Who Is Next?

While watching the riots around the country last week I wondered how long it would be before the creeps began to pick on George Washington. Well, yesterday I saw an article that showed poor bronze George laying laying face down wondering what the hell happened. I am wondering the same thing. There is nothing that divides a country more then civil strife. I often declare myself a bigot, and a racist, but I live with black neighbors as well as brown and yellow. These people are fine people. All they want is to live in peace, raise their families and to have a good life, they are okay, or at least they appear to be. Frankfort is a magnet for minority families because of the fine reputation of our schools. They come here to give their kids the same chance as I gave mine. They don’t want their kids hooked on drugs, nor recruited into gangs. Yet, Frankfort has both of these problems within the boundaries. My own grand daughters told me exactly where they could go within the school to get drugs. It was a different place for different desires. I read the police blotter in the locals and the number one reason for being pulled over is to examine for drugs. Lately there has been an explosion of burgled cars and homes. I can only reason that these thieves are feeding habits. The number one house that gets robbed is one with doors unlocked, the same for cars. Stolen cars are easy pickings when the owners leave them unlocked with the keys in the console.

What we haven’t seen yet in our town is unpeaceful protesting, rioting, and looting. These activities seem to be organized by political groups mostly leftist or communist for the purpose of creating division between peoples. These are ruthless criminal types that will betray their country for money. Many are highly educated and brainwashed into leftist thinking that they have it bad. Never do these people listen to logic nor understand statistics about how more black lives are lost within their own community perpetrated by blacks. Black lives don’t really matter if it is a black killing a black.

Blacks are progressing in this country. Although because I, a white man has said it they will disagree. There have been myriads of laws passed dictating that blacks are equal to whites, trillions of dollars have been spent to make their lives better, and it has done so, but they don’t think it is enough, they want reparation too. This rioting and protesting will only end when the entire country is communist, poor, and starving. In other words, never. We will never succumb to communism peacefully.

This week I heard the term “Juneteenth” for the first time. The word is completely strange to me, but since that first time it is a ll I’ve heard. Evidently, it is a term used to commemorate freedom from slavery. Southern states have been celebrating this day, but not in my half of the country. There is now a movement to make Juneteenth a National Holiday. I suppose the day will rival the National Holiday of July fourth with picnics and concerts on the National Mall, fireworks, parades, and time off from work.  Hell, if we celebrate more and more none of us will have any time to work for a living. Life will be more acceptable if we didn’t have to work. What an awful four letter word work is.

The Goal Was Not To Lose

IMG

My latest book is not fiction, it is history. Specifically, Revolutionary Summer deals with the short period of May through September of 1776. Joseph Ellis does a remarkable job of chronicling the people and the events leading to America’s independence from Great Britain. One thing that impressed me is the significant role played by John Adams in orchestrating the separation of the American Colonies from the British Empire. Most of us like to believe that Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, but it was John Adams who master minded the Declaration and Jefferson who translated Adams ideas into words. There is a wonderful movie covering this same subject called “1776.”

This story depicts the difficult task ahead of George Washington as he leads the Continental Army, a band of amateurs, against the élite and experienced British military. Washington makes a critical mistake at the beginning of the war when he encamped his entire army on Manhattan Island in New York. The British fleet arrives with thirty thousand men, and also lands on the island. The armada of ships loaded with firepower and supplies lay just off the shore ready on a moments notice to move to where ever they would be needed.

Washington’s biggest task is to avoid being annihilated, and/or captured. He wrestles with losing his honor and that of his army because he knows the practical thing to do is to retreat from the island to the mainland.

I saw similarities to 1776 and 2013 while reading this story. An unorganized, untrained, poorly armed band of zealots stand-off against the world’s most powerful country. In my mind I see a band of Tea Party Patriots and Militias standing tall against the world’s largest, strongest , and richest country. Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime, but we are on a track to having to stand up for what we believe. Our first line of attack is through the ballot box knowing that if that does not work, the next step will be . . .

Ashamed of Their Country

Grumpa Joe intended this blog site as a place where he would post his work exclusively; He would share with readers the wisdom of his years. For the most part about half of what he posts is original stuff and the other half comes from contributions from friends on subjects that touch his nerves. When he does post a contribution he adds words of his own to give a rationale.

Today, he has a piece from a Dorothy, a friend he knows from the company they worked for. She and he were at different ends of the building but they made enough contact to become friends. She worked in Carpet Land, and he worked in the trenches. Whenever he got called to see the Boss, she was the one who announced his presence. After many years of retirement they somehow hooked up again via the blogosphere. Dorothy sends him really good stuff regularly. Today, she got him going with this little known piece of news that didn’t really make the news. This is the kind of stuff that gets his juices flowing.

First is her contribution, second will be Joe’s thoughts on why this happened.

Whattheh

George Washington statue is hidden at the MLK rally in Columbia, SC

The annual MLK observance at the state house in Columbia, SC had an interesting twist this year. 

The event is held on the North side steps of the statehouse.

Prominent at that location is a large bronze statue of George Washington.

This year, the NAACP constructed a “box” to conceal the father of our country from view so that participants would 

Not be ‘offended’ by his presence.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw this picture of the MLK Day rally in Columbia, South Carolina. 

This rally was sponsored by the NAACP, and they said that they covered the statue because they “didn’t want to offend anyone.”

Really? George Washington is the father of this nation. How is he offensive to anyone?

Can you imagine what would happen if we covered the statue of Dr. Martin L. King on President’s Day? Or, is only the statue of a ‘white guy’ offensive??

Of course, this display of anti-Americanism wasn’t covered at all by the national media (surprise, surprise!!), and the local paper in Columbia only ran a short piece on it. It has been covered a little by the blog-world, but I think the word needs to get out to the general public that this is what the NAACP is all about…militant and (most definitely) racist.

*******************************************************

An angel on Joe’s shoulder told him to check this out on Snopes before hitting the “Publish” button. Snopes gave it a Green dot with a red circle around it, meaning the article above is a mixture of truth. Actually, it is true but not complete. Snopes doesn’t allow one to copy their analysis, but ASK.com does and their version is identical to Snopes.

This is excerpted from ASK.com

Text example:
Email contributed by David H., Jan. 18, 2011:

FW: Father of Our Country Boxed Away

The annual MLK observance at the state house in Columbia SC had an interesting twist this year. The event is held on the north side steps of the statehouse. Prominent at that location is a large bronze statue of George Washington. This year, the NAACP constructed a “box” to conceal the Father of His Country from view so that participants would not be offended by his presence.

Analysis: I haven’t (yet) been able to determine precisely who took the above snapshot, but eyewitness accounts and other photos of the Jan. 17, 2011 event confirm that it’s authentic.

As stated above, the occasion was the NAACP’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally at the state house in Columbia, South Carolina. The participants’ view of the statue of George Washington that stands in front of the capitol building was indeed obstructed by a three-sided wooden box during the ceremonies, a measure which has been roundly criticized by right-leaning political bloggers as disrespectful of the nation’s first President.

Whereas the forwarded text asserts that the organizers of the event sought to “conceal” the statue of Washington “so that participants would not be offended by his presence,” an NAACP spokesperson offered a different explanation, as reportedby John O’Connor in the Jan. 18 edition of The State:

A three-sided structure that covered the front and sides of the statue was intended to display a rally graphic and serve as a photo-and-television backdrop for the event’s speakers, said S.C. NAACP executive director Dwight James. However, the graphic was not finished before the rally and could not be put in place.Photos from the event showed a three-sided box with Washington’s statue visible only from behind the stage. “What we had constructed was a background with a graphic to be placed on it,” James said. “We weren’t trying to obstruct anything.”

The State reported that the statue has been similarly covered at MLK Day events going back at least four years, though most groups holding rallies at the state house leave it unobstructed.

*******************************************************

Grumpa Joe tried researching for articles from the last four years but could not find anything. His hopes were to find another photo from another year to prove the validity of the claim that they have been covering statues at their events. He was unsuccessful.

Here is Joe’s take on why they covered George. Even though George Washington played a huge role in kick starting America into existence he owned slaves. Most of the NAACP people Joe has heard speaking resent the Founding Fathers who endorsed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the BIll of rights, and consider them all hypocrites. They wrote “All men are created equal . . .” yet never included blacks in the conversation. It wasn’t until Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation that they became free men. Our government has worked diligently to pass laws to correct the imbalance between blacks and whites, but  have been largely unsuccessful. There is still racial division today, and our first black President is the main perpetrator of racial division. He uses race at every chance to his advantage. Meanwhile, even though the Founders blacks out of the original documents in favor of establishing a country which ultimately advances the black cause and has raised their level of wealth, and education to above the level of blacks anywhere else on earth they refuse to budge from dependence to self-responsibility.

The root cause is slavery. The blacks have been spoon fed by liberals that whites owe them something to make up for the sins committed by the ancestors who did own slaves. Joe’s take on this is “Get over it.” Many countries lived with slaves going back to ancient Rome and further. Eventually, slaves were freed and assimilated into civilization. Every European country had a system of feudal serfs. Serfs were freemen but belonged to the estate on which they worked. They lived free but were required to work the fields of the Lord, while slaves were told exactly what to do and how. Slaves were property, Serfs were not. Serfs could leave an estate at anytime, but because of the feudal system they could only get work on another estate as a serf. Either way, the life of a slave and the life of a serf were pretty darn close.

Yet, many serfs fled European countries to become freemen. We do not hear white immigrant descendents of European Serfs slamming their government, nor claiming restitution for years past. They are happy enough as free men to work within the system. U.S.A. Blacks are several generations removed from slavery, yet they persist in receiving back pay. Haven’t we paid enough in the past 148 years?

Blacks want us to love them and treat them equally. The country has made great inroads to doing that in the past fifty years. Laws favor blacks over whites in many cases. They have served well to lift blacks to make them more equal. In some cases they have an edge over whites. Compare white-workers to black-workers in government jobs. Blacks often have union people assigned as Discrimination Officers. They function to resolve any grievance by a black regarded as discriminatory against him in the favor of the black. Here in Illinois we had a State Mental health Center. In the beginning, it was heavily staffed with whites. With the equal opportunity laws employment swung toward blacks and the State made sure they would not be held for discrimination. As time went on, the blacks outnumbered the white by a ratio of two or three to one. Yet, the Discrimination Officer remained. Blacks discriminated whites daily, but the Discrimination Officer slept in his office waiting for a black to walk in with a claim. Black workers took advantage of white workers every chance they got. For example, telephone operators worked three shifts. The blacks had a system in play. Whenever an operator was going to call in sick to take the day off she would alert the others not to answer their phones at home. That way the supervisor who was calling around for a replacement would not find anyone. The supervisor then “mandated” the worker still at work, to work the next shift. Most of the times the worker mandated was white. In my opinion, the State should have been sued for violation of work rules but they never were. They claimed they needed to keep a health care center running at all costs. Isn’t that a form of slavery, i.e. mandating a person to work another eight hours against his will?

Another example. Two telephone operators working side by side, one black, one white. The black sits at her phone chatting with her Avon customers while the board is lighting up with calls. The white works her butt off to answer her calls, and admonishes her partner to pick up her calls or to switch her board over. “Let them wait” was a typical reply. Both workers made the same money, but the white worker had more value per hour than the black. This type of workplace behavior goes on in all government bureaus, both state and federal. Did you ever wonder why the government workers need the SEIU? Because too many blacks would get fired without a Discrimination Officer in place to shout “racism” to a supervisor and throw the place into a panic about a lawsuit.

How can whites love blacks when they surround the whites with such behavior?

Another example, the Farm Bureau has a program to pay farmers who own small farms $50,000/year to make up for the awful way their ancestors were treated on the same land. Most farmers are black and the program intends to help them. I heard an interview with a black farmer in the program who made a really good living on his farm. The interviewer asked him if he felt dishonest taking the money from the Bureau program. “No, I feel it is my place to punish the government for treating my grandfather and his slave ancestors poorly.”

The bible story “The Tower of Babel” from Genesis finds the Lord dividing people and scrambling their language to make it harder for them to reach heaven, yet we mortals strive to do just that, we try over, and over again to build a Utopia that is not worth living in.

New International Version (NIV)

The Tower of Babel

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward,[a] they found a plain in Shinar[b] and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone,and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scatteredthem over the face of the whole earth.

Throughout history there has been a racial divide between people of color. Let’s face it whites don’t like people of color just as people of color don’t like whites. The color shouldn’t matter but it does. The laws force us to treat each other equally, but push the equality toward people of color to the detriment of the whites.

Another example is the Affirmative Action law which requires institutions to give equal consideration to race, color, religion, etc. This one law has resulted in what I call the Dumbing Down of America. Universities and Colleges force themselves to take on black students with lower credentials than whites. The result is many of the blacks come out with degrees they don’t deserve because no University wants to admit they failed a black. Our current President is a prime example of affirmative action. He would never have made it into the schools he did without affirmative action or a lot of money. Universities also discriminate toward foreign students because they pay cash and out-of-state fees. Perhaps Obama came in as a foreign student fully sponsored by a foreign government.

Nonetheless many very capable white students are being left out of prestigious schools because of Affirmative Action. Some of the Phd degreed blacks i see being interviewed on TV are the most left leaning liberals on earth. They could never hold a real job in the private sector so they continued education by playing the system until they got the title of doctor. That gives them the air of superior intelligence. Most of them are out of their league, and expect us to love them because they are smart blacks.

I don’t deny there are some very smart blacks in the country. Favorites like Thomas Sowell,  Econ Professor in California, or Ben Carson, Brain Surgeon, or Mychal Massie, Author, or Hermain Cain, Businessman, or Walter Williams, Economist, or Col. Allen West, Retired Military and Politician are all people I would live next door to and love them like my brother. The real question is would they want to live next to me?

Fourth Grade Patriot

img011

As a child in grammar school I read a lot of books. Once I discovered the local library my world opened immensely. I lost myself in reading books about early American life, the frontier life. I especially enjoyed reading about colonial America. The Revolutionary war held my interest and I reveled at the exploits of our Patriot Citizens who formed an army to fight the mighty British.

As an adult, I often bad mouth the French for their attitude toward the US, but when I read accounts about the founding of America, I realize just how critical French help was to making victory possible.

This winter I have read a few books more than I have in the past, and on my last trip to the library I spotted a book that piqued my interest. The author’s name did it, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich has been somewhat controversial in recent years He served in Congress and was Speaker of the House during the Clinton Administration. He is largely responsible for Clinton’s successful second term as President. Clinton is often praised for leaving a budget surplus for the next president. The truth of the matter is that Gingrich as Speaker orchestrated legislation that Clinton very wisely signed into law.

Newt Gingrich is a historian. Before entering politics he taught history. His love of history is clear in “Victory at Yorktown.”  Reading this story brought back memories of my fourth grade début into the world of history. Gingrich with co-author William R. Forstchen have crafted a fictional story of George Washington’s leadership to end the war and to solidify the USA. Within the story depicting the factual accounts of Washington’s strategy and the hardship his army endured for six long years there unfolds a personal account as well. Two friends growing up side by side in the colonies find themselves working as spies. One worked for the Loyalists (England) the other for the Patriots. They share a love for a single woman who has her own allegiances. Who will she wind up with, or will she survive the rigors of war? Throughout the story of the war, the authors cleverly weave the love story into the plot just often enough to keep it a fascinating read.

It infuriates me when I read news accounts about modern educators dumbing down America by  rewriting history books to push their ideological spin on our kids. As a child, I developed a love for my country by learning about the hardships endured by those who fought to make it happen. It filled me with pride to know I was born into that effort. The authors of the new history books want to re-direct our children into learning to love ideologies which are contrary to those of the Founders.

As parents and grandparents, we must stay ever vigilant to the material being fed to our  kids at school and to take action to remove offensive material, and to banish politically motivated teachers from the system.

Patriots Weep

Mount Rushmore Weeps
Where are you headed America?