Don's Tuesday Column

           THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   11/14/2023

Protests, marches then and now

Writing on Sunday morning, having watched Veterans Day commemorations of gratitude for their service in football games and other venues, this writer has restored faith in America’s fabric and soul. Unfortunately, recruitment goals for our military services (except for the Marine Corps) are close to 200,000 short, out of over 4 million 18-year-olds.

1) Polling shows a diminished sense of service to this nation among younger Americans. 2) Between the lack of a high school diploma or a GED, a record of heavy (beyond recreational) drug use, and insufficient physical fitness mostly through obesity and sedentary lifestyles—nearly 70 percent of that demographic is basically unqualified for enlistment. Yes, America has always relied on a relative minority of its citizens (and immigrants) to fill the military ranks, but this does not bode well for deterrence of foreign threats.

Could it possibly have anything to do with the incessant “woke-ness” conveyed through the ad celebrating the enlistment of a girl with two moms; the thinly-veiled emphasis on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; the embracing of the LGB-alphabet soup of gender nonsense; and a Defense Department member quoted that she wants to avoid reliance on recruits from previously serving families so as to steer away from a “warrior cult”?

Pro-Palestine protests showed up in Chico and Redding; an Israel-supporting counter protester was killed in Thousand Oaks, a short walk from an Arby’s restaurant I managed in the 1990s. I’m mindful of protests and marches I participated in from college days to the Tea Party movement (whose local rallies I attended) protesting being “Taxed Enough Already (TEA).”

I likewise recall a Jewish friend from Valparaiso University, early 1970s. “Lenny” (I’ve long since forgotten his last name) was a valued member of our little counter-cultural clique of pot-smoking rebels against a campus culture dominated by fraternities, sororities, athletics, and the engineering school into which I had earned a scholarship. “If I could only do it over again,” said no one ever, right?

We were curious why Lenny’s Jewish parents sent him to a Lutheran university, but our lives were enriched by his sense of humor, his challenging intellect, and the fact that none of us felt devotion to the Lutheran faith. He probably achieved his degree, unlike this student that gravitated to the side streets and out-of-mainstream whirlpools of drugs, left-wing politics and anti-war protests.

Before dropping out, sans degree, I had seen through the hypocrisy and counterproductive goals and means of the leftist anti-war protest movement; I gravitated to drug-free spiritual communes and jobs well beneath the potential that earned my scholarship out of high school.

A brother a few years behind me was also exposed to the same influences in college, but focused on actually earning a degree, qualifying for a position that suited his exceptional abilities, and saw through the mirage of pot-induced alternate reality.

Now, between Chinese drugs, Mexican production and smuggling, and nationwide networks of pushers and “pot shops,” drugs such as fentanyl have hollowed out and destroyed countless lives, even affecting our nation’s ability to defend against the Chinese Communist Party military behemoth over the sea.

The pro-Palestine movement (little removed from the pro-Hamas terrorist movement) expresses pride in proclaiming “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—meaning exterminate the Jewish state of Israel—and a license to direct visceral animosity at identifiable Jewish students and bystanders. It would have been inconceivable for us in 1970 to see antisemitism directed at our Jewish friend Lenny, but maybe Valparaiso University has “evolved” to tolerate such intolerance.

Seeing even a toned-down version of such fanaticism in Chico or Redding (God forbid a Hamas flag is flown on a Red Bluff sidewalk) does not absolve such protesters from accountability for their ignorance of facts inconvenient to their jaundiced narrative. The spoken Jewish language of Hebrew, biblical history for the Jewish faith that long precedes Christianity and Islam, and lineage for Jews worldwide—make Israel a legitimate Jewish homeland long before the U.N. created the Jewish state.

Palestinians and their leaders, elected or not but all advocates of Israel’s destruction, have rejected their own state over and over, preferring to indulge the evil hope that their Jewish neighbors would be eradicated. Polling supports that case; videos show the cultivating of murderous hatred for Jews into their children.

They happily celebrated the sub-human slaughter of Israeli children, women, babies and defenseless men; Israeli military forces make every conceivable effort to avoid collateral damage and casualties to innocent Palestinian civilians, even as Hamas tries to keep “human shields” vulnerable to death.

Israel “de-occupied” Gaza 18 years ago. Literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims have been killed, murdered, starved and worse—not by Israeli firepower, but by nominally Islamic national leaders from Syria to Iran and elsewhere. Hamas thinks nothing of shooting Palestinian civilians trying to flee the north, let alone any opponents of their brutal rule.

When supporters of such barbarity show up on local sidewalks and newscasts, this writer will not remain silent. These are my final words on the subject.