August 11, 2023

Two articles written with a different twist on how they see the country. In my opinion, it is okay to disagree with one or the other – that is how our country is suppose to work. But, what I don’t agree with is when other citizens disparage one or the other writers and want that person removed because they don’t agree with the words. – that is not America.

Differences in opinion are settled at the voting stations – not disparaging someone.

8/6/2023

Reblogged on kommonsentsjane/blogkommonsents.

How She Sees It – Verna Benham

We scarcely recognize our countryfacebook

The America I’ve known most my life is one of easy-going goodwill, practical common sense, can-do spirit, pride in what our country has achieved, responsibility, respect for authority, truthfulness and helpfulness to needy people.

Our news brings endless investigations, wrangling, challenging the legitimacy of the Constitution and Supreme Court and hateful acts revealing a lack of such values. Many of us turn it off, sadly discouraged.

Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative commentator, captures our bewilderment, “The Coup We Never Knew.”

• Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

• Since when did borrowed money not have to be paid back?

• Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices?

• Was some law passed that allowed biological males to compete in women’s sports, shower in their locker rooms?

• When was it decided that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony?

• What happened to the once-trusted FBI?

It really was a coup — a slow, secret one. For more than 60 years, leftist-oriented people have worked steadily, mostly undetected, to change America beyond recognition, a cultural revolution in Western civilization similar to China’s. Their goal was facilitated by Mao’s teachings on re-educating minds.

In “The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left,” Jones of Kings College London and Smith of the Australian War College traced Maoism’s influence on the socialist crowd in European universities, which then migrated to our Ivy League universities and became global. In France, students wore Mao jackets and browsed through his “Little Red Book,” excited by how revolution came to China: “calling teachers black influencers, tearing down monuments and destroying 2,000-year-old Confucian texts.”

As alarming as are destructive acts, Mao’s sinister methods of achieving thought control were worse. To reprogram minds, individuals repeatedly had to report everything in their lives for judgment, afterwards repenting of misdeeds (as defined by Mao). Capturing the inner world — the soul — Mao sought to transform persons into usable tools of the revolution.

Mao also found anger useful: “If you get people enraged, that enables the left to double down.”

Maoist rage is all about permanent division, permanent revolution.

The Epoch Times is running a series of articles, first written in Chinese, then in many languages — English title “Sabotaging Education,” describing Marxist infiltration of all levels of U.S. education. With creation of a federal Department of Education in 1979, leftists entered its bureaucracy to control what was taught and how. Value neutrality was forced on teachers; they were forbidden to teach right and wrong. Increasingly, parents, school districts and state governments were expected to take orders.

Psychological manipulation was used to bring about tolerance of evil, making students think sex, violence, pornography and terror were normal parts of life. Traditional teachings, in both East and West, said sexual conduct should take place only within marriage; it was taboo to speak of it in public. Sex education classes were used to replace such morality with free love. In the ’40s, Kinsey taught that children are sexual beings from birth, to be explicitly educated in every manner of sexual activity, which they did. Sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies rose rapidly.

A self-esteem course called Quest, said to help students make healthy decisions, confused cause and effect. Genuine self-esteem is the outcome of increased abilities and accomplishments. It shouldn’t be expected without good work. Growth in learning lost out to feelings. As “victims,” students felt entitled to good grades. Material was dumbed down, with even less effort required of under-performing students.

In 1976, a four-year study of results from “Decide,” a drug-prevention class, found that students who took it picked up drug use earlier and used drugs more extensively than a control group that didn’t. Why? New and strange content stimulated curiosity. The intent behind such classes was to destroy divine standards and family values — to pollute our children and youth.

It’s amazing to me that a coercive ideology, which favored destruction of the world’s most ancient culture and currently has the creative Chinese people tightly controlled and stifled, had any appeal for our leading universities. Yet, leftist professors and students encouraged its negative spread throughout our educational system — a great loss to quality teaching and excellent achievement by our students — and to morality in the culture.

I applaud those who have resisted this attempt at systemic change. Hopefully, they are many, and they will continue the fight.

Kerrville resident Verna Benham spent 20 years traveling the glob

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I called this coup Democrats/Pelosi’s Jan 6 coup who hired her daughter/son in law to film the event and then a movie would be the result. Did the call for action come when the cannisters were used by the police to attach the protesters?

kommonsentsjane

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Why don’t we recognize our country?
Tim Summerlin Aug 7, 2023 1

My friend Verna Benham wrote recently of changes in America. She senses a shift from responsibility, common sense and character to distrust, wrangling and violence. I suspect that many share these perceptions, regardless of their political beliefs.

However, her column’s analysis of these changes, leaning on one questionable commentator, moves into a familiar litany of the sins of progressivism, suggesting a decades-long coup being carried out almost unnoticed, one analogous to that of Mao Tse Tung’s in China in the 1950s. Politicians and bureaucrats have undermined core values through a “dumbing down” of learning, promotion of sex and violence, and a general subversion of traditional values. These subtle efforts, it appears, have created the nation we can no longer recognize.

Truly, America has changed dramatically since the early post-WW II era when your columnist and I were children, in some ways for the better, some for the worse. In 1950, there were 150 million Americans, 89.5% White and 10% Black, according to the limited demographics of the census. In 2020, there were 330 million, White, Latino, Black, Asian and mixed race, among other categories. In 1950, 57% of the adult pool had a high school degree; 88% did in 2020. Occupations then were grouped basically as business, manufacturing and transportation and agriculture. Today, the information age has shattered our notion of forms of employment, altering it every year. The dichotomy of that Cold War era is more complex globally in our time.

OK, these kinds of facts explain one reason for believing that any Rip Van Winkle going to sleep 70 years ago would be dumbfounded to wake up in our era. But the cultural changes that Benham’s column addressed require us to dig deeper. Has an insidious campaign by the left made us unrecognizable? Progressivism or liberalism has left its mark certainly. But have the slow dismantling of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, all bipartisan but spearheaded by Democrats, really undermined our values, or have they helped fulfill them?

More recent changes associated with same-sex marriage, abortion and LGBT reforms may be more sensitive, touching on religious beliefs, but they have been addressed in vigorous public debate and embraced by Americans who are not the least sinister about seeing such changes as sensible and humane. The more radical left may indeed be as intransigent and self-righteous as the extreme right, but changes such as these do not seem to reflect a covert socialist coup.

Many issues that create uproar are party agnostic. Democrats see spending as the cure for all ills, even if the money is not available. Republicans love tax cuts, but few are willing to reduce the services or expenditures that bloat the budget. Both parties have a mania for impeachment. Both gerrymander to create safe districts for their zealots, though by controlling more state legislatures, Republicans have been more successful. Neither side has much of an answer for immigration issues, although in 2018 a bipartisan Senate group proposed sensible ideas quickly rejected by both sides.

However, the most alarming element of the column — a missing element — is its response to the question “Did someone or something seize control of the United States?” Astonishingly, the article makes no reference to the recent president who denied that he had lost the 2020 election, attempted to have state officials change their election results, tried to coerce his own vice president to act unlawfully, encouraged a mob to descend violently on the Capitol and spoke dismissively of the Constitution.

Frankly, these are all things that make it hard for me to recognize my country.

Ironically, on the same page of the KDT as this column was a letter chastising Rep. Andy Murr for his Ethics Committee’s impeachment of AG Kenneth Paxton. Apparently, chronic dishonesty is less important than party affiliation to the writer.

I say, “Thank you, Andy Murr, for doing something few politicians of any stripe have the courage to do in these strident times — to put integrity first. You help me recognize my country.”