I am always grateful to good friends, like Robin that help me find material worth posting.
Robin likes The STAR Forum, and likes what we we are doing. Just before she left California, politics came up with a good friend of hers, named Audrey. She found out they had similar views. The letter that follows is an actual letter that Audrey’s husband sent to their two college age children. This is beneficial for all to read, and I received Audrey’s permission to post it. I have not included their last name to protect their privacy; however, if you want to submit comments, I will make sure they receive them. FREEDOM CAN WIN. Enjoy.
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Dear Jake and Danielle,
What a disappointing, yet inspiring time. Already I find myself doing what Hoedad did late in his life, apologizing for the insufficiency of his generation. As his is called ‘the greatest generation’, ours is simply ‘the biggest’. These characterizations are not coincidental. “The greatest’ because they waged and won horrific war which saved civilization as we know it from Nazi inhumanity. The ‘biggest’ because they, visiting death, returned to make life.
They did so at a time when survival was being technologically and pharmacologically liberated from perennial threat. Food production, refrigeration, transportation, communication, antibiotics, medical and every other industrial innovations, etc., propelled the standard of living far past historical mortality.
They did so with classic American enthusiasm, hard work, ingenuity, and resolve, expressing the same self-interest which won the war. The problem is that the greatness with which they fought for values was not as great as the values for which they fount. (Rand used this phrase to describe Victor Hugo’s heroes.) The rank and file American person possessed the classic American spirit of individualism, but the American intelligentsia and political leadership abandoned true liberty early in 20th center, and then disastrously during FDR’s reign of error. The only reason America escaped FDR’s perpetuated depression is the war forced economic and industrial realities of production upon his destructive policies. When the war was over, the power of American liberty was left standing. Our economy replenished a ravaged world. Our intelligentsia and politics however remained moth-eaten, leading to efforts like ‘the great society’ and a general inclination towards socialism which persists today.
As young people, you expect to be born into a functional and sustaining society. You expect that the generations before you and settled on basic rules of civil conduct promoting societal advance. You expect that the models being displayed have been merited, naturally selected by prior challenges to survival and reliability. This is obviously not the case.
Just in the last several weeks, three separate and vital institutions have failed their constituents, you. “Scientists” responsible for climate data, which was being used to fundamentally restrict energy usage and hence our economic relationship to the environment, falsified finding to fit their theory. The scientific method has been deconstructed. Aspersion is thus cast up on the means of establishing the truth, the foodstuff of human evolution. Science, still in its infancy compared to the rule and depredation of dogma, has been abused by those positioned to glorify it.
Our political leadership is in the act of lying. They promote fiscal irresponsibility, indebting your generation forever, while calling it the “era of responsibility” (Obama’s deceitful inauguration). They are devaluing the currency, the means by which you will monetize the value you’re working to achieve. They are forcing a fraudulent healthcare bill down the American throat which will choke us to death. The only means to pay for their insane efforts is to tax and punish yours.
Tiger Woods, heretofore one of the most charming, successful, and popular icons, has betrayed his following by betraying his family. Family is the centerpiece of human evolution. It is the biological and cultural means of procreating the species. If not modeled consistently and correctly, we are biologically and culturally doomed. Woods, by desecrating his marriage, has failed the billions of people who pay him homage.
As a society, we are teaching you wrong. Instead of providing reproducible positive models, we exhibit the negative. Rather than displaying what to do, we display what not to do. This may contrarily inspire you to pursue and practice real science, seek out real political and personal leadership. It however places much greater demands upon your own judgment and developing values. If not exhibited before you, how does one establish right from wrong, truth from falsehood?
My own answer has always been to resort to first principles. Discern the origins, of the universe, of life, of human nature, of reason, of morality, and the evolutionary means by which negentropic progress is made. As human individuals are our basic evolutionary unit, establish that which promotes, establishes, secures, and unleashes individual potential. Fidelity matters, to oneself, one’s spouse, one’s family, the truth, the transcendent. Society like our species, will then benefit and thrive. We are most certainly here to assist you as we can.
Love,
Dad
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