Dancing to the Darkness

"I am honestly scared for the future of this country, and am seriously considering moving to a different country..."

"This country is doomed!"

"I am so disgusted, sad and disturbed by the results tonight.  I am afraid and sad for the future of our country... too many stupid people."

"Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble... like never before."

"I can't stop crying... you people are idiots."

"America died."

These are posts by people who reacted strongly to election results that did not go the way they had hoped.  The election had been long and vicious, guaranteeing the country would remain divided.  Having invested so much into the campaign and believing the end was near if their candidate didn't win, voters were left despondent and desperate.

If you didn't know better, you would have thought they were posted by people reacting to Trump's victory on November 8th.  But they're not.  They're from Tuesday, November 6, 2012.  The night that Obama was sent back to Washington D.C. for his second term as President of the United States. 

I'm sure I was telling my wife that America was finished back in 2012.  That everything that made America great was under assault when Ohio's 20 electoral votes went to Obama, and I, in frustration, turned off the television and reached for the sleeping pills.  We had hoped that this great country had seen through the "historic" BS of 2008 and realized its mistake -  Omabacare, higher taxes and a struggling economy.  Surely, voters would respond to Romney's message and turn leadership of the country over to a businessman with experience.  But no.

So four long years later, the shoe is on the other foot.  You can say some things never change.  Every year, we are led to believe candidate A is the only reasonable choice.  Candidate B will bring an end to our way of life as we know it.  However, despite predictions, the sun always rises the next day --  and the doom and gloom slowly dissipate like the smell of cooked liver and onions from two days ago.  

Or does it?

The one thought that NEVER occurred to me was to riot in the streets and protest the legitimate results of an election that clearly indicated a winner.  Obama was not my candidate, but the people had spoken and I was forced to accept the fact that for one night in 2012, more people who saw things differently voted for someone else.  And that's all that mattered.

Maybe being in sales prepared me for failure.  Or maybe being a Badger fan while going to college in Madison prepared me for some difficult times (fortunately, Barry Alvarez's arrival was just a short six years away). 

So what's different now?  What's so hard about accepting our nation's first female nominee for president being beaten by some brash New York pussy grabber?  Why claim "Trump is not MY president" when  the election clearly says he is?  What's driving young people into the streets and out of the classroom?

First, my upbringing didn't evolve around social issues like gay marriage, racial injustice and global warming.  Youth today have been led to believe those things are the most important issues in America.  Not freedom from terrorism, not better jobs that pay well, and not protections given to us under the U.S. Constitution.  And it doesn't seem like Chemistry, Math or Economics are very important either.

Young people today have been attending the College of Social Justice since kindergarten.  Some are being taught to question the fairness of race relations, while ignoring law and order.  It's surprising how important climate change is to them, to the degree that they will not listen to reason (no amount of facts will change it).  Captain Planet has completely, and I mean completely, obliterated rational thought on the impact of carbon burning fuels on good ol' Mother Earth.  

Their passion for global warming can only be matched by their defense of gay and transsexual lifestyles.  Being a heterosexual male who is crazy about the opposite sex, I can only imagine why.  Perhaps they have been told we shouldn't be judgmental, or that they want the same things we all do.  That's fine, but being forced to accept a lifestyle that is counter to what my religion teaches is a little hard to handle.  Worse, I'm being told that I'm a bad person if I don't agree.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite the small number of gays actually in our country, you would think heterosexuals were in the minority.  Within a span of a few months, our country chucked thousands of years of tradition and declared the old definition of marriage was dead.  As I said before, if you disagreed, you are attacked and made to walk the "walk of shame."  Ask the bakers in Oregon, or the state legislatures in Indiana and North Carolina how it feels to be on the wrong side of the LGBT coalition.

Social issues like gay marriage led our youth into believing other archaic traditions would fall next.  Eight years of Obama's "change" had many believing the country was going to break that glass ceiling and elect Hillary as the first female president in November.  The social issues tsunami would not be denied!

And then November 8th happened.  Oops...



Trump's election is more than just the defeat of Hillary.

For the first time in at least 8 years, his coming presidency is a real challenge to these social issues that have been gaining ground.  So should we be surprised that their reaction is one of fearful overreaction?  Or rage?  Of course not -- and yet I am.

For many college students, this is their first election and first encounter with the unexpected twists and turns of a presidential election.   Compounding the problem is how students don't have the necessary coping skills to deal with results that fall outside of their self-imposed safe zones.

For most schools and universities,  failure is a dirty a word.  As dirty as those found in MAD Magazine and National Lampoon in the 60's and 70's.  Our teaching institutions -- ironically -- have failed our children in preparing them for real life.

Early on, awarding participation awards to kids in sports and other competitions was thought of as a way to strengthen their self esteem.  Making winners out of losers was supposed to foster success, help them engage in activities, deal with challenges and interact with others.  Self esteem was the genie in a bottle -- providing the building blocks for school success, and a firm foundation for future learning.

I never bought into self esteem; that's not to say that you shouldn't feel good about yourself.  Because we are all much more productive when feeling confident.  The trouble is too many people are doing nothing to warrant that feeling.  Feeling good about yourself -- or feeling like you are on the right side of an argument -- needs to be earned or it's a hollow victory.

I think Vince Lombardi once said, "It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up again."  Participation ribbons aren't teaching our children anything.  Take it from Vince -- failure is the greatest teacher of success and it's a lesson that needs to be taught again and again, and students need to experience it every time they are wrong.

Ooooh, but that's so harsh!

Today's students don't know how to confront opposing opinions.   Videos I have seen -- students screaming at each other during class meetings and in response to guest speakers who were invited to speak on campus -- are embarrassing.  Our school's adherence to the PC culture has left students shell-shocked whenever they hear someone challenge their collective views of social justice and fairness.

Since they were first exposed by their kindergarten teacher through readings of "Tango Makes Three," and later through required viewings of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" for science class,  students have been molded into a pajama-wearing, identity-driven, racially-sensitive student body that schools have been able to control.  Political correctness is being used to silence dissent and debate on campus.  No longer institutions of greater learning, they have become an experiment in safe zones, balloons, play-do and puppies.  Instead of graduating students capable of dealing with real world issues, this hyper-sensitivity is teaching students to claim grievous harm in nearly any circumstance and after any affront. 

Examples abound --

Feminism has led women to expect free contraception.  Any challenge to it is an attack on women's health.

Atheism has forced schools to ban God from sporting events, and restricted certain clothing or jewelry from campus.  Religious references are considered unconstitutional and a violation to the separation between church and state.

Racism I can be found on colleges where black students are forced to live with unreasonable expectations -- like going to class, learning how to speak and write, and pass a class.  This leads to attaching "white privilege" to everything from test results and course studies, to -- God help us -- walking past a campus building "that was built on the backs of black people".

According to Ebony McGee, who is an assistant professor of diversity and urban schooling at Vanderbilt, all of these politically incorrect assaults have students feeling "anxiety, stress, depression and thoughts of suicide, as well as a host of physical ailments like hair loss, diabetes and heart disease."

And here I thought it had something to do with passing exams and graduating.



Where do we go from here?

I'd say go back to the basics, but I honestly don't see the culture on campus changing.  Teachers will continue to berate students who voted for Trump, and students will continue to search for equality where none exists.  If anything, teachers have lost control of the students, and there is no putting THAT horse back in the barn.  It's like the bad guys on Walking Dead coming face to face with the zombies that they have kept locked in the basement.  Through some unforeseen development, the bad guys fall victim to the very monsters they helped create.

It's time we give up on our feelings and start looking at what we know.  The nonsense that can be found at Google where you can indicate how you are feeling highlights one of the problems we face.

Our election has uncorked the bottle that held many people in check.  It's not just the college aged kids protesting in the streets, of course.  Paid, professional protesters like those bused in to Fergusson, MO and Madison, WI continue to love the media attention and spotlight.  And the money is good.   Anarchists have existed for decades and they aren't going away either.  Like Mystique from the X-Men movies, the One Percent protests have mutated into Black Lives Matter, who will evolve into something when another protest is needed.

But it's a good bet that they all share something in common.  Somewhere along the line, they learned everything they needed from a sociology class like the one on heterogeneous team-building (whatever that is) found in the Urban Studies 101 section of Race Relations.

It concerns me that these young protesters are excelling at heterogeneous team-building, but failing in math, reading and science.  Our country is on average with -- or below --  the rest of the world in test results from those three subjects.  How do we correct institutions that are graduating classes with students closer to Lebanon and the Dominican Republic than to students from Singapore?  Our universities have become a joke to the rest of the world.

Despite giving out coloring books and bubbles to 20-year-old students in designated safe places, it is reported that forty-four percent of America's college students are suffering from depression.  The social experiment that began with self-esteem is failing our students, and there doesn't seem to be any answer except more coddling and ways to avoid feeling bad.

Kids, it's time to put away the coloring books and pick up one on conflict resolution.

Viva Les Deplorables!

"The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation."
-- Bill Clinton



November 8, 2016 will be remembered as the day America stepped back from the edge of a precipice.

Over the past eight years, the conservative foundations that shaped my life had been violated, attacked, manipulated and trashed under the guise of fairness and political correctness.  Had the HildaBeast won on Tuesday, I'm confident many of those foundations would have been pounded into dust, leaving little behind except fading photographs in a salute to long forgotten memories.

What happened?  How did Trump -- hated by the left and abandoned by many on the right -- overcome unbelievable odds to bring America back?  How could the media -- who gave Hillary anywhere from 70 to 100% chance of becoming president -- get it so wrong?

As best as I can explain -- it was repudiation from an electorate that had grown tired of a corrupt system of politicians and big businesses seeking to control the lives of ordinary people who simply want America to be great again.  Ordinary people, fighting for a decent life were ignored by both parties in favor of illegal immigrants, alternative lifestyles and an increasingly intrusive government (think Obamacare).

I know that I had grown tired of being called a bigot, racist and sexist.  Tired of feeling like I was doing something wrong every morning before the fog of sleep had left.  I was angered over Obama's apology tour, my perceived white privilege in society, businesses too big to fail, the lies our media told about police brutality and last but not least, the need for safe zones in schools (Look!  Someone wrote "Make America Great Again" in chalk on the sidewalk!)

Decent, law abiding people can only take so much.  And because I am a God-fearing, law-abiding person I waited until the election to do something about it.  No marching in the street at night, burning businesses and looting stuff that didn't belong to me.  Apparently, at 58 years old, I need my beauty sleep. 

I did what America has always done since the first votes were cast in 1789 for George Washington as for president:  fill out a ballot and live with the results.

There have been forty-four men elected to the highest office in America and up to now, there has been a peaceful transition from one to the next.  Despite the nightly protests claiming "Not our President" it is my hope that one of our country's most unique characteristics continues for the forty-fifth. 

The liberal media has given many reasons for Trump's win on Tuesday.  America refuses to have a woman president (and yet 40% of the people voting for Trump were women); Bernie Sanders' supporters failed to show up; old fashioned racism which wanted a return to traditional white rule (and yet more blacks and Latinos voted for Trump than during our last election); the fake FACEBOOK stories that tilted things Trump's way; and my favorite, the great divide between "educated" voters and those described as "working class" voters.  The elite media not only failed to see this coming, they still haven't display a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump  (there isn't a better example than that of the monolithic, insulated political culture in our colleges and universities).

Perhaps the best reason is the simplest -- that Donald Trump remembered the forgotten men and women of this country.   Our politicians were so enamored with fringe groups that they forgot about normal Americans, like me.

Instead they had nightly orgasms covering the following groups:

Activists, especially groups like Black Live Matter. Their violent tendencies were mostly acted out on other black people, but the forgotten men and women of America saw them on TV and were not amused.  It turns out that people of any color -- black, white or yellow -- prefer to live in relative safety.  Maybe it would have been different if they had victimized only whites, but they were abided and abetted by politicians who gave them "room to vent." 

Or illegal aliens who have broken the law and entered this country.  The forgotten men and women of America watched them take their jobs and collect welfare benefits for their anchor baby's support.  They watched as non-citizens behaved badly, burning our flag and demanding free education and healthcare.  The people of the United States are a tolerant group, even when the phone asks you "to press 1 for English."  But there are limits and if our politicians skirt the law and welcome more to enter this country, they shouldn't be surprised when the forgotten stand up and say "enough!"

Or terrorists that have entered Europe and America under the guise of refugees.  The forgotten men and women of America watched as radical Muslim refugees in France and Belgium killed, raped and terrorized innocent people in the name of Allah.  They stood silent as Hillary and President Obama tried to calm their fears, then announced that they wanted to increase the number of refugees by over 500%.  Politicians promised to vet the refugees carefully and to keep America safe, then built walls around their homes and traveled with armed bodyguards for protection.

I've seen and read enough Facebook posts to last a life time. No doubt family and friendships have taken a hit despite my best efforts to remain civil.  I rarely responded, even when they angered me.   As far as I can tell, I haven't been de-friended by anyone yet, but I suspect it will make for some quiet conversations during the holidays!  I don't now how I turned out so different than my brother and sister, but somewhere along the line they fell under the voodoo spell of Comedy Central, MSNBC and CNN.

I play basketball with a sociology teacher that tried to explain the polarity of people's thinking by saying we are all heavily influenced by groups of like-minded people, who reinforce our thinking and isolate us from opposing opinions.  But these groups attract people with similar thought and opinions which were there to begin with.  So many of these people come to the group already sharing the same group think.

What have I learned from this election?  That you don't want Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce with you on the campaign trail...

Seriously, Liz and I made the decision that we would not check on the election until the following morning.  We'd been through enough heartbreak that we didn't want to sleep on another one.   So, as I lay in bed the morning after the election -- without knowing the results -- I was thinking of smart responses that I could give to co-workers who were sure to be gloating over a Hillary win.  I decided on something simple:  "Well, at least Trump has pulled back the curtain on Washington politics."

The Democrat party, in particular, was unveiled as a corrupt party that couldn't play by the rules. Despite Bernie Sander's popularity during the primaries, he had no chance of being named the nominee. And the discovery of Donna Brazille providing questions to Hillary before the debates confirmed the long-suspected love-fest between the media and Democratic candidates.

Further proof that most Democrats running for office are truth-challenged.  They can't tell people what they really hope to accomplish because people would refuse to vote for it.  And as Wikileaks revealed over and over, they depend on the media to help shape their message. 

For years, I've known the media is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, but this year it became abundantly clear that almost all major network news and press organizations like the AP were totally in the bag for Hillary.  The press was so confident that Hilary would win that they gave up trying to be balanced.  The mainstream media ignored the Wikileaks barrage and Hillary's email controversy and instead defended her or simply didn't report some of the facts. 

When I was going to journalism school in Madison during the 80's, there was still a desire to challenge government officials and find the truth (of course it helped that Reagan was president and everything he did was fair game).  Today, if you are in the press, you are more likely to be handed an open invitation to a Hillary fundraiser than to be handed a top secret file describing her speeches to Wall Street big wigs in the shadows of some underground parking garage.  

The Democrats biggest Super Pac was NBC, ABC and CBS.

But it wasn't just the Democrats who were exposed by Trump.  When Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich failed to stop the Trump train, a powerful group of Washington elites came forward to say that they would never vote for Trump. "Never Trumpers" -- people like George Will, Bill Kristol, John McCain, Mitt Romney, the most of the Bush family -- claimed that Trump presented such a unique threat to America and to the Republican party's legacy that it was ok for Hillary to win the election  (and along with it, the reshaping of America to illegal immigration, and a Supreme Court leaning to the left).

It never occurred to me that so many people claiming to share my conservative views could be part of the same Washington ruling class that was tearing down this country.   They were SO good at what they said that we kept voting them into power.  They said:  "Give us the House of Representatives and we will control the purse strings to shut down Omabacare!"  Then it was "Give us the Senate and we can filibuster and stop Obama's radical agenda".  Finally it was "Give us the White House and we will change the world." 

Until the last man standing was Trump.  Then everything changed.  And then it was Never Trump!  I should have listened to a good friend of mine from Grand Rapids (who has since passed away) who didn't trust Bush and what he was trying to do.  Every year the evidence was in front of me, but I never believed it.  In retrospect, I am no longer surprised by what has happened to my country over the past 30 years.

The straw that broke the camel's back came when FBI director James Comey found Hillary to be "careless" with her email accounts and private servers.  Instead of being given an orange jumpsuit in a small cell in some high security prison, she was rewarded with the Democratic nomination for president.  I'd heard that Comey couldn't bring himself to take down the Democratic candidate just weeks before an election.  Or that there was no intent.  The release by Wikileaks of her "lost" emails proved that was not the case.  Her intent was to hide what she was doing.

The idea that anybody could look at what this woman did (selling special access while Secretary of State and later as the presumptive nominee for President) is abhorrent.  No amount of shared commitment to abortion, or women's rights should excuse the corruption that surrounded this woman and the Clinton Foundation.  To those of you who voted for Hillary despite this evil cloud of corruption, I can only wonder what is worse:  not knowing, or not caring?

Ten years from now, we will know if Donald Trump was a game changer or a mistake.  History will tell us what he accomplished as the 45th President of the United States (just not the history being taught to our children)...  So going forward, I don't know what's going to happen. 

I know what I want for America, and I hope this country gives him a chance to lead and make America great again... 

Long live the forgotten Americans!