A Letter to my Posterity

Dear Young person, grandson or granddaughter:

Let me introduce myself.  I am one of your grandfathers, this year I am 71 years old and am writing you from the beginning of the 21st Century, in 2009.  This letter and those that will follow from time to time are sent to you to try to give you some insight into my time on this Earth.

What we are doing politically at this time in the United States of America  will most certainly have effects on your lives that we of this age can barely perceive.  However, it  is apparent to some of us that the actions that are being taken now and those  in the near future will affect the course of humanity far into the future, maybe for centuries.

We are now embroiled in a struggle to see if mankind, at least in the United States of America, will recapture from encroaching tyranny our human freedoms for the enjoyment of life, liberty and property that were first secured for us by the American Revolutionary War and then magnificently protected for us by the amazing Constitution of the United States of America.  Or, on the other hand, if mankind will once again descend into serfdom.  This time a serfdom not beholding to some abstruse nobleman,  but  to one that makes us minions of an all powerful Socialism.

When I was a little boy, I was taught that any person in this great country could expect that there would be no legal impediments to stopping oneself or any other person from rising to the very apex of society.  Success in that endeavour could be assured by using your mind and the sweat of your brow.   We had all sorts of freedoms, especially freedom of thought and speech.   People could say anything about anybody  if it was true, and you could go anywhere and do anything so long as you didn’t hurt others in the process.  Yes, you could say anything about anybody, but you didn’t.  You could only  say bad things in jest …  we were taught and intrinsically knew that words could  hurt; hurtful speech was not socially acceptable.  But nonetheless,  a manifestation of this freedom of speech was that there were tasteless jokes about status, intelligence, ethnicity, religion, sex and race.  It seemed, when I was young, that it was OK though, because in those days it was understood that the jokes were not intended to be vicious, but were intended to be funny or startling.   Most were harmless, but, still,  in some there was the true hatred of bias or racism.  We seemed to be able to winnow the wheat from the chaff.

However, there was another type of attitude prevalent then that was not just tasteless, but institutionalized and rampantly wrong.  I will never forget, as a thirteen year old, driving into a town  in Arkansas with my parents, and at its outskirts seeing the city sign:  “Welcome to Beautiful Harrison, Arkansas — Nigger don’t let the sun set on your ass.”  To say that I was stunned would be a gross understatement.  In the years since that experience, America has changed a lot.  The type of racism embodied in that sign has been rejected by one and nearly all, although, for a few,  no law or code of ethics can ever wipe hatred from the darkest recesses of their hearts.

I have struggled with that experience quite a lot in the years since then.  I have come to realize that the jokes were the commentary laymen on the human diversity of their fellow citizens, often showing the butt of the joke the folly of his own prejudices.  The mere volume of the jokes mandated that eventually  everyone and everything was ridiculed and because of that were accepted in good humor by most.  But the sign  … ?  Every person in Harrison, Arkansas had to have seen that sign on a daily basis and the city fathers had to have sanctioned it or it would not have been there.  That sign was a product of government, albeit local, nonetheless government.  If one reflects on the persecution of minorities it becomes apparent that true atrocities do not come to horrendous fruition until government gets involved.  The persecution of blacks after the Civil War came from the “Jim Crow” laws.  The persecution of the Jews in Europe came from the government: first, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, then the Nazis in Germany, the Communists in the Soviet Union and so on.  Think of other groups that were targets of the state:  the Pilgrims in England, the Huguenots in France, the Armenians in the Mid-East, the Cherokees in America … the list is endless and all caused by government action.

In the 1960’s the great majority of Americans revolted against the government imposed discrimination then imposed upon the huge mostly southern black minority.  This time was a time of a tremendous amount of civil strife, but the upshot was that most of the legal impediments in the Law imposed against the blacks were removed.  Nevertheless, the unintended consequences of this upheaval were many and great.

Those who would re-enslave the blacks found new methods to discriminate against them.  The government did things like “school busing for diversity” causing the urban white population to abandon inner cities to the blacks, like urban renewal of the central cities offering near rent free housing to keep the inner city dwellers there, like welfare payments which were used as an incentive to keep the population in place, like minimum wage laws used to guarantee a large jobless population dependent on welfare and many other programs designed to indebt the recipients of the “largess” to the government.  A few of the unintended results were:  the decay of the inner cities, rampant drug abuse, murderous urban gangs, the break-up of the black family and not the least, about 65% of all black children being born out of wedlock.  An absolute horror to the concept of freedom.  Such is the benevolence of Government.

But the saddest out-come of the movement was the attack on free speech.  Use of the “N” word quoted above was first considered gauche, not to be used in polite society.  Soon the use of it, according to the typical liberal, was supposedly “prima facie” evidence of the user’s racism, although it was not.  Once that precedent was established,  it became “homophobic” to refer to homosexuals by any other word than “gay”, even to the use of the word homosexual.  From there the list of prohibited words began to fulminate.  Then the government got into the drama by enacting a series of Federal and State  “race crimes” which spoke to any display of prejudice, and was epitomized by concept of  “politically incorrect speech.”  The laws provided penalties for derogatory speech directed against minorities or minority dogmas characterized it as “hate speech.”  Very soon, there were no more jokes.  No more kidding around on the job.   Then as people became more and more concerned for their jobs or from  fear of social ostracization, they  became want to comment on any attribution of any evil intent to anyone.  Common people and people of responsibility had been silenced for fear of retribution, be it personal or commercial.

Then the kicker.  Although Islamic terrorists were responsible for attacks against ordinary Americans  whom they publicly beheaded for no apparent reason and to American installations around the world, culminating in the attack on the USS Cole and the attack on the Pentagon and the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, it was made official government policy not to “profile”, that is to cast any kind of  suspicion on any mid-eastern Arabs or to in any way offend any Muslim.  Never mind that all the people responsible for these atrocities were Muslim jihadists.  Never mind that Islam is a proselytizing religion that considers all other religion its enemy.  Or to the point that if people under their control won’t convert to Islam, they are given the choice to do so or face death.  Obviously, not all  Muslims do, but many of them subscribe to holy war, jihad, against all non-believers, believing that the killing of infidels (non-Muslims) is a God given ticket to paradise.

This “politically correct” mind bent permeated our entire society, including the military.  It culminated in a tragedy where an American US Army Major, known to the military authorities to be a jihadist, murdered 13 and wounded another 40 of his co-soldiers in the name of his god, Allah.  All this because his military superiors did not want to offend any Muslims in the Army with “profiling.”

Who can tell the consequences of depriving or even mitigating the freedom of free citizens.  Certainly, you can personally reprimand someone who is not “politically” correct and failing to have effect, you don’t have to associate with them, but using the force of government, with its penalties and fines, is opening Pandora’s box for all evil.

I will send you another letter soon,

Love from the past,

Your Grandpa