Hard On The Brakes Won’t Do It

     Before I begin this screed, I’d like to express a thought that has often risen to mind but has seldom made its way through my fingers and into the sacred pixels of Liberty’s Torch:

     Whoever and wherever you are, including those of you who read my crap to laugh at my Neanderthal sentiments. (Yes, there are some people. I could name them, but you don’t need to know who they are, and they already do.) Knowing you’re out there keeps me going. Nothing else could do it.

     And now, on with the show.

     Ann Barnhardt isn’t just a great Catholic voice in a time that desperately needs such voices. She’s also one of the clearest-eyed writers currently gracing the Web – and she says what she thinks about what she sees. Consider the following large excerpt from her column of yesterday, which I reproduce here with her permission:

     Folks, I dropped out of high school largely because of this. Also the open rape threats by black guys while sitting four feet away from a teacher in study hall who had announced on the first day of school in August of ARSH 1992 that, “I’m retiring this year and I don’t give a shit about any of you. Do not talk to me. Do not bother me. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone.” He wasn’t kidding. Even hearing a six foot tall black guy threaten to rape my fifteen year old person, less than 100 pounds soaking wet, didn’t phase that POS “teacher” in the slightest. I looked at the teacher after the black guy said, “Bitch, you uptight. You need a gud f***”, locked eyes with the teacher, he looked down at his magazine, I got up and walked to the school office and said, “Draw up the withdrawal papers. I’m done. I’m never coming here again.” Punchline? The lib boomer gifted teacher, having been summoned at the news that Ann Barnhardt – as in the-one-who-was-skipped-twice Ann Barnhardt – was demanding withdrawal, looked at me, called me a “princess” and asked, “Who in the hell do you think you are?” To my eternal shame, I did NOT say, “Who do I have to be?” I said, “Well, I know I’m better than this.” Derp. Such a lost rhetorical opportunity. Anyway, I digress.

     Aside from that, the fact that I hadn’t learned anything in YEARS was another huge factor. Why continue to go to a school in which nothing is taught? And WHY was nothing being taught? Because of the ITBS standardized tests – Iowa Test of Basic Skills. The Leavenworth, Kansas school district lived and died by the ITBS scores, and what the ITBS scores showed EVERY YEAR, in EVERY CLASS in EVERY SCHOOL was that the ghetto black kids were basically frozen at the first grade level. I was in Kindergarten with a ghetto black boy who was SUB-VERBAL. He could not speak. When I was in 7th grade, many of the ghetto blacks were already EXACTLY what the woman in the video above describes. While the average kids were doing one more year of arithmetic, the smart kids were in Algebra. That ghetto blacks were in what was called “consumer math”. As in, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and MAYBE fractions and decimals. And those kids did EXACTLY the same “consumer math” curriculum every year, just maybe with a different name like “Practical Math”. And they would fail. Every year. They couldn’t write, hell, they couldn’t speak except in James Brown-esque incomprehensible ebonic yelling.

     […]

     But today, children across the board from ghetto blacks to affluent whites, have basically zero interaction with their parents at home, and their parents, mostly now BORN in the late ’80s through early 2000’s are themselves hopelessly uneducated and CONTRA-educated, and, like their parents are slavishly attached to “personal screens”.

     I was tempted to boldface and italic far too much of the above, so I decided to let it stand. It speaks for itself. Ann gives the following diagnosis:

1. Destruction of the nuclear family, in particular removing fathers from households, both physically and passively. LBJ took care of the destruction of the black family first with the Great Society, but now it’s EVERYONE. What is worse, to have a totally absentee father, or some obese low-T heterosexual faggot slob laying around noshing edible marijuana and inculcating his spawn into the vidja gamer slothstyle? Discuss amongst yourselves.
2. Infiltration of the schools.
3. Glorification of the black hip-hop culture and universally instilled hatred of any intellectual life, pursuit or achievement.
4. Electronic devices – people literally do not SPEAK TO EACH OTHER anymore, especially parents and children. Children do not even hear adults talking amongst themselves.
5. CoronaScam lockdowns and masks.

     That fifth entry was an accelerator rather than a primary cause, but it surely has a part to play in the drama. Convenience plus the gravitational pull of the lowest common denominator brought this about:

1. Greatest Generation parents, grateful to have survived the Thirties and the Second World War, overindulged their Baby Boom children.
2. Those children grew up to be inadequate parents who raised whiny, ignorant men.
3. Whiny, ignorant men have created still whinier, even more ignorant men.
4. Whinier and more ignorant men have created completely flaccid, totally ignorant men.
5. And the dynamic built into every institution in our society has decreed there’s no changing it.

     Ponder that while I fetch more coffee.

     Consider the Negro kids in Ann’s vignette of her high school experience. The school had made it a sub rosa policy to leave them exactly as predatory and ignorant as Ann depicts them – and that was more than four decades ago. It was never an openly avowed policy; it arose from the flaccidity of those who were nominally responsible for instructing them. They refused to make the effort. Why? It’s quite simple, really: under the rules that governed the school system, they didn’t need to. They’d draw their paychecks and accumulate the luxurious benefits the unions had extorted for them without having to lift a finger. So whether or not it might have been possible to civilize those young savages, there was no effort put to it.

     Education? That hasn’t been the priority of “public” school employees for a long time now.

     White kids, seeing what the Negro kids could get away with, began to emulate them. Emulation seldom confines itself to a single characteristic of the emulated ones. Those white kids – the ones who didn’t have a firm hand at home to curb them, and yes, there were surely some such – adopted the thuggish culture and predatory manner of the Negro kids virtually in their entirety. If it happened in Iowa and Kansas in the Eighties, you can bet the mortgage money that it had already happened just about everywhere else… and I can tell you from my personal experience that indeed it had.

     Yet this is where the devolution started from:

     Get into your time machine, go back fifty years [i.e., to 1950 — FWP], and walk the streets of any of the great cities of this continent. They were safe. They were almost perfectly clean. People didn’t jostle one another, hurl obscene imprecations at one another, deface the sides of buildings with moronic scrawling, or pollute the air with pain-threshold levels of their preferred “music.” Men treated women with courtesy, respect, and a certain protective affection. Even the poor, of which, though they were less numerous than they are today, there was no shortage, were clean, self-reliant, self-respecting, and courteous.

     The police would sort out those who couldn’t meet the prevailing standards and would unceremoniously tell them to “keep moving,” in which effort they were overwhelmingly reinforced by the non-uniformed public. If you wanted to surround yourself with degeneracy, you had to find the local Skid Row, the only place where such things were tolerated. It wasn’t a big place, and the folks you found there permitted themselves no pride about their condition. No one indulged in nonsense notions about the “dignity” of the homeless, of welfare dependents, of drug addicts, of gang members, or any of today’s mascot-groups for the coercive-compassion camp. As a result, government, which fattens on public perceptions of danger and disorder, was relatively small and unintrusive.

     Were there some blemishes on this pretty picture? Yes, of course there were. There were still legal barriers against women entering the workforce in many states. There were still entailments on women’s right to hold real property in a few places in the south and southwest. A residuum of racism encumbered the black population’s efforts to raise its condition — though in fairness it must be remembered that a popular movement largely composed of white people was already afoot, and just fourteen years later it swept all race-based legal restrictions into the dustbin of history. Government had swollen due to the unconstitutional New Deal and America’s involvement in two foreign wars, and those who liked the result were working to swell it still further.

     Still, in 1950, America was a place of nearly overpowering civility. In 2000…?

     How did we lose it?

     Don’t just read it and lament. Think about it. For the love of God, think about it!

     I could go on for another fifty thousand words, and on occasion I do. But I think the setting has been sufficiently well painted in. If you’re asking “What do we do about it?” you’re good-heartedly asking the wrong question.

     You cannot reverse it. You cannot even halt it. It’s not possible to save what has been so thoroughly ruined. But you can escape it.

     Ann again:

     Folks, you better have a plan. And your plan needs to account for the ability of the society you live in to maintain the ability to have such luxuries as running cold potable water, flush toilets, electrification, commodity production and transport, antibiotic production and delivery, and anesthetized surgery by a skilled surgeon… just to name a few items. And, of course, the Sacraments of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

     […]

     GET OUTTA DODGE, Y’ALL. Step 1: Get your children and grandchildren OUT OUT OUT of the public and infiltrated private schools.

     As for Step 2 et sequelae, I shall refer you to my esteemed, invaluable colleague David de Gerolamo. I beseech you to read as much of his oeuvre, and that of his Co-Contributors, as you possibly can. His compass reads true north.

     Have a nice day.