Pravda!

 Pravda!

My wife and I lived with her parents back in the 60s while we were going to South Alabama.  Her father proudly labeled himself a “reactionary”. That was no understatement.  But most of us in the South learn, not only to tolerate, but to love the  things people elsewhere might not understand. Stockholm Syndrome?  He and I learned to tolerate each other and in the end, he told me he loved me.  

But getting there was fractious. There was, for example, the casual remark made by one of our friends that the “Star Spangled Banner” had been a British drinking song. She meant it as an aside.  It wasn't any kind of posturing.  She wasn't even talking to him. He lashed out. How dare she say something like that?  We didn't engage him. It wasn't worth it.  

That memory came back up for me recently with the flap over the student protest at Murphy High School and what was lost in the typical back-and-forth reactions. I congratulated the Murphy students. Others? Not. I assumed it was a Rocky Road-flavored TDS protest; a mixture of different but congruent flavors and nuts. Then I saw someone else’s response that answered the question I thought most germane. Why is the Secretary of Education, an agency that was supposed to be in the process of being dismantled, at Murphy? 

I went to bed last night pondering whether the fact that my feed was blowing up with posts touting the huge success - MILLIONS OF PEOPLE - going to the Turning Point Super Bowl counter-event. Could it be? Probably not. We learn from how groups act to look for what might be hidden, for the agenda, the “truth”. We are part and parcel of the (dis)Information Era. I remind myself; "be wary".

When the students became the only narrative, I set out to underscore what I thought was the salient point: that Linda McMahon is part of a progromme to completely whitewash history; that claims that it is some sort of leftist plot to accurately paint a picture of this country's past; that the Heritage Foundation, Carlisle, Hillsdale, Turning Point and others - the people obsessed with this supposed indoctrination programs like DEI and "wokeism" - were in the process of doing the very same thing and are using shadow techniques like Commission 1776  to sanitize our cultural and political history.  

The outrage over the “War on Christmas”, the inconvenience of  political correctness, the denial of the right of hate speech, got us here. The organizing vehicle was the making of a rump theory like critical race theory into something so worrisome that patriots needed to race to the barricades. THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD! “Our truth.” Pravda! Peddling a line that leaves out the inconvenient facts, that somehow panders to the notion that race and sex discrimination weren’t no big thang, that won't talk, much less discuss, the country's past blemishes because it is somehow "unpatriotic" is, at best, cowardice.  

        McMahon is only the tip of the spear. 

        Yesterday, a Mobile County School Board member posted a picture of himself with Linda McMahon and Bruce Pearl. I posted what I know about Turning Point, about the "1776 Commission", Hillsdale, etc. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because if you don't know, you don't know. “That’s what happens when you don't put educators on school boards,” I thought.  His response was emblematic of this whole issue. The coward erased my comments. If you are a willing accomplice - or perhaps more - in this cultural war, your complaints will ring hollow.

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