What Matters

With this post, I saw an end to my thinking deep thoughts. 

Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?

We bought the lunatic Nazi Race Theory advocates in our universities and now in our young, professional class as soon as we decided to pay for our social services with printed money.

After more than 14 years of thinking out loud on this blog, I had finally come to the conclusions Kipling reached in The Gods of the Copybook Headings. It dawned on me that traditional values resonate because they're true. Modern values, particularly the race-based ones and those trying to equate the sexes, turn me off because they're lies. It's not any more complicated than that.

This isn't hard. Living according to traditional values is simply a matter of relaxing and accepting the rules laid out in the reality that God created for us. As a man, acquire meaningful skills so you can protect and provide for a family. Expose yourself to the lives of men who are good examples of this, both through your friends and from history. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson come to mind. 

Wife kitteh and I had another in our evolving discussions about sexual roles last night. We both know women who have swallowed the modern values that tell them to pursue careers first. Their children, if they have any and many don't, are raised by others. They have loads of student debt. There's no evidence that they have the inner happiness of being good wives and mothers. We both wondered out loud what it was they thought they were buying with their careers. It certainly wasn't satisfaction. It was only stuff and the stuff had not made them content.

I need a lot more space to think this out and this post is getting close to tl;dr territory, so I'm going to close with this.

Politics is a false god. It demands that you care deeply about the trivial. Our progressive, social justice deacon gave the homily at Mass yesterday. As he rambled, he hit all of the fashionable themes - justice and racism and tolerance. He hit none of the themes whose dangers loom over us like monster-movie beasts - debt, drugs and sexual degeneracy. He thought he was saying something important and the congregation were all familiar with his topics, but none of them really mattered.

Ignore the political and focus on what matters is the message I heard, even if it wasn't delivered in the sermon.

More on this in later posts.

Learning skills, like cooking, matters. This is a beef tenderloin we found in the good-Lord-this-meat-has-almost-turned-lets-discount-it-and-sell-it-before-we-have-to-throw-it-away bin. We had gone to the store to get a fresh chicken to grill, but found this and scooped it up, no particular recipe in mind. However, I'm getting better with my Oklahoma Joe pellet smoker and knew if I put on a rub and smoked it for an hour or two, it would come out great. It did.