Culture Wars

Where is the United States culture being driven these days? This is a great question considering the current importation of immigrants with cultures that seem to conflict with U.S. norms.

United States culture is centered on core values like individualism, equality, and freedom that are enumerated in our Constitution and expressed through norms of a strong work ethic, informality, direct communication, and appreciation for innovation, alongside popular elements like sports, diverse cuisine, and a powerful entertainment industry. However, safety is one value that is becoming increasingly overlooked.

Safety is widely considered a fundamental personal and organizational value that guides behavior and decision-making. The feeling of safety in the home, workplace and during travel should never be compromised, however we all must practice awareness of our surroundings because the human race is quite imperfect. Governments implement a system of rules and enforcement tools to deal with individuals who impede the safety of greater society. A culture of peace and prosperity is hindered when governments fail to use common sense when implementing the safety system.

There is currently a war being waged in our country between the safety of the law abiding citizen and the aloof civil officials. We never saw this war coming because it simply wouldn’t occur to the average law abiding citizen that their government would not protect them. Of course government cannot be present for every safety concern which is why our constitution explicitly states that we have a right to self defense. However it appears that many local jurisdictions are testing the average law abiding citizen by allowing repeat criminals to roam freely and in many instances these criminals avoid showing up to their court appearances thereby causing a warrant for their arrest. Breaking another law! Common sense be dammed.

But it gets worse…many civil officials actually believe that criminals should be shown more compassion than their victims. This is morally backwards because justice will not work under this condition. To have true justice the alleged perpetrator must be adjudicated within an established system that recognizes victims rights. A different standard of constitutional rights applies to non citizens depending on their status. This is why a non citizen must be especially aware of and responsible for their own status. Overstaying a visa, not showing up for an asylum hearing, evading border control, using a stolen or made up social security number to obtain work or benefits, and working under the table are all examples of criminal activity under federal law and examples of unfair practices towards citizens. Civil officials who condone the breaking of laws or who incite unrest among people are causing a reflexive unrest among other people. This “war” causes divisiveness within our culture.

We don’t have two different cultures, we have one culture with two sides that understand rights and responsibilities differently. The resulting chaos is a Marxist ploy for revolution whether we understand it or not.

Retiring Woke

How about that! The majority of voters want some common sense brought back to our federal government. This common sense has nothing to do with sexism, racism, homophobia or whatever other “ism” one can “imagine” that covers the whole woke spectrum.

People are tired of the nastiness being played amongst us. So much has been done by the political establishment to create a country of “us vs them” and it didn’t work. It will never work because we actually love each other as a beautiful and complicated family of Americans.

This bride will go on the create another loving American family.

As I retire from a career that has been both a blessing and a curse to manage through the good times and bad, I see that ultimately my experience was a joy because the people who needed my services relied on my expertise and they appreciated it. My work had value. Their dreams of looking their absolute best for the “big day” were fulfilled. Each individual I helped had their own story. I played a part, but yet their story remained their own.

As a country moving on to a new administration, let us all retire the nastiness of the past. No matter how much each of us played in the electoral drama, we must remember our American story remains the same…To pursue life, liberty and happiness as individuals and not as groups. An administration doesn’t give these things, our Creator does. Your God given ambition makes it possible. What career of value can you create that others will appreciate?

Shrewd on The Grim Reaper

It’s definitely general election season! The political hate mongering is here, and thanks to social media it can spread like a wildfire.

The baseline for the hate is the same as ever…One “side” must lose. Unfortunately the narrative of hate from the left “side” has created a must die situation. How on earth did we get here?

Is it only the left side? Certainly not. Let’s get real about the situation. The right has just as much complicity.

The old expression ‘You reap what you sow’ comes to mind. Our web connected devices have become portals to soulless content created by careless individuals who spread the seeds of accusations and gossip to reap clicks and shares. The Shrew finds it interesting that so many people are entertained by these weeds that become entangled in our culture. Aren’t we smarter than this? Apparently not. So many people have allowed the weeds of destruction to grow.

How grim are the times that we are living in today? Is it reversible? The optimist in me believes that yes, we can scythe out the hatred. All it takes is transparency and an enlightened mindset. What is truly interesting to me is how an individual can take information without having direct experience of a given situation to arrive at an assumption and then call it a fact. This activity is neither transparent nor enlightening. Instead, it is pure ignorance.

Our new culture of ignorance is what we must lose. This is not a political “left” side or “right” side issue. It is a human issue. Civility in our society can only be restored when we all recognize the problem. Only then will we reap real sustenance.

Information Age Morality

We are about seventy-five years into the sociocultural evolution of the Information Age. So, how are we humans doing culturally and emotionally at this point in time? Pretty poor I would say…Poor in mind, body and spirit.

This standard of “poor” needs some serious discussion. Innovations of digital technology have progressed the most rapidly during this period. How unfortunate that illiteracy has also progressed. Whether due to laziness or miseducation, we must admit that our reliance on the information we receive or transmit through these technologies has diminished our capacity to understand each other with deep humility and honest compassion.

My engineering degree mostly strengthened my technical writing ability. I hated my reading and writing assignments in high school because the topics were not very interesting to me. Who needs Shakespeare and Tolstoy when regarding the bigger picture of life? Turns out that all of us need this rigorous education. I am so glad for the exposure to these pre Information Age literary guides.

Now that I am much older, I read and listen to the classics with enjoyment and appreciation. While reading and listening to newly produced information I tend to assess the content against the information standards of decades ago. I find that many of our modern cultural expressions in news, literature, motion pictures and lyrics are devoid of our natural human capacity toward Godly standards of metaphysical growth. Can this observation be applied to our current crisis in mental illness? Absolutely! Examples can be found in many current narratives.

For example; the next time you read or listen to a news story please look for the following criteria:

1) The headline matches the story’s content.

2) The content covers the who, what, when, where and why effectively.

3) The author addresses any missing information and commits to providing it in a future story.

4) The author uses caution to prevent misjudgment on behalf of the reader.

5) The author does not judge the people in or the content of the story unless they are editorializing.

6) The author points out that any anonymous source has actual first hand knowledge specific to this one event.

You can add a several more days to that headline lol

If what you read or hear does not follow the above noted norms, then the author is probably creating a biased narrative. There is nothing wrong with biased narratives, however the author must be up front about the content actually being an opinion piece rather than actual news.

It is immoral to present fantasy as fact. This narration of information has been happening far too often in our current culture…Media and literary pundits must pick a lane and confess their implicit bias practices before we all become ignorant slaves to the content that they generate. Otherwise we will quite literally lose our minds. Perhaps that is the goal?

The Fetish With Pronouns

Do you remember Mad Libs? I used to love these one page “stories” in which you fill in the blanks and the story would become sillier with the more interesting noun, pronoun or adjective you would think of…This is how I imagine our world today 🙂

The thing is, back when I was in grade school and Mad Libs were popular, my education was on par with filling out those blanks. For instance, a sentence was a sentence. It had a beginning, middle and end with punctuation and most of all meaning. These days I’m finding that most anyone graduating past the year 2000 or so is forgetting about this grammatically correct way of communicating. I’m not suggesting that my writing skills are perfect, however I’m seeing that the real world is behaving more like a “Mad Lib” every day.

For instance, let’s consider pronouns. A pronoun (I, me, he, she, herself, you, it, that, they, each, few, many, who, whoever, whose, someone, everybody, etc.) is a word that takes the place of a noun, typically replacing one’s name or a thing as referenced in a sentence. The pronoun sometimes is “gendered” which simply means that it identifies with the name of the individual. This last point is important! Why? Because “gender” is grounded in language. Gender is real and necessary. “Language activists” believe that a pronoun is a descriptor which an individual wishes to be referred to in order to indicate their gender identity. No! Gender identity is a personal construct of the imagination. Believing that someone can wish their pronoun into being is a fetish of narcissistic magnitude and goes against language norms. Either an individual has a proper name or they don’t…The pronoun identifies the name.

“Hello. My name is __________ (fill in the blank). I am happy to meet you! We should get together sometime soon to get to know each other better.“

“I just met a new friend named _________ (fill in the blank). He/She (Correct pronoun needed here depending upon the name) is a very kind person.“

The two sentences above are grammatically correct depending upon the inserted name and corresponding pronoun. My name is Bette and it is a female name and therefore uses a female pronoun which would be “She” in the second sentence. If I am emailing someone I have never met before who is named Pat, Chris or Jamie then I might have a problem, but I don’t need their pronoun in order to converse with them directly. I would hope by the time we get to know each other that the he/she or him/her aspect would be known. If Pat, Chris or Jamie have the least bit of self awareness then they would grant me the respect of learning who they are by not getting upset over a pronoun. An email that closes with “Sincerely, Pat he/him” is fine, but only because Pat realizes that he is a man and might be mistaken for a she/her….But this is typically insignificant because people should always be granted the benefit of doubt! I can’t tell you how many times people get my name wrong, even those who have known me for years type Betty. I could never judge them harshly for this oversight because I understand that my name is different. This is the Christian way to behave. Otherwise your behavior is judgmental, egotistical and borders on tyrannical.

Now there are newly created pronouns attempting to be used in the English Language. Here are the examples: xe/xem/xyr, ze/hir/hirs, and ey/em/eir. What are these? Fetishes of a clown world of course. Go ahead and use one as your legal name, but don’t mess with the fundamentals of our English language.*

*My opinion on this subject is my right to express according to the Constitution which governs our country.

The Shrew View: New Year, New Perspective

2023 is a year to lean back. All through 2022 I heard the term from main stream media (MSM) and progressive leaders to “lean in”.

What does it mean to lean into something?

From Wiktionary…To embrace; to experience fully or respond to wholeheartedly. quotations ▼ To take on or embrace something difficult or unpleasant, usually through determination or perseverance; to find a way to benefit from, or alleviate the harm of, risk, uncertainty and difficult situations. quotations ▼

As you can see, the term is meant to encourage a person to use their energy, skills and knowledge to turn a bad situation to better. But today’s MSM and progressives abuse the term by politicizing it. For example; they use politics (aka “equity “) to encourage social/cultural change because the “old way” of doing things to “alleviate harm of risk and difficulty” they believe only benefits the already “privileged”. Leaning in allows a progressive mindset to disrupt the old way and force a new way that changes familiar systems to better benefit “marginalized groups”. Trouble comes however when this change enforces “re-education” tactics that are tyrannical in practice. Leaning in removes questioning and debate both of which are cornerstone principles of a free society/culture.

Leaning back preserves questioning and debate. Conservatives know this to be true which is why our Constitution is full of checks and balances to limit the possibility of tyranny. Liberals used to believe these same principles as the foundation of States rights, but their quest for power has blindsided them. By relying on the progressive agenda for Democrat political power, liberals have lost sight of their own strength of being part of the power balance which is shared by individuals of different beliefs and backgrounds.

Conservatives in the 118th House of Representatives got it right! They leaned back on formerly accepted methods of congressional rules to force the Speaker into being more mindful of The People’s Business. No longer can this one person in a position of power force an action through Congress without proper time allowances and debate. “But,” you say, “the process will slow down work for The People!” Of course it will! Not all bills, laws or use of taxpayer funds are deemed appropriate by every elected representative. Each representative has a perspective and a voice which is guided by their constituents, not by the elite swamp of Washington D.C. or the political party in the majority. This is true for State legislators too.

As a former city councilor I was privileged to see this perspective, and in all honesty I can tell you that help for the individual in a community begins with this relationship especially if a person has not been able to build a strong family or faith community foundation. The Federal Government will never have your best interests at heart because it is much too big a swamp of ulterior motives to see your specific needs and all too often mismanages the bureaucracy. For example; when my city had a serious problem with many homes, streets and shoreline destroyed and lost due to shore erosion that the Federal Government admitted to starting by building a poorly implemented Army Corps of Engineers project, it took decades for our representatives in D.C. to have our voice heard. Wouldn’t you know that funding wasn’t in the huge infrastructure bill, better known as the climate change bill (of which this project would have certainly qualified)…Our swamp Republican Senate representative was later swayed to vote for the huge omnibus spending bill in December because the swamp elites who put the bill together added our erosion project funding to it! We shall see if the project ever really starts. How many other projects were funded in this way? Meanwhile some of our citizens struggle with inflation because of these poorly designed spending bills. Who wins? Think about it…

So lean back this 2023. All we need is right there for us if we would only question and debate the merits of a bill, policy or anything for that matter. Risk, uncertainty and difficult situations are learning opportunities that should lead to growth and mentorship, not ignorance and dependency.

The New Abolitionist

Identifying with a group or a cause can be a fulfilling experience in some ways. You understand that you are not alone with your thoughts and your emotions. Identifying with other people about an issue can even motivate you to act…These emotionally motivated activists are plentiful in our current politicized culture.

When emotions outweigh rational thinking you can be sure that disaster will follow. The social emotional learning (SEL) tools that are being introduced at K through 12 schools are experimental and require that teachers take on a psychologist persona. SEL helps a child identify into a system of compliance that favors groups over individuals.

From kappanonline.org: “Although SEL has been conceptualized in various ways, it can broadly be understood as the processes through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to manage their emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions (Weissberg & Cascarino, 2013). More specifically, Roger Weissberg and colleagues (2015) have identified a set of five core clusters of social and emotional competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.”

Sounds nice doesn’t it? However we must understand what their term “broadly” actually means. In the case of SEL I believe the term applies to a broad form of behavior compliance…Individualism is sacrificed for the collective. This spells disaster for our Constitutional Republic. Universities are creating activist teachers who in turn use SEL to reinforce measures of control on vulnerable students.

Many school teachers have given up on their traditional core clusters of reading, writing, math, history and the scientific method. During the pandemic the latest NAEP test results (2019 through 2021) show disappointing drops in academic performance for 4th and 8th grades across the nation. This is not just because of a pandemic! Teachers were failing their students even before then…No Child Left Behind became Common Core which then became Critical Race Theory. SEL is simply the tool now devised to grow student activists who will champion for a government collective. The World Economic forum makes this clear: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/what-is-collective-governance/

The ideology of collectivism is slavery. This was wrong in Roman times and it was wrong before the Emancipation.

If you use discrimination in an effort to remove discrimination you achieve nothing meaningful. The new abolitionist is one who maintains a firm action of inclusivity based on the character and merit of the individual. Absolutely no group of people can be thought of as monolithic because the new abolitionist creates space for the individual to learn and thrive objectively rather than subjectively.

The new abolitionist has the emotional maturity to position differing opinions as opportunities for deeper understanding. Parents know this. Sadly the teachers unions have identified teachers as the activist group to develop a society of like minded collectivist slaves.

The new abolitionist is faithful to Godly principles and knows that humankind’s imperfections and ego can harm this faithfulness. Idolatry has no place in a heart that serves God.

Our children are too precious to condemn their lives to government control. Yet this is where we are headed. Enough is enough!

Shrew View: Oh Women, My Women

Women are more than a word and more importantly women must remain the word.

“Trans woman” Lia Thomas (pictured left) is NCAA “Woman” of the Year.

Just as culturally ethnic people have norms and experiences attributed to them, biological women own their norms and experiences. It is illogical to me that radical leftists scream racism and cultural appropriation relating to people of color while also trying to pawn off the idea that a biological man can claim to be a woman. What these leftists want the mainstream populace to believe is that two genders (male as man and female as woman) is an idea constructed solely to make humans conform to one or the other. Poppycock!

Anatomy and hormones are hard facts for determining gender. Sure, we can and should acknowledge that there are birth anomalies that can blur this distinction, but these are not the norm and parents along with their pediatrician choose the best path forward for these beautiful individuals. Any other “gender” description beyond man or woman is based on personality, is an appropriation of gender and harms societal norms.

Women are suffering the most during this absurd time of gender appropriation. Through the decades women fought hard for their autonomy and equal rights. Sisterhood, motherhood and menopause are distinctly anatomical and hormonal in their development. Men can never experience these physical and emotional demands no matter how they change their hormones or anatomy. And sexuality is not the same as gender…sexuality is about who or what you fuck! So, when you are asked what your sex is this too is gender based as male or female, one or the other. God gave us genitalia to procreate our species…we can’t fake this no matter how you get your sexual thrills!

We women must remain strong in word and deed. We cannot allow our righteous power to be usurped by personalities that demand our privileges. Men cannot be women. “Trans-women” are not women but rather men with very feminine tendencies, and this is fine as long as actions are clearly modeled as such. The world is a far more interesting place when individuals believe they are blessed by God given physical and metaphysical attributes, these cannot be taken away except if a government steps in to create laws denying them. However, when individuals appropriate new supposed “genders” government then must step in to define them and the laws to grant special “rights”.

New gender definitions beyond women and men are stepping stones to Artificial Intelligence “rights”. We must be careful what our culture and our government begin to normalize. Extinction of the human race could be legalized if we aren’t careful. Think about it.

Is Less Really More?

Empty store shelves, back-ordered web purchases, higher food costs, increasing energy prices, slower services, and hours cut back at your favorite restaurant or coffee shop…How are you adjusting?

I remember several household habits from my childhood quite distinctly:

– Keeping lights off in a room that you were not using;

– Dad cleaning the dishes by hand;

– Mom giving the hair cuts;

– One bathroom for a household of seven people being do-able;

– Cans of vegetables being stored and rotated in the basement;

– Re-using or re-purposing plastic food containers, brown paper grocery bags, wrapping paper, news paper, milk jugs, etc…

I also remember as a family we would go out to eat on rare occasions, get along with one car just fine, and communicate with one home phone. I am a child of parents who grew up during the depression. The 1970’s weren’t the 1930’s, yet hard times did make their appearance none the less. Learning how to adapt to hard times is a skill not easily acquired if you have never been exposed to hard times. Our current inflation is a good reminder that hard times can make an appearance no matter what the circumstances.

Sometimes habits or behaviors from one generation transfer to the next…Obviously all the above household habits are healthy habits and I have used the experiences at times in my own adulthood. Reduce, reuse, recycle therefor comes naturally to me as does planning for one trip to grocery shop for the week and minimizing the stuff I WANT to have as opposed to the stuff that I NEED to have. But I really don’t think that my example has been adopted by my children all that well. My children have not been spoiled, but I think the consumer-driven era that they have grown up with can really spoil the generations of its time.

It’s a Woolworth vs an Amazon mentality. Either you can walk about a mile or so to get your basics or you can sit and have many different boxes and bags delivered on your doorstep. It’s a Main Street vs a Corporate Monstrosity mentality. Either you want to be in person with your community or you want a socially distant social media pseudo relationship. When people need a web device to direct their day to day experiences, then I suppose there may be less aggravation and more time for other experiences. But when people must use a more “hands on” and in-person approach to daily life, then one might find that less consumerism is actually required perhaps because the physical sensations are more satisfying. Sure, there may be more frustrations when you can’t find exactly what you want, but that can happen at Woolworth or Amazon. Some of us are just that picky lol! The ability to curb frustration is a cornerstone of healthy character building.

I believe that the Covid19 pandemic has really shed some light on this topic. Locking people down in their homes has driven the web-based consumer appetite to higher levels. This is obvious given the billions of dollars that the owners of these platforms have amassed. Lock-downs have also reinforced the notion that physically distancing from others is a medical necessity to minimize the spread of germs, but is there more to maintaining a healthy immune system? Of course there is! The average physically fit person on zero medications is a virus’s worst nightmare. Being around people when you are a healthy, fit individual builds immunity for the whole environment…Immunologists have known this for decades if not centuries.

A society that emulates a place of scarcity is similar to putting healthy, fit individuals in hiding from a virus…Wealth (similar to immunity) is not allowed to spread. In fact, hoarding can happen. But when a society embraces abundance, it builds wealth (i.e. immunity) for everyone in the environment and is almost “contagious”, but in a good way…Wealth and giving among and between individuals spreads! An individual in the USA always has the choice in an abundant environment to cut back on their consumption either to save money for the things that they wish to redirect the money for or to maintain a perspective of “reduce, reuse, recycle” (less can become more). However an individual living in an environment of scarcity will never be able to improve the quality of their consumption (less is always less). We should never allow the elitists in government to control our marketplace by imposing their will on our choices and our freedom of movement.

I want my children to live in a country where there is limitless abundance and opportunity for all individuals. A country that uses the framework of God’s Laws to help guide their choices and the Rule of Law to help hold them responsible. LESS control imposed by government IS MORE freedom for we the people!

Critical Race Nonsense

CRT is a disingenuous practice of brainwashing through story telling and sensationalism while manipulating data, leaving out competing narratives, and linking loosely related material.

The Shrew

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