The Relentless Weeds of Radicalism

Have you ever noticed that gardens do not always grow as we want them to? We have a couple of wildflower gardens in our yard that although they seem to be budding with plants, are slow to put forth any blooms.

So we try to be patient, to continue watering them and pulling stray shoots of grass out of them, while we wait.

But that scenario does not hold true for weeds. They grow without being planted. Dandelions, for instance, can push through the grass and stick up a yellow bloom overnight and go to seed just as fast. We don't plant them and certainly do not consciously water and nurture them. But they grow nevertheless. It is a daily job to search them out and uproot them before they bloom and these blooms turn into seeds and propagate more of the same.

Good ideas and ideals worth defending are like flowers. They tend to be slow to come to fruition. It takes hard work, determined efforts and convictions before they take hold.

Bad ideas and radical thinking, on the contrary, are like the dandelions, springing up overnight and going to seed at the speed of sound. America is experiencing that reality today. The true virtues of American life has taken the backseat and the rapidly growing weeds of discontent are seemingly controlling everything.

Who would have thought, three or four months ago, that entire sections of cities would have been surrendered to radical domestic terrorists while the police either refuse to control the area and enforce the law, or they are being told not to by misguided leaders? Who would have thought that Antifa would be teaming with Muslim Sharia Police to "govern" No-Go Zones in American cities, as have been prevalent in Europe for years?

The blooms of radicalism has popped up and gone to seed at a record pace. Police departments are being defunded. The police are being removed from the schools because radical thinking sees them as more of a threat than protectors of our children.

Congress is passing laws to regulate the police all across America by instigating regulations they have been trying to do for decades but could not. Now the political climate has changed and they are advancing their long-desired ideals.

Environment matters. You have always known that water is a liquid, but when put in a pan on a stove and heated, it becomes a gas, steam, and when placed in a freezer, it becomes a solid. Same water, different environment. Different reality.

The environment enveloping America is changing who and what we are. Not just by chance, but by consciously changing the environment. This new environment has opened the door for tyrannical regulations being forced on all of us in the name of public safety and for "our own good."

Over 50% of all retail space in America was shut down by Democrat governors, for "our own good." Trillions of dollars has been lost to the economy. Almost 50 million people were forced out of work by their responses to the Covid-19 "crisis." Wearing masks is mandatory in many places and some leaders want it to be a permanent thing.

This could not have happened a decade ago, or even last year. It took the new environment of chaos and turmoil and an agenda to feed the weeds. Our history is being destroyed by over-sensitive radicals who know nothing of the history they are destroying, and they don't care. People who love to watch fires, don't always care what is burning.

We must realize that, just like the weeds that we must deal with soon or they will take over the garden and the yard, this reluctance to confront the radicalism that we are so far both permitting and promoting, will take over every community and as the communities of America go, so goes the country.

The weeds of discontent and aggression are as stubborn and relentless as dandelions and they must be removed from the root up. Picking off a bloom here and there won't do the trick. You have to be serious and determined about their eradication.

Tolerance will only lead to more weeds, bigger weeds until they are all we will see. And tolerance of radicalism, incivility, and anti-social behavior will only lead to more of the same. The longer we wait to begin to uproot this evil, the more difficult it will become.

At some point, what was once a garden will be an unappealing weed patch that no one wanted, and no one saw coming. But the path we choose determines the destination we will one day arrive at. It is as sure as any law of nature. So, at this crossroads, we will either choose the survival of America or its demise. We can't have it both ways.

It is time to pull some weeds. Glen Spicer

A Method to the Madness

I understand that many try and steer away from politics because it tends to be a volatile issue. But with the screwy things that are happening in America today, it is time to take a stand.

We are seeing the Left getting student-aged millennials and young people fired up about the “evils” of the Confederacy, the historical importance notwithstanding. So, the destruction or removal of statues of Confederate soldiers and leaders was guaranteed to follow.

The Confederate Flag has always been a popular target but has grown even more so as of late. Even the state of Mississippi is under fire because a corner of their state flag displays a small version of that flag.

But the drive for “ending racism” did not stop there. Statues of Abraham Lincoln has been vandalized, even though he “freed” the slaves. A statute of Teddy Roosevelt is being targeted now because it shows him on horseback with an Indian standing on one side and a Black man standing on the other side. So, how is this racist?

The statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the General who won the Civil War for the North, has been torn down. Should he not have been seen as a hero? Not by those bent on destruction and ignorant people with no working knowledge of our history.

Even George Washington’s statue did not escape their lunacy and one of the statues of Christopher Columbus has been decapitated and toppled. The statue of Francis Scott Key, who penned the words to the National Anthem, is seen as an undesirable now and they demand it be removed.

What was promoted as an end to displays of racism has devolved into sheer thirst for destruction. Or perhaps it has actually evolved into what it was designed to be from the start, an orchestrated attempt at destroying the history of America by those who hate this country.

We have seen the unprecedented rise of “Democratic Socialism,” whatever that is supposed to be, and we had Democrat Party presidential candidates run on that platform. While their campaign did not run the course, the idea has not died.

The Black Lives Matter movement has also always devolved from the idea of social equality and racial justice to an excuse to loot, burn and destroy America and the assaulting of Whites just because they are White (which is the very definition of racism itself) and into a reason to assault police officers.

Suddenly, every police officer in America is somehow to be responsible and held accountable for the actions of a small handful. By that logic, every Black person should be held accountable for every crime committed by a Black individual. Does that sound logical? Of course not, but logic for BLM is nonexistent.

The Left and BLM are joined at the hip and the erasing of “inconvenient history” or the symbols of law and order has replaced any demand for justice with brutality, savagery and anarchy. The idea of justice for George Floyd, a Black career criminal who was incarcerated nine times on drug, thief and gun charges, who once held a loaded gun on the belly of a pregnant Black woman while his five friends robbed her house, and who was raised to the level of hero and martyr by the Democrats and BLM, has long disappeared.

There is a method to their madness and it involves chaos and civil disobedience carried to the extreme. It is to collapse the economy, overrun society with confusion and turmoil, open the door to whatever “solution” the Left says they represent, and currently to install protestors as a protected class of people and even giving over portions of cities like Seattle to them for their nonsense to be carried out without interference by police, the influence and power they are demanding be stripped from the community.

In Denver, the police have been removed from city schools because the logic of the city council says that this move will make students, especially “students of color” feel safer. How does that work? I guess the possibility of another mass school shootings does not bother them as much as their child seeing a uniformed police officer protecting them does.

State governors have issued warnings to everyday citizens to “remain in their homes unless you are protesting.” After being told for months that the Coronavirus was deadly and we must isolate ourselves to restrict the possibility of spreading it, protestors are allowed to gather by the thousands with no repercussions, further illustrating the fact that responses to this “virus crisis” is guided by politics, not medicine, science or even commonsense.

Both the Covid-19 responses by Democrat governors and the BLM movement have the same goal, the elimination of what we know America to be. It won’t stop any time soon because those governors that are enabling the protestors, and backing off even when their cities are being burned, are Leftists with the same inherent desire, to see America “fundamentally changed” just as Obama promised to do when he was elected. They are carrying on his efforts that he left unfinished.

We will likely never fully understand the extent that the responses to this pandemic will have on America and its population. Apart from the economic impact, where they shut down over 50% of all retain store spaces in the country and cost the economy trillions of dollars, we are seeing a spike in suicides as their fear promoting has driven some past the place where they could see that life is worth living.

And another side of the coin has been the assault on Christianity. Christians and Jews were told by New York City mayor Di Blasio, for example, to remain at home and if they were to reopen their churches and places of worship, they would be arrested, while at the same time, he patted himself on the back for having fed “hundreds of thousands” of Muslims (by his own estimate) during Ramadan.

So, what we are seeing is an assault on America, its heritage, it’s traditions, its history and its future, all in the name of tolerance and civility even though their methods are anything but tolerant and civil.

America is at a crossroads and where we end up will determine which fork we take. Will we demand a return to peaceful communities and the honoring of America’s past and present, even while attempting to make it a better place to live, or we take the path that will cause us to see the destruction of this great American experiment complete?

The time for not taking a stand and for avoiding politics, as nasty and as messy as it can get, is past. We have seen what the promotion of fear and hysteria has done to us and our willful obedience has made us complicit in the result. We will either be an influence in what happens to America from this day forward, or we will find ourselves one day scratching our heads and wondering, “What happened to America I once knew?”

Glen Spicer