Category: weight loss

These July 4th thought provoking words were written by my friend, Curt Haney. He shares his opinions and concerns about our USA and the current events taking place throughout our land.

It’s well worth your time to read. And I agree with everything he said. (Pictures are mine.) Happy July 4th to you and your family.

Words of wisdom written by Curt Haney:

Twice a year, on Memorial Day and Independence Day, I write about one of the things I love dearly, and that is my country. Two years ago, I noticed in our nation a terrible trend of acrimonious and vitriolic sentiment toward one another amongst our populace, in fact I wrote the following words in my 2018 Independence Day blog…

… My friends, we must come together and learn to work together and get along despite our differences for the good of our nation and not just for our own personal and selfish agendas. If we can do that, it will benefit us all.

Otherwise we’ll just keep traveling down this road that we’re on, where one side takes advantage of the other, and then they switch around every so many years. And that only serves to keep us where we are, divided…

But folks, nothing could prepare me for what I see happening in my country today. Today, just two years after writing those words, I see lawlessness at a level that I never thought could exist in my country; I see persons in authority ignoring that lawlessness, and in some cases even encouraging it; I see blatant corruption in our government at all levels that dares to be called out and when it is, it’s simply rationalized away as being necessary and therefore justified.

I see disrespect for authority at a level I never thought I’d see, and disrespect for each other at an even greater level; I see disrespect for our own flag and nation at a level that I find incomprehensible and offensive; and I see the gap of division between the right and left and among the races growing larger, deeper, and with more disdain by the hour. The sad thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In my writing from 2018 I ended the above paragraph by saying…

… Let’s get back to the basics of helping each other no matter our political leanings, of helping each other no matter the color of our skin, and of helping each other no matter our station in life. Let’s get back to practicing human decency, and let’s get back to what we were founded upon, the Judeo-Christian beliefs of one nation under God. E. Pluribus Unum – Out of many, one.

Folks, never in my time have any words carried more weight and truth than today. Today we have certain well-funded groups on both sides that have agendas, and they will do everything they can to achieve their goals at the detriment of those who disagree and at the destruction of the very ideals this great nation was founded upon. There is a timeless strategy in war that advocates to divide and conquer, and that is exactly what these groups are doing.

They are dividing our nation in order to conquer or achieve their goals, and they’re doing so by changing the way we think. And if they change the way we think of something or someone or a class of people; in other words, if they control our thinking by convincing us that their way of thinking is the only “right” way, then they control everything about us from out our beliefs to our actions, and they usher in a new order, a new ideology, and they install themselves in places of power and in the end, we lose and they win.

So, let me speak to a few things that’ll probably anger some of you. Folks, no matter what you hear or read, there are white nationalist groups like the American Freedom Party, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Ku Klux Klan that are nothing more than white supremacist groups that subscribe to the same belief as slaveholders, and that is that people of color lack the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Well, I disagree.

There was a gentleman and statesman by the name of Frederick Augustus Washington Baily, or you may know him as Frederick Douglas, and he proved by his oratory and by his writings that he was a living counter-example of those prejudiced beliefs. Folks, people of color have the same value and intellectual abilities as any other person, and Mr. Douglas was a fine, fine example of that fact.

But likewise, Black Lives Matter is nothing more than a socialistic organization that by their own words strive to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”

To put that into plain English, no longer will you have the power to be or to raise your family to be independent thinkers, but rather you exist only as “collective citizens” of their specified idealism. Folks, that’s Marxism. Their founders have admitted to being trained Marxist and followers of that ideology.

Now, I know they proclaim that they exist simply to stop the systemic violence against people of color (actually they don’t mention any other color except black), but does that really exist? Is there really a policy of violence against black citizens that is secretly promoted by the national authoritative system? I don’t think so.

Have I seen police do terribly wrong things when it comes to arresting or detaining some black people? Absolutely. Do I see them do the same terrible things to people other than black people? Absolutely. And I’m not trying to water that down at all, wrong is wrong and needs to be corrected and punished where necessary, no matter what.

But let’s face it, there are some bad people in every organization and unfortunately, they get all the attention. Their actions are the very ones the agenda driven, biased media promotes ad nauseam, and all it does is encourage distrust and retaliatory violence.

But please tell me, how does burning your own neighbors’ livelihood to the ground, or looting your neighborhood businesses help you? It doesn’t, it only hurts you. And I’m not just pointing my finger at our African American community, no, we’ve fostered a whole segment of our populace into this “cancel culture.”

But think about it, if there was truly a national policy of violence against black people by the police, why then would black people be a part of that organization? Now, there was a time in our country that, unfortunately, there was systemic racism again the African American community and all people of color, and it was wrong.

But great leaders like Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved far more for their race than anything BLM has done, and they did so through non-violent methods. Violence, my friends, only causes more violence and statements like “give us what we want or we’ll burn the system down and replace it” does nothing but cause people to circle the wagons in preparation for that confrontation.

Could police use an upgrade to their methods and better training in how to handle certain situations, sure, there’s always room for improvement. And they need to weed out the bad apples who are giving that organization a bad name.

But, folks, if we continue down the path of defunding or dismantling the police, chaos will prevail. Believe it or not, there are certain violent criminal elements in our world that would simply take over if we replaced the police with daisy pushing public liaisons who simply hand out gold stars to those who do right, and ask the criminals to “pretty please” stop.

Folks, we don’t need a bunch of hall monitors to keep us safe, we need the police. We need a police force ready and strong enough to handle the worst of the criminal element. But they also need to be well trained to handle incidents where there is less danger.

Never should a citizen of any color lose his or her life because they were impaired and stupid. However, if they are threatening bodily harm or the lives of the police or people around them, then then should be dealt with accordingly to maintain the safety of the innocent.

So, here’s the bottom line, we are all valuable and deserve to be treated as such. Like Frederick Douglas, we should all have the firm belief in the equality of all people, whether they are black, brown, white, female, Native American, or any other immigrant. We should understand that we don’t all believe the same things, but we should also understand having those differences shouldn’t make us hate each other.

If we all believed exactly the same things, then we’d be like lemmings following our leaders right off the cliff. Having different opinions is okay; violently trying to force them upon each other is not. We should instead believe in dialogue and making alliances across racial and ideological divides so that we will become united and therefore stronger as a nation.

This country has been a beacon of hope for 244 years. It affords opportunities that people around the world only dream of. Every person, regardless of their station in life can better themselves, better their communities, achieve goals and realize their dreams with hard work, and enjoy life, liberty, and their own pursuit of happiness. No one is going to stop you if you try.

You see, if we keep heading in the direction we are heading, it will end in another civil war and we will become nothing more than a fading memory known as the late, great country of the United States of America. How sad that would be considering we all have the power to stop it.

You know, Frederick Douglas was criticized by other abolitionist because he was willing to have a dialogue with slaveowners. But he replied to their criticism, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” I think Mr. Douglas was on to something because, folks, wrong is wrong and right is right; and right is never wrong, and wrong can never, ever be right.

Maybe we should consider taking those words and the words of Frederick Douglas to heart and returning to become the UNITED States of America, E. Pluribus unum – out of many, one.

I hope you have a wonderful Independence Day celebrating all this great country is and is to come. May God bless you and yours, and may God bless the United States of America.

Written by Curt Haney

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