THE UNWATCHED PARADE

Black Civil War soldiers in Washington DC; (Not the 54th)

The desecration of the statue honoring the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common by Antifa puppets is typical of a Globalist mindset which believes the way to resolve our differences is through destruction. Such resolve is as futile as attempting to turn humanity into identical clones with identical fingerprints; even if such a stark utopia was forced upon humanity, the clones could not all stand in the same place at the same time, and therefore their brains would not hold identical data, and no amount of dogma could prevent the spread of creeping individuality. Differences cannot be destroyed.

Actually such destruction is an affront to the Creator, for He is the one who made us so marvelously different. If you have a problem with the fact we are not all the same, take it up with Him. Not that you will stop talking long enough to listen. For thousands of years He has been telling us that the answer to the problems created by our differences is not destruction, but Love. Yet who has listened?

The chief problem is divisiveness, which draws a distinction between “them” and “us”. Weak minds cannot see beyond such distinctions, and fall prey to a mindset of murder; IE: The way to resolve a difference is to remove the person who differs. Such murder does not need to be physical; it may be as subtle as shunning. But it is not Love.

The problem is not discrimination. We all discriminate. How else are we to judge what is good from what is evil? Martin Luther King asked us to discriminate, but to base our discrimination upon the quality of character and not the color of skin.

This is easy to say but hard to do. It is not easy to understand why people behave the way they do, when we do not share the same background. If you grew up in a trailer full of empty beer-cans you might better understand the mindset of people called “white trash” by the unsympathetic people some call “the elite”. However you didn’t grow up that way. Even if you share the same skin color misunderstandings may arise.

The path past misunderstanding is through respect, rather than tearing others down. This is not to say you can’t fight in self-defense, but that you shouldn’t start a fight based merely on the fact others are not the same. At the start of the Civil War the so called “Abolitionists” didn’t want to abolish individuality, but rather slavery. They drew a distinction and employed discernment, which the mob desecrating the statue to the 54th seemed to fail to do.

If the mob thought at all, they likely disliked the fact the statue portrays a white man up on a horse as the black foot soldiers are on foot. However this is historically accurate. Robert Gould Shaw did ride a horse, and may well have died with his troops, shot from a horse. On the other hand he may have died after dismounting to fight by their side.

But die he did.

At this point full disclosure demands I state my last name is Shaw. Robert Gould Shaw cannot be anyone’s ancestor because he died as a young man, without children. War is the opposite of Darwin’s Theory; those most fit to live are often the ones sacrificed. However I do count him among my ancestors.

I cannot be free of bias, because my own family is involved, but I can pass along some insights that have been passed down to me, that you will not find in Wikipedia.

The Civil War was far more complex than two groups of men dressing in blue and gray and squaring off, and the rivalry between Boston and New York predates baseball’s Red Sox and Yankees. Some of Boston’s elite and many of New York’s actually sided with the Confederacy, for reasons having to do with profit more than anything spiritual. For example, some did not desire to see the price of cotton go up.

For a young idealist like Robert Gould Shaw, who grew up benefiting from inherited wealth he didn’t have to get dirty fighting for, such grubby materialistic concerns were incomprehensible. Therefore his letters confess the “them” against “us” attitude of a young Abolitionist. He definitely was not perfect. If you want to find imperfections to excuse your desire to tear the Boston statue down, look to his letters.

If you want to find evidence of “racism”, look towards his inability to comprehend the Irish. Few could, for few had been through the hell the Irish had endured.

During the Great Famine of 1844-1849 the population of Ireland declined by roughly 20% through starvation, and around a million children died, as, rather than sending help, the English “elite” exported food from Ireland for profit. This heartlessness did not make the Irish expect much from the non-Irish. They expected little in the way of love from their fellow man. If they didn’t put themselves first, no one else would. They left Ireland in droves, penniless and with little but sweat to offer, and were not welcomed arrivals in many lands, unless you were a member of the “elite” and eager to exploit cheap labor.

In the American south the Irish were used for dangerous work that might kill a man. A slave cost the modern equivalent of several thousand dollars, and, if a slave died, it represented a sizable loss, whereas if an Irishman died it cost nothing.

In the north the Irish did receive pay, where southern slaves received none, but southern slaves had to be fed, clothed and sheltered, whereas the Irish had to fend for themselves, living in squalid tenements we can hardly imagine, yet calling themselves better off than in Ireland. They did not like the idea of slaves being freed, for they feared the slaves would come north and take their jobs.

All Robert Gould Shaw saw was the tip of the iceberg, and he had a hard time comprehending why the Irish behaved the way they did. In the privacy of his letters he expressed frustrations which he likely would not speak to an Irishman, face to face, (or would not speak without employing the care of a diplomat.)

In like manner, even as an Abolitionist, Robert’s letters express frustrations he felt about the African Americans who lived in the north as freed slaves, or in some cases as men who had been born free and were well educated, and were themselves exasperated by illiterate Irishmen.

(As an aside I should mention that when I was Robert Gould Shaw’s age, 110 years later, some “elite” quasi-genius (more dense than a half-wit) decided it was wrong for the Irish to have one neighborhood and the African-Americans to have another, in Boston, and the answer was “busing”, which in a sense was to forcibly rip children from safe environments and place them in unsafe areas. It went over like a lead balloon, and I recall experiencing great anguish as a witness, because I liked both neighborhoods and both peoples, yet saw the worst being fomented. I may have written some things at the time I would now rue having published, for frustration creates a fume that does not smell nice, and I basically became angry at three sides: African Americans, Irish, and also the leadership which was banging the two side’s skulls together.)

If you really feel it is a good thing to speak badly of the dead, and crave some evidence they were not perfect, look to old letters, or diaries they kept when they were young, or some traceable record of emails they wrote when drunk but deleted the next morning without ever sending. If you want to find some proof Rembrandt was not a good artist, find some work he did when he was five-years-old, and use that as an excuse to burn his masterpieces. All you are doing is proving you are an absolute snob, incapable of true understanding, true sympathy, and true Love.

The tale of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment is told in the movie, “Glory”, and is well worth retelling, though perhaps not by me. To put things in context, the battle of Gettysburg was July 1-3, the New York City Draft Riots were July 13-16, the Battle of Grimball’s Landing occurred on July 18, and the ferocious Second Battle of Fort Wagner was fought later the same day. Even Wikipedia will fill in the details, if you desire a broader view.

I bring up the Draft Riots to accent the complexity, and also the irony, involved. The riots occurred because the Irish were told they would be drafted to go fight and die to free slaves who would then later take their jobs, and they didn’t like the prospects, especially as rich people could escape the draft (for roughly $6200 in current dollars) and black people were exempt. In the sweltering heat of pre-airconditioning New York City the “peaceful demonstration” turned ugly, (sound familiar?) and the Irish turned their wrath onto the African Americans of New York City, brutally killing over ten, as over a hundred Irish died when troops, that had to be diverted from pursuing the retreating Confederate Army, were used to”restore order”. The irony is that this riot helped the Confederate Army escape, and therefore prolonged the very draft that was being protested, and also, even as the Irish protested that blacks were not going to be drafted, the 54th was marching south, many to their deaths, led by a white man who was only 25 years old.

At this point I’ll just add some family lore.

First, Robert did not initially want the job. He’d been fighting since the start of the war, had seen the bloodiest battles and twice was wounded, and did not want to desert his comrades. There was some doubt about the ability of black soldiers to face withering gunfire, and he feared he and his troops would be relegated to some behind-the-lines duty. The fact he was chosen was not so much a case of him stepping forward as it was of others stepping back. (It should be added that once he took the job, whatever racist preconceptions he had he shed, doing things such as demanding equal pay for his troops.)

Second, it was not merely in the North that there was doubt that black soldiers could withstand military discipline. In the south it was felt that, at the first bang of a gun, former-slave’s eyes would get very big, round and white, and they’d bolt. The 54th disproved this belief. Even before the first battle they created a sensation marching through southern streets in close order, radiating discipline, their uniforms impeccable and their buttons gleaming. The African American onlookers were especially impressed, (which the southern aristocrats felt set a bad example). Then in battle they fought without fear, basically rescuing the 10th Connecticut from envelopment early in the day, and gaining the ramparts of Fort Wagner in the afternoon. Although the higher command chose not to send further troops in to exploit this gain, instead ordering a withdrawal, there could be no doubt as to the skill and bravery of the 54th. But the reaction of the rebel troops was not admiration, but rather hatred and loathing, especially towards the commander who led them. Where the body of every other Union officer was returned to the Union side after the battle, the body of Robert Gould Shaw was stripped naked and dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave with his troops.

After the war there was an idea floated that his body might be exhumed and buried in some cemetery with honor, but the Shaw family stated he was proud to have served with his men and would likely be equally proud to be buried with them.

No long afterwards the mass graves were exhumed and the all the decomposing bodies were lain in neat rows with gravestones reading “Unknown”, but the Shaw family only wanted his sword back. Somehow they got it, and it was hauled out to be sentimentally displayed on occasion, until the blade gradually was forgotten and gathered dust in some attic until it wound up in a museum. However the surviving black troops didn’t forget, and were behind the erection of the memorial to the 54th, which was took decades to see brought to fruition; the statue itself was begun in 1884 and unveiled in 1897, and in 2020 took mere moments to desecrate with graffiti.

I often have wondered about the complete contempt displayed by the rebels toward the 54th and Robert Gould Shaw, for there is a contrary logic seen among soldiers wherein they must hate their foe to fight them, yet also feel admiration for the courage they witness in the men they maim and kill. What happened to the admiration in this case? I imagine what happened was that, despite the fact the rebels had defended their fort and won the battle, the 54th whom they had fought was a living proof the South had lost the intellectual war. Why? Because hand in hand with the concept of slavery is a concept like a caste system, which clashes with the idea that all men are created equal. The 54th had proven they were equal.

This leads me to a final anecdote from family lore, involving a similar caste-hierarchy in Boston, and the 54th marching off to war and passing the front of a prestigious club on Becon Street where the Boston Brahman were wont to gather.

By the summer of 1863 it had sunk in that, through the troops sung, “When Johnie Comes Marching Home Again”, many would not be marching home. The death toll was well on its way up to 600,000, which is basically a number the same as how many Americans have died in all other wars added together. Every older graveyard in New England has a crumbling monument to men buried far away, standing as mute testimony to the carnage which a Civil War involves. Therefore a poignancy was involved in the cheering, as the 54th marched by, with people putting on a brave face, and some holding back tears, until the troops marched in front of the club full of Brahmans. Their response? They pulled down the shades in the windows of their prestigious club.

Even 157 years later their snooty, self-imposed blindness is, upon this page, angrily remembered. It demonstrates that even in my own family bitterness is difficult to drop.

Not all memorials are raised to people’s most noble side; bitterness is a stone statue in our hearts, making hearts heavy, burdened. God urges us to love and forgive, but we prefer a poison which we ingest thinking it will harm others, when it harms ourselves and our children, just as the feud between Montegues and Capulets in the end killed Romeo and Juliet.

“The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.”

My great-grandfather was born in 1850, and that makes me the “fourth generation” since the horrors of the Civil War. I like to think my children are freed from the bitterness, for they are the fifth generation. However to achieve such freedom we must pull down statues, but not those erected externally, but rather the inner ones in our stony hearts.

Pulling down external statues is like pulling down the shades. There is something we do not want to see. But if we do not look at history and learn from it we are doomed to repeat it, as are our children.

‘The fathers eat the sour grapes,
But the children’s teeth are set on edge’

If we only see the error of the past, we accent error and fail to see the glory which, if God is everywhere, is in every situation.

For, when you think of it, if your forefathers were completely bad, and all they did was bad, then you should start by pulling down yourself, for you are their creation. However, if you think your forefathers were good to create you, and it is only other forefathers who deserve destruction, then you are on the road to a Brahman racism all your own.

I actually have learned to like the image of the Boston Brahman pulling the blinds as the 54th marched by. It has great poetic value as a symbol. For the fact is this: A parade is marching in front of all of us, and we can either pull the blinds, or see the glory.

To those who can see no noble parade marching by, I say look beyond the blinds. Often what modern technology brings to the forefront is an ugliness in the way of beauty, but the beauty is still there, parading by behind it.

. UNWATCHED PARADE SONNET

I paused my weeding, ceased my looking down
And gazed across the pasture to the trees
That wavered green; looked up from dirt’s brown
Hearing and seeing an invisible breeze
Part summer’s locks with a sigh that’s unheard
With the radio on. Every green leaf stirred.
Every green branch swayed. Far too short a word
Is five-lettered “trees”, and it seems quite absurd
Such marvelous wind invisibly passes
Unseen and unheard, like an unwatched parade,
When I fret about news of rioting masses
And make myself deaf to music God’s made.
God knows how we ache and sends us His balm.
Turn off the radio. Heed, and be calm.

PUPPET’S GRIM REWARD

To some degree ignorance walks hand in hand with youth, but youth makes up for what it lacks in wits with exuberant energy. Therefore youth requires a leader of some sort. Without banks a river spreads out and becomes a swamp, and so we have the expression “channeled”. Although youth tends to find discipline oppressive, they also dislike being aimless, and ambiguously seek the very “channeling” they find oppressive. Parrots need someone to copy, and even lemmings need something to flee.

Before the Floyd protests occurred I expected them, in some form, though I didn’t know what the excuse might be, because there is no way to bottle up youth in the springtime without an outlet. Even dictators use sports to ventilate the stifled. Social isolation also creates a hunger for crowds. Also chanting slogans, at the top of your lungs, blows off steam.

I pay attention to the slogans, as they tend to encapsulate what passes for thought in mob-mentality. In the LA riots of 1968 the motto was, “Burn, Baby, Burn”, and during the riots at the 1968 Democrat convention the motto was “The Whole World Is Watching”. I’m getting to be an old man, and I’ve seen this, and been here, before. History is repeating itself.

The people chanting tend to merely be parrots, but that is an insult to parrots. Parrots may be bird brains, but their eyes are not so vacant as a mob’s. I never liked the protests of the 1960’s, for I felt part of a mindless multitude. I prefer thought. Protests made me feel like the vast suicidal throng all bellowing “Heil Hitler” at Nuremberg, like a vast throng of lemmings all headed to a verge.

The parrots receive the slogan they chant from a slightly more educated parrot which I suppose you might call a puppet, though they were called “outside agitators” in the 1960’s. Such puppets are filled with a grandiose sense of their own significance, and spew the party-line of “outside agitators”. In the comics of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s this sort of person was typified by the Doonesbury character “Megaphone Mark’

As the years went by Megaphone Mark, despite zealously avoiding graduation through a number of ploys, eventually had to get a Real Job, and went to work at NPR.

It is said that “art imitates life”, but sometimes it works the other way around, and, as Oscar Wilde stated, “life imitates art.” For example, all it takes is some pop psychologist to appear on a talk-show and speak of some new “syndrome”, and all of a sudden you’ll notice lots of people suffering from an ailment no one ever heard of before. In any case, far too many people are followers, and don’t use their powers of discernment. “Discrimination” has in some ways become a bad word, yet it is only common sense to “look before you leap”.

We hopefully teach this to our youth, but even in my youth teachers were moving towards a left-wing position wherein they felt they could replace old-fashioned traditions with some new-and-improved “betterment”. As a ridiculously loyal boy (I was even loyal to the sponsors of advertisements during Red Sox games) I can recall being appalled when a teacher questioned the virtue of George Washington “because he had slaves.” I suppose this was meant to stimulate “critical thinking”, but one does not scuttle the ship they are in without another nearby ship (or at least lifeboat) to get into. Therefore one, as a critical thinker, should always ask, “What alternative do you propose?”

Once one has investigated alternatives, the initial conditions often do not appear as intolerable. When I was young I dared to actually test out alternative lifestyles, at times muttering “screw this” and heading off in a huff. I’d abandon ship without even a lifeboat, for I was a good swimmer. However I didn’t demand the ship be sunk, nor that a lifeboat be built for me, (which is what I hear in some of the slogans chanted in current riots). And it turned out to be a good thing I didn’t sink the ship I abandoned, for I had someplace to return to when I got tired of swimming about looking for a better boat.

Jut after World War Two Churchill made a famous statement in the House Of Commons,

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”

One slogan I saw was reported chanted during a recent demonstration was something along the lines of, “Revolution Not Elections Bring Solutions”. This made me wince, hurting me worse than a salted paper-cut. It was obvious the parrots all chanting this slogan hadn’t studied the history of humanity, and what happens when this is tried. Nor have they studied how hard it is to regain the right to vote, once you have lost it.

It seems it is human nature to want a hero, some marvelous father-figure who takes on our responsibilities, and allows us to relax. This is in some ways laziness, and an abdication of personal responsibility. What people eventually learn is that, if you are too lazy to swim, you drown.

This problem is very human, and ancient. Roughly three thousand years ago the Jews were weary of all the responsibility involved with being a free people, and, rather than ruled by their Conscience, wanted to be ruled by a king. The prophet Samuel warned them that along with a big strong king came big-government, and

“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

It is not clear exactly what form of government existed 3000 years ago, but it clear it wasn’t a central authority. Apparently the Hebrews followed the dictates of their heart, following certain disciplines to make certain their hearts were set on the highest ideals (IE God) and were not darkened by lowering things (IE False Gods, such as opium). In cases where the dictates of two people’s hearts clashed they brought their disputes before elders called “judges”, but most of the time they lived as freely as birds. Sadly, they slacked off in terms of the necessary discipline, and fell from freedom into despotism.

History repeats itself. Freedom isn’t free, for discipline is involved, to make certain the heart is unencumbered by low tendencies that drag one down. Two disciplines involve, first, loving the Truth, and second, loving ones neighbor. Sadly, Truth is increasingly disregarded (IE: “Fake News”) and neighbors are increasingly seen as an enemy unworthy of respect (IE: looting, among other things).

People who succumb to such a failure of discipline often use someone else’s injustice to justify their own. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they feel they are an exception to the rule.

For example, I run an Outdoor Childcare. I basically make an unprofitable farm just barely profitable by babysitting kids as they run around outside and gawk at chickens. There is little status in calling myself a “babysitter”, so the term “Childcare Professional” was invented, yet Childcare Professionals are very poorly paid. If I wanted to get all political I could say it is wrong for society to invest so little in children, and that “for the children”, old-fashioned traditions should be replaced by new and improved “progressive” concepts. (In actual fact I feel blessed, and that romping around outside showing kids the wonders of nature sure beats working on an assembly line, and other jobs I’ve had.)

This is how it begins, with a sense some injustice is involved. However the rewards of Childcare are not measured in coins; a mother does not have coin-slots by her breasts, and babies are not born with wallets. Yet what is basically a matter of the heart is corrupted by the brainy mentality of an accountant, and teachers can even begin to teach children things that are corrosive to a healthy heart. For example, rather than “Honor Thy Mother and Father”, parents can be portrayed as the enemy.

Teachers who succumb to such leftist dogma are well aware what they are doing, but believe it is for the best. The dogma states it takes roughly twenty years to indoctrinate a generation, and if teachers are only patient they will live to see the benefits. What they hope for is honor and fair pay, (which they already receive), but what they are doing is undermining the very society that they are supposedly serving. They feel they are glorious revolutionaries, but they are puppets training children to be parrots, and will not harvest the crop they hope for.

In 1984 Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB agent who defected to the United States, stated the cruel and brutal Truth this way,

“They are instrumental in the process of subversion only to destabilize a nation,” he said of the academics and activists. “When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power, obviously they get offended. They think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”

This is exactly what Mao did to all China’s teachers and professors during his “Cultural Revolution”, and Stalin didn’t merely “purge” educators, but just about every “comrade” who originally supported him. Pol Pot had nearly everyone who could write executed, for if you had a writer’s callus it was a sign you were a capitalist.

History does repeat itself. History is clear as day, if teachers dare to teach the Truth.

Now is not the time to kowtow to politically-correct propaganda. George Washington may have had slaves, but he wasn’t a mass murderer. Rather he was part of a process that furthered freedom, rather than abolishing it. Democracy faces constant problems, but is the best way we have come up with to handle problems. Life has constant problems, but we do not therefore abolish life. That is either murder or suicide. Therefore rather than seeking to abolish the American Constitution teachers should take the time to study it. It is an amazing document, and needs to be taught.

Once again “these are times that try men’s souls.” Either you stand by Truth, or you are against It.