I saw a video today of a Corvette accelerating to 195 mph, supposedly. It’s a 1000 HP modified car that the guy is trying to sell by showing off its speed. I understand that he was given citations for his speed which will have to be contested in court because he was not actually pulled over by an officer.
This reminded me of a book that I’m working on. I’m talking to a couple of different publishers right now, so it’s on my mind. The book is the Tail of the Dragon, and it features a car that is a 700 HP car that runs off a diesel conversation to vegetable oil. Anyway, watching that Corvette reminded me of what the acceleration would look like in my car chase book.
Here’s a reading from me of the first couple of pages.
This morning I had to revise part of the package of questions one particular publisher sent me for some market analysis of my novel to figure out if it fits into their 2nd quarter lineup. It’s a long time consuming process, but I thought for the sake of fun that I’d put up the contents of my correspondence today in tribute to that speedy video.
Dear Gail,
It occurred to me after I sent back the questionnaire for publication of my Tail of the Dragon novel, that the answer to item 24, what is the most compelling aspect of your novel, was not fully explained until I thought about it over the last few weeks.
The answer I provided was decent enough, don’t get me wrong. I would like to add to what I provided.
The most compelling aspect of the novel is something equally grand, but philosophically less obvious. Its felt more than explained, which explains the lack of articulation on my part. Tail of the Dragon involves our heroes going on a destructive romance through the entire state of Tennessee and North Carolina that results in the deaths of many police and National Guardsman. Not on purpose or maliciousness, but as a by-product of the experience. It also results in hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage and captures for a time the entire nation. Such events traditionally end in the death of the characters, such as in Bonnie and Clyde, but not in Tail of the Dragon.
In my novel the heroes live happily ever after. In fact the lead character gets a contract to begin racing in NASCAR because of his sudden fame and marketability. What happens is the same public relation firms that are criticized heavily in the Tail of the Dragon are employed at the end to re-shape public opinion, and within days of the destructive incidence, the same people that suffered at the hands of the heroes, are now in line to get their autographs, and that is the true parody to the story, and is the most compelling aspect to the Tail of the Dragon.
I hope that you will send this forth to be included with the other information I provided in regard to publication of my Tail of the Dragon. And I hope that you and your family have a delightful Christmas and fantastic New Year.
I have to laugh when I watch programs initiated by Progressives, because they assume that a majority of the American people will just blindly follow, and will play by the rules that they conger up.Progressives believe that if they create a law then they have won.
Well, I happen to know a large part of our society that puts up with laws so long as they can live their lives. But if those laws become an inconvenience, then those laws will be broken.
And if there were ever a revolution needed to wrestle the government back under the control of the American people, these same people would be the first ones to the front line.
I know many of these people personally, and when my wife and I ride our motorcycle all over the country, each and every one of them on the road waves to me.
Who are these mysterious people? They are the American Biker.
Anyone that has been to a motorcycle event knows what I’m talking about. These may be people on the fringes of society, but they will be the first to say enough is enough.
How would aprogressivelike George Soros and his Open Society Institute deal with the American Biker? They aren’t like minorities that will bloc vote so they can get free stuff from the government. They aren’t like the middle-class that will just vote to avoid a conflict. They aren’t the rich that have a stake in the political machine.
They are among the freest people on the face of this planet because they are free of concern and don’t give a rats-ass what anybody thinks of them. Now that makes them repulsive to most members of society. But when the going gets tough, they toughen up.
I would love to see the Huffington Post spew their rhetoric at the folks that attend the Sturgis Rally. Or the EasyRider Rodeo at Chillicothie, Ohio.
Or Arizona Bike Week
Next time you see a biker, you don’t have to sit down and have lunch with them. But if you see them on the highway, give them a polite nod, because their very existence will keep you free. The progressive philosophy does not have a way to convert them into the collectivism needed for an Open Society or a one world government.
Sorry, George. You won’t be able to control these people.
Glenn did a tremendous amount of very good work that I think captures the spirit of Christmas better than anything done on TV for years. For that, I want to capture for prosperity the essence of that truly wonderful event.
To understand where people are going you need to see where they’ve been. Lucky for us, Progressives are arrogant in that they have left plenty of footprints in the snow storm of media coverage. So there is a lot for us to study. Now, there is a LOT here. So be ready to spend some time with this one. I’ve made the work easy for you to just sit back and watch.
Progressives are an extremely dangerous group for those of us that embrace traditional values. So let’s study the type of people who are behind Net Neutrality and progressive ideologies.If you don’t know what a progressive is click on this link. Take your time and listen to each of these, even though some are very long. I’ve watched them all and listened to the words carefully, and my determination is that these people are not masters of the universe, as they think they are, but are of the same mold as your typical car salesman. I’ve sold cars, credit cards, worked as a waiter, which is sales of food, so I know the tactics. These are just polished liars. I’ve met these types before and their words can’t hide their real intentions if you know what to look for. So study these clips for yourself.
Here is Al Franken.
Here are some real people from that represent the Hollywood left. Good people. I know some of them myself. But their idea of reading is not the same as mine, theirs, magazines, mine lots and lots of books. It is hard to listen to them without laughing to myself, because they believe they are right. In reality they’re just repeating what they were told by people like Soros, and are easily seduced by his salesmanship.
This is the war that is going on, progressives against traditionalist, not republicans and democrats.
The problem with this guy in the next clip is that the internet is already free. For the truth on this, click here.
Here is an attack on Bill O’Reilly, in an attempt to discredit Fox News because of its tremendous ratings advantage over other, less controlled networks.
And here is the master liar, Bill Clinton. We know he lied, just like all the people above. But watch him look at the camera and outright lie to you. Now pay attention to all the crap he says before he discusses Monica Lewinsky. Much of his tactics are borrowed from the Delphi Technique.
Here he is again months later. And again, study how he spins it. But still, compare the two videos, one where he said he had no relations, then this one where he finally admits it.
Remember the video above with Ted Kennedy. Remember when he was drunk and wrecked his car into a river where the woman with him died. Here’s his spin speech. See the pattern?
This is what Progressives want to do to the United States. They may not mean to, because many of them are as clueless as the writers guild people. But this is what will happen.
Stay informed and don’t let yourself be scammed and you’ll go a long way to saving your nation.
Ronald Reagan arrived in 1949 at the third plateau of his political journey. First had come his disillusionment with the general bureaucracy as an adjutant in the Army. Then there had been his revelation at Jimmy Roosevelt’s that Communists were enemies of the Constitution. And now, having seen what happened when the economic order was forcibly turned upside down—civil servants becoming civil masters—“I shed the last ideas I’d ever had about government ownership of anything.” Ronald Reagan as written by Edmund Morris from the book, “Dutch.”
In the week before Christmas, guess what the government brought just ahead of Santa’s sleigh. On Tuesday the FCC took a power move using NET NEUTRALITY to get its feet in the door of internet regulation. And on Wednesday the President signed the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Act,”
Last year Health Care was put on the table, the day before Christmas.
So why do you think these large, controversial government power grabs are introduced and signed during the busy season of Christmas?
Because THEY know the American public is too busy to pay attention.
Glenn Beck did a nice piece on just this sort of thing and explains how public opinion is shaped. Listen to that here:
Think about it, why is “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” important. Sex is something that even human beings in extremely healthy sexual relationships spend less than 5% of their time pursuing. So why would we build a policy completely on the bases of sexual preference.
I could care less of there are military men and women that are gay. It’s a complete non-issue, doesn’t matter in the least. But I don’t want to know about the sexual preferences of the people around me. It’s none of my business, and really occupies a small part of my thoughts.
It’s all about the grand distraction. It’s about keeping our minds on these little issues while the big issues get passed under thousands of pages of law that nobody has time to read, and the public is too distracted to comprehend.
So when we get to a holiday, pay attention to what gets initiated, and that’s how you can figure out the intentions of your government, that you completely fund with tax dollars, in fact, government is nothing without our funding.
So why are we funding it to turn on us like they do? We should cut it down dramatically and take away the wheels that move it along because if all government has to do is introduce bills that are intrusive, such as that of Net Neutrality, they are absolutely useless. The internet has done just fine without the government. Their interest in it is purely out of self-preservation.
Listen here while Bill Cunningham discusses with a congressman what states are losing house seats and why. You will find this discussion to be extremely revealing.
Ronald Reagan had begun his adult life as an idealistic young man flirting with joining the communist party, and the general liberal politics of Hollywood. As he lived life, he had moved through the phases mentioned in the opening paragraph, just as many do who live life and have enough intelligence to adjust their views over time to correspond with reality.
That’s how Reagan became one of the greatest presidents and world leaders in memory. He understood the journey of arriving at conservatism.
The policies introduced though in these under handed manners, such as Net Neutrality, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and Health Care are conceived by people who have not yet lived real lives. They are dramatically flawed people who view the world with warped glasses shaped by unlived lives, and they try to inflict their wishes while the rest of the world is distracted. Because if normal people were paying attention, they’d put a stop to the non-sense.
The following line is NOT a bit of dialogue from the new Disney film Tron.
“We must take action to protect consumers against price hikes and closed access to the Internet—and our proposed framework is designed to do just that: to guard against these risks while recognizing the legitimate needs and interests of broadband providers.” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski
What?
Who do these people think they are? That’s almost as audacious as trying to regulate the air. But that statement almost sounded like the uttering’s of the character Clu as he addresses a sea of program soldiers about to be unleashed upon society in the new Tron Legacy film.
This is clearly a power grab by the FCC to further attempt to justify their existence. It must be terribly frustrating for them to have a part of the media that they don’t have any control over, and this is an attempt by a government agency to get control.
If you don’t understand what NET NEUTRALITY is, listen to Bill Cunningham of 700 WLW discuss it here:
As far as the platform the FCC is using to justify this move, the prices on the internet have regulated themselves. Prices too high are beat out by companies that offer better rates. It’s pretty simple really.
I can remember when the internet was new, and charged by the hour, then service for the month for a flat fee. There were many different combinations of price packages that were created along the way, but ultimately cheaper prices in a competitive fashion created the internet we have today, where a single user can talk on their Smart Phone, while talking on a headset over their XBOX and answering their email on a laptop, all done on the internet. The bandwidth drop that the FCC is talking about is a complete fabrication.
It has regulated itself and is one of the only aspects of society that is free. The internet is the model for what society should mimic.
But the FCC under the disguise of “fairness” is attempting to get their little feet in the door, and once there they will unleash many, many, many more regulations, just as they have for television and radio. It won’t take long for everyone that wants a website to have apply for one to the FCC just as a radio broadcaster does. And if you violate their terms, you’ll lose your license.
You have to consider what we’re talking about here, and that is access to the internet. Since the internet is just a bunch of computers talking independently of each other, it might as well be air. It has no central location and does not stop at a nation’s border. Therefore, the only way a government can get control of the internet is to control the on-ramp to the World Wide Web. In this case the FCC is using “fairness” to begin a relationship with internet providers that will become a much more parental relationship down the road.
This power move is so audacious that they by-passed congress to do it. We can’t even blame the incompetence of our congressional politicians on this one. This is a raw power grab from a branch of government functioning without any checks or balances, and in the context of things, is very serious.
If you dear reader scanning over these words don’t find this whole NET NEUTRALITY issue to be EVIL, and doesn’t provoke you into an outrage of forced accountability of the FCC, you can count the days that you soon won’t be able to read these words, because I will, along with this entire Blog Site will be found in violation of the FCC regulations, and will be shut down. And you will have to get thoughtful comments from an “orthodox” source that the FCC has given an approved license to.
That’s what’s at stake. As always, government sells itself as having your best interest in mind. It’s all about fairness, according to them. But history says otherwise.
The internet has thrived without any government regulation. And now, those public employees that have their socialist tendencies toward securing their own wallets in a collective utopia desire to hang themselves like parasites from internet commerce.
As always, it’s about the money.
While I write this there is a court case against WLW for setting up a Christmas manger at their tower in Mason, Ohio. The reason for the law suit is because they have a FCC license and that the argument is any government entity should have a separation of church and state.
Also, the FCC is using AL Sharpten to crack down on conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, because the bottom line is people like Rush need to be shut down in order for government to expand, which is the goal of these types of regulators. They desire to secure employment for themselves from tax dollars. That’s all there is to it. The whole concept is incredibly short-sighted and selfish. But that’s what you usually find are the quality of people that desire to make a living off government work.
Once this line is crossed, these parasites of government regulation will embed themselves like a tick on a dog to suck the life-force of the creature.
Without Net-Neutrality, an entire industry, which young people are quite aware of has risen. These sad politicians wouldn’t know much about that industry because they are too busy pursuing lobby supplied prostitutes on K-street, or exotic dinners where they believe their discussion will pave the way for the nation.
No.
You can see the future by simply turning on a Nintendo Wii. The interface of either the Wii, the XBOX or the PlayStation 3, which is all internet based, provides at a glance Netflex, weather updates, news from around the world, and a portal to play Black Ops with a friend from half-way around the world in real time. That is the world of tomorrow, and it was created without governmental control.
Before I went with my family to see the new Tron film, I watched my kids swordfight with each other on the Wii, and many of those images came to me while I was watching that very interesting film. Tron is all about the world of cyberspace and the empires that can rise and fall within that world. And every new game created is a new experience for each and every human being on this planet to be a part of. But the overall theme of Tron was the perilous course of pursuing perfection.
Art becomes reality, most of the time. “Your focus will determine your reality,” a line from another great science fiction film proclaims, and it’s true. Too bad human beings don’t think through things and learn from their art, instead of repeating the same mistakes over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over…………………………………infinity.
We don’t remember what life was like before social security, or Medicare, or any number of government programs. But every one of us knows what the internet was like before the government decided to stick its nose in it. And it has thrived.
Don’t believe the lies. Encourage the new congress to escort the FCC to court for this gross imposition on our freedoms and liberty, and instruct them to stay out of our nation’s way.
Guess who is the main man behind this push………………..George Soros. Listen to Rush Limbaugh discuss it here.
We have arrived at the impasse, the point where life as we know it will change. The car is headed toward a massive financial cliff and the point of no return is near. We’re all packed into the car together, and the arrogant driver won’t heed the warnings that they are about to kill us all.
I’ve always been particularly good at directions. My reputation is that you could drop me anywhere on the face of this planet with a blindfold and I’d find my way home within a few days.
I once had a vicious argument with a former friend of mine over the movie, ALIVE, where a soccer team crashed in the Andes Mountains and resorted to cannibalism as a way to survive. It would have been far easier for those people to just send one or two people to walk down hill, and follow the water till they hit a village. There isn’t any place in this world where a village cannot be found within a three day walk, give or take the strength of the walker.
I had the same argument with another former friend over the film Castaway. Again, the main character knew he crashed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and was east of Hawaii. Grab a log, start swimming east. If a shark comes to eat you, kill it. Eat the shark and keep swimming. End of movie. You don’t spend years of your life stuck on an island!
I had similar argument with a family member over the Blair Witch Project when I proclaimed that there was no way a group of teenagers could get lost in the woods of Maryland. There are no virgin forests that large, where they could walk all day and arrive back in the same spot.
All those people that argued with me had in common a blind trust in the social structure, and what the characters of these films shared with them, and apparently the common audience is a similar sense of helplessness. I on the other hand have learned to trust nothing resembling structure, because it’s prone to fail at some point.
Back in September 2010 I went on WLW radio and proclaimed that the course the Lakota School System was on was unsustainable. I received a lot of criticism for proclaiming the obvious. And to my critics I felt sorry for them. These were the same sad people that saw films like ALIVE, CASTAWAY and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and could relate with the plight of the protagonists. They would be the type of people that would freeze under duress and not be able to make a decision.
Instead of heeding my warning, and the warnings of people like Darryl Parks, and Scott Sloan both of WLW radio, the established thinking insisted on maintaining the finance model they had achieved through several generations of threats and coercion only to find out that there isn’t any money left. And they willingly held the children they are teaching as hostages, cutting busing at the first sign of trouble even though busing is only 2% of their costs. It is the same sad game.
I was doing some reading the other night about the history of union activity in the United States and how many union bosses were proclaimed communists and code word “progressives,” much of this literature coming from sources prior to Glenn Beck, much of it from the late 70’s to early 80’s. I read about how the entertainment unions of 1946 attacked Warner Brothers and turned over cars in radical behavior that predated Saul Alinsky. Alinsky the author of Rules for Radicals is actually endorsed reading by the NEA. These simpletons have been at this behavior for a long time, entrenching themselves into our government as public workers unions, teachers being one of the largest sectors of that unification.
Forward thinking people like me and several others have been saying that it’s coming to an end. The inflation rate in the United States, a weaken US dollar, and our debt to other countries such as China have tied our hands behind our backs. We couldn’t even go to war with North Korea to help South Korea if we wanted to, because China would slap us silly for even thinking about it. They own us now!
And these derelict thinkers of public unions cleaving to the edges of reality like desperate survivors craving to eat their own people instead of truly doing something productive like reconsidering their entire life style and benefits packages, because they are causing massive economic failures due exclusively to their extremely high expectations, are digging in to their beliefs.
They are the kind of people that would stay on a remote island eating coconuts and developing a relationship with a soccer ball called “WILSON” instead of getting on a raft and to start swimming, again I’m thinking of CATAWAY here. Or ALIVE, or THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Every time I see a scene for CASTAWAY I gag! I can’t believe Robert Zemeckis directed that film. What happened to him!
But everyone has been warned well in advance. For Lakota, they have a 160 million dollar budget. The time for the LEA to approach the school board about saving the district came in November. Instead, they dug in their heels and chose to play the same old game of cutting busing.
For the rest of Ohio, Kasich budget cuts are going to be deep, and painful. And 2011 will be very difficult for people that make a living off the public dollar.
Turning over cars, or holding massive strikes and work stoppages won’t help you. All that will happen is that we’ll realize how little you really do, and you’ll prove that you’re over-paid. But radical behavior is what caused this issue. The public paid you too much to shut you up. But now they don’t have it to give you without drowning themselves, so they will now tell you no. That’s the way of things.
You should have listened when we told you to re-think your situations. Now, you will suffer much greater than you needed to.
You will suffer because you trust in the social structure that you helped to create, and it’s failing under its own weight.
Below is Darryl Parks from WLW discussing many of these issues. Remember this when we get into the hard months of April, May, and June of 2011. It’s not like the information wasn’t out there for people to act upon.
Below is the 60 Minutes interview that Darryl was referring to. I think these two interviews are loud warnings that should be heeded while there is still time.
The cynic in me knows that most people will just plant their heels where they stand and grip blindly onto what they know best, even if what they know and trust is wrong.
Those of you that have been “gaming” the system for many years whether you’re a union leader or member, a real-estate agent, a developer, an investment manager, or just a measly politician, or any innumerable guilty parties, you know who you are, somebody had to pay eventually. Our current crises are because of your collective irresponsible actions, and that’s why our county is now suffering. So now it’s time to get off your ass and help out. Stop crying and start swimming, because you’re holding back the rest of the country that wants to survive.
One of the most frustrating things in life is knowing your going in the wrong direction but being unable to tell the arrogant people driving the car that they are about to drive you over a cliff, especially when you’re better at directions than the driver. And now we are at the point of turning around and going back where we came from, or we go over the cliff. And the point of no return sign comes when we hit the metaphorical year of 2011.
If the car doesn’t stop soon and turn around, I’m going to jump out. I don’t need a car, or a GPS, or even a road to find my way back. So I’ll let the car go right on over the cliff with all the arrogant idiots that don’t listen in it, because I won’t let them make a decision that ruins my life too.
And I won’t sit in the desert at the edge of the cliff waiting for someone to come and rescue me. I’ll start walking back within seconds, not wasting a moment of time.
Truly one of the great writers of our time is Edmund Morris. I loved his work in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and Theodore Rex. So did Ronald Reagan, because he picked Morris to be his personal biographer during his presidency due exclusively to the work of the first Roosevelt book.
That book became after many years of writing, Dutch. I’ll get into more on that book later. But for now a caption from it I think is particularly revealing. It is in regard to a raw footage viewing of the film Lest We Forget, which was a done by Warner Brothers and filmed by Bill Graf. Ronald Reagan was slated to do the narration. Bill had managed to get some incredibly terrible footage of the tragedy that occurred at Bergan-Belsen.
The following description of Bergan-Belsen is from Wikipedia:
Bergen-Belsen (or Belsen) was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as the prisoner of war camp Stalag XI-C, in 1943 it became a concentration camp on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas[1]. Later still the name was applied to the displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most commonly associated with the concentration camp it became as conditions deteriorated between 1943-1945. During this time an estimated 50,000 Russian prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there,[2] up to 35,000 of them dying of typhus in the first few months of 1945.[3]
The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division.[4] 60,000 prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill,[3] and another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied.[4] The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:
“…Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life………”
Once Bill’s footage was gathered it was taken to Warner Brothers to be shown to a select group of people, Reagan one of them because he had to do the voice-over. The following quotation is from the great book, Dutch, page 215.
In the projection room Col. MacDuffie took the seat of honor and next to him were Bob Carson and Ronnie Reagan. I was up front with a few other enlisted men. Together Bill Graf’s footage took us on a journey out of reality, into hell.
We saw gaunt emaciated living skeletons, wondering around like lost souls in some kind of purgatory. Some of them stood naked and shit where they stood. We saw a skull complete with face sliced in half like a melon so the camp doctor could study the special conformation of the Jewish brain. If my grandfather from Krakow hadn’t emigrated here ninety years ago, that might have been mine. We saw stacks of cured and flattened human skins. The commandant’s wife had selected inmates with colorful tattoos to be killed and flayed for lamp shades. I guess these were the rejects. Somebody told Bill Graf that she liked skins with large nipples, because of the pleasing aureole effect when light shone through them. We saw—I don’t want to tell you what else we saw. It makes me want to puke, even now. When the lights went on, I felt chilled to the bone as if I were in an ice house. I feared I was going to freeze and smother at the same time. I had trouble swallowing and desperately needed water and warmth. I rushed out into the sunlight and looked around to make certain I was not dying in Germany but was here alive, in Culver City.
The others shuffled out of the projection room more slowly, like men who had seen ghosts. Reagan was strangely silent, buried in thought. It was if we had attended a mass funeral, and that in some way we were the ones that had died.
The film Lest We Forget, made a lasting impression on everyone that had to see it that day. As for Ronald Reagan, he made his sons Michael and Ron Reagan see the film when they turned fourteen as a kind of rite of passage into adulthood.
The reason I bring all this up and show these pictures is because the human race has forgotten. When the crises of the world are these immature, half-developed children protesting in London for free education, or children in the United States that won’t get up off the couch to get exercise, or the power grab by politicians to get Net Neutrality passed, none of them understand real pain, real suffering, and the blackness capable in the human heart corrupt with evil.
These modern politicians like their predecessors from 1945 did not understand how a woman could desire a prisoner to be skinned and turned into a lamp shade so the light coming off the nipples would cast an interesting light. Such thoughts are truly evil. And such evil cannot be legislated from existence. You cannot change what hides in the soul of a human being with more laws.
You have to address the real issue of personal responsibility, and not allow evil to hide behind legislation, and black-hearted politicians corrupt with their own desires for power. And such people populate the earth in abundance, outnumbering even the stars in the sky.
Never forget Bergen-Belsen. Because in the context of history, it wasn’t the only time terrible things like this have happened to human beings, and it won’t be the last. Never take it for granted that the earth has seen the end of evil, quite the opposite. Evil hides where people are afraid, or too lazy to look. And from those places the next terrible events to be inflicted upon the human race will attack.
Here is Ronald Reagan revisiting that terrible place many years after he had seen the footage that had impacted him as a much younger man.
Click below to see him address the crowd that was standing in 10 degree weather, about -5 with the wind chill. See the Blog spot of this video on The Blaze.com, one of the best news sites on the internet.
That address was after a 2 hour radio show, a book signing, his 5 PM show for Fox, then this little speech just prior to his big 8 pm show. In between all those events he took the time to meet many, many people and hear their stories. He made himself incredibly accessible for a personality of his stature.
The critic might listen to this clip and think that bringing 3 new jobs to a book store, and the prospect of a few more jobs here and there isn’t a big deal. They might also wonder why the crowd wasn’t noisier, because the audio sounds like a small crowd. I can say this much……it was quiet in the crowd because everyone was frozen. It was too painful to clap, and the roughly 1000 or so people in the middle of Main Street stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk and extended all the way back to the theater where Glenn’s tour bus was parked. For people with such criticisms I’ll say one thing to you……what are you doing to help out your fellow man? What are you doing to help the world around you….besides complaining? I have never in my entire life seen a personality like Glenn Beck do anything of this caliber before. Oprah comes to mind as the closest thing. But I know Wilmington, and I have known many people that have lived there for years, and to see the transition that Glenn Beck made on Mainstreet USA in downtown Wilmington, Ohio is nothing short of extraordinary.
But the event was not about Glenn Beck. It was about spirituality.
When I first arrived that morning I realized that something had happened in that town. The event was similar to a fair, where the street was blocked off from outside traffic. At the south end of one city block right next to the hotel, was the stage you saw Glenn speaking from. At the other end was a street vendor. In between those two things was a book store, a church, a comic book store, several craft stores, and the majestic Murphy Theater with the “Broke” tour bus parked in front. And the street was full of some of the most bright eyed and thoughtful people all gathered in one place that I can ever recall experiencing. The only way for me to describe it is that it reminded me of the good feelings you get from people when you attend church.
When people go to church, they are always on their best behavior. They tend to be kind to each other as though the eyes of God will take notice and grant them entry into heaven. So people drop their discriminations and anxious feelings at the door of a church and show a side of themselves they don’t show during the rest of the week. I have noticed that much of that image disappears quickly when church is over and people get back inside their cars.
That day in Wilmington, the cold and the nature of the event sifted through the various personalities of society, and all that were present in that street were easy to identify. If society stopped on that day, and the government stopped issuing social security checks, or stopped building highways or any of the services we’ve all grown used to, it would be those people who would be the leadership that would save society and help it rebuild.
Not that everyone was running around with crosses and praying to Jesus. In fact, the only time I saw such references were in actual churches. But, the people behaved as though they were in church, their manner was not instigated out of fear from the gaze of God because they were generally good people to begin with.
I believe more people made eye contact with me on that day in Wilmington than in months of traveling in heavier crowds. It’s because the concentration of people at that event shared in common a love of life, and a lack of fear from what others may see in them.
I also spoke to more people than I have in quite some time. Normally, I dress in a way that people find unapproachable. I normally wear Gargoyle Sunglasses, with an outback cowboy hat just about anywhere I go in public if I’m not traveling by motorcycle. It’s an old habit. Since I’m a thinker, it keeps people from wanting to interrupt my thoughts with useless chatter. That might sound cruel, but I’m being honest. I don’t enjoy being interrupted when I’m thinking, which is all the time. But, I do enjoy the company of people who are genuinely good of heart, and are functioning not from fear but out of sincerity. With that said, many, many people made sure to speak to me and my wife. They didn’t go out of their way to do it, and weren’t doing it in a fake gesture of hopeful redemption. They did it because they wanted to.
I’ve spent entire days at amusement parks like Kings Island, Ceder Point, Universal Studios, and all the Disney Parks, in close proximity to thousands and thousands of people, and I spoke to more people in Wilmington than at all those playgrounds of summertime pleasure. Ironically, the only place I’ve had such an experience of anywhere I’ve traveled was in Key West.
And that brings this simple banter of letters to the ultimate conclusion. People did not go to Wilmington to see Glenn Beck. Glenn was simply serving as a focal point of positive energy that thousands of people were willing to brave the cold and isolation of that small Ohio town for a chance to experience something authentic.
I could see by the people shopping and carrying bags of crafts and other homemade mementos that many had found that authenticity in stores ran by the good people of Wilmington. Others had found authenticity in the Churches, specifically places like the Sugertree Ministries, and the by now well-known chalk paintings. But my wife and I found authenticity in a little Mediterranean restaurant called simply enough, The Mediterranean Restaurant and Café.
It was a time of day where the sun had dropped below the highest buildings and the air instantly become colder. My wife and I were hungry and frozen solid. I saw a Kentucky Fried Chicken at the north end of town so we headed away from the crowded street packed with people trying to get their books signed by Glenn Beck at the bookstore. We passed the inauspicious Mediterranean place naively when my wife said through chattering teeth, “why don’t we eat here? We can go to KFC anytime.” I looked down the slight hill at the KFC sign seeking familiarity and I realized she was right. We came to Wilmington to have a bit of adventure on that Wednesday afternoon in the cold, and going to KFC would be short changing our experience.
So we stepped into the entrance, which was like a strange world because the first thing we saw was an empty hallway with a door on the immediate left. A sign on the wall said, “Welcome Glenn Beck.” I opened that next door and an enchanted world of warmth embraced us. There was also a huge line that extended all the way down a pathway that led to the kitchen. There was a fire in the center of the room in an open pit fireplace, but the line coaxed me to turn back into the cold and head to KFC. That’s when a few of those people I mentioned before spoke to me. “The line isn’t so bad. We’ve only been in line for about 20 minutes,” said a kind woman in her upper 50s. Then a man about four feet down the line addressed me. “I love the hat! That’s a great look you have there. Hey, the line moves fast. Don’t worry about it.”
My wife and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and decided to stay. We proceeded to head to the back of the line. The place was packed but nobody was angry or in a hurry. The people filling the dining room all had lights on in their eyes. I didn’t feel anxious to stand in a line. I typically hate lines, but in that room, with the whole day ahead of my wife and me, the warmth of the room and the good nature of the people, the wait in that line was actually part of the fun.
From the line we could look out into the large dining room equipped with ceiling fans hanging from the high ceiling. The décor was standard Mediterranean, the colors were earthy and on the light side for the most part.
Finally, after our toes had found their feeling again, the hostess greeted us and took us to a table that would normally seat four. I found it odd that because there was only my wife and I, the hostess didn’t wait for a table equipped for just two, given the length of the line behind us. She seemed unconcerned, and I wasn’t about to argue, because the aroma in the room was enchanting to our already hungry stomachs.
I looked up and hanging on the wall above our heads was a sign that said, “BELIEVE.”
For the next hour my wife and I both ordered gyros, which we’ve had from various places all over the United States. And what the waitress put before us was a creation of some remote artisan, not just a cook in the kitchen. The gyro and fries were truly exquisite and I found myself licking my finger tips just to recover the memory of the taste long after the gyro was gone.
We spent the rest of the day after that meal visiting sites all over town. We saw a lot of wonderful energy at the various events. The day came to a sad end when Glenn Beck came out on that stage like the host of a fine party and thanked everyone for coming. While outsiders of this experience would mistake that Glenn Beck was the focus of the event, all that were there know otherwise. Glenn simply held a party in the town and invited America to come and be a part of it. Once there, each person found something special unique to themselves.
And Glenn Beck knew it all along. That is the genius of a man that thinks outside the box. Like any truly good host, Glenn set the mood, and the rest was done by the people in attendance.
So was it an audacious statement that Glenn made, that Wilmington could be way out ahead of the rest of the nation in spirit, and that it could serve as an example to the nation of what our country should look like? I say no, because I found a unique treasure in the form of food in a quant Mediterranean restaurant on Mainstreet that overlooks the courthouse. The treasures of this world are not along paved roads and easy to reach places. All those treasures have been claimed in their ease by the rest of society, and the corrupt among us guard them like dragons sleeping on piles of gold. New treasure must be found away from the Washington DC’s and New York Cities. They won’t be found in the streets of LA, or in Beijing, China.
New treasures are found in places like Wilmington, Ohio and the thousands of small towns all across this country, otherwise known as the fly-over states. Glenn Beck was right…….again. All of us that went to that frozen sacred place and soaked up the new found treasures of that town can now utter ourselves to deeply comforting sleep each night with the secret knowledge that “We are Wilmington!”
The next time I want a gyro, my wife and I will drive out of our way to go back to The Mediterranean Restaurant and Café in Wilmington, Ohio, and we’ll enjoy our new found treasure and skip the KFC.
Something Doc Thompson said the other day sent me down a dark abyss of contorted anger. He mentioned Roxanne Qualls, who was at a budget meeting he attended.
Roxanne used to be Mayor of Cincinnati, and I have some experience with politicians in that grand city hall. It was in that building that I learned at the early age of 25 the principles of politics. (Pictures referenced from Wikipedia. CLICK HERE to learn more.)
It was refreshing to hear Doc talk about his experiences with a city council member that gave him the cold shoulder at that budget meeting, when in fact that very same day, Doc had that council member on 700 WLW to explain how important his integrity was to him.
Doc’s comments were classic, and refreshing, because it confirmed in me that I am not alone in my experiences with politicians, and that at least one other person in the world had virtually the same opinion of them.
I sat in front of Roxanne Qualls in her large, opulent office while her staff worked outside the door and watched Qualls giggle smugly at my suggestion that she support lower taxes. Her look made me feel as if she were telling me, “you poor naive young man, you don’t understand that we’ve already made all the decisions. We only have the public meetings to facilitate the public into believing they play a part of the process.”
I learned much later that the technique used by virtually every politician is the Delphi Technique, or some variation of it. I received the same look when I explained to Todd Portune in his office how my idea for a non-alcoholic night club would benefit the pleas of desperate moms pleading with Cincinnati City Council to do something about the under aged drinking that was going on at the University of Cincinnati campus, specifically a nightclub called COOTERS.
A few weeks after my meeting with Mr. Portune the Corryville Business Association put pressure on the owner of the building I was trying to lease, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how they found out what I was up to. I knew they would be upset with my non-alcoholic nightclub idea, because back then, bars had to close at 2 AM. If I operated an establishment without a liquor license that would put a lot of pressure on the surrounding bar establishments that would lose some of their under-aged business to me, because kids under 21 don’t like the hassle of possibly being turned away, or getting caught with a fake ID, and I’d be able to stay open all night.
But my business idea died as quick as it rose. I found out that Mr. Portune at the time, a council member was also the attorney for that nightclub. So it had to be him that tipped off the nightclub to what I was doing.
It was a hard lesson of the nature of politics. It struck me hard with disillusionment and anger at the process that crushed fresh ideas before they ever had a chance to move forward. You find in every council meeting across the nation, every trustee meeting, every school board, every state congress and senate, and each federal congress and senate is that same blank elitism that Doc described.
I think it starts with a love of titles, and people who love them tend to crave positions of power, and the perception of politics is that being elected is a reception of power. It’s a puerile idea which appears to be inherited through the collective learning process gained over the centuries of human development.
The United States Constitution was designed to alleviate the need for much of this political trouble. But, unfortunately the weaker human minds, the ones that crave power, that crave material things, that crave the adoration of the public, they are the ones that run for office, and they are the ones that want to sit behind a desk and decide the fate of many. In their hearts, they truly want royalty and the false respect that comes with it.
As I’ve said, I’ve sat across the table from many of these types of people, and they all have the same glass-eyed blankness that seems more appropriate of a jack-o-lantern two weeks after Halloween.
I shouldn’t say all. I’ve met a few here and there that had a light on behind their eyes. Rob Portman is one; I had several long talks with him in the early 90’s back when a thing called the Reform Party was making news in the papers. I also met a few of Ross Perot’s children and they were all bright-eyed and unspoiled. I could see the light on there as well. But those people are the very rare exceptions. Most of the rest are ready to make a deal, for there is no ethical avenue to guide their movements. After a public meeting the voting public just looks to each other for a moment of disbelief as if to wonder what just happened, because the deals had already been made well before anyone showed up for the meeting.
I once attended a meeting the Cincinnati City Council had with the public to figure out what to put on the river. They wanted ideas, this was sometime around 1993. I watched my friend and several other citizens give very impassioned speeches about how to develop the riverfront. The council members would scribble stuff down and nod their heads, and thank the speakers for their input.
After the meeting, the common people would go up and try to speak to the council members, but the council people were only interested in speaking to the developers, or in other words, the people who may contribute future campaign funds. My friend had made by far the best speech of anyone, and not a single council member wanted to shake his hand or would even look him in the eye. They shunned him because his input wasn’t really wanted. The whole process was just a show for the papers, to report to the public that the council people were listening to the people speak. The real deals were going on elsewhere.
Politicians are dangerous because most of what they crave is false, honor through title, respect by name plates, and wealth through side deals. In too many cases, they are hungry attorneys who use political contacts to bring business to their practice. They aren’t interested in being public servants.
That’s why they cower behind their little desks and office doors and cling to the frail appendages of reality they shape through public opinion. Because if you get too close to them, and gaze upon the soul that drives the body, you’ll find the seat vacant. Instead you’ll find the wires and gears responding to a remote control, and the real pilot no place to be found.
