Sake White

A taste of the goodness here.

Let’s be honest, as Bob suggests, and admit that there has never been a single country on the face of the earth; nor could many even imagine a country, that is as decent and good as America; and which is so committed to the idea of human freedom that it’s people would fight and die to bring freedom to another country. Bob aptly describes this as “the unimaginable goodness of America.”

I wholeheartedly concur. All my life I have counted myself almost unbearably fortunate to have been born in the wonderful country. I choke up whenever I think about it; whenever I ponder the philosophy of the Founders, who despite their very human flaws were able to creat a nation that could not have even been imagined by most of the people of their own time; and still cannot be imagined or appreciated by the supposedly progressive and advanced people of the modern world.

What an incomparable achievement America was and is! We are most certainly not burdened with the need to be perfect (only the insanely unrealistic and out-of-touch-with-reality political left suffers from that toxic brand of narcissisism). And we frequently have strayed and stumbled from time to time–it cannot be otherwise for any human endeavor. But what a marvelous triumph of freedom, of progress, of human achievement America is! A living, breathing and real-world expression of the abstract ideas of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” .

So much do we love the freedom and values of this country, we have always been willing to put our lives on the line, not only to insure that the blessings of liberty will be passed onto our own children, but to pass it on to all people; all races; all religions.

Russ Vaugn, at American Thinker reminds us that, “America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong”; and goes further to identify what it is about America that is so splendid:

I think a good background reading into similar topics can be found here, which was Tink’s rant at blackfive which was very very enlightening concerning feminism from a feminist. Or shall I say, former feminist.

“So, where are the feminists while we’re doing this fight? Same places they’ve always been - sitting somewhere safe yapping about stuff that doesn’t matter while good men and women die to protect them.”

Warning, I’m gonna rant and ramble.

They were yelling loud and clear in the late 90’s..

Personal story here. I was involved with a group that researched content for a major ISP. During research on “Women’s Rights” in 97 was when I first learned about the Taliban - the stonings, the total lack of medical care because women couldn’t be seen or touched by a male not a member of their family - but women were no longer allowed to be doctors. Their husbands dead, the women weren’t allowed to work, weren’t allowed out of their homes without a male relative escort - yet they no longer had male relatives, so they either starved or became ghostly beggars. They weren’t allowed to have an education..

If any of the “rules” were broken, they were beaten or worse, assassinated in the soccer stadium, with their children forced to watch.

I could go on and on and on..

This group of women I worked with was FURIOUS that “we” (The US) weren’t doing anything. So we wrote letters, we “raised awareness” - we posted our research on the content screens of this major ISP, we joined forces with some actors wife (I can’t remember who anymore - sorry, brain cramp)to send supplies and support in through aid agencies.

Then came 9/11 and a few days later my husbands Guard Unit was activated..

I started to get email and messages from these same women who I was still working with - women who knew my husband was on orders and we didn’t know what was going to happen. Those emails had little notes about how it wasn’t the “right time” to go to war.

Women who knew good and well what the Taliban had done to their “sisters” (as they called them) over the last few years…

It disgusted me, but everyone had a right to their opinion..right? But Oh Dopey me couldn’t understand why these women who were so furious that “we weren’t doing something”, we’re all of a sudden so against everything we had talked about over the years.

Soooo, I continued to work with these women and I began to read daily news from all over the world, and Centcom, and press briefings, and found newspapers published by units in country. I dug for any and all information I could find - I wanted the info straight from the horses mouth, not some else’s ideas of what that info was..

Those women? They got their friggin’ “news” from “The Daily Misleader”, published daily by Move-On.org. Seriously.

In 2004, when Hubs unit mobilized to Afghanistan - these women basically stopped talking to me about anything of consequence. All these people who I had supported over the years would only talk to me about How’s the weather? . All those women, who back in the 90’s were begging for the US to take action to oust the Taliban. They sure supported taking that country by force in the late 90’s, we had talked about it hundreds of times.

But yeah, they were against it - now.

After the Afghan election in 2004 - I was so damned excited - In that same province in the news story above, a place where the womens polling place was smeared in human feces and they and their families had been threatened with death or dismemberment if they voted? Yeah, the women voters OUTNUMBERED the men.. Things had gone very smoothly, there was no violence in the polling places..

I was so proud of those people for fighting back..

And those women I worked with? All I heard was “yeah, buts” Basically, things weren’t perfect yet and the US is bad, and Bush this and Bush that.

They didn’t give a damn about those women anymore, it was all about Bush.

When Hook first started his shoe drive, I let them know..all these women who “cared” so much. The response? I don’t want to be involved with military projects.

A guy collecting shoes for kids, but to them, it was a “military project”

Yanno, our guys were the first permanant US presence in that area, they built their FOB from scratch. In 4 months there had been HUGE progress. There wre people there who were willing to fight for their homes and families, and with a permanant US presence, they finally felt they had a chance.

Yet all those women cared about was that it wasn’t perfect yet. More than 2 decades of war, and we hadn’t fixed it in a couple of months. I was getting my info from troops right there on the ground, from the guys doing the actual work…and they would tell me it wasn’t happening because that’s not what they read in the daily misleader yanno…

That’s when I submitted my resignation.

The “wrong” president was in office, they no longer gave a damn about anything.

All of those “good friends” of mine, people I worked with for 8 years, I never hear from them anymore.

(end of rambling rant)

Posted by: Tink | Nov 30, 2006 3:10:32 PM

If you want more TINK, better click on the link.

Now a look inside the rabbit hole. This article describes the view of the Left, very very interesting. And it also helped me form what I call the “Unified Field Theory of Leftism”. Not the primary hand sort either.

“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group”

Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women’s studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women’s statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women’s studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us.”

I see this as medicine. Sure, it might be bitter or you might not like reading it, but it is necessary to know and to comprehend the view of the other side. If only because of Sun Tzu’s teachings.