Rediscovering Old Sentiments

 This is a series of thoughts I am publishing earlier than anticipated as last night I was watching something that sort of ignited something inside, and I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on it today.  

In the past year or so, I have really gotten into watching these Dhar Mann videos. In case you haven't seen those, they are short inspirational films produced and created by a billionaire Indian American businessman named Dhar Mann, and many of them went viral.  They deal with situations in life where a lesson is conveyed via what is a normal life situation.  In doing so, the videos deal with a lot of life and social issues - bullying, divorce, workplace discrimination, etc.  The typical formula of such videos is that a situation happens where a person is misjudged by someone, and as it turns out not everything is as it seems - for instance, in several videos, a manager of a store is rude to a customer, only to find out later that the person the manager was rude to ends up being someone significant - their boss, a friend of their boss, and in some cases even another person who ends up being more important than their appearance would suggest.  At some point in the story, the individual tries to tell their situation, and their account ends with the words "so you see," which has become one of Dhar's trademark phrases.  While there are occasional political/social takes in these I disagree with, overall, the videos do convey some solid messages, and they also serve as an inspiration for perserverance in the face of seemingly overwhelming adversity.  In that, they are actually not only entertaining to watch, but they aid in helping someone see their own value as an individual. Last night, I was watching a new one of these that really got my attention, and I want to talk about that briefly here before sharing some thoughts of my own.

In the story, there are a group of directionless street kids who ended up homeless due to unfortunate situations in their families, and to survive these kids resorted to petty theft.  Their ringleader, Daniel, has been in and out of jail many times.  When they have time to just relax, they play a form of street soccer, and that gets the attention of an elderly Black man who is a soccer coach himself.  The old man sees a potential in these boys, and he eventually forms them into their own soccer team to compete in tournaments.  The old man, however, has another dimension - he was once one of those street urchins, and he understands them in a way no one else can.  This causes him to make a connection with them.  At first, the boys are skeptical as they think he is either an undercover narc or just a crazy old man.  However, after the guy is fired from his original team he coached by a manager who is more interested in money than this guy's passion for helping kids, he finds the kids in an alley and goes to visit them.  He brings them a new soccer ball, and he then convinces them of his genuinity by offering them food - many of these kids haven't had a decent meal in days, so they have ravenous appetites. In time, he forms the kids into a team, and he especially becomes a mentor to young Daniel.  Daniel, at this point, was facing a long jail sentence if he didn't show up for court, and on one of the initial soccer practices he forgot his court date and the cops show up, apprehend him, and take him in.  The judge pronounces sentence - Daniel has to serve one month behind bars for his offenses.  The old man comes into the courtroom though and begs the judge for mercy - although the judge cannot reverse the sentence, she does allow Daniel to play the tournament, which they win.  A month passes, and by this time the poor coach and his wife are in bad financial straits - little income, and the bills are piling up. Then, one day he gets a knock on the door, and Daniel is there.  Daniel surprises the coach with a check for $10K and asks him to be the manager, as Daniel was discovered by a scout and recruited for a team after serving his jail time. The happy ending of this was quite inspirational, and it was a happy ending for both Daniel and his coach.  For some reason, that story sparked a few things in me, and that is what I want to talk about now.

Many of you who have either followed me for some time or know my story will remember my own upbringing - I spent a large part of my later childhood in very abject poverty in a small West Virginia town called Kirby.  My single mother at the time was a chronic alcoholic, and there were days we didn't have much to eat in the house - I remember many times surviving on buttered toast for dinner on some nights, or even raiding the neighbors' gardens for vegetables so we could have something like corn on the cob, fried squash or cucumbers, and drop biscuits I learned quickly to mix up myself.  When we had a little more money, a bag of Doritos or a piece of longhorn cheese from the local store was a huge luxury at some parts of our lives then.  Many of the neighbor kids were in the same situation, and we had an unspoken code between us - sure, we had squabbles and disputes, but everyone knew who everyone else was and we all respected each other.  I had no criminal tendencies or anything, as I had other things to divert my attention, but some of the neighbor kids were not as lucky.  Some of them suffered abuse, one girl in our community was being trafficked for money as a sex slave by her own father, and later many of the neighbor kids I knew ended up being involved in crimes, drugs, and other bad situations.  Fortunately for me, my life turned around when I was 15, and I got out of the community and my high school years were much more stable as my mom ended up being a live-in caretaker for an elderly lady whose family practically adopted us as their own.  But, even before that, my diversions were reading, listening to vintage big band music, and either fishing in the creek or collecting wild plants in the nearby woods - teaberries, wild garlic, wild berries, and also an occasional unique flower like a lady's slipper or Jack-in-the-pulpit that grew on the ridge that loomed in front of our house.  Those pursuits gave me not only a vivid imagination, but also helped to educate me so I did very well in school and was able to in time go off to college after high school and live a somewhat stable life.  Also, finding Christ at age 16 - a time which was filled with a lot of adjustments and transitions for me - helped a lot, as church gave me an outlet for doing something constructive too.  Any rate, as I watched that Dhar Mann video, a lot of that was brought back to me, and it led to a few other thoughts as I began to reflect on it. 

To begin, I want to talk about mentorship.  Fortunately for me, when I was young I had many good mentors in my life that helped guide me  - pastors, good neighbors, teachers, a couple of more sound relatives, etc.  Mentoring is important, and although anyone can display empathy, what really gives a sort of "street cred" is if a potential mentor comes from where you come from - that means they have been there and they know what you are facing.  The problem with a lot of counseling and social programs today is that they are made up of essentially educated idiots who have no clue as to what the people they are supposed to be helping are going through.  Often they are rich White college kids who grew up in stable households, and they don't share the values of their clientele.  They are always trying to psychoanalyze their "subjects," and they can get a little too patronizing.  This is particularly true of political liberals who decide they want to be "social justice warriors" and don't know a damn thing about life.  This is why nowadays the Democrats are so out of touch with the groups they consider their target constituencies, and it is also unfortunately a reason why many of my fellow conservatives also miss the boat on this stuff too.  Let me get into that now. 

Many poor people - be they Black inner-city kids in Baltimore or rural White Appalachians from my home state of West Virginia - are by default socially conservative.  Yet, mainstream conservatism has ignored them for so long that they vote for Democrats as a matter of survival.  The thing is however is that conservative neglect and Democrat patronization are both detrimental to these communities, and therefore something different is needed.  I want to first address where conservatives got things wrong, and then I will focus on Democrats.

I am a very staunch conservative myself, both socially and fiscally.  I believe strongly in conserving traditional values, I want small government, and there is a sort of social inequality that has plagued this country for 60 years at least or more.  But, at times many conservatives can also be clueless to real needs and issues in certain demographics, and when I hear someone I would otherwise agree with disparage poor people, it bugs me. Despite how "pro-life" many self-professed conservatives claim to be, it has glaring inconsistencies when you actually hear what they really think.  I remember a few years back in Florida when I went to church with this guy named Bob and his wife Carol.  Bob was a man of some means, and he retired part-time in Florida as a "snowbird."  He claimed to be "pro-life," but what happened in the course of conversation was him saying something to this effect - he thought that poor people were hopeless, and therefore any programs or incentives to help them out of their poverty was a waste of resources because to him they chose to be that way.  He essentially more or less expressed support for constructing an economic caste system, he was open to eugenics measures, and he also even had a bit of overt racism in his tone as he elaborated upon his views.  To me, this was anything but "conservative," and I have learned over the years that just because someone is registered "Republican" on their voter ID does not necessarily make them "conservative."  Bob was raised in a rather wealthy home, he had never experienced the challenges of just struggling to make ends meet, and his comments displayed a sickening ignorance of real life.  And, this is unfortunately what wins Democrats elections in many cases, or at least it used to (more on that shortly).  Bob is one of many who share these attitudes, as even high-profile "conservatives" such as the late Pat Robertson and Bill O'Reilly have even supported eugenics programs against poor Appalachian populations and Black segments in cities.  This is a huge reason why I never supported the Republicans and have always remained an independent conservative - I cannot bring myself to support Republicans who talk and act like this.  Fortunately, in recent years there has been a grassroots shift, as many elitists are thankfully now being outshadowed by more common-sense people, and that is due in part to individuals such as Donald Trump.  Trump is not perfect, and as a billionaire businessman himself he hasn't experienced the hardships many people struggle with everyday either.  But, the difference is that he is not claiming to - he is in support of many measures that would benefit poorer segments of the citizenry, and for that I support him although I will never be a Republican. For other self-styled "conservatives" like Bob though, I am convinced they are elitists who live in their own self-constructed ivory towers, and I want nothing to do with them.  At some point, I want to do my own manifesto on this from a political perspective, but that is for another time.  Let's attack Democrats now.

Like elitists self-styled "conservatives" such as Bob, the Democrats as a whole are outright aloof to real problems too.  While many of them want big government spending and more weird handouts that look good in principle, the reality is that Democrats are just as elitist if not more so, and they always have been.  Unlike the Bobs of the world, the Democrats do not dismiss the plight of poor Americans, but rather they exploit it to gain power for themselves, which means they go to the other extreme.  They thing they can buy and bribe votes from targeted populations by promising a virtual goody-bag of entitlements, but they don't deliver and usually those entitlement programs are failures.  In the past ten years or so, the real face of the Democratic agenda has come to light, and what it really is basically is a group of career politicians who will do literally anything to secure power for themselves - many are financed by megalomaniacal billionaires like the Despots of Davos (Soros, Schwab, Gates, and company), and they exploit the poor to gain more power for themselves.  They would love to implement programs that would even defy the scenario Aldous Huxley created in Brave New World, and they would be happy if 80% of the population was impoverished and died off so they could completely dominate the planet.  This too is wrong and needs to be stopped as well.  Again, I will save more detail on that for another time. 

Whether the elitist denotes himself as a "conservative" or a "liberal," the bottom line is that they are still elitists.  Each wants to eradicate people who don't meet their standard, and neither has the common good at heart.  An elitist is an elitist, and like a zebra, it cannot change its stripes.  The time has come for an alternative to both of these honestly, and surprisingly many others are thinking the same thing - this is why Donald Trump is doing so well, and why Robert Kennedy Jr. is also gaining a lot of attention. Both Trump and RFK resonate with a wider audience than the Establishment does, and the Establishment hates this.  On that ground, there are really two sides to the whole issue that no one focuses on - Establishment vs. Anti-establishment.  The average guy on the street - who now has to worry about whether to eat or pay his rent due to inflation and other crazy nonsense - is sick of the Establishment, and the new movement is more commonsense, and it is also diverse - more Latinos and Blacks are embracing it, as they are populations often spurned by this Establishment.  This change is good, as it means that finally people are coming to their senses.  Let's hope that continues.

I got off on all that to say this.  Our young people in particular need mentors, but they need mentors who can relate to their experience, and not some dumbass psych major from Harvard.  The young people in question are not the blue-haired freaks blocking traffic and burning down cities either - those are the rich White offspring for the most part of the elitists, and they are the Establishment's "Storm Troopers" for maintaining power. No, the young people I am speaking of are the poor Black inner-city kid who shows intelligence and just needs guidance to channel it into something better.  It is the poor Appalachian kid who goes to school with holes in their shoes but also has a knack for algebra and thus raw potential that needs to be cultivated.  It is the Puerto Rican kid in Harlem who maybe displays a talent for playing the saxophone and thus has the basic tools to turn that passion into a success.  These are the true future of America, and we need to pay attention to them.  I was musing that it would be nice to mentor a group of 5-6 mountain kids who are being raised like I was, and maybe turn them into potential leaders - everyone deserves a leg-up, but the right people who care need to help those who deserve it based on their individual God-given talents, and there is a reason for that.  Many of these kids are disregarded by their own families in many cases - they have a passion, but they are either threatened when they show an interest in it, or their folks just plain don't care.  They also face adversity in school - many of them are bullied, targeted for bad treatment by bad teachers who have no place in a school, and many are forced to settle for less.  They feel alone, and that no one cares about them, and as a result, they often are lost in bad behavior that will eventually kill them (Fentanyl addiction is on the rise not only in the inner cities, but like a bad virus it now infects rural areas and small towns too).  That needs to be remedied.  I speak as a kid myself who grew up like this, and by God's grace I was protected from a lot of the negative influences, but I was also forced to live with many adversities too.  It is time that changes for good.  

Thank you for allowing me to share today, and while there is much more that could be said on this, I have to streamline and organize my thoughts on it so I can at a later time.  Have a good remainder of your week, and will see you next time.