Illustrated History of the Father/Son Camping Trip

Last week, I took my son on an adventure to, among other places, my childhood hometown. We visited some of my old haunts and camped in the mountains overlooking the canyon in which the town is located. Let's get this trip started!

I know: choices, choices. No, that's not me, but I went to the college that is referred to in the sign. After almost four hours of driving north from Sacramento, I stopped at my Junior College alma mater, College of the Siskiyous. I figured it would be a perfect place to get out and let my almost 5 year-old son burn off some energy, because our destination was still two more hours away. College of the Siskiyous (more commonly referred to up there as C.o.S.) is located in a small town called Weed, California, which is located along the slopes of Mount Shasta on Interstate 5. It used to be that if you took a certain exit off I5 in Weed, this sign awaited you at the bottom. It was no big deal until the Internet came along, and photos of the sign went viral. Some bureaucrat must have taken notice, because the sign at the bottom of the exit now says Central Weed/College of the Siskiyous along with their respective arrows. By the way, the town is named after a man named Abner Weed, who located a lumber mill there because almost constant winds in that area dried out freshly cut lumber faster than surrounding locales.

What better place to have my son get out of the car than at one of the prettiest track and field/football stadiums you will ever see? I ran track and cross country at College of the Siskiyous, and I spent many an hour running in that beautiful setting, including when there was snow all over the track or when the fog was so thick you couldn't see the finish line from the top of the straighway. I ran several important races on that track in high school as well, since it is only one of two all-weather tracks in the entire county. Look at the deciduous trees mixed in with the evergreens overlooking the stadium, and imagine the sight during the fall when those deciduous trees turn colors. When I went to football games while attending CoS, I would often forget about the game and just study the trees.

And he's off! I have watched my son run quite a bit, and I have to say, he can run his butt off for only being five. He lifts his knees and pumps his arms very efficiently, and I have never even taught him how; he just does it.

Ah, the solitude of the track. I will try not to push them into the sport, but I truly hope both my kids give track and field a try. It's the best!

After leaving Weed and CoS behind, we continued along I5 for another half-hour to a town called Yreka. At Yreka, you leave I5 behind and begin traveling west along a winding two lane highway called State Route 96 for about 70 miles. When we were within about 15 miles of our destination, I saw two helicopters hovering in the canyon way in the distance. As we got closer, I started to smell smoke, and then we rounded the bend to see a fire in the hills above the highway. The fire started right along the highway (cigarette tossed from a car perhaps?) and the fire climbed the hill from there. A pilot car had to guide traffic through the area, as there were firefighters parked all along the highway.

And then we arrived! No, that sign is not a joke; that is the name of the town in which I grew up. It is an old gold mining town that was founded in 1851. It was originally named Murderers Bar, so I guess things could have been worse. The story goes that one day in 1851, a bunch of gold miners struck it rich, so that night in their camp, they partied hard and the camp was very happy, hence....

Growing up there could feel rather isolating at times, being so small and off the beaten path, but I wouldn't trade my experiences of growing up there for anything in the world. This is the kind of little mountain town to which people flock while on vacation, and I lived there! Every day was a vacation.

After obtaining a campfire permit at the local ranger station and additional provisions at the local grocery store, I took my son to my favorite swimming hole, which is located at Clear Creek, about 10 miles downriver. As a kid and as a young man, I spent countless hours at this most holy of recreational places, swimming, snorkeling, jumping off rocks, socializing with friends, and yeah, drinking beer. My son loved this place just as much as I thought he would.

With a little coaxing, I got my son to swim to the other side where the jumping rock is located. The swimming hole varies between about 10 and 15 feet deep, and there is a fallen tree on the bottom that has been there for decades that you can actually swim under. God made that jumping rock as if it had been designed to be one. There are places to jump from varying heights into varying depths.

As you can see, the swimming hole extends for quite a ways. The bridge is State Route 96, which shows you the convenient access to the Clear Creek swimming hole. I have watched quite a few people jump off that bridge into the water below, including my own brother. I even watched one person dive off. Jumping off the Clear Creek bridge was some kind of local badge of courage. It seemed like we all knew who and who has not jumped off that bridge. At the moment however, my son is not too interested in the bridge. So many rocks to throw and so little time.

My son and I eventually relocated from the upper swimming hole to the one right below the bridge. There are always those neat little rapids that divide the upper hole from the lower one. My son was sitting there tooling around, when he said in a somewhat panicked tone, "Daddy, there's a little lobster by that rock!" Mmmmm, crawdads are good eatin'.

As we hiked up back toward the car, I couldn't resist capturing this perfect example of why it is called Clear Creek.

We drove back upriver, through town, and up Indian Creek Road to a turnoff at Doolittle Creek. There is an old logging road that goes into the Doolittle canyon for miles. The logging road splits at one point, and if you take the fork that travels up the mountain, you arrive at a bend in the road with a practically unobstructed view of the Indian Creek canyon below, with a mountain called Slater Butte which dominates the horizon:

After parking the car, we set up camp. It was dinner time when we arrived, so I quickly got a fire going, pulled out our gear, and set up some grub. While my son was sitting at the table eating, I walked up the road a few paces and captured our campsite. Not surprisingly, not a single car passed by us on this road the entire time we were parked there.

Whoa there Kiddo! Find a smaller piece of wood if you please! If you like to go camping, I highly suggest you blow $3 on a mosquito head net. We only needed them for about an hour as dusk turned to night, but it would have been a very harsh hour with them.

As a concession to this young boy, who, for the first time would be sleeping in some pretty creepy and isolated woods for the night, we slept in the back of the CR-V you see parked behind him. I collapsed the seats and laid out some blankets above and below us. My 6'2" frame didn't exactly fit very well, but he felt safe in the car from all the bears and mountain lions that he was sure were hiding behind every tree.

The next morning, we woke up and ate some breakfast and then drove back down the hill to do some more sight-seeing. We would be leaving around noon to make a three-hour drive to my parents' place, so time was at a premium.

A big highlight of the morning was hiking up the Town Trail. You park at the trailhead, and then begin an ascent up a zig-zagging trail that takes you to a special view at the end. The trail gives one a perfect overview of the flora of the Siskiyou Mountains. These woods are not like the dry coniferous forest where my parents live, which is dominated by pine and manzanita. These mountains are a mixture of fir, pine, oak, madrone, dogwood, and lots and lots of poison oak. I have been in many different forests, and the forests in these parts are easily the spookiest I have ever encountered. It is partly due to its isolation, but there is something more. Perhaps the denseness of the forest has something to do with it, or maybe it is stories of Bigfoot that are so famous in the area. Whatever it is, I have had long conversations about it with my mother, who feels the same way I do about these woods. We are at once fascinated and intimidated. I know it sounds cliched, but you always feel like you are being watched.

As my mother once said when she tried to put the mysteriousness of these woods into words, these woods seem to hold the answers to that which we do not know the questions.

And then we reached the end of the Town Trail. Now the name makes sense doesn't it?

It occurred to me that I hadn't been in a single photo so far, so I handed the camera over to my son. Not bad, Kiddo! Yes folks, I grew up in that little town behind me.

Then it was back down the mountain to the car. It was approaching lunch time by that point, and it was time to start heading out of town. But we had one more stop to make. A few miles outside town, just off the highway up a short dirt road, there is a primitive shooting range. I had brought along my 9mm pistol, SKS, and a .22 long rifle with me, so it was time to start teaching the boy how to shoot. Ooooh, did you squishy anti-gun statists just gasp in horror? I know you did, because I can hear you. Believe it or not, teaching little boys to shoot at this age used to be quite common; it still is in these parts. Not to mention, do you think I am going to take my son deep into the spookiest woods I know without a way to defend the both of us? Well, if you are still squishy about it, then behold:

I helped him hold the .22 steady and aim, but he had the stock in his shoulder and he pulled the trigger himself. It was great, and you couldn't wipe the smile off his face. We had eaten lunch at the range before we started shooting, so after I packed everything back up, we were on our way to my parents. As we began driving, my son began to tear up and began whimpering. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me, "I miss this place already." That's my boy.

We got from SR-96 back onto I5 and began heading south. Just south of Yreka, I snapped a quick photo of a hay barn with an illustration of a strong sentiment up in those parts. The state of Jefferson is a dream of forming a new state out of northern California and southern Oregon. Both of those regions feel marginalized and neglected by the major population centers and government officials of their respective states. The population centers and capital city of Oregon are in that state's north, and the population centers and capital city of California are in that state's south. As I drove around Siskiyou County, I saw signs and seals referencing the state of Jefferson in front of businesses, in front of peoples' homes, and as always, this cool hay barn. The dream of forming a state of Jefferson was actually gaining steam in November and early December of 1941, but then the U.S. became involved in world events that put the dream way on the back burner. If the state of Jefferson intrigues you, go here.

My wife and I had prearranged that she would leave Sacramento with my daughter and meet my son and me at my parents' place near a small town in northeastern California called Burney. We all ended up getting to my parents' house within 15 minutes of each other. We stayed at my parents for three days, and as nearly always, my kids wanted to visit the Subway Caves lava tube near Mount Lassen, which is an active volcano in those parts. I have to admit, I never try to talk the kids out of going. I think it's fascinating.

On the way back from Subway Caves, we stopped at a campground along Hat Creek. This is not just my opinion, but Hat Creek is considered by fishermen to be one of the best fly fishing creeks in the United States. It's also drop-dead gorgeous. The kids and Grandma seem to agree.

My son takes in Hat Creek. Don't fall in; even in late June, the water is just a couple degrees above freezing. That is pure snow melt off the slopes of 10,000+ foot Mount Lassen.

I don't know what that flower is called, but I sure thought it was pretty.

Here is a closer look.

A big ant caught my son's attention.

Of course, his little sister wants to help in the investigation. When she gets older, my daughter will also be camping in the woods with me. I can't wait to see her swim in Clear Creek!

I will leave you with a little piece of advice. When taking in the beauty of the forest, as you look around you, take the time to look up as well.

Good Day to You, Sir

Work in Progress

As you can probably tell, the blog is experiencing some technical difficulties. It is still entirely readable, but I am just messing with the format a little bit. The problem is that Blogger won't just let you make minor changes; they make you start from scratch.

Just so you know, that is the street sign from the actual Buckhorn Road from whose name the title of this blog is inspired. I took the photo during my son's and my recent trip to my hometown where we camped for the night.

Good Day to You, Sir

Latest column is up and running

I have returned! The father/son camping trip was a blast, but I'm having a little trouble with getting the pictures installed on our main computer. Additionally, I have been smote down by an excruciating case of sciatica for the last week, so I have been running around seeing my doctor, my masseuse, and a chiropractor. How's that for a 37th birthday present?

In the meantime, I did manage to get my latest Tales from the Classroom column sent to the Sacramento Citizen. Click the link and give it a read!

Good Day to You, Sir

Time for a father/son adventure!

Not that I have been blogging all that much lately - I have been very much enjoying my summer vacation - the blogging is going to get even more sparse for a few more days.

After five years away from my hometown, I am going there tomorrow with my son on an overnight camping trip. Since he was born, my son has served as a measuring stick for how long I have been away from the woods I love so much. Now that he is about to start Kindergarten, I figured it was time.

Our itinerary includes sneaking a peek at the house in which I grew up, throwing rocks in the creek, shooting some guns, and doing some trail hiking. I already know where we will be camping; it will not be in a campground. It will be on a wide spot on a bend on a logging road where the views include this, this and this. I took those pictures during my last visit, and I will post more pictures upon our return, which will not be until after this Sunday.

Good Day to You, Sir

Ma'am not good enough for you? How about B****?

Stuff like the following usually sticks in my craw for a few hours or a day, and then I brain-dump it. My anger about this is not going away. Even my wife told me she can't let it go, and my wife almost never obsesses about politics as much as I do.

Watch the absolute petty arrogance displayed by Senator Barbara Boxer, who unfortunately represents my own home state of the late, great, California:



I will bet dollars to donuts that the Brigadier General worked a lot harder to gain his title than Boxer ever did to gain hers. Nevertheless, the General is undoubtedly satisfied being called "Sir."

I am so utterly embarassed that Boxer represents my state in Congress.

Good Day To You, Sir

I'm how old?

In just a half-hour, I will step over the threshold that separates my mid-thirties from my late-thirties. Yes, I am about to turn 37.

Except for my chronically sore elbow, I don't feel 37. How can I be 37? Am I talking to myself?

37.

Good Day to You, Sir........ 37.

1965: Year Zero

Being a teacher and student of history, dates are important to me. Although memorizing dates has fallen out of favor in many history classrooms, many of us are still able to instantly name the important events that happened in such years as 476, 1066, 1492, 1620, 1776, 1865, 1914, 1945, 2001, and so on.

I have another year for you to remember: 1965. Over the years, I have come to designate this particular year as the one in which we, perhaps irretrievably, lost our country. So many society-changing events and acts of legislation were passed in 1965, I cannot think of another year in our nation's history - not even during the Civil War or the Great Depression - that so permanently altered the fabric of our society and, consequently, our nation as a whole. I expect that many people will disagree with my analysis, and could give their own reasons why another year should be considered instead of 1965, but let us consider the following:

The Great Society - What better catastrophe to start off our list than Lyndon Johnson's grotesque dream-cum-nightmare that has sapped our nation's coffers and its motivation ever since its inception. This series of government programs, announced by Johnson during his State of the Union speech on January 4th, 1965, began to remove the stigma of welfare and set our nation down the road to a dependence on government that has been seared into our populace more and more with each ensuing generation; unfortunately demonstrating disproportionate effects in our nation's racial and ethnic minority communities. The chaos in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina could be considered Exhibit A in that assertion.

The Social Security Act of 1965 - You may never have heard of this law, but you have definitely heard of two of the government programs it spawned: Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare provides taxpayer-funded health care for Americans over the age of 65. Medicaid provides taxpayer-funded health care for Americans who subsist at certain poverty levels. These programs were instituted under the belief that health care in the United States was too expensive... so how's that working out for us? A surefire economic law is that when you subsidize something, the price of it tends to increase. Once government's deep pockets began picking up the tab for millions of people's medical bills, thus distorting the incentives of the free market, costs for medical care unsurprisingly went up. Medicare/Medicaid have become so expensive, that hands are now wringing in the media and our government on how to pay for the trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities these programs are experiencing. President Obama and Congress' solution is to take the Medicare/Medicaid model and apply it to all Americans under a so-called Single Payer System. "Single Payer" is a quaint little euphemism that fails to note that the "single payer" is you, the taxpayer. That way, everyone can now be dependent on the government for our health care!

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) - This law expanded the federal government's role in the education of our nation's children like nothing before. Although the Constitution grants no powers of regulating education to the federal government, Congress did an end-run around this obstacle by dangling ESEA money in front of the states. Once the states accepted that money, then the states had to play by the federal government's rules. As the octopus arms of this law have slipped into the classrooms of most of our nations's schools, the result has been the educational wasteland that culminated in the 1983 Nation at Risk report that said if a foreign power had imposed our lackluster educational system upon us, we would have considered it an act of war. Instead, we have done this to ourselves. The one-size-fits-all approach of the ESEA provides almost limitless federal funding for just about every ineffectual educational fad that comes down the pipe, giving parents and schools nowhere to hide but for paying taxes toward public education in addition to tuition for private school. Over the years, those fads have included Title I funding of which studies have shown no gain; Whole Language instruction, which turned a generation of children into semi-literate non-readers; block scheduling, which tried to force teachers to abandon the traditional models of instruction that have worked for thousands of years, and the list goes on. Our schools, which used to be the envy of the world have been ravaged by this law that still exists today as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

The Watts Riots - On August 11, 1965, the city of Los Angeles exploded with fire and violence, as a routine traffic stop between a white police officer and a black motorist turned into days of nihilism which ended with millions of dollars in property damage and 34 people dead. Beyond the immediate death and damage, years of misery awaited as the Watts Riots served as a catalyst for the "Black Power" movement, which announced itself less than a year later. The Civil Rights movement for blacks in the United States was a necessary and noble endeavor. For some blacks however, the non-violent, integrationist methods of Martin Luther King and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee were plodding along too slowly. The violence, intimidation, and self-segregation of the Black Power movement became an alternative method to non-violence and integration, and looking at the state of Black America today, with its self-imposed segregation, belligerence, disproportionate crime rates, and high rate of out-of-wedlock births, it is unfortunate to note that Black Power won out in the war of ideas.

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 - Back in 1924, Congress realized that the United States had been ingesting an enormous amount of immigration for the previous 30 years. In an effort to let that meal settle, immigration was brought down to practically nil between 1924 and 1965. During that forty-year period, immigrants and their offspring had the chance to assimilate into American society without having to compete economically and culturally with ever more new arrivals. Ethnic groups such as Italians and Slavs moved up the economic ladder, moved out of the cities in which they had originally arrived, and began fanning out across our great melting pot. In 1965, that all changed. Whereas the 1924 Immigration Act dictated that the nationality of immigrants should match the then-current demographic makeup of the United States, a new immigration act was passed - under the leadership of none other than Teddy Kennedy - that removed nationality quotas, meaning people from any country in the world could arrive on our shores. While only 500,000 immigrants arrived in the United States during the entire decade of the 1930s, over 1 million immigrant arrived in just the year of 1996. There is nothing wrong with immigration as long as the people who arrive here are motivated to become part of our American society, to adopt our culture, and not carve out their own "communities" where they languish in self-segregation. This is what is occurring today, and has been since 1965, as the U.S. receives millions of immigrants from third-world countries whose cultures, religions, and political philosophies are often anathema to what has made the United States a place to which people around the world are willing to risk their lives to reach in the first place.

According to Ted Kennedy, this was not supposed to be the result of the 1965 Immigration Act. What has come to pass regarding that law was vehemently denied by Kennedy and other proponents as being even a possibility. Here is Kennedy's money quote about the bill during floor debate:

"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset . . . Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia...."

One only has to look at our current demographics to know that Kennedy's soothing words turned out to be a bunch of hokum. To make matters worse, take the massive levels of third-world immigration we have experienced under this law, and couple it with the Great Society-inspired welfare that is still very much available, and you begin to understand the bigger picture I am trying to illustrate for you.

Escalation of the Vietnam War and the protests the war inspired - The year 1965 was the first year that actual combat troops - as opposed to military advisors - were sent to fight in Vietnam. It was also the first year that the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and other left-wing groups began the mass protests that would define the War back home. There was nothing wrong with the United States involving itself in the Vietnam War. It was a necessary action that checked increasing Soviet designs on world domination. The tragedy was that Lyndon Johnson was not playing to win, and tens of thousands of American soldiers paid the ultimate sacrifice for Johnson's equivocation. In addition to the thousands of actual American deaths in the battlefields of Vietnam, the war also gave rise to the death of our institutions back home; institutions such as respect for authority, unabashed patriotism, and common decency. The duplicity exhibited by many of our politicians in their efforts to not win the War in Vietnam gave many an American a reason to never again trust our government to do the right thing, even if our government truly is doing the right thing. This fact was made painfully apparent during the numerous protests held on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and in other large cities around the country in which people openly supported our communist enemies and called for the United States to lose the War in Vietnam.

_________________________________________________________


If you wish to see the legacy of 1965, you only need to go right now to your television or newspaper and turn it on or open it up, or take a walk down the street or visit a local school.

President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress have just in the last few days fired their opening salvos in their fight to force socialized health care down the throats of the American people. The seeds for that possibility can easily be traced back to the incremental imposition of Medicare and Medicaid for certain portions of our population.

I have seen with my own eyes and photographed with my own camera hundreds of modern-day anti-war protestors who call for the defeat of the United States and the death of our brave soldiers in the fight against Islamic terrorism and the Islamists' attempts to reestablish a Caliphate that would make the Soviet Union a paradise by comparison.

I teach in a school where over 30 different languages and dialects are spoken. I have driven through certain parts of downtown Los Angeles that are practically indistinguishable from Tijuana. I have sadly marveled at the sight Muslim women walking down the sidewalks of my hometown, covered from head to toe in their mysoginistic uniform of flowing clothes and hijab. Great Britain is currently flirting with the idea of allowing Sharia law to be used in its court system. How long before this horrible decision reaches our shores as well?

The school at which I teach exhibits the racial "achievement gap" in test scores which is prevalent in just about every school district in the country. Our black students bring up the back of the pack in every measurable academic category. They also lead the pack in discipline referrals, suspensions, and expulsions. The belligerence and self-defeating attitudes of the Black Power movement continue to hold back an entire generation of black students who could do so well if they just applied themselves and not worry that doing so would be abandoning their "blackness."

And tying all of the above together is the legacy of the Great Society, in which government largess personal independence, personal pride, and personal responsibility for too many people. Social pathology and dysfunction continue to be rewarded, subsidized, and multiplied.

Over forty years have come and gone since 1965, which means we are now working on our third generation that has lived in the aftermath of that seminal year. The tragedy in this fact is that for a major portion of our country's population, the American people know of no other reality than the one that was imposed upon us in 1965. How does one impress upon millions of people who don't know any better the fact that things weren't always this way, and they don't always have to be?

Good Day to You, Sir

Overwhelmed

Today is the day before my final day of the school year. Tomorrow, I will travel with the 7th graders as a chaperone for their trip to a local waterslide park.

In the meantime, I have a crudload of work to do. My school is moving campuses, so I have had to pack up everything in my classroom for the move. We teachers tend to be natural pack rats, so not only have I had to box everything up, but I have had to scrutinize every book and stack of paper to decide what makes the move and what gets purged. This makes for an agonizingly slow boxing-up process.

As much as I hate to admit it, I am going to need one day next week to pack up the rest of my classroom and move much of it to my new classroom. We received a set number of boxes to pack up our official classroom stuff, but anything personal, I will have to move myself. My new classroom is on the building's third floor, so I am definitely going to be getting my workout.

I am so looking forward to summer and bidding adieu to this year's group of 8th graders.

Good Day to You, Sir

The Sacramento Citizen is up and running

Not long ago, I informed you about a new online publication serving the Sacramento area, called the Sacramento Citizen (it's also linked on my blogroll).

After messing with the format and getting rid of - in the words of its editor - its "bloggy" appearance, the Citizen is updated in both form and content and looks outstanding. Furthermore, the Citizen has a recurring column called Tales from the Classroom, which features an education columnist who you might know and revere. Check out this columnist's initial effort in the Citizen right here. Hopefully, many informative columns will follow, and I will let you know here when a new column appears in the Citizen.

Good Day to You, Sir

65 years ago today

Read the accounts of two men - one American, one British - who fought that day.

Arthur Selzer -

"I wasn't worried about getting shot, I was worried about not drowning. When we finally got to the beach there was no craters for us to hide in and naturally machine guns up there were firing. Omaha got the name 'bloody Omaha' because the only thing you could see was soldiers lying on the beach that were dead, blood all around you."

Jim Tuckwell -

"I came face to face with a German, and I beat him to the draw. I killed him. I sat on the grass and was sick and I cried ... he was some mother's son."

God Bless these men, and all the rest who fought, bled, and died that day, June 6, 1944.

Good Day to You, Sir

Those mean conservatives!

A pundit of whom I have grown quite fond is Andrew Klavan of Pajamas Media/PJTV/Big Hollywood (See blogroll). He is a novelist who has had a couple of his books made into major Hollywood Movies (Don't Say a Word with Michael Douglas, True Crime with Clint Eastwood).

On PJTV, Klavan does an occasional video blog, and his latest is absolutely brilliant. Behold, as he uses the writings of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville to explain why the fight to retain our God-given liberties (yes, my dear troll, I said "God-given") is not as "mean" as some people out there think it is.

Good Day to You, Sir

Happiness is...

...having both my kids sleeping in between my wife and me in bed last night. My son and daughter came running in just after midnight when Sacramento was hit by what was easily the most violent thunderstorm I have seen in this city in my 11 years living here. The storm was on par with some of the monster light and sound shows that I saw in South Carolina when I went through Army basic training there in the summer of 1993.

Last night, the flashes were piling on top of each other; the rumbles, cracks, and crashes of lightning overlapped each other; and the Chanman family was huddled together on the king-size bed in the master bedroom, riding out the storm. Both my kids fell asleep with their hands over their ears!

Those are the priceless family moments that you just cannot quantify.

Good Day to You, Sir

The more things change...

For the last several... well... years, I have been reading A Patriot's History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. It is a thoroughly enjoyable tome that addresses every aspect of the history of our wonderful country. Since I am always tackling way more books than I can ever hope to read - at least until my kids are grown and gone - A Patriot's History often gets shoved to the back burner. I did pull this book out the other day to read about the Great Depression and the events leading up to it. I was astonished by some of what I read, as the parallels between the candidacy, rhetoric, and presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama are eerily similar. The following quotes from the book are especially profound when you consider that the book was written when Barack Obama was not yet running for president, and was still an obscure state senator from Illinois.

In the months leading up the 2008 election, you probably remember Obama taking George W. Bush's administration to task for his profligate spending and lamenting the hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit spending that Bush had carried out. Obama wasn't running against Bush, but he did spend the campaign linking McCain to Bush's policies - hence the nickname "McSame" that the left called McCain. All this can make you chuckle as we now watch Obama making Bush seem like a reasonable spender.

During the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing to Hoover. Even though Franklin Roosevelt would go on to expand government and government spending to unprecedented levels with the New Deal, Roosevelt didn't seem to make this known during the 1932 campaign:

...during the campaign, FDR, a man whose presidency would feature by far the largest expansion of the federal government ever, called for a balanced budget and accused Hoover of heading "the greatest spending Administration in... all our history [which] has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission." Honest observers can find little difference between his programs and Hoover's. His own advisers admitted as much. Rexford Tugwell, for example, noted "We didn't admit it at that time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.

Never forget that this whole bailout nonsense started with the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which was begun by the Bush Administration, and for which, as a Senator, Obama voted in favor.

Ah, but the parallels get even better. Keeping in mind Obama's repeated urgings that we take immediate action or it will be too late, here is what happened during Roosevelt's administration once he took office:

Thus, the New Deal contained little in the way of a guiding philosophy, except that government should "do something." Equally as important as the lack of direction, virtually all of the New Dealers shared, to one degree or another, a distrust of business and entrepeneurship that they thought had landed the nation in its current distressed condition. Above all, emergency measures needed to be done quickly before opposition could mount to many of these breathtaking challenges to the Constitution. (emphasis by Chanman)

And finally, the hopenchange factor. Check this out:

...the Hundred Days especially addressed areas of the economy that seemed to be the most distressed. The banking system had to be stabilized, and wages (including farm income) increased. And the only calculated policy Roosevelt had, namely, to somehow restore the morale of the nation, rested almost entirely on intangibles such as public emotion and a willingness to believe change would occur. (emphasis by Chanman)

Again, I remind you that these passages were not written to cash in on any comparison between Obama and Roosevelt. All this was written before Obama ran for president, and was practically a nobody.

As the decades continue to separate us from the time of the Great Depression, it is becoming more and more clear to historians, economists, and the general public that the Great Depression did not end because of Roosevelt's New Deal; in fact the only thing Roosevelt accomplished was to prolong the Depression. The Depression finally ended in spite of Roosevelt's policies, not because of them.

Now we have a president carrying out a repeat performance of Roosevelt's failed policies. Let's hope we don't need another World War to bail out Obama and the American economy.

Good Day to You, Sir

Goodbye Safeway, hello government food commissary

If you would like an idea of how horrible nationalized health care would be for our country, give a read to this hilarious satirical column from the Orange County Register. The column pontificates what our world would be like if our grocery stores were put under the same "single payer" system that Obama and his cronies want to inflict upon our health care system.

Good Day to You, Sir

In case you were thinking of cozying up to a movie

If you happen to rent the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves, Andrew Klavan of Big Hollywood puts you on notice:

...Keanu is sort of a spaceman Al Gore - like Al Gore himself - on an enlightened mission to save the earth from pollution. How is he going to accomplish that? Why, by destroying the human race that causes all the mess, of course. That’s right. He’s going to murder every man, woman and child so the trees won’t die. And he’s the good guy!

It must’ve been really hard for the people who made this film to understand why it underperformed at the box office - as hard as it is for us to understand how they managed to give themselves colonoscopies with their own heads. I mean, they actually thought we were going to root for a creature who was going to slaughter our children in service to An Inconvenient Truth.

Ah, those wacky environmentalists. They purport to love the Earth, but every once in a while, they let the truth slip out, and their truth is that they hate humans. Of course, in a classic case of leftist hypocrisy, they want me and my family to die, but they are not willing to make a similar sacrifice on their part. I'm going to be watching it anyway. I need a good laugh or two.

Good Day to You, Sir

Really all you need to know about Sotomayor...

...is the quote from a speech that Obama's Supreme Court pick made in Berkeley (figures) back in 2001:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

For my fuzzy-headed leftist readers who might wonder what's wrong with a little fresh perspective, you only need to turn the quote around to see how truly disgusting this woman is:

I would hope that a wise white male with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life.

If a white male had uttered that in a speech, would you think he is A-OK to sit on the Supreme Court? Didn't think so.

Nevertheless, you can pretty much take it to the bank that Sonia Sotomayor will be our next associate justice on the Supreme Court. The Republicans most likely do not have the huevos to go up against a Latina (no matter what kind of a left-wing loon she is), and they probably won't have the votes to block her nomination anyway.

I hope you Obama voters are enjoying all this. He is giving you exactly what you voted for.

Good Day to You, Sir

Please tell me they grow out of it

I have to honestly ask: Have middle school-age children always thought this way, or is this yet another indication of the morally bankrupt instruction they have received since birth in our oh-so politically correct universe?

This morning, I am teaching my 7th graders about the Age of Enlightenment; all those political thinkers from the 17th-19th centuries like Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu.

We started the lesson with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that the closer to a "state of nature" that people lived, the better. He believed that we people are born good, and that it is government and civilization that corrupts us. I mentioned a quote of Rousseau's to my students in which he said, "One could say that savages are not evil precisely because they do not know what it is to be good."

The students weren't too sure what that meant, so I gave them the example of a lost traveler getting stuck on some remote island full of cannibals. The cannibals capture the traveler, kill him, cook him, and eat him. That is the cannibal culture, and that is what they do. I then asked my students if this was wrong?

They all agreed it was not, "If that's their culture." But they are killing an innocent person, I protested. But they held their ground on their position. I could have brought up other examples like clitorectomies on little girls in the Muslim world or the practice in India of forcing the still-alive widow to join her dead husband on the cremation pyre - a practice extinguished by the British when they controlled India. However, I am not in the mood to have some Muslim or Indian parent breathing down my neck so close to the end of the school year, so I once again emphasized that the students were giving the OK to the killing of an innocent person, and left it at that.

This interaction is a textbook example of the legacy of the multicultural crap that has been fed to our youth over the last few decades: No culture is better than any other. Who are we to say what is wrong and what is right for someone else? Sorry, but a culture of freedom and the respect for life and the rule of law is better than cultures in which these qualities are missing.

Later in the lesson, we got to John Locke and his Natural Rights theory. This is when I ask my students where their rights come from - who gives them their rights?

The number one answer? Government.

I am really fighting the tide here.

Good Day to You, Sir