied an entire building. And they literally got computer bugs, a moth to be exact. Later they sized it down to a very large room.

Desk top computers arrived but were very bulky, and the small screen was green or black and white. It was quite a step up from the Remington typewriters or the IBM Selectric typewriters from college. In a communist country, we had to have special permission from the security police in order to have a Remington typewriter in the home and few were so lucky. We had to give them a written sample so they can identify the specific way our typewriter printed, the strokes of each letter, so they can later isolate us if we published any kind of political materials they deemed unacceptable and anti-communist.

Computer users had to learn so many different computer commands just to do word-processing because nothing interfaced. And the large 8-inch floppy disks, which were used with the floppy drives invented at IBM by Alan Shugart in 1967, filled up fast. The smaller 5.25-inch disk was developed that was used on the first IBM personal computer in August 1981.

I lost twenty pages of my dissertation because I ran out of computer space. Research was cumbersome, we actually did have to go to the library and paid the librarian to run one search at a time for about $28 which often did not yield much usable information, depending on what key words we used, but it sure printed hundreds of cards with perforated holes; if dropped, the cards would be out of order and unusable.

My first personal computer was an IBM and it cost $5,000. It was a gift from IBM since I was the first teacher in 1990 to impart knowledge to far-away high schools on a fiber-optic network that could communicate two-way instantaneously all over the country. It was called MS Fiber-optic 2000 and it prepared me for both radio and television as I was teaching from a room with half a million dollars-worth of equipment, no students, TV screens filled with classrooms far away, with whom I was instantaneously interacting, and only a technology person present. The companies that sponsored this effort thought that I needed my own computer at home. It was a good thing since I could not have afforded the price tag on my young teacher salary.

In the early 1980s through the 1990s we used VCRs to play movies rented from Blockbuster or Movie Gallery. Sony’s Betamax was in competition with VHS manufacturers such as JVC. The video cassette recorder had its down side as it was sensitive to humidity and temperature changes and could often damage tapes. Moisture or dryness could affect the magnetic tape.

The first cartoon that I taped for my children on our first VCR was “Stanley, the Ugly Duckling,” followed by hundreds of hours of Disney cartoons. Very expensive at first, upwards of $500-700, eventually the typical VCR model price dropped to $50. In time, the VHS blank tapes became rather inexpensive as well and could only record a set number of video hours. The DVD player took off and VCRs became obsolete. The movie rental places survived for a while but most have gone out of business as movies on DVDs became cheaper and cheaper.

There was a lady in Romania who used to translate through 1990 all the American movies smuggled into the country. She would translate the dialog on screen and write the subtitles in Romanian for later viewing in private homes. She did this for so many years because Romanians were not allowed to watch what movies they wanted, only what the communist party censors would allow.

During my teenage years in Romania, if a person owned a cassette recorder, they were really well-off. Prior to that, reel to reel expensive German players were available on the black market, usually smuggled on a cargo ship. When tape recorders/boom boxes became available, people paid huge amounts of money to own one. The audio cassettes made it easy to record music which was not available or forbidden by the communist government. Cassettes were eventually made obsolete by the Sony Walkman, portable radios, CD players, iPods, mp3 players, and the iPhone.

The phonograph, invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, called later the gramophone, and in the 1940s the record player, is still used today by people who love to collect vinyl records. I have a pretty good collection myself but no record player with the diamond needle to play it on.

My husband gave me a small boom box in 1977. I sold it for $150 so I could pay the tuition I owed to the communist government for high school and two years of college. A very cheap price to pay considering how expensive education was in the west. I should not have had to pay anything at all because all Romanians were guaranteed free education. But it was suddenly no longer free for me because I was marrying an American and somebody else was going to reap the benefits of my education. Some cassette recorders sold for upwards of $300. That is still a lot of money today for many Romanians who earn on the average about $400 a month.

During Ceausescu’s communist regime, people were forced to use strange things as commodity money, cigarettes, cassette players, cassette tapes, soap, shampoo, makeup, panty hose, and other things in short supply, better produced in the west, economically forbidden to the proletariat, or grossly mismanaged by the communist party.

In the late 1970s, I was shocked to find that there was such a thing as an eight-track tape. Very popular in the United States from mid-1960s to late 1970s, it was relatively unknown outside the U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. Then it was replaced by the compact cassette tape.

My uncle Ion owned a manual Leica camera with Carl Zeiss lenses. It must have cost him a fortune back then or he traded rationed food for it. Nobody else in the family owned a camera. The photos were black and white, no color film was available. I am grateful because his camera captured a few moments in my early life in communism that otherwise would not have seen the light of day and the special moments would have been forgotten. I never owned a camera myself until I moved to the U.S. and bought a Kodak with disposable flashbulbs and an Instant Polaroid camera.

Today people take for granted the relatively inexpensive digital cameras that are so affordable. Smart phones have become our cameras, computers, compass, maps, weather bulletins, TVs, theaters, typewriters, VCRs, printers, and spying devices that liberate us but have also enslaved generations of young people more than the Bolsheviks of the former Iron Curtain could have ever dreamed of.

Most people now own a smart phone, sharing every snippet of their daily lives with the world on social media, while technology is charging full-speed ahead with Nano-technology that will further alter our lives in ways that even the sci-fi novels and thrillers of the last century could not have ever imagined.

Household goods have made our lives infinitely better, freeing America’s chores and cooking time. Vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, convection ovens, dishwashers, washing machines, driers, coffee makers, refrigerators, and air conditioners have made life more enjoyable and shortened the time people spent in the kitchen or cleaning. Air conditioners made hot climates more bearable; refrigerators/freezers helped store food and reduced daily trips to the grocery stores significantly.

Push mowers created verdant and well-manicured neighborhoods to the frustration of the U.N.-driven globalists who think that suburbia represent “urban blight” and thus “unsustainable.” They say nothing of the third world slums. Instead of creating a better life and environment for those people, globalists are interested in destroying our middle class suburbia.

Despite all technology, we seem to have reached a paradox of technology affluence, the more gadgets we invent, the busier and more overwhelmed our lives appear to be; it is a paradox of invention overflow and information overload. What was meant to help us has turned into so many choices that people are turning back to the old adage, less is more.

People were afraid to use microwaves in the seventies. Large signs warned shoppers in stores and restaurants that microwaves were in use. Most people were so fearful of getting cancer that many potential buyers did not purchase them for years until they finally became conventional and prices dropped.

Not so long ago most people had only two television channels to choose from, in our case in black and white, and running mostly communist propaganda. No remote controls to change the channels, viewers had to get up and do it manually. And reception was achieved by rooftop antennas and rabbit ears, often adorned with aluminum foil to improve picture clarity. And TV sets with their huge tubes were encased in large boxes, made from plastic or nicely carved wood like Curtis Mathis sets. By midnight, all stations signed off with a patriotic song. But then color TVs became more affordable and cable companies started offering a variety of newly-minted channels which offered night-owls non-stop television choices. We now have 500 plus channels but we only watch about ten on a regular basis.

What will become yesteryear’s technology in the future?

Our Disposable Society

Photo: Ileana Johnson

In our throwaway society, where nothing is sacred anymore and is discarded with the speed of an unwanted darkening banana peel or a lit cigarette butt out the window of a moving car, the miser in me keeps coming out periodically.

Animals, love, life, family, relationships, marriages, appliances, trash, things recyclable, valuables, and trash are thrown out or disposed of mostly on purpose with no remorse and with a faster speed than you can say “I do.”

I sheepishly admit that I was washing Styrofoam containers and plastic forks from McDonald’s back in 1978. Why throw away perfectly reusable items, I thought, when I just landed from the land of poverty, misery, and long lines for food? We had rusty flatware on our table and chipped mismatched plates. My Grandpa used to wash her plates in a little tub of hot water boiled on the gas stove. And sometimes they still had dried food stuck to them from the previous meal. I tried to scrape it off and wipe it with a towel when she was not watching. I could not afford to be choosy or hurt her feelings.

My husband at the time made fun of my miser side because he could not possibly understand even though he visited my childhood home. No matter how many times he took me to the grocery store to see the laden shelves of abundance, my miser inner self could not comprehend so much food and I was certain, it would be gone the next day.

To this day, I wonder when we might have to be without food, water, and electricity, or things that everyone takes for granted, like toilet paper and vitamins. So I used to go from room to room and turn the lights off that my husband had left on and I still do today. Why waste energy? What if we had to be in the dark again like we were often under the socialist/communist regime that planned enough for them while the rest of us had to struggle hungry, cold, and in the dark after sunset?

I recycle today every piece of paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum that crosses my kitchen and my pantry. I even cut the plastic circles that hold bottles in place for fear that some wild animal might get stuck in them if the plastic winds up in a dumpster.

It pains me greatly and I do not understand how someone can throw a live human being or puppy tied in a garbage bag on the side of a deserted road, miles and miles away from a city, and leaves them there like trash, to suffocate and die? Isn’t the way we treat our helpless, animals, children, and old people, an indication of how civilized our society is?

We discard aborted fetuses, humans who are perfect and want to live because progressive society views that as a “choice.” We dump the elderly in nursing homes and seldom visit them. We depend on strangers to be good to them. We visit at holidays out of sheer guilt. There’s an influx of visitors at the nursing home around holidays, I suppose they don’t want to be left out of grandma or grandpa’s will.

We dispose of marriage quicker than we planned the lavish weddings – we get divorced at the drop of a hat. Nobody tries hard to get along anymore; everyone seeks instant gratification and personal happiness. If you ask, nobody is able to give a cohesive definition of what that personal happiness is. But rest assured, it revolves around the “me, myself, and I.”

The “selfish-me generation” throws away everything that is old, including their country, their citizenship, their culture, and their Constitution. Anything they do not understand but has been drilled into their heads by socialist teachers as evil must be discarded. If it is repeated enough times, it becomes their “social justice and equality” playbook.

We discard and abandon children to foster care like a used-up toy because we are too busy or too unable to care for our own offspring.

We euthanize those among us we do not wish to bother with anymore, and we abort the result of loveless hookups because nobody wants to be inconvenienced by a human breathing inside them.

We dump our friends on a whim – they just don’t share the same politics and ideology of the moment and are therefore no good. People we disagree with are suddenly poisonous snakes.

Yet grown Americans keep that one collegiate t-shirt from years ago, with holes everywhere, or that ratty disintegrating blanket one used to drag around for comfort as a toddler, or a favorite dog’s or cat’s toy. Those are holy objects that cannot be thrown away.

We keep that first car, often on cinder blocks, rusted out, and covered with weeds, spiders, and cobwebs. Sometimes rabbits, coons, and the occasional rattlesnake make their nests inside.

We keep that old moldy dresser that belonged to great-grandma because it’s an antique and it might be really valuable someday and fetch a big penny at auction.

We could feed an entire small country daily with the amount of food thrown away in locked dumpsters around the country, perhaps composted, incinerated, or buried later in the landfill.

Beautiful books of wisdom are recycled or buried all the time, in the drive to become a paperless society and to save the trees and the planet from progressive Armageddon. Who has time to read and learn something useful when there is the Internet?

Electronics are discarded as well, perhaps recycled and some buried in the city landfill. Valuable metals, plastics, and glass tubes get buried with them as well.

We throwaway a perfectly running TV that nobody wants in order to make room for a flat screen and top of the line smart TV, so smart, it can report anything you do to the mother ship.

And nobody has landline rotary dial or key punch phones anymore. They worked even when power went out. Those are dinosaurs, thrown away long time ago with the trash, not even recycled. They are buried somewhere in the city dump. When the smart grid goes out and it will eventually do, nobody will have a phone to communicate and answer that 3 a.m. call.

This disposable society mirrors the trashing of our culture in general, of our borders, our language, and our national identity. “We went through darkness so you can find the light." Why are you extinguishing it?

 

The Character of a Nation and Precious Snowflakes

Arlington National Cemetery
Photo: Ileana Johnson

A lot can happen to a nation’s soul, heart, and character in 70 years. In 1944, eighteen-year olds stormed the beaches in Normandy, embracing almost certain death; eighteen-year olds today need a safe space on campuses to cry or cower in fear because words hurt their precious snowflake feelings.

This fundamental change of the American character was accelerated by the Marxist indoctrination facilitated by Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education, founded in 1979.

The cultural demise exploded with help from academia who brainwashed our children into collectivism, from Hollywood’s culture of depravity, from its promotion of drugs, by progressive agendas entirely divergent from the best interests of a healthy and prosperous society, by sexual promiscuity, abortion presented as a choice when it is really murdering human beings as late as four days before live birth, the loss of faith, and by the destruction of the family unit.

The drugged up generations of today have no knowledge of Civics and therefore believe that democracy, a fancy notion of mob rule and anarchy, represents our country. In reality, our Constitutional Republic was founded on entirely different principles which are alien to these mentally insane progressives, useful idiots of global elites, who manipulate them like a fine-tuned violin to do their bidding in the form of riots, slashing and burning their way across our cities while this administration remains silent and the police is told to stand down.

Almost six million men served in WWI and 16 million in WWII. I’m not sure how many WWII vets are still alive, their numbers dwindle with each passing day. American soldiers served our country to preserve our freedom and the freedom of many nations and “our good and decent way of life.”

But today, our society is a corrupt cesspool of vile and immoral entertainment on every possible venue. Music and movies are laced with profanity and women are degraded in rap songs. Singers objectify themselves by imitating sexual acts on stage, scantily clad. Everything goes as long as it feels good.

Proper behavior, honesty, and law abiding citizens are denigrated. Rap and the worst elements of society are worshipped and invited to the White House and celebrated. Immorality and sexual promiscuity is rampant among high school students. Administrators in public schools and colleges have mandated that boys should use the same bathrooms and locker rooms as girls, inviting rapists and pedophiles into our schools. The majority must yield to the sexual confusion and psychological illness of the few.

The average student does not think twice about having multiple “loveless hookups” by the time they graduate. Sexually transmitted diseases, rapes, and unwanted pregnancies happen all the time. After all, the courts have ruled that it is the woman’s choice and her body; they can legally kill their babies conceived in “loveless hookups.”

Profanity rules in Hollywood, on radio, in normal conversations, and in young progressive crowds that are up-to-date on who the latest “reality nobody” is, but don’t understand the Socialists of the Democrat left whom they adore and whose polices they support – collectivist social justice and impossible equality.

Thousands of innocent babies are slaughtered in the womb every day but none of these leftists bat an eye. They only get upset that Donald Trump might take away their “choice” to murder a human being who wants to live.

Those who are lucky to be born are anchor babies from foreign citizens and babies of those Americans who are married and believe in the sanctity of life and family.  A large percentage of black mothers are “married” to Daddy Government and its life-long welfare and many fatherless children end up in gangs, on drugs, and in prison.

The birth demographics of citizens in most developed nations are on a civilization-suicide downward spiraling curve. Young women prefer to push carriages with dogs and cats instead of babies.

Marriage has been bastardized and made irrelevant by our government and the gay lobby has embarked on aggressive tactics to bankrupt and punish those whose religious views reject homosexual marriage.

The rabid and intolerant left has freedom of speech which they exercise violently through riots, assaults, beatings, and property destruction, but they want to destroy anybody else’s rights who disagree with them.

Dr. David Sponseller asked rhetorically in a recent letter on Veterans Day, “Would our soldiers, sailors, and airmen have been so willing to face possible death or crippling injury in combat, knowing that such a cultural way of life were in their future if/when they got back home? I rather doubt it. Rather, they must be rolling over in their graves now at the knowledge of how far the culture has collapsed.”

A gay person, whom I have known a long time, has publicly wished that Trump would deport me back to my home country. I have been a naturalized American citizen longer than this person has been alive. I was lucky to come to this country legally and I am proud of the opportunities it gave me to become everything I could not have become in the socialist/communist dictatorship I was born under.

Not letting truth get in their way, the intolerant progressives and the gay lobby are projecting their fascistic beliefs onto the one man that just might make everybody’s lives better now and in the future.

It seems that the left does not understand that in our Constitutional Republic the Electoral College plays an important role in elections. If the popular vote was the sole benchmark of elections, the overpopulated states bordering oceans would be the only ones in which American citizens and illegal aliens would get to elect our president, the rest of the country would have no voice. Hillary won the popular vote against her opponent, Barack Obama, but he was elected president. Somehow, it was fine then, but not now with Donald Trump.

The outlook for our country was dismal when the progressive candidate was promising more of the same immoral lifestyle, exalting abortion, and seeking to radicalize the Supreme Court for probably 50 years through liberal appointments. “A godless, secular culture so far gone would have been impossible to recover.”

“The winner gave us hope and satisfaction that the 22 million who have fought in WWI and WWII did not fight in vain.”  Dr. David Sponseller continued, “Millions of Christians stormed Heaven’s gates before the election. The Lord heard the prayers of God-fearing citizens and answered us with the most astounding political miracle in memory. He gave us a president-elect that will appoint judges respecting life, marriage, and the freedom of religion once again. He gave us hope for stemming the cultural decay and restoring our once-great country in the decades ahead.”

We must be vigilant. The rabidly progressive left is highly organized, with money to burn. The globalist coffers are never-ending. The progressive elites are not accepting this or any defeat graciously, they are massively financing the country-wide violent rioting which nobody seems interested in stopping; they are going to undermine Trump at every turn, along with the RINOs in Congress.

The Incredible Legal Immigrants

I am always fascinated by legal immigrants who left their loved ones and their homes behind, came to this country,  and made America a special place unlike any other on earth. Their individual stories of true grit and endurance in the face of adversity gives our American citizens their unique character and cultural fabric.

I am not talking about the failed European multiculturalism model pushed by progressives to incorporate as many different ethnicities and religions as possible whether they fit in or not, including people who have broken the law or have given aid to our enemies. This societally disruptive and demographically suicidal model failed in Europe, it is certainly going to fail here.  

I am also not talking about people who crossed the border illegally to benefit from the abundance and generosity of American welfare and who have no intention of assimilating into our culture. I am talking about legal immigrants who came here with all the right intentions.

Americans are unique because we borrowed the best traditions from so many ethnic groups but forged one amalgamated culture. While keeping the native language at home, legal immigrants of the last century have embraced their new country and learned English. A unified language gave our country its strength.

People like Dr. Pol, an incredible veterinarian who has cared for the health of his four-legged patients who cannot speak to tell what hurts them, and the hearts and farms of his two-legged customers. For 30 years he has seen all of 19,000 furry large and small patients; some are repeat accidents waiting to happen – their curiosity of exploration runs them smack into the quills of porcupines or traffic.

A healthy and enthusiastic man of 70 with an infectious demeanor and incredible positive outlook, Dr. Pol became a proud American citizen in 1976. A native of Netherlands, Dr. Jan Pol  grew up on a farm with a one-room house and was the youngest child. He experienced hard work and the importance of laboring close to the land.

He can run circles around many twenty year olds with his constant energy. He does not love just what he does but he loves this country. He is so respected and celebrated in central Michigan and his vet practice so famous that they made a reality show about him, “The Incredible Dr. Pol.”

My friends who won the immigration lottery in their respective countries brought to America a lot of expertise: engineers, doctors, chemists, athletes, researchers, professors, computer specialists, and nurses. They did not work in their fields right away – they started rather small.

Doru ran a pizzeria at first despite his limited language skills. When he learned English well, he applied for a job in his field, mechanical engineering. He now runs an entire R & D department in the south.

My second cousin Mara, who left her loved ones behind when she won the immigration lottery, is a skilled mathematician who works for a famous company. She has a family and two lovely children.

My long-time friend Lula came from Egypt years ago and is now a tenured professor of psychology. We had lengthy discussions about her life in Egypt, how she had to flee the new regime after Sadat was assassinated, and United States’ prominent role in the world in advancing freedom. We marveled how tolerant and welcoming Americans were in spite of our differences. We were so anxious then to prove our mettle and earn our freedom by giving back to this wonderful society who welcomed us with open arms and gave us the opportunity to succeed.

My friend Samir from Lebanon became the cafeteria manager at the university where I taught while pursuing his doctoral degree in chemistry. We became friends when he took my class in order to satisfy a Master’s level requirement that he had not had. He worked very hard in spite of the fact that the heat in the room and the exhaustion from his regular job made him doze off in class sometimes.

I remember my first job in the U.S., working for minimum wage of $3.10 an hour. I was perhaps the most educated person in the office but the lowest on the payroll rung. I did not care, I was happy to have a job that allowed me to eat and have a roof over my head.

During college, I always held 3-4 different part-time jobs in order to fit my class schedule in the daily very hectic routine that extended through the middle of the night all week long. To top it off, I was pregnant with our first child. Nothing was going to deter me from reaching my fullest potential when I was in the land of opportunity. In Romania, only the children of communist party apparatchiks were allowed the chance to excel  and have a good life.

Liberals are wrong, no matter how hard they demand social justice, economic, and academic equality. We can have equal opportunity but we cannot have equal outcomes, not even mandated by government fiat. Those in power will always have more and better, some people are more motivated than others, some work harder than others, some are more experienced than others, some are smarter than others, some are more talented than others, and some are luckier than others.

A couple I met from the former Czechoslovakia was brought to the U.S. through a Baptist Church mission trip. They claimed political asylum although the wife was eight months pregnant. It was scary for them at first since their English was quite limited. Using a mixture of German and Russian, we communicated until they established a home and learned English. I helped them with the baby, got them enrolled in school, and drove them around town. He is now the director of one of the largest planetariums in the country and a professional photographer. His wife runs a very successful business from home.

The most interesting story was that of my best friend Frieda who defected from East Germany during a short vacation to the U.S. There was no way she was going back to the hellhole life controlled by the Stasi, the secret police! She was given permission to stay on the condition that her friends would provide for her financially and she would not be a burden to our welfare system.

We proceeded to collect money for an apartment. I helped Frieda with clothes, a waitressing job in a local bar, found an apartment, and everything else that allowed her to function daily. When the apartment complex burned down, I found her another one.  Her legal resident alien status changed several years later when she became an American citizen. Almost twenty-five years later, she is the vice-president of a chemical company. Her Economics degree, hard work, and the desire to succeed helped her achieve her dream. Interestingly enough, we studied Economics at the same college in Europe but our paths never crossed then.

During my thirty years of teaching, I helped many immigrants pro bono by translating their birth certificates, school transcripts, and other necessary documents. My phone number was on the speed dial at the local hospital when they needed me to translate surgical procedures they were performing on foreign nationals who were either new to the area or were passing through. This was my way of paying it forward in hopes that these people would become good Americans, building our country up and not tearing it down.

But  all these stories pale in comparison to the sagas of the initial legal immigrants holding satchels with their earthly belonging who had to pass through Ellis Island after the arduous Atlantic crossing, were quarantined, some assigned new names and new spellings by careless clerks, and were given or denied permission to enter the New World. These were the true pioneers who battled hardships, life and death situations, insecurity, the unknown, lawlessness, prejudice, abuse,  interment, and unforgiving conditions, yet they prevailed, thanking God for their good fortune and their freedom.

Do Not Underestimate the Value of Culture as a Power of Change

Hope and Change, Hope and Change, Hope and Change… Millions of Americans were chanting totally mesmerized. Change at the speed of light is here and accelerating. Hope is fading away. How did we get here so fast? It did not happen overnight. We just failed to pay attention.

We underestimated the value of culture as a power of change, irreversible change. We were too busy building nations and democracy in countries living by seventh century rules written in one book to notice that our culture was being changed from within and without, partly by theocratic and totalitarian cultures, partly by globalists, and their human tools and institutions, and partly by illegally-domiciled cultures.

You cannot change “hearts and minds” in a culture that values death more than life; you cannot absorb a banana republic culture with “family values” of God and the pursuit of happiness in which happiness is not self-generated but expected from a benevolent government.

Changing “hearts and minds” of nations requires time and arduous indoctrination. It is a process similar to underground water burrowing through stone, shaping magnificent rocks, tunnels, caves, stalactites and stalagmites.

“Cultura animi” as Cicero described it in “Tusculan Disputations” is the cultivation of the soul and mind. (“Animus” is Latin for soul or mind.) The American soul and mind have been cultivated in the direction of socialism for a long time. We are noticing the change now because it has finally come to fruition after more than a century of constant scholastic, moral, social, and political programming.

Culture encompasses the material culture of a nation and the non-material culture such as language, customs, traditions, and its unique identity. A culture exhibits a group-specific acquired behavior which can be changed over time with the right tools. A culture is multifaceted; it includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by humans as members of society.

W. C. McGrew defined culture as a six-step process:

1. A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is modified.
2. The innovator transmits this pattern to another person.
3. The form of the pattern is consistent.
4. The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after having acquired it.
5. The pattern spreads across a population: families, clans, troops, or bands.
6. The pattern endures across generations.

Language, a very important element of culture, is the direct expression of a people’s national character. Johann Gottfried Herder said, "Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache" (Because every people is a People, it has its own national culture expressed through its language). We do not have our own official language – the government and necessity have forced the use of two languages.

Immigrants, who have entered other cultures through time, have formed their own sub-cultures within the primary culture:

-         Core culture (Leitkultur or “lead culture” as the Germans termed it) - minorities had an identity of their own, but they supported the core concepts of the culture on which society was based

-         Melting pot – immigrant cultures mixed willingly without state intervention; such was the case of the United States until liberals intervened and changed it into “tossed salad bowl”

-         Monoculturalism – was adopted initially by some European states as a government policy to assimilate immigrants; it was deemed racist and nationalistic by ruling elites

-         Multiculturalism – immigrants preserved their cultures while interacting “peacefully” within one nation; France, Germany, and U.K. admitted recently that multiculturalism failed miserably in their countries; other European nations are struggling to survive as they are losing their identity, culture, and their countries to the “peaceful” immigrants

United Kingdom’s sociologists developed cultural studies influenced by Marxism. These studies, models, and lessons were incorporated and adopted by universities around the world and preached in thousands of classes every year. The core message was the same – socialism and Marxism are the wave of the future if society is to attain utopia and happiness. The entrepreneurial work ethic of capitalism was disdained and maligned.

We are in a globally-accelerated culture change period driven by these educational models, international trade, the socialist mass media, and the population explosion. Many inside and outside forces encourage and promote change through thinly veiled environmentalist and globalist propaganda indoctrination, economic, and political measures. Other forces resist change coming from cultural ideas and practices favoring socialism and Marxism, but they are outnumbered. New technologies and social conflicts also produce change by promoting new and peculiar cultural models that alter social dynamics in the utopian vein.

The feminist movement deeply affected gender relations and economic structures in the American culture, often in negative ways. Environmental conditions and groups caused cultural change through global warming brainwashing. War and competition over resources such as oil greatly impacted social dynamics and culture.

Cultural ideas were transmitted through diffusion (fast food across the globe, innovations, direct borrowing) and acculturation (acquiring traits). Individual like me who learned the language, history, customs, and traditions became assimilated into the new culture. Likewise, over many generations of students, trained College of Education teachers indoctrinated their pupils into the socialist mindset without much interference from the clueless parents who were often themselves products of the public school cultural modification curricula.

People who were born, raised, and grew old under oppressive communism, did not culturally understand any other way of living. They felt alienated when capitalism replaced communism. They did not know how to make a living, how to survive on their own and provide for themselves, they were still waiting for the communist regime to hand them their meager rations – it was not much, but it did not require having to think, having to provide for themselves a daily subsistence, or having to work. These elders wanted communist enslavement back because it was a certainty they recognized.

People who fled communism were not shocked that the Russians celebrated by the thousands Stalin’s birthday recently, in worship to his dubious and murderous achievements, having starved and killed 20 million innocents during his reign of terror in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). We know that a dependent and hopeless culture breeds helplessness.

The French are so unwilling to give up their culture of “welfareship” as Sylvain Charat calls it, that they have fallen hard into the “poverty trap.” France is going to allow doctors to “accelerate the coming of death” of French patients in the socialized medical care system, in order to fund their cradle to grave lavish welfare. What caused such a harsh change in the values of their culture?

Why are Americans allowing the dreaded 15-member “death panel” of Obamacare instead of trimming the government’s lavish spending and offering healthcare insurance to the uninsured in some other form? If some Americans want universal healthcare and gun control, why don’t they move to Cuba?

Why would a culture run household budgets in such a way that citizens are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their children in the future and the grandparents through euthanasia driven by medical care rationing in order that the parents live better in the present?

It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans prefer a lazy lifestyle, dependent on government welfare for their every need as the only viable solution to daily living; they want a secular society devoid of faith, a society that does not think twice about killing the unborn as a form of contraception but builds crossing bridges for turtles, a society that does not seek justice for the murder of innocents but demonstrates to release infamous terrorists and criminals.

Americans who no longer share the values of the culture that was established long time ago, adhere to the culture of socialism/Marxism. The low-information Americans, who chanted for the promised hope and change, aspire for a culture of government dependency and entitlements in perpetuity.

Entrepreneurship is slowly replaced in the American psyche by “assistance-ship” through a barrage of constant cultural indoctrination by the academia, the media, and the government.