RUTHFULLY YOURS

Those who believe that sharia law trumps the Constitution should not be allowed in. And those who look the other way should never become president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton, responding to the knife attack in a St. Cloud, Minnesota mall for which ISIS took credit and the bombing in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood by a gay-hating Afghan-born Islamist who was a naturalized American citizen, warned us about the dangers if radical Islamic terrorism, but of intolerance to Muslim-Americans:

“[L]et us remember, there are millions and millions of naturalized citizens in America from all over the world. There are millions of law-abiding peaceful Muslim Americans,” Clinton said.

Yes, Hillary, there are a lot of naturalized American citizens, including the 858 from what are euphemistically called “special interest countries”, naturalized by “mistake” due to the use of multiple identities and fingerprints not digitized in any database. This speaks to Donald Trump’s about a cessation of admitting refugees from these countries until we know what we’re doing. Clearly we do not. What other mistakes are being made that will naturalize the next Mohammed Atta?

Dzhokhar Tsanaev became a naturalized citizen before he and his brother used pressure cookers to bomb the Boston Marathon. Ahmad Khan Rahami became a naturalized citizen before he became a jihadi Johnny Appleseed, planting pipe and pressure cooker bombs in New Jersey and New York neighborhoods. Both in effect took up arms against the United States and its citizens, which one would think amounts to a renunciation of their U.S. citizenship. Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled repeatedly to Dagestan and Chechnya, once spending six months there. Rahami traveled to Afghanistan, returning radicalized. Did anyone care to monitor their movements and motives? Hillary says if you see something, say something, yet is the first to cry “profiling” and “Islamophobia” when we monitor Islamist activities and conduct surveillance radical mosques. The San Bernardino shooters could have been stopped if a neighbor had not been intimidated by political correctness into not reporting their suspicious activity.

There are those who warn against trading liberty for safety and protecting the Constitutional rights of naturalized American citizens. Well, my Constitution has a clause about protecting the rights of all American citizens against our enemies, foreign and domestic. We have a right not o be killed. Naturalized citizens are invited to be American citizens on condition of their loyalty to this country and its beliefs. They do not have a “right” to be here.

There are those who remind us that the Statue of Liberty invites the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We indeed invite those to America who wish to become American, but not those who live in Islamist enclaves in places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis. We are Americans who yearn to keep on breathing, unimpeded by shrapnel from exploding pressure cookers, or being stabbed at the mall by an Islamist who sees America as an infidel waiting to be slain.

I haven’t read Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, “Born to Run,” but I read Dwight Garner’s review of it (NYTimes 9/21/16) and was incredulous about the following declaration: “Mr. Springsteen’s father was a frequently unemployed bus driver among other blue-collar jobs; his mother a legal secretary. They were fairly poor. In their houses – half-houses, more often – there was generally no telephone and little heat.” Bruce grew up in the 50’s and 60’s in the state of N.J. – not in Yoknapatawpha County in the backwoods of Mississippi. In America during the the 50’s, two thirds of all homes had phones and though air conditioning was not yet common, heating certainly was. I won’t quibble about whether or not these statements are partially true but I will say that a boy whose mother was a legal secretary was not poverty-stricken, so why the desire for that illusion? Does it increase his creds as a man of the people to boast that despite being a member of the 1% now, he came from dirt-poor beginnings?

Wealthy democrats in America are often confused and guilt-ridden about their extreme affluence. Hillary Clinton ranted about being in debt when she and Bill left the White House, a statement that was not only a lie but a telling one reflecting her embarrassment about their net worth. Do politicos believe that wealthy people can’t be seen as empathic towards the need of the poor? How strange, considering the billions of dollars that wealthy people have bestowed upon charities to help the needy not to mention to improve parks, libraries, schools, hospitals,, museums, cultural centers – urban environments that exist for all members of society to use and enjoy.

Once upon a time America was super-proud of those super-rich democrats Jack and Jackie Kennedy whose White House was decorated in a manner befitting lifestyles of the rich and famous. No false modesty or embarrassment in the elegant couture of our fashionable first lady or the family compound on Cape Cod – rich meant cultured, sophisticated, articulate and charming. Today, despite the preponderance of so many billionaire democrats – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, Oprah, Kanye and Beyonce, David Geffen – to name but a few – wealth is more commonly associated by the media with the Koch Brothers in a pejorative way that implies Republican influence peddling and nefarious finagling. The NY Times, whose advertisers represent the shops frequented by the 1% and merchandise too expensive to be labeled, uses its editorial and op ed pages to disparage the very audience at which the ads are pitched.

This is what we know as cognitive dissonance and it should make us squirm with its inherent dishonesty. There was a time when lower middle-class people were proud of being productive workers who didn’t consider themselves poor. Many of them were immigrants who came from the old country where poor meant people without enough to eat, without a house to live in, without the opportunity to work and support a family. Coming to America meant coming to a land of opportunity with free education and the chance to work hard and move on up – if not in one generation, certainly in two. Those people would not have exaggerated their poverty – that would have stripped them of their dignity. Today’s mores allow super-rich celebrities and politicians to tout their humble beginnings as proof of how deserving they are of their subsequent fortunes. I’d prefer reading that Bruce Springsteen was proud of his legal secretary working mom and a father who tried to find work wherever he could. I suspect that any family with enough expendable cash to buy their son a guitar probably had enough for a phone and portable heater. Bruce deserves his fame and fortune by virtue of his creditable talent – no need to flaunt his deprivation of a phone which jars us by ringing so untrue.

Students at the California State University–Northridge sat around in a big ball pit (which they a called a “vent tent”) and talked about hurtful words and their feelings as part of a school-sponsored inclusive language campaign.

According to video and documents obtained by Heat Street, the campaign lasted for a week, was put on by the University Student Union (USU), and cost more than $1,000 in student fees. It’s not clear exactly how much of that money was spent on the ball pit rental, or if there is any research supporting the idea that sitting in a ball pit while having a discussion provides any educational and/or therapeutic benefits.

The USU also printed out posters featuring several words and phrases that it deemed offensive and posted them all over campus. Some of the phrases are actually very offensive (“this b****,” “you are such a f**,” and “you stupid w****”) and others are much less harmless (such as “you’re being so crazy”) but in both cases, the posters are pretty useless. As for the less harmless ones, it’s clear that something like “you’re being so crazy” is often used in a lighthearted manner, perhaps to describe someone who is being silly, and therefore doesn’t really deserve a blanket warning against its use in all cases. As for the clearly offensive ones? Well, as Heat Street’s Jillian Melchior points out, “it’s pretty inconceivable that a university would feel the need to teach college students that it’s not nice to say, for instance, ‘you stupid w****,’ ‘this b****,’ or ‘f**.’”

Other features of the campaign included a spinning wheel with offensive words, which students would spin and then discuss whether they found the language offensive, and a board where students could write for themselves which words they considered to be harmful. According to Heat Street, one student apparently wrote “When I hear the word ‘edgy,’ it makes me feel triggered,” but it’s not clear exactly just what in the fresh hell that student was talking about, or what people on campus are going to be expected to do about it. After all, “edgy” is pretty universally seen as a harmless word. Should people on campus be expected to suddenly stop using it because one random person considers it offensive for some random reason? I feel like the answer there is pretty clearly “no.”