Turning Their Backs

The more the people of this country turn their backs on the principles that made this country great, and blessed by G-d, the worse things will get.

And yet, our news media and many of our politicians and public figures, embrace values that are antithetical to the values that made America what it is. America is embracing the suicide of America. There are Americans cheering on the suicide of America.

If that is not the definition of f***ed up, I don't know what is.

Now for a lot of people, their response to my previous sentences might be that America isn't too great. We had slavery, we have income and other inequalities, capitalism has mutated into a rapacious monster, and yes sometimes when people's bad actions put police in a tough situation, those police aren't always as careful to preserve life (even the lives of criminals) as they should be. Hence our current situation with the death of George Floyd.

Let us set aside for the moment that the Left's solution to all that is more centralized State control, which invariably leads to stagnation at best if not outright tyranny at worst. How bad do things have to be when communism is your answer? Pretty damn bad, I guess. I thought we sorted out the issue of whether communism works when the Soviet Union fell.

However, just because your answers are terrible, doesn't mean your questions are always illegitimate. America is a place where innovation is at its best, where hard work and intelligence are frequently rewarded, but ALSO a hot mess constantly flirting with the prospect of civil war. America is a chaotic place.

Perhaps unexpectedly. the closest thing we've yet seen to "boogaloo" (civil war) wasn't right-wing militants waving guns, but left-wing militants waving Molotov cocktails. Who will drop the next shoe, remains to be seen. And at the same time that all this shit is going down, the first ever humans were launched aboard a commercially-made and partially reusable rocket. A great leap forward in manned spaceflight, created by a South African immigrant to America who had a dream about a place where anything was possible. A dream about the most forward-looking, scientifically advanced, and greatest spacefaring nation ever: America.

I am not saying that a return to the fundamental values of America will solve all our problems. The only thing that solves all problems is death. I AM saying that if we do not return to the core fundamental values of America, things will continually get worse and worse. What are these values?

1. Individual moral principles based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments. G-d is at the core of all these other values.

2. Limited government and individual responsibility. If the citizens are responsible, the government doesn't have to be. If the government is made responsible for everything, the citizens eventually lose their freedom. Humans are habitually morally corrupt and have limited insight into the truth: make sure you do not make any man or men too powerful or you will invariably regret it.

3. In line with #1, HONESTY. It used to be a value in America that people be forthright and frank in a helpful spirit. The corrosion of this value also leads to the corrosion of all others.

4. Duty. This value was abused in the various wars America got into that were often not justified and were for geopolitical reasons and empire building, and so it got a bad name. The devil loves to corrupt good principles to bad ends. You have a duty to country, to others, to self and most importantly to G-d. These are the guide-rails that keep our lives from going off-track.

5. Honor. This value was also frequently abused, often by the same people. Honor ideally means that you have a code of conduct for yourself and you stick to it, and you don't violate it for personal gain or to avoid the disapproval of others or because of peer pressure.

6. Preparedness and self-reliance. If some of these values sound like they come from the Boy Scout Handbook, well a lot of them are in common. Be Prepared. Be prepared in mind by anticipating problems that may arise. Be prepared in body by being strong and fit. Be morally prepared by studying wisdom (#8). Be capable of taking care of yourself and looking out for others in adverse situations. Connected to this is...

7. Be Thrifty. Money doesn't exist as a means to your pleasure, it exists as a means to your survival. Before you spend money on wants, make sure your needs are prepared for adequately. Save money against adverse conditions in the future.

8. Wisdom. This is actually not so much a traditional American value as a value I would like to see adopted as American.

As a Gentile raised in a fairly liberal family, what seems most remarkable to me about Judaism is their emphasis on studying wisdom. This is a value that is repeated throughout the Tanach. Part of moral preparedness is studying wisdom: read the Bible, contemplate the situations presented therein. Think about potential situations of moral conflict and how to resolve them. One of my criticisms of Judaism though is that they tend to take the opinions of their beloved dead rabbis as being more than what they are: opinions of men. Opinions of good men, I am sure, and probably worthy of study, but they were just men. Everyone must think these things through for themselves. If our society had a greater emphasis on teaching and exploring wisdom and ethics, we would be in a far better condition than we are.

9. Freedom. Part of our problem in a sense is that we are a country that has insisted on freedom from our earliest days. We are rebels by nature. However when freedom belongs not to intelligent disciplined responsible citizens but lawless deviant degenerate rabble, that's a real problem. And that problem has also existed from the beginning. The mobs in Boston prior to 1776 weren't all exemplars of American virtue. They too were often lawless rabble not opposed to a little looting.

Nevertheless, free men must insist: I belong to no government, I am nobody's chattel or slave, I am a free man and if need be I will die one rather than submit to slavery.

10. Service and charity. Now, just like duty and honor, charity has been abused of late by evil people. That is why I no longer give money to large charities or virtually any charities, because they are essentially pirates making money off of peoples' consciences. Which is pretty much the scummiest thing a human can do short of violence.

However the duty to serve the community and help the less fortunate remains. The more people shirk this duty, the greater will be the call for fathermothergovernment to step in, which they are just an even larger version of these corrupt charities that fatten themselves in the name of the less fortunate.

11. Justice. Justice both means freedom for the innocent and consequences for the guilty. In personal life, do not act such that innocent people will be affected unfairly. On a government level, rule of law. Judge people according to fair process and according to evidence.

12. Clean life. Drunkenness, drug use, sexual immorality and decadent levels of self-indulgence have never made anyone's life better. And don't give me that shit about pot being different: pot makes you stupid. It's a drug like the rest. If you need drugs as medicine (if you have glaucoma, or cancer,) that can be a legitimate use. Otherwise you're just a druggie, not different in kind from the heroin addict or the nymphomaniac or the alcoholic.

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I challenge anyone to tell me how these values will somehow make America worse. Why then do large sectors of society (honestly, mostly the atheistic cynical sectors) not embrace them and sometimes openly deride them? Media reporting on the riots going on lately will mention social justice and racism, and not what is actually going on which is looting and pillaging. That is dishonest and immoral. The event of actual importance going on is violence and wanton destruction of property, and I am hard pressed to figure out a situation outside of total war where that is ever justified. But lies (#3) fall like rain these days.

The widespread embrace of these (old and new) American values truly would Make America Great Again.