WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
You Never Had It So Good
byVanderleunonJanuary 30, 2019
You cruise your local Dollar Store
Trying to buy wine in a box.
You’re saving like they all said you should.
You get Hamburger Helper
Instead of Gravlox.
Yeah, you never had it so good.
You’ve got two dirty jobs
That don’t add up to one.
You’re a hard working man of the hood.
You work eighteen hours but you’re never done.
Yeah, you never had it so good.
You never had it,
But you heard that it’s good.
You never had it
But you think you should.
You never had it,
So you’re breaking bad at it.
Yeah, you never had it so good.
If you’re black just get back,
Just know that you’re free,
Just pull on this hoodie
For your next shooting spree.
If you’re white
You’re not right
So you gotta pay more
Of that nothing you make
To even the score
With the slaves at the rave,
Or they’ll break down your door,
Throw you down on the floor,
Then empty their gun
(Hey, they’re just having fun.)
Saying you never had it so good.
Lyrics in search of a melody?
Thought experiment:
What band/ musician would best do justice to these lyrics?
JWM
rabbit tobaccoJanuary 30, 2019, 8:44 AM
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood !
VanderleunJanuary 30, 2019, 8:46 AM
What musician or band is precisely my question.
OneGuyJanuary 30, 2019, 9:01 AM
I don’t understand it. It seems to be a “poem” from a minority complaining that they aren’t getting enough free stuff. It seems to be flying under the banner that they are downtrodden and life sucks because even in this the greatest country in the world they can’t make ends meet. I call BS. This kind of thing might fly with the pot smokers and crack users but IRL we see why these people have to buy hamburger helper with their food stamps because they sold half their food stamps to buy drugs, alcohol and smokes. Our poor in this country live better than the middle class in Europe and better than the rich in Africa. So I don’t get it.
Harold Macmillan was PM at the end of the Fifties and start of the Sixties. You’re damn straight things were good. Possibly the best times after the war and up until today, but how would I know for sure since I was only a baby?
Times are what you make of them. African Americans who never personally experienced slavery, although it exists right now aplenty among Muslim countries and in Africa (irony here), bitch about their lot. Whites support the same line of horseshit; a Native American acting entitled and yet of the lowest possible character yet honored by the media and the Left. And you wonder why I swear so much on here? Outrage could radiate from my eyeballs and I’d certainly be entitled to that. I read the news, after all.
Yeah, my granddad was white. His privilege was to pass on a diesel ship from Hamburg to Washington State (via Cape Hope {!}), live on the subsistence prairie, homestead in the rain forest, hike a hundred miles through Indian land to find work in the Great Depression, send his boys off to fight in the war, and then die young and in pain. OK, I want to write some really rude stuff next, but I think you get the idea that my family does not come from privilege and any suggestion of that is an insult to me.
BillHJanuary 30, 2019, 9:51 AM
Casey, take it from me, the end of the Fifties and start of the Sixties were the greatest. I was making my living flying Connies back and forth across the Atlantic into Europe, N. Africa and the Middle East, and once in a while down into S. America. Nothing but blue skies, and always a tailwind. Well, there might have been one cloudy day in there somewhere that I’ve forgotten.
I just thought. Dire straits? I could hear Knopfler (sp?) singing this.
JWM
Sam L.January 30, 2019, 10:07 AM
Distopia Uber Alles!!!!!
ghostsniperJanuary 30, 2019, 1:48 PM
Right, jwm! Perfect! I can see Knopfler right now in my minds eye doing that toon.
On another blog this morning I commented about the negro’s and the blogger agreed with me.
As long as I’ve been alive the main thing I know about the negro group in the US is constant complaining, it never lets up. piss, moan, repeat And there’s absolutely nothing good to say about them. Nothing. Every where they live there is horrifying squalor and criminal activity, as you would expect from distant foreign lands rather than right here in our own country. Every town no matter how small or large has their “bad” section that everybody knows about and knows not to go there. Ever. You can always find those sections on the map, just look for MLK Blvd.
It’s like the negro’s have their own little countries carved out in little enclaves all over the land and everybody is OK with that. But not really. They just don’t know what to do about it cept throw stolen money at them. More, more, more. More and more stolen money, all the time, it never lets up, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. And dragging everything around them down too, into the ever expanding squalor.
Looked up the home I lived in when we first moved to Fort Myers, Florida in 1966. Back then it was white stucco with teal trim, palm trees swaying, blazing white sidewalk, shiney station wagon in the drive, kids playing in the grass, bikes laying around til dad gets home – and now in google street view there’s 2 junk cars in the drive, the dingy walls are an undescribable color from long ago, some of the roof trim is hanging down, some is missing, patchy dry brown neglected sand-grass, broken concrete driveway and sidewalks, trash everywhere, dirty despaired negro adults sitting on the porch smoking cigs, even the sky was a dirty gray-brown. I have wonderful memories of that house and neighborhood and that street view was like to flaming daggers in my eyes. Disgusting animals.
You give them a hand-up but all they want is a hand-out, no pride, no sense of self worth, just gimme, gimme, gimme, all the DAM time. 12% of the population but 90% of them are squalor or crime. What in the hell do you do with a mess like that, just keep putting up with it forever? Such a waste all the way around.
When I started scrolling down the comments I had a cheerful, upbeat thing to say.
Now I want to cut my throat.
Leo LaRueJanuary 30, 2019, 2:40 PM
I’d recommend James McMurtry. A few years old, here’s We Can’t Make It Here:
Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze
One leg missing, both hands free
No one’s paying much mind to him
The V.A. budget’s stretched so thin
And there’s more comin’ home from the Mideast war
We can’t make it here anymore
That big ol’ building was the textile mill
It fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
We can’t make it here anymore
See all those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They’re just gonna set there till they rot
‘Cause there’s nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks
Empty storefronts around the square
There’s a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don’t come down here ‘less you’re looking to score
We can’t make it here anymore
The bar’s still open but man it’s slow
The tip jar’s light and the register’s low
The bartender don’t have much to say
The regular crowd gets thinner each day
Some have maxed out all their credit cards
Some are working two jobs and living in cars
Minimum wage won’t pay for a roof, won’t pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO
See how far 5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
Bet you can’t make it here anymore
High school girl with a bourgeois dream
Just like the pictures in the magazine
She found on the floor of the laundromat
A woman with kids can forget all that
If she comes up pregnant what’ll she do
Forget the career, forget about school
Can she live on faith? live on hope?
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it’s way too late to just say no
You can’t make it here anymore
Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
‘Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can’t make it here anymore
Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in
Should I hate ’em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed
Their kids won’t bleed in the damn little war
And we can’t make it here anymore
Will work for food
Will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks
Let ’em eat jellybeans let ’em eat cake
Let ’em eat shit, whatever it takes
They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps
If they can’t make it here anymore
And that’s how it is
That’s what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper
Read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind
If you’re listening at all
Get out of that limo
Look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone
Tell us all why
In Dayton, Ohio
Or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That’s done closed down along with the school
And the hospital and the swimming pool
Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There’s rats in the alley
And trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can’t make it here anymore
Snakepit KansasJanuary 30, 2019, 4:53 PM
JWM for the win. Wish I would have thought of it! Knopfler, OF COURSE!!!
Ghost, I grew up in a rather small all white town. There were some Mescan families too but we all considered them white. I recall no prejudice against them. I worked at the local grocery store through high school and with that you see all the food stamp fraud, poor life style choices and poor people proliferating more poor people though the generations. Blacks do not have a corner on the market in this area although I don’t go to The WalMarts in the big city without my Glock 17.
I do think that most blacks have a demented and non-pragmatic way of thinking about the economy and their way of life. The local college here has a good and large engineering program. The company I work for hires these students by the gobs. To date I can recall a single black student engineer. The guy emigrated from somewhere in Africa and the guy appears to know he hit the lottery by being in the US. Great guy who works his ass off and he is going places. I am horrified by the relatively few blacks I know that almost always fall in line with the spewing of Jesse Jackson, Obama, etc. It is a game with only a single bad ending. We need a whole bunch more Thomas Sowell’s and Ben Carson’s if this country is going to bring the blacks into the conservative fold. I shut up now.
TerryJanuary 30, 2019, 4:57 PM
@ Leo LaRue- Thanks for posting that.
Now, will someone post something with some cheer please. I could use it.
DANJanuary 30, 2019, 6:01 PM
our newest neighbor here in b.c. 6 yrs now, WHITE FARMER from S. africa, has first hand knowledge of the mindset of blacks, the most recent bit of black wisdom coming out of s.africa was the white man was to blame for the drought in capetown because wait for IT the whites built the resevoirs TOO BIG. i shit you not !!! if they were smaller there would be more water in them. another of his axioms is you can take the black out of africa but you’ll never take africa out of the black. another valid point is there isn’t ONE DAMN NATION on earth ruled by blacks that can be considered succesful, total genocide in s.africa NOW against white farmers, be just like zimbabwe very soon, no food too damn bad.
Tom SherryJanuary 30, 2019, 6:53 PM
Foo Fighters.
ghostsniperJanuary 30, 2019, 6:56 PM
Cut the fuel, stolen gov’t money, and all sorts of things will instantly start working themselves out.
Give a man a dollar (stolen from someone else) and his lazy gene will kick in and be satisfied, though grumpy cause it’s never enough.
Give a man a chance to earn a dollar and his ambitious gene will kick in and he’ll stay late to earn 2 dollars more. Every time.
And the man that was stolen from repeatedly will become bitter, sneakier, and even more ambitious in an effort to make up for the theft. Every time.
Jewel gets Laugh of the Day Award!
So here it is: on the one hand I have so very much to be grateful for. I have been blessed with a wonderful marriage to an absolute babe. Our needs are modest and we have enough to get by comfortably. I have The Lost Canyon Project to keep me busy, and give some purpose to my life. I could go on. I have been richly blessed.
And yet, like so many men of (ahem) a certain age I find myself looking around and just choking on the goddam anger. Yesterday I took one of my very frequent walks. I hike a mile or so along the railroad easement, and then up the boulevard to the Taco Bell for coffee, and then a toke in the park. Retirement rocks that way.
One tramp on the easement. A filthy homeless camp sprouting up under the trestle. Some homeless lunatic bouncing a ball off the crossing gate at the Boulevard. Some pants shitting derelict in a wheelchair in the alley by 7/11. A filthy drunken negro hits me up for change. Some guy passed out dead drunk or maybe dead on the sidewalk. Another one sleeping in middle of the park parking lot with a blanket wrapped around his head.
Not to mention the thousands of rental units that have cropped up here in the last five years, and the thousands yet under construction. This used to be a sweet little corner of So Cal.
I could go on. Our civilization is is decline. We were fortunate to have seen it peak. Maybe we’ll be safely gone before the shtf. Who knows?
Point is, there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. I don’t do TV, so I get all my news and info from the web. I run through my list of links on line. Every one of these guys is sharp. They’re all entertaining, and informative, and right. And they all want to leave you pissed off over something that you damn well better be pissed off about.
So we find ourselves choking on the goddam anger. It is no accident that anger is listed in the Seven Deadly Sins. Anger is toxic, and addictive as nicotine. It is always tempting, and it’s easy to get another hit. And it utterly forecloses any chance of happiness.
I don’t have all that many years left. The thick part of this book is in my left hand. I don’t want to ruin the time that I have.
So I pray, or try to “…lead us not into Temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Sometimes it’s all I can do.
JWM
AesopFanJanuary 30, 2019, 9:03 PM
“The thick part of this book is in my left hand.” – JWM
Never heard it put that way before. An especially poignant image for all of us bibliophiles.
Terry:
John 16:33 King James Version (KJV)
33 These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.
pbirdJanuary 30, 2019, 9:08 PM
Yeah, McMurtry could do.
HJanuary 31, 2019, 5:41 AM
“empty their gun”
Ha.
Barry Corbin’s character in No Country For Old Men: “What you got, ain’t nothin’ new…….you can’t stop what’s coming”
I have to take a different point of view vis: minority races. I have met plenty who approach life with magnanimity and humility (not deference; humility). If I have ever felt unfairly treated, and I have been once or twice in my long life, I look to humility. From dust I came, and thence I shall return.
Any human who feels owed by the rest is a sucker. It’s the default feeling of a liberal society. If feeling privileged is a sin, then feeling entitled or owed is equally so. Nobody short of the royal family is entitled, and who likes those morons, anyway?
Maybe there are large swaths of garbage in inner cities in the East, but Hollywood is totally worse, compared to them, with the constant drumbeat of how superior they are – how virtuous and woke.
@AesopFan:
Your response to Terry, the quote from the KJV, really hit home for me. Allowed me to exhale, if you know what I mean. Thanks
JWM
AesopFanJanuary 31, 2019, 9:48 PM
JWM – We all stress out in these crazy times; it’s good to go back to the eternal essentials.
Snakepit KansasFebruary 1, 2019, 5:36 PM
Casey,
I mean no disparagement of minorities in whole, ever. My first wife Mexican, my second was black. My current (and last) wife of 15 years is Asian. Our kids are mixed, and my son looks completely Asian. My above response came from analysis of a career active military black guy and another MBA level professional I respect and work with. Both have it all together, work hard and provide for their families. Good folks…..that sign onto the BLM, kneeling during the national anthem etc. I cannot mentally get there, not even at a stretch.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
Lyrics in search of a melody?
Thought experiment:
What band/ musician would best do justice to these lyrics?
JWM
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood !
What musician or band is precisely my question.
I don’t understand it. It seems to be a “poem” from a minority complaining that they aren’t getting enough free stuff. It seems to be flying under the banner that they are downtrodden and life sucks because even in this the greatest country in the world they can’t make ends meet. I call BS. This kind of thing might fly with the pot smokers and crack users but IRL we see why these people have to buy hamburger helper with their food stamps because they sold half their food stamps to buy drugs, alcohol and smokes. Our poor in this country live better than the middle class in Europe and better than the rich in Africa. So I don’t get it.
Harold Macmillan was PM at the end of the Fifties and start of the Sixties. You’re damn straight things were good. Possibly the best times after the war and up until today, but how would I know for sure since I was only a baby?
Times are what you make of them. African Americans who never personally experienced slavery, although it exists right now aplenty among Muslim countries and in Africa (irony here), bitch about their lot. Whites support the same line of horseshit; a Native American acting entitled and yet of the lowest possible character yet honored by the media and the Left. And you wonder why I swear so much on here? Outrage could radiate from my eyeballs and I’d certainly be entitled to that. I read the news, after all.
Yeah, my granddad was white. His privilege was to pass on a diesel ship from Hamburg to Washington State (via Cape Hope {!}), live on the subsistence prairie, homestead in the rain forest, hike a hundred miles through Indian land to find work in the Great Depression, send his boys off to fight in the war, and then die young and in pain. OK, I want to write some really rude stuff next, but I think you get the idea that my family does not come from privilege and any suggestion of that is an insult to me.
Casey, take it from me, the end of the Fifties and start of the Sixties were the greatest. I was making my living flying Connies back and forth across the Atlantic into Europe, N. Africa and the Middle East, and once in a while down into S. America. Nothing but blue skies, and always a tailwind. Well, there might have been one cloudy day in there somewhere that I’ve forgotten.
I just thought. Dire straits? I could hear Knopfler (sp?) singing this.
JWM
Distopia Uber Alles!!!!!
Right, jwm! Perfect! I can see Knopfler right now in my minds eye doing that toon.
On another blog this morning I commented about the negro’s and the blogger agreed with me.
As long as I’ve been alive the main thing I know about the negro group in the US is constant complaining, it never lets up. piss, moan, repeat And there’s absolutely nothing good to say about them. Nothing. Every where they live there is horrifying squalor and criminal activity, as you would expect from distant foreign lands rather than right here in our own country. Every town no matter how small or large has their “bad” section that everybody knows about and knows not to go there. Ever. You can always find those sections on the map, just look for MLK Blvd.
It’s like the negro’s have their own little countries carved out in little enclaves all over the land and everybody is OK with that. But not really. They just don’t know what to do about it cept throw stolen money at them. More, more, more. More and more stolen money, all the time, it never lets up, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. And dragging everything around them down too, into the ever expanding squalor.
Looked up the home I lived in when we first moved to Fort Myers, Florida in 1966. Back then it was white stucco with teal trim, palm trees swaying, blazing white sidewalk, shiney station wagon in the drive, kids playing in the grass, bikes laying around til dad gets home – and now in google street view there’s 2 junk cars in the drive, the dingy walls are an undescribable color from long ago, some of the roof trim is hanging down, some is missing, patchy dry brown neglected sand-grass, broken concrete driveway and sidewalks, trash everywhere, dirty despaired negro adults sitting on the porch smoking cigs, even the sky was a dirty gray-brown. I have wonderful memories of that house and neighborhood and that street view was like to flaming daggers in my eyes. Disgusting animals.
You give them a hand-up but all they want is a hand-out, no pride, no sense of self worth, just gimme, gimme, gimme, all the DAM time. 12% of the population but 90% of them are squalor or crime. What in the hell do you do with a mess like that, just keep putting up with it forever? Such a waste all the way around.
The J Geils Band could pull it off.
When I started scrolling down the comments I had a cheerful, upbeat thing to say.
Now I want to cut my throat.
I’d recommend James McMurtry. A few years old, here’s We Can’t Make It Here:
Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze
One leg missing, both hands free
No one’s paying much mind to him
The V.A. budget’s stretched so thin
And there’s more comin’ home from the Mideast war
We can’t make it here anymore
That big ol’ building was the textile mill
It fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
We can’t make it here anymore
See all those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They’re just gonna set there till they rot
‘Cause there’s nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks
Empty storefronts around the square
There’s a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don’t come down here ‘less you’re looking to score
We can’t make it here anymore
The bar’s still open but man it’s slow
The tip jar’s light and the register’s low
The bartender don’t have much to say
The regular crowd gets thinner each day
Some have maxed out all their credit cards
Some are working two jobs and living in cars
Minimum wage won’t pay for a roof, won’t pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO
See how far 5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
Bet you can’t make it here anymore
High school girl with a bourgeois dream
Just like the pictures in the magazine
She found on the floor of the laundromat
A woman with kids can forget all that
If she comes up pregnant what’ll she do
Forget the career, forget about school
Can she live on faith? live on hope?
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it’s way too late to just say no
You can’t make it here anymore
Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
‘Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can’t make it here anymore
Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in
Should I hate ’em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed
Their kids won’t bleed in the damn little war
And we can’t make it here anymore
Will work for food
Will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks
Let ’em eat jellybeans let ’em eat cake
Let ’em eat shit, whatever it takes
They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps
If they can’t make it here anymore
And that’s how it is
That’s what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper
Read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind
If you’re listening at all
Get out of that limo
Look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone
Tell us all why
In Dayton, Ohio
Or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That’s done closed down along with the school
And the hospital and the swimming pool
Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There’s rats in the alley
And trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can’t make it here anymore
JWM for the win. Wish I would have thought of it! Knopfler, OF COURSE!!!
Ghost, I grew up in a rather small all white town. There were some Mescan families too but we all considered them white. I recall no prejudice against them. I worked at the local grocery store through high school and with that you see all the food stamp fraud, poor life style choices and poor people proliferating more poor people though the generations. Blacks do not have a corner on the market in this area although I don’t go to The WalMarts in the big city without my Glock 17.
I do think that most blacks have a demented and non-pragmatic way of thinking about the economy and their way of life. The local college here has a good and large engineering program. The company I work for hires these students by the gobs. To date I can recall a single black student engineer. The guy emigrated from somewhere in Africa and the guy appears to know he hit the lottery by being in the US. Great guy who works his ass off and he is going places. I am horrified by the relatively few blacks I know that almost always fall in line with the spewing of Jesse Jackson, Obama, etc. It is a game with only a single bad ending. We need a whole bunch more Thomas Sowell’s and Ben Carson’s if this country is going to bring the blacks into the conservative fold. I shut up now.
@ Leo LaRue- Thanks for posting that.
Now, will someone post something with some cheer please. I could use it.
our newest neighbor here in b.c. 6 yrs now, WHITE FARMER from S. africa, has first hand knowledge of the mindset of blacks, the most recent bit of black wisdom coming out of s.africa was the white man was to blame for the drought in capetown because wait for IT the whites built the resevoirs TOO BIG. i shit you not !!! if they were smaller there would be more water in them. another of his axioms is you can take the black out of africa but you’ll never take africa out of the black. another valid point is there isn’t ONE DAMN NATION on earth ruled by blacks that can be considered succesful, total genocide in s.africa NOW against white farmers, be just like zimbabwe very soon, no food too damn bad.
Foo Fighters.
Cut the fuel, stolen gov’t money, and all sorts of things will instantly start working themselves out.
Give a man a dollar (stolen from someone else) and his lazy gene will kick in and be satisfied, though grumpy cause it’s never enough.
Give a man a chance to earn a dollar and his ambitious gene will kick in and he’ll stay late to earn 2 dollars more. Every time.
And the man that was stolen from repeatedly will become bitter, sneakier, and even more ambitious in an effort to make up for the theft. Every time.
Anybody but Billy Joel.
Jewel gets Laugh of the Day Award!
So here it is: on the one hand I have so very much to be grateful for. I have been blessed with a wonderful marriage to an absolute babe. Our needs are modest and we have enough to get by comfortably. I have The Lost Canyon Project to keep me busy, and give some purpose to my life. I could go on. I have been richly blessed.
And yet, like so many men of (ahem) a certain age I find myself looking around and just choking on the goddam anger. Yesterday I took one of my very frequent walks. I hike a mile or so along the railroad easement, and then up the boulevard to the Taco Bell for coffee, and then a toke in the park. Retirement rocks that way.
One tramp on the easement. A filthy homeless camp sprouting up under the trestle. Some homeless lunatic bouncing a ball off the crossing gate at the Boulevard. Some pants shitting derelict in a wheelchair in the alley by 7/11. A filthy drunken negro hits me up for change. Some guy passed out dead drunk or maybe dead on the sidewalk. Another one sleeping in middle of the park parking lot with a blanket wrapped around his head.
Not to mention the thousands of rental units that have cropped up here in the last five years, and the thousands yet under construction. This used to be a sweet little corner of So Cal.
I could go on. Our civilization is is decline. We were fortunate to have seen it peak. Maybe we’ll be safely gone before the shtf. Who knows?
Point is, there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. I don’t do TV, so I get all my news and info from the web. I run through my list of links on line. Every one of these guys is sharp. They’re all entertaining, and informative, and right. And they all want to leave you pissed off over something that you damn well better be pissed off about.
So we find ourselves choking on the goddam anger. It is no accident that anger is listed in the Seven Deadly Sins. Anger is toxic, and addictive as nicotine. It is always tempting, and it’s easy to get another hit. And it utterly forecloses any chance of happiness.
I don’t have all that many years left. The thick part of this book is in my left hand. I don’t want to ruin the time that I have.
So I pray, or try to “…lead us not into Temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Sometimes it’s all I can do.
JWM
“The thick part of this book is in my left hand.” – JWM
Never heard it put that way before. An especially poignant image for all of us bibliophiles.
Terry:
John 16:33 King James Version (KJV)
33 These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.
Yeah, McMurtry could do.
“empty their gun”
Ha.
Barry Corbin’s character in No Country For Old Men: “What you got, ain’t nothin’ new…….you can’t stop what’s coming”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1U3MyX0pmE
I have to take a different point of view vis: minority races. I have met plenty who approach life with magnanimity and humility (not deference; humility). If I have ever felt unfairly treated, and I have been once or twice in my long life, I look to humility. From dust I came, and thence I shall return.
Any human who feels owed by the rest is a sucker. It’s the default feeling of a liberal society. If feeling privileged is a sin, then feeling entitled or owed is equally so. Nobody short of the royal family is entitled, and who likes those morons, anyway?
Maybe there are large swaths of garbage in inner cities in the East, but Hollywood is totally worse, compared to them, with the constant drumbeat of how superior they are – how virtuous and woke.
@AesopFan:
Your response to Terry, the quote from the KJV, really hit home for me. Allowed me to exhale, if you know what I mean. Thanks
JWM
JWM – We all stress out in these crazy times; it’s good to go back to the eternal essentials.
Casey,
I mean no disparagement of minorities in whole, ever. My first wife Mexican, my second was black. My current (and last) wife of 15 years is Asian. Our kids are mixed, and my son looks completely Asian. My above response came from analysis of a career active military black guy and another MBA level professional I respect and work with. Both have it all together, work hard and provide for their families. Good folks…..that sign onto the BLM, kneeling during the national anthem etc. I cannot mentally get there, not even at a stretch.