Bastards & Common Sense

I want you to consider the following statement written by a teenage girl from Wales. Right off the cuff, you could consider it insulting if it weren’t true. Well… I wasn’t insulted, because it is true.

Never again will I step foot on USA soil.  To me, it would be like stepping back say some thirty years into my grandfather's Ukraine when it was under old Soviet rule.  His sad stories and harrowing experiences are now coming to life before my eyes in present day America.  The "in-your-face" lies, corruption, deceit, control, loss of individuality, fear of government, media manipulation, corruption of the public education system (turning that institution into indoctrination centers), confiscation of property and personal freedoms, denigration of religion (a higher authority), pitting  groups against groups, having as many people dependent on the largess of government, among numerous other adversities, were normal.  Seems these are the "new" normal in USA.

There is something very interesting about this statement, outside the list of failures… It’s the second sentence; To me, it would be like stepping back say some thirty years into my grandfather's Ukraine when it was under old Soviet rule.  What this sentence says to me is she has been given tradition… Her grandfather took the time to educate her on what he knew to be true. You might say she has common sense.  Common sense isn’t what people think it is; it is family tradition.

When the hippies choose to discard the idea of family and all that went with it, in favor of free love, piece (no, I did not misspell it) and rock and roll, they instead threw away Love, Peace and Harmony; Common sense.

Common sense is known under another name as well… Wisdom. With the advent of the hippies, (this to include the compassion of the welfare state), there was a decline in marriages, an increase in divorces and the countryside was littered with bastard children. The home, ‘Woman,’ was replaced with a second income, or she had to produce in order to rear her children.

In many cases the grandparents tried to hold the traditions together, but as time wore on, and poor habits repeated, and the number of bastard children increased, the factures grew and slowly the family traditions gave way to ignorance and dependence on public assistant.  

Although the American free enterprise system has provided abundance, it can not provide family tradition, common sense.

The abundance as provided education, and with a lack of family tradition, has left our children prey to a whole array of strange and misguided ideas. The profusion of wealth has gone a long way to insulating the culture as a whole from the effects of these misguided ideas. But as the ignorance grows and more and more people embrace ‘modern thinking’ the impact is near at hand.

This started in the early twentieth century with the importation of European professors. The impact was small because family tradition prevailed and an ole saying came to be, “If you’re twenty and not a liberal, you have no heart, if you’re forty and not a conservative, you have no brains.” But without a firm reliance on family tradition to purge ideas which do not produce, you have nothing to work with except what you learn in school.

America has become a sea of well educated people with a lack of common sense. But it was built on a foundation of family people, with a wealth of wisdom.

George Henry Nichols