PORTLAND CITY HALL HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT

“I have nine children with nine different women,” said Richard Cox, 56, who also said he is a former Army Ranger and has been homeless for a year. He, along with Aaron Porter, 24, were assigned to me as trained press liaisons for the homeless encampment at Portland City Hall on Congress Street. Aaron told me he has been homeless for eight years but both men preferred to call themselves “unhoused.”

Press liasons Richard Cox and Aaron Porter

They were attached to me last Friday after I took some pictures near the medical tent and asked questions of the volunteers there. One got on a walkie-talkie and pretty soon Richard and Aaron showed up. We went around the corner on a side street so my digital audio device didn’t pick up traffic noise or screaming obscenities from “residents” like the two women near us were delivering with incredibly-loud voices. 

Gray stains on pavement are dried urine

The “unhoused” encampment has grown on the steps of Portland City Hall and on the sidewalks in front of and beside the impressive stone edifice for almost two weeks. It would be more accurate to describe the building as a formerly-impressive edifice as it’s now covered with stains of dried urine, tents, trash,  sleeping bags, canopies, and people sleeping or walking around. How much more the encampment grows may be determined by a Portland City Council meeting scheduled for Monday, August 3rd.

Aaron and Richard told me no one is working in the building since Covid and are instead working from home. However, the Portland Press Herald reported that City Hall closed for business the previous Monday because staff felt unsafe. Walking around the encampment, I was reminded of what's happening at the other Portland on the west coast and in Seattle where leftists took over whole city blocks.

A large, prominent, professionally-printed sign on the sidewalk declared: “Our Demands,” which included: “DEFUND THE POLICE” and “EXTEND EVICTION FREEZE.” Another sign said: “HOMELESS LIVES MATTER.” That called to mind the Black Lives Matters protests there few weeks ago accompanied by violence and looting. Protesters included organizers like African refugees Hamdia Ahmed and Abdul Ali. Later, someone named Abdikareem Hasan was arrested for firing several shots into the nearby Portland Police Station parking garage.

Abdikareem Hassan

Leaving Richard and Aaron and walking carefully up the steps of City Hall, I squeezed between tents and sleeping bags, some with crashed-out people in them. There was dried urine all the way to the top and I couldn’t avoid stepping in it. I pitied people in tents on the lower steps and on the sidewalk as the urine would, of course, flow down to them, especially when it rained. I was glad not to see, or step in, any excrement, however.

Urine stains on City Hall steps

In one kiosk, I saw a list of people to whom donated tents, sleeping bags, soap, XL women’s diapers, kids’ clothes, and many other donated items had been given. There were written directions conspicuously posted explaining when to administer Narcan for those who overdose. 

“Housed” people were arriving regularly to drop off items that were requested on still another list. Everything visible, except for the people, was donated from the outside. This was clearly kept going by others who wanted political visibility.

Press liaisons Richard and Aaron wore walkie-talkies on their belts and were periodically called to quell disturbances. A Paddy Wagon with blue lights flashing on the next block took people to the police station or to the Cumberland County Jail where I had been volunteering for four years until the pandemic closed it to employees and inmates only.

Preble Street Resource Center

Also closed down by government overreaction to the virus was the nearby Preble Street Resource Center. It had provided all the services to the homeless now being delivered at the City Hall encampment and more. That seems a foolish decision considering that those camping at City Hall and in Deering Oaks Park aren’t socially distancing and few wear masks. There were also toilets at Preble Street. Paradoxically, it seems the “unhoused” at the encampment don’t have to live in donated tents because city officials have said homeless shelters at Oxford Street and at the Portland Expo are operating at only half capacity.

Portland Police Chief Frank Clark reported that shots were fired at the encampment on Saturday. The whole thing seems a political stunt to this writer and US News said it's organized by something called the “Maine People’s Housing Coalition,” I did several searches for it and only came up with a Facebook page. Links from there led me to national, leftist sites with LGBT, socialist, and communist links. The Portland Press Herald, however, has not dug into the “Maine People’s Housing Coalition” or its affiliates.

Is Portland, Maine being plagued by the same leftist forces now ruining the other Portland on the west coast? It would seem so.

Leftists Lose It

Young woman reacts to Trump win

Driving through Portland, Maine with my wife the day after the big election, I expected to see black crepe hanging from windows. I didn't, but there were women holding signs offering hugs to distraught liberals downtown. Hundreds gathered there to chant “Not my president!” and “Keep hate out of Maine!” They were peaceful though, unlike they were in that other Portland across the country.

From Portland Press Herald

Back and forth we go each week between rural Maine and urban Maine — from the mountains to Greater Portland — from red Maine to blue Maine for a couple of days, then back. It’s quite a contrast. In the mountains people know me, but in the city they have no idea that I’m a conservative who voted for Trump. I can observe leftists in their native habitat where they feel safe. Sometimes I feel like Jane Goodall.

Downtown Portland, Maine (PPH)

Downtown Portland, Oregon (from London Daily Mail)

In the mountains, Trump won; in the city, Hillary did. Maine is divided between rural and urban and the world views of the former are strikingly different from those of the latter. On the coast of Maine they like marijuana, Hillary, and gun control — in the interior, none of those — just like the rest of America. Gun control in the form of increased background checks was defeated, but marijuana was legalized. Leftists in Greater Portland prevailed there and when I was a leftist, I smoked it too. After giving it up more than thirty years ago, I moved right. Was that causative? I don’t know, but it correlated. Leftist billionaire George Soros has always marijuana legalization initiatives. Does he believe smoking weed moves people left? It would seem so.

Leftist Billionaire George Soros

The Portland Press Herald published several maps of Maine — one each showing towns voting for Hillary vs Trump, Yes vs No on marijuana, and Yes vs No on gun control. All three were virtually identical. The blue/red or left/right divide if you will, runs between the city and the country in Maine and in the whole of our country as well.

On the car radio, I heard news of my alma mater — the University of Massachusetts Lowell — where the “Office of Multicultural Affairs” sent out a notice the day after the election:

“…While it may take some time to fully take in all the recent events, please also know that the OMA office is here for you. Our UMass Lowell community is here for you. Do not hesitate at all to come in or ask for support. Today there is a Post-election self-care session from 12-4 pm in Moloney. The event will include cookies, mandalas, stress reduction techniques and mindfulness activities. Counseling and Health Services will also be available…”

When I lived there in the 1970s, Lowell was a tough city hosting the New England Golden Gloves every year. Evidently it’s being repopulated with snowflake stoners.

The Huffington Post reported on a post-mortem meeting of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), during which a young committeeman identified only as “Zach” flipped out at the DNC’s truth-challenged Chairwoman Donna Brazile. Claiming her ineptitude enabled Trump to win, he frantically exclaimed:

“You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change! You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy!”

Poor baby. I sincerely doubt Brazile really believes in anthropogenic climate change, but doom-sayer Democrat propaganda has clearly terrified this young leftist.

On the bright side, several leftist celebrities have promised to leave the country if Trump is elected and I hope they do. The list includes: The allegedly Reverend Al Sharpton, Cher, Miley Cyrus, Whoopi Goldberg, Lena Dunham, and several others whose names are unfamiliar to me. To them, I say: “Bye-bye! Don’t let the doorknob catch you in the ass!” But, alas, I doubt they actually will leave us. The allegedly Reverend Al was back on MSNBC Wednesday morning. Maybe he booked a late flight or something. Maybe he hasn’t finished packing, but I have a feeling he’s going to stick around. If I’m wrong, I hope he pays the millions he owes the IRS before leaving.

In his Veteran’s Day post, columnist Mark Steyn wrote: “This week American universities, now among the most expensive yet worthless institutions on the planet, have held mass ‘cry-ins’ to protest Tuesday's election. At the University of Michigan, sufferers from PTSD (Post-Trumptastic Stress Disorder) were consoled with Play-Doh and coloring books. Can you imagine any of the teenagers who stormed the beaches of Normandy - boys who were men, and often five, six, seven years younger than today's elderly ‘students' - agreeing to participate in anything so ostentatiously self-indulgent as a 'cry-in' followed by free Play-Doh?”

No, I cannot, but as our new Nobel laureate Bob Dylan put it: “The times, they are a-changin’.”

Left and Right

You could call it the “Wayne’s World” of politics. Every other Wednesday, I go to the Valley Vision studio in North Conway, New Hampshire and argue politics for an hour with a liberal named Gino. We call the show “Left and Right” but I keep suggesting we call it “Right and Wrong” instead. Gino doesn’t agree. Each episode runs over and over in different time slots for two weeks until we tape another. Only people who subscribe to the local Time Warner Cable franchise can watch it on channel three, and we have no idea how many tune in. I think my mother would, but she has a satellite dish.

Gino and I are both political junkies who keep up on issues of the day. Each of us keeps notes on whatever is happening to bring up on the show, but I have an advantage: I used to be a liberal and I remember how I thought back then when I was young and foolish. Gino, however, was never a conservative. It would be accurate to say that I’m a personification of the adage: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re forty, you have no brain.”

Churchill's biographers say they can't find the quote, but someone said it.

The left/right dichotomy has strongly influenced my life for decades. When I was teaching in the public schools, my history textbooks were slanted liberal. I provided balance by offering a conservative point of view to contrast the book’s perspective. Lately I’ve been teaching a group of ten home-schooled, high school-age students in Auburn with whom I’m doing something I’ve always wanted to try: using both a liberal text and a conservative text, and assigning them readings on a particular period in history from two perspectives. Each student has “A People’s History of the United States” by the late Howard Zinn - a closet communist. They also have “A Patriot’s History of the United States” by Schweikart and Allen. I’ve got students only once a week for two hours, and we cannot cover too much in one year, but it’s very instructive to compare and contrast the two points of view. Authors of both books claim to be unbiased, but neither Zinn nor Schweikart, nor Allen are of course. Neither am I, but I try to be. No one is really, but we should keep our minds open.

When I started teaching in 1975, I was pretty far to the left. After dropping out of college in 1972, I worked with liberals in John Kerry’s failed congressional campaign in the Massachusetts 5th district that year. I also worked with “community organizer” disciples of Saul Alinsky and Noam Chomsky in Lowell, Massachusetts. After all that I went back to school to become a teacher and began my long metamorphosis from left to right. When I first started publishing columns in 1989, I was still straddling the fence. By about 1993, however, I had become a full-fledged conservative.

Around that time, I began publishing regular weekly columns for local newspapers in which I expressed my opinions without reserve. Many readers on the left assumed I taught my history classes the same way I wrote my columns. At first, they wrote letters to the editor suggesting I was unfit to teach and these were published frequently. Several leftists went further by trying to influence principals, superintendents, school boards, and state teacher licensing agencies to discipline me, silence me, or pull my teaching certification. By the time I retired, I had amassed quite a paper trail documenting their efforts.

For the past three years, I’ve been working on and off writing a book about this, being careful to get it all down as it happened. Last month, I thought, “Okay, I’m done. It’s all down there in black and white.” I printed it off, made some copies, and asked friends to read it with the condition that they be ruthless in their feedback. Well, that feedback is trickling in and I’m thinking maybe I’m not all done. Looks like I need to expand it. Some suggest I add more on what caused me to move from left to right. Others said it reads too much like “just the facts, ma’am” written by a detective or a reporter, and I need to put in more about what it felt like as events unfolded.

Then there’s the business of book publishing. It’s not like publishing columns, except that both are changing rapidly. The more I look into it, the more I realize how much I still have to learn. It looks like I may have been premature when I announced on the “Left and Right” show that my book about moving from left to right was finished. It was hard enough to get down what happened. Now I’m going to have to write about my feelings? That’s not something I’m used to or very good at either, but it appears to be still another thing I have to learn.

We're The Needy Ones Now

Missionaries from Africa are working here in Maine. What does that say about us? Well, we need missionaries to bolster our faith because it’s waning. Yes, we used to send missionaries to Africa because they were more in need than we were, but that situation has reversed. There’s a critical shortage of priests here in Maine, but not in Africa — or not in western and central Africa where Father Innocent Okozi had been working. Now he lives in Bridgton, Maine where he is pastor of St. Joseph Parish, which includes St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in nearby Fryeburg where I attend, as well as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta Parish, which includes St. Catherine of Sienna Church in Norway, Maine, Our Lady of Ransom Church in Mechanic Falls, and St Mary Church, Oxford, ME, which is open only during the summer. 

When I grew up in suburban Boston in the fifties and sixties, our parish alone had half a dozen priests. Now one has to cover multiple parishes here in Maine, even while church buildings are being closed down and sold off all over the state. Young men in New England and in other, more liberal parts of our country are reluctant to devote their lives to the priesthood compared to former times. Seminaries have few applicants. That’s not as much of a problem in conservative Catholic dioceses in the midwest and south, but here the shortage has reached critical levels.

Last month I had an opportunity to talk to Father Innocent about this and other topics. “There was a time when Europe and America used to send a lot of priests to Africa. That was a time when there was a vocation boom on this side,” he said. “And now, Africa is enjoying a similar thing.” Some bishops in Africa are reluctant to send their priests out, but if the Church in Rome looks at its worldwide situation, there’s more of a shortage in the United States than elsewhere, except Europe, which faces a more acute shortage than the United States.

Father Innocent cites two reasons for the shortage: families have fewer children and “their priorities have changed, a lot.” There is less openness to the spiritual life among baby boomers, but the generation following them is seeking that out more, he said. “Because they grew up in a [spiritual] vacuum?” I asked. “Exactly,” he said. Let’s hope he’s right about that.

Father Innocent baptizing my twin grandsons Luke and Henry Lowell

He came to Maine originally for pre-doctoral work in psychology at UMO, the University of Maine Orono, and checked in with the Bishop in Portland as a courtesy. Soon he was filling in at masses in different parishes and, when he finished his studies, then-Bishop Malone asked him to stay on. He and another Nigerian priest, Father Samuel Madza, SMA were both assigned to Bridgton and Norway, with Father Innocent as Pastor. Father Innocent baptized my twin grandsons last year and Father Sam presided over my nephew’s funeral shortly after.

Father Sam at my nephew Owen's funeral last April

Christians are persecuted by radical Muslims in Nigeria. Most of the world first became aware of Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram when they kidnapped 200 girls from their school in northern Nigeria last April. The name “Boko Haram" means “western education is forbidden” in Hausa language. The girls have since been sold into slavery or forced to “marry” terrorists. It’s actions are very similar to those of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, with whom the United States had recently gone to war.

According the Gatestone Institute, “in the last four years alone, approximately 1,000 Christian churches have been destroyed by Boko Haram and its Muslim sympathizers in a nation that is approximately half Christian half Muslim.” According to Human Rights Watch, Boko Haram killed 2053 Nigerian Christians just in 2014.

Father Innocent was born the oldest of eight children. As he was studying for the priesthood during the late 1980s and early 1990s in southern Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire respectively, his family moved to the Borno State in Northern Nigeria, which has since become a major hotbed for Boko Haram depredations. His father was transferred there by the automobile dealer he worked for and his mother worked in the restaurant industry. Father Innocent visited them during his Christmas vacation and witnessed firsthand what was then just developing.

Boko Haram Leader

A local Muslim boy was interested in one of his younger sisters, who invited him to a Christmas service. His father was a local leader. As Father Innocent described it: “[If he attended] not only would [his family] disown him, some family members may poison him.” Then Father Okozi’s mother was warned by the meat sellers from whom she purchased beef for her restaurant that radical Muslims were planning to poison the meat, knowing that Christians purchased a lot of it during Christmas. Then there were plots to attack Catholics as they left midnight masses on Christmas Eve. Shortly thereafter, his family moved away from Borno State to a safer part of the country. “When I read about [what’s going on now], I thank God they moved before things got worse,” he said.

Borno State Nigeria

It’s ironic that priestly vocations are booming where Christians are persecuted, and waning where they’ve gotten complacent.

Back At It, My Way This Time

People ask if I miss teaching. Up to very recently I’ve said, “Sometimes, but the feeling goes away quickly.” I do miss it though. When I had autonomy in my classroom, which I did up to retirement, teaching was a very gratifying experience. But the federal government has been taking over more and more of public education and it became apparent that I would soon lose my academic freedom and be forced to teach the way “progressives” (a misnomer, that) would dictate. Then there are increased meetings and more meaningless paperwork that accompany increased federal intervention.

People who consider themselves progressive - a euphemism for liberal - have long been in charge of academia at every level. Most recently, they’ve consolidated their control over curriculum for US History - the subject I taught - by issuing a new exam for AP US History courses. We cannot see the new exam though. According to Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “a complete sample exam has been released, although only to certified AP U.S. History teachers [who] have been warned, under penalty of law and the stripping of their AP teaching privileges, not to disclose the content of the new sample AP U.S. History Exam to anyone.”

During my career, most states mandated that US History be taught at 5th, 8th, and 11th grades. Students were required to pass it in order to receive a high school diploma. By issuing the new exam, the College Board will changing the way it can be taught at all levels. Kurtz claims: “the new AP U.S. History Exam is about to entrench a controversial and highly politicized national school curriculum without proper notice or debate. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and a full understanding of our founding principles are on the way out.  Race, gender, class, and ethnicity are coming in, all in secrecy and in clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantee that education remain in control of the states.”

Many of the same people who brought you Common Core are bringing this. It’s not a shock to me because the handwriting had been on the wall for years, and it’s the primary reason I took early retirement at sixty. It has also been obvious to homeschooling parents. A group of them in Auburn, Maine contacted me over the summer to ask if I’d be willing to teach their children a US History course in which the Judeo-Christian values inherent in America’s founding would be emphasized rather than played down. In other words, would I be willing to teach a course to high schoolers in the traditional way? At first I thought, “Nah, I don’t have time.” Then I pondered it for a week and agreed to at least sit down and discuss it, and to pitch an idea I’ve always wanted to try.

It first occurred to me several years ago when the principal told me to pick a new textbook for my US History course because the old ones were falling apart. Every text I examined was boring because they all avoided controversial subjects. And, they all had a leftist bias. Instead of buying one of the boring, contemporary, liberal texts for nearly $50 apiece, I proposed purchasing two books for each student, which together cost less than half of one mainstream textbook. The first was the Marxist Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The second was Schweikart and Allen’s “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” which was written from a traditional, conservative perspective and formatted as an antithesis to Zinn’s book. Students would read passages from each on the same theme, then compare and contrast the opposing viewpoints presented. The principal nixed the idea, however, saying, “You could do that, but you’re retiring in a few years. Whoever replaces you wouldn’t likely have the knowledge or experience to pull it off. So, let’s go with a traditional textbook.”

Meeting with the parents, I emphasized that if their children enrolled in typical public or private universities, they’d be surrounded by people who see US History the way Zinn did - from an exclusively left-wing perspective. They would need to understand that pervasive viewpoint and be able to formulate critical analyses - in their own minds, at least. They won't likely be allowed to actually produce such critical analyses in research papers however. Instructors and administrators who celebrate diversity on college campuses today believe only in diversity of skin color or ethnicity. They discourage diverse methods of thinking, especially conservative ones. Many are openly hostile to conservative Catholics and my students would need to understand why. One of my charges this year will be to help them with that, and to fortify them intellectually to withstand the special disdain progressives reserve for people like us.

We start next week.

The New America

In spite of my shock and depression over election results, I banged out a short piece titled “Reckoning” the day after the election. It focused on our looming financial disaster and voter ignorance about Obama’s responsibility for it, but there are so many other aspects of this electoral disaster. It showed us so much about what our country has become, and I’ll deal with another part of it here.

Those last three Obama campaign commercials really shook me up. They were appalling, and I thought: “Who would vote for a president whose campaign put these out?” I believed he would be defeated, soundly and deservedly, because Americans were much too decent to approve this sort of thing. They would be as appalled as I was.

But, alas, I was wrong. Obama was reelected.

The commercials were for internet viewers, not for television, and they were detestable. The first featured a young woman with a tattoo on her shoulder saying coyly: “Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy . . . Before, I was a girl. Now, I was a woman. I pulled back the curtain and I voted for Barack Obama.”

I thought: “Wow. The Obama campaign is really misreading the American voter. This is going to backfire on them, big-time.”

But I was wrong. Obama reads America better than I do. How depressing - not because I’m inferior in my perception, but because of what America has become. I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was this bad.

The second, put out by Moveon.org, started innocently enough at a nursing home. “A Message From the Greatest Generation” appeared in text. Then five elderly residents appeared and the camera zoomed in on one: “Marie, 97 years old.” She said she was born during World War I and first voted for FDR in 1940. Then she said: “If your voter suppression throughout this beautiful country enables Romney to oust Barack Obama, we will burn this motherfucker down.”

Then another old lady said: “If the Republicans steal this election, I’m going to track down Mitt Romney and give him the world’s biggest cock-punch . . .” Then she paused and looked to her side saying: “What’s the matter sonny? You never heard that phrase ‘cock-punch’? Hah-hah.” Then she grimaced, held out her hand as if to squeeze something and said: “Right in the nut-sack!”

Then an old man said he was a veteran of World War II and that if their offspring let the Republicans steal the election again, they’re going to look down from heaven and watch them have sex.

There was a sick comedic attempt in this second one, but the third was deadly serious and the most shocking.

In it, a series of young girls begged their mothers: “Please, please, please vote for President Obama. Otherwise, your vote is a vote against me.”

If mothers were to vote for Mitt Romney, they would be voting against their own children, the commercial purports. Why? Presumably because Romney would appoint judges not supportive Roe vs Wade - the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court decision preventing individual states from outlawing abortion. Neither Romney nor Roe are mentioned, but the implication is clear.

Each of the girls depicted, ranging in age from about five-years-old to twenty-something, all beg: “Please make the right choice so that when I grow up, I can still have one.” What each aspires to have, of course, is an abortion. They’re begging their own mothers who didn’t kill them in utero to vote for Obama so they can kill their own babies - who would be their mothers’ grandchildren - when they grow up.

This is what my country has become and it’s why I’m so depressed. I’ve always known there were lots of Americans who think like the people in the commercials, and that their numbers were growing. What I didn’t realize was that they’re already in the majority. America has changed, perhaps irretrievably. The concrete of our Brave New World had set while I wasn’t looking.

My view had always been that when people became cognizant of what we were turning into and why, they would choose to reverse course - but that’s not what last week’s election showed us. Now I realize that most of my countrymen believe it’s wonderful and they want more of it.

The commercials may be repulsive to me, but they’re not to the new majority. They’re not ephemeral zeitgeist. They’re what we are.

Reckoning

    My friend was being too pessimistic - I thought.

    Months ago he said the country will continue its downward slide because those who depend on government have become the majority, and will always vote to keep those government benefits coming no matter what.

    Yes, those people who depend on government for everything are increasing, I acknowledged then, but even most of them weren’t stupid enough to believe those benefits would keep coming forever. They understood the simple arithmetic that we could not continue indefinitely borrowing 42 cents of every dollar we spend. If conservatives only pointed out that - even if we took all the income of the richest Americans - we could only continue funding our nanny state for a few months, people would understand. They’d know the whole thing would collapse if we stayed on the road we’re on and they’d vote for fiscal sanity instead of four more years of President Obama’s pie-in-the-sky promises.

    No they won’t, he said. Most Americans are not that smart, he insisted - and he was right. Tuesday’s results proved him right. They proved me wrong and I have to adjust my thinking.

    The wagon-riders have become the majority. Most Americans don’t want real liberty - the liberty to succeed or fail on their own - they want to remain attached to the government umbilical cord and stay home watching “Dancing With The Stars.”

    For quite a while now, commenters on my blog have been deriding me as out of touch with mainstream Americans. I guess I am. I’ve overestimated the common sense of the average American voter.

    Thirty years ago I got to know a wealthy family as I took care of their property. The matriarch’s grandfather made a fortune in shipping during the late nineteenth century, but by the fourth generation, it was all gone. Rags to riches to rags in four generations. How long has it taken the United States to go from the richest nation in history to the biggest debtor nation in history? About four generations.

    My father-in-law is on his death bed as I write this. He’s a twice-wounded veteran of World War II and went on a morphine drip Tuesday - election day. The family is around his bed waiting for the end.

    What strikes me is how analogous that is to our nation’s condition. We just reelected a president who has promised to continue for another four years with the policies that have increased our national debt by 50% and stagnated our economy. Whereas the family waiting for my father-in-law’s death is fully cognizant that he’s dying, the electorate that put President Obama in for another term Tuesday doesn’t understand that America as we know it is dying too. My father-in-law will be gone inside a week, but our country may limp along for months or even years.

    The fiscal cliff looms for January. That budget problem our government put off dealing with? It’s coming up soon. Does President Obama realize that he’s inheriting a much bigger mess for his second term than he did for his first?

    Who is he going to blame it on this time?

Write, Left, Right

My thousandth column was published sometime this year, not sure exactly when. At about 800 words each, it hasn’t amounted to a million yet; that’ll take another four years if I keep it up. It all started with letters to the editor when I felt strongly about something. Then I published a few opinion pieces in a Catholic weekly newspaper, then a few in a big daily which was first to pay me. In 1992, I began publishing every week and lately I’m asking myself why I keep doing it. The money is nice, but it’s not a lot. Other ventures pay much better.

It’s probably because I write about whatever I want. Mostly it’s been politics and world affairs, or social issues, or history - whatever is most on my mind any given week. Sometimes it’s a personal issue, but there are some personal issues about which I’d like to write but cannot do so publicly because it might hurt others, or because I haven’t come to enough resolution on them to make any sense in print. Should they resolve themselves, they’ll likely emerge here.

Various editors have suggested that I write more of this kind of column or that kind, but I’ve resisted, and I guess that answers my question. I only write what I feel like writing, and I’m likely to continue as long as I can do that.

Early left-winger days

When I started in the mid-to-late 1980s, I was still pretty liberal. If I’d stayed that way, I would likely have gotten bigger checks because most big dailies are liberal, but I changed. I was moving right while New England was moving left. Readership diminished. I’m still changing, and don’t expect to stop until I stop breathing.

Ira Rubenzahl, one of the Alinskyites I worked with in the 70s today.

An old friend from Massachusetts happened upon my blog last year and was shocked that I’m so conservative now. We both worked a couple of years with Saul Alinsky, red diaper baby “community organizers” in the early ‘70s. He’s still a proud leftist and loyal Democrat. He didn’t ask me why I’d changed, and I didn’t ask him why he hasn’t. Perhaps we’ll discuss it someday.

Alan Solomont, another of the Alinskyites I worked with in the 70s today.

Until fairly recently, I felt ashamed of my left-wing activities in those days, but I realize now they were essential to constructing my world view of today, especially now that my country is being run by the kinds of people I worked with then. It’s not just the president and secretary of state, it’s thousands of bureaucrats, judges, and other functionaries appointed over the years. I understand how they think.

Liberal, anti-nuclear-activist days

To sum up a few of the differences between them and me within an 800-word, op-ed column, generalizations are necessary, so here goes:

They’re nihilists. I’m a theist. They believe the universe happened by itself. And humans? A few chemicals mixed together in a primordial sea and became a cell which reproduced and evolved into us. There’s no meaning, so don’t waste time looking for any. The laws of physics are absolute and nothing else exists. I believe God created it all and He is absolute. Laws of physics are secondary instruments of His spiritual will.

They’re relativists. I’m not. I believe in objective truth, but since I’m as flawed as every other human, I perceive it imperfectly.

They’re utopian. I’m not. There can be no perfect society this side of heaven. My former Alinsky associates think they can manifest utopia with big government. Mine is a tragic view. That is, we can never achieve perfect happiness in this life. The best we can expect is episodes. As government grows, those episodes become fewer and farther between.

They’re atheistic, or, at best, agnostic. I’m Christian. More so, I’m a Catholic Christian. My church is the oldest, continually-functioning institution on earth, but it’s imperfect too because it’s comprised of flawed humans like me.The recent conservative me at CPAC with Erik Erickson of Redstate.com

Both Communism and Nazism have been manifestations of their thinking. That the Catholic Church and capitalism were enemies of both is not coincidental. The 20th century was dominated by the struggle between and among these competing belief systems. Hundreds of millions died and that struggle continues, smoldering, into the 21st. Neither Communism nor Nazism are dead. Both had been in remission, but are re-emerging in parts of the body politic with ubiquitous application if Alinskyite euphemism.

Even when I was a leftist, however, I was pro-life, although today that would be considered oxymoronic. I always knew abortion kills innocent human beings. Abortion epitomizes the leftist, nihilist, atheist, utopian mindset. Protecting it is the primary objective of today’s Democrat Party. Redistribution of wealth and income is second. Big government is their vehicle for both. The November election will be pivotal to the continuing struggle.Writing this column - putting ideas into logical sequences of sentences and paragraphs each week - helps me work all this out. I do it more for myself than for you, my readers.

The Laptop Is Mightier Than The Tank

If the pen is mightier than the sword, the laptop is approaching omnipotence. Instantaneous flow of information changes our world so fast it’s hard to keep up. The power and scope of the internet is enormous and growing. It may have originated with government research decades ago, but it has grown so rapidly because government has had nothing to do with it since. It’s not clear how long that will continue though because we’re witnessing how vulnerable governments are around the world when citizens are informed. Their control over what citizens know or don’t know is diminishing fast.And it’s not just in the Middle East. Two years ago at this time, nobody in the United States ever heard of the Tea Party, but in about eighteen months it virtually took over the US House of Representatives. The United States government, however, is not so vulnerable compared to middle eastern dictatorships. Thanks to the First Amendment, we’ve always had a free press. Americans have been as informed as they wanted to be and our media has tended to keep government relatively honest throughout most of our history. Ours is a government designed to be responsive to the will of its citizenry - especially the US House of Representatives and state houses.

Here the internet threatens the mainstream media, which has become entrenched and complacent with a profound left-of-center bias. Lately, they have tended to protect politicians who share their political perspective, like Bill Clinton and the current White House resident. After wielding their power to depict George W. Bush as a moron and anointing his successor, Barack Obama, as a savior, the mainstream media ignored the Tea Party movement for about six months, then tried to portray it as an angry mob. It grew anyway, however, because the MSM no longer controls what the public knows or doesn’t know.

The New York Times’ motto has been: “All the news that’s fit to print” - the news its editors believed was fit to propagate, that is. Every evening, the alphabet networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasted pretty much what the Times printed on its front page - no more and no less. Today, however, people can find out whatever they want online and they do. They can also spread that information around to their friends and associates via email and social networks.

So, when Democrat congresspeople went home to their districts in the summer of 2009 and conducted “town hall” gatherings as they always had, they didn’t find the usual sleepy meetings where they could shake hands and renew acquaintances. Citizens had informed themselves about President Obama’s proposed health care bill and they asked questions the representatives could not answer. They knew more about the bill than their representatives did. They recorded congressional ignorance on video and put it on Youtube where it “went viral” as the expression goes, and most of those congresspeople were voted out last November in a conservative, Tea Party tsunami.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi never knew what hit her. She’d heard about the crowds her minions were encountering in their home districts back in 2009. She sensed how nervous they were too, but she insisted those crowds did not represent a grass-roots uprising of concerned citizens as her fellow Democrats suspected. She called the boisterous, town-hall gatherings “astroturf” as if they were rent-a-crowds ginned up by Republicans. Not recognizing that a new political phenomenon was emerging, she thought it was politics as usual and rammed Obamacare through her chamber. She found how wrong her assessment had been when she became the former Speaker of the House.

And it’s not just Congress. The Tea Party voted out governors and state legislatures across America and the new ones have started cutting government in formerly-Democratic enclaves like Wisconsin. The Democrats’ core constituencies - bloated, overpaid, arrogant, out-of-touch government unions are on the ropes and getting pummeled. Union demonstrators are the “astroturf” Pelosi thought she was seeing two years ago. Unions turned out their troops in Wisconsin, Indiana and elsewhere to protest state budget cuts and they were getting paid to do so by taxpayers. Public-sector parasites called in sick at their schools and civil service jobs and had tantrums at state capitols - hoping to keep the taxpayer money-spigot flowing.

Tea Party taxpayers showed up to counter-protest at their own expense. They paid to be there and realized that they were paying for the other side to be there too. They were even paying for the publicly-funded doctors who wrote phony sick notes to shield teachers from accountability in their districts.

Thanks to the internet, the Tea Party understood that they were funding public employees who don’t work as hard as they do, who have more job security than they do, who make more money than they do, who have a better medical plan than they do, who have more generous pension benefits than they do, and who pay less for it all than they do. President Obama supports his public-employee-union constituents and the mainstream media depicts them as sympathetically as possible, but it’s not working the way it used to. Citizens aren’t buying it. Why? They have their own sources of information now.

Old political play books have to be re-written everywhere. The internet is changing everything. The laptop is king.