Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is all but singing CALL ME IRRESPONSIBLE! She writes:

The American Value System we treasure is crumbling before our eyes from a number of sea changes in the culture. Some of the changes were slow and sneaky. Lately, some are arriving like runaway trains. But one thing’s for sure – the country bears scant resemblance to the country most of us grew up in. Why?

The most serious reason is the disappearance of on-scene fathers, particularly fathers who are also married to at least one of the mothers of their children. The alarm was raised decades ago, but those advocates of fatherhood were railed against and pilloried as racists and also sexists: “What do you MEAN that a strong, independent single woman isn’t perfectly capable of raising several children from multiple sperm donors? A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle!”

We sowed that wind from the late ’60s on and have not even BEGUN to fully understand how we are now reaping a whirlwind capable of powering every charging station in America.

In addition, the vanishing of our religious underpinnings, to an extent never seen before in the West, is a tragedy. Couple that with the fact that we currently have no rule of law – or more accurately we have one law for rich and famous Democrats or Democrat-voting criminals of color and another for the deplorable hoi polloi, or even billionaires whom that riffraff might wish to elect.

But the foundation of it all, and related to each above disaster, is a society-wide refusal at all levels to take responsibility. “What is this word of which you speak?” ask huge segments of the influencers and cultural arbiters. “There is no such thing as ‘agency’ – everybody is a victim, a marginalized, oppressed person. Asking anyone to take responsibility is white supremacy.”

Perhaps my favorite of all phrases employed to duck any responsibility, beloved of politicians and Public Relations flaks, in the passive voice extraordinaire is: “Mistakes were made”.

Yup. Guns just lying around fired themselves, chocolate cake in the fridge somehow “became eaten,” cars were jacked with marginalized armed youths standing near them, and [stuff] just happened!

Our very own second worst President, Barack Hussein Obama, employed a version of that when he wanted to make sure women could continue to kill their babies. “If my daughter ‘makes a mistake,’ she shouldn’t be punished with a baby,” said the brilliant Smartest President Evah.

HUH! Now, being a fairly elderly woman, I have had sex more than several times in my life. And not even once was that “by mistake.” I don’t know how you COULD have sex by mistake. Oh, you could make a mistake in choosing a lousy partner – but the sex itself is a pretty deliberate act with specific steps leading up to it, such as turning off the television, finishing your ice cream, brushing your teeth and taking off at least some clothes. Even then, there’s several bases to round before you are ACTUALLLY having sex that could lead to a baby. Stop at any one of those intermediate steps and guess what? You aren’t having procreative sex any more. Hence: no baby, no reason to kill it.

So why not just SAY the truth: “My daughter could make a terrible decision to have unprotected sex with a hookup she just met and she could get pregnant.” See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? A woman has to DECIDE to have sex with a male person to whom she’s not married, affianced, or even dating. Then, with no knowledge of his sexual history, she has to hop in the sack without protection from disease or pregnancy. No “mistake” about it. Terrible decisions. Once upon a time, if a woman got pregnant from deliberately having sex with a fiancé or serious boyfriend, they got married. Period. Some didn’t work out. Some lasted “till death did them part.”

It would seem, then, that many of these cultural disasters are just a matter of not knowing the definitions of words. This should be corrected, and I am just the person to do it. We need to impress on the next generation the differences between “a mistake,” “an accident,” and a “bad decision.”

Let me give you some examples from my own life, not entirely free of any of those things.

A “mistake” is when I – ALWAYS – type “tge” for “the” and “gor” for, well, “for” when I am texting. No matter how hard I try to do it right, the teeny tiny keyboard and my chubby little fingers just conspire to hit those particular keys. Sometimes three times in a row, when I try to backspace and do it right. It drives me crazy. Okay, that’s a MISTAKE. Perhaps it’s also a mistake not to use the “talking” option to text on the phone, but I’ve seen some doozies of mistakes there, too, as the device prints what it thought it heard.

An “accident” is when the vast majority of malfunctioning ballot printers on election day turn out to be – who could have predicted this? – in precincts that heavily favored Kari Lake! No, wait, that was a deliberate decision made by the dolt she was running against. My bad. An “accident” is when a hypothetical person is boiling eggs to be Deviled later and gets so distracted by trying to make her column funnier that the water boils dry and the eggs explode all over. Again.

And a “bad decision” is to stay in The Dusty Little Village for the months of July, August, and September. Barring bankruptcy, it probably won’t happen again.

We’re on a roll now. Let’s try another one. What is a “loan”? A “loan” is when some bank, some very nice taxpayers, or just a regular friend or relative LENDS you money to go to college or buy a car or buy a house, with the express promise, often in writing, that – here’s the tricky part – you agree to pay it back with a series of payments over time. Usually, the repayment will include some extra money called “interest” that the lender will get to make up for what he COULD have made some other way than loaning it to you.

If you borrow from the Government, it may come to pass that some feckless reckless politician tries to bribe you with taxpayer money by promising that you DON’T have to pay the loan back after all! O Happy Day! That politician is taking money from waitresses, truck drivers, construction workers and daycare providers who did not go to college to GIVE it to you to study Queer Etruscan Art, at tens of thousands of dollars a year. That is another word called “theft.”

If you get a “loan” from Guido’s Payday Loans & Fill Dirt, you will not be at all confused about whether or not you have to pay the loan back. Because Guido don’t play. Guido does not concern himself with interest. You WILL pay weekly something called the “vigorish,” “vig” for short. And, sadly, NONE of that will EVER be applied to the principal. So you can pay him the vig for the rest of your life and still owe the entire amount. Unlike Uncle Joe Biden “forgiving” your loan payments for three years – Lordy, couldn’t you whiny deadbeats have saved up a LITTLE for when that came to an end? – Guido will not forgive even one missed payment. You will find a way to come up with the money or you will leave town with no forwarding address or find a job suitable for a man with broken fingers, if you are lucky. Legs, if you are not.

Once I accidentally tuned into Queen Latifah’s talk show. It was one in which several young women of color were “borrowing” clothes from stores. In other words “stealing.” The young women clearly knew it was wrong and hence were using the self-deceptive word “borrow.” Queen Latifah actually asked, “Well, are you planning to bring the clothes back?” And they were astonished that Queen Latifah did not understand that those borrowed clothes now BELONGED to them! And even more astonished when she pointed out that that was NOT “borrowing” but theft.

Though I have never returned anything in my entire life, “returning” is not unheard of in my extended family. I have a cousin by marriage who has been banned from Amazon, which I imagine in that customer-friendly environment is a pretty hard thing to achieve.

She is the Queen of Returns. I saw a yuge accordion-style filing system she had with receipts for everything she had ever bought in the last 10 years. But even she was no match for Jeffy Bezos. Before Prime, she would order something and then add an item to just get to the total for free shipping. Then, when the purchase came, she would return the unwanted item. Genius! Except Amazon caught on to the ploy and banned her for life. As someone unfortunate enough to eat in restaurants with her when she sent EVERYTHING back at least once I was happy to see it.