Ricky, you may not remember that I lived in Ft. Worth almost five years and I remember when a blue Notrher rolled in from Oklahoma. In those days, almost everything bad came from Oklahoma. The football coaches came to Texas to recruit.
Chas, I remember those days when the worst things we had to fear were Okies and Russians. Now I go to Oklahoma when I want to observe a more wholesome culture. The young people at the Thunder games are pretty clean cut: no weird hairdos or tattooed ladies.
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing tattoos on otherwise normal-looking girls and women.
Fads are crazy things — reminds me of someone telling me there was a trend in the 1980s (which I really don’t remember, I must have been too busy starting my career) where women shaved OFF their eyebrows. Completely. And then they drew on little thin, pale lines instead. Guess it was “a look.”
Apparently some brows don’t grow back after that kind of trauma so now women who succumbed to that are having to get new brows “tattooed” back on.
DJ, I remember seeing a few of those. I was very young, but I thought it quite odd. I think my junior-high English teacher (whom I loved) may have done that.
I actually think the border patrol has a point here. However, articles such as these can’t be good for tourism. Last week it was a Canadian of Indian descent who was turned back attempting to go to Vermont for spa weekend with her friends (her white friends were allowed through). Now Dutch Canadians can’t make it over to help the poor. A previous article noted March Break trips to the US was dramatically down from last year.
Thanks for posting, HRW. That is a pretty sad story. On a somewhat related note I heard this morning that college applications of foreign students to US universities are down. Those Canadian student missionaries would have done good here and spent money here. A missing foreign college student might have started the next Apple.
Here’s good article on the current kerfuffle regarding Rep. Steve King’s comments referencing immigration and assimilation in Europe—which of course, is relevant here as well.
Most of the controversies that liberal journalists whip up these days have little basis in fact. But the tempest around Rep. Steve King is real, and points to profound issues that Christians, Americans, and conservatives need to think about. As The Hill reports:
King in a tweet praised Geert Wilders, including a cartoon depicting Wilders plugging a hole in a wall that reads “Western civilization.”
“Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” the congressman wrote.
“It’s a clear message,” King said on Monday. “We need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed within a half century or a little more. And Geert Wilders knows that and that’s part of his campaign and part of his agenda.”
King went on to criticize illegal immigration to the United States and immigrants who don’t “assimilate into the American culture.”
“Living in enclaves, refusing to assimilate into the American culture and civilization. Some embrace it, yes. But many are two and three generations living in enclaves that are pushing back now and resisting against the assimilation,” he said.
King also emphasized his view that “Western civilization” is “a superior civilization.”
The reaction to King was ferocious and predictable. Kim Bellaware at the Huffington Post labeled King a “white nationalist.” Worse, some self-styled conservatives took this occasion to polish their credentials as good multiculturalists, and suggested darkly that King was implying that children of non-European descent are somehow intrinsically inferior……
I may have linked this article when it first came out about a month ago (also from StreamDotOrg) but it is relevant to the national discussion of citizenship and culture and what those things mean. In that sense, it’s also relevant to the context of Rep. King’s statements.
……If you are trying to boil down citizenship to its philosophically respectable components, and if ideology is all you are interested in, then it does not really matter where you were born. Or who your parents were. Or whom you love. Or the hymns you know by heart, the folk tales you treasure, the God you worship. None of these merely human matters measures up, ideologically speaking. None of them can be enshrined in a manifesto, or beamed across the world via Voice of America, or exported in music videos. They do not raise the GDP, or lower the interest rate, or increase our command of oil reserves. They cannot be harnessed to drive the engine of globalization. Therefore, to some people, these things do not matter. Such pieties can be harnessed in the run-up to a war, can form part of the Army recruitment ads and propaganda campaigns, and may even find their way into presidential speeches. But essentially there is no difference between a fourth-generation American and an Afghan refugee who just landed at JFK—so long as they both accept the same ideology.
How did we get to this pass? How did conservatism, which once centered on the fierce defense of tradition, religion, and particularism, turn into an ideology — that is, a philosophy in arms, a political system shorn of its ties to real people and places, slimmed down by dropping historical baggage, packaged for export on the global market of ideas? The simple answer is the Cold War. …
The post-war conservative movement labored mightily to craft … a version of Americanism that could be promoted internationally, which Europeans and Asians, Latins and Africans alike could adopt as an alternative to Marxism. …
Increasingly, America was defined according to the most expansive, abstract reading of the Declaration of Independence, combined with a version of market economics well-suited to the unrestricted “pursuit of happiness.” Anything that did not fit that formula tended to fall down the memory hole: the Anglo-Celtic roots of the Founding, the specifically Christian (mostly Protestant) identity of America, the very existence of the Confederacy, and the profoundly Western roots of our culture. …
It is a grave mistake to conflate “Christian identity” with “Anglo-Celtic roots”. There are vibrant Christian student organizations today at every one of the Ivy League schools. Those organizations are overwhelmingly Asian. I want more of those people to be my fellow citizens.
Unlike some people, I’m not on some kind of racial crusade. I’m not interested in changing the racial makeup of the citizenry. We are who we are–and that’s a mixed bag. I’m interested in seeing the citizens we have become Christ-followers. I’m also interested in seeing the current citizens demonstrate that we can get along before we bring ANYONE else into the mix.
Wandering Views 
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Ricky, you may not remember that I lived in Ft. Worth almost five years and I remember when a blue Notrher rolled in from Oklahoma. In those days, almost everything bad came from Oklahoma. The football coaches came to Texas to recruit.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Chas, I remember those days when the worst things we had to fear were Okies and Russians. Now I go to Oklahoma when I want to observe a more wholesome culture. The young people at the Thunder games are pretty clean cut: no weird hairdos or tattooed ladies.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing tattoos on otherwise normal-looking girls and women.
Fads are crazy things — reminds me of someone telling me there was a trend in the 1980s (which I really don’t remember, I must have been too busy starting my career) where women shaved OFF their eyebrows. Completely. And then they drew on little thin, pale lines instead. Guess it was “a look.”
Apparently some brows don’t grow back after that kind of trauma so now women who succumbed to that are having to get new brows “tattooed” back on.
LikeLiked by 1 person
DJ, I remember seeing a few of those. I was very young, but I thought it quite odd. I think my junior-high English teacher (whom I loved) may have done that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I actually think the border patrol has a point here. However, articles such as these can’t be good for tourism. Last week it was a Canadian of Indian descent who was turned back attempting to go to Vermont for spa weekend with her friends (her white friends were allowed through). Now Dutch Canadians can’t make it over to help the poor. A previous article noted March Break trips to the US was dramatically down from last year.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hamilton-church-volunteers-denied-entry-to-u-s-so-they-wouldn-t-steal-american-jobs-1.4022969
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for posting, HRW. That is a pretty sad story. On a somewhat related note I heard this morning that college applications of foreign students to US universities are down. Those Canadian student missionaries would have done good here and spent money here. A missing foreign college student might have started the next Apple.
LikeLike
Here’s good article on the current kerfuffle regarding Rep. Steve King’s comments referencing immigration and assimilation in Europe—which of course, is relevant here as well.
https://stream.org/god-save-steve-king/
LikeLiked by 1 person
I may have linked this article when it first came out about a month ago (also from StreamDotOrg) but it is relevant to the national discussion of citizenship and culture and what those things mean. In that sense, it’s also relevant to the context of Rep. King’s statements.
https://stream.org/could-moderate-nationalism-save-us-from-post-christian-americanism/
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It is a grave mistake to conflate “Christian identity” with “Anglo-Celtic roots”. There are vibrant Christian student organizations today at every one of the Ivy League schools. Those organizations are overwhelmingly Asian. I want more of those people to be my fellow citizens.
LikeLike
Unlike some people, I’m not on some kind of racial crusade. I’m not interested in changing the racial makeup of the citizenry. We are who we are–and that’s a mixed bag. I’m interested in seeing the citizens we have become Christ-followers. I’m also interested in seeing the current citizens demonstrate that we can get along before we bring ANYONE else into the mix.
LikeLike