Slouching Toward Gary, Indiana

The Democrats Are Responsible

The writer Joan Didion put out a book in the late sixties under the title “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”. I read the book years, and years ago, and though I can recall little about the book and it’s description of San Francisco during the Hippie Days of Haight-Ashbury the title itself stuck with me. I enjoyed her work, although I did get caught up in the 1990’s reading her brother-in-law a bit more, Dominick Dunne, what a life he led. What a life they both led. Having Harrison Ford as your beach house carpenter is just one of the small oddities you find in reading her.

I didn’t know until I googled the title to ensure I was quoting the correct source on the phrase that she borrowed the title from an old Yeats poem.

Where poetry is concerned my interest stopped at Joyce Kilmer.

“Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track, I go by a poor old farmhouse, with it’s shingles broken and black”.

You may know his more famous work “Trees”. He died young in WWI.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that title of late as I feel our entire nation is slouching toward the future. There is a distinct malaise across the country, and I think the majority might say our best days are behind us. You can feel it, this feeling, it is palpable. Happiness and joy have given way to concern, a furrowed brow at every turn. At the cash register, on the face of the guy driving the car next to you at the red light, on the worker leaving the construction site. No one smiles as they meander and walk, they have more of a grim demeanor.

And I wonder if this “message” of doom and gloom for the future is manufactured. I do wonder if our media has been on loop for at least the past twenty years telling us how awful we have been as a people, with race, race, race a constant theme.

Being forced to have our children taught under CRT, with all things seen through the prism of race, it is right there in the title. And all of us at work being lectured about “equity”, and our “white privilege”, through DEI training.

Working class men and women all, just trying to earn a living, being brought into rooms at work, only to be told that their unconscious actions throughout the day are causing “harm”. One can get rather self-conscious being told the way they walk, or talk, or even line up to pour themselves a cup of coffee in the work kitchen is causing discomfort in the people of color around them. How many ways of change are required until those around us feel “comfortable”? Is there some compliance norm, or are we whites just to keep changing, becoming more and more docile and subservient, until such time as we get the nod of approval from the people of color surrounding us all?

I have to think this is all intentional. That somehow people in government planned and coordinated all of this. The negativity in the media, the new “course work” in CRT and DEI, could it be possible that there are those who decided long ago, over thirty years ago or more, that a more anxiety ridden populace is more docile and easier cowed and controlled?

Religion is a shrinking part of our daily lives. And I’ve seen that this was intentional, back when they bankrolled the atheist Madeline Murray O’Hair and her crusade against prayer in the schools in the morning. She won, and morning prayer disappeared from the public schools.

Make no mistake. From the elimination of prayer in schools, to eliminating “blue laws”, religion came under attack. When I was born there were laws known as “blue laws” stating you couldn’t operate a business during the Lord’s Day, Sunday. All shops were closed. Malls were closed. People went to church on Sundays, and for those who did not attend many spent the day in quiet reflection over their lives, their creator, and their spiritual being. Sundays when I was born in the fifties were a much different experience than today. People had a solemn reverence for “The Lord’s Day” way back when.

Today Sundays are no different than a Saturday, it’s a day of shopping, football, cook outs, golf, boating, and fun. God need not apply. The population that goes to attend actual church services on Sunday in America has been dropping my entire lifetime.

I know the elimination of religion in our daily lives, and a move toward a more secular less “devoted” society was planned, there was a concerted effort on the part of those in government to decouple Americans from their church. To move us all toward what is known today as a “Secular Society”. Where we are no longer as connected to our traditional faiths as all our families all once were. I know it is absolutely true in my own family. I spent a “lifetime” in church prior to turning 14. Other than the occasional wedding I haven’t seen the inside of a church in near fifty years.

That doesn’t mean I am not spiritual. But certainly the devotion to organized religion in our lives has waned considerably.

But this current malaise, the idea that the American Dream is dead, that future generations for the first time in US history may not be able to exceed the previous generation in wealth and achievement, was this theme hammered home to us by a compliant media doing the bidding of government officials who wanted the narrative preached? In the same way that government went to war with religion in America from the 1960’s on, are we also under some government Psyop media campaign to create a permanent anxiety?

Could it be that a more anxious people is easier to govern, is one that is going to seek more security, a security provided by none other than the same government putting us all in the malaise to begin with, by preaching the narrative through the mainstream media and media manipulation.

I think it is instructive to look back and see that it’s only roughly 25 years we’ve lived under the growth of Bush passing the Homeland Security Act, along with the Patriot Act, both of which has led our government to get into the surveillance business to a degree that is extremely frightening. They are now Hell bent on curbing our liberties as never before, under the guise of “securing the homeland”.

We moved awfully quick from creating “Homeland Security” to surveilling Catholic school moms by the FBI, I know that. We moved awfully quick from an agency designed to provide airport screening to one that had Joe Biden stand in front of an eerily red-draped building declaring half the population was the “greatest terrorist threat” we face.

In November of 2002 Bush passed the Homeland Security Act and we’ve spend 409 billion since on a department that didn’t exist at all back when we all worried needlessly about Y2K.

Do you feel any safer?

Whenever I think of safety and our government being the provider of this “safety” I can’t help but picture the poor of Louisiana, faced with the storm Katrina, waiting on the government to be their salvation, and not being self-reliant. Bloated bodies floating in the high tides, people who didn’t heed the warnings to get out, or didn’t have the resources and funds to get out once the storm hit. They waited on government to save them, and of course our bloated bureaucracy didn’t respond in time.

Over time since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 we’ve raised generations to think that government will care for them, government is the answer to their problems, they don’t need to worry about their own safety, the almighty government will provide and care.

If you believe that I’d ask you to google Katrina, and look at the people walking over a bridge to safety as bodies float in the nearby high waters and flooding waters. Those people believed that government was superior to self reliance, and they paid a heavy price for their faith in government.

So we find ourselves today anxiety ridden and fearful in general, across the population at large. The young are discouraged over the cost of housing, and starting pay. The elderly worry that inflation is eating more, and more of their fixed income, and that they may not be able to survive the way things are going. Or that a severe change in lifestyle may be required to survive.

Workers hear stories about Social Security not being available when they go to retire, though they pay a sizable portion of their pay into the system. Workers see companies in mass layoff, they worry about their jobs, their job security. They feel the pinch of inflation in insurance costs, energy costs, gas, food, restaurants, entertainment. The paycheck isn’t stretching. Hard decisions are being made, difficult decisions that they did not have to contend with before.

Make absolutely no mistake, going into this election in a few short weeks our entire country is anxiety ridden. On the right we ask “will they cheat again”, on the Left they question our IQ and social status. How can those people support him, they didn’t even go to college, they are just so damn stupid. They are costing us our country.

As for me I see a glimmer of hope. It dawned on me this past week when I pulled in for gas. It just so happened that our requirement for gas and a doggie pit stop to go coincided with there being a Buc-ees off the interstate. Since I’d only been in the parking lot of a Buc-ees in Katy, Texas, and never actually been inside one of these behemoths, I pulled into this one in Northern Florida.

Only in America could you find a Buc-ees. Good Holy God. What a monstrosity.

Only an American mind could fathom a hundred gas pumps, a store the size of a Wal Mart. The traffic entering this place was so thick I thought at first when I had pulled off the highway that this was all traffic for a football game, or concert. There were literally a hundred cars at the two-lane red light to get into the place.

The flow of people going into the store as I pumped gas was just incredible, a constant stream of families, couples, groups. The wife went in and came out with just a fantastic pulled pork sandwich that I ate on the go. I was gobsmacked. I never actually went into the store itself, so technically I still haven’t been to a Buc-ees though I’ve gotten gas twice at one of their establishments.

But the place gave me hope.

You see in our New Democratic America you wouldn’t get a Buc-ees. No one in a malaise, or anxiety ridden is going to bet on spending that much money and risk losing it to succeed on such a large scale. Democrats have no optimism and vision for the success of a single businessman. Only the government can size things the size of a Buc-ees. The government and their hand-maidens at Black Rock.

Creating a Buc-ees, that only happens in an optimistic America, a land where the people see better days ahead. A place where there is hope, and yearning, and optimism for a brighter and much bigger future.

Buc-ees restored my faith that we can beat back the narrative, we can reduce the size of the Homeland Security, we as a people still have that verve, that drive, that desire, that vision that can overcome. That we can fight back to regain our liberties and freedoms, that we can preach self-reliance, and move away from an all inclusive, all controlling, all being government.

There is zero chance that a Buc-ees would ever grow in a Democratically controlled environment. Democrats would rail against 100 gas pumps all in one location. They would decry the footprint size of the place as too big, too over-bearing, too disgustingly over-sized. Too commercial. Democrats don’t want any gas pumps at all, if they had their way every one of those pumps would have been electric charging stations. Which might suit Buc-ees management well, as having people wait over an hour to charge up their vehicle would provide a lot more shopping time inside the stores. Except that none of it would exist under a Democratic regime, they’d never approve the permits for something that size and scope.

The fact that Buc-ees exists gives me hope.

The American ideal is alive and well as evinced by the fact that they exist. We still have visionaries in America. Where Stuckey’s failed, Buc-ees grew. We didn’t stay in a Stuckey’s decline because we stood too long on the edge of the old highway system and didn’t adapt to the new interstates. New visionaries built up monster gas stations off the interstates, replacing the old Stuckey’s large and in-charge.

There is indeed a concerted effort right now to keep us all in fear, anxiety ridden, and dependent. In the same way they decided to decouple our families from our religion, they are attempting to make us feel more dependent on government, and to give up our liberties for security.

But that goes against the grain of the American spirit. We aren’t Europe.

The American way is to be a visionary that creates a Buc-ees, thinking big, investing big, taking risks, and getting huge rewards.

So I tell you this, I have hope in this election that we can beat back the shadow government that moved out Biden and seamlessly gave all a Kamala no one wanted.

And I believe we can do it because I was just in a Buc-ees.

The American Dream isn’t dead, yet.