Book Review: Dachau Review (Volumes 1 and 2)

Apologies to those who think a dictatorship, pushed to cut population along the lines of hate it had been using for other purposes, is too real for Halloween. This Halloween, I think it's real enough that it should distract us from the cute little ghost and witch costumes. Not only do we have a party that overtly wants Socialism; that party has formed an alliance with a group who hate Jews. If ghosts can haunt, a lot of grandfathers are coming out after their grandchildren this Halloween.

Title: Dachau Review

Editor: Wolfgang Benz

Publisher: Comite Internal de Dachau, Brussels

Date: 1988

Length: 240 pages (v. 1), 206 pages (v. 2)

ISBN: 0854962697

Quote: "The Dachau Review is the first volume of a new periodical which contains in unabridged form in English the most important contributions of the previous three issues of the Dachauer Hefte."

These two cheaply produced, poorly bound paperbacks aren't fun to read. They weren't meant to be. They're a serious, scholarly collection of survivors' accounts and historians' studies of the German prison camps during the 1930s and early 1940s. Their purpose is to document the atrocities that really happened, and dispel the myths.

Although there's no reasonable doubt that the prison camps were the scenes of atrocities, one thing these reports confirm is the huge amount of concealment and deception that went on, the impossibility of knowing for sure whether some stories were true or false. Prisoners lied, for obvious reasons. Prison managers also lied, for reasons that may be less obvious. Bribery often worked, and the value of a bribe was completely unpredictable: a gold tooth might buy a prisoner a cup of dirty water, or a plausible English passport. Threats were used as discipline. Rumors abounded.

So, were prisoners' bodies used to manufacture household goods? After reviewing the evidence Benz, Barbara Distel, and others can't really say that that never happened; all they can say is that no such goods were found.

Were masses of prisoners gassed in shower rooms? In some other places--first in nursing homes for elderly and disabled "Aryans"--that happened. "In Dachau no gas chambers were used," our researchers report. In Dachau prisoners could be shot for any breach of discipline, for becoming unable to work, or just to intimidate other prisoners, but rumors about gas chambers seem to have been based solely on the existence of crematoria, which no living prisoner had actually entered. Poison gas cost money; both gas and money were in short supply. Guards and overseers could be vicious--there was no penalty for beating a prisoner to death. Still, starvation and infectious diseases killed far more prisoners than were either euthanized due to illness, executed according to what passed for due process of law, or murdered outright.

Were the majority of those imprisoned, or of those killed in the camps, Jewish? Not at Dachau.

Were individual guards kind enough to help individual prisoners escape? Sometimes, but not often or predictably. One informant describes having to thank for saving his brother's life the same guard he blamed for killing his mother.

In the end, how many people--Jewish or otherwise--did the Nazis kill? No true answer will ever be known. The number is certainly in the millions, but too much lying and destruction of evidence went on for any estimates to be accepted as facts. These books contain some eyewitness accounts of faked deaths that may or may not have allowed prisoners to escape.

Certainly faked deaths did allow several of the presumed dead to survive. In a family I know two teenaged boys, first cousins who had been friends, disappeared at about the same time. During the year each young man mourned the other's death, they were living within a mile of each other in London. Both enjoyed long and successful lives, and were able to recognize each other and share memories when one of those fifty-years-later TV programs featured one of the cousins.

Holocaust deniers have even cited the case of an entire town whose Jewish population, apparently decimated during the Holocaust, surged back almost to prewar levels between 1945 and 1946. And not many houses or businesses had been sold, either during or after the war, either. Apparently there was just a benign conspiracy to accept, for the duration of the war, that a few thousand individuals had never been Jewish--whom did people think they were talking about?--until it was safe for these people to identify themselves as Jewish again.

Unfortunately it wasn't always so easy, and while the species of contrarians known as Holocaust deniers were able to disprove some claims without much difficulty, the Nazi Holocaust was just too big to fake.

Meanwhile, people who view the Holocaust from a different historical perspective have exaggerated the sadism of the Third Reich and overlooked the profit motive. Dachau was built not to torture or kill men, but to profit from their labor as the (alleged) criminals "paid their debt to society." As long as it was profitable to keep prisoners healthy, most were well enough fed and sheltered, even medicated where possible, to keep them alive (as slaves) for years. That's why there were so many survivors. 

But why, now that most of the survivors have written out their memories and died of old age, do we need to go on reading about it? Certainly not for pleasure; and I for one don't think there's any comfort to be gained from comparing our own immediate misery with someone else's theoretically greater misery. If you're feeling sad because you didn't win the competition or the person you've had a crush on has asked someone else for a date, reading about how the victorious U.S. troops found one group of seventeen almost-survivors who were too sick and starved to digest food when they were fed may help you put your angst into perspective, but it's unlikely to make you feel good. (If it does, I don't want to know you.)

I don't get any particular jollies from thinking about "the triumph of the human spirit" in the survivors, either. My brother, adoptive sister, and I inherited the non-depressive gene along with the brown eyes and crooked teeth genes. My natural sister got the alternative genes. That humans can agree that some genetic traits are more pleasant to be around than others doesn't say anything particularly uplifting about the human spirit, to me.

Some survivors learned moral lessons in the prison camps, although that's not what you'll find in the Dachau Review. In one of Bob Schuller's books, reviewed here last week, a survivor shared the edifying story of how his camp usually offered two kinds of food to prisoners: bread, and soup. The bread was cold, coarse, and unflavored, and tasted vile, but did contain some fibre and nutrients from whole grains. The soup absorbed some flavor, but was usually just a cup of hot water with very little nutrient value. Some prisoners would trade their bread for other prisoners' soup rations...and at the end of the war, all the survivors turned out to be bread eaters; the soup sippers starved. Preachers have already publicized that kind of stories. The Dachau Review didn't need them, or use them.

So, what made this well-fed, non-Jewish American pay hard-earned cash for these books? Supporting the library that allows me to maintain this web site was one reason, but why choose the Dachau Review over the "westerns" and romances that had also been donated to the library's benefit sale? Obviously, I thought these books deserved resale; I do think this piece of history has some relevance to our time.

It's best stated, though oddly reversed, by Ralph Giordano in volume two: "I warn you young people of today: don't let anyone tell you that this undemocratically and un-humanly motivated anti-communism ever was, is or will be anything other than the belligerent brother of its own professed diametrical opponent."

Germany, a smaller country already impoverished by losing another idiot dictator's useless war, collapsed faster under National Socialism than Russia did under Soviet Socialism. In both countries, and in most other countries that have experimented with socialism, the socialist government collapsed and the result was chaos, wars, plagues, and mass deaths. A few countries that flirted with socialism, like Britain and China, have survived by learning from examples and giving up unsustainable socialist schemes. Either of those things could happen here.

German Jews, Lutherans, and "Communist" atheists had not exactly liked each other, but had coexisted peacefully, in times of prosperity. Religion became a cause of hate and war when the people felt poverty-stricken and desperate. Hitler whipped up hate of both minorities in order to unite the majority for his own self-aggrandizing purposes, while telling people he trusted how much he preferred the war and death cults of Pagan Germany to the Protestant churches he had to exploit. (What has survived of Germanic Pagan mythology was complex; there were "gods" and cults of love and peace, as well as war and death; Hitler had no use for the nice ones.) These United States have prospered as a nominally Christian, in practice predominantly Humanist, nation where all religions are tolerated...until what are still a minority of Americans have started to feel poverty-stricken, and although I doubt that most of these people know anything about poverty, immediately mistrust of all religions but one's own (including the pseudo-religion of atheism) sets in. Religious hate could happen here. Even the explosion of religious hate into mass violent insanity could happen here.

Hitler really owed his success, though, less to hate than to his Biggest Lie of All--the seductive lie that Germans could recover prosperity, rather than sinking into real plague-and-famine poverty, by giving their leaders total power over every aspect of life. The United Nations, once the trusted mediator between Europeans like Stalin and Hitler, has succumbed to this fantasy with its "Agenda 21" bid for total control over every aspect of life in every member nation. To the extent that the ostensibly civilized nations of the world cooperate with Agenda 21 or any of its successor schemes, the totalitarian government and the poverty it produces could very easily happen here...in the U.S., in the U.K., in any part of Europe or of any other continent, or, if the lunatics in the U.N. get their way, in all of them.

Probably everyone has, and should have, our own way of saying "Never Again." For me, as an American Christian, "Never Again" tends to blur into an older slogan: "Love all (never buy into collective hate as any kind of solution to anything), trust few (never entrust anyone with more power than is necessary to prevent violent crime), and always paddle your own canoe (make your own decisions based on what you observe where you are, which really is something about which you would know more than anyone else could)."

The Dachau Review is a good clear explanation of the alternative.

Watching Fox

While waiting for my own computer to be reconnected I spent an hour or so watching Fox News, and this is what I learned...

1. Lindsey, or however she spells it, Clancy murdered her three children because, after using "psychiatric medications," she heard voices telling her she had no choice but to kill her children and herself. Everyone knows she did it. She admits she did it. The only question is whether a jury will send her to prison or to a hospital for life. In her place I think I'd prefer the prison, but in any case living with her family, dating, having more children, doing a job or going to church, are options she's written out of her life. Why do news readers need to spend time dwelling on this tragedy? Why aren't they moving forward, letting this wretched woman be forgotten so her relatives can get on with their lives? And where is the discussion of which drugs did that to her brain and which pharmaceutical company her family should be able to sue?

2. A gang of young people raided and apparently just about destroyed a liquor store while some of the gang were driving recklessly outside the store to distract attention. Some people think this may be a consequence of their growing up in a "lower trust society" where they weren't free to roam the streets after school or sleep over at friends' houses. Bah humbug. For what it's worth, I didn't have a friend at whose house my parents would let me sleep over--because "That would mean reciprocity," Mother later explained when admitting that actually one school friend's mother had asked. My brother didn't have such a friend, either. My sister had such a friend, but only one. My parents didn't want to take responsibility for teaching crash courses in radical Green lifestyle alternatives to everyone in our classes. Only a child from a fairly radical Green family could even visit us for an hour after school. And y'know something? That has never caused either of us to want to trash a liquor store. I have been seen in a liquor store--only in Maryland, only because in Maryland a liquor store is where you cash checks if you don't have a bank account. I didn't like the place or its proprietors, but I never felt hate-crazed enough to want to go back and trash the store. Iirc I just wanted to get back to work and earn some more money. I don't know why those kids wanted to trash that store but I know it's not because they didn't have sleepover friends in middle school.

3. And the Democratic Party's strategy is to look for younger, cuter candidates, so that's what the Rs need to be doing, too...The news readers mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and didn't even mention that Anna Paulina Luna is more than a match for her. ("I would've thought you would've wanted to watch those two debating the Farm Bill on C-SPAN," I said to a girl-watching male acquaintance earlier in the year. "AOC and APL were on the same side for once! All of that long black hair flying in all directions!" Actually both of them do pretty well at keeping their hair under control on the job.)  I've often mentioned that Ilhan Omar does a lot for a hijab, too. But Mamdani and that other Islamofascist creep? Cringe. Those faces don't even look sanitary.

I have been known to mention Gate City's own Terry Kilgore as an example of a young, good-looking Republican. We share the baby-face gene. Since reaching age 60 he's finally started to look old enough to be conspicuous in a college freshman class. In any case the salient point may be less "who looks good in a T-shirt" than "who actually is young enough for millennials to relate to," and those are two different concepts. I think there may be more baby-boomers than millennials who look good in T-shirts and tight jeans.Though Anna Paulina Luna probably does, Charlie Kirk certainly did, and Candace Owens, Erika Kirk, and Laura Loomer could be a poster trio of young cute conservatives if they'd stop catfighting.

Herewith, as a favor to Fox, a Top Ten List of Non-Left Public Figures Who Look Fit and Healthy and, at Least to Those Who Love Them, Undoubtedly "Hot": (All photos and video links from Google.)

1. RFK--in his way. He's not young but he is fit. The pale grey eyes and deep tan are an unusual, I might even say startling, some would say alarming, combination. My father had that combination so I'm used to looking at it. Some people were scared of him and some seem to be scared of the Secretary too, not even because either man has even started shredding their preconceived notions about anything, but on a more primal level of Are you SURE you're not a ghost? Pooh. Anyway, whether you're attracted to the legendary Kennedy charm or scared by the pale eyes, Secretary Kennedy works out regularly and could be a model for T-shirts. Or exercise videos. He has actually published a topless exercise video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deolshNz3lE (Warning: topless 70-year-old man looking buff.)

2. Anna Paulina Luna, the young woman I might once have wanted to look like.

3. J.D. Vance...yes, I see our Vice-President as young. His wife is a Beauty and on his good days he doesn't look out of place beside her. Actually a lot of people in the current presidential administration look as if their credentials included looking young and cute relative to the current President, and the only reason why Fox didn't pick up on that is that the current President's idea of "young" seems to be "well preserved at 60 or 70 years old."As distinct from being 80 years old like him.

 
4. Young (Oak) Kim. There are probably a thousand people whose real name is Young Kim. Two of them are competitve golf champions. There's even another well-known person whose name is Young Oak Kim. Anyway, the US Representative from Orange County, California, is probably the most distinguished person using that name. She's about my age actually, but she looks as if she might literally be young.

(It should probably be mentioned that Pennsylvania has a young politician whose real name happened to be Neil Young. He wasn't much to look at but his photo definitely shows that he's not a close relative of the rock star by that name. He lost the election, probably because the rock star had annoyed  a lot of people. Rock star Neil Young looks Metis but says all his known ancestors were White. Pennsylvania's Neil Young looks White.)

5. Maria Elvira Salazar. She's not really young either, but you'd never know it from her photos. 

https://www.nbcmiami.com/video/multimedia/watch-incumbent-maria-elvira-salazar-gives-victory-speech-after-winning-district-27-primary/3847914/

6. Madison Cawthorn. When elected he was the youngest Congressman we'd ever had. He's still close, and as a paraplegic he looks like absolute "inspiration porn."  

7. Brandon Gill. He is currently the youngest man in Congress. 

8. Stacey Dash. She's not very young.  (When De, the character, was fifteen, Dash, the actress, was twenty-eight. This helped to set the rule for all the TV and novel sequels that De was the smartest, most mature of the teen fashion victims in Cher's social clique.) She was not elected to Congress, either, which may not be surprising given that she's best known for playing a "Clueless" teenybopper and modelling dresses that push the limits of legal "decency," but she is movie-star pretty.

9. CJ (Coreco Jaquan) Pearson.

10. Amanda Batten, formerly on the staff of Delegate Brenda Pogge, now campaigning for Pogge's former position. 

Book Report: The Great Destroyer

Title: The Great Destroyer

Author: David Limbaugh

Author's web page: http://davidlimbaugh.com/

Publisher: Regnery

Date: 2012

ISBN: 1596987774

Length: over 500 pages with over 100 pages of endnotes

This review was written from a library copy of the book. The quote I would have selected, by way of recommendation for The Great Destroyer as a new book, was the introductory promise that this book can become "your one-stop shop" for facts, figures, and quotes if you get into a debate about Presidential Election 2012.

If you'd been keeping up with election news, most of the stories were familiar. You could skip enough to scan the whole book, and remember what you were likely to want to look up in it, in a week or less. You could decide, after scanning it, that a library copy was enough. Now, of course, the book is an historical artefact for your collection.

Limbaugh doesn't pretend to be impartial. President Obama was the "great destroyer." Limbaugh, a Republican (of course), picked the deadliest quotes, including Joe Biden's faint praise for China's abortion-pushing policy. He also offers a stunning array of statistics about how Obama's bailouts, stimuli, and proposed Obamacare disaster have affected our national economy.

The Great Destroyer contains about four times as many facts as The Amateur, and although it's less insightful, it's more comprehensive than Never Allow a Crisis to Go to Waste. If you could read only one campaign book, this was the basic book that would make up for inattention to the headline news.

Book Review: Deliver Us from Evil

Vintage book of the week...and is this one ever "vintage." Historical interest.

Title: Deliver Us from Evil

Author: Sean Hannity

Date: 2004

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-058251-0

Length: 326 pages plus index

Quote: “We cannot prevail tomorrow without courageous leadership today.”

This book makes the case for war. Since I believe war is generally a bad thing, and I know that complete and accurate information about the justification or lack of justification for any specific war is not going to be made available to civilians until the war is over, it’s not possible for me to like this book. It has historical value. It’s a well written summary of what we read in the papers. How true was what we read in the papers? Future historians may be able to judge.

I’ve read articles by Hannity, on other topics, that I liked. I’m not thrilled by the way he comes across in Deliver Us from Evil as a 24-karat fire-breathing hawk; I understand the competitive urge, the sense that we thrive on conflict, that whole Irish thing, but my feeling is that if tennis and politics aren’t a sufficient outlet for your competitive urge, either you’re not getting enough exercise or you’ve spent too much time in New York. Hannity presents himself here as a patriotic Irish-American writer who needs to nurture his talent with a nice long working vacation on an organic farm. 

Book Review: Going Rogue

Book Review: Going Rogue

Author: Sarah Palin

Date: 2009

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 978-0-06-193989-1

Length: 403 pages

Illustrations: photo sections

Quote: “The way forward is to stand and fight.”

Fair disclosure: I’m not a real fan of Sarah Palin’s. I do respect her calculated decision to hand her political opponents what I think ought to be the most discrediting thing about her: her position on the use and sale of natural resources.

I will now display my moral superiority to most people who call themselves liberals these days. I admit: I never dug up the facts to debate Palin’s position on the most controversial issue in her campaign. I find her position philosophically reprehensible, and feel emotionally that beating her in a fair debate ought to be doable, but without being paid to do it I didn't try it. But I think the greater shame goes to the Democrats for not even trying to fight Palin clean. If anything could make a “Green” non-Alaskan think that there might be some actual reason for chanting “Drill, baby, drill,” it would be this left-wing pusillanimity. I say forget about her lipstick (if I lived in Alaska I’d pile it on too, and I’m a woman who, living in Virginia, seldom manages to use up an Avon lipstick sample before it melts) and focus on defeating “Drill Baby” in a reasonable, a self-respecting way.

In Going Rogue, Palin reveals more of her strategy for deflecting cheap, mean attacks by making them on herself first,. She claims authorship of some of the cheapest of the shots taken at her, including “Sarahcuda” and “pit bull with lipstick.” She might have learned the trick from observing W Bush, who authorized, if he didn’t compose, some of the cheapest shots about his intelligence.

A large part of Going Rogue analyzes how party headquarters’ attempts to “market” Palin and McCain may have cost them votes. Along the way, Palin also corrects some of the rumors we’ve heard.

During the campaign, Palin was identified as a single mother. In the book, she replies with a wisecrack: “Have they seen Todd?” I turn to the photo section. I think it’s a good thing, actually, that women have never been able to reach a consensus about the relative attractiveness of other people’s husbands.

Going Rogue also gives people who don’t like Palin’s position, or any number of her positions, reasons to like her. Dana Bash is quoted as publicizing one of the best. “McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times...she labeled robo-calls—recorded messages often used to attack a candidate’s opponent—‘irritating’ even as the campaign defended their use.” I have to give “the campaign” points for remembering not to call me at home, not ever, unless you (a) are paying for my time, including phone time, or (b) have a “phone appointment,” or (c) are having a personal emergency and need my help. I wasn’t aware that Senator McCain had defended this nuisance; I wasn’t aware that any sane person could. But if the Democrats really couldn’t challenge Palin on facts, which is hard to believe, can’t they at least give us a campaign without “robo-calls”?

Other writers may find their bonding-with-Sarah moment on page 322: “The special needs coordinator also called...to say that we should no longer use the term ‘special needs people’ because special needs families find it offensive.” Maybe we need a special campaign to stamp out p.c. censorship.

The book also explains the names of the Palin children...admit it, you wanted to know. You wanted to read Going Rogue. That’s why it became a bestseller.

On the whole, book sales have probably been good for Palin; in the book she comes across as a likable person. Is this good for the country? Well...somebody should have beaten Obama in 2012, and it wouldn't have been Mitt Romney (who suggested the most un-American and loathsome features of Obamacare). Considering the way the mass media distorted Palin’s image (the “single mother” bit was, according to this book, an outright lie) I think it’s definitely good that people are reading her book. We may not want Drill Baby in the White House but we need a good solid proof of just how unreliable broadcast news stories can be. 

Book Review: Fire in the Whole

Title: Fire in the Whole

Author: Robert G. Callahan

Date: 2024

Publisher: Westminster John Knox

ISBN: 978 16469 84053

Quote: "I can call myself a survivor of racialized spiritual abuse."

So he can. So, in this book, he does. He does not convince me that he's survived whatever he endured long enough to have reached any really edifying insights. This web site's goal is to encourage living writers; I want to encourage this one to pursue some further lines of thought that might have given this book more lasting value than it gets from his engaging "writing voice."

Robert Callahan is an evangelical Christian who left his church, apparently, because he fell for the Very Fine People Hoax. A racist group attended a pro-Trump rally; Trump said there were very fine people at the rally; Democrats immediately began screaming, and Callahan apparently believed, that then-candidate Trump meant the racist group, specifically, as distinct from the other people who had organized the rally, which of course were the ones Trump obviously meant. 

Callahan had survived numerous race-related microtraumas before the Obama administration, which led Black Americans to expect that all race conflict was going to be over, and left them feeling disappointed as a new wave of race riots broke out. He claims that that was what started him turning against the church he had been attending, that the Very Fine People Hoax was the last straw. He also asks readers to believe that he thought people's shift from tweeting "#BlackLivesMatter" meant that they didn't think Black lives mattered all that much, really--as distinct from "Black Lives Matter" having been registered as the name of a specific group many of us didn't want to support. The publishing process is slow. This book was published in 2024 yet, apart from a few throwaway references to COVID, it reads as if it were written in September 2016.

He doesn't say whether people at his church tried patiently correcting his facts, which as he presents them are subject to a good deal of correction. He says he's embraced a reasonable, nonviolent, justified anger at the church he left. 

So be it, you might say. Many people have left many churches for good reasons and bad ones. I'd place Callahan in the category of people who've left for bad reasons, though he may have had better reasons that were too personal to be discussed in a book. What he tells us is basically that he left a right-wing church because his politics are left-wing. For hyped-up, specious reasons unsupported by facts. It is possible to be a left-winger for reasons based on legitimate facts, even if those facts are as specific to the individual as George Stephanopoulos' story (in All Too Human) that he replied to advertisements for jobs with both parties during the 1988 election, and joined the party that offered him a job. Callahan became obsessed with a claim that was made for rhetorical reasons and easily refuted. 

What he describes is a political, not a spiritual, journey. He makes the valid point that some Christians, the ones I like to call churchians, aren't characterized by outstanding love of their neighbor. However, his quest for any new fellowship was not guided by the Bible; in fact, he tells us, he stopped reading the Bible because it reminded him of the people who had emotionally abused him by voting for Trump. 

Or by being socially inept. So many Black Americans' real grievance against their White neighbors seems to be based in a fantasy that White Americans are or ought to be perfect. Callahan fixates on an incident where a White church lady didn't make conversation with him easily. She and he had taken their children to the local playground, greeted each other casually, then realized that they were acquainte from church. The woman's feet beat retreat in what, since she fled into a building where White men were standing, seemed to Callahan a racist way. Maybe it was; I don't know the woman. But Callahan doesn't prove that her thinking was closer to "That cannibal from Africa wants to eat my child" than it was to "That Democrat wants to pick a political argument" or "That trial lawyer is likely to make me sound stupid." 

What White people so often find ourselves defending to our Black friends is that most White people are not, in fact, haters; are, in fact, more likely to be socially awkward or inattentive, when they want all Americans to enjoy equal rights and opportunities but either don't know what an acquaintance expects or don't think the acquaintance's expectations are reasonable. Haters are rare. Socially awkward and/or inattentive White people are common. Small towns are full of White people who are afraid, not even always without some reason, to talk to their own White cousins in public because "S/He is so much 'smarter,' went so much further in school, I don't know what to say to him/her." I've observed this pattern of behavior among biracial Americans, and am credibly informed that it's been seen even among Black Americans.

Callahan is a good enough writer, with a snarky enough sense of humor and intriguing enough lists of references, to keep me reading along, hoping the book improves. Does he, for example, realize that although fair treatment for Black Americans is not a partisan political issue, the only steps toward it he seems to recognize are partisan political issues? Does he turn to his Bible and notice the odd mix of separatism and humanitarianism in its texts, and even, perhaps, organize group studies of the humanitarian messages that run throughout the Bible? Does he...? Long story short; he doesn't. He owns his righteous anger and grief at the kind of "White Christianity" that preferred to ignore the incidents cited as triggers for riots. That's as far as he gets. He's written this book from the position of being stuck in unpleasant emotions, not having any step toward emotional resolution or societal solutions in mind.

It would be possible for this to have been a really useful study of how evangelical Christianity can be Bible-based, true to its traditional doctrine, and also supportive of Black or other minority-American believers. Well...too bad. This is documentation of how a Black man who was old enough to know better let himself be emotionally manipulated by a callous political group and has spent eight years repeating campaign falsehoods. 

I'm disappointed. I was supposed to have received an advance review copy of this book in 2024. It probably arrived in a form Amazon had decided to stop supporting; I never received a readable review copy, but I received at least two things that might have been meant to be copies of this book. Other people gave the book favorable reviews; it's still on its publishers' lists. The publishers kindly sent me a copy now that the book's been published. But where are the insights into anything beyond party-line hype and hysteria, for which I've waited for two years? There aren't any. Robert Turner's Creating a Culture of Repair was rich with possibly good ideas, a book-length brainstorming about what people can do to demonstrate, accept, and cultivate good will. Robert Callahan's Fire in the Whole is devoid of ideas that don't boil down to a trendy but unhelpful "I just can't stand Republicans."

The story of how Callahan comes to understand that he's been politically exploited, turns back to the Bible, and commits to having a solid relationship with his own Black family as an emotional base for coping with the cluelessness of whatever White people he chooses to claim as friends, is the story he has to write that will be worth reading. Unfortunately he's not written that one yet.

He could profitably pursue the topic of separatism and unity in the Bible. Both Jews and Christians are told "Come out from among them and be separate" in the Old and New Testament, but they are also told, "You shall not oppress a foreigner," told that the blessing of the Sabbath is to be shared with "the foreigners within your gates," told that foreigners who accepted their religious beliefs were to be accepted into the community as equals and allowed to marry into the best of families, and so on, all the way up to the statement that "In Christ there is neither...Jew nor Greek, bond nor free." The Bible says a great deal that ought to have inspired or at least influenced whatever people did about the incidents that triggers race riots. 

In some cases--and I think this is behind some of the harsh judgments of White women in recent anti-ICE demonstrations: White Christians feel more free to say it to people they see as like themselves--Christians might observe that, however unfairly they were treated, people like Rodney King ought to have been obeying applicable laws; as should the policemen who beat him. A hundred years ago, in many cases, Christians should have been (and sometimes were) the ones shouting most loudly that "in Christ" ethnic identity means nothing, that any practice of injustice toward any demographic group is taking people "out of Christ." Today that particular sin is less common and, for that reason, much less tolerable. Our grandparents or great-grandparents might have been in mortal danger if they'd said anything about the Black patient left to bleed out in front of a White hospital. Today all most of us are even required to do about race prejudice is to say, "They were here first," or, "While we particularly look for stories that add cultural diversity to our web site, all manuscripts are read in the order received before the cut-off point." Some churchgoers may, however, need further encouragement to say those easy things.

In some cases Christians might ask ourselves where we went wrong. While being legally White, I've been told--by churchgoers!--"You're stupid to try to build a business by hard work these days. A smart person would find a government grant to exploit." Now we see White Christians waxing indignant at the sheer magnitude of Somali immigrants' exploitation of government grants. Why did they all open day care services? Because government grants were offered to people opening day care services. Naturally there's no reference to this item in a book that was published in 2024, but I, as a legally White person with "background," would like to know which White Christians guided the Somalis to keep those day care centers open after the friends' children for whom they'd provided any day care they ever did were grown up. Yes, it was exploitative. Yes, abusive. Yes, taking money away from blind people and combat veterans and cancer survivors. And I'm 99% sure that some White Christians encouraged them to do it. Let them stand forth and confess. 

There are a lot of things White Christians might feel moved to do, after reading the Bible, or Creating a Culture of Repair, or the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, or any number of other things. They might even ask Black or other "minority" Christians to guide them; they might even ask introvert Christians to guide them in making reparations to us, and Heaven speed the day. The danger with Fire in the Whole is that, because the Democratic Party has used hyped-up, often insincere, emotionality as a rhetorical device too often in recent years, all they'll feel moved to do after reading this book is ask for refunds. Because about all it tells them they can do is vote...for a party that has yet to find its way after inflicting poverty and race riots on Black and White Americans alike? How's that supposed to help?

An occupational hazard of Callahan's day job is that it encourages skill in making accusations at the expense of skill in saying anything more uplifting. Perhaps, as a balance to writing accusations, he should practice writing "daily devotions." Write things that tell a White American undergraduate, trying to pay bills and tuition on a student-labor job, how to practice the good will person feels toward per Black classmates. Tell a White American combat veteran, motivated to learn to walk on his "peg" but not guaranteed a full-time job when he learns, how he can become his Black neighbors' friend. Tell a White American grandmother, rearing three grandchildren, how to make Black Americans feel welcome in her little restaurant. (Most White Americans do not consider themselves rich, nor are they perceived as rich by other Americans.) Write for real people, as the individuals God made them, not the demographic groups that exist in the minds of leftist political theorists. Then I can celebrate his talent for writing by pointing to a book that people will feel better, and be better, for reading. And Heaven speed the day.

Election Rant That Outgrew a Web Log

Fellow Virginians, the campaign is getting so bad that I'm starting to believe the Democrats do intend for it to be this bad. 

Even a week ago, when Angry Abbylab Spambucket spewed forth another advertisement telling YouTube viewers to hate Winsome Earle-Sears because she represents the majority's political views, I was thinking it had to be just that Angry is so hard to work with that her own staff are sabotaging her. And stupid enough not to realize it? I had a harder time with that one. Maybe she thought she needed to throw the election to the Black candidate? She does have a site called WorstOfWinsome.com, and the Worst of Winsome is still more winsome than the best of Angry.

Then they let the boys out. Virginia's State House has had some decent Ds who might have been good Attorneys General, but the Loony Lefties running that party these days probably didn't even ask them if they wanted to run. They nominated this hater.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/10/05/virginia-dems-affirm-their-support-for-candidate-who-wants-his-foes-and-their-children-murdered-n4944497

I don't know Mr. Miyares, who must be our next Attorney General, and his campaign ads have not exactly made my fingers ache to hold a ballot, but at least this apparent trainwreck of a campaign is starting to make sense. The Ds aren't trying to convince anybody that they represent anybody's actual interests, or that they are decent human beings, or even that they're competent campaigners. This campaign is one big flip-off to We The People. It's a very elaborate (and expensive, and they plan to send the bill to us) way of saying "We don't have to give a dahm what the voters think or want. We can count on enough votes from handout-dependent urban voters, even if they hate everything we say and do and are, that we can afford to run a campaign that spits hate in the voters' faces." 

The Angry Spambucket may not be planning to hang "White" and "Colored" signs over the water dispensers at the Governor's Mansion, but if she ever gets control of any public water supply you can count on her to block her opponents' access to water. 

If people who are as arrogant and hostile as Angry and That Young Man with the Name That Sounds Like an Alias get control of, say, the idea of their managing the public health in another epidemic, or plandemic...you can count on them to understand that the unstated goal is to set a precedent for trampling over the public's right to privacy, or choice, while getting rid of as many older voters who remember better politicians as possible.

If they get control of the schools, you can count on them to sigh and wail as they report that the incidence of major mental illness, requiring multiple drugs and probably surgery, has skyrocketed in our public schools during the last ten years, and call for an investigation that's been ordered to find a comparable incidence in home and private schools.

And of course they want to let convicted felons vote. Sounds Like an Alias can relate so well to the way convicted felons think.

Things to start doing:

1. Watch your D neighbors. Drive them to the polls early, then give them things to do at an all-day-long post-election party to make sure they don't continue voting. It would be worthy of Sounds Like an Alias, not of us, to serve them sweets made from chocolate laxatives. Knockout drops in their drinks are also a bad idea. But we can ply them with enough different flavors of steak, shrimp, pie, and ice cream that the ones inclined to gluttony become torpid and harmless for the rest of the day. Lead them to a TV room stocked with reclining chairs. With any luck they'll be snoring in their chairs at ten o'clock on the Wednesday morning. If you know that their reaction to alcohol involves harmless loss of consciousness, ply them with more and "better" liquor than they could normally afford, too.

2. Involve the public in a contest to choose the best set of lyrics about Sounds Like an Alias to fit this tune: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oqAU5VxFWs

Qualifying songs should use the phrase "Felons' Friend," "Would-be Baby Killer," and/or "Leftist Fascist" in their refrains, linking these phrases with "Mr. Jones." All qualifying songs should be played on as many radio shows, at as many times of day, as possible. 

3. Have polite, friendly conversations with people who depend on your tax money for part of their living, whether they are retired, disabled, government employees, or homeless panhandlers. Help them to understand that it's not physically possible to keep the pensions rolling. Assure them that people working for budget cuts want to allocate more money for disability pensions, funding whatever is relevant to an individual disability even in the absence of a large group of people who seem likely to benefit from exactly the same thing...and, for everyone else, encourage more new business, especially in Anonymity Protection Centers that block businesses from storing any data that contains strings of nine or ten digits.

4. Take known D voters in for COVID boosters on the Monday evening. The goal is not to cause them all to be unconscious or dead on Election Day. It is to promote peace of mind by ensuring that they have the sort of "health care" they are known to want. Whether or not that leaves them fit to vote is in the hands of Fate.

5. Don't waste postage on mail advising D voters that their polling place has been changed, however funny the locations you may be thinking of may be. Do line the block outside the polling place with R campaign signs. Hire platoons of nice retired Rs to stroll around outside the polling places making R noises such as "Good morning! Isn't it a beautiful day to be happy in the Lord! I can hardly wait to see our Winsome in the Governor's Mansion!" This will do no harm to sane Ds but it may cause interesting, and disabling, fits in the Loony Left. The goal is to produce so much cognitive dissonance between what every Virginian has been taught about showing polite, respectful manners to these dear older people, and what every left-wingnut actually wants to say and do to Rs if people weren't watching, that most of your local wingnuts will spend Election Day pleading for tranquillizers at the emergency room.

6. Organize a special tour of Palestine for radical Ds, during which you arrange for someone to draw them out in public conversations about issues like transgenderism, transhumanism, abortion as a "right," the use of poorer and darker-complexioned communities as a testing ground for bioengineered products, and the need for "gay" representation at the highest levels of government. They should be stocked with Palestinian flags and coached on using Muslim-friendly language so that the arresting officials and prison staff will be inclined to treat them humanely--by their standards. Also arrange that even the ones who are not arrested will arrive in New York after 11:30 p.m. on Election Day.

7. Speaking of arrests, how many Ds in your neighborhood would, if it weren't for White/rich privilege, have been arrested for things like speeding, distracted driving, or public use of profanity years ago? 

8. Identify inner-city parents who are tempted to vote D because they think something really ought to be done about the schools their children attend. See how many of those children can benefit from full scholarships to attend private church schools--books, transportation, and uniforms if applicable, included. 

9. Pull the rugs out from under the Loony Left's feet by organizing a Non-D Rainbow Coalition where members of all the Ds' favorite demographic groups parade through their neighborhoods carrying signs and singing "Spanberger/Jones/whoever think they own me--they are wrong." Women could, for example, wave signs that say "I don't need abortions, I need freedom." 

10. Organize live reruns of the old game show "Are You 'Smarter' than a Fifth-Grader?" where middle school students who have been studying the history of the US Constitution answer questions on that topic that adults miss. (Participating adults should have put up an entry fee that will cover a month's tuition at a local church school.) Follow with lectures and discussions. In the town of Berea, Kentucky, which is admittedly accustomed to this sort of thing, live quiz shows become quite entertaining.

Most importantly: Overcome the emotional feelings you may have about the idea of voting Republican. You know the current presidential administration consists of moderate, or what currently pass for moderate (Secretary Kennedy never used to be called moderate), Ds who were forced to run as R by the Loony Left. You know that, when the Loony Lefties lose hope of ever winning another popular vote, sane and decent Americans will reclaim the D Party and you'll have the option of voting for Ds again. But not this year.

After Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk was murdered on Wednesday. 

I read this news item and thought "I've heard that name before," but it didn't mean anything in particular to me. That shows what a rut we middle-aged people in cyberspace can get into. I follow as many of the "conservative" blogs, and of the really "liberal" (as opposed to hate-filled left-wingnut) blogs, as possible; somehow the ones with forums that appeal to me seem to appeal to people who are currently over age 50. We share and discuss content from Joe Rogan, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Naomi Wolf; we don't keep up with the younger news bloggers. I think Russell Brand is the youngest "conservative" I've seen linked. And that gives me a lot to read and listen to, and meanwhile people like Charlie Kirk, Lara Logan, Anna Paulina Luna, Saurabh Sharma, Michael Knowles, well, they're out there somewhere. Older "conservatives," or moderates or classical liberals who are currently labelled "conservative"? It might be interesting to Google "conservative speakers under age 40" and see how many you've ever read or listened to. Time has its way of creeping up on us. We're not in the habit of thinking how long it's been since we were under age 40.

So I've learned about this man only last week. He was thirty-one, not much older than some of The Nephews (yikes!). He left behind a picture-perfect nuclear family, wife with lovely long blonde hair, two children barely old enough to talk; very reminiscent of President Kennedy's family. People in the commercial media who had met him remember him as the voice for free speech and open discussion. "A Christian," I'm told he was, who wanted to debate people and win on facts alone. His last public speech (on Fox News) and X-post were about the Ukrainian girl who was murdered in North Carolina: "It is 100% necessary to politicize the murder of Iryna Zarutska." In other recent speeches he spoke against Sharia law, and accused women who want to wait long enough to be sure they're getting husbands with fatherly characters of "choosing careerism, consumerism, and loneliness." That's not a very insightful summary of what they're choosing but it probably is an accurate summary of what Kirk was rejecting by marrying young. A nice, wholesome, Young Republican.

Conservatives are rumbling, even saber-rattling, across the land. Suddenly two young people most of us didn't know, had never made time to listen to, have become everyone's favorite niece and nephew simply because they were murdered. I have to wonder how some Rs' real nieces and nephews feel about that. 

I think we who didn't know either Kirk or Zarutska will probably have cause to miss them. There are three obvious ways to spin the Zarutska murder story. 

The one that appeals to me casts Zarutska as a poster girl for women's long denied civil rights. Andrew Tate, I can't believe that old blowhard is still being allowed to speak, much less that anyone's listening, blatted, "What was that GIRL doing OUT ALONE AFTER DARK?" He doesn't think women should have jobs, much less the right to commute to and from their jobs in peace. I think Tate's argument, that men are inherently violence-prone so women should be cowering indoors, not daring to earn our own room and board, just starving in a ladylike way if we can't live on what our male relatives make I suppose, is actually a very good argument for not allowing men to be on the streets without responsible female supervision. As in, not merely a sympathetic friend or relative, but an armed police officer. If anyone needs to be locked up, it's the violence-prone ones, not the potential victims. Unfortunately all women have been trained to see all men as potential assailants, no matter how much love and trust we feel for the ones we know personally. The brother you love and trust may be someone else's mugger or murderer. So if we listen to Tate, all the men in America need to be either working on their family farms, or working in labor camps with armed guards in towers along the razor-wire fences, or in institutions. Women have the right to use the public streets. Women do better in the skilled professions and are far less likely to commit violent crimes. Women would miss being able to learn from male co-workers or flirt with men in clubs or hear men preach in church, but if that is freedom's price, we might not mind.

The one that clearly appealed to Fox as being even more sensational casts Zarutska as a poster girl for White victims of Black violent criminals. If you saw the train's surveillance video you know how that works out in real life. Three Black men were in that end of that railcar. The smaller one was cringing against the wall. The older one was staring into space, not letting himself see, The big one clearly scared the other two men as much as he did the surviving woman. Most White Americans already see little difference when they look at men like those three. A Black man is a Black man is a Black man. So the two nonviolent Black men in that railcar have to go through life not knowing whether to be more afraid of Black men like that violent one, or of White people who see no difference between them and him. No wonder Black men have such high rates of hypertension and early death. This web site apologizes in advance to all law-abiding Black men.

Then there's the one Charlie Kirk apparently had in mind, which was simply that after a certain number of violent offenses an offender should be considered incorrigible and locked up for life. How reasonable. How fair. How ethical. How...boring? Was that why he was murdered? Some other young man found his ideas boring? Nothing radical or polarizing or revolutionary?

Those who think we need no more radical, polarizing, revolutionary blather added to the existing supply are likely to miss Charlie Kirk. He seemed the type of young man who could, calmly and politely, explain where, how, and why Fox had got his message wrong. 

I think I may have to give up reading one of the North Carolina blogs I've been following. People who may need to ride a train in Charlotte understandably have very intense feelings about the fact that no armed railcops burst into the railcar before Zarutska was dead. Some people at that blog seem to have intense feelings about life in general, at best. They seem to forget that in recent years people who still make noises like a "White Supremacist" are likely to be paid informers.

The "Trump Train" consists of a mad mixture of right-wingers, moderate Rs, fiscal conservatives, classical liberals, Independents, true Greens, sober Libertarians, conservative Ds, and people who had no politics before concerns about their or their relatives' health drove them to the Children's Health Defense movement, who are now lumped together as "conservatives." Everyone but total left-wingnuts now seems to be classified as a "conservative," which of course gave the Trump campaign a big boost. Being a good "liberal" in the sense of enjoying the mood of these diverse elements all stewing together, I've stuck to reminding people that we "conservatives" do not need to act like the idiotic stereotype the clueless Left would like to stick to us, that one Civil War was more than either Virginia or North Carolina ever needed...

...That old people don't make the best martyrs for a movement. As mentioned in the introduction to a short story I posted here some years ago, at 

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/short-story-influencers.html ,

If anything is ever going to stack up against financial interests on the scales of public opinion, it's the untimely death of a promising young person. The violent death of an older person can also be effective, but nothing else hits hoi polloi as hard as the loss of someone who was young and fresh and promising, all her (or his) road before her (or him). Like Iryna Zarutska. 

Charlie Kirk's X profile does not show evidence of much original thought, but it shows clear thinking. He was in favor of free speech and objective debate and fair fighting. He also understood the value of a martyr to a movement. Iryna Zarutska doesn't seem to have stood for anything in particular; she was just a half-grown pizza flipper. She was not a world-class Beauty; her face showed imperfect symmetry, her bleached hair didn't make her look credible as a blonde, and she was letting the black roots of her hair show at an uneven parting; but she was young-and-therefore-pretty, with good Slavic cheekbones and big brown eyes. Young men would have stopped to look at her. Kirk wanted to make her famous as a martyr for some movement related to commuter safety. 

And then he, too, became a martyr for freedom of speech and objective debate AND FAIR FIGHTING. I want my saber-rattling e-friends to let that sink in. I don't want to hang around there nagging at them. I want them to think about him and fight for their cause "the way Charlie Kirk would've done," with reasoned arguments and courteous manners. 

Something that came to mind recently was a clip from Secretary Kennedy's testimony in the Senate. He was speaking with Senator  Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren. She was clearly treating him as an equal; at one point she called him "Senator." But then she...I'm not sure that "lost it" is the phrase. She was in control of her manners but she lost control of her image. Kennedy has a major speech impairment. Warren has none. She wasn't exactly yelling, she wasn't standing up and leaning across the table, she wasn't even shaking a fist or pointing a finger, but she was...spewing out words. She spoke fast and furiously while he was trying to force words out. It was a painful scene to watch. 

I don't know that Charlie Kirk would instinctively have had better skills than that. I think--hope--he had. I think it was an instructive moment for all us "conservatives" who think it's time for a "turning point" in the way people understand the word "progress." We want to make progress back to the American idea that all people are created equal, with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which people may or may not define as wealth. (According to legend, Thomas Jefferson originally wanted to say "wealth," but Benjamin Franklin reminded him that the radical Christians in Pennsylvania weren't pursuing wealth, primarily, so our Declaration of Independence says "happiness.") 

That means nobody has the power to arbitrate equal outcomes; people have to take the natural consequences of their actions. It means nobody is so superior to anyone else as to be a "gatekeeper" to what other people are allowed to read or write or think or say. It means most people have a right to be armed, and are likely to be armed, so it's good to avoid fights even if you think you could win a fair fight with the other person. It means debates need to be won on facts, not on extraneous factors like the ability to talk faster than another person. It means people are innocent until proven guilty--although the man who murdered Iryna Zarutska had been proven guilty fourteen times and released from prison on a technicality that was probably considered only out of a misguided sense of race loyalty. 

Metaphors of violence may be built into our language, into most human languages. We are keyboard warriors. Right. We're fighting for reforms. Right. We want to kill bad bills. Right. We should avoid throwing those metaphors around in ways that suggest any interest in physical violence. 

There is a movement, originating in corporate trade associations whose representatives have tried to recruit "influencers" and politicians, aimed at "destroying" Robert Kennedy. Well, anyone who even looks sidewise at the Irish Chieftain of Glyphosate Awareness is also likely to meet my Inner Mama Bear. Someone in Washington annoyed me enough to get a message recommending that the person leave Kennedy alone or I'd call out something less than admirable that the person has done. I think that's within the ethical boundaries for us who have recently, and to our surprise, been designated as "conservatives." We can embarrass people, if we have some good "dirt" on them. 

But with Charlie Kirk as poster boy, those of us trying to preserve freedom of speech should feel reminded to keep it polite, keep it clean, keep it nonviolent, leave people's parents and children out of any disagreements, and generally "fight" like gentlemen, or -women. Use language that won't embarrass those of us who live with young children, or the children. Never stop saying, "This is wrong. This won't work. This didn't serve people who tried it very well in some other time and place, and it's likely to be even worse for us." Try not to start saying "You're an idiot. You're a traitor. You're an evil person." 

Left-wingnuts were saying horrible things about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Let's assume that they were in emotional denial that the murder was real. "Next time can we do [an older "conservative" writer?" Let's just say, not if I catch you, you can't. 

We can do better than this. We're right. Some prog-trog posted something that looked like a statistical argument on X in support of a specious argument. Something about the statistics didn't look right to me. Hello? This is cyberspace. I Googled. Trog's statistics didn't look right because they were blatantly bogus. I quoted accurate statistics at him. I think the trog's running yet. 

Go and do likewise, Gentle Readers. Be best. In memory of Charlie Kirk.

Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth: Belated Post for 8.7.25

A contributor to a blog I follow felt that some presidential policy moves he does not support show that "Trump has failed" and, if even populist Trump was not aligned with his views, he "was done."

Well, that was during the heat wave. Exhaustion was a very natural and logical feeling to have. 

A reaction from a stouter heart followed, here:

https://ncrenegade.com/stop-whining/

Can I think of more specific encouragement for, specifically, Glyphosate Awareness people, and, more generally, all who support more individual rights including the right to make our own health-supporting decisions, especially in choosing minimally contaminated food and water? Of course I can!

What follows started as replies to specific comments and questions from people discussing the "I'm done" post. (No link to that post; having been encouraged and taunted by that community, the author concluded that he wasn't trying to leave the country or give up activism altogether, just scaling back his activity to a more balanced and weather-appropriate program, so there's no need to take up any more of his energy.) I've tried to organize them into a logical order. That is why they are late.

I'd like to call out Dave DiGerolamo's post because I think doing so highlights something we do at this web site. We don't dictate or demand. We form alliances with people who are working toward a common goal, even if we and they have other goals that may be different. 

Glyphosate Awareness is not and should not be the story of anybody's life. It's important to all people who prefer being healthy to being sick and/or prefer being alive to being dead, whether or not they realize how important it is...but it's not even an ongoing organization. It's not going to become anybody's full-time paid job. We agree that poisoning people for profit is evil and must be stopped. 

We want a ban. Secretary Kennedy has done an heroic job of getting people to agree to things voluntarily without a formal ban. That's also good. In the case of poison sprays we may need a formal ban, but it's certainly best to begin by encouraging farmers who sincerely want to raise good food to take their first fearful steps voluntarily, if that can be done.

Technically, a ban on glyphosate will be the official end of Glyphosate Awareness. I've come to feel that, because the corporations have shown such lack of concern about human lives at even a slight risk to profit, we need to be fighting for a ban on all outdoor use of poison sprays. Whether we're fighting for a ban on one specific chemical that harms us personally, or on all outdoor spraying, once we get that ban, we disperse. Whether you have one more idea in common with Bernie Sanders, or with me, or with anyone else who's helped to spread Glyphosate Awareness, or not, is up to you. We are not a cult. We are a diverse group of people who've managed to agree on one thing. 

But, in a more general sense, we are all activists. We are all committed, in whatever way we understand it, to doing what we've been called to do to resist evil in this world.

DiGerolamo begins with "civil disobedience." I especially like the examples he gives. Many of the things we're opposing are neither laws nor politicians nor political systems. Evil often operates through peer pressure--specifically, market pressure. 

"I just sold my first load of early corn. When do you expect to sell your first load out of that unsprayed, mixed-crop field of yours? You'll never make a profit on that field. Taxes are going to eat you up if you don't start farming the modern way. Plant bioengineered corn that can resist it and then drown your field in pesticides!"

"It's cruel to take the chance of letting children develop natural immunity to measles! Do you want your children to suffer? Do you want them to grow up blind?"

"It's crazy to try to live without a car in this world! It's dangerous, walking in traffic! It's career suicide because people aren't going to hire someone who doesn't have reliable transportation to the job, even if you say that your feet are reliable transportation to a job one mile away. Think of what you're doing to your children..."

Etc. etc. etc. I've only been hearing it for sixty years. I'm not saying I was old enough to understand it for all of those years, but I was certainly hearing it. My parents disobeyed the social mandate to become dependent on motor transportation everywhere. It cost them jobs; it cost them some people's approval. I grew up. I learned how to drive a car. I drove a few cars other people owned. I owned a couple of cars other people drove. Finally I both owned and drove the same car all by myself like a person with no consciousness of the reasons not to join the car culture, for about six weeks. Since then I've disobeyed the social mandate to depend on motor transportation, and I'm likely to walk in situations where my parents would have used a taxi service.

Not that I am nagging anyone else to choose a car-free life. Not that I think motor vehicles are altogether evil. It's our overuse of them that is evil. By walking when it's feasible we can reduce pollution, improve our health, and avoid the kind of local warming that provides the pretext for left-wingnuts to scream about global warming calling for global dictatorship to save the planet.

But everyone feels called to resist evil in this world according to a different set of priorities. This is probably an indicator of what we're best qualified to do. I'd like to try to avoid quarrelling with others in the broader movement about priorities. Some things Robert Malone has said recently have offended people who liked his book. Some people see gene splicing itself as a bigger hazard than "pesticide" spraying. When dropping facts on an anti-vaxxer didn't convince her immediately that glyphosate is more dangerous to the public than vaccines are, I understood the feelings people express. We want to shake or slap the ignorance out of some people. We feel as if they were the enemy. These feelings are not helpful. Balkanization, being divided and conquered, is one of the aspects of evil we need to resist. If we abandon our mutual goal and fight against each other, there's no chance of reaching the goal.

(Why is glyphosate more dangerous to the public than vaccines? I mean the vaccines that everyone can agree have done more harm than good...Still, it's possible to avoid vaccines. It might have cost some people their careers, but we could say no to the jab. It's not possible to avoid glyphosate. If your reactions are disabling, you can give up social eating, give up most of your favorite foods, give up open-air exercise, become a total agoraphobic crank, and still spend a lot of days being sick. This should not be possible, of course. That's what we're fighting against.)

I try to respect everyone's differing priorities, and I'd like to encourage everyone else to do that. People usually have reasons for their priorities. If you live in a place where the climate is naturally hot and you know people who won't survive if it gets hotter, climate is probably your priority, you may even listen to those calling for global dictatorship, and you probably aren't even reading this web site regularly because you think we're insensitive to the dangers of climate change. This kind of thing is annoying but inevitable. We have to work through it, to reach our goals.

So, as someone asked in the comments, who will lead and guide us? 

Only the Great Spirit will. Only the Great Spirit can. If we place our faith in a fellow mortal, even if that person never disappoints us, that person is mortal and will grow old and die. 

Speaking of which, many of us are already pretty old. This is not all bad. Old people can be fearless. We can say:

If I live another fifty years, I'll still have a long list of things I want to do.

If I die tomorrow, I'll still have had a longer and better life than most humans have ever had.

I am not afraid of Hell.

But where does that leave the young? Sometimes I count how few of the previous generation in my extended family are still alive, and I wring my hands and pray--"God, she's eighty-five years old now, he's ninety--oh please let them stay active for another fifteen years!" This is true even for two cousins I've never met who don't feel rich because they're not in the top one percent of America's richest, but they are in the top five, and it's not inconceivable that they might remember that their mother's wealth came from dividing some land in a way that cost my grandmother money while it made their mother rich, and consider leaving some money to me. Just as fellow celiacs who want to support Celiactivism, the larger and much more pleasant cause that will remain after Glyphosate Awareness is over, they might consider leaving some money to me. I could use the money. I'd still prefer that they remain alive. I hope the young feel the same way about us...but, regardless of how anyone feels, we will not always remain alive. My generation, who identified as "the young" for so long, are becoming "the old." 

I don't recommend that the young be publicly identified as leaders in Glyphosate Awareness because the corporations who embody our enemy are so evil. People who are or might become parents of young children should not do things that might deprive those children of parents. I recommend that the young practice leadership skills with their children and in "safer" organizations like neighborhood watch and PTA-type groups.

I don't share, and don't think we should feed attention to, the perception that the young are unfit to survive after the old. It has always seemed to people who've lived long enough to have read all the books in their large personal libraries, and been tested by adventures, and developed craggy faces with interesting scars, and come to understand how many things are of more enduring interest than sex, that the young are uninformed, weak, pasty-faced, hormone-addled blobs of glup. What the young are is young. They will outgrow it. Some people don't seem to have revisited their high school or even college yearbooks lately. Young people I see remind me very much of the ones who were young along with me, back in the day. ("Aaaack!") I don't know that we should slack off in order to make room for them to grow. I think there's still room for them to grow and mature on their own. Still, a little reminiscing about our own experience of being clueless and pasty-faced ought to reduce any distress we feel about leaving the world in the hands of the young. They will mature. Younger generations always have matured, and always will.

The young will, eventually, lead the resistance against evil. Trump won't be here. Kennedy won't be here. We the technorati, the early adopters of privately owned computers, the bloggers and social media networkers, won't be here. They will have to be led by the Great Spirit, just as we do.

In questions like "Who will lead..." I hear the disparity between what might fairly be called a fascist, or at least authoritarian, way of thinking and a more democratic, or American, or biblical, way of thinking. People will have a king if they want one. Some people do. But God's perfect will was that people receive orders directly from God, and not feel a need for kings.

For literal, physical combat, of course, strategies and drills are useful. Strategies for physical combat often do rely on members  of a team to lead a multi-person strategic move. "When A sees X happening, A gives the cue to B to..." This web site recognizes a place for combat in this world but this web site is utterly unqualified to organize or even encourage physical that could become violent. We are all about nonviolent strategies that are best implemented by individuals, usually acting as individuals. A March Against Monsanto may be fun for its season but it's when individuals stop buying Monsanto-Bayer and similar products that the corporation has to take notice. 

For purposes this web site has anything to do with, therefore, the little personal choices are the important ones. Why organize anti-glyphosate rallies, where we're likely to be deliberately sprayed or worse and where we do the corporations' profits no harm at all, when just not buying things actually hurts the corporations that have poisoned  us? Don't buy things made by corporations that also make glyphosate--or other "pesticides." 

We should all be raising as much of our own food as we can. How much land we have, and what it will produce, naturally determines how much that is. Corn and beans need a certain amount of sunshine to grow. Chickweed and violets need less. The commercial food industry have taught us that we need the standard commercially grown vegetables that need a lot of sunshine. Corn and beans and tomatoes and suchlike are very good, but if your glyphosate reactions indicate that most of the commercial produce is still marinated in glyphosate or some other chemical that makes you ill, and most of your favorite fruits and vegetables are never going to grow on your property, you may be amazed to discover how nutritious and how tasty chickweed and violets can be. Actually, most of the native "weeds" we pick out of our gardens are nutritious, and taste good, too, when eaten in the right season and quantity. 

We do need to keep voting. There may be slots on the ballot where writing in the name of a famous dead person, a cartoon character, or a vegetable makes sense--if it won't get the election done over, at the very least the Lesser Evil will know how many people voted against him. Generally it's good to vote for the least of the available evils, or against the greater ones. Elections have been decided bmuch y one vote in one precinct. Why waste yours?

We need to add talking and writing to voting. We are the technorati. We have to educate the people who didn't form a habit of reading at school. Personal relationships with these people are not always part of communicating with them. We can run for local office, and write letters to local papers, like good traditional activists. Those things boost our signals. So does being a good customer, when we can. So does talking with people at church dinners, or drinking coffee (or beer) with them when we meet them in town. Doing some sort of useful community service is very good, and might become important in an emergency,  too.

Everything we do does not have to be serious and goal-oriented. That can be a formula for burnout. When I was doing the Twitter Live Chats, which required much advance reading, quick learning, quick thinking, even in languages I can't properly be said to speak, so each one was a real workout for the brain, I found refreshment in reading, re-posting, and writing the sort of light content I call "the fluff." So did my followers. After a heavy chat we'd head for Twitter pages that specialized in pretty nature photos, cute pets, cartoons, and short light poems. So this web site, now that it's sponsored to do so, features butterfly pictures on Mondays, adorable adoptable pets on Tuesdays, and poems on Fridays. I try (don't always manage) to make time to read the Meow and Messy Mimi blogs daily, the Mirror and Barkley and Poets & Storytellers blogs whenever there's a new post. Refreshment is encouragement, too. If your refreshment consists of painting landscape pictures or piecing beautiful quilt tops or polishing and cutting stones, you're not letting the side down; you're lifting some of us up. "The fluff" is important too; it reminds us of what we're fighting for.

Left-wingnuts call everyone else fascists because that is what they say when they feel frustrated, but are we fascists? Then we should try to avoid talking like them. Historically, fascists liked to classify people as strong or weak, winners or losers, and look for what they saw as strong, winning leaders. Like Mussolini--oh right. If we want to be or to follow better leaders than Mussolini, it may help to reflect on St Paul's meditations in 2 Corinthians. We all have strong and weak points, strong and weak moments, and it may even be true in activism as it is in spirituality, "When I am weak, then I am strong." 

Surely the "weakest" thing an activist could do would be to die in an accident mid-struggle...wouldn't it? Yet there are laws in force today that bear the names of people in whose memory they were, more or less, enacted. There are "Amber Alerts" because the previous system failed to save a child called Amber. Martyrs have tremendous posthumous power. Of course people who are clearly willing to be martyrs, but survive, have even more. That is why we have a President Trump and Secretaries Kennedy and Gabbard. Like them or not, everyone can see that they're not afraid of becoming martyrs. 

Many people in cyberspace have had the privilege of education that gave us "strong" voices. Oh, we're so privileged. Most of us had a lot of help toward getting our educations. Anyway, other people merely lurk and never post a comment because they don't think they're able to type anything that would be up to our standard. They merely do their blue-collar or pink-collar jobs. I have seen plumbers, mechanics, and hairdressers reach people who wouldn't listen to us overeducated computer nerds and geeks  Lurkers can be doing more good than bloggers know. (Of course, some lurkers are also hackers and spammers, but maybe a little information rubs off even on them.) 

A couple of local lurkers have come forward to tell me they're dyslexic. (So am I but the kind of dyslexia that runs in my family interferes with speaking more than it does with reading.) When the instructions for something they want to do are written down, they have no trouble, but they don't want to try to read whole books. They used to be called functional illiterates. I call them intelligent people who cope well with physical obstacles to learning. They are called to teach their own audiences. They are old enough to know who those are.

Whoever is reading this...you're only one person. No other person is going to stand with you every time you have to take a stand in life. You may be the only one saying something at a particular place and time, but if what you're saying is true, then you are not alone--the Truth is with you. Deal with the fact of our existential solitude as human beings, and then appreciate the fact that we can connect. We can relay information--by writing letters on paper, or by word of mouth, if the Internet fails. I've looked at the statistics shown on the inside of this web site and thought, as bloggers do for the first few years, "And how many of those twenty-nine readers even vote in Virginia?" Then I've also posted "Print this article to claim a freebie/discount at a sponsor's business" and had tourists come in, all the way from Australia, carrying their printouts. You never know whom you may be reaching. 

Some things can be known. For example: real, honest "conservatives" may hold grudges against people who did something to them, but otherwise they're not haters. That "conservatives are racists" routine the Left love is an example of what, in the slang of my youth, we called weaselling--loudly denouncing someone else for doing something by way of distracting attention from the fact that you are doing the same thing, often to a greater degree. (("You shut your blank-blank bleeping foul mouth and stop using that kind of blanking blinking language!") Hating large groups of people is stupid. Most conservatives are not stupid, or at least not all that stupid. I'm still mentally processing Margaret Roberts' research-based bombshell: Timothy McVeigh, who was clearly able to work with people from different backgrounds, made all that noise about his White Supremacism and promoted a novel about people who murder their neighbors apparently just for being Jewish, because he was being paid to make concern about the Waco disaster look bad? It's worth a second look at anyone who posts racist garbage on a "conservative" page. 

In theory even White Supremacists have bodies that react badly to glyphosate, so they can benefit from Glyphosate Awareness too, but I personally want nothing to do with anyone who does not appreciate those of The Nephews who are legally Black as much as those who are legally White. In fact hateful remarks about any ethnic group that includes a friend or relative of mine, which includes most of the ethnic groups on Earth, tend to bring out my Inner Mama Bear. 

We need to shun hateful or violent people. (We can pity them and pray for them if we like.) We should practice good will toward everyone else. To the extent that it's possible, without compromising ourselves by supporting things we really can't support, it is desirable for activists to make ourselves known for kindness, loyalty, and generosity.