Tag: traditional family

Reclaiming the Family – Part 6 – The Miracle of a Traditional Wife

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I never tire of reminding Camera Girl that in my mind she and I are very close in behavior to the married couple in W. C. Fields two classic movies, “It’s A Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  In both movies Field’s hen-pecked character has a wife played by Kathleen Howard a tall, stout woman who affects the character of a cultured, histrionic scold who constantly hectors and nags at Fields’ character.  And Fields’ answer to almost every utterance of his wife is a meek, “yes dear.”  And I tell her this not because there is any resemblance physically or temperamentally between her and this shrewish character but because this reminds me of the natural antagonism that husband and wife experience in the course of their wedded bliss.  Well, also because I am sort of a jerk.

A few weeks ago, we were sitting down to dinner and she had cooked a soup using the leftovers from a ham we had for the holidays.  It was a ham and lentil soup and she decided to make it so thick that we call it a stoup, meaning stew/soup.  As I started eating dinner it occurred to me that being married to a woman like my wife is probably the greatest good that a man can have in his life.

A traditional wife makes your house into a home and raises a family.  And a family is the only true wealth that any man ever actually possesses.  And if she’s also pretty and a good cook like mine then it’s as close to heaven as any man can hope to see on this side of the great divide.  That’s the information I can provide to the young guys around today.

But where can you find such a woman today?  All the American girls have been sold on the idea that they have to have a career to be fulfilled in the modern world.  That is the root of the problem.  There are only two solutions, either convince some woman that there is a better option or go outside of the local pool of women.

As far as convincing women to move away from careers I think a man has to have the wherewithal to convince a woman that he can support a stay-at-home wife.  Probably that means owning your own home and having a stable income.  It would be best if you are up front about your plans and expectations so that you can eliminate the girls that will never work out.  I’m too old to know anything about on-line dating services but I would imagine a primary function would be trying to line up marital expectations.  Correct me if I’m mistaken that they must have a profile that corresponds to a traditional homemaker.

One thing that might be a starting point is avoid any girl who is planning on going to some very expensive college.  Unless her parents have funded her entire education, she is going to have to pay back those student loans and that will make it doubly difficult for you to afford a one income lifestyle.  So maybe you should be looking at women who go to the local community college or even better ones working in local jobs that do not require high powered college credentials.

But however you find one, if she has all the qualifications I mentioned in my intro then marry her and never let her work a day of her life outside of the home.  Have a passel of kids and enjoy every day of it for as long as you both shall live.  Raising a family is a challenging and sometimes a confusing task but as you get older, you’ll find that it really is the only meaningful thing that most human beings ever accomplish.    Ray Bradbury wrote a story called the Happiness Machine.  In it an inventor tried to make a machine that would make a person happy if he sat in it.  It had all the sights and sounds that he imagined could make a person happy.  Music, exotic vistas, delicious aromas, everything he thought he would want.  But by the end of the story, he discovers the truth when he looks into the window of his own house and sees his family, his wife and his children, performing their routine daily activities together in his own home.  That is the true happiness machine.  And if a man can’t find happiness in that then maybe he never will.

We Are the United States of America

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We are the United States of America.  What do I mean by that?  I’ll start by defining the word we.  I’m restricting that down to the right-wing of the people living in this country.  I don’t mean any ethnicity or race or political status.  I am talking about the people who are in rebellion against BLM, Antifa, Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Mitt Romney, Google, Twitter, Facebook, California, New York, New England, Seattle, Minneapolis and Portland.  We believe in the Constitution of the United States as written at our founding.  We believe in the God given rights found in the Bill of Rights and we do not acknowledge the authority of the FBI, CIA, NSA, or any other government or corporate goons to try and take those rights away.  We do not acknowledge white privilege, systemic racism, critical race theory, intersectionality or any other pseudo-intellectual theory that tries to rationalize disenfranchising Americans of their freedom and rights.

We believe in the things that our ancestors have believed in for all of recorded history.  We believe in God.  We believe in a man and a woman forming a family from the children that they create from their bodies.  We believe that that family is the basis for all the good things that we hold sacred.  We believe that families support each other to form a community and those communities are what make up this nation.  Anyone like BLM or GLAAD whose stated goal is to disrupt the primacy of these families is a mortal enemy of this nation and needs to be rooted out and eliminated.  We don’t believe that sexual deviancy is something to be celebrated.  We don’t believe that men and women who are confused about their sexuality are competent to teach children about any aspect of life.  We don’t believe that the government is responsible or competent to raise our children.  We don’t believe that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are optional or conditional.  We believe in a divine right to live the kind of life we live.

Anybody who believes in or even knuckles under to these people and ideas on the Left isn’t an American.  At best he’s a pawn of these usurpers.  At best he’s an obstacle to reclaiming our country.  And at worst he’s one of them.  He’s part of the truly despicable movement that has allied itself with the globalist elite that is attempting to consolidate power over the formerly free people of the United States of America.  And they’ve come pretty far in their plan.  Most of it they did while we weren’t even aware of their presence.  We can thank the Republican establishment for that.  Their job as controlled opposition was to give the illusion of resistance to the Left while ensuring that the Left always got their way.  By diverting all power from the Right into their hands they ensured that nothing effective was ever done to save our way of life.  Well, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.  I won’t be fooled again.

As the only legitimate remaining part of the United States of America we have several jobs.  One is to maintain the culture and the memory of what the United States was.  That’s a pretty big job.  We’re assaulted on every side by the Left’s war against normalcy and against our history.  Evangelizing the young and celebrating our culture is important and takes time and resources.  Resources are needed to pay for schooling and other institutions that keep our way of life alive inside the occupied territories.

Another job is to begin building the structures and institutions that will allow us to have autonomy from the leftist controlled government and corporate entities.  We’ll need our own banks and schools and companies so that the Left won’t be able to discriminate against us and deprive us of services.  We need to distinguish between those who are hostile to us and those who are not and do business accordingly.  We must build community and support each other.

And finally, we need to build up power structures at least at the state level to resist the attacks of the Left at the federal level and eventually overcome them and take back the country.  Whether this is a slow separation of Red and Blue states or a more dramatic revolt is hard to say.  But we have to know that our beliefs aren’t ignored by the people in charge.  They need to be accountable to us and we need to stay awake to what’s going on and take charge of the democratic process.  Assuming that the elites have our best interests at heart is how we got in this mess in the first place.

Well, that was a lot of words.  But what I’m trying to say is that regardless of what the media tells you and how the people in charge spin what’s going on, we are still here.  We’re who we always were and we will endure.  And the way we endure is to celebrate what is true and sacred about life and reject the false and diseased.  We are strong and we are vital.  They are confused and they are fading away.  And especially at this time of year rejoice and have faith.

A Reminder of the Magnificence of Normal Family Life

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Here in the Orwellian gulag that is Woke New England even family gatherings are a fatal thought-crime punishable by whatever means is imagined most effective at discouraging the proles from following so sinful an example.  And mothers of young children are the easiest to frighten into following whatever bizarre and depressing rules are forced upon them.

And so, throughout this sad exercise in government overreach my grandchildren have for the most part been held away from me and Camera Girl by their parents mostly out of fear for our health.  And no grandfather is foolish enough to argue with his daughter when she is concerned about the health of her children.  All you can say is, “Do what you think is best for the kids.”

But yesterday was a great day, a turning of the tide.  My daughter and my son-in-law brought over our grandsons for a barbecue and games in the yard.  No masks, no distancing, no nothing.  Camera Girl outdid herself with wonderful food that we enjoyed on the porch with badminton and other outdoor pursuits.  The four boys immediately reverted to true form and scuffled and bickered about every interaction.  It was glorious.  Even the weather was cooperative.  It was overcast and the temperature hovered around 75 degrees which meant no swimming pool but just the perfect temperature for me to participate in sporting activity without breaking a sweat.  And that allowed me to spend the maximum time with the kids instead of the adults.  Perfect.

I got to talk with my oldest grandson about his sophomore high school curriculum and offer help with chemistry and math if he needed it.  I talked to his brother about his eighth-grade classes and his sports interests.   And with the two younger guys I just talked dinosaurs and toys.  Apparently, T. rex still reigns supreme with the four-year-old although opened up an alternative category for herbivores and awarded it to Diplodocus.

I also got to talk to my daughter and son-in-law about how they were keeping these housebound boys busy this summer and was impressed by their ingenuity and energy.  I will confess I wouldn’t have had the stamina.  And it did my heart good to see Camera Girl laughing and playing with her younger grandsons and indulging all of their food requests up to and including various ice cream products that are forbidden to me!  I could tell that she was reveling in this socializing just as much as I was.

When they finally went home after a full day of fun, we cleaned up the wreckage of the gathering and traded favorite moments and observations on how much the boys had grown.  And it was then that I realized what an empty world this crazy quarantine has created.  What they say about not knowing what you have until it’s gone was made blindingly clear yesterday.

So, forgive this long rambling preamble into my domestic situation.  The point of this essay is acknowledging the real damage that isolating family members does and a philosophical question on quality of life.  If you are a grandparent being shut out of your grandchildren’s lives is a depressing and painful thing.  If children’s educations are interrupted that is a dangerous loss to our whole society.

Formerly we always placed the welfare of children before everything else.  If you are a grandparent how much of your grandchildren’s lives are you willing to waste to slightly increase your own odds of living?  Now admittedly I’m not the highest risk of dying from COVID-19.  I’m at the beginning of the age demographic affected but my health is reasonably robust.  So maybe this thing isn’t real enough to me make me afraid.  On the other hand, someone in our family died of the virus and another person needed hospital care and cutting-edge medicine to survive it.  So maybe I am aware of the stakes.

From my point of view, I would say the children ought to be allowed to go to school.  If there are teachers who are at risk, they should be retired, at least temporarily, at attractive financial terms and let the kids get on with their lives.  The people at greatest risk from all this are the elderly and the chronically ill who live in homes with school age children.  Let the doctors figure out the best way to protect these people and let everyone else get back to normal life.

Saving the sick and elderly is a laudable humanitarian goal.  But what can you say about a society that sacrifices the precious youth of a generation to marginally advantage the life span of the very old?  Do we duck and cover every year during flu season?  After all, the same elderly population is the one that accounts for 90% of the tens of thousands of flu deaths that occur every year in the United States alone.  Are we denying that people, especially the very frail and sick will die eventually?  Have we lost all sense of proportion?  And does that mean grandmothers and great grandmothers have forfeited permanently the right to hug and kiss their grandchildren and great grandchildren?  That’s pretty sad.  I guess I can’t speak for anyone but myself but I vote to end this madness and if I keel over tomorrow from COVID-19 or any other virus that the Chinese dig out of a cave I’ll go happy knowing I got to share a meal with my family and play a game of ball with my grandsons.

Reclaiming the Family – Part 5 – Reinvent the Matchmaker – First Thoughts

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Two things are true about this particular item.  The first thing is I’m sure this is one of the most important aspects of trying to bring back family life.  The second thing I’m sure of is that I know almost nothing about how this would work.  I know almost nothing about women or dating or anything else having to do with human mating rituals.  I met Camera Girl by complete accident when we were both seventeen-year-old kids each separately skipping out on our separate schools and meeting at one of the most anonymous places in a city as large as New York.  It was at least a billion to one shot so no one should ever take relationship advice from me.

But I do know that kids these days and especially kids from whom their parents hope someday to receive grandchildren need a better way to find mates.  Sure, there are places like match.com and the like but this doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.  What is needed is some kind of sponsorship of social activities where the participants are vouched for by their families.  In other words, you want to keep the freaks out but still have a place for young people to meet.  Now this used to be taken care of by high schools and other teen age membership institutions.  But because college is the place where normalcy goes to die and because women now postpone marriage and childbearing until their mid-thirties, we’re in the place we’re in.  So, to my mind a new arrangement has to be formulated.  And the only ones who have the talent, the inclination and the opportunity are the mothers.  This brings to mind the scenes in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye’s wife is trying to arrange a marriage for her oldest daughter through the village matchmaker and picks a terrible husband that luckily is sidetracked by a subterfuge by Tevye.  And of course, living in these liberated times no one is going to allow his parents to pick a wife for him and vice versa but setting up opportunities for young people to meet likely partners makes perfect sense.  I will have to consult with my daughters to see if this is an at all reasonable idea.  They both have children who one day (and in some cases soon) will be marriageable.  I am interested to know if they’ve thought of helping along the process by some discrete manipulations.

But one thing that would increase the chances for more women to find husbands is for them to look outside of the college pool.  A young woman right out of high school could do much worse than finding a young man in one of the trades, an electrician or a welder and setting up a home instead of wasting four or more of her most valuable years sitting around a college quadrangle watching the soy boys playing frisbee.

I really have to do more practical research on this and this is just an introductory post.  I am especially interested in getting the mother’s point of view on the practicality of trying to influence the courtship decisions of today’s youth.  But I’m convinced that this topic is of extreme importance in trying to somehow revive the traditional family from inside the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah that we find ourselves trapped in.  Stay tuned for more on this.