Random Thoughts

 As you may have noticed, I have not been writing as much lately - with my doctoral program and so many other things going on over the past couple of years, there has not been much time to write about anything.  However, in a couple of weeks, I am going to be having my 53rd birthday, and naturally that at times sparks introspection.  This sort of inspires me to give just a few observations about some things that have been on my mind lately.

Did you ever notice that the older you get the more you start perusing obituaries either online or in the newspaper to look for people you know?  I now go through that ritual at least once a week, and peruse the websites of about five funeral homes in places I have lived from the time I was a small child until I graduated high school.  Many of the people you know the best will pop up in your formative years like that, although obviously we all make friends and acquaintances throughout the course of our lives.  Thinking about how I check the obituaries now every week religiously, I started thinking, "my goodness, this is morbid!"  What makes it even more morbid is that now people I grew up around who are actually younger than me are popping up in the obituaries these days.  One in particular was a neighbor boy I knew in Kirby, WV, as a young kid whose name was Tim.  I had known Tim for about close to 45 years honestly, and he was actually about 2-3 years younger than me.  Yet, a couple of weeks ago, I saw he had passed away.  Now, seeing that, and then also losing my parents over the course of two years, it really forces one to think about the future.  Over the past couple of years, a lot of things have gotten much more uncertain now than they once were, and that is quite a reality check when you think about it.  So, it got me thinking as well about what legacy do I want to leave behind, and who will be the steward of it?  Unless I get married in the next couple of years to a younger lady who can produce a son or daughter for me, it does not look promising.  And, I really do not want the cabinet full of memories I have - pictures, documents, and other stuff - to end up in a garbage dump somewhere.  Luckily, God has answered a few prayers in regard to that, but I will talk about that more at another time.   However, an important word to keep in mind as one gets older is legacy, and it relates to another word, destiny.  The legacy of those who have gone before us does play a very important and significant role in shaping our destiny, and destiny cannot exist unless it builds upon legacy, and that makes me want to soapbox a little. 

We all know about "cancel culture," and those who are most guilty of perpetrating it are some of both the most evil and the stupidest individuals who ever walked the earth.  These are the Antifa types who tear down statues, desecrate artwork, and even are screwing around with classic movies to remake them in their own image.  These are well-funded individuals too, and as iconoclastic as they are, they unfortunately are now the establishment despite how they try to paint themselves as "revolutionaries."  In recent history - the past 130 or so years at least - often what is called "revolutionary" is actually systematically dystopian.  Many of its proponents are failures in various areas of life, but instead of using their personal shortcomings as a lesson to do better, they take on a "victim mentality" and instead seek to destroy that which they failed at.  It is, as one person put it, "revenge of the herd."  When I watched one of Dinesh D'Souza's documentaries once, he was interviewing this actor who basically said what should be obvious - those who are the biggest proponents of "cancel culture" were themselves rejects of the culture they are fighting to cancel. However, there is a serious problem with this deeply-flawed logic - they have no sense of purpose, legacy, or destiny, nor do they care.  While they try to reinvent society by destroying many things, they are forgetting something - what if, a couple of generations down the road, their grandkids rediscover what was destroyed and then move against "cancel culture" by cancelling it??  It could happen.  I was part of one of those generations myself.  My mother's generation, the Baby Boomers, were very iconoclastic - this was the beatnik and hippie group of the 1960s and early 1970s.  Then, they gave birth to my generation, Generation X.  The defining legacy of my generation was the fall of another "cancel culture," the Soviet Union.  Many more radical Boomers were ardent Marxists (Bernie Sanders comes to mind) and idolized the Soviet system and also thought Mao Zedong was their hero.  But, my generation had a President that thought differently - Ronald Reagan.  And, thank God he did.  So, while the Millennials burn down cities as part of Antifa, they are so stupid that they know nothing about Tianmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Many do not even know about the horrors of the Cristero Wars in Mexico, the Holodomor famines in Ukraine, or the atrocities of the Nazis - as a matter of fact, they often look more like the barbarians that initiated those atrocities rather than being "inclusive" as they often try to be, using their fake pronouns and other junk.  Even as I write this, the server that was created by some of these techno-geeks in Silicon Valley spell-checks Tianmen Square!  It was forgotten.  Legacy is vital and it is important for the survival of our human race, and when we start to neglect that, we tend to, as the philosopher Santayana wrote, fall into the predictable trap of repeating those atrocities - his exact words were something like "those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them."  It works kind of like school - if you fail the 6th grade, you have to do it over again.  We have a society of ideological failures - they occupy the boards of corporations, the offices of government, and they control the media, the universities, and entertainment.  Despite how "counter-cultural" they claim to be, they are the ones controlling the culture.  And, they risk destroying some important and valuable legacies we should preserve as a nation.  Although this is reaching epidemic proportions now, we who appreciate and preserve history still have options, so we need to take advantage of that while we still can.

Despite the fact that major tech platforms are controlled by iconoclastic ideologues, the good thing is that they cannot control everything.  On Facebook for instance, family members can still share treasured family photos, and that is something we can take advantage of.  We need to know our family "story," and the availability of social networking makes that more accessible than ever.  So, I would encourage you to save and print copies of those pictures and compile albums of them - also save videos and other family documents too, as they are your treasure.  Starting on that level, it is also worth noting that although Amazon and EBay are now controlled by iconoclastic leftist ideologues, they are still good marketplaces where many things can be found, and on a societal level this means we need to take an interest in other media that the Left wants to "cancel," and buy it up to preserve it. If we do this, we insure the survival of Western Civilization.  We have to take small steps in order to make massive change, and it starts with efforts such as buying a rare book off of EBay which otherwise would not be available.  Legacy is vital to our survival, so let's preserve as much of it as possible. 

I know that I bordered on political with this today, but it has been something close to my heart for a long time.  We need to safeguard the next generation from the disasters of previous generations, and it takes each of us doing small things.  Saving a precious family photo, for instance, could have a great impact on your great-grandchildren. Therefore, as you think about these things today, please take this into consideration.  Also, writing down your memories is a good practice too - I do this in two different ways.  First, I keep a regular journal, and secondly I also am writing my life story down and update that every year.  I also hang onto all my old calendars, church bulletins, check registers, tax and medical records, academic records, and other things.  I want to have as complete of a life history as I can once my time on this earth ends, and this is my way of insuring that happens.  And, I just need someone to leave it to, and that too will come to pass as well.

Thank you for enduring my rambles today, and I will hope you visit again soon.