Dakota Beacon

“A people without a knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” (Marcus Garvey)

What is the “balance sheet” on the elderly?  It is becoming more clear every day that organized “medicine” has determined that it is now time to begin weeding us all out.  Jacques Attali, in 1981, is quoted as saying that those over age 60 no longer produce more than they consume and thus must be culled.  As Alex Jones recalled in his presentation of this statement, Ezekiel Emanuel, in considering aspects of Obamacare, said much the same thing, referring to those over age 75 as “useless eaters”.  Well, that’s about as bare-bones as it gets.  Right to the point.

But what, really, do the elderly give to society?  Well, we could say that they paid in advance.  Our soldiers in World War II paid.  Many paid with their lives and limbs, with their health.  Many of those now considered “elderly” invested heavily in terms of their life’s blood in the building of our economy, the raising of our children (I would have to say they might have done this better).  They built the houses we live in, they built the roads and bridges we travel over.  They invented the miracles we use every day.  So we have that already paid.  But this is just a small part of what our older Americans do for us.

Of course, many of them take care of their grandchildren.  Some of them write us letters.  Some of them do even more.  Some of them share our country’s past with us.  

My grandmother played a huge part in my own life.  She was born in the last years of the 19th Century in South Dakota, which then was a frontier.  She knew all about life on the vast and lonely prairie.  She also saw our country go through World War I, or, as it was known then, the “Great War”.  She brought a perspective that does not translate into textbooks or history classes.  Her own grandparents had had to play a major part in her upbringing because her mother had died at age 21, leaving behind three young daughters.  She told me about the pretty iron beds her grandfather got for each of his three little granddaughters.  They were all different.  “Mine was apple green,” she remembered.  

My great-great grandfather owned a hotel.  Every day he would go down to the train station and meet the people getting off and invite them to the “best hotel in Eureka” - and it was well-known far and wide as an oasis of elegance and fine dining in that remote outpost.  My grandmother told me of one of her memories of her grandfather running back from the train station on November 12, 1918, a newspaper in one hand, waving his arms and exclaiming, “The war is over!  It’s over!”  Such was the excitement when the Armistice was signed, and everyone knew their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers were coming home.  

She came of age in the 1920s.  I have a photograph of her dressed very stylishly, standing by a classic roadster - it looked like it could have been a still from Phriney Fisher or the Great Gatsby.  She used to tell me that she thought the invention of the car “ruined’ the country, though.  And she told me about cranking up a Model T.  As she raised her young family in the 1930s she had experiences she related about the Dust Bowl, about hobos, about “Dance-a-Thons” and about the hard times everyone must have lived through.  Once she saw John Dillinger.  She could tell me about my uncle at 18, going off to serve in World War II.  

My own mother told me and my siblings and our children about the Big Band Era.  She would demonstrate the Jitter-Bug for us.  She told us of doing readings on the radio in the early days - and she could recite poetry at the drop of a hat.  (A few years ago I was trying to exercise my own memory and thought, “I'll learn some poetry.”  I mentioned my efforts to my mother one day on the phone.  She said, “Well, go ahead.  Show me.”  I began an Irish poem which predated World War I by a poet who died in his 20s in that war.  I was about three lines in when she joined in and recited it flawlessly with me.  It was one I had never heard her recite before.)  She told me about growing up in small-town Leola, South Dakota - the place she thought of as “home” the rest of her life, about her own great-grandmother, about her German Russian grandparents and her grandmother’s aprons.  Her grandmother always surreptitiously took some coins out of her ample pockets and pressed them into my mother’s little hand, holding a finger to her lips.  Although my mother knew no German and my great grandmother knew no English, they had a lifelong unspoken bond.  My mother surmised that her grandfather would have disapproved.  A few years ago she sewed an beautiful apron for me.  In the pocket, held there with a safety pin, was a shiny new quarter, in memory of her grandmother.  

This is how we learn.  We learn from our parents.  We don’t learn from our day care providers or even our school teachers or professors.  The important things we learn at our mother’s knee or our father’s elbow, as they pass along the lessons they learned when they were young.  Useless eaters?  Hardly.  Costing more than they produce?  Are you kidding?

This is the tragedy of our era.  The loss of our narrative, our history, our family ties, those things, intangible things, which bind us to those who went before and those who will go on after us, when we are gone.  My mother passed away in 2018.  I still feel she is just a phone call away, just a conversation ago.  She is ever present with me.  My grandmother, who used to read storybooks to me and peel potatoes while I sat on the kitchen counter next to her sink, she, too, is still with me.  I hear her voice.  I hear her pithy traditional sayings - “Well begun is half done.”  I still think of the jar of rose petals and salt she kept.  I remember her silver sugar bowl, well used for her coffee.  My grandfather, too, is a presence, even though I was but five years old when he died.  I remember my grandmother’s half-brother Gene, who let me play with his defunct cigarette lighter while I sat on his lap.  Every time I smell lighter fluid Gene comes instantly to mind. My own father was a paratrooper in WWII.  He almost never mentioned his own experiences in the war, but once I recall when we were watching a movie set during WWII on the late show one night, he said, “You know, at that time we didn’t know who was going to win the war.”   It sent a chill up my spine.  We are so confident that it was preordained that we would win.  We did not know anything else.  We had not experienced that reality, that possibility, that need to fight to the death to win.  To us it was all “history”.  

Who are these people who have been so deprived themselves that they cannot understand what the generations before have given us and continue to give us?  What is wrong with them?  I suppose we should pity them, but more than that we need to push back strongly against them.  We must stop them in their tracks and let them know just how inappropriate and dysfunctional they are.  We need to absolutely reject them.  

Think about it.  If what our earlier generations did was unimportant and their investment is our future so worthless that they, themselves, haven’t even the right to collect on that investment, what of us?  Of what value is our effort?  Does it really matter whether we contribute when we are 20 or 40 years old?  Why?  If our parents’ and our grandparents’ and their grandparents’ contributions can be written off and our elderly can be considered “past their usefulness”, why would any of the rest of us make an effort?   We are said to stand on the shoulders of giants.  Without what these people accomplished - and endured - for us, nothing we do matters either.  It might well be said that the quality of a civilization can be summed up in how they treat their elders and their children.

It is my own belief that the entire covid hoax (yes, of course there was a virus - there is a virus every other year but it did not kill 200,000 citizens or anything close) was created and puffed up to push a vaccine.  The vaccine (which is not a vaccine either) is a means of killing millions of us.  I hope we will reject this too.  It is targeting the elderly - our treasured earlier generation.  It also targets those with impaired immune systems.  Next it will be those of child-bearing age.  We will have a generation which does not even have children.  Need I say more?  

None of this is for the public “good”.  It is for the public death.  It is nothing but a death cult - the masks are part of it and especially the “social distancing” is part of it - where we were told we could not be with our families and friends, where we were “required” to separate children from their grandparents.  It is evil.  Not the virus.  The government’s and society’s and above all the corrupt medical practitioners’ deliberately destructive response.  Resist it.  Push back.

“A nation that forgets its past can have no future.”  (Winston Churchill)