Dr. King’s Dream in 2022

I arrived in Chicago via train on April 4, 1968, as a preschool child traveling with his family to visit an aunt who was recovering from surgery. I have only fleeting memories of that trip: the sounds of the tracks and diesel smell of the engine, and the odd configuration of the onboard restroom toilet. I don’t remember the anxious rush of relatives who met us at the train station wanting to get us away from the downtown area.

That was the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. My cognizant life has been lived in the man’s legacy.

Mid-1950s Southern Democrats, ninety years after losing the Civil War, continued to cling to acculturated race-based tiers of society. As society progressed and those outmoded ways of thinking encountered the same sort of ideological headwinds which ended slavery in the previous century, it fell to Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks to spark the formative challenge of Alabama’s racial segregation. The result was the Civil Rights movement lasting another decade, in which Americans of African descent demanded equal footing in their nation and in which Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the prominence that eventually cost him his life.

Shortly afterward, it was the same Democratic Party—who lost ownership of their slaves a hundred years prior, and who vehemently opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act—formulating a controlling strategy only slightly less abhorrent than presuming to categorize another human being as property. Blacks, unable to be kept in place through intimidation, were now introduced to the more subtle bondage of family-destroying dependence on social welfare programs. Black Americans, having only just overcome the shackles of segregation, became Black Democrats and began voting for their political masters in rates invading the ninetieth percentile.

The battle for equal footing in the pursuit of excellence and of the American vision—and Dr. King’s dream of defining quality of character—has been replaced on the political Left by the pursuit of lame advantage. It happened first through empowerment conferred by the aforementioned engineered monolithic voting bloc. Via leveraging divisive politics of racial identity and evolving into the ongoing woke culture, the Democratic Party descended into our modern day’s last harbor of the slave-owning mentality in a nation they innately despise. Steering the vulnerable into the morass of a cultivated victim mentality has been the Democrats’ primary strategy since, comprising a continuous tug on loose strings in the fabric of American society.

To abandon economic morality and seek gains outside the rewards of excellence requires confiscating the fruits of the more capable. Doing so by wile rather than force requires such to be handed over rather than taken. Acquiescing to such assumption also had to be engineered, and so we arrived at the second great strategy of the political Left: the assignment of unwarranted guilt, again on the basis of race. Nothing more is required to acquire the label of racism than refusing to accept the undeserved accusation, and deconstructing the underlying premise as indefensible only causes one’s accusers to increase their volume.

No one living today’s American society has ever experienced institutional slavery here. Outside of the scourge of communism and the doctrinal servitude continuing to be practiced in Islam, the incongruity of slavery was reconciled with my nation’s founding principles within a lifetime of their establishment and with the greatest cost of life in our military history. Dr. King’s dream embraced nothing of inherited grievance. To do so is bondage imposed by the same spirit of envy driving the increasingly sputtering engine of the political Left.

The pursuit of lame advantage might indeed result in advantage. The lameness, however, will be more consistently enduring.

Dr. King’s dream that his children would be assessed by the content of their character was an ideologically American dream. It’s one currently making inroads in the fracturing Democrat voting blocs who, being as capable of intellectual influence as any other demographic, continue in increasing numbers to realize the intentional limitations of the victim mentality. There is an essential humanitarian disconnect in those who profess concern with their supporters’ state while actually pursuing a lame advantage of their own: in valuing sustained political empowerment well in excess of any benefit conferred to their enabling constituents.

There is no racial component to ideological Americanism. Rally under the red, white, and blue banner of my tribe. Stand for the Anthem and you’re in. Appreciate what history is available to teach us all how to comport ourselves going forward. We may do so edified by the experiences of our forebears and by the rational criticism of premises that drove their striving in days gone by, whether we view them in the present day as points of light or shadow.

This fragile American experiment is an anomaly in humanity’s long history of governmental tyranny. The dark spirit of despair holds slaves of its own, chained by the deception that little else matters beyond our selfish concerns, that justice is synonymous with confiscation, and that the whispered choice between love, hate and indifference matters less than the braying voice of covetousness driving its victims to take what they’re told they have inherited the right to snatch away.

Be the people, and Martin Luther King, Jr. will be proud.

Choose to love – DA

*****

In production news, the Editress is now working in the second half of the seventh and concluding novel of Boone’s File, Two Years with Master Quan. God willing, the title will appear in the second quarter of this year. While we wait for Boone’s origin story, as told to a little girl who asked, pick up her first novel, Absinthe and Chocolate, as a free download or priced inexpensively as allowed wherever your eBooks come alive.

The White Nationalist Bogeyman

Politics, as reflected in narratives thus advanced, represent the emphasis on character or the disregard thereof inherent in a given camp. Reliable people do not traffic in lies, nor do evil folk endure the examination of their values, intent, or world view generally. So far as the political Left is concerned, criticism of unsound behavior has evolved into the only real sin worthy of opposition.

Leftward-leaning premises contribute nothing to the general condition, and in fact degrade the human experience past the point where a moral being may ignore their effects. Nothingness comprising the essence to which they consign themselves—in self-focus and faithlessness—consistently manifests in the poor quality of their propositions and unsustainable supporting arguments. Lowering the standard of rhetoric as they do, typical weapons Leftists most often employ are equally dishonorable to the remainder of their creed. Scare tactics, insubstantial claims, and accusations designed to leverage emotion rather than survive critical examination are chief among those.

Distraction is another strategy to avoid the death knell of leftist ideas, only nominally deserving to be labeled thought. Likewise, redirection is another common avoidance of defending, much less conceding, fatally flawed premises. Combining these rancid techniques, to heat and stir in the cauldron of the political Left, is the foul recipe that produced today’s Democratic Party.

Dems, particularly when exploiting racial issues, need to rewrite the history of their own party and offload the righteous indignation aroused by their residually spectral aura of slave ownership. Their offenses against humanity continued even after the institution was ended, such as the atrocities perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan—an organization founded by Southern Democrats to suppress black voting, by the way—acculturated racism and resultant segregation in the Democrat South, and their party’s consistent opposition of 1960s civil rights legislation advanced by Republicans.

Racism endured, though, and sought new advantage and embodiment in targeting the integrity of urban black families via the dependency enabled by politically-motivated social welfare spending … initiated by another Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Over generations of engineered tragedy ironically termed The Great Society, Democrats leading and feeding their dependent voters cultivated the impression that somehow the political spectrum had reversed, and the Democratic Party now holds more concern for Americans of African descent than conservatives, or particularly the GOP.

Nothing can be farther from the truth. But as we’ve seen already, the farther from the truth one deviates, the more dearly held the narratives of the left wing.

The slave-holding mentality of the twenty-first century resides in three places: the doctrines of Islam, Marxist ideology, and the modern-day Democratic Party. All three degrade the humanity of those they presume to manage out of a self-defined sense of superiority. Inflated ego arises from psychological wounds festering in compensation; the condition produces perceived privilege to direct the lives of others like an untended laceration seeps pus.

The compulsion to direct, to run the show, to make things happen is insatiable. History is replete with unfortunate examples of the affliction. The assumed divine right of kings led to colonial imperialism in prior centuries, culminating with the onset of transportation and military technologies in nineteenth-century nationalism. In the next, two great wars followed as extensions of ideology promoting national interest to the exclusion of noble considerations governing civil international behavior. The many millions who died left their survivors determined to rebuild the world in an entirely different paradigm.

So it was we arrived to the era of international cooperation, as expressed first in the failed League of Nations and afterward in the United Nations. The compulsion to direct the lives of others, always present in the shadows of human nature, assured the adoption of good ideas would afterward be run into the ground in the name of progress.

The current trend of political elites toward favoring global government is the unfortunate result. Elitism metastasized is what produces this ideological tumor.

The primary obstacle to globalized government is the strength of the social fabric expressed in a strong national culture and identity. Ideas expressed by our founding documents—of just powers derived from the consent of the governed, government as a necessary danger liable to attract those who prefer directing to serving, and promoting a shared consensus regarding moral judgments whose fruit is healthy living and an improved general condition—are anathema to globalized socialists. They’d rather stand in the ranks of like ilk currently threatening to undo the character of our stable and prosperous society.

The Left needed a bogeyman to distract, to redirect, to project as a danger in order to advance their narrative solutions. They constructed the image of the White Nationalist to fulfill all those deplorable requirements, leveraging righteous indignation felt toward unrelated and hateful ideologies such as white supremacy and white separatism.

National interest, as opposed to globalized socialism, roots in self interest. Whether one expounds the subject to the extent found in Ayn Rand’s literature is a matter of philosophy. Ms. Rand’s essential point, however, that self interest does not morally equate to selfishness, endures critical and historical examination to a greater extent than louder voices who decry the same in the name of collectivism.

National culture in the United States is a sense of integrity making borders a necessity. Bolstered by ideological Americanism into an enduring moral fabric, it’s now portrayed by those advancing the narrative of White Nationalism to be the modern equivalent of the very ideologies our opposing strengths defeated in two World Wars.

My annoyance with the political Left throwing the Nazi label at ideological Americans tests my wordsmith’s capacity to express. Nazism—a contraction of national socialism, by the way—reflects the same fascist tendencies of their camp, not mine. My father was written up for the Bronze Star after being shot at by real Nazis, not upright folk who accept the reality of adult life in which one’s behavior is subject to rational criticism. The narrative specter of White Nationalism is nothing more than a shield against being required to defend indefensible premises and mask globalizing collectivist tendencies.

Regardless, closely resembling Hitler’s ideology—now consigned to the dustbin of history—doesn’t make the political Left Nazis either, relentless as they are in assuming to occupy unearned moral high ground. They are merely whiny pursuers of lame advantage, such as is found in attempting the assignment of unwarranted guilt.

There is nothing inherently noble or suspicious in skin color, and anyone asserting otherwise is a racist regardless of their own extraction. The depths of depravity in setting aside the benefits of morality, altruism and other attributes of humanity are plumbed in exploiting divisive identity politics. Ideological Americanism was formulated to negate those dangers.

Americanism is the embrace of beneficial identity politics, incorporating and promoting virtues the political Left reject as excessively judgmental of their behavior. Like the remainder of their platform, it stems from having little idea of what works or what kills.

America descended from the valid faith of the Judeo-Christian experience, that storehouse of Things that Are Real and treasury of long-held guidelines preserved so we should have life, and live it more abundantly. The vacuous faithlessness of secularism driving globalized socialism will never satisfy the human spirit to the same extent.

Under the banner of our tribe, it’s okay to be white, or black, brown, red, or Asian. Patriotism is a virtue. Humanity should preside over one’s ideology, doctrine, or politics. Sound and thriving souls know such things a priori, without needing to be instructed.

History, not to mention natural law, harshly judges the insubstantial. Screeching demonization of the sort currently driving the political Left is propelling their camp toward a steep drop-off, and it seems little can be done to convince those deaf to the Spirit otherwise. Were it so, they wouldn’t have occupied the vehicle of their destruction in the first place … and those mandated shoulder belts and airbags won’t help much once their deficient ideology hits rock bottom.

Choose to love, -DA

How to Be a Bigot

This isn’t a tutorial. If you thought so, I’m guessing you followed a link from Gab … but then that Wild West outpost of Internet commentary is another subject.

Vae Obscurum is about ideas: good ones, generally, sometimes juxtaposed to others deplorable as can be imagined. We know good and evil in relation to each other in lessons taught by a loving and shepherding God; those lessons, however, often need to be sought in order to be seen. A faithful orientation is prerequisite to begin, and you may rest assured the enemy is planting as many distractions on the way to school as he is allowed to contrive.

Many of those side roads beckon with the promise of advantage. Life is a difficult journey, and when people tire they seek easier ways. They turn from what is and what should be to imagined alternatives—some of which have evolved into lifestyles—and presenting those comprise the main mechanism of deception.

Excuses, you see, relieve the burden of performance and its necessary embrace of excellence to achieve desired results. Unfortunately, the cultural phenomenon of intersectionalism provides not only excuses for a suboptimal result, but then makes it possible to accrue bonus points based on the number of the same one is able to assemble.

Intersectional status is attained by accumulating grievances. As an example, any given individual born a white male, regardless of his personal circumstances, is assigned the least  rank according to myths of privilege driving the remainder of the philosophy. Attaining the highest hypothetical score is difficult to imagine, although one may indulge various scenarios (after you finish here) via https://intersectionalityscore.com/.

A simple three-step formula in the pursuit of lame advantage begins with Excuses. It moves on to a Proposed Moral Balancing of the equation via transfer from the supposedly privileged to arrive at Profit rumored to make life easy.

If you disagree with any of this you’re a bigot. See? It’s that simple.

Such name calling functions as deployment of rally words designed to draw a crowd of additional voices and increase volume, which is the natural defense of those unable to justify their premise in rational dialectic. To such people, having not yet intellectually matured to rationality is less important than perceiving themselves as occupying self-defined moral high ground.

The only problem is that it wasn’t really self-defined. God’s enemy did it for them by waving a placard at an intersection. They made the turn out of laziness, found a dead end, and now reside in the mire of error.

Every possible reparation will be funded only by excellence. The simplest route to accumulated actual advantage is, therefore, performance. This truism is the prime mover of the political Right, where virtue outperforms vice according to observations made over the course of centuries. That unavoidable actuality is what eventually scares the living scat out of people trapped inside the sticky and opaque imprisoning membrane of their ideological bubble.

Want a better life? Edify your capabilities. Do worthwhile things. Reap the rewards of your labor. What you attain as a result is then yours. Rest assured someone else, given to travel the side road leading to the deadly sin of envy, will compile a scheme to come for part or all of it. History, one might say, is made of those encounters, and preparing oneself for such times is also a difficult responsibility of adulthood. The faithful also keep in mind that we were warned about all of this well ahead of time, and know the effort of living as we ought is promised to be worth the cost.

Choose to love, -DA

*****

In production news, sadly, there is none. The Editress is a person of many responsibilities and hard pressed at the moment, circumstances leading to a hiatus in the content edit of ‘Ghosts of the Republic.’ The process should resume later this season, depending on what life tasks we are presented in the meantime. Updates, as always, will follow here.

Ours

The granddaughter of an author friend is going through a well-documented process of discovering the names of things, words and concepts that will define her world from now on. It’s always best, as the Taoist master Pooh observed, to begin at the beginning. Sometimes, it’s a place to return in reduction to essence, as my character Jon Anthony terms his method of understanding.

One of the foundational concepts this youngling is encountering includes the idea of Mine. Sometimes a child’s assertion is a plausible premise, as in the case of pointing to her foot. Sometimes it is less so and warrants correction. How we go about that vital process depends entirely on the validity of our own orientation and perspective.

At the appropriate time we need to take away the object in a childish claim of Mine and pass it along to a co-owner, pointing out the concept of Ours. Then to another, repeating in demonstration the higher ideal. Finally, the object lesson may pass back to the child, but again with the admonition: Ours. In most things, we are in this together.

Nearer the age of accountability, and once the essential choice between love and hate and indifference has been incorporated into a young life, the time arrives to encounter in faith another concept: His. A successful journey is an ordering of loyalties as our capacity permits. Faith, commitments, and self. This involves one descending in priority rather than retaining the juvenile self-focus marking our starting point, and in that perfect balance of acknowledging our place in the natural order diminishment equals growth.

In the Christian perspective, the closed circle of our Creator’s revelation, God took Mine and Ours and made it His. Our transgressions, our shortcomings, our just punishments earned in lifetimes and generations falling short of the Glory of God. He gathered those to Himself and placed the burden forever on the Cross. When it was over, he returned with the treasure and declared as a good parent: Ours. We are in this together.

One sees the concepts of Mine and Ours and His in play throughout life and society and politics. Sometimes those are embraced in solid premises, and in other times less or tragically not, and only the acid test of deconstruction will reveal one from the other.

Mine can be a prison of false liberation, where vicious manipulation in presumably self-serving politics of identity promise gain and instead diminish one’s American heritage. Mine can be the justification for the pursuit of lame advantage, where lust and envy, fostered by assumptions of due accommodation and reparation stunt the lifelong edification of a healthy intellect and vital spirit.

Ours, embraced in violation of natural laws, becomes an immoral process of conversion. There, the individual entitlement of Mine metastasizes into communitarianism or worse travesties of economic and political ideology stripping the return from one’s labor and collectivizing achievement. Ideological platitudes aside, have no doubt there will always be those at the top of such an order who fully retain the empowering and individual concept of Mine.

Even His can be subverted to serve purposes other than worship. Assumed delegation assures some servants will be held in higher regard and position than others, with the privileges and advantage of Mine cloaked in tradition and esteem and hierarchy preserving what ambition—having lost its focus previously—has established to perpetuate a comfortable arrangement instead.

His and Ours and Mine exist in the balance that Pastor Lin Shun Lun perceived in the second novel of Boone’s File, The Bonus Pool: another tripartite reality of Heaven and Earth with Man between. It remains our challenge to sort one from another day by day, a process by which we are winnowed as well. It’s good to keep this in mind.

Choose to love, -DA.

*****

In production news, Daniel Sean Ritter’s next, The Yemeni Package being the fourth title of Sean’s File, is approaching the three-quarters mark in production editing and on schedule to appear in January, 2018. Now is a good time to begin, if you’ve neglected the story of the man who has yet to miss his appearance in one of my novels. You will, I promise, discover why.