“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
(drummer at Fort Mackinac / Mackinac Island, MI / Julie Cook / 2017)
The past several days in this country have been witness to a page out of some
sort of Orwellian novel.
The sad thing is….that this is not the stuff of fiction, legend nor lore but rather
sadly the stuff of our new sick and very sad reality.
I have not had time to properly process the latest madness taking place across
this land….
this land which is my land as well as your land….
There is much to say…
yet not until I’ve had the time to properly consider my words.
However for the time being…
Watching young people tear down, deface, kick and stomp innate statues that
represent moments or individuals from our nation’s history and not the
falsehoods that others now wish to project as incorrect and indeed false
in meaning, is pure and simple idiocy, both asinine and insane.
Question.
Do any of these angry, kicking and stomping young people work or attend school?
Because I believe that those who attend school, those who work,
those who need to work, those who want to work…
have so much more to do than scream, kick and destroy.
A fact.
It actually takes two to argue.
So was our President wrong when he said both sides in this latest brouhaha
were at fault?
If two groups are fussing at one another, yelling at one another, throwing
punches at one another…hating one another…..
I think that is indeed two sided…
as in two sides equally responsible, equally at fault.
Our history is a weaving…a woven tapestry of time, blood, struggle
and hope.
Some sections of the weaving are beautiful…
beautiful in pattern, color and texture while other sections are
a bit rough and tattered…
yet each section makes the entire full tapestry what it is…
precious.
I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’
and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’
Bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the ends of the earth—
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”
Isaiah 43:6-7
cookiecrumbstoliveby 
In my opinion, the perpetrators of the initiative to erase our history know exactly what their objective is. Tear down our institutions and connection to God, so the only resort is the government. The useful tools, in this objective, have not been properly educated and are fueled by emotion. You are exactly right about, the requisite of two for a conflict. I will not take sides in this as the media would like, so as to help push us towards division. Love is the only answer.
So very true!!!!
The teacher in me, the historian in me, is so aghast over this madness but the Christian in me knows that despite the madness, God remains just that God!!!!
This whole thing has been shocking to say the least. I don’t support nazism or antifa; extremism begets extremism. I believe some of the growth of the alt-right is a reaction to BLM and anti-white statements, but I also recognize that these folks have been around awhile.
I’m not sure how tearing down confederate monuments fixes any problems. I’m not in love with those statues and I understand how they came to be there, but it is a reminder of a history that’s being lost at a time when we need it most. We need to remember how much has changed since the scars of the civil war and the awful Jim Crow laws. I feel we are regressing towards a more segregated society instead of a united one…
I pray the Lord pours out healing on our land.
I totally agree with you—any nation has its past…and often those years of past growth and development is full of scars, ups and downs of rights and wrongs as that nation wrestles to find its true self….
As human beings, we will always be apt to making mistakes– we won’t always get things right…But usually in the end, as we have seen in the US, we eventually come to the place that is on the right journey…as that is just what our name implies, a UNITED union…
But that was also when we still considered God as a supreme ruler over mankind…..
However today what we’ve been witnessing as of late are groups within these United States who wish to divide and disrupt—be it BLM or White Supremacy….hate groups plain and simple that yes, groups which have been around since our inception, groups, who like aggravating gnats, are so miserable with themselves that they in turn want to make everyone else miserable as well.
I think the average citizen is stuck in the middle watching all of this dumbstruck.
And yes, thanks to the news media who seems to wish to fan the flames and fuel the wage, the average citizen is being held captive…..
I think all the faithful can do is truly and earnestly pray for this nation and let the politicians, the news media and all the varying groups know that the average American is sick and tired of this behavior!
Yes—pray earnestly. Well-said!
yes, and yet for all the grammatical errors and typos—ie. “is” needing to be “are”, “wage” needing to be “rage”—-you catch my drift 🙂
so yes, pray!!!!
Julie… I appreciate your post.. truly. I very much sense your shock & awe. But for the sake of clarification… you mention a few times “the average citizen”. Who would that be? Does “average” describe “complacent”? A “bystander” to the process? Is the “silent majority” the “average majority”?
How does the “average American” express the “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!”?
Or… is the so-called average citizen destined to “follow”, and in the face of complex challenges submit to prayer?
Hi Doug—when I use the phrase, “average citizen” I’m talking about folks like myself…an average joe or josephine…a person who raises a family, gets up and goes to work every day, a person who does their due…pays their taxes while hating doing it but does so because we’re suppose to do it…a person who tries to do the right things by their fellow citizens…a person who is too busy living their life to waste time fighting a tit for tat endless war of words….
average does not mean that I don’t get mad as hell…nor that I am a mindless lemming following the masses to the cliffs—it means middle of the road—not an extreemist and one whose heart breaks watching a country that has been my world for these 57 years tear itself apart all over again over things that in the big scheme of life, are meaningless…while feeling helpless that no one with any sense seems to be speaking up or out….
that’s average Doug……
Reason I asked is because as humans we are a diverse species.. and one person’s average might be different from the next person. It’s the reason we can’t judge one another. In a world of seemingly Type A bloggers around every corner it’s kinda refreshing reading from someone from a different position on the food chain. 🙂
Doug, I started blogging shortly after retiring from a life long teaching career. I was a high school art teacher for 31 years in the same school.
Upon my retirement, I still felt as if I had things I wanted, needed, to say.
In public education, teachers are often muzzled when it comes to offering their “kids” the wisdom of common sense and morality— I always considered my job as being not just a teacher of content but also that of a nurturer and caregiver. Kids spend the majority of their day with their teachers—so we in essence become a surrogate family…
yet our times are such that teachers are not held in the highest of regard…and granted there are those who abuse their position, egregiously.
I belive in civility. I believe in rules and laws…as such helps a civil society function.
Yet I am frustrated that our culture is embracing a slippery slope.
I am a lover of history as it was my minor.
I believe in learning from past mistakes. Yet I am appalled that most of our Western Civilization seems to simply disregard the lessons once supposedly learned.
Oh I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture.
No, I am not an aggressive Type A blogger but rather a Christian and keen observer who shares what I observe and shares what I know to be Truth…
Welcome to the world of Cookie 🙂
Well, I could interject that there might be some Type A bloggers that are also Christian… or in the leastm they think they are 🙂 But.. I do know what you mean.
Thanks for the welcome.
I’ve read a few of those Doug…and there is a bit of a rabid mentality…I try to be a bit more rational 🙂
The state of affairs in our country is appalling. Could it be that we have too much time in our hands that we become lazy and apathetic. Keith Haney has a great post on creative thinking. He raises lots of thought showing that necessity leads to invention..I’m thinking we’ve given way to letting others tell us what to think and how to react. AKA the media and those who wish to get our president out of office. We can’t destroy history by tearing things down. It will always be a reminder of the ugliness of society.
I agree—there is a huge amount of laziness, an apathy, and what you have raised as most interesting, a lack of creative thinking…as we’ve allowed too much technology to think and do and entertain us and therefore are we not perhaps more reactionary than perhaps we would otherwise be?
I don’t know…
What I do know is that we have a great many of our young people who have been raised in a “me only” sort of society of thinking…
Our culture has become one of instant gratification and that is what they are seeking…be it positive or negative….
It time for a revival of our old time religion, turning from self to others and living as Christ showed us by example I’m truly sick of what’s going on in our country,
time us average folks become a little more than average 🙂
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
I remember back in the 80’s, Pravda-ZILLA (aka the mainstream media) did pretty much the same thing to Ronald Reagan.
For Ronald Reagan, it was always, steady as she goes.
He didn’t respond to all the prefab hullabaloos constantly emanating from the Press and from the Democrat Party.
They really were out to ruin him.
I totally agree my Silent friend—I’ve thought a lot about Reagan during all of this…with that very thought in mind. It was how the “teflon” president responded that really took the bite out of the vicious and hungry media and the liberal Dems.
If our current President could take a page out of the Reagan play book, which he won’t as they are two vastly different types of personalities, he might just find things quieting down.
Reagan was a man driven greatly by his faith—again, our sitting President needs to really work on that department…or so it seems as he allows self and ego to get caught up in the melee.
The current book, A Pope and A President by Paul Kengor—about JPII and RR and how their stories, both separate as well as together, helped to define the 20th century is very telling….
As noted the other day in a different conversation with Tricia—as we each lamented over wondering where the William Wallace of our time might be… I now add to that where are both the Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II of our times…..
Interesting, as I’ve been thinking a lot about Reagan as well and how he might have responded to these events. Where is he indeed.
same with our William Wallace Tricia!!!!
Thank you for this posting. I feel better seeing in print common sense, as opposed to the one sided media blitz following their “talking points” direction from (???)
On History: As of Irish decent I read a lot of Irish history and to begin to detest the British for their treatment of the Irish until I realized that I probably would not exist if that history had been different.
Likewise today millions of individuals in this country would not exist were our history different.
So why not accept it as it is(it can’t be changed) and get on with bettering what ls.
True wisdom Harold!!
I too am of Irish decent and it is easy to dislike, eventually moving to loathing, in this case of, say, the British…
The picture I posted is that of a “soldier” there at Fort Mackinac, albeit a reenacting solider.
I was going to include a bit of history regarding the fort as I wanted to share your very sentiment but opted to wait.
The fort was originally British, then became American, then during the war of 1812, with the help of the local Indians, went back to being British…
as our thoughts today might be “thanks a lot Indians for betraying the Americans”…
But when we look at the particulars we see that the Indians were just trying to protect which side of the toast theirs was buttered and by helping the British it seemed that their lives and lifestyle could and would stay the same if not grow…under the Americans not so as they were the usurpers of both Indian land and livelihood…
So whereas the Civil War seems, for all apparent purposes, to have been a battle over slavery and slavery alone…that is not the case at all…yet today those myriads of reasons are all but mute and moot allowing the focus to be solely and incorrectly on slavery alone.
And therefore the trouble we have in today’s society and culture is that very few if any are truly aware of their / our history and what the stories and lessons are there….opting to, or actually preferring to, rewrite it–turning into our personal story….which it is not.
And, as you say, we are merely seeing things for what we think they are today–and not as we should.. It is an encapsulated time frame of social norms etc that are a far cry from our set of norms today…so our modern minds work to contort the past, bending and reshaping it to fit our mindsets of today—which is an egregious and as we are witnessing dangerous act.
We have vast numbers of youth who have nary a clue as to who or what any of the statues or the people behind them mean…
And yet they, these forgotten men, women, events become the latest victims of ignorance fueled by the desire to hate.
We cannot change our past, Germany cannot erase the horrors of Nazi Germany or the Holocaust…but we can move forward—being ever mindful of where we’ve come from and working diligently to go forward.
Accepting what is done for it cannot be changed or rewritten and get on with the task of bettering ourselves not demeaning our fellow man….
Sorry for the lengthy reply…
When I was growing up, I noticed my father sympathized with the IRA. He never said much about it. Never encouraged us to take the side of Catholics, but I could occasionally detect that sympathy. He was a third generation Irish Catholic.
We pass on our prejudices to our children. I guess my father was trying to avoid that. Since my mother was largely of English descent, I suppose he had more incentive than he might have otherwise.
Not much point in hanging on to old hatreds. The people responsible are dead. They will meet our Maker, and He will judge.
truly so Tom…looking back, only in passing and only on occasion is to be expected, but to visit over and over while staying longer and longer to the point of dwelling, breeds an infection that becomes incurable.
Good comments here Julie. Me? I’m to sad to have anything to say, and will just concentrate on spreading the glorious message of Jesus Christ to all…even those professing to believe. He is the only thing that can change anything
Yes Wally, I know. A heavy heart indeed.
but that nagging teacher in me is such that I never stop trying to teach and remind…
It’s just that the pupils are growing hard and callus….
Christ Jesus, it is He—the only One who will change the hard hearted and hard headed….
Reblogged this on Citizen Tom and commented:
The fact we need to battle to save the Confederate Monuments both amazes me and doesn’t. I am not a great historian, but I know tyrants rise to power by leading hate-filled mobs.
How does that seem to work in the modern era? The so-called right distinguishes itself by creating mobs that hate Jews and other supposedly inferior races. The so-called left creates mobs that hate the bourgeoisie (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bourgeoisie). Really, the extreme left and the extreme right are much the same.
Of course, that does not stop hate-filled mobs from hating each other. It is almost inevitable that competitors of that sort will hate each other. So it is that the so-called left hates the so-called right. Ironically, what neither the extreme left and the extreme right seem to realize the degree to which the modern Democratic Party, the party if identity politics, represents a fusion of the beliefs of the extreme left with the extreme right. But that’s another post.
Here the subject is horror. In her post Julie does something I don’t do well. She expresses her horror. What I know how to express in writing is disgust. As close as I get to horror is reading a story about our modern iconoclasts and shaking my head, wondering just how stupid we can be. In words filled with commonsense — well, good sense use to be common in America — Julie expresses her horror and the need for prayer.
Good post Julie, you really express exactly what I’ve been feeling too. You’re so right, what’s happening is very Orwellian, made all the worse as city leaders just stand by as anarchy reigns. I guess we’ve been there before throughout history but it’s truly a strange thing to be living in a time when people will surely look back and say, “remember when America went mad?”
In the 60’s we had Police and the National Guard called in to either help keep order or to “fight” the protesting while curtailing the violence…as everyone seemed to agree the violent protesting had to stop. It was all very ugly but we had leaders, those who were at least trying to keep or restore some semblance of order–
Today the difference is that our leaders are turning blind eyes, our police and military have their hands tied while the “inmates” are running the asylum (and lest anyone think I infer that the current protestors are insane, which if the truth be told, they are, that is a figure of speech…but I’m certain that the way we’re going, such figures of speech will be deemed offensive and we will not be permitted to use them while we are ostracized and hunted down by the insane masses….) God Help Us!!!
You’ve pegged it Julie, that IS the difference. Responsible parties on all sides used to share a common definition of what’s right and wrong. I see too many people compromising values if it benefits their side. Not good at all.
Thanks Tricia and no, it is not good!
Another effective way to destroy is to divide and conquer which is what a complete racial split will accomplish in this country. Evil is afoot and weaving its web that will bring us down if our leaders are not careful. 😦 😦 😦
You hit the nail on the head my little tumbleweed 🙂
So sad to see our country get so torn up