Spring Fundraiser 2013, Day 3

This has been a karmic Fundraiser Week. I’m reeling from the public and personal events I’ve experienced so far. Just to mention one that probably hasn’t grabbed much attention in the news: Oklahoma had a series of small earthquakes early today. I wouldn’t have known about them except for a cryptic message from the Lurker that the donation to Gates of Vienna will be very delayed. That made me go look, of course.

And I forgot about the Marathon and Patriot’s Day and the doom of Tax Day on April 15th. We pay our taxes in October and I wasn’t thinking. But I swan, we sure picked a doozy of a week to ask people for money.

Yesterday would have been my “turn” to put up a fundraiser post but halfway through the essay, my notebook computer died. Or rather the power cord did, followed shortly by the battery. I hadn’t noticed the latter was the real power running the thing and that my cord was kaput — I know, I know, you geeks out there are saying, “How could you not notice?” Take my word for it, not noticing is my specialty.

This has been a blessing for the Baron — for all I know he has dancing girls and booze upstairs. There was one time when he pulled off a surprise birthday party for me with a whole lot of people who’d tiptoed into the yard and I was clueless till we rounded the house (we’d been out in the woods looking for pink lady slippers)…

So yesterday before the big computer crash, I was intensely caught up in dealing with themes and consequences. So many consequences to consider it, would make a good Catholic girl wall-eyed. I was on a bit of a tear, actually. I had begun gaining speed in a thank-you note to one of our donors. I got wound up and set a-going like a cross between the Energizer Bunny and Cotton Mather. The more I wrote, the more I thought about the moral ramifications of the issues I was addressing, and off I went.

My themes were the various kinds of butchery you can presently find on offer in my native land.

The Progressives preach that American history is hopelessly contaminated by butchery — e.g., the cruel ways in which white men displaced the Indians from their land, or the widespread slavery in the South, fed by the owners of slave ships from New England. But of course it’s not that simple. I mean, find one unbloodied spot on this earth that is “owned” by its “original” inhabitants and then show me how these indigenes lived in peace and harmony until the arrival of the Eeevil White Man. Bah humbug! Every square inhabited inch on God’s green earth has been fought over repeatedly by successive waves of human beings spreading out and taking charge. They often left little trace of the people who came before, marrying the women and killing the men and children.

England is a good place to start on that kind of journey; it’s small and many of the displacements have been recorded extensively. Or focus more widely on the Northern European peoples, by turn benevolent and/or butchering, depending on the decade or the differences among them. Remember the Treaty of Westphalia and the beginning of the nation-state? Fast forward to Peace in Our Time; didn’t that usher in the bloodiest century of all? Having moved on to the next millennium now, we have no idea whether we’ll do any better.

Somehow I think we won’t, but that may be the mistake of Presentism. As in, never underestimate the complications you can’t see. I have a few ideas on how we might improve our record. First though, let’s examine the most pressingly bloody problems clamoring for attention.

Here in the Northeast, we’re gazing wide-eyed at the Butcher of Philadelphia. The Good Doctor Gosnell is safely locked up now, but that institutional bureaucracy known as the Pennsylvania Department of Health left him to “operate” unhindered for decades. After all, it was only poor black women and their babies who were his victims, and didn’t Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Planned Parenthood, admit that the whole point of abortion laws was to keep down the inferior races? Not only that, but other doctors who wouldn’t do late term abortions themselves didn’t mind referring patients to him for disposal of their problems.

For conservatives, a long fight ensued to compel the MSM to even admit Dr. Gosnell was on trial. Once CNN’s back was to the wall and they were forced to talk about it, those talking heads air-brushed out their huge silence. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. But here’s the real truth, if you can bear to read it: the Grand Jury’s indictment (pdf).

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And now Gosnell’s place on the front page has been replaced by some other butcher(s) who chose the Boston Marathon as a new Ground Zero, though on a much smaller playing field. Rumor has it that the perp or perps might be Saudis. Whoa, Jack, just like 9/11. And our Terrorism Comforters Peace and Love State Department also — by coincidence — just gave Saudis expedited entry into the US. without having to go through the humiliation of being closely attended. I think that bomb was their special thank you to the Chief of Bowing and Scraping. And we thought those folks were simply killers. Obviously we missed their finely-tuned sense of humor.

What happened in Boston is awful. In another life, I was among the people who lined the streets in Wellesley handing out cups of water to the streams of runners going past on Washington Street. We could walk there from our house — though Wellesley is far, far from Boston’s Ground Zero and no doubt is still as bucolic as it was back then. Drugs and mayhem among the disaffected young? Yeah, they have their share. No place escapes the modern woes.

However, I truly believe we have to start rethinking our response to the evils that surround us. Leaving aside Islam for a while, let’s think about our own messes, the ones that existed before Islam started sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Think about how we respond to public slaughter in general:

• candles
• teddy bears
• flowers
• T-shirts with mighty slogans
• admonitions to “others” about how they caused this and what they need to do.
• premature ejaculations of forgiveness

And don’t forget the easy answers. For example, they need to get guns under control. They need to realize that poor people are victims deserving of our government’s care. They need to stop _______ing and start _______ing instead. Depending on your political philosophy, fill in the blanks with the ready solutions of your choice.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with government-applied solutions to anything. Government gave us Roe v. Wade (years later, Ms. Roe wanted to change her mind and turn back the clock. Abortion had become too brutal for her. Too bad. Big business was in charge now), and government gave us all those immigrants, illegal and otherwise, that have become the middle class’ burden, though the m.c. is clueless. If they don’t hear it on the “news” then it doesn’t exist. Thus, their ever-increasing tax burden goes to pay for all those abortions and all those immigrants and all those union-fueled “education” programs which leave the majority of New York City’s school children functionally illiterate. Got a problem with that? Too bad. Shut up and dole.

I have some ideas about the solutions for these tragedies, but first we have to get the Big Bully out of the way, and I’m not sure how to do that. Yet. However, experience has taught me that there is no human condition that government “intervention” helps. Name an issue that government’s solutions haven’t made worse. Name a problem you’re confident that government’s intervention will improve.

But you know what is worse than government solutions? It’s government plus anything else. Go over to the Refugee Resettlement Watch and see the evidence for the ungodly chaos and evil that ensues when government teams up with faith-based agencies like Catholic Charities. Take a look under the rug Ann Corcoran has pulled back for you and ponder what crawls out…(oops, today, in contrast, she leads with a story about the OIC’s helping hand in Indonesia). The site has a good search engine, and Ms. Corcoran has helpfully lined up a whole host of issues on her sidebar.

In case you think this is the land of milk and honey for those third world immigrants who land here, you can research some of the work those folks are put to once they arrive. It was through her that I first learned about the squalid conditions of CAFOs. That’s Confined Animal Feeding Operations. Many immigrants from, say, Somalia or some of the American territorial islands, are put to work slaughtering and processing these animals. The plight of the animals is bad enough. The condition of the workers, many with AIDS or tuberculosis, is even worse. But Big Meat wants slaves workers, and so the government complies. Then you and I eat the labor of their hands.

I know personally of one woman — rural, white, uneducated — whose health was ruined within a year of working for Con Agra. The conditions were, and are, inhumane. Thus, this woman is one of the many who legitimately needs disability because of the conditions under which she worked, conditions which our hot-to-trot government regulators are paid to ignore. The meat producers are just one of the reasons our disabled population is increasing.

Another factor is governmental stupidity about food in general. It took me years to research what real nutrition is. Government sure won’t tell you; it will do its damnedest to prevent you from finding out the truth, too. It subsidizes those food manufacturing industries, and it is not in their interest for you to know. Of course, the EU knows — that’s why it refuses our poisoned meat and our GMO grains.

Your family doctor? She all too often spouts the government line about what constitutes adequate nutrition. Unfortunately, I’ve had to learn on my own because my doctor — a fine physician in many other respects — believes the government and the MSM. So just like all those fat people, I was addicted to wheat and sugar; I was ashamed that I couldn’t “control” my eating. Well, I still am addicted to grains and sugar, but we don’t have those things in our house anymore. My cravings are not eliminated, but they sure have quieted down and my health has improved as a result. Will I ever get it back to a good level? I don’t know; a lot of damage occurred before I could discover what was making me so ill. Some of the damage to my endocrine system is probably permanent. Caveat emptor.

I have some ideas about what we can do to address the issues I’ve raised. I’ll return to discuss them during the course of the fundraiser. Yep, they are all things that constitute sticking my head over the parapet, and many of them raise the blood pressure of the socialists who run and ruin things in my beloved country. Many of you will not agree with what I have to say, and that’s all right. I have quit caring about so-called “settled” issues. Purported consensus that doesn’t make sense doesn’t matter a damn to me. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I may not be able to define what deviancy is, but I know it when I see it. And I’m seeing way too much of it in our public life.

I will return. Meanwhile, here is a list of the places today’s donors live and move and have their being:

Stateside: Florida, New York, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, British Virgin Islands, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK

We are so very fortunate they choose freely to share their resources with us, even if for some of them it means hiding the fact that they do so.

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