Dakota Beacon

Saturday will be July 4, Independence Day.  Will it be our last?  This time next year we might be well on the way to Wuhan.  The Democrat who is running for president has promised to “force” us to wear face masks.  What else will he “force”?  A CCP vaccine?  A gun grab?  Maybe a friendly alliance with China.  Certainly more debt and less freedom.  More government bureaus and departments.  Even worse federal judges (not that we can brag about any that the Republicans have appointed).  The tumbrils will be rolling to the guillotine with the dissenters aboard.  Free speech - what was that, again??  

If the polls are right this is what we can expect.  I apologize if I don’t sound like I’m celebrating our nation’s birthday.  Our nation is dying.  Our president is basically out to lunch.  The current crisis is first, rioting and insurrection (that is a “biggie”) and second, another wave of virus illness.  The latter begins to pale when we see how suddenly death can come on the streets of our cities.  Personally, I’m done with hiding from the virus.  It can come and get me - maybe it will.  It looks like less of a loss the more we see of the world we are making for ourselves to live in.

I’m sick of holier-than-thou celebrities trying to make themselves relevant in these turbulent times by bailing out looters.  When their Beverly Hills palaces are looted how will they address that?  So far only one celebrity has responded with anything like compassion for anyone - surprisingly, the usually crusty Barbra Streisand.  She quietly made a gift of a piece of 

Disney’s Magic Kingdom to the orphaned six-year-old daughter of George Floyd.  In so doing, she has redeemed herself for a lot of bad politics in the past.  She has so far been the only Hollywood celebrity who showed any compassion or caring for the family of the late George Floyd.  The rest have done nothing but promote vandalism and theft and felt good about it.

I hope you will find it in your heart to celebrate the Fourth of July.  My mother told me how her grandparents, immigrants from Russia, celebrated.  They cooked for weeks, preparing special foods for “the Chuly”, as they called it.  It was the biggest day of the year, in which they made their thanks for being part of America.  They should know, having left Tsarist Russia in the 1880s.  They had a great advantage over the half-baked kids who pontificate to us from their college dorms and campuses.  They knew what oppression actually was and appreciated their good fortune in escaping it for a hard but rewarding life.

My great-grandfather and his wife and two daughters came over on a steamer to Ellis Island.  My great-grandmother had lost her sight on the way over - it was adjudged to be hysterical blindness.  She was that terrified of the crossing.  Later, when she recovered, she vowed she would never go on the seas again.  My great-grandfather and a few others did make a return trip to visit relatives one last time, but she refused to leave South Dakota.  They left New York on a train for the “West”, where they were promised a chance to earn land by farming it.  They arrived in October, at the end of the line, in Eureka, SD.  There was no lumber, nothing with which to build a shelter and nothing but a vast prairie full of rocks and prairie grass.  They dug a hole in the ground and lived underground the first winter.  The next year they built a sod hut and literally “moved up in the world”.  My great-grandfather and his brother acquired an ox, which they shared to plough their fields and in time, with unending work, they managed to do very well.  My great-grandfather became an implement dealer.  The family were all musicians and singers and their elder son, my grandfather played cornet in the city band (a point of great pride to him) and played baseball.  His cousin, a near-clone, was a professional ballplayer with the NY Giants, one of five pro baseball players born in Russia.  But I ramble.  My point is that these people came with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, a few seeds to plant and a dream.  A dream they turned into a reality.  They and so many like them brought this hope and dream to America and built their new country and raised their families and prospered.  It was a great formula.  We seem to have made some substitutions.  Instead of gratitude and love of country we have substituted a twisted self-loathing and self-accusation, a hatred for the noble aims of our forebears, an embrace of what our forefathers escaped - a totalitarian dictatorship, theft of property and services, silencing of discourse and debate, word-banning, censorship.  

What’s happened?  It’s simple.  We took all that hope and work away from people.  No opportunity to plant these seeds and dreams any longer.  Farms are all corporations now.  Other opportunities are constricted by millions of regulations even the bureaucrats don’t know.  Everyone goes to college - they don’t earn the money or work their way through.  They borrow.  So costs go up accordingly and these students stay in school way too long.  It’s no longer about education, it’s about a school “career”, and what are they learning?  Oh, important stuff that we all need, like transgenderism, social justice, communism, hate for America.  

So maybe this 4th of July birthday celebration will be one of those only we who were there will remember.  Our history is being obliterated as we speak, our monuments to our great contributors are toppled and defaced, our flag burned or used as a mop.  Do people still celebrate the 4th?  Not sure.  Maybe they have only been celebrating battles of the bands, fireworks and brats on the grill all along.  

If anyone breaks the social distancing rule long enough, try to remember why you have the day off at least.  If you’re planning a trip, this might be your last chance to see Mt. Rushmore.  I always wanted to go there when I was a kid.  Never had the opportunity.   But that’s alright, I would say to myself, Mt. Rushmore’s not going anywhere!  Silly me.