Guest post; American Lives Matter

The following ruminations come from Ex-PH2;

AMERICAN LIVES MATTER

I spent the afternoon on Sunday making chocolate chip cookies and sampling them, of course. I have the Tollhouse recipe memorized, so I don’t even need to see it any more. That recipe was the product of a woman who ran a restaurant called the Tollhouse Café. She sold the recipe to Nestlé and they made it an iconic recipe that is printed on the back of every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips, semi-sweet or otherwise. She was an American.

Tollhouse cookies are as American as apple pie (English), corned beef (Medieval Europe), cider (England), beer (Mesopotamia, Egypt), ice cream (Chinese – 3,000BC; Italy-17th century).

There are many, many things that were either brought here from the Old Country (still haven’t found that place on the map) or were invented here. Pasta is Italian but pizza is not? Hah! Flatbreads with toppings were around centuries ahead of modern pizza. Rice is Asian? The Italians had access to rice from Africa centuries before Marco Polo made his famous journey to Cathay (China). What he brought back was long grain Asian rice, a variety different from the African variety.

We are composites. We come from everywhere on the planet. My ancestors started coming here from England in the mid-17th century, and they just kept on coming from other countries, but they came in by the front door and set up housekeeping. I think if I go back far enough, a bunch of my ancestors are probably Sicilian and Spanish Moors. And so what? I come from everywhere, but I was born here.

Everyone who wants to be here should be required to use the front door. If they won’t use the front door, then send them back where they came from. Period. We are in the land of opportunity, a place that acts as a magnet for people who want to have a chance to make use of that opportunity. WE invent things here. Other countries mostly just copy us.
Alexander Bell invented the telephone. He really wanted to create something for deaf children to use. Instead, he invented the telephone. Sam Morse developed the telegraph using wires to transmit messages. He worked out that code we still use for getting help – S-O-S , which comes out of Morse code. You can still send telegrams at Western Union if you want to but I think that now, they go by way of the internet. The internet was around in the 1960s, long before Al Gore was out of diapers ;), but only the DoD used it. Now, it’s the way most of us communicate. Anyone besides me remember teletype?

Competition drives people to succeed. That’s just one benefit of being here.
The Wright brothers, those two bicycle repairmen in Ohio, were competing with a lot of other people to be the first to fly, including Weisskopf and Langley. But the evidence for most of those others was anecdotal, not corroborated. The Wright brothers got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in sustained flight in a heavier-than-air powered biplane flyer. They repeated it and recorded it. And it happened here. We’ve gone from a powered glider in 1903 to a stealth fighter before the end of the 20th century.

The point is that we’ve been first in a lot of things that make a difference in this world and make it a better place. It is the drive to succeed and the chance to do so that make this a great place to be born and grow up, to find out what you can do with the gifts you were given. It doesn’t have anything to do with which sex you are, what your skin color is, or what part of town you grew up in. It’s on your shoulders from the get-go. You can take the high road and make something of yourself, or you can sink to the lowest level and become a mindless moron who blames others for his failures and gets into trouble with the law.
I’m as appalled as the rest of you when someone who has every chance in the book offered to him decides to go on a rampage and shoot up a storefront in a Midwestern town and then goes some place else for the sole purpose of killing people he doesn’t know. It isn’t the first time it has happened, but it should not happen at all.

We complain about words coming out of Foggy Bottom, someone saying all the correct things, and we know that it is meaningless because nothing really matters to the person who says them. We get annoyed because one part of the media denies reality, when anyone in touch with reality knows it would do them a world of good to not be so desperately nice once in a while.
My mother never, ever said the wrong thing. She constantly corrected what I said: ‘you can’t say that, you can say whatever was nice’ because ‘whatever’ means that you’re willing to lie your ass off just to get someone to like you. The truth is just too harsh.

The difference between her and me was that she was never willing to admit that she was as prejudiced as you can get and that my father was the same way, because it wasn’t nice and she didn’t want anyone to think she wasn’t nice. And yet, when I was in high school in the early 1960s, she told me that when World War II was declared, she had told her father that ‘the yellow race would never conquer us’.

So you see, I was raised to not be prejudiced by two of the worst hypocrites on the planet. The phoniness I saw in my parents is what I see in this imbecilic world of political correctness which has no purpose other than getting votes.

Trump has stirred the pot, because he is so outspoken. He’s pissed off a lot of people in a lot of ways, but he likes the attention and he doesn’t care who gets pissed off at him. He has brought up issues that are real issues, that people are unwilling to face and discuss openly, just like my mother would never do. Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth. Let’s not offend people by what we say, because we want them to like us, even though they never will. Let’s never admit that they hate us because we exist, and that people like my ‘nicey, nice’ mother would find themselves buried alive. Admitting that wouldn’t be nice, and we must always be nice, mustn’t we?

They hate us because we are free and they are not. They hate us because we exist. They want to kill us. They get a euphoric rush just like a drug rush out of it. Since they do not value human life, they have absolutely nothing to lose, and that’s all there is to it. You don’t negotiate with murdering thugs.

This government doesn’t want to face these things, or admit that it is lying to the people of this country, and address the reality of these attacks by going back to their origins which are not just recent stuff – they go way back and have next to nothing to do with this country.

Without the AIC facing those issues, all the things that we hold dear are up to US to save. If WE are a symbol of hope and opportunity, WE can’t afford to let that die.
WE are Americans. WE have the right to defend ourselves against those who wish to destroy US, whether the scaredy-cat PC addicts like it or not, whether they want to let US do so or not.

It’s called self-determination. WE built this country on that quality. WE decide our fate, not some obnoxious jerk with a hair up his ass about some imagined wrong.
WE count for a hell of a lot in this world.

WE are Americans and AMERICAN LIVES MATTER.

Category: Who knows