The Fine Art of American Protest ... Alan Caruba

The Fine Art of American Protest
By Alan Caruba
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There have been many mass marches on Washington, D.C., so the locals know how to make plans to anticipate the congestion and the police are polite and skillful in the science of crowd control. They can afford to be polite because the crowds, no matter how large, are too.

Oh, sure, they shout a lot, but that’s what a protest march is all about. Back in April 1894 unemployed workers known as “Coxey’s Army” showed up to demand that Congress do something. It was the second year of an economic depression that would last another two years, but it was the worst that had hit the nation barely three decades since the end of the Civil War.

Americans know where to head when they are at odds with their government and most know or suspect that the source of their problems can be found in Washington, D.C. and they are always right.

Bloodshed has been extremely rare at such events. On June 17, 1932 a “Bonus Army”, some 20,000 World War One veterans and their families massed in the Capitol seeking advance payment of bonuses from the Hoover administration. The year is significant. It was four years passed the beginning of the Great Depression that began in 1929.

Orders were given to disburse them and to destroy the shanties they had built. An Army Colonel named Douglas McArthur led the troops. Several of the veterans were killed. Hoover’s reputation never survived that march.

Americans tend to march to protest economic issues and/or wars. Some social issues draw crowds such as the March 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which most people remember because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech, “I have a dream.”

The 1960s were punctuated by many marches to protest the Vietnam War. The crowds massed in 1965, 1966, 1967, and1969. They kept coming back as in 1971. In April 1974 some ten thousand gathered to demand the impeachment of Richard Nixon. On August 10, 1974 Nixon resigned; the first and only President to do so, the final act of the Watergate scandal.

The 1980s had a smattering of smaller marches, but they were about things like lesbian and gay rights or global nuclear disarmament. It wasn’t until another war that a lot of Americans got on the buses to Washington, D.C. again. The Gulf War ginned up a crowd estimated at 75,000. The 1990s saw a handful of marches of not much consequence.

The war in Iraq stirred familiar passions and the first protest march was on September 24, 2005. By 2007 the pace picked up, but while the war was unpopular with many Americans, it did not generate the kind of anger that Vietnam did. Barely ten thousand showed up in July 2008 and, by Washington, D.C. standards, that was small.

What is significant about the Saturday, September 12, 2009 march was the totally grassroots nature of the event. It was billed as a “Tea Party”, a name taken from the rather spontaneous tea party events that occurred shortly after Congress went insane and started spending billions of taxpayer dollars on bailouts, the takeover of General Motors, ownership of an insurance company, and a huge so-called “Stimulus” bill.

With the economy heading south, Americans quickly and correctly concluded that the Democrat controlled Congress and the new President were taking the nation over the cliff with their spending, borrowing, and printing of dollars.

September 12, 2009, however, was a protest against President Barack Obama.

Second and third in line for public protest were Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Having achieved total political power, the President and Congress had generated a massive grassroots resistance barely seven months into his term.

On Saturday Americans from around the nation gathered in Washington, D.C. to demand that the U.S. Constitution be obeyed!

The U.S. press initially described the crowd as “tens of thousands.” It was so big that, by evening, even the Capitol police had not yet released an estimate of its size, but British press observers pegged it at two million!

America was born in protest and a new generation is carrying on the tradition. It is not an idle thing. They could have gone to a football or baseball game. Instead, they came to Washington, D.C.

Only fools would dare ignore them.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, September 2009

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The Dream of America Lost to a Socialist Nightmare

Multiculturalism, Diversity, and Political Correctness have Destroyed America
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

As I observe more and more frustrated Americans opining how “they/we want our country back,” I also observed that more and more Americans have no clue what we are asking! THAT was, in itself, and epiphany, of sorts, for this scribe. You see, our young people in America have been denied their lessons in history, especially the history of this country, the United States of America. And, yes, they ARE doomed to repeat the “mistakes of the past” and, equally as unfortunate, they are doomed to make new and event worse mistakes as a result of their ignorance of our sometimes tortured past as well as our sometimes glorious past.

I remembered that I had written about this a while ago and decided to look it up.

As I was reading over my ancient scribbling it occurred to me that not much had changed -- if anything. It also occurred to me that now, right now, as our beloved nation is tearing itself apart trying to find a majority of Americans to either swing America completely over to socialism, which is the first step to national communism, or remain a representative republic, it might be a fairly good idea to re-publish my words of long ago.

So, I brushed off some of the cobwebs and dusted it off, a bit, and I present them now, with some updating for your edification.

First allow me to mention the following: I find nothing quite so repulsive as those who feel WE are the enemy of America. “We” being those of us who want our country back. It is THEY who demonstrate their own blinding ignorance of this country’s sacrifice to gain and maintain the freedoms granted us under the constitution as a representative republic. It is THEY who are ignorant of the blood sacrifice shed on the alter of freedom to preserve the constitution under which they are allowed the freedom to slander the very America that gave them the freedom they enjoy as a birthright. It is they who damage our beloved nation once described by one of America’s greatest presidents, Ronald Reagan, as a “Shining City on a Hill.”

Many Americans fell for one of the oldest political “come-ons” in history offered by one of the least qualified candidates for president this nation has ever had the misfortune to have offered it by a political party which has adopted so much of the socialist platform they are almost indistinguishable from those who openly claim their socialist beliefs. They feel for “C H A N G E .”

Change is not always good. Change for the sake of change is almost always BAD. And yet that is what put the current occupant of the presidency in the Oval Office as America’s President and the Commander – in-Chief of the US Armed forces.

So – how did we arrive, as a nation, at this pitiable juncture which, I sincerely hope will go doen in the future history books as an anomaly?

I think the words below may shed some light on how such a thing can happen to a nation, any nation, even one so blessed by Providence.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

There was a time in America, not so long ago, when we had white people, black people, brown people, yellow people, etc. We had men and women. We had healthy people and we had sick people and we had handicapped people.

We had smart people and we had dumb people. We had retarded people and we had normal people.

We had queers and homosexuals and but we had no gay and lesbian people.

We had the truth and we had the lie.

We had people who loved America and people who hated America. There was no “in-between.”

We had Republicans and Democrats and no Independents. We had conservatives and liberals. We did not have moderates.

Well, what happened? Answer: World War Two!

What’s World War Two got to do with it, you may ask? Glad you asked. It has everything to do with the mess in which we find ourselves in America today.

Our US troops who fought in Europe, and were stationed there after the war, brought something back from Europe that was, up ‘til that time, alien to America. In those days it was called “Moral Relativism.” Simply defined it says there are no absolutes. There is no absolutely black and there is no absolutely white. There is no absolute truth and there is no absolute lie.

Now -- this was like a bombshell going off in America. Those of religious faith saw it instantly for what it was. The GREAT LIE!

The pointy-head elites, all over the country, especially those of university academia, saw instantly a way to cover all the things they wanted to do and say with the cloak of moral relativism. And they took it up and reveled in it. They began to teach it to our kids. Then those kids became elementary and high schoolteachers themselves… and they, too, taught it to our kids and, their kids.

It is not accidental that those on the left side of the political spectrum in America came so quickly to adopt Moral Relativism. You see… they WERE the university elite. Someone has said recently, it is now a part of the DNA of the political left and the Democrat Party.

Nowadays, Moral Relativism is known as Political Correctness. No matter what it is called it is still the most effective way to live a lie and sell that life style to others.

When I was a boy, America was referred to as a great Melting Pot. People from all over the world would come to America and melt right into the unique American society and culture. Sometimes it took one, or even two, generations to make the cycle complete but they worked at it. And it made America strong.

Then, the left came up with something called “Multiculturalism.” Basically, that is to say any and all cultures are as good as ours. (When we had a unique American Culture. And for those of you too young to remember… we DID have our own culture!) The breakdown of American society, and culture, began at that moment. The political left began to foist their plan to no longer have a single American culture but a vast array of cultures from all the peoples who had come here to ostensively become Americans.

It was kind of cute at first, the gay colors of the Hispanic peoples and their holidays… and the October fest of the Germans, and the Irish holidays, and the various other cultural celebrations of the host of other peoples in America. Then it became sinister. That unique American culture began to be absorbed into the multitude of other cultures. Now, for all intents and purposes, the American culture is gone. And with it went the identity of the American people.

And then came the icing on the cake: Diversity.

Ever since there has been the institution of marriage, a man and a woman deciding to live together and create a family… man has needed to get away from the little woman.

You have to understand, men are barbarians. We can’t help it, that’s the way Nature made us and we will never be house broken. Even in the pre-Columbian days of the Native Americans on this continent the tribes had their “Man’s House”. Even then, the men needed to get away. It’s not that the man loved or respected the woman any the less; he just needed to let the beast out for a while. He could not, and cannot, do that in a domesticated setting.

For a very long time, the work place served as the man’s retreat. Then the feminist movement came along and women decided they could have it all… including the heart attacks, ulcers, nervous breakdowns, alcoholism, infidelity to their spouse, and everything that goes with the workplace, and they chose that over their families! The invasion into the man’s retreat was on and it was overwhelming.

The office known as “Personnel” was suddenly changed to “Human Resources” and diversity in the workplace was near complete. But… not quite so in American society.

The Military was next. Man’s last retreat from curtains and all forms of domesticity was invaded and defeated. Again In the name of diversity.

Now, diversity and multiculturalism feed off each other and they both feed off Political Correctness. How IS that, you may ask?

Well, if we clear the fog of political correctness away for a brief moment, we can clearly see that multiculturalism is bad for the country. It has robbed us of our identity. Diversity has robbed us of our homes and families… and robbed us of our places in society. Male and female have morphed into one sex now. And again, we have lost our gender identity. Even the forced injection of different races into each other’s cultures, in the name of diversity, has robbed ALL races of their distinct identity. So we came up with hyphenated names to try to identify who we are. But… it doesn’t work. Not really.

Why can’t we see this? Because Political Correctness has laid the cloak of the Big Lie over everything and we dare not question any of it because that would be… you guessed it… Politically Incorrect.

And so… we are lost. We don’t know who we are anymore, we don’t know where we are anymore, and we don’t even know how we got here.

So how can we change it? We can’t. You can’t unring a bell. You cannot re-instate virginity. We’re stuck!

The US has succumbed to that fatal disease which strikes all great nations and brings them their knees. Guilt.

I mean, heck, we can’t even fight a successful war anymore for fear that we will hurt the enemy. And we feel guilty for, well, something or other. The left will certainly fill in the blank for us.

The Thanksgiving season in America is only a couple of months away. Certainly we can take a tip from our founders, those 102 frightened, but determined, souls who left their country in search of a new beginning.

Like the Pilgrims we are going to have to leave and begin anew. Where, you may ask? Antarctica? Hardly. I would point in one direction. Straight up. I firmly our destiny lies out there … among the stars.

Since government can’t afford to fund a colonization program, it will have to be private enterprise, which comes up with the money, the will, and the way. And do not kid yourselves; my guess is -- they are hard at work on plans for such a venture right now.

In the past 2 decades or so, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the nearness of our horizons. We have become fat, lazy, and satisfied. Our wanderlust is gone. The curiosity to learn what lies over the next hill has diminished. And THAT, Dear Reader, is a death sentence to any society. To paraphrase the scriptures “Without a vision, the people perish.” OUR vision is gone.

Well, that’s not ENTIRELY true. Some, among us, cling to the vision of spreading our collective wings and soaring into the universe. Some of us believe it is our destiny. And, as we look around us, some of us believe it is our salvation as well.

J. D. Longstreet

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