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by Reid Fitzsimons

The preacher opens his mouth and out comes fury, like always. He doesn’t have to be a Christian preacher- other religions could do the same- but his sermon is filled with venom and righteousness. He talks about sinners (or perhaps infidels), and how they will be thrown into the eternal hellfire of damnation. God is angry, and He judges severely. Somehow the actual message of Jesus Christ isn’t mentioned because it’s not really important. What is important is manipulating and controlling susceptible people, those with whom the message of fire and brimstone resonates because they are convinced they are the chosen, the righteous ones, and that they are better than everyone else.

Left: prosperity Christianity televangelist Kenneth Copeland, net worth about $300 million Right: Egyptian-born American Imam Ammar Shahin, who gained a certain version of celebrity in 2017 when he preached, “Oh, Allah, count them (Jews) one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one.” He is currently affiliated with the "non-profit" Islamic Center of Davis, CA

The enraged and violent approach to religion has waxed and waned throughout history, sometimes marginalized, but at other times the predominate cultural and political force. Insane Christianity had its moments and was the source of massive misery, wars, and genocide, but thankfully this approach involving righteous atrocities has pretty well faded away over the centuries, largely because it never was based on Jesus to begin with. And yes, the statement, “Kill them all and let God sort it out,” is historically accurate. Not to malign Islam, but unfortunately too many people who control things in Muslim areas pervert Islam for their own greed and power in modern times: kind of where Christianity was 500 years ago.

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by Reid Fitzsimons (this is an article about elitism, with photos of people deemed to be elite, past and present)

Most people want to feel they belong to something, almost an innate human characteristic. Historically people belonged to, and had allegiance to, family-clan-tribe. As great migrations and the such led to interactions of different people and cultures (and assimilation, forced assimilation, and destruction of cultures and people), blood relationship ties to some extent gave way to other commonalities, geographic being an important one, and things such as kingdoms and countries evolved. There were also smaller associations of people with shared interests, guilds being among them. Of course, any discussion of belonging to a group has to include religions. It would be wonderful to say all these relationships, loyalties, shared beliefs, senses of belonging, etc led to a world of perfect harmony, as when in the early 1970s Coca-Cola exploited a gentle but overall silly song in a cynical ad campaign. Yet there would be no perfect harmony for humans,rather endless raping and oppression and pillaging and slaughter and lots of other atrocities. To be fair there have been plenty of bright and hopeful moments in human history; sometimes it almost seems to cycle.

L: a scene from the 1970's ad for Coke R: James Quincey, apparently a white male, is the CEO of Coca-Cola with an annual salary of about $25 million and a net worth of $135 million. For his company, "Diversity, equity and inclusion are at the heart of our values and our growth strategy and play an important part in our company's success," though there has been some DEI backpedaling since Trump's election.

Associations in today’s world actually still include those from long ago,for example countries in Africa are largely artificial remnants of European colonialism, and tribal affiliations remain strong and important. Likewise class structures, especially along economic lines, continue omnipresent. A sense of belonging can range from benign to violent, including everything from being a member of a bowling league to a member of an urban gang. There are people who feel they belong especially to a small community (“hometown pride”), a country (patriotism), and a more supercilious claim of belonging to the world (a “global citizen”). Some of these belongings- memberships- are more imagined than real, which leads to a group in which lots and lots of people believe they belong, or at least yearn to: the elite.

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by Reid Fitzsimons

I received an email from a highly accomplished, highly qualified mid-level civilian employee of the Dept of the Air Force. He really doesn't like Trump, as can be intuited from the subject of his email: Quote from Trump’s OMB (Office of Management and Budget) director nominee about me and my fellow civil service employees: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. " That's a pretty harsh statement and the question is, "Are bureaucrats and civil service employees the same thing?" Being a retired civil service employee, I think- and hope- the answer is no. Below is my response to his concern.

Left: a cartoon suggesting that Congress has largely ceded its responsibility to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who make decrees that are viewed as law. Right: many government employees- civil servants- have important functions, and overall they are generously compensated.
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Admittedly I am neither a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School nor a policy wonk for the Brookings Institution. In other words, none of the great policy makers are ever going to seek my thoughts or recommendations on immigration or related issues. I could argue that living in Central America for 5+ years would offer me some kind of credentials, but in general people who make policy, control funding, and exert power- sometimes referred to as the Establishment- are not concerned with actual, real-life experience, but with academic pedigrees. It’s kind of like the real world of the Establishment is the pretend world, and those who make decisions that can effect millions of people tend to dismiss, and even disdain, lessons from the actual real world: it’s less hassle to live and advance in the pretend real world than in the real real world. At some level pretend real world people are envious of the real real world people. In the recent presidential election, for example, millions were apparently impressed that the Democrat candidate might have once worked briefly at a MacDonald's decades ago, which in their minds gave her real real world credentials.

Photos from our project in the village of El Cacao, Honduras

Of the 5+ years in Central America the majority of the time was in Honduras, with a little less than 6 months in Guatemala in 2001-2002, where I was involved in 2 or 3 volunteer efforts. Beginning around 2005 my wife and I developed a children’s charity project in a small, rural village in Honduras, and opened in May 2007, a place where kids could come and have wholesome fun- arts and crafts, story-time, play and sports- and receive breakfast, lunch, and snacks; it proved to be very successful. Living in a village as the rare gringos contrasts to what is called living as an expat, a perfectly fine life choice but it tends to keep one insulated among fellow English speaking expats with limited exposure to the culture and people. Many expats don’t have the need to learn other than basic Spanish, but we had to become pretty functional in Spanish in order to do what we did.

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by Reid Fitzsimons

Picture yourself at a generic social gathering where someone you just met blurts out, “Don’t you thank God everyday for sacrificing His Son to pay for our sins!” If you are a fellow believer you might respond with “Praise the Lord,” or, if you are an anti-Christian progressive activist type who craves being offended, you might say, “Don’t force your beliefs and your fascist pretend god on me!” Or, if you are a reasonably mature and sensitive person, you might think “That’s kind of an inappropriate thing to say to someone you don’t know” and try to politely redirect the conversation.

In terms of the person making the statement, what are their motivations? It’s certainly possible they assume everyone believes as they do, which is kind of arrogant. Maybe it's a kind of religious virtue signaling. More likely, it’s simply something very important to them to and they just can’t filter their words from their thoughts. It’s extremely doubtful that a non-believer would have an epiphany and cry out “Save me Jesus!” What’s more likely is their audience would think, “That really doesn’t do much to advance their cause.”

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by Reid Fitzsimons (note this is a very long article of approx 5,300 words, the first 3,500 being mine and the remainder those of a then pro-life Jesse Jackson from 1977)

Around 45 years-ago I was visiting in-laws deep in Mississippi, this being in the waning days of what we call “Jim Crow.” The in-laws were relatively wealthy, as defined by being two million in debt due to ill-conceived business ventures. They had employees, many of them black, and I befriended a young black man about my age. We had been given an excess amount of pecans and I offered him a bag to take back to his family, which he appreciated. As he was walking away, one of the in-laws, a generation older than me, exclaimed “He’s stealing the pecans!” Knowing this could have an unfortunate outcome, I quickly explained I had given him the bag. The response, in a genteel Southern accent (me being a Yankee) was, “We don’t do that kind of thing down here.”

The political structure of Jim Crow was pretty typical of oppressive societies throughout history, meaning the oppressors needed the oppressed to maintain power. In Jim Crow, there was dangled before the white masses the perpetual threat of “nigras not knowing their place and being uppity.” This had broad and powerful appeal to many of the white masses, who from childhood had been taught that blacks were, simply, inferior. They- blacks- could be dutiful and affectionate pets and treated accordingly, but there was always the fear they would turn on their masters, and the whites holding the power knew how to exploit this fear: one can picture the ugly man, George Wallace, with his ugly promise of “...segregation forever!”

The deluding and the deluded
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by Reid Fitzsimons

A scene in the excellent comedy My Cousin Vinny involved a young man who, when asked by a cop “when did you shoot the clerk?,” responded with an astonished “I shot the clerk??” He, of course, didn’t shoot the clerk, but his “statement” was treated as a confession.

Left: the scene from My Cousin Vinny where Bill Gambini's (Ralph Macchio) words are misinterpreted by the police and (right) claimed to be a confession

On Labor Day weekend I visited someone I’ve known all my life but never spent much time with; I should add he’s a truly decent guy. I never bring up politics in social situations such as this and had no idea of his leanings, but he mentioned he detested Trump to the point he thinks he should be executed. I asked him why he felt this way and he vigorously mentioned atrocious things Trump has been to reported to say, stating emphatically in some cases, “I heard him say it!” The following discusses some of the egregious and hideous statements attributed to Trump, including those the person “heard” that led to his extreme hatred of Trump, and what the truth actually is.

Two sides of the same coin: white supremacists and masked left wing fascists (curiously calling themselves "antifascists") in Charlottesville, VA August 2017

Charlottesville, VA. In August 2017 there was a “Unite the Right” rally which quickly devolved into violence between protesters and counter-protesters. Several days later Trump was asked about this during a news conference. Included in his response to the loaded question, “Mr. President, are you putting what you're calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?” was a mention, “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” This was immediately reported as Trump claiming Neo-Nazis and white supremacists were very fine people, and elicited outrage among the usual suspects, including the Democrat party leadership and the media. Joe Biden has repeatedly stated this was a major factor in his seeking the presidency, and is to this moment being used by the Democrat nominee, Kamala Harris, as an example of the hateful nature of Trump. Of course, Trump specifically condemned the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists a few sentences later: “I'm not talking about the Neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,” yet this total lie was and is being propagated by those who so passionately seem to hate Trump. And, like so many lies, intentional misrepresentations, and fabrications, have proven very effective.

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by Reid Fitzsimons

Once in a while you’ll see an older guy in a store wearing a hat the says Vietnam Veteran. If you do consider this for a moment, you’ll probably assume he is, indeed, a Vietnam vet. If you pause a little longer, you might imagine what a profound impact this experience must have had on him over a half century ago when he was a young man, perhaps just out of high school. I fear the significance of serving in a war is being lost on us as a society overall, relegated more to a video game mindset: The share of the U.S. population with military experience has declined, according to data from the US Census Bureau. In 1980, about 18% of U.S. adults were veterans, but that share fell to 6% in 2022.

Tim Walz photo from Army basic training 1981; wow: on the right the corresponding photo of me from1976

There is a person named Tim Walz, the current governor of MN who was recently declared to be the Democrat’s candidate for Vice President. While Waltz is among the most extreme leftists in the Democrat party, he fits the bill for a slightly older non-homosexual white guy, designed to balance the ticket headed by a lady who is pretty much white but portrays herself as black, and is an equally extreme leftist. This article, however, is not to discuss the extremism of this duo and the party they represent, but to explore a specific fraud they hope will be ignored or successfully glossed over, that being Walz’s military service. It should be acknowledged without reservation that he was a member of the Army National Guard for 24 years. He retired in May 2005, and came darn close to having served honorably.

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by Reid Fitzsimons (Preface: The word “culture” is used frequently; perhaps overused. We have cultural icons, cultural appropriation, and culture wars; a privileged person might view his or herself as being highly cultured for listening to NPR or patronizing expensive sushi bars, and we have cultures associated with black, white and every skin tone in between. In reality it’s difficult to define the word, but I recall the professor from my Cultural Anthropology 101 class at the University of Wyoming in 1977, who succinctly stated culture is “learned behavior.”

In order to make the point of this article I need to be a little autobiographical. I was raised in the almost exclusively white Maryland suburbs outside of Washington, DC. While wealth is always relative, we were certainly well off, not country club/private school rich (there were plenty of those households around), but we had a spacious house, two cars, membership in a community swimming club with tennis courts, and took family vacations. The typical and expected trajectory was to complete high school, graduate from college, perhaps go to grad school to become a lawyer, accountant, or obtain an MBA, get a well paying job, start a family in a nice house in the suburbs, and repeat the cycle.

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by Reid Fitzsimons (this article was written as a Letter to the Editor of a small local paper, the Susquehanna Transcript, as a response to an earlier anti-Trump letter)

Sometimes we love too much, and sometimes we hate too much, to the point the object of our love is perfect and flawless and the object of our hate is vilified in totality. These feelings can be personal, and not infrequently political. Extremes in love and hate might feel satisfying, but too often feelings overcome reality, and make us believe and do stupid things. The June 12thissue of the Transcript contained a letter from a nonagenarian residing in Uniondale entitled Assimilate 201. It was a little difficult for me to follow, but it was clear the writer is no fan of Donald Trump, and her inaccuracies and falsehoods presented as fact, both small and significant, suggests she hates Trump a little too much.

Hitler is the go-to comparison for people Democrats don't like

She claims Trump called immigrants “vermin,” then segued into a predictable comparison to Hitler, mentioning that, “In case you didn't know, Hitler killed 8 million mostly educated Jewish people in large gas ovens.” It’s not a huge point, but I don’t think Hitler really cared about the educational level of the Jews he had exterminated, and for historical accuracy, the accepted Holocaust figure is 6 million. The mention of killing so many people in “large gas ovens” likewise is inaccurate: the Nazis used a variety of methods to kill Jews and other demographic groups- large ovens were typically used in concentration camps to efficiently incinerate the bodies (and perhaps hide evidence of their atrocities) after they were slaughtered. This may seem a petty point, but if someone is using historical comparison to make a political point it should be reasonably correct.

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