Unfortunately we are limited by our own thinking. Me too! Of course, me too! When I was teaching, especially when I was teaching argumentation, either forensics or composition, I always told my students not believe what I said, to check things out for themselves. Furthermore, if I offered a personal opinion I offered the opposing opinion and reasoning as well. I think that is fairness if one is in a position of power, that being not imposing one’s personal opinions on others.
So there are many ways my thinking/our thinking is limited. We are automatically limited by having our parents’ thinking superimposed upon us. Then we are limited by our environment, our culture, our heritage, and even by our socioeconomic status. Very often our socioeconomic status determines how and where we are educated and that can either expand and extend our thinking or grossly (and unfairly) limit it.
Another element that plays into our thinking is our life experiences. While all of this is quite complex, being appropriately nurtured at birth, especially in those critical first three months, is a major factor. Having two parents is a factor. Life events, losing a parent, other trauma, physical and/or mental abuse are all factors that determine how and what we think. In some people, such things severely limit thinking. In others, they move through it all and end up with expanded thinking.
Who knows? Who can say? We are all different although of course as human animals we are all the same. And on top of all that is the physiology of how we’re born, if our brains are normal, whether or not our parents used substances while we were in the womb, etc.
And so it goes.
Well, I’m not a sociologist or medical doctor or psychologist. I’m and EdD and I was a teacher for more than 30 years. I also have an MA in English and have been writing for more than 50 years, since I was 15. I’ve had my own life experiences and I was born the way I was born. For those of you who have read my work and/or know me, you know I was an incubator baby and I was born with a lazy eye. I had three eye operations when I was three (I think it was actually when I was four, but I’m fond of saying it as three at three, so…) And here I am at nearly 71.
So the point of all of this is, plain and simple, I think I know when people are messing with my head and I’m here to tell you that our government, particularly the Despicable Democrats are messing with our heads. As the newly disclosed indisputable facts show, Schiff, Comey, Clapper, Brenan, Susan Rice and others said one thing under oath and in secret and the opposite out in public.
Or, they were messing with our heads, plain and simple.
We now know Obama lied. Biden lied. We now know the FBI lied to the FISA court and about Flynn as well as other things.
Or, they were messing with our heads.
It goes on and on and on, and it’s never been worse.
Pravda USA, the mainstream media lapdogs of the Despicable Dems, have been lying to us for years, like forever actually. They hide behind the First Amendment and claim they are unbiased. That is their first lie.
Pravda USA, the Despicable Dem mainstream media lapdogs that are definitely lying to us are worse now than ever because they are brazen about it and don’t even attempt to hide it. It’s worse than ever now because they are owned by a few multi-billionaires all of whom have their own personal agendas from making millions of dollars in China to seeing that their sweetheart deals with our government aren’t upended by an independent president like Trump.
It’s all diabolical. They are messing with our brains and they want our thinking limited and controlled.
But hey! Don’t believe me. Don’t believe them. Check things out for yourselves. Facts are facts. Opinions are opinions. All or nothing is almost always a fallacious argument.
By Peter Weiss
We’ll keep this one short too. For all you Democrat-dogma supporters, nah, nah, nah, boo boo on you. Only one thing left to say besides imploring you to think for yourselves independently and that is: be careful — you may just get what you ask for.
You/we all have choices. You can believe what Pravda USA mainstream media Democrat lapdogs want you to believe, or you can look at things independently for yourself. You can question, or you can accept. You can act like an ostrich and bury your heads in the sand or…
Once again, and straight out for the record…
In 1970 at the Ohio State University demonstration in which six hundred people were arrested, I was the first one. Six unidentified FBI agents were beating on a demonstrator, a small kid not more than 135 pounds soaking wet. I went to help him, they knocked me out, I came to in a paddy wagon. An undercover policeman led us through a conversation that was recorded and showed up verbatim at my trial.
Here was the offer: plead guilty to misdemeanor assault and battery on a police officer, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct and be allowed to graduate (not be expelled from the University), get sixty days in the workhouse and a two hundred fifty dollar fine. The trial would be held off until I finished up my last trimester and graduated.
Or:
Don’t plead guilty. Be re–arrested for a felony, rioting one. Go to trial almost immediately and be facing a year in the state penitentiary. Bail would go up so high I couldn’t post it and I’d be expelled, hence not graduate, upon being found guilty.
My lawyer refused to let me do anything other than take the plea deal. He said they would surely find me guilty in the political climate there at that time and that I wouldn’t last a week in the penn. What he actually said was a young boy like me, they’d kill me (literally) in the first week.
My lawyer also said that if I refused to take the deal he’d quit my case and he’d make sure that any other attorney I got made me take the deal.
So I lied. I didn’t lie about being innocent. I lied about being guilty. I said I did something I surely didn’t do.
Think independently. Look what they did to Flynn. Check out who did it, who lied about what they did and why they did both.
They are guilty. Not Flynn.
Flynn was the key to… We all know what the Democrat-dogma-people can’t/won’t say.
Two things to remember: be an independent thinker, and, you lefties, be careful because you may just get what you want and discover it’s not at all what you think it is or you thought it would be.
By Peter Weiss
The other day I wrote a Monday Morning Rant called I Wonder. In it I mentioned that I wouldn’t be on the social media outlets if it weren’t for publishing my blog and keeping in touch with distant family members. I went on to say that some of my family has stopped communicating with me because of some of my opinions and I said I found this funny, which I do.
But that’s only on one level.
When I wrote that, it felt a bit “funny” meaning strange/awkward, and it still feels a bit unsettling as I’ve been thinking about it.
On another and totally different level, having a family member (family members) stop communicating due to politics or other opinions (to be clear not actions) is tragic and sad. In particular, in my case, because I’m older and one family member “not communicating” is much older than me, I fear we may never speak again, ever. That’s tragic and sad.
So I think about connections. Somewhere, somehow, things are connected. My family disconnect connects to the nature of the Democratic dogma/doctrine/diatribe. Metaphorically, it goes back to one of their paragons of leadership, Maxine Waters. Remember her call for her “people” to bother them, Trump-supporters, when they see them in gas stations, in restaurants and even at their homes such that they are disturbed in their sleep? Those people, the Trump supporters, according to Waters and the Democratic dogma, are immoral for working for Trump, for following Trump, for (and this is really it) not ascribing to the Democratic doctrine. Hillary called, well you know this well, the entirety of the Trump supporters “deplorables” and of course it goes on and on.
Action-wise, remember when Trump’s Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was driven from the restaurant where she was eating with her family? That is metaphoric for the Democratic dogma and representative of their disdain for more than half of the people of this country.
It gets worse.
A good juxtaposition as I sit here writing this is Kavanaugh/Biden, what was done to Kavanaugh in accordance with that self-determined, self-judged moral superiority the Democrats profess to have and what is being hidden/denied by those very people when it applies to their presidential candidate. Those same people willing to destroy a man and his family for their own political interests are willing to not even look at the actions of their own candidate.
And on and on.
Antifa is just in their violence. Trump supporters are KKK members just for speaking their opinions, and according to the Democrats violence done to them is violence deserved, violence justified.
There are some bottom lines and some consequences.
The mainstream media Pravda USA are complicit in the division of the people of this country. It is purposeful. They are dishonest, biased and hell-bent on advancing the Democratic agenda. Why?
The results of their goal of division is purposely aimed at divide and conquer. One result is that, like for me, families sometimes don’t talk to one another anymore. This is tragic and sad.
I would say it’s about political power, which of course it is, but more than that it’s simply about money, for our new American Politburo to get richer and richer while the people they are supposed to represent become like the zombies in the zombie movies.
This is worse than tragic and sad. It’s absolutely diabolical.
By Peter Weiss
Sunday was a beautiful day, a little windy but the sun was bright and out there for everyone to look at, out there in all its glory. My daughter was antsy and she wanted to go out so we drove to one of the parks and went for a nice long walk around. We had to practice some social distancing for people passing, but other than that, we were pretty lucky. We were fortunate.
Gratitude.
Yesterday was a wild day, very heavy rains and sustained high winds. Power outages occurred all over. We were lucky. We didn’t lose power. We lost it Sunday afternoon for about an hour or so. Why?
I’m thankful for electricity. More gratitude. But in this day and age in America, short of real tangible and uncontrollable circumstances, no one should be without power.
Today, Tuesday, is just another superb day. We have bright sunshine and it’s not too cold. The wind is there, but just a bit.
What a difference a day makes!
And it’s more than that.
I started to write a Monday Morning Rant the other day. I wanted to say that we have very little say and very little control over what’s going on these days, which I believe to be a true statement. I wanted to say that we go on and we will get through this and passed this. I wanted to say look to the sun. For me, just for me, having something like that to hold on to really helps. I don’t always feel positive, and like everyone, I’ve got my own stuff, maybe more than some people, maybe not. Who knows? I’m trying not to get weighed down by it.
Sometimes that’s easy. Sometimes not. Sometimes it’s like the days we have, some good ones, some not so good ones, and of course there’s some great ones.
Anyway, here we are. It’s important to remember that we all wear different shoes and we all have different perspectives. So no matter how I’m feeling personally at any given time, an objective look at my family and me says that as a whole we are very fortunate. It’s pretty interesting. We are not perfect, not ideal, neither rich nor poor. But here we are.
Other people are not as fortunate. Some are much more fortunate than we are. And so it goes.
So I see we are getting back to — we never really left – politics. While the President, no matter what you think of him, is doing what he can to help the country get through the pandemic, mostly behind-the-scenes and some right out there for everyone to see the Democrats aided and abetted by a corrupt propaganda media machine, Pravda USA, are campaigning, politicking, fundraising and maneuvering to effect their agenda.
I’m not going to say much more than that. We all wear different shoes and we see things as we see them. The one thing that must be continually stated is that the mainstream media is not and has not been for a very long time telling us the truth. In fact, it no longer even attempts to hide its bias. This is dangerous. In accordance with the Democrat credo – never let a good crisis go to waste — the Democrats’ puppet-Pravda USA Mainstream Media-is using this crisis to advance the leftist agenda instead of presenting truth and/or attempting to find it. It is working against the President, for the Democrats and against the well-being of the American people and America.
Not only is this dangerous, but it’s wrong and it’s immoral.
What a difference a day makes. Or is it any difference at all?
By Peter Weiss
I’m getting up there in age, well into the high-risk group for the corona virus and that weighs heavily on my mind. But this isn’t about that. Not really. This is more about thought.
Lately, more often than before I’ve been having thoughts about how events and things have changed my life. I’ve been wondering what I would have been if this or that had happened or if I hadn’t done this or that. It’s not so much in the form of regrets although honestly there are some regrets. It’s more in the form of wonderings. I wonder what I would have been if this hadn’t happened and then that had happened because this happened, etc.
Some things happened. Some things I did. Some things happened and then I did some things because those things happened. Maybe I would have done other things.
Who knows?
So I was out for a good walk today. One of the things I’m doing since I’m working from home and home a lot more now is trying to get back into shape. I was a long distance runner for about twenty years, until my hip started to bother me. That ended up in a hip replacement and the hip replacement kind of meant no running, and I got out of shape. Now my other hip is an issue, but not so bad yet, so I’ve been working little by slowly at getting back into shape.
A couple of minutes out on the road walking and I started into some of those what-if thoughts. And I thought to myself, don’t do that. It was a fair thing to say to myself. Some things, sometimes, are just not worth going into, end up not being productive at all.
And that’s the point of this. It’s a simple point: Don’t do that.
It kind of applies across the board. We should not be playing politics at this point in time. Don’t do that. But I spoke about that last time.
So the next don’t do that is second guessing. No one really knows the truth of what is going on with the covid virus. It’s pretty sure China isn’t telling us the truth about their numbers. Other countries don’t measure as we do and don’t know what we know. And in all fairness, vice versa. Altogether we aren’t that great. Our numbers as they flash on the screen do not project a real picture of what is going on. If you listen to the full reports of the people studying this, you get great variables in the projections and vastly different scenarios.
So don’t cheat. Don’t stockpile medical equipment. Don’t sell equipment out from under our first responders to make a bigger profit.
Don’t second guess what our leaders are doing. Those in charge of states, cities and the country are doing the best they can with what they have. We may not agree with everything and we may not like some things, but they have no reason not to be. So don’t sit in the background and take cheap shots, don’t second guess. We’re in uncharted waters here, so make the least negative assumptions.
We are who we are and we know what we know. We all have different points of view and come from different backgrounds. We all wear different shoes.
Don’t do that: don’t be part of the negativity.
Look to the sun.
By Peter Weiss
So forget our government. As regards information, these days, take what you need and leave the rest. Regarding all the rest, they’re full of it, and you just choose what “it” smells best to you.
In a nutshell, that’s it.
As far as the media goes, you know, Pravda USA, they’re so far off the mark that they can’t even see the mark anymore. It’s all about agendas, personal agendas.
So there’s a good line in the movie Shooter spoken by Ned Beatty. He says “There are no sides, son, there’s only haves and have-nots.”
Overall, clear as day, and make no mistake about it, that is what drives the agendas. Envision it any way you choose. We are the zombies, they are the people. We are in the districts, they are in the gated city. We are the cows in the pasture who have to produce the milk. They own the farm and drink the champagne they buy with the money made from selling the milk that we must produce for them.
And so it goes.
No. I’m not really bitter. I have my feelings and my resentments. I have my experiences and the effects of them, and I have what was superimposed upon me by my parents and those people who have had any influence in my life. It is what it is.
If anything, especially now, I’m thankful. I woke up this morning. My family has its medical issues but we are mostly okay. I’m thankful I worked all my life and while we are not rich, we are okay. I’m thankful I have a job and I’m set up to work from home and can do so for this period of time, whatever it will be. I’m thankful that my parents taught me to work hard, to rely upon myself, to not be wasteful and to save for the future. Especially in times like now, I’m glad I didn’t spend my money on two hundred dollar sneakers or brand-new cars that I couldn’t afford the payments for. I’m glad that I bought what I could afford, saved my money and am prepared for a rainy day. Today might be that rainy day in this environment. I don’t think so, but it just might be, and that’s the whole point of not living beyond your means or being dependent upon others.
I’m grateful for so much more too. I wrote about that in the little piece on gratitude. I’m most glad I’m in America, and this even though our government is FOS. It is FOS, no question about it. But still and all, America is the best place to be, at least as as I see it.
Right now, and at least for now, everything is quiet in my house. Last night when I wrote some of this, one dog was downstairs watching TV with my wife. One was in bed with my daughter. They were both sleeping peacefully.
Thank God for the little things. I thought that then and still think it now.
That’s about it altogether. The only thing I implore everyone to do is to look clearly and closely at everything. Believe nothing the government and Pravda USA say until you verify it for yourself. Follow the Golden Rule and remember man is by nature selfish and greedy. Try not to be one of the greedy and selfish. Fight that instinct. Being able to understand our instincts and to temper them is what it means to be human.
By Peter Weiss
Strange days indeed. I had other things written, particularly more on the luck of the draw. It’s not insignificant, at least not from my perspective, but later. The Bill Wynn series continues and is fun. A new installment will appear later tonight.
So this is really about gratitude. Like all families and individuals in this unusual time, my family has had its issues. But thanks to the grace of God, we are standing up on the right side of the earth. I have gratitude.
I won’t bore you with the specifics. But I will say to the atheists that when any individual mocks faith and begins to think s/he is the center of the universe…
I hope you get my drift people like you-know-who-you-are.
So if nothing else, this whole virus episode clearly demonstrates that we’re all winging it. Yes. Sad to say, we’re all winging it. Many of us are experts in what we know, in what we’ve studied, you know, like a master plumber is an expert. Even master plumbers run into new situations where they “don’t know what they’re doing” and have to “wing-it.”
When we start to think we know things we don’t really know… Do I need to finish the statement?
It gets worse when someone is in a position of power and uses that position wrongly. Start there with governments. Then remember, man is by nature selfish and greedy. Putin is the richest man in the world. He just doesn’t show up that way because his wealth is well hidden in the wealth of Russia. It’s co-joined, so to speak. He was a KGB agent. How do you get to be worth two hundred billion dollars as a KGB agent?
Why are the bulk of our politicians multi-millionaires?
All the dictators live like kings, and all our politicians live like princes and princesses.
That said, gratitude. I’m grateful I’m in the US. I’m grateful I’m alive, my family despite its health issues, is okay so far, safe so far, and doing okay. We have the simple things and much more. I’m grateful for that. I have a job, even in retirement, and in this time. I’m able to work from home. I’m grateful for that.
So many, many things to be grateful for, even if there is no toilet paper in the stores.
And then there’s more, so much more.
And on top of it all, I thank God for all.
So really, that’s today’s rant.
We are where we are at. It’s not a time for criticizing. It’s a time to be smart, to stay safe, and at least here in America to be thankful we are here in America.
By Peter Weiss
The point is we are who we are and we get what we get. Most of it is not our choice. Most of it is the luck of the draw.
Then, if that’s accurate, and no matter how you slice it, it seems accurate to me, the bottom line is: what makes us who we are is what we do with what we get.
We get what we get. We know what we know. We do what we do.
And so it goes.
But of course there’s so much more.
So on top of being a first generation immigrant from Hungary, my father was born poor, dirt poor is the old expression. He was an Orthodox Jew born to a very learned father whom I never met. He was Orthodox until he went into the service. He was dealt the depression and left school in eighth grade to go to work to help support his family.
He got what he got.
Then came the war. He did what he did. Like so many other true Americans, he enlisted and went to that war. In between, he met my mother. That’s a whole other story for another time. Short version for here and now is that his sister married my maternal grandmother’s brother (or my aunt on my father’s side was married to my great uncle on my mother’s side) and somewhere in there my father and mother met, and for whatever else there was, in 1942 they married before he went overseas.
And so it goes.
Although my mother had the still-born twin and two miscarriages physically, my father got them as well, as well as the sickly baby deemed not likely to survive, but who did survive, and then later the baby with the lazy eye, me.
We all got what we got.
It was different back then. And this is important to understanding how it is now. Back then, and we’re not talking so long ago, only about roughly seventy years, and really all the time before then too, people had a work ethic. I’m not talking about whether or not they wanted to work or if they liked working. I’m talking about a work ethic, plain and simple. Life was simple. You went to school, you graduated (or not) and you went to work. A few people back then went to college and became professionals. You were taught as a matter of fact that there was no such thing as a free ride.
As a point of history, welfare in the US starts during the Great Depression in the 1930s. But welfare as we know it today, where a person who is not elderly or disabled can receive aid from the federal government, does not start until the 1960s, after the Great Society Legislation passed by LBJ in 1964-5, right after and in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy.
And by the way, as a pure aside, LBJ was probably more crass and vulgar than Donald Trump, but he was a Democrat so… And JFK purportedly had more than 500 women while he was in the White House, but he was a Democrat too, so…
Anyway, it was different back then. Back then you might have bitched about it, but no one was helping you in any way, so you went to work. As a parent, you taught your kids that no one was going to give you anything and nothing is free. You were taught that after you were done with school you had to go to work.
It is what it is and that’s what it was.
More. You were taught to be a responsible person and a responsible citizen. You were taught to learn to take care of yourself and be responsible for doing just that, and you were taught to be proud of being able to do that. You were taught to take pride in who you were, but more, you were taught to be responsible for who you are.
That was then, and now, except for our older generation, people like me, then is gone and if the Democrats have their way, they will make sure it is dead, wholly gone, and they will bury it forever and all of us too.
And so it goes.
(To be continued)
By Peter Weiss
My mother died when I was twelve. I’ve written about this too. For all we or anyone knew, she was healthy one day and dead the next. We ate pizza, she got what seemed like indigestion, my father called the doctor who said it was indigestion and he’d see her in the morning if she were not better. Seven-thirty the next morning, after she’d dressed herself to go to the doctor, she plopped down on that green sofa and died. But she didn’t die before knowing that my aunt gave birth to a baby girl.
You get what you get. My little cousin, named after my mother, now fifty-seven, has had to live every birthday under the shadow of my mother’s death. But I wonder. I wonder if that’s her reality. I feel for her, but then I think maybe it’s just me. You know. Maybe she doesn’t feel anything about it or think about it. She never knew my mother. Her father, my uncle, was crazy about my mother. He was deaf. You get what you get.
My cousin got what she got and I got what I got, and of course my father and brother got what they got, and the whole family did too, the luck of the draw. It is what it is.
And there’s so much more of course.
A little while ago I wrote a series here about those shoes you, we, anyone and everyone are standing in. The series was about perspective, how we see things and why. It kind of centered around politics, about all the free stuff the Democrats are promising and how one views that. If you are not paying taxes or have been irresponsible and/or uncaring about your finances (like living way beyond your means), that free stuff is a great thing, like really almost free. But if you pay taxes, work hard, live within your means (like going to a college you can afford and not buying a house you can’t afford or taking expensive vacations instead of paying credit card bills, etc.) then you’re not only not getting any free stuff, but you’re paying for the free stuff for those who are getting it. So you view the offers of free stuff differently than they do because you understand free isn’t free. Whose shoes are you wearing? Which ones?
My father, POW in Nazi Germany for three and a half years, got what he got. As I’ve been told, for at least six months after he was home, every time he heard an airplane he had to run out into the backyard to see whose plane it was. Then there’s the famous story of his jumping under the kitchen table at my aunt’s house. As she told it, it scared the hell out of her.
Hello Georgewood!
Along with the PTSD (they didn’t know much about PTSD back then) he had a pretty severe case of jungle rot. He also got a rheumatic heart that the government would claim no responsibility for.
You get what you get. It is what it is.
Anyway, if you’re one of the remaining World War II veterans, or a veteran of any war, especially Vietnam whose Vets got a raw deal, and that’s not the half of it, and you see what the Democrats are standing for here in 2020 – I don’t even have to say it.
You get what you get. It is what it is.
While he was overseas, my father’s father died. They didn’t tell him his father died. It was one of his first surprises for when he was liberated and returned home.
Recently I ran into a Vet wearing a Big Red One insignia on his cap. My father was Big Red One. Go Infantry!
(To be continued)
By Peter Weiss
We are who we are and we get what we get. That is what it is.
I was born in the United States, in New York, in fact. I was born white. I was born to a mother who’d suffered two miscarriages in the two years before me, and with a brother who was part of a twin. My brother’s twin was still-born and my brother was born very sickly. He wasn’t expected to live. But he did pull through. He survived.
I was born with a lazy eye. I write about this in my fiction sometimes, not often. I had three major eye operations when I was three. I say three at three, but I might have been four. No matter. I was a skinny baby, born pre-mature like my brother, until the eye operations. I spent the better part of the year of those operations with a patch over one eye at a time and mostly laying on the green couch in our living room. I remember the light from the black-and-white TV flickering against the wall over the couch. I got fat laying on that couch and have had a weight problem ever since then. All my life my weight has been up and down.
You get what you get.
So on that couch my mother fed me Campbell’s tomato soup made with milk, not water, and with a whole load of saltines crushed into it. One of my comfort foods.
Nowadays, they know all about those first few formative months, the time when babies are supposed to be coddled and cuddled and held, when touch and having needs met are most critical to forming trust and becoming well-adjusted. Well, my brother and I were incubator babies. So much for that. My brother was in the hospital a very long time.
You get what you get, the luck of the draw.
Me? I’m spatially retarded. I talked about this before too. By today’s standards, no doubt I would’ve been special education. Back then? Who knew? It’s about imaging and how my eyes work. So my initial image-forming on my brain was skewed due to my lazy eye and the simple fact that even after the operations my eyes do not work together well. Hence, I have poor hand-eye coordination and I lost every game of Foosball to my friend Richie, who has super hand-eye coordination, 11-0 or 21-0. He let me score sometimes so I would keep playing with him.
You get what you get, the luck of the draw, and it is what it is.
On and on.
That father I was born to spent three and a half years in Stalag IIIB Furstenberg in World War II. Yes. He was a Jew in a Nazi POW camp, a survivor. He came home emaciated like a concentration camp survivor. The galley on the ship transporting the liberated POWs was open 24/7 and the POWs could eat anything and everything they wanted, any time they wanted. My father once told me he was so seasick he couldn’t eat.
So I was born to a survivor who suffered from PTSD along with several physical illnesses. Our wonderful government that nowadays does more for illegal immigrants than for most citizens in need while expecting the citizens to pay for it, gave my father an 8% disability, not enough to get benefits, to be treated in a VA, or to be buried in Arlington.
You get what you get. The luck of the draw. It is what it is.
(to be continued)
