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A repeat for those with short memories like mine!

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Austin Slater #13 and Jaylin Davis #49 of the San Francisco Giants kneel during the national anthem near cardboard cutouts of fans before their exhibition game against the Oakland Athletics at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on Monday.

Cancel Culture

 Toppling statues, shouting down speakers with different views; shaming people on social media posts; flooding sponsors on media programs to force them to cancel personalities or programs for which one disagrees; defunding and cancelling the police; it is not only wrong, it is downright scary. Do we really want to cancel out all opinions that don’t agree with our own? There are places where there is no difference of opinions and only one opinion matters; i.e. China, Russia, Cuba Venezuela and many more. Is that what we want to create here?

We have a large element that now hates America and wants to change it, into what? A socialistic country? A Marxist Utopia? Ask any person who now lives in America that came from a socialist country for the freedom of our country and they will tell you their own horror stories and equivocally state, “Don’t even think of letting it happen here!”

How did we get to this point? Much of it has to do with our young people who received little or no history of our country and believe us to be an unfair, unjust nation. As a retired police officer in a large city with over (30) years experience and a college instructor with over (20) years experience I can see the results of just how little young people know about history. When I ask my classes, “Who did we fight in WWII,” I get answers like, “Was it China…Russia?” I began one class to talk about the gold rush and noticed two young men in the back wearing San Francisco 49er hats and jerseys so I asked them, “Why are the 49ers called the 49ers?” “We don’t know they said.” So then I told them it had to do with the year the gold rush started and that the number 49 was part of the year. I asked them to put two numbers in front of 49 and that would be the year the gold rush started. They responded, “Would that be 1949?” Close enough, right! When I was teaching a class in the central valley I told them that many of them probably had their ancestors move here because of the “Dust Bowl.” One young girl said, “Is that something like the Rose Bowl?”  

I could go on with more examples but why bother, you get the point. Now these uninformed young masses are being led by anarchists to tear down our country because, “Darn, our past has just been so bad!” Really? Name a country that hasn’t had terrible things happen in their past? How about Germany? Mega millions of people killed in WWII and millions more executed in concentration camps. Rather than “cancelling it out” Germany provides millions to maintain the Auschwitz camp built in Poland by POW’s under German force. Auschwitz was the horror upon horror slaughter house of mass executions but it has been allowed to stand as a memorial to people throughout the world so all can see the horrors of the past so that it would never again be repeated.  Germany did NOT cancel the bad parts of their history to be politically correct. Yet we have to be vigilant because we now have students coming into college that have never heard of Adolph Hitler. Our students know every damned thing about social media personalities but little or nothing about history, and you should know the rule, “If we don’t learn from history then we are doomed to repeat it.”

So what do we do? Answer: We insure that every student is proficient in history, and not an edited or biased version. We also must spend hours of family time each week to watch The History Channel or DVD’s of the history of our country including all the wars and the good and bad of our past. I do not blame our students as they are products of this environment. I think YOU know who to blame! Now it it is time to reverse course and go back to the basics.

Lastly, let’s all remember to support law enforcement. Do not be naïve enough to believe they should be cancelled. They are the only thing that stands between us and the apocalypse. Every year almost 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty, almost half by criminals and the others through accidents. Are there bad cops; sure! There’s bad in every profession, but most officers are here to protect and serve.  So that’s it, we can do this. We must stop the cancel culture before it cancels us and we need to be proud of who we are both as individuals and as a country.

Respectfully submitted,

Dennis McKenzie

Editor’s Note: I look forward to others submitting their literary skills to The Farsider!