Society

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By Reid Fitzsimons. Note: The weekend of April 5th and 6th brought widespread and at times large protests under the banner of “Hands Off!” These were mostly directed at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, expressing opposition to reducing or eliminating a large variety of government expenditures. Though I could find no demographic data regarding the protesters, a review of the many photos available on the internet suggests a very significant portion we’re socioeconomically advantaged white people. In fact, to find a non-white person is almost a Where’s Waldo exercise: there doesn't even seem to be many token non-white people, as is evident in the photos that accompany this article.

Around 20 years ago, as my spouse and I were laying the foundation for our rural children's charity project in Honduras (which opened in May, 2007), we did a few R&R overnights on Utila Island. As we were strolling along the water’s edge we came across a rustic touristy beach bar that had a sign stating something like, “Funded by a grant from USAID.” I wondered aloud why in the world USAID would be involved with a tourist bar on a Caribbean island, but put the memory aside. It recently emerged, however, with the Trump administration shutting down USAID because of spending tax dollars on questionable, and even pernicious, things.

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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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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

I’m fairly confident I made it through the years of adolescence and young adulthood with just the average amount of obnoxiousness, and that whatever stupidity I committed did did not include “gay bashing.” Perhaps I should be proud of this, but I’m not sure not being a jerk is deserving of pride. Then again, at the time (this being the 1970s) homosexuality wasn’t really The Thing: back then, if you wanted to garner attention and stick it to the MAN, radical hippie chic was more in vogue than “coming out.” Paradoxically, eventually the anti-establishment hippie radical largely became establishment, as did “coming out.”

Groovy man! Confusing self-indulgence with altruism
I didn't realize there was a "coming out" day until I did research for this article

That’s not to say there wasn’t “gay bashing". People I became friends with decades later admitted they said odious things to homosexuals, and came to regret their behavior. One was (at the time) a young pastor who, with like-minded idiot Christians, drove about the known homosexual areas of Dallas and hurled insults. He quickly realized there was nothing Christian about this activism and, besides being appalling, was counterproductive- the success of convincing a homosexual to say, "Yes, I will now become a heterosexual” upon hearing someone yell, “Queers are going to burn in hell” was about 0%. By the time I met this pastor he was perhaps the most sincere “walk the walk” Christian I ever knew, who dedicated his life to providing a home for abandoned and abused children in Honduras. He was very conservative, with beliefs that would make him an object of scorn among the diversity and inclusion crowd: his theology was God loves the sinner but not the sin, as compared to God loves the sinner and especially loves the sin, with carnal sins being extra sanctified. The latter is the theology of the progressive collection of pretend Christians, often referred to as “mainstream.” To them, self-gratification is the highest calling.

Contradictions that speak for themselves
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by Reid Fitzsimons

Every once in a while some hapless Republican is excoriated for suggesting some version of, “Well, Hitler did some good things,” a statement often quoted without context. With the exception of a handful of neo-Nazi morons and a frighteningly larger number of anti-Jew extreme leftists (who do their anti-Jew things with tacit support from establishment leftists), pretty much nobody thinks Hitler did anything overall “good,” but from a historical perspective, it’s not unreasonable to ask, “Did he do anything that could have been perceived as “good” that rallied millions upon millions of people to support his ascendancy and policies?” This is an important question for this moment in time, as there are worrisome indications the world is once again turning to authoritarianism.

So...how did Hitler obtain absolute power in Germany? Undoubtedly there have been innumerable papers and books on this subject, but ultimately the answer is as old as history and is in play to this very moment. For brief background, Germany was in shambles following its utter defeat in WW1. The victorious allies, acting on understandable emotion but with little wisdom, forced upon Germany a repressive and retributive agreement called the Treaty of Versailles (www.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-Versailles-1919), designed to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a military power. It demanded huge reparations and allotted heretofore chunks of Germany to other nations. Not surprisingly there were wannabe left wing and right wing revolutionary movements and all the chaos they entailed, so the reasonable solution was some form of democracy that came to be called the Weimar Republic (www.britannica.com/place/Weimar-Republic). Nevertheless, great discontent continued and there were vacuums to be filled, and Hitler had the skill to fill the void, and the patience.

Adolph Hitler in 1924 at the age of 35
Before becoming a bloodthirsty dictator, Hitler was an artist
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by Reid Fitzsimons

Boston is city where the present, characterized culturally and politically by enormously wealthy progressive elitists, is completely at odds with its past: the birthplace of the idea and ideals of America along with the associated Revolution against the English empire, and traditional Protestant/Yankee concepts of hard work, self-discipline, and frugality; all ideas and standards disparaged and dismissed by the current power base.

A number of years ago I walked about downtown Boston taking in the historic sites and buildings, which included many old churches. Formerly the homes of Reformed and fairly dogmatic Christianity, many of these churches were festooned with “Everyone Is Welcome” signs and the color purple; purple I think at the time being the preferred color of virtue signalers, the “Look at me, I’m fabulous” class (purple has since been replaced by rainbows). The “Everyone Is Welcome” theme is maybe pleasing to some, but is nonsense because 1) there is no place in the temporal world where “everyone is welcome” and 2) by “everyone” what was really meant was certain preferred identity groupings, the demographic groups that made the privileged feel really good about themselves. I seriously doubt some guy wearing jackboots and a Swastika armband would have been welcome, and rightfully so: in your face cultural and political activism perhaps has a place, but not in places like churches, and this applies to all political spectrums.

It's unlikely that people who are vocal in their opposition to the tenets of the Unitarian Church would "fit in."
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