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On the Threshold of a Great Awakening
I have had a strong spell of ‘feeling’ good of late and that’s just not like me. If I stuck strictly to observing events flowing from our government and our industry I likely would not have this uncalled for ‘feeling’.
I’m going to explain this by covering some of the public cultural happenings that I have experienced over my long and mostly enjoyable lifetime. I grew up in the state of Georgia I went to public schools all the way through high school that were legally segregated by color, white children and black children. This was always promoted as separate but equal but I doubt it, none were really that good, but we did learn ‘reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic.’ Everything public was pretty much divided between black and white. There was no attention given to Latinos, Asians, Catholics, or Jews because if they were around in Georgia, they were not enough to be noticeable. Oh, there was one Latino in my high school and he was also the only Catholic of my acquaintance. And by the way, Republicans were not noticeable in Georgia politics either. There was a Democrat Primary every four years in September that decided who the governor would be and ‘he’ was the only choice on the ballot on Election Day in November.
By the late ’50s, things were starting to change. I was in the first class at Georgia Tech in which females were enrolled. The Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Dr. Martin Luther King was hard at work. In 1959, my mother died, I dropped a full scholarship attending Georgia Tech and moved to Washington, DC, and went to work in commercial bank operations. That’s the year I turned 21 and became eligible to vote. In 1961, I was drafted into the Army during what was called the “Berlin Crisis”, served during some forced school integration in Alabama and during the “Cuban Missile Crisis”, was separated from active duty and returned to banking in 1963, and was discharged from the reserves in 1968. Military service was really my first opportunity to experience the full impact of what was then called “integration”, a non-event, in a way, but not really.
The next thirty-five years make up the core of my productive life period. I was married to a wonderful lady who emigrated legally from Peru, we had three children, and now we have seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. I finished 2 more years of undergraduate work and another year for a Master’s, all at night while working full-time. My wife worked full-time at home. All of our children are college graduates, have never been arrested or addicted to illegal drugs. I only mention those things so you may understand why I have been happy all my life.
Now, what about this awakening? I was really impressed with what happened in the elections last week. I think the electorate might be on the verge of a tipping point. I want to give @henryracette a shout-out here to support his views and also a lot of his thoughts on what this turn-around requires: things like what happened in Virginia and other locations and not so much of what Jan. 6 turned into.
My life experience tells me that the Democrat Party has always been the party of bigots fomenting racial and religious prejudice. This is still true. In the old days, they were also biased against big business, with some just cause that still exists today but not among the Democrat leadership, who don’t acknowledge wrongdoing by the corporate community that supports Democrat Party initiatives. The bigotry and bias against business separated Democrats from Republicans in my youth. This has now changed in a big way. Republicans were never racially bigoted like the Democrats and are not today. And Republican voters have abandoned much of their previous support for big business that Democrats now embrace. The Republican Party leadership needs to acknowledge what can be seen regarding the attitude of the voters, the people. They need to work hard to secure the support of the minority community whose votes are now being used to further the elite in politics and big business. Most Americans are not now engaged in bigotry and prejudice but the Democrat Party leadership and their cohorts in big media are pushing a falsehood that it exists among white Americans. That is false.
I truly pray that the Republican Party leadership can see this and successfully work over the course of the next year to turn this country around.
Published in General
Maybe it will also spur the other sort of Awakening.
Very nicely done.
I guess that is your life experience.
I was born in 1970. My life experience is that the left always wins. It was already a decade into its long march through our institutions. The Baby Boomers were one the move and gaining power. As the years have passed, the Boomers only got more and more power. Now they control everything. Every idea, every institution. It is all radical Berkley all the time. Saul Alinsky won.
There is not one leftist domestic agenda that has not succeeded over my life. Healthcare is run by the government now, in fact, if not in name. Not one leftist item has ever been overturned. Even welfare reform was undone. We are about to pay people who illiberally came into the nation hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Great Awakening? Half the nation wants me to die because I am a white man and the root of all evil. No, we are not headed for a great awakening, but a great tearing apart of this nation.
Here’s a different perspective on where we are and what it means. I can still pray for an American turnaround.
I will not spend my Sunday arguing with those older and wiser than me but I will raise this one quibble: The party is run by managers. (While it is the [traditional] phrasing, you do disservice by using the term above.) Yes, there are a few leaders in the beltway but they are kept at arms length from the management of the business to make sure they don’t disrupt the smooth operation of that business as orchestrated with the Other Party. Politics is good business for all of them…just not for We the People.
That is all.
Whippersnapper . . .
Update: Get off my lawn!
@bryangstephens I’m not going to contest what you have described as what you have seen over the course of the last fifty years. I have seen what you have seen, not very much for real Americans to cheer for. But I have all the progeny I described in the post with more on the way so I have hope and pray that we can complete a restoration of the American Republic. Time is short, that’s for certain.
Yes. I pray I am wrong.
I think this is accurate and I tried to touch on how this got to this state when I was pointing out that Democrats at one time were not so enamored of big business but that has changed whereas Republicans were pro big business from their beginning. We won’t achieve what I am hoping for unless we can get the people into the forefront of Republican Party policy. I’m sure that means a contest with established leaders but many of their donors prefer the Democrats even when they give money to Republican politicians. We must try to change that outcome.
EDIT: What I meant in changing that outcome is to change the Republican Party leadership from those who still like getting their funding from big business donors to leaders who are responsive to the people.
Bob, you are about the same age as my older sister. about 12 years older than I. My family came from Virginia and I recall the feeling of some of the southerners of those days. They always felt that the attitude of the northern folk toward the southern was hypocritical and that the northern Democrats were much more prejudiced than the southern Republicans, which they themselves were. I did not grow up in Virginia, but in Pennsylvania, which in their minds, seemed to never be quite as good. I mention this to say that your words strike a chord with me.
It is as if we have been half- asleep for many years, while America has been being dismantled bit by bit.
When I saw the headlines about the firemen in New York who refused the vaccine mandate, a voice rose up inside me saying ” Who the (COC) do they think they are?” (meaning those who would impose mandates.) Good Christian boys are not supposed to be using language like that even in their minds. Remember after 9/11 how people used to wear baseball caps and t-shirts emblazoned with the FDNY and NYPD logos? They were for a while our heroes – men who would rush into a burning, collapsing building to pull you out. Now insult has followed insult. I believe that some people are waking up. I hope there are enough of us and it is soon enough.
And those were the same heroes who continued to fight fires and rescue people etc, during the months before a vaccine was even available.
Indeed.
Saw some female Democrat former advisor on the tube talking about how the danger to the Dems is if the Republican Party becomes the “party of parents ” . . . .watch out.
Then she made the dubious (as in contrary to recent evidence, cf. Virginia) that the Democrats are really the party of parents.
If the GOP could be both the party of parents AND also the party of Main Street’s small independent businesses and the self-employed, we might get somewhere.
This was not just a feeling on the part of your folks and others in the South, and that sense prevailed all across the South. The northern Democrats proved they could match and exceed the southern Democrats (southern Republicans never were that prejudice because they were mostly former Democrats who never were racists to start with) when it came to organized resistance to school integration. Today’s young people don’t even have an understanding that racial segregation was stronger in the northern cities even though it was not by law. Just go back and read some of the accounts on busing to accomplish school integration in the northern cities and you’ll see accounts of the organized protests to resist.
Part of the resistance to forced integration in the north focused on the federal courts’ judicially created remedy of forced busing. Boston’s “Southie” neighborhood was a key battle ground in this fight, as South Boston’s anger at Judge Garrity was directed through the efforts of Louise Day Hicks, a Boston City Council member. The judge had ordered things like an entire junior class from one high school being bused to a different neighborhood altogether so as to achieve racial “balance.” Really over the top stuff, micro-managing by a judge of local schools.
Yes, I was bussed in 6th grade and it was a complete failure at achieving the desired ends. All it did was move kids from their neighborhood schools into other neighborhood schools (we were an almost entirely white city anyway, so there was only a class difference). Central planning is always a failure. How about improving schools in minority neighborhoods?? How about that idea?
I think it’s hopeless. The education establishment has been gutted by leftists and now wears the skin of “education.” Burn it all down and piss on the ashes.
Or save some construction costs on rebuilding by turning the buildings over to the charter-school people that Thomas Sowell writes and speaks about.
It was always hard to figure out what was going on with busing in the northern cities. Segregation in northern city schools was not required by law but the city populations were segregated by choice and no-choice so there were black neighborhoods and there were numerous other neighborhoods of other ethnic minorities. As noted here the busing didn’t always accomplish much because the segregation in the schools resulted because that’s how the neighborhoods were populated. I suspect this was an embarrassment for the politicians so they had to do something. They still haven’t figure out what that something is.
Most nights I wake up once or twice to use the toilet and get a drink of water; then go back to sleep. That’s an awakening. Even though it’s sometimes more interesting than that, it’s still not a Great Awakening.
My experience here in a mid-sized city is that integration happens organically. Maybe that’s because we’re a military town and military people are used to “mixing.” But, in any case, I think it’s kind of hilarious that the snow white, long-haired hippie lefty down the street has a ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER” sign in his front yard, but his black neighbors three doors up do not. I’m tempted to knock on his door and ask him why he thinks that is. . . Chances are they’re too smart (and too patriotic) to fall for that neo-Marxist claptrap. But, he probably would come up with some calumny like “they’re afraid of their white neighbors!”
Maybe you’ll come up with a better appellation if we actually turn this thing around.
While some things might get turned around (and we should try to work with that as best we can) I don’t think we should expect that this entire thing will get turned around. It’s not the same package deal to other people as it might be to us.
If you’re in the bed alone, a great awakening may be impossible.
I think the federal government infringements, augmented in many instances by state and local governments into the daily life of the people, and accompanied by unprecedented corporate intrusions creates a potential impetus for the electorate no one living today has seen. We won’t have to wait long to know.
Bob, I think this is a terrific post — thoughtful, reflective, and grounded in reality.
When we speak of Democrats and Republicans, it’s easy to think of the political hacks in D.C. and state houses across the country, and forget that most Republicans and most Democrats are registered as they are because their fathers were. For most Americans, party registration isn’t a sign of deep ideology, but rather a remnant of history.
But I agree with you that Republicans have a great record on civil rights, and the Democratic Party has been blowing smoke about this for years, conflating its peculiar brand of “racism for a good cause” with something compassionate and just, when it clearly isn’t. It’s time for Republicans to reclaim public recognition as the party of color-blind Americans in the best tradition of Martin Luther King.
I do think we are seeing the beginning of something important. Unlike the TEA Party, which was fundamentally a Republican reform movement, what we’re seeing now is broader and, I hope, more enduring: a populist rejection of progressive cultural change. The hard-left has staked out several positions that, when exposed to the light of day, are proving to be extraordinarily unpopular with a majority of Americans. The left has coasted for too long with the cover of a complicit press. It is dawning on Americans that something is very wrong, that the smugly self-righteous people who oppose free speech, who can’t stand criticism, who cancel and censor, and who hide their actions aren’t really the good guys.
I know there are those who think the battle is already lost, that some kind of civil war is inevitable, that the framework the founders gave us has failed and can’t be used to restore our nation. I think they have a mistaken view of the nation’s character and of the people who make up the majority. They see the apparent successes of the left as true victories, rather than what they are: the untreated advance of an infection. It’s time Americans started paying attention and expressing our outrage. I think that has begun, and I don’t think the left has the ability to respond intelligently to the growing pushback.
But don’t forget, if they can’t respond intelligently, that doesn’t mean they won’t respond some other way(s).
We fought a civil war to keep the Democrat states from separating. Racism and slavery were dominant issues, but also agriculture and industry. The industrial north won. Now we have to come to grips with the same division. All states are industrial but some are post industrial, or globally industrial, whatever we might call it. Race is still important to Democrats and some of them want to impose a form of slavery on everyone, but it’s all very different. The post industrial states are very powerful, but couldn’t win a civil war and most likely wouldn’t fight it. The industrial agricultural states are everyone else but are subject to governance from the post industrial states and the senior bureaucrats in Washington and capitals. They need to separate and form a republic based on the original constitution. They don’t have to separate until it’s shown they can’t win a national election. If they can, they can fix matters, if not, we have to be prepared to separate. We won’t because of national defense, but the democrat party is destroying our ability to defend ourselves. Is it because China already calls the shots for vulnerable Biden, or do they just not see the world in such terms? It doesn’t matter. We can’t wait until the next elections. Simple steps, states with borders need to close them and states without borders need to help. When the Federal government tries to stop it by nationalizing the guard, the guard has to say, sorry already busy.
I agree with the meaning and intent of what you say here though I object to your use of the term “national election” for which there is no such provision in the U.S. Constitution, unless I am out of date. I already admitted to being old.
The reason I agree with the intent of your comment is that the states to which you refer should not have to be concerned that not being able to elect their preferred party to the Presidency results in the citizens of their state and their elected representative state government being denied Constitutionally guaranteed rights. When we are at that point the Republic is gone.