2006 : THE PAPER BOY : Part II
Did the Hockey Puck Displace the Paper Boy?
This is our country, don’t you want our country to be great? The culture of the anti-Americans were around when I was young but they were fringe minority. Patriotism in my childhood was sacred and we had great respect for those that sacrificed in the past for our freedom. We didn’t just give lip service saying “Thanks for your service.” Contrast today’s university students and teachers that deride patriotism and teach history through the lens of race while denigrating the founders. REAL Original source history is rarely taught in school anymore. Why would you walk out of your own graduation?
I remember a walk out in high school by a few disgruntled kids for some unknown cause. Most of the people that participated had no clue they just went along with the crowd. Group think in hindsight was right in front of me. These kids just wanted attention and to ditch class. I could relate but I thought it was stupid to join the empty rhetoric and useless student revolt.
I wasn’t raised in the church but my family was traditional. We stood on our principles and we had boundaries of right and wrong that were clear most of the time crystal clear. My parents raised us with integrity and honor and a genuine patriotism that was the culture of that time. Right was Right and wrong was wrong.
Right was Right and Wrong was Wrong
My brother and our friends went to the first Congregational church on Mill on our own without our parents. Church was fun and our friends were there. We used to love to chat with the organist as she taught us how to make great music in that historic place. The church bells from the early 1900’s can still be heard today. Later my wife and I were married there it was a dream realized.
Common sense was common and the words stupid and retarded were normal because they set boundaries and implied that we have to grow up learn things and be smart so we had a better life. Peer pressure was to grow up and be an individual and political correctness pointed the conversation at sell outs who went along with the crowd.
Parents talked to each other. Neighbors talked to and helped each other. It was the “village” that helped in raising a generation of latch key kids without cell phones, bubble wrap and helmets. The community was our safe space. Most of us still had two parents in that generation, even if dysfunctional. Both parents and kids had to be responsible to make the dream work. People genuinely looked out for each other because it was a necessity. Not so much these days but that too can be restored as we pull together in today’s stagflation that’s even worse than Jimmy Carter.
Families knew then that even though the courts of man had made the murder of the unborn legal it was not something you were supposed to do. It was a shame and a secret shame because the culture still valued life. My goodness how did we get to a place where the culture no longer values life? Times have changed and this is not the progress we were promised.
If we no longer value life how can we call that progress? A culture of skulls and death is really a slow march to a modern gas chamber. Tattoos were taboo and only the dregs of society embraced them. Now tattoos are everywhere illustrating the march of the culture that embraced all the taboos of the last generation as normal today. Counter cultural inversion is in every generation and as you get older it is easier to see.
Interestingly now the counter culture is moving in the opposite direction. I look at the protesters today as stupid and the radicals as criminals destroying our country. I grew up. When riots and destruction are the celebration of sporting events it just makes me think about the fall of the Roman Empire. I guess we started treating people like things and things like people in our downward spiral. It’s past time to reverse course.
We are living through a fall and we are headed for the modern day gas chambers if we continue to embrace the lies and reject truth. The schizophrenic culture celebrates pride, climate hysteria, euthanasia and moral decay these days. Maybe our education system needs to focus on reading and math again? Humility is how you grow up and our country is being humbled right now because we have become so prideful and vain. Virtue and vice matter. We have to get real and drop the virtue signaling and return to real virtue.
The Good News Is Still The Good News
The good news is still the good news. They call it the gospel and when life becomes unmanageable as it often does we turn back the good news of the gospel and grow up. America needs a 12 step program and we will do a lot of growing up in the coming years. Your privacy and your freedom are your property now threatened by Artificial Intelligence (TECHNOCRACY).
As I got older this started to click into place that culture was always changing to and fro like a cycle. I began to see how groups of people could be led to war and began to see that it really does not happen overnight. It happens a little at a time and then all at once. It’s like bankruptcy and that applies to morality as well.
I also began to see how narratives are used in marketing to persuade you to buy something. The craziest thing though was when I began to realize that the recent generation was marketing communism rebranded as progressivism. The program is being installed through Marxist and Socialist curriculum that began to permeate the education system in the 1980’s. That was years ago and now we are reaping what we have sown.
As a paper boy in my youth I never dreamed I would be writing for the paper. Yet here I am writing for the paper about being a paper boy. We recently found a paper on the 1966 flood and another on the 1969 Flood and it was really eye opening the similarities to the 2023 Season. The front page of one of the papers had the circulation just under 8,000 back in the late 1960’s. The population of Porterville was about 8 thousand with 30 thousand in the wider area.
We don’t print newspapers like we used to and the printing press is not what it once was which is also an interesting contrast as we compare the printing press to the internet. It seems we are in a second reformation period and folks will need to remember that the reformation coincided with the printing press and the world was at war for a hundred years in the first reformation period. Once people gained access to Information directly it set the world on fire.
In hindsight we can see the clear parallel of the printing press vs the internet. Imagine the clear parallel with the realignment of power of the church and the state. As we all know information is power whether wielded by the church in the first reformation or controlled by the government through the internet in the second. Freedom of the press when there is no printing press is new territory but same old conflict. The mantras of separation of church and state are morphing to separation of school and state.
We had the pleasure of meeting professor Victor Davis Hansen (VDH) recently at an event. He reminded the audience about the old saying as we entered this mad age in answering a question about bankruptcy. “How did our country go bankrupt?” was the question. The answer is easy it was gradual for a long time then all of a sudden. Victor has done a good job describing the de-civilization of our civilization now caught in a doom loop because of a lack of REAL virtue.
Why have so many traded the REAL for the ARTIFICIAL?
The argument reflects what we are seeing today doesn’t it? When you apply this to moral bankruptcy it rings true. Slowly and gradually we have lost our moral compass since we removed the Bible from our schools. A generation embraced moral relativism rejecting truth over time only to become morally bankrupt all of a sudden. We don’t really even stop to think about it until we run out of other people’s money and go financially bankrupt.
We got so focused on materialism and self-gratification we outsourced everything. We outsourced our lawn care. We outsourced our cooking trading home cooked meals for fast food. We traded family dinner for TV dinner and the family time dwindled. You name it we outsourced it. There are still do it yourselfer’s out there but back then we were all do it yourselfer’s. In a couple of short generations we outsourced all of our manufacturing to the third world turning our country into a throwaway society. When it breaks just get a new one and throw the other in the landfill. No wonder the landfills are overflowing.
The prosperity of the age has now been outsourced. We outsourced our manufacturing and medicine to countries with few laws and regulations while we saddled ourselves with more laws and regulations. We told ourselves we were cleaning up the environment while we helped the rest of the world become unregulated polluters that sold stuff to us.
The amount of energy and pollution from moving container ships around the world eclipses the energy and pollution from cars. The fast food throw away lifestyle of today means we even send our trash on vacation to other countries. Landfills are so full in other countries now from our trash it is creating an ecological disaster. We tell ourselves we are recycling but that is not true at all in any significance. We have deluded ourselves and refuse to see the truth of the matter because we would rather embrace the lie and false virtue than change and be accountable. I guess we have also outsourced our accountability.
As the reality of this generation sets in we will soon realize how deluded we have allowed ourselves to become. Maybe a pencil and paper is a better idea than yelling across the room at a hockey puck. Maybe going into generational debt to support a broken university system was a bad idea. Maybe it’s time to get back to basics and insource the things we had outsourced. If we have outsourced our thinking to Artificial Intelligence we have gone too far.
It seems to be an age where we need to stop outsourcing our thinking to a hockey puck and giving away our freedom and our privacy to big brother.
The Spirit of America Was Outsourced
The Spirit of America was Outsourced and It’s Past Time to Regroup
and Get Back The Basics That Make America Great.
Let’s start the insourcing generation where we return to self-sufficiency and doing things ourselves again.
Let’s cook meals for our families.
Let’s support the local church.
Let’s get more engaged in our schools and help our kids to take on some responsibility like a paper route.
Let’s get to know our neighbors again and celebrate our differences.
Let’s get back to focusing on local things that will have a national impact.
Let’s insource things and strengthen our local community and local business.
Let’s get back to character carving through competition and sportsmanship (HUMILITY) and recycle the participation trophies to produce real achievement and real self-esteem.
•The paper boy is a symbol of a community that loves freedom.
•The paper boy is never without controversy as are all healthy conversations.
•The paper boy is essential to our being informed and connected.
•The paper boy was once part of the fabric of society & we need to embrace that idea again.
•A hockey puck cannot replace the paper boy. Past is Prologue.
UNALIENABLE RIGHTS© ... With Ed McKervey
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