For those who bought a copy of my new book Tail of the Dragon during the fourth quarter of 2012, you helped bring a small bit of joy to my family this past Christmas, and for that I thank you.  While I finished the novel I avoided the fun stuff I typically enjoy like playing Xbox and computer games because I had a schedule to meet.  Once the book came out in September and I did a little media for it, I felt I could take the time to enjoy life a little bit before getting too serious about the next one—which is in outline form now.  My wife had wanted to play an MMO with me called The Old Republic but it required us to purchase two high-end computers instead of having just one, so we could play at the same time.  The other computer we have is dedicated to my business ventures and the work that goes into this blog site daily, so my wife hadn’t been getting much computer time after her other computer had a terminal malfunction some time ago.  To play that new game I would have to buy two desktop PC’s, as tablets or lap tops wouldn’t be powerful enough in this particular case.  We would need personal computers that could run on the high-end and that would be costly.  There always seemed to be more important things to spend a few thousand dollars on, so the computers were put on the very back burner. I didn’t even want to think about something fun until the book was out, and we put a new roof on our home before winter hit, so she waited patiently.  She felt bad wanting to spend so much money just to play a video game, so she didn’t push it—but after the fourth quarter sales closed, I secretly put aside a little bit of money and bought us both two new super computers for Christmas which my kids and I surprised her with on Christmas Day.  Click the video below to see her reaction.

Much of the time it is my wife who does all the nice things for the family, so she is seldom surprised by anybody doing something nice for her.  But this year was different.  We’ve always been a traditional family where she maintained the home and I maintained work relationships, so we didn’t have the modern benefit of a dual income household to just throw money at our whims.  That benefit is something that we have both vehemently rejected out of dedication to providing for our children, and now grandchildren a constant loving female presence in their lives which far outweighs any monetary value.

I have been called a sexist my entire life because of my almost Amish-like adherence to traditional family values.  My wife has been called far worse because she has so obviously rejected the feminist movement of independence from men.  In our marriage which is coming up on a quarter century now, our household runs like many did in America during 1920 through 1950.  I treat her respectfully, she participates in politics equally, and she controls all our family income.  She cooks, cleans–is the family psychologist, maintains all the relationships with the extended family—her job is a difficult, thankless one. There is no prestige for the American woman who dedicates herself as a housewife and in my mind there is no job more important in the entire world.  My wife didn’t have a career, when our children needed to be homeschooled.  When my kids were little, my wife was a room mother at their school, and the teachers turned against her when during the fourth grade consensus emerged that all the little girls of that age needed to learn how to put a condom on a fake penis as part of sex education.  We of course declined to sign the permission form and the teachers retaliated.  Soon the administrators learned through the teacher’s lounge that my wife was “one of those women,” one of those “trouble makers,” so they made it difficult for her to even pick my kids up from school, because my kids did not ride the school bus.  (Yes, my kids were too good to ride the school bus with the other kids.  My wife drove them to and from school every single day of their schooling lives.)   My wife had resisted a progressive platform so the school circled the wagons to push her out.  We responded by pulling our kids out of the school.  We were able to pull the trigger when it was needed due to political pressure in the school district of Mason many years ago because my wife did not have a career—a commitment to a business interest outside of our family home.  If I had a quarter for all the times family and friends told us that we were wrong in our approach to raising our children, we’d be millionaires rolling in rooms full of those quarters.  Much of that advice we were given by well-intentioned people had its source with daytime television and talk shows like Opera who we now know was intensely committed to the spread of progressive ideas.  Their advice was wrong even though the masses seemed all to agree on those feminist statements.   It has never been easy because the rest of society was going in a noticeably different direction and we were openly rebelling against the progressive political attack against American tradition.  For a woman to stay home and care for her family in a traditional manner from 1990 to 2010 seemed to be the vilest insult against progressivism, judging by the insults that came in our direction.  So the older we have grown, the more flagrant we have flaunted our position, especially once we learned the source of the advice.

As discussed at this site in great detail modern progressivism is all about destroying the American version of family, so it should come as no surprise that children share authority between their government schools and their parents which leads to much of the misguided rebellion many young people cast against their parents.  It is also no surprise that divorce rates are so high because both spouses are dedicated to goals outside the family unit, and women have been told they must be equal to men in the workplace.  The progressive strategy has been to remove the heart of the family—women and demean them into pursuing male-like career goals—which are empty social acceptance roles that offer very little real substance.  The goal of this aimless existence is to put the faith Americans used to commit to individual family strength and instead invest into it faith towards government.  In my traditional view, American women are the government; they are the only government that matters.  They rule America’s households and in our family, nothing happens without the approval of my wife.  She even has legislative power over every oil change I conduct on our various vehicles.  I don’t buy anything without her approval, which is how it should be.

On the other side of the coin, for over 20 years now I have had to strive to make enough family income to compensate for two college educated adults because that’s what it costs to get through modern life.  Most of the time I pull off that task with extra revenue generating activity like writing books, designing t-shirts, or other types of creative enterprise.  In my younger days I worked various part-time jobs to pay the bills and sometimes rode a bicycle everywhere as we went for years with only one car that my wife needed to use for driving the kids to school.  At one point I rode 12 miles one way to work every day for over 1 year on a first shift job and worked a second job on the way home that helped divide up the return mileage to something less exhausting.  I’d peddle the remaining 6 miles home in the rain, snow, and extreme heat at around midnight and would start the whole thing again at 5 AM the next day.  I never missed work, or got sick, because I couldn’t afford to.  Sometimes the money has been easy, sometimes it was very hard, but always we have managed to keep my wife as the hub of the family and there is no government that supersedes her.  I have always put my wife on a pedestal because that is where women deserve to be.  They are not equal to men, they are bigger, better, and sweeter—and deserve to be cared for with love and understanding.

This brings us back to Christmas, for the first time in our lives, my wife wanted a vacation with me that involved actual time spent together—not on a tour bus through Europe, or on a Gondola in Venice being pushed around the canals by a heavily fragranced Italian man who looks like he’d rather be making meat balls. She wanted me to spend “time” with her—not writing books, not working on politics, not practicing bullwhips, or even back-woods hiking.  She wanted to spend time with me, and since she loves Star Wars, there was no better way to spend that time than with an MMO dedicated to Star Wars that requires thousands of hours of partnership.  But in order to play an MMO with another person, two computers are needed, and that cost is typically prohibitive for such a luxury item.

The gift was more symbolic than fiscal because it was a commitment to time spent rather than a dollar value—although to arrive at that moment it did require a significant financial investment.  The computers had to be powerful because we know family members who have tried to play The Old Republic on a single core processor and fried their video cards from the excessive heat generated, even with the graphics turned all the way down.  Because we both love Star Wars we wanted to play the game with full graphics resolution—(which are fabulous by the way), and we still wanted computing power to spare.  So my son-in-law and I overdid all the specs and built the computers seen in the video above.  My wife didn’t think it was possible because a few months earlier we had spoken to a Best Buy consultant about the amount of money it would take to buy computers that would play the game the way we wanted to play it, and his response was frustrating.  He gave us a cost of nearly $4000 for two computers.  Frustrated because we still needed a new roof, a dishwasher, and a number of other important daily items, we put it on the very back burner to revisit a few years down the road.

Over this past weekend my wife pointed out to me that we have now played The Old Republic for 20 straight days and we are only just getting started.  Our average playing time is 5 to 8 hours per session.  Saturday we played the game for 18 hours straight—no interruptions.  My kids are all playing the game and my son-in-law who built those computers built one just like them for my one of my daughters while he beefed up his to match the specs.  We have all played together and we have been playing with extended family members from out-of-state and it is everything that we hoped it would be.  When my wife saw that she had unlimited computing power it wasn’t because of the pretty lights or status of having a new expensive gift.  It was in being able to spend time with the people she loves in a game environment that she adores.  The computers are simply a means to get there, and in this case, the powerful machines are designed to operate without limitations that prohibit such an experience.

The first thing that people reading this will ask is how can we afford to spend so much time playing a game?  Well, in her case, she has the time because she is not in service to any institution outside our family.  In my case, I have worked hard to get out ahead enough to buy myself the time to play the game by releasing a new book that is out making money and freeing up my personal time, so in that way, I have afforded myself the ability to give my wife more of my time which is all she really wanted for Christmas.  The look on her face is as authentic as it gets and I offer the rare look behind the curtain of my family so that others can see the reality behind the rhetoric that often surrounds me.

Many of my readers and friends here have wanted to see pictures of my new grandson, and they are curious as to what daily life is like within my family.  We are a close family because my wife has dedicated her life to making it so, and she deserves a lot of credit for that.  It can be seen clearly in videos like the one shown above.   The tickets she received at the beginning of the clip were symbolic of the kind of vacation that we have been experiencing for the last 20 days.    It took her a long time to put all the elements together to figure out what was happening, but once she did, she was extremely happy, which earned for me the worth of the whole enterprise.  She has taken a lot of flack for being a full-time housewife over the years, and she has patiently put up with most of the slander that has been thrown her way which sometimes gets compounded when money is tight.  We know that most families cannot do as we have done, because these days so many women are embedded in the economy that if they all pulled out to become full-time mothers our national unemployment rate would jump up to 30 to 40% instantly.  Many women also would be lost as to their roles as central family beacons, because there is a lot of responsibility in that job, and they have been taught not to take that responsibility.  When things go bad, there is nobody but one person to point at and blame.  If a child goes bad, the mother often will blame herself, and many women hide from this responsibility behind their careers, and that will not change over night.    But most women deep down inside know that no matter how much money they earn, it cannot replace the impact of their love and attention for their families.  Kids who have such busy mothers are easy to spot in a crowd, and these days most of our society is functioning from a hunger for their mother’s attention that they never received as children.  The public schools are not adequate replacements, and mothers who make such decisions of putting career in front of motherhood are fools.

Progressives have attempted to change human behavior and they have failed.  Anyone who defends those failures is an idiot, and I know a lot of them.  Some people are so far into building their lives around that idioticrity that they will lash out at people like me by calling me a sexist, and calling my clothing “wife beater” attire as they did in my video A Whip Trick to Save America where I wore an Under Armor muscle shirt that was labeled by my feminist political critics in such a fashion.  Those people are wrong, and have built their entire lives around being wrong.  Many of the names progressive women have called my sweet wife over the years, and myself really reflect their personal feelings of guilt.  I know it, she knows it, and they know it.  My kids have witnessed it, everyone knows what the motives are behind the actions, and after all of that I continue to believe more and more, that a child needs a mother to be ever-present, and a family needs a string of such women to be strong otherwise failure is assured and the family structure will break down in the absence of such personalities.

The sacrifice to have a strong family by allowing the women of that family to serve no entity but their families is that money is harder to come by.  But it’s worth it for those few times when enough money is made that quality time with loved ones becomes possible.  In the case of the Christmas computer gifts it is not the machinery or hardware, it’s the time that playing the game will giver her with me, her children, her nieces and nephews, sisters and even parents that are scattered all over the Earth.  The gift she received was time with the people she cares about, and that is the a gift that extends beyond conventional value, and is the reason for her delight on that memorable Christmas morning that had been a long time and coming—which she waited patiently to see.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com