List of 24 Weird Things
These things are weird. They’re all related to historic preparedness, mostly via Obama and Missus Clinton, to change the world, along with a big swell of “the desire to appear good.” The liberal tide of spreading hate began taking a visible form many years-ago, though the visible parts were difficult, if not impossible, to connect to any nefarious purpose, and were always cloaked as “doing good.” These things are all generally unprecedented.
American schools started teaching that “sex” is not the right word when talking about “sex.” Instead, other than very few purposes, the word “gender” suddenly became “correct,” for no reason at all. When I was in school, sex was used to describe if a person or animal was male or female, and “gender” would be incorrect. Any schoolteachers I polled on Quora or elsewhere talked about this as if it were never different, as if sex was never the right word, despite books filled with the previously-correct usage of the word.
They told us sex doesn’t matter when you pull your pants down, making bathrooms cross-“gender.” This was probably uncomfortable for 99% of humans, American or not. It was unexplained, and considered by most to be a strange problem they hoped their children never have to run into. I can’t imagine anyone thinking this was a good idea. By now (this started years-ago), the only places “sex” is a word, is to describe something as “unisex” or (of course) in the increasingly useful phrase “sexual ambiguity.”
In the past, my whole life, when constructing prose, the word “he” could be used as a general-use personal pronoun, in a sentence like “No-one wants to have his writing criticized!” Today, it has to be “his or her,” though in my opinion that’s a waste of ink, as everyone already knew what I was saying, and it was not incorrect. In the future, I imagine a dog will no longer be “man’s best friend.” It’ll have to be “person’s.” I say “woof” to all of it!
School shootings. These are still curious to me. While some events like this could be considered caused by a disgruntled member of society, the only similar occurrences were snipers on college campuses. Before the Coronavirus emptied schools, America was experiencing an unusual trend of repeated high school shootings.
ISIS disappeared. I follow news, but am not an expert on Isis. Where did they go? To a non-expert like me, it seems the terrorist group Isis disappeared completely when Obama left office. It’s easy to remember the group being at the top of the extremely nasty news daily when Obama was in office.
Being “progressive” means both being weird and racist. During my lifetime, Pee Wee Herman and Mister Rogers were considered a little weird. The progression has been toward transvestite celebrities like Rupaul being honored and glamorized. We have taught children to be tolerant, to the point of considering an honest approach to comedy like we saw in Archie Bunker (the classic bigot) and George Jefferson (black man done good) a bad thing, to the point where open-mindedness is bad, its head put on a chopping block. During most of my lifetime, discrimination was easy to understand, and Joe Biden promising to pick a “black person” as a presidential running mate would clearly have been seen for what it is, discrimination. Today, that dynamic is turned on it’s head so far Donald Trump, who probably only needs someone good at the job, promised to nominate “a woman” for the Supreme Court. While in the past promising to hire someone based on their sex would clearly be wrong, today he would probably be chastised for not doing it. This is a great example of a hidden agenda; it’s a dangling piece of a bigger puzzle.
Elective surgery to change someone’s sex, including breast enhancement and cosmetic surgeries, even what appears sometimes to be tattoo addiction, have all risen dramatically in popularity, and considered acceptable for young people. Experimentation with sexuality, particularly lesbianism, has never been more common.
Technology has lent a hand in changing how people live. One of the most damaging side-issues isn’t devious, but conveniently supports the division of society we’re experiencing. It’s easy to see, a computer on Facebook is an easy way to insult someone without having to face them. This could also have been done in the past, by telephone or mail … but not so easily PUBLICLY. Through social media and video, libel and slander are so commonplace it’s quickly become impossible to determine what’s what, or to police.
Blaming older people. This is completely new. This is the complete opposite of what we were taught in school. We were taught history, and to learn from it, so as not to repeat the bad parts. We were taught to respect our elders. There’s a strong and disturbing trend, taught in schools, to challenge older people and blame them for everything.
Political correctness. This is the bane of the entire world’s society. Political correctness is based on the incorrect premises that people are intrinsically bad and what you’re thinking right now is probably wrong. It’s an insult to intelligence. Humans will never succeed at creating a master plan for politeness, because politeness is an in-the-moment matter of opinion. Combined with less in-person communication, political correctness does nothing good, while constantly threatening to make anything and everything bad. Political correctness is “very” wrong.
The great accomplishments of all men and women suffer when we try to contain some good as different than other good. Good deeds done by a black person are no better than those done by any other person. The balance needed to learn about each other, with tolerance and curiosity, has been thrown out like a baby with the bathwater, in a dim and uninspired, cheap-shot attempt to “appear” to be good. Being good is not something one human does better than another, nor does one human have the right to adjust or judge what I think is right. The law takes care of that.
We are not in a major war, though the US is present in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. President Trump entered and completed four years in office without starting a war. It’s been nearly a tradition for the US to get involved in a major new conflict when a re-election is upcoming, which isn’t happening (actually, the opposite is).
We had A US President who is not proud of the United States. In Obama, this unusual characteristic was seen for the first time, shrugged off by the media and generally ignored. Obama is known for having apologized for the United States, and in photos is seen refusing to salute the US flag. Very strange!
Intolerance along political party lines. The tradition in America, famously, is healthy discussion, followed by handshakes and maybe dinner. The change has been hard to watch, and the media has become famous for leading the charge for intolerance. Those who claim to be tolerant are usually seen as the worst offenders. Far beyond a battle of personalities, the media has strongly reinforced an attitude of intolerance in the US to a degree never seen, a dynamic that’s caused Americans to be misinformed and America to look very different to other nations.
Embracing of Chinese business by American taxpaying businesses. Amazon is at the forefront of the growth of retail business worldwide. Beyond paying taxes in the US, the company is not US-loyal. Amazon has catered unflinchingly to extremely aggressive Chinese marketing, resulting in good, well-made American goods being impossible to find on the Amazon platform, while Chinese small businesses have flooded the platform with cheap no-name products, strongly stifling any efforts US companies had to compete worldwide. The US has never had a one-stop-shop-from-home entity like Amazon, nor a US-based business that was less interested in supporting the US economy. Even Walmart posed as patriotic.
Ease of information consumption. This has become a problem when easy-to-read and easy-to-access lists of news stories available from places like Yahoo and Google, under the guise of being unbiased (which historically was the norm), show only a select number of stories approved by news agencies (including Yahoo) to discredit one party and lean far in one direction, but never the other. Many stories are never seen, but many more are never written. It’s astounding to see John Roberts from Fox repeatedly ignoring what White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany says in a televised press conference. Ten years ago Roberts would have been considered unfit to be anywhere near a news terminal. Today his ignorant positioning, clearly intended to create an “alternate story,” the polar opposite of the truth, is not covered by any news organization. While Fox makes these moves seemingly intentionally, the innocent news consumer is just trying to save time, but as a result every person interested in American politics is being made a fool by news reports that don’t tell the truth.
Telling people they’re “part of the problem.” You can do this all you want, but you will have no listeners. How clever it sounds, but just like political correctness (see above), the trend to tell others how to live will never be popular; it’s the opposite of open-mindedness and the statement relies on an unbending egoistic premise. I suspect this kind of phrase is only used when the protagonist has no ammunition for his argument. The idea of being strongly arrogant mixed with vagueness and lack of substance has gotten a strange sort of momentum.
Forgetting history and toppling historic memorials. Clearly pure criminal activity with no moral message. This activity shows lawlessness, and should be treated as such. None of the antagonists were present, I’m sure, at the many meetings where installing the statue or memorial was discussed. The impulsive need to “correct” a wrong of the past which no living person was a part of is misplaced anger, not protesting.
Antifa and disrespect for the US military. These things never proliferated in the past, not to the the widespread degree they exist today. Some of the issues may be eternal, but the mechanisms used by thug groups to do nothing but disrupt society have been contained in the past. Riots going on for months is unprecedented and unnecessary. Any “good” message, truthfully any message at all, was lost in noise and fire a long time ago.
Acceptance of communism. US history is full of anti-communist energy. When I was younger, you’d be arrested if you were Bernie Sanders. That’s not even an exaggeration. Anyone suspected of being friendly with a communist was potentially considered one himself, and Sanders, today, once a hopeful to be a Presidential candidate, openly admits he’s a communist. It seems no-ones head even turns when founders of “Black Lives Matter” announce they’re “trained Marxists,” and Hillary Clinton has recently been discovered to have colluded with communists in 2016.
Isolation. COVID didn’t do us any favors, but the world had already become more isolated. While workout centers around the world install big acrylic “people dividers,” people will always prefer, and need, to be together in a group. While we can easily take a lesson, do a project or workout via teleconference, it will always feel wrong when the viewer is all alone in his living room, pretending to join a group of others. The idea of convenience through technology continues to seemingly-innocuously threaten the world’s general mental health.
As a society, Americans are falling victim to a not-too-honorable way to express themselves. Free speech has been abducted and hidden, replaced with offensive self-serving, ignorant, shameful and intolerant insulting speech. The punishment in America for slightly offending someone is to immediately, and with the support of the community, offend them “back” much worse. It’s seen as gloriously proud. This is the stepchild of PC. Insulting the President and the American way of life, flag-burning and threats have never been valid expressions of anything, and have been tolerated, dealt with under the law when necessary, but these things have never before been glorified.
Hypocrisy. It’s a trend. Hypocrisy’s always been a part of politics, but today it’s ignored. This is mostly due to the blissfully unaware conspiring news media, who pick and choose what they want to tell us. We have politicians being put forward for only the color of their skin. Democrats like Hillary Clinton have shown us double-talk and how they can intentionally cause confusion by blaming the other party of what they’re doing, as in calling President Trump a racist who colluded with Russia, when it’s now been made clear Trump did nothing, but Hillary colluded with the Russians in 2016. Barack Obama, a past US President, famously doesn’t like the US. The idea of political correctness comes second for the elite who practice to deceive, to convenient altering of the truth, usually to appear “good.” People are wearing masks while hiking alone and riding motorcycles, because they’re caught up in appearing to be “good.” The same people seem to be first to attack anyone they disagree with. It often feels like the cause of good is being done politely and quietly in the background, while we’re forced to watch, over and over again, intolerant people who yell louder than anyone else, telling us we’re all, all of us, wrong. A crowd of thousands of US servicemen (and women) recently attended an event where Joe Biden called them “stupid bastards.” The level of hypocrisy is at an all time high, with Biden, Harris and Pelosi in the lead.
And our President, nominated three times this year for a Nobel Peace Prize, is a racist. That’s America today. If you’re confused, I believe we’re only getting started, so please put on your seatbelt!
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Mark Urso
mark@markursoblog.wpcomstaging.com
@A_Candle_Lit
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