Vice vs.Virtue

As Americans, we've got to get our heads straight again. This division promoted by the so-called Progressives as a means to their desired end, that of fundamentally changing the governance of our country, is fundamentally wrong. There is no better governance platform than our representative constitutional democracy-driven Federal Republic. Simply because it is structured to ensure we the people decide its ultimate practice, not some self-appointed autonomous entity or contrived cabal. If one takes the time to read our constitution, they would realize its writers recognized the inadequacies, the biases of all governing forms that preceded it, and provided a composition for the people to prevail in attempts to corrupt it. The Progressives have systematically tried to undo those provisions, intentionally misinterpreting their intent and purpose; through politicization, circumventing the checks and balance of its protocol. We must choose virtue over vise if we are to preserve the dignity of all human life, observe common decency, traditional values, and morals, be united in their support. Be the Americans that only we can be!

The Zeitgeist of the Dissidents

We no longer abhor deviants and dissidents but lionize them; we no longer subscribe to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and self-reliance but entitlements, reparation, welfare, and mob rule. Social disorder has run amuck in our cities. We are encouraging lawlessness, racism, and insurrection in our actions and inactions. Covid caused us to disengage, become islands unto ourselves, insensitive to the division and chaos engulfing our country, worst tolerant of it! It's no longer a question of civil rights but right and wrong-,one of law and order. Once known or suspected inadequacies in our governance were debated and resolved in legislation and courts of law, not taken to the streets in violence and vengeance. That was not the way of our American representative republic but that of Banana Republics. We are regressing!

Irrational

Those that feel they can extort favor by threatening violence are only to incite disfavor and violence in return. The Black Community best take heed of the MLK teachings than that of the BLM extortionist. It is beyond me why those creditable spokespersons and champions of our Black brethren’s civil rights, and there are many, are not being heard above the din of the likes of Sharpton and Waters. See, the make-up, rhetoric, and antics of their supposed, taken to the street’s protesters, turn to burning, looting mobs, and saying they represent their civil rights movement? These are not my Black peers, colleagues, and friends. And, those thought to be privileged Whites preaching Americans are Systemic Racists having no basis for their provocative claims yet persist in spewing this false narrative to further inflame Race relationships We persist in being irrational.

Instructions Please.

I'm so weary of the doom and gloom purveyors attesting: If Covid doesn't get you, the Russians or the Chinese will, or heaven forbid we should run amuck of the violent anarchist and malcontents roaming our streets creating disorder. We all know who these purveyors are, none other than our elected politicians their public servant minions and the medium talking heads. The rhetoric is endless, repeated ad nauseam with never suggesting alternative countermeasures to mitigate or avail. Enough of the inflammatory observations and hand wringing; give us instructions of what to do, how to get out of this quagmire of despair and foreboding. Be specific; walk the walk!

It Is All In One's Perspective.

I ponder the effect of someone revered and respected in our Black community who would dare to stand up and say: All lives matter. Advise: Police shoot more white people than Black people. 70% of all Black children are born out of wedlock. More Black babies are aborted than are born. Disproportionately Black people commit more crimes than their White counterparts. Black people perpetrate the major portion of crimes committed against Black people. Does anyone refute these statistics? Does anyone not feel these statistics suggest a systemic problem within the Black community and should be addressed? Yes, we all should be judged on who we are not what we are. However, prejudice exists to one degree or another against all races, as it applies to one degree or another to all religions, nationalities, gender, and whatever and whomever; it’s the human condition. It's not exclusive to any of us who are different in mind, body, or spirit for whatever reason we so deem ourselves different. We’ve got to get over ourselves and move forward, overcoming whatever adverse circumstances might challenge us BUT in consideration of what's best for all of us, for whatever, we are all in this together. Where have the likes of Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall spokespersons of civil rights gone only to be replaced by race-baiters Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters?

Will We Ever Learn?

Shouldn’t some ”RINOS” retain a modicum of fiscal responsibility instead of condoning the most massive tax and spend policies in 60 years? Doesn't anyone remember Boston’s “Big Dig” or Obama’s“ Shovel Ready Projects”? Are you all suffering from “McCain disease,” an affliction that only affects Republicans who, after years of service to the right, suddenly feel obligated to reach across the aisle and compromise with the steadfastly progressive left? It never ends well.

Don't Be Politically Naive!

Trust and integrity, we all know, one without the other, is the antithesis of any form of social intercourse. Politicians, however, take exception to that postulate in adapting a variation on the theme. Spin, the altering of the truth, if not outright falsifying supposedly prevailing facts-, a staple of the practicing politician, but presenting them in a shroud of subterfuge to favor their agenda. Not all of them mind you, but the vast majority of the rank and file unscrupulous in the ruse, shamelessly repeating a deception of the truth with such vitriol and repetitiveness to the point of garnering believers. I urge you to take nothing of consequence in the realm of politics for granted without first verifying it from unbiased sources. Don't be politically lazy as well as naive!

The Olympic Woke Movement

The US Olympic Committee in December issued a statement that paved the way for using the Olympics as a platform for protests by deciding that athletes “will not be sanctioned for peacefully and respectfully demonstrating in support of social justice causes”.  Here we go. Doubling down, they recently issued guidelines for what will and will not be allowed at the Olympic games that will be held this year in Japan, after having been postponed one year due to the pandemic. Athletes will be allowed to “raise their fists”at the start line or podium, or “kneel during the national anthem”.  They will also allow wearing hats or facemasks with political phrases like “Black Lives Matter” or words like “equality” or “justice”.  Not allowed are hate symbols as defined by the Anti-Defamation League or any actions that would prevent other athletes from competing, such as obstructing the field of play.  Apparently the 9-page document defines acceptable demonstrations as having to involve “advancing racial and social justice; or promoting human dignity of individuals or groups that have historically been underrepresented, minoritized, or marginalized in their respective social context.”  They also amusingly provide a disclaimer of sorts, stating that the Olympic organization cannot prevent third parties from making “statements or taking actions of their own”, although based on current trends in corporate America, it would seem unlikely that any corporate sponsor would risk the backlash of withdrawing financial support from any athlete that has done an effective job of portraying themselves as a victim of racial inequities.  

 

Recall, gone are the days when top Olympic athletes in this country toiled in obscurity, maintaining their amateur status by subsidizing their athletic training with conventional employment on the side.  Professional athletes have been able to compete in every Olympic sport since 1986. Today’s upper echelon of Olympic athletes, the ones that will have an opportunity to use the podium as a platform, have cash rained down on them from wealthy benefactors, well-funded government organizations, and multi-national corporations. Many compete on professional circuits for prize money and are rewarded handsomely for product endorsements. High profile Olympic athletes have done well financially with Snowboarder Shaun White amassing some $20M from endorsements and sponsoring events. Bode Miller, the renegade alpine skier, accumulated some $8M from endorsements, and Ted Liggety, another alpine skier raked in $2M in endorsement deals, prize money and business ventures. According to Sports Management Degree Hub, corporations may sponsor entire teams rather than just one individual athlete, making many athletes’ gear resemble a NASCAR-like patchwork of corporate logos.  Swimmer Ryan Lochte was reportedly receiving some $2.3M from multiple sponsors, with clauses based on medal performance.  And apparently not on conduct.  And the US Olympic Committee itself is big business, making over $625M annually from broadcast rights and another $120M from corporate sponsors.  This enables them to reward Olympic athletes with what is essentially prize money for winning medals, with $25 thousand for gold, $15 thousand for silver and $10 thousand for a bronze.  Again referencing Sports Management Degree Hub; some companies may “partner with the USOC to participate in the Olympic Job Opportunities Program, pay[ing] full-time salaries and benefits to (Olympic) athletes while allowing them to work part-time.” Granted, the top athletes fare well while the bottom tiers still struggle to make ends meet, particularly in the lesser known sports and those that don’t command prime time television spots.  The top ten runners in the world can earn $100K or more annually although there is a precipitous drop in earning power as the rankings fall. Sprinter Usain Bolt reportedly raked in $31M in 2019 alone.  But only 20% of the top 10 track and field athletes make over $50K annually says the Hub, with over 50% making less than $15K annually from their athletic pursuits, requiring income from another vocation. Obviously lesser known athletes competing in sports such as fencing, curling, biathlon, and the shooting sports are going to be in a league with the bottom tiers of the more well known Olympic sports like track, skiing and cycling.  

 

But that brings me to my point.  After years of sacrifice why should an athlete’s breakthrough podium moment be marred by some self-aggrandizing superstar creating a spectacle with a social justice warrior display at the awards ceremony? And even the opposite is true: will lesser-knownathletes in lesser-known sports seek to gain the spotlight by engaging in a garish display of woke protest?  Will the third place finisher draw the cameras away from the patriotic gold medalist because of a fist-in-the-air salute and a BLM T-shirt? It is unfortunate, but we know how the media will respond.  They will heap praise and attention on the racial and social justice display to the detriment of what the Olympics is all about: sportsmanship and competing to represent your country.  Who hasn’t witnessed the emotional podium appearances of our female Olympic gymnasts, after years of grueling training, parents bawling in the stands while the little pixies finally get their tear-filled moment in the sun, proudly standing with hand on heart as the Stars and Stripes is hoisted to the rafters to the strains of the Star Spangled Banner?  Chokes me up every time.  Is that Olympic moment, like so many other standards of decorum, going to be cast aside and, in essence, be sacrificed for the cause? Has the USOC even consulted the NBA?  When the NBA decided to pacify their overpaid egomaniac stars, and that BLM and virtue signaling was more important than public opinion, viewership plummeted. Revenue followed. The NFL had a similar experience.  Why then, would you take the most revered of international sporting events, aside from soccer’s World Cup, perhaps the greatest source of national pride in sports, and turn it into a platform for disgruntled pampered athletes to display their woke social activism?  Disgusting. It will be an interesting experiment given the polling numbers that show the protests are not well received by the public. Will the networks respond by not showing medal ceremonies?  Will the rather loose guidelines by the USOC allow athletes to push the envelope with displays of wokeness extending onto the field of play? Will this be largely an American phenomenon, making us appear as the egocentric, ugly Americans that the rest of the world already thinks we are? We shall see.  For me, the first self-centered, disrespectful display and I’m out, relegating the Olympic games to my ever-expanding trash bin of sporting events I will no longer watch. And my bet is I’m not alone. 

Hypocrisy Redux

Having just read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, outlining the absurd woke posturing of corporate social warriors Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola in denouncing Georgia for passing legislation to shore up voting regulations, it came as no surprise to hear NPR still clinging to the same progressive vitriol as corporate America 24 hours later.  Claims of a reduction in voting hours, limited access to “drop boxes”, requiring some form of identification, and the patently absurd claim that voters in lines will be denied water as they bake in the hot Georgia sun, are all simply not true. And using the same modus operandi that the NCAA and Amazon employed to extort South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, causing her to backpedal on supporting legislation to protect female athletes from having to compete against trans-females, Major League Baseball piled on by moving the 2021 All-Star game out of Atlanta as punishment for not adhering to the woke narrative. Didn’t we just cover the topic of hypocrisy?  Not to beat a dead horse, especially when climate change regulations may shortly make that one of our most reliable means of transportation, but how can Delta Airlines require identification to board one of its aircraft, but thinks that requiring identification to vote is somehow discriminatory?  And Coca-Cola, who has been aggressively marketing soft drinks laced with up to 8 teaspoons of sugar per 8 ounce serving to minority communities, who disproportionately suffer from diabetes, make similar claims that Georgia voter law adversely affects the Black community? And is MLB just pandering to the left who have long criticized baseball for its low percentage of Black players at 7.8%, despite 27% of players identifying as Hispanic?  What’s with this fascination with quotas anyway? If racial equity is the goal in professional sports, then the NBA better start running advertisements in Wine Spectator and Sailing magazines to recruit some white players to level out the 74.3% of Black players in the league.  At the start of the 2020 season, eight teams didn’t have any white players on their rosters.  Hilarious. But once again, I have to suspect that these woke corporate hypocrites are just intellectually lazy.  Delta CEO Ed Bastian and Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy can’t be idiots.  Or can they?  Perhaps   they are just following the lead of the progressive mob, led by Joe Biden, who called the Georgia legislation “Jim Crow on steroids”.  At least he didn’t drag out the “Jim Eagle” line again. Hopefully that speechwriter has been banished to a position licking stamps.  But did Biden actually read the legislation? If he didn’t, he’s ill informed, but if he did, he’s lying to us. It provides for more hours of operation for polling places than New York, and as noted in the WSJ, provides for “no-excuse” absentee ballots that aren’t even allowed in his home state of Delaware.  And the preposterous claim that voters will be denied access to hydration has been totally contorted by the left and parroted on cue by NPR.  The law will not allow any gifts of food or beverages to be handed out by any partisan group attempting to influence voters.  How would the left react if Trump supporters were handing out water bottles with MAGA labels?  I suspect not so well. And all this fuss about identification.  Why? Well despite the progressive narrative, it is an inconvenient truth that in Georgia, a significant number of voters were from out-of-state, or had moved to another county, and apparently some 10000 of them were actually dead. As in deceased. Oh, that. So exactly who in today’s world can survive without any identification? The law even allows for this miniscule percentage of voters by providing free of charge, state-issued non-driver identification cards and failing that, will allow alternate forms of ID such as social security, utility bills, bank statements, government checks and paycheck stubs.  The suggestion that minority communities cannot manage to produce some form of identification given this wide swath of options, or navigate the process to obtain one is rather demeaning.  Yet the left continues to speak of the black community as if they are somehow dim-witted children that must be protected by the party.  It is the worst form of racism and it is astonishing that the democrats, after decades of this racist drivel, haven’t suffered any form of backlash.

So let’s assume that the corporate CEO’s and Major League Baseball are indeed misinformed, or perhaps frightened by shareholders into following the lead of a biased media and our hyper-partisan elected officials. But NPR, a leftist news outlet that has become a propaganda wing of the democrat party while receiving support in the form of taxpayer dollars?  And President Joe Biden, the great unifier, paying lip service to bipartisanship, pretending to represent all Americans?  They are outright liars.

Have We Lost Our Way?

Why do we remain unconvinced that there is no better plan for we Americans than to garner our common sense, our selflessness, follow our Constitution aiming at the good for us all, and sacrificing everything to that end? Have we failed to understand what is happening to us, our country? Have we fallen, wilfully or otherwise, so far off the path of morality, allegiance and preservation of our Republic, never to recover? How does it go: I have met the enemy, and he is us!