Fantasy is the bridge that meets the world of reason with the perception of what one suspects is there, but does not yet have the facts, or the methods of obtaining those facts. Under such conditions we can never say with any certainty what something is. But in our rational minds we can spot truth even if it is laced in the play of fiction. It is because of these elements that I am fascinated by the production of The Hobbit directed by Peter Jackson where he takes viewers on a journey through the third video blog directly from the set. You can view my previous comments about The Hobbit by clicking on this link. You can see the next video below where Peter Jackson has traveled to London to film Christopher Lee in his pick-up shots at the legendary James Bond stages in England. There is so much to like about this clip as it is a wonderful trip into the history of film that crosses many genres to explore the significance of the dwarves in full make-up.
My enjoyment of fantasy films and books is not to say that I openly embrace the theories of mysticism, the practice of arbitrarily placing faith in ideals that do not have any roots in reality. To me, I see the theories of most modern economists, particularly those of the Federal Reserve to be more mystical than the actions of the dwarves and wizards of The Hobbit. I see blind faith into any idea to be mysticism, and that includes religions and even the political trends of global warming. Anything that is believed with an abandonment of fact is considered a form of mysticism. That includes the arbitrary statement that education funding must increase to improve education, because such statements have nothing to do with reality. The reality is that increases in funding do not improve education. Such statements are made because the participants who say those things want to believe it, not because things are actually that way in actuality.
To say that the earth is warming and therefore carbon credits must be sold to save it from mankind’s degradation is to place the same faith in fantasy and mysticism that one places in a religious figure, which is why such political measures are presented in the same fashion as a religion. People are asked to arbitrarily subscribe to a theory based on completely agnostic comprehension. They are asked to believe that the earth is in danger because “experts” told them this was the case. To me, these thought patterns are pure mysticism.
So the magic in a film like The Hobbit wielded by a wizard like Gandalf the Gray is not a lesser concept than anything proposed by a modern mystic such as those behind the global warming movement. All politicians who propose that they can heal the sick, bring riches to the poor and thus change the world for the better are simply making arbitrary claims rooted in pure mysticism. I find the literature of J.R.R. Tolkien to be more valid than those mystics who run for president or state governments. Because I have learned that I can’t believe anything that the average politician says, or the media that reports it. But I can trust in the sincerity of the characters in The Hobbit. There is a truth in their actions that point to observations not yet made with human eyes.
We are all children of the universe and we come into its existence learning greater and greater truths as each year meets us. We might not understand at age one the complexities we can fathom by age 19, or age 50. As time passes we develop the cognition to piece together observations based on reality. So with age we can be said to gain much wisdom. This is why the mystics seek to discredit the old and give power to the young, because the young are not yet developed and do not understand the tricks of the mystics. But the wise do. And in The Hobbit, it is Gandalf, the wise old wizard who embodies more truth even in his magic than most who live and breathe among us in the real world.
When I see these clips from The Hobbit I see an honesty present that is more real than a whole day of watching CSPAN on cable TV. There is less fiction in a fantasy set in an unspecified time in a fictional place called Middle-Earth, than in the suit and ties of modern politics. And that is why dear reader, I am spending so much time on this subject of the upcoming film called The Hobbit.
The mystics of our time point at fantasy stories like Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars and declare them to be harmless fantasies intended for light entertainment and escape. But the escape is not one from reality, but toward it. In these fantasies I do not seek them so diligently to leave the world of reality to immerse myself into their imaginative splendor. I seek these epic stories because there is a truth present in the actions of the characters that hint at knowledge not yet discovered through the mechanisms of deductive thinking. It is through the imagination that we see what our senses have not yet matured enough to see and the mystics of our time would have us cast away logic and drink ourselves drunk so that we are enchanted by their crooked tongues.
And even as one of the greatest film directors on the planet, Peter Jackson cannot help but be enchanted not by the film he is currently making, but by the memory of the great films of James Bond at the historic sound stage in England. Because as all story tellers and lovers of those epics know, there is truth in myth that shows the error of those actual mystics who wish to defy logic with every breath they take and word they squeeze through their teeth. It doesn’t matter if the fantasy is from The Hobbit and its magic wielding leader the wizard Gandalf, or the suave charisma of James Bond, there is truth in those fantastic movie characters that point to reality and those of us who are hungry for it.
I’m not really interested if what I’ve said here is too obscure for most to understand. I’m sure a handful of you will know what I’m saying, and a majority will be thoroughly baffled by my statements. That doesn’t matter because I’m writing to those select few who have developed the ability through their love of fictional fantasy to grasp complicated concepts. It is in those types of people who the world is not a mystery and the actions of the mystics are obvious. Because before one can see the big picture, they have to be able to grasp it in their mind and it is in fantasy that the tool for developing this ability manifests.
The world is full of false prophets and mystics at virtually every step in the human experience. Yet the answers are usually in all the places they tell you not to look. And they say not to look at fantasy films like The Hobbit for any grasp of reality. But in my experience, if it’s reality you seek, you will find it in those places of the imagination built with the scaffolding of observed logic.
Putin loves power so much that he was the subject of Glenn Beck’s GBTV episode on this very topic. For whatever reason, most Americans find it difficult to grasp that much of the fantasy of spy films like James Bond are actually watered down revelations of the real mentality occurring in the actual world. I have provided many instances at this site about how the KGB has infiltrated American culture during the Cold War and had the intent to manipulate our culture to destroy it from within. This is a fact! It is not fiction. You can see one of those articles here:
You can see the video from GBTV below where Glenn Beck breaks down the most recent manipulations by the supposedly dismantled KGB, who now has a world leader from their ranks pulling the strings. This should concern every person on planet earth.
Spies like Putin know that most people are so addicted to their static patterns that they often will refuse to see the truth even if it is placed right in front of their faces. So for the sake of education I would encourage you dear reader to Google any term I use here along with the key word “OVERMANWARRIOR” and you will see the hundreds and hundreds of articles that I have written on that term. Pick any term, and you will see that I have written on it. Serious, try it out. So when you want to understand what static patterns are, know that they are what govern your life, and if you want to change those patterns then you must introduce a dynamic pattern and accept the results. If you reject the results, then your behavior will not change the evidence provided by the dynamic. Closing one’s eyes does not make the problem go away just like pulling the covers over your face may make one feel safer, but the danger outside of the covers is still very real. There is a real science to this stuff, and KGB agents, and the CIA are VERY aware of these methods. And they use them against each other, against other governments, and against the entire human race in various applications. This is not news.
Most people however do not want to accept that many of the influences in their lives currently may be the result of war between two counter spy networks who have become so good at their jobs that they are on a quest for power themselves. I saw a young girl the other day who was working on computers and she was covered in “PEACE” symbol jewelry. It’s very fashionable for young people to buy clothing and jewelry displaying the “peace symbol” so I asked her if she knew the origin. She of course didn’t, and when I explained to her that she was a victim of Cold War politics and that the peace symbol came from the KGB implanting it in American culture in the 60’s to turn the youth against the adults so that the will to fight against Russia was diminished greatly averting the necessity for direct conflict with communist Russia. Russia knew they could not beat America in a production war because communism cannot beat capitalism. So Russia sought out to turn American youth against the adult establishment in an effort to destroy America from within. And now we have a president like Obama which is a result of these youth created by the KGB in the 60’s who openly embrace communism. The KGB is as much behind the creation of The Great Society as LBJ was, because President Johnston and Kennedy before his assassination were reacting to the communist push by the KGB infecting Cuba at the time and felt they needed to respond to the millions of protesting youth who had the power to vote.
As angry as I get at President Johnston for bringing America The Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal it is communism pushed upon American society by the KGB forced onto those presidents into making mistakes against our own Constitution. It was an act of war during the Cold War and freedom was the casualty, not actual human bodies. It was a casualty predicated by the KGB.
I told this story to the young girl who was no older than my youngest daughter. And she looked at me like her head was about to explode. I just smiled at the kid and let her off the hook with conversation about the computer she was fixing. Her reaction was at least more honest than that of most contemporary adults who pretend to understand what I say, then belittle the information behind my back as though by doing so it might change the facts of the matter. Most people are so intent to keep their beliefs intact that they ignore the evidence of new information which tends to shatter the illusion they wish to believe about the world around them.
Putin in Russia is doing almost exactly what Obama is doing here in the United States and considering that it is well-known that Putin is a former KGB agent, a particularly dangerous one, who has been running Russia for a number of years both in front of public image and behind the scenes, it should bring every American great concern that Obama who hasn’t been anything in his life before becoming a Federal Senator from Illinois who was propped up to become president by powers many people don’t wish to comprehend, are so similar in their behavior.
The details of what Obama has done are so numerous that I have enough material here to fill an entire book. Just go back through some of my previous articles to learn how. Obama shares with Putin a love for power, a manipulation of the people with his public image, and a desire for world domination that is alarmingly similar and that should tell Americans everything they need to know about the political world around them. But they chose to ignore the information and this is by design. I have even went to the trouble to teach your dear reader how this is done to you, and you have read the information, yet are powerless to alter your behavior to incorporate that knowledge into your daily life. For a review look at this article of how you are manipulated by virtually every entity in your life, family, friends, local politicians, national politicians, public relations experts, and spies from far away lands. There is a lot of competition for your attention and often you are so tired you don’t even know why because so many images come at you on a daily basis that it’s just too much to comprehend. So you turn on American Idol to relax and let them entertain you while your brain recovers from forces you don’t understand.
Like the girl I tried to explain the peace symbol history to, most people point at the things I say and want to call it fantasy. However, they are using an inaccurate definition of fantasy. A fantasy is an assertion that is not based on any fact and the facts of a case like the spy manipulation of America by the KGB show that our culture has been transformed by Russia into a country that does not pose a threat to them. The fantasy is to declare that the opposite is true, that all these world powers want world peace and is a world that holds hands and sings songs around a campfire. That is the fantasy.
If Obama is not stopped in 2012 during our own presidential elections you can look forward to taking another step into the direction of Russia which has been their plan all along. And if you want to have an understanding of how bad Russia is compared to the United States take a hard look at the reality of the people between the two cultures. If you go online, you will see without any difficulty thousands of attractive Russian women who are willing to marry an American man just to get into the United States to live. You do not see thousands of American women putting ads in the paper to marry a Russian man to move to Moscow. The market just isn’t there. That fact alone should tell you dear reader everything you need to know about the situation. The law of supply and demand will tell you what the media, controlled by people like Putin, will not tell you. And that is how you know you’ve been scammed, even when the conditions shown to you by the spy masters of the world indicate otherwise.
This is thanks to you and your other money-grubbing cohorts. We’ll be moving to Mason. Enjoy losing more property values.
Norma Stits February 25, 2012 at 4:35 AM
That poor woman actually believes what she says. She believes that I am greedy for not wanting to pay more money than we already do in taxes. She also believes that there is no end what current residents of the Lakota School District will pay in higher taxes, therefore ruining their property values forever and making the taxes so high that nobody will ever be able to afford to buy a home in the Lakota District because of the taxes. People like Norma actually believe there is no end. She would pay forever whatever was asked by those extortionists of public education.
Well, sorry to break it to you Norma, but you are wrong. Taxes don’t just affect you in your tiny little world of your tiny little home around your tiny little family. It affects commercial interest too, and commercial business has been dried up for 5 years because of the current tax rates which need to come down, not go up. You know who those “money grubbers” are? Those evil people who build and run the shopping complexes and restaurants you visit. In Norma’s world those people should give away their services for free. They should not seek to make a profit. They should donate any earnings they make to the “youth,” so that people like Norma can have a free education for her little children whom she’s too lazy or insecure to teach herself.
Well, I have two grown daughters who are quite attractive, and because of that I’ve met many young people, particularly males that have come out of the Lakota, Fairfield and Mason school system, and I’ve seen what the schools are teaching first-hand, and I see how stupid many of these kids are when basic things are explained to them. They are future products of stupid parents like Norma, ill prepared to even pay rent, hold a job, let alone—vote. I’ve met kids who show up and attempt to impress me with big words only to see they can’t hardly pull their pants up because they are trying to copy the black culture of their favorite R&B artists, (and I say R&B in an attempt to be respectful and not come loose on a diatribe about the degradation of music). I’ve seen kids who think a fun night out is to get plastered in drunkenness and that somehow I’d be happy to let my daughter wake up passed out in a room full of guys stoned on marijuana. My kids wouldn’t do such a thing, but the boys look at me strangely and roll their eyes when they think I can’t see while I speak about why those kinds of activities are wrong. They really don’t understand! These boys don’t understand either why I expect them to have jobs instead of playing X-Box when there are bills to be paid. Or why I’d be upset that they’d rather take a welfare check so they’d have more “time for themselves.” I’m not talking about poor kids in the ghetto; I’m talking about nice middle-class kids from Lakota and Fairfield.
Through my daughters I’ve had to learn the terrible truth that there are thousands of girls who are on Care Source, which is a form of Medicare that bails out these kids when they have sex, and get pregnant because their schools and stupid parents like Norma tell them it’s alright, that there are no consequences to actions. A boy can get a girl pregnant and it’s alright, the government is there to bail them out. The boys often claim that the act of sex just happened, that it was beyond their control. Yet it was. A boy had to stick a penis into a girl and inject semen into her like some parasitic animal in the wild, without thought or care. Without any thought about the next step, because the schools have taught these kids that the government will pick up the slack and pay for everything. Thousands upon thousands of kids think this way. Twenty years ago it would have been shameful to see a girl in her freshman years pregnant in school. It was scandalous. Today the teacher holds a baby shower for the girl in her classroom. The kids and their welfare mentality are victims of their environment and parents like Norma.
Norma may put her kids on Blue Cross and Blue Shield, but her behavior supports a system that endorses everything and more mentioned above. Ladies and gentlemen—and Norma, we are in serious trouble—culturally. Our youth is broken in ways that no amount of money can fix. They are truly victims of this age of broken homes, divorce, and intrusive public education establishments.
People who tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about are only mad at me because they don’t want to hear what I’m saying. They want to blindly adopt destructive policies of living that will eventually destroy them with the same intensity that a moth attempts to fly into a flame—because they like the bright light. People like Norma are in love with the idea of socialism and they do not want to see the results of their error. Well, I’ve seen it. I’ve been up close to it through my kids because I stayed involved with them even now that they are grown up, because there’s always something to learn. And I have many friends in the business community who are struggling. It’s not for Norma to say that these friends of mine should not be able to buy another restaurant, or a new second home, because people who build and make things are who move the world, and they don’t owe people like Norma an explanation as to their actions. The money they earn by creating things that people want is not Norma’s money, it’s not the money of public education, and it’s not the GOD DAMN governments! It’s their money!!!!! They earned it!!! Money made and generated is not for some group collective.
There are many problems that must be fixed in this year of 2012 that took nearly a century to arrive at. And those problems were perpetuated by people like Norma who voted in politicians like FDR. These same voters also fantasized about sleeping with JFK, and LBJ and like a porn actress swallowing semen from a stranger, these voters accept the policies of THE NEW DEAL and THE GREAT SOCEITY.
I don’t want The New Deal or The Great Society of which this Medicaid culture of welfare has sprung up and created a whole generation of weak-minded youth who have reckless sex and expect society to pay for it. Doesn’t Orgy-porgy from A Brave New World ring a bell with people like Norma, or let me guess—they haven’t read that book!
“Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at 0ne with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release.”
That’s a ritual from that classic book where everyone gets in a circle and has group sex so that all sense of possession and individually is erased from their consciousness. “Kiss the girls, and make them One.” Notice the capital letter on the word “One.” That is because the word ONE is an indicator of an entity onto itself. This is the goal of The Great Society created by the womanizing presidents of the sixties. This is the aim of public education; this is the aim of government insurance, Medicare and Social Security! And these are the pathetic creatures that my kids have to associate with as friends in their peer groups, these children of this distorted government experiment. To see what this Great Society is taking us to just read A Brave New World. That book seemed like a fantasy when I read it over twenty years ago. Now it’s a pending reality.
So call me names you orgy-porgy well wishers, you welfare recipients, you apologists for The Great Society. Your opinions mean nothing to me because your path is clear for anyone with eyes to see. Your story ends only one way, in cultural demise leading to complete social destruction. The end game is as easy to add up 2+2+2+2. One thing leads to the next, which leads to the next in a very predictable manner. Only people who add all that up and give any number beyond the answer of “8” are the ones being fooled. And people like Norma will add up all these conditions and declare that the answer is whatever she decides. If she wants the answer to be 10 then it’s ten. If she wants it to be 20, then it’s twenty. She will say these things because she is not giving opinions based on reality. She is ruled by emotion, the orgy-porgy of our day. The collective orgy of thought and action where there are no consequences with the giant safety net cast by mother government.
So with that, have fun moving to Mason, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. And until your house sells, and since you obviously lack culture, here’s the movie version of that book since you obviously can’t read. Maybe you’ll learn something.
For those who do know better than orgy-porgy Norma, please pass this to a friend to share the classic work of The Brave New World. If they won’t read the book, maybe they’ll watch the movie.
I woke up on the morning of February 24, 2012 with the note you can see below. It’s from a parent in the Pickerington School district who has been watching the actions of Superintendent Mantia here in Southern Ohio. This parent is uniquely positioned to give a statement about Mantia because Pickerington is the school district that the current Lakota superintendent came from in August of 2011. It read as follows:
I’m a parent of students from Pickerington and let me tell you that Dr. Mantia will ruin your schools. She removed almost all music, art, phys ed teachers and librarians. Our libraries used the most current media material and the students loved library where they learned to use podcasts, they wrote book reviews and they had the greatest book clubs. The students loved to read because of the fantastic librarians. They are gone. She has combined music, art and gym together. They currently meet as a group at a school every 6-9 weeks. That means that they only receive physical activity for one week and it isn’t intense activity either.
She took a pay raise one month before she left after resigning. Please watch her and her agenda for the sake of your students, teachers, support staff and your wallet.
As my readers here know, I declared the Lakota School District officially dead after the February 13, 2012 meeting, so I saw no point in going to this latest meeting.It was as predicted more of the same strategy of protecting the wages of the school employees with the smoke and mirrors of fancy terminology that essentially meant nothing. The concession by the Lakota School System to retreat backward as a district with these three public school board meetings instead of restructuring their very expensive labor contracts is deplorable. With this third budget cutting school board meeting, the No Lakota Levy has officially begun the campaign to end this fourth levy attempt which appears to already be underway on behalf of the school board decisions. No Lakota Levy will soon announce a major initiative in reaction to these decisions by the school board. I am done with Lakota as a governing body. I officially cast my vote of no confidence in their direction.
Lakota under the leadership of Superintendent Mantia from Pickerington elected to eliminate 36 more jobs centering on art, music, and physical education, which is consistent with the behavior indicated above by the note from the parent. This is in addition to the 69 positions cut from last weeks meeting that caused me to regulate my opinion as a nail in the coffin to the Lakota educational body as a whole.
During the meeting last night several people were texting me and asking what I was doing, and why I wasn’t there. I told them that I was watching the DVR backups of Ghost Hunters, and my TV show was more important. I said that I thought the ghosts walking around on that TV show were more real than the ghosts walking around at the Lakota School Board meeting on stage, because both were just as effective as managers. In the TV show the ghosts make noise by banging on doors and sending out cryptic EVP recordings. The Lakota School Board does the same; they make a lot of noise with a stupid program named S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) while at the same time cutting those programs with staffing and as Jeff Kursman said at the meeting,
“These aren’t efficiencies, these are reductions. Efficiencies will include things that hopefully we’ll hear about in the next week or two. Things like outsourcing of technology when it comes with dealing with the central office, cutting back on central office administrators…centralizing purchasing or negotiating a better rate in health care. What I see you talking about here today is a degradation of liberal arts education.”
All that was occurring at the school board meeting was a bunch of ghosts making noise to a captive audience. Just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters the ghosts are powerless to do anything in real life because they are in fact dead. The school board is powerless to do anything but scare people, just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters. So I see no difference between the school board meeting and an episode of Ghost Hunters. With that in mind I stayed home in the comfort of my home and watched the ghosts on TV rather than waste my time at the school board meeting.
I’m happy to see the comments from Jeff Kursman and others who are now beginning to question the merit of this entire money scheming operation known as the Lakota School System. The key to meeting a balanced budget is to reduce the cost of the services, and that is to drive down the labor costs. Cutting a few teachers here and there is only a band-aid to the situation. Only by making across the board cuts to the 80% of the $160 million dollar budget can the Lakota School System meet its budget supplied generously by the community. Anything less than a contract restructuring with the Lakota labor force will be sufficient.
Karen Mantia has brought with her to the Lakota School System a strategy used at her last job of Pickerington to diminish the quality of the district in order to force parents to pass a tax increase to sustain their inflated union contracts. And to execute that objective she and the school board are willing to destroy everything that is good about Lakota to protect the wages of their union allies. That’s what these ghosts of Lakota were doing, and why I’m not interested in anything they have to say any longer. Instead, the No Lakota Levy will be shifting gears to approach our tax fighting methods without the assumption that Lakota will see the light and come to their senses by listing to our arguments. Now, we must assume that they are not even relevant, and we must find ways to remove their impact from destroying our community in an extortion ring that is evidently well underway. If this fight for more taxes were for the kids truly, then these ghosts of Lakota would not use the kids by stealing from the community’s $160 million dollar budget and take away programs while protecting employee incomes at the expense of the children.
So for now on, I will treat these employees like the ghosts they are, as irrelevant to the land of the living, and powerless to us all if they are robbed of their ability to invoke fear. Because as far as usefulness, they are lacking completely in any ability required in the real world, and are truly manifestations from the land of the dead.
I have heard the criticisms coming from the pro levy people already who proclaim that it is easy to cast dispersions from the sideline as opposed to jumping in and helping to solve problems. These critics of course are attempting to highlight their volunteerism, or paid resolve as though they were helping to solve problems as opposed to someone like me who writes about what a bunch of fools they are. “Oh Rich Hoffman, you criticize but do not offer to help. Instead you throw in firebombs when you should move into an elected position or serve on a finance committee.”
This is a blanket statement that could cover any ground from the president of the United States, to my local school board of Lakota, but nobody can help people or their jobs if their beliefs are not grounded in reality. I have covered many topics and offered plenty of advice that I would hope some of these people might use to solve their problems. Particularly regarding the Lakota School Board, which I consider a microcosm of the federal government in general, I have identified the problem and determined that my volunteerism or even paid help will not help that body of government no matter how much money or good intentions I might invest. That is why I determined on February 13, 2012 that the school system was in fact effectively dead in its current form. It is my assessment that nothing can be done to save it because the parties involved in the process are in denial of their reality, and are therefore unable to alter it. So my involvement unless they would listen 100% to my direction would ultimately lead to their doom.
As I speak hereafter about Lakota as a school district I might as well speak about virtually all school districts and government in general, because all these public entities are suffering from the same problem. They are not functioning from a grounding in the rules of reality. I don’t mean that facetiously, but quite literally. It’s a philosophical problem that infects the very nature of civilization. And without having that philosophic problem fixed, there is nothing that can help those who do not live within the realm of reality. So with that said, the reality of the situation pertaining to the Lakota School System, and public schools in general is that they have built the entire structure not for the benefit of the students, (the product) but for the employees themselves. To exhibit this point please refer to this article on The Blaze about the Buffalo teachers union contract that has perks so outrageous that it covers plastic surgery, including liposuction.
I have been in Lakota School Board meetings where the teachers union has protested any increases in their health care benefits. I’ve seen them threaten to go on strike to drive up their wages. And their behavior is exactly in line with those of the Buffalo teachers union. The reality of the situation is that the employees of these public schools are a selfish lot who wish to loot from the community the wealth of the districts.
However, like a drug dealer tries to convince themselves that their actions do not harm people, or the prostitute who pretends they do not destroy families, or the drunk that convinces themselves that they are not a menace to their families, the public education teacher tries to convince themselves that they critical members of a community and important to a child’s life. They believe that they are providing a service that cannot be done by anybody else in society and that if they do not perform their task that our country will crumble to ash.
What teachers are professing with those thoughts are wishes, not reality. Reality says that even a stay-at-home mom without a teaching degree can teach their children better than public education can. The stats prove it. But the wish from these particular public employees is that all such evidence would be wiped away so that they can sustain their fantasy–that they are as important in reality as they are in their own minds.
This is called the Tinker Bell complex. These poor fools have been raised to believe that if they just wish upon a star, or rub Aladdin’s magic lamp that they will be granted wishes, and they wish to these invisible gods beyond reality to be important in the scheme of society. They believe that because they dream it in their small minds that reality can be bent to their wishes.
This is why they hate me, because they cannot argue against the facts that I’ve given them. They see my spreadsheets which point out reality and they react as though I just threw Holy Water on their demon infested souls. They whither in pain and protest and attempt to call me names and discredit my facts rooted in reality. They are like the small child who has just been told that the Little Mermaid is just a cartoon–that Ariel is not real. Or the Fairy Godmother will not turn their pumpkin into a magic carriage, because these are the actions of fantasy, of dreams, and wishes.
It might be fun to dream and make wishes. It might bring comfort to the mind to see a falling star and make a wish that something in our lives might be made better by asking the mysteries of the universe to help us with a problem. Or a birthday cake with lit candles where a wish is made before blowing them out. Our culture is built on wishes and pleadings to entities that exist outside of reality and this is part of our modern social problem. Too often people would resort to magic and wishes rather than hard work and wisdom, and this is the source of much social misery. So the public employee teachers are in good company, but their status in life is merely a wish outside the boundaries of reality. They wish themselves to be valuable and worth $63,000 a year because their unions have told them they have a value equitable to such a value. But the reality is that the average wage mentioned is about $20,000 more than the true market value. That entire amount of $63K per year is artificially propped up by hopes, dreams and wishes.
I know one of the daughters of a former union president locally and every time I see her she looks like she has a dead cat on her head which is intended to be fashionable, but in reality just looks ridiculous. She obviously gets her nails done frequently and is a continuous visitor to the hair salon. She always wears the latest fashion and is quite the socialite. Now none of those things are necessarily bad, but every time I see her I think of what she would have been if her mother had not been the union president who would twist the arm of a school board for everything they had in them. I’m sure this cat headed lady has a master’s degree and all the “qualifications” that the labor union deems important, but what is her real value? Is it $63K per year or $83K per year? Well, by my assessment of her talent and role in a school district I’d say it’s no more than $50K per year. She’s too young to make more than that off any pay scale and could have only arrived at a large salary by obtaining yearly increases exceeding 5% to 7% a year beginning with a very excessive starting point. Because of this inflated value this person gets to pretend they have true value and when she gets her hair done, and her other cosmetic work, she is functioning from a fantasy outside of realty. She did not earn her wealth. She stole it. Her mother stole it. Her mother stole it for all her union members, not just the daughter. The money wasn’t earned. It was gained through manipulation, extortion, and coercion by creating the illusion that all this activity somehow benefited children with the campaign slogan, “it’s for the children.” But in reality children have nothing to do with the actions or desires. The reality is that the members of the union, including the cat haired lady become wealthy off tax dollars without providing a service of real value. The real product was fear of what the world would be like without their service. Not the actual teaching of children.
This behavior is in no way exclusive to the cat haired woman or her mother. They are just playing the game of well wishers. They wish in their minds that their efforts in public education might actually be valuable, but the reality says teachers who make much less and with less experience could do the same work for equal outcome. The reality says that it is the participation of parents and the quality of them that makes all the difference in a child’s life. It is not the teacher no matter what the pay scale.
In order to fix the problem these participants have to stop wishing the world is one way when in fact it is another. Until that action takes place nothing I can do will help these poor people. They will continue to be lost in their own fantasies because they refuse to see the truth. I can place the facts right in front of their faces, but they will not see them because they are more attracted to the fantasies of their minds rather than the reality of their lives. The public employee teachers seek to cover the gap between their fantasy and actual realty with looted wealth and that is simply not acceptable. I am happy to help these poor people with their problems, but like an alcoholic, they cannot be helped till they realize that their wishes do not determine realty. And their wish is that they are indispensably important to the culture of public education. But the facts do not support this, and I am personally finished with trying to ease their minds back into reality. It is their task to get with the program, not society’s, and it’s not our burden to throw money at their fantasies in order to make them happy, so until they are prepared for the truth, they cannot be helped, and my time is too valuable to waste on looters of reality, so I will continue with the firebombs until they finally get the point. At that time when they ask, I will solve all their problems in about one month and at half the cost. But I will not be lured into playing their game their way in a land of illusion and fantastic wishes.
A long time ago I used to be the guy who fed the string of exploding fireworks from the top of a Chinese restaurant that I worked at while the owners of the establishment put on an epic dragon dance like the one seen below. The fireworks were coiled up in a box that had over 50,000 tied to it and I’d have to stand on the roof and feed the lit explosions just over the dancing dragon below as it performed for a massive audience. My task was to keep the fireworks about two feet above the action but to protect anything from igniting the feed box, which was very dangerous work on my end, that I loved.
As I witnessed many oriental dragon dances I contemplated the difference in how oriental cultures viewed dragons and how the Occident, (western cultures) viewed dragons. They are very different ways of looking at the same thing. In the orient, dragons are a symbol of life renewing aspects. The dragon sheds its skin, and is seen as a serpent and life-giver in many respects. In the west, the dragon’s breath fire, are meant to be feared and usually sit on top of huge piles of treasure and are sought after to be slain. But why was this?
It was that primary question that sent me on a ten-year study and provoked me to quit college three times because nobody had a satisfactory answer for me in the field of philosophy. That might not have been the case if I had been able to attend Sarah Lawrence College where Joseph Campbell taught comparative mythology, or Leonard Peikoff’s philosophy classes at Long Island University, had I known about them when I was 18 to 28. But the books of those men were available, and I scooped up the work of Joseph Campbell and devoured them for the next ten years trying to figure out what was wrong with this whole problem of dragons in human society.
I spent many late nights at Waffle Houses all over Cincinnati reading till 4 to 5 AM over breakfast omelets pouring through all of Campbell’s classics meticulously, and it was this action that catapulted me into a lifelong study of myth, philosophy, and human culture that extended beyond the realms of classic anthropological and archeological study. The study of dragons in our culture actually is the skeleton key to understanding the conflicts of our age and it all begins with the grace of that dragon dance from my youth and the hypnotic fireworks I was tasked to feed during the ceremony. And it ends with the reason why I am so excited about the new Peter Jackson film translation of The Hobbit, which I so enthusiastically support at my site here.
My wife’s birthday was last night and my daughter, son-in-law and I went to our favorite Chinese restaurant in Liberty Twp to get my wife the only food she truly likes, Chinese from Panda King. My entire family loves the oriental family who run that restaurant and we’ve known them for years. The man and woman who operate Panda King are two of the hardest working people I know and their son grew up much like the sons I knew in my teenage years, working with the family business, doing their homework between orders and displaying a fantastic work ethic. It is that work ethic that I admire so much in the people of the orient. They have no fear of hard work and cannot be stopped once set in motion. So my wife wanted food from The Panda King for her birthday dinner and nothing else.
About that time a young man who I had fired from his job about 7 months ago came in to order food and appeared to recognize me. There was that tension where words cannot cross a void and nothing is said as a result. He didn’t know what to say to me, and there was nothing I could say to him to bring comfort. Asking how he was doing would have been inappropriate under the conditions of his termination, and asking for an appeal to me would have been degrading. So he avoided eye contact with me, ordered his food and left unceremoniously, as my daughter and I continued to talk about Smaug from The Hobbit.
Running into former employees that I’ve had to terminate happens a lot. It happens when I get gas, and at various shopping complexes as I am out and about, so I’ve learned to shift into the proper gear when those encounters happen. Firing an employee or letting them go as a reduction-in-force is difficult, but the situation is always in their control. It is a failure in job performance that does them in, and they either accept that fact or they don’t. So the choice to be angry is entirely in their control.
This guy in Panda King chose not to be angry and took responsibility for his actions, so his lack of desire to be confrontational to me earned some respect that he had won back just a little bit from how I felt about him upon termination.
When the food was done cooking the owners put it all in a giant box that it took to carry it all home. I joked to them about coming home with us to eat it all. The couple gave me an odd look not comprehending what I was saying as the thought of leaving their work in the middle of the evening was not even a consideration, even joking. And there-in-lies the fundamental difference between the east and the west, as much as I admire the oriental work ethic and their very dedicated preservation of strong families in their culture, they do not function very independently. Independence is not important to them culturally. The people of the orient think in terms of collectivism, as a complete organism of which they are but a single cell. They are naturally altruistic by their cultural heritage and as much as I admire them as a social organism, they think very different from the way I do. This is why their dragons are revered as life-sustaining, because the dragon to them is the state. This is why oriental cultures tend to fall toward communism. This is the case certainly in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and if the politics is not literal communism, then it might be monarchy, feudalism such as what is found in Japanese cultures or an out-right dictatorship. The people of the orient are prone to sacrifice their individual lives for the benefit of the collective whole.
When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings he set out to bring Great Britain a proper mythology for their culture, which England did not have. England through their reign of empire had a hodgepodge of many cultures as they imported the King Author legends from France, which had its roots in the troubadours of romanticism. But England lacked an authentic myth to unify its people, so Tolkien set out to give it one with his characters in the literary classics of Middle Earth. As a professor at Oxford he saw firsthand the spread of socialism throughout London society and as a veteran of World War I he had some very unique perspectives into the progressive conditions that spread after the Treaty of Versailles. Tolkien the intellectual kept his mind free from politics like many creative people and instead delved into creating his own world mythology which reflected the concepts of our actual life. Walt Disney and George Lucas have done that in the United States and in England Tolkien was taking his observations of human behavior and painting them against stories such as The Hobbit in 1936.
Tolkien was so prone to withdrawal from contemporary politics that he lashed out in anger at those who declared his Lord of the Rings as an anti-communist parable comparing Joseph Stalin to the Dark Lord. Tolkien saw his work as reaching beyond the politics of the day even though he was clearly reacting to the events through the mechanism of myth.
The Hobbit is in essence a treasure hunt, not too unlike that of Disney’s beloved pirates from Pirates of the Caribbean. Bilbo Baggins was conscripted from a group of treasure hunters led by Gandalf seeking to take back their kingdom and the treasure guarded there by the dragon Smaug. This takes the home-loving Hobbit Bilbo on an adventure of the lifetime and lead directly into the events that become Lord of the Rings, which is a much more sinister story about evil and the nature of its influence. In The Hobbit, Smaug is the perfect embodiment of the classic occidental dragon motif as seen in this clip from the 1977 cartoon adaption of The Hobbit.
Notice Smaug is a pompous, arrogant creature who uses brute force to guard his treasure taken from the surrounding kingdoms. And he sleeps atop it guarding each and every item. Bilbo the Thief, the (pirate) has been tasked to steal an item from the dragon’s lair. The dragon in these stories represents The State, the institutional control of an organization that takes and steals by force the wealth of the people who have their rights to their creations. So the dragon is the villain in occidental mythology where the creature represents a destruction of individual liberty, and the right to their personal wealth. The dragon does not have a right to hoard the looted wealth of the people in its lair. This makes the dragon slayer, the thief of Bilbo Baggins a hero in this case.
However, if the same story were told in China, Bilbo would be the villain and it would be the dragon who would be the hero. Because in that culture the dragon is the revered creature, the state and the survival of the culture is the paramount concern. But in European post renaissance mythology, before Karl Marx spread his disease across Europe, it was the individual desire for conquering one’s personal dragons that become the concern.
I put the quality of J.R.R. Tolkien’s thinking in line with the Founding Fathers by way of intellectual capacity in what he was trying to achieve. Tolkien had the ability to behold very large ideas much the way Ben Franklin did, and was able to see beyond the political trends of his day to tell very powerful myths in an attempt to hold his culture together. Tolkien was creating a mythology which directly leads to philosophy, two ingredients that are paramount to holding a culture together.
Political science and other feeble attempts to bypass the process of myth always lead to social decay. Mythology is needed in order to form complicated social concepts which give context to large ideas. This is why the new documentary called Finding Joe, which is about the power of Joseph Campbell’s scholarship in creating a new field of endeavor called comparative mythology which will soon become a major field of study like anthropology, sociology, and even physics is now, because there is power in myths and the words that form them. So much so that societies will rise and fall based on the strength of their mythological messages.
But that is the difference between the east and the west and these ideas are in open conflict with each other. The hippie movement of the 60’s and into the modern-day sought to study the east as the premier mode of thinking using examples of India, Tibetan Buddhism, and Japanese Zen to challenge the thinking of western thought. It was even Jane Fonda who basically made love publicly with communist North Vietnam using her sex appeal to win over millions of American’s into communism.
But it cannot be disguised what lingers in the heart of mankind. And all the open conflicts of our day could be seen in Panda King where my daughter and I were buying my wife dinner for her birthday. My friends who run the place genuinely enjoy seeing me when I come to place an order and our friendship exists completely in respect. But they do not understand my motorcycle riding, my cowboy hats or my outlandish dress on occasion. They do not understand my strong desire for individual liberty. And I do not understand their blind obedience to collectivism, or their selfless natures. I admire it in some respects, but I do not, nor do I wish to understand it. When I see a dragon I wish to slay it and mount it’s head on my wall so I can hang my bullwhips from its teeth. When they see a dragon they want to do a dance and celebrate its nature.
And the fellow who I fired was a young fellow who was confused by all this stuff. He thought that work was optional, that he could show up when he wanted. He often wore symbols of the Yen and Yang on his jewelry and had a fascination with the Peace symbol. He thought that he could make up his own hours and that if he lost his job he’d just collect unemployment. So I gave him directions to the unemployment office and told him to get in line because he was now on it. He huffed and puffed and bragged on Facebook about how was going to stick it to me and what a bad guy I was, but in the end he had lost his job because he did not perform the tasks he was hired to do. He was functioning from a faulty philosophy. He wanted the collectivism of the east without the hard work, yet he still wanted the individuality of the west, again without the work. That young man is a victim of no mythology, but rather a grouping of broken symbols that had lost their meaning leaving his mind vacant of resolution. This gives him little social value in that he cannot even be hired like Bilbo Baggins to steal treasure from a dragon resting atop a pile of gold.
If you want a long sustaining society that will always hold itself together, the orient has the problem licked. They are a stable people who can have a continuous society that lasts for generations, but they are willing to give up individual liberty to have it. The Occident, (the west) tends to burn itself out quickly in the absence of strong family values since the innovations of one generation to the next die out as the great minds of one age find the descendents of the next one much like that guy I had to fire. Without the work ethic to sustain an idea, they quickly die out and the culture disintegrates. But, it is in individual endeavor that innovation thrives, and it is in the Occident that we developed aviation, computers, the internet, electricity, and virtually all technological marvels. Because the keys to a good life, the treasures of mankind are underneath the dragons of society and those dragons must be killed to gain those treasures. You cannot dance around them and throw sacrifices at those dragons and expect the dragon to give you treasure. Instead the dragon will only ask for more. So the dragons must be killed, so that society can prosper and advance with each slain monster.
American society will thrive once it stops feeling guilty for the dragons it kills, because we are not like those in the orient. We are unique, and it is our task to kill dragons and steal their treasure for our use. That is the mythology of the west, and one that at a subconscious level, we all understand.
A person of considerable intelligence might ask why our current society with all the technological innovation available to us, behave in such a foolish fashion. Why do people not see what Barack Obama and the government in general are all about? How have labor unions and politicians built an organized crime style empire on the backs of tax payer money in plan sight right without punishment? Why is it that with all the news stories happening at such a feverish pace on the nightly news that all news channels seem obsessed with the Republican nomination for president? Well, the answer is one of science, and is proven beyond refute, and the thieves of our society use this science to openly rob society in legalized theft.
This science is similar to what makes a human being see “magic” during a magic show. It’s used heavily in such demonstrations and can be tracked with the increase in media devices such as radio and television, and now the computer to happen in day-to-day life. One would think that with the advent of these technological breakthroughs that society would become collectively more intelligent, but this has not been the case.
To understand why society is functioning at a low-level of intelligence I will use an example discussed in the book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand to exhibit the condition that is currently enslaving the human race. To understand the science of this enslavement we must look at how crows process cognitive information. Crows have been studied because they have shown to be comparatively intelligent for a grouping of animals, specifically birds. So they serve as an excellent example of displaying a complex problem.
A hunter goes into the woods to shoot a whole flock of crows that have gathered there, but upon seeing the hunter the crows flock to the tops of the trees to hide. The hunter frustrated that the crows won’t show themselves leaves the woods. After the hunter leaves, the crows come out of hiding from the top of the tree and resume their activity.
The hunter thinks about the problem and decides to try one more time. He grabs four other hunters and returns back to the woods. The crows see five hunters and flee back to the tops of the trees. The hunters have no clear targets. But the original hunter tells his four friends to now leave the woods which they do. The first hunter remains still. The crows see four hunters leave and they assume the threat has now left the woods. This is because the crows do not have the cognitive ability to see more than three threats at a given time, anything more than three sort of blends in to the surrounding environment. So the hunter has discovered the weakness of the crows. He has figured out a way to trick them into thinking the threat to their lives is gone. Once the crows believe this they leave the tree tops to resume their activity. At that time the hunter can then open fire and kill as many crows as his gun can destroy.
For human beings, we are considerably more intelligent than crows, but how much cognitive material can we process at any given time? Is it 7 items, 9 items, 20 items, how many issues can we deal with in our daily lives until everything becomes a blur to us.
Well to my knowledge developing cognitive ability is a skill built much like one builds a muscle. By doing the work of cognition often, the ability is improved. So I would probably be able to count more hunters than someone else, because I work the ability more than most people do. But at some point, we reach a saturation point in how much information we can absorb.
This is the strategy of the modern crook, the politician who seeks to swamp the human mind with so much detail that the average person cannot retain the information presented. This is why legal contracts tend to be too long, and sales people speak too fast, and the wording for products sold on TV for $19.99 are often too small to see, because the intent is to scam the public by presenting so many facts that no single person can understand the information. Just like the hunter sending the other four shooters out of the woods to trick the crows into coming out of hiding, the salesmen of the world wish very much to overwhelm their customers with too much detail.
The looters of our society do seek to overwhelm the voters, consumers, and demographic groups into behavior they know they can control. Obama has been very active with executive orders while the media focuses on the Republican debates. Looters know that most people arrive home at the end of their day with their minds filled with their business, their associates, their pleasures, their pains, and the essence of their survival—such as food, water and clothing. The human mind after being concerned with those primary things in their life have perhaps room for one or two major news stories before all the other information coming at them turns into a blur of data.
A person who has developed the ability to grapple more subjects at the same time might be able to pay attention to the needs of their family, make a living, pay their bills, read a newspaper, listen to the radio, then send texts to their friends while still maintaining the ability to read part of a book, watch the evening news, check their email and browse the internet for interesting topics pleasant to their minds. But somewhere in all that the modern human must develop some interest in the laws of their state and community, and pay attention to what the federal government is doing.
The looters know that most of the human beings they are dealing with do not have room for those other topics, let alone the notions of world economics and the spread of communism as a global political philosophy. Human beings have the tools available to them, in computers, the internet, and more books published per day than in any time in human history. There are numerous television programs that can teach everything from advanced physics to the history of particular battles. Yet society seems to not have the ability to handle very many topics at the same time and find themselves easy prey for the hunters in our civilization.
I watched this hunting of the human population just the other night at a school board meeting in my home district. The administrators wanting a tax increase from the public used all the key words to trick the large audience into believing that the hunters, (the administrators) were looking out for the residence of the district. The hunters know that the parents supporting the school had very full lives, and there wasn’t any room for these parents to learn much detail about why the school needed money. So the parents just wanted someone to tell them what to do, to vote yes on a levy or no. They don’t have the cognitive room to think, so they let the looters do it for them which was the plan all along as the meeting drug on for over two hours discussing so many little details that meant nothing, that the real intent of the meeting existed outside the cognitive ability of most of the audience.
The same thing goes on in our state and federal governments. This is why more people know the contestants to American Idol over who their representatives in government are. It’s because the American Idol knowledge is more pleasurable to know, and if the typical human must pick between the cognitive retention of one item or the other, they will almost always pick the one that is most pleasurable. That’s why sex sells. But since human beings do not have unlimited cognitive ability they cannot behold everything, just as the crows could not determine that all the hunters had left the forest if the number was greater than three. The human being, like the crow is vulnerable to an attacker if the predator attacks while the mind is being asked to function outside of its cognitive ability.
Much crime happens under these conditions, and the roots to evil seen in the human race can be traced back to this notion of limited cognitive ability in the human being as they find themselves continued victims of hunters who reside like the forest hunter, outside the human perception of cognition.
So be cautious of any being, governing body, or media outlet that attempts to overwhelm your mind with too many details too quickly. Chances are its being done on purpose. When you feel it happening, even if you can’t see the threat, duck your head, because there is a hunter in your midst’s ready to take a shot at you. Chaos is the camouflage of the predator, and camouflage does not always have to be cosmetic. Sometimes the camouflage can be within the mind as too many details flood the brain’s ability to reason through all the options and cognitive ability falters under the load. That’s when the attacks happen and the hunter’s show themselves. That’s when we wonder how it happened even though we couldn’t see it coming, but should have because the enemy was right under our noses.
I don’t have much thought about the death of Whitney Houston other than to say that her trajectory was predictable and self-imposed. It was easy to see where she was headed, and it’s frustrating to see and not be able to help such people. I live around and speak with future Whitney Houston’s every day and they are hell-bent on personal destruction. So I usually don’t commit much of my mind to their lives.
But Glenn Beck had a wonderful summation of the life of Whitney Houston on his GBTV show that many people who aren’t aware of his show might have missed. So I’m putting it up here so that it can be shared for its own merit.
A fate cannot be escaped. One plus one equals 2. 5 plus 5 equals 10. This notion that people can have whatever life they conger up in their minds no matter what they put into their head is utterly ridiculous and leads directly to these terrible tragedies whether it’s Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, or Elvis. Talent in life is not enough, and money cannot make you happy. It’s far more important to put quality into everything you do in life, than to just coast on a raw talent and hope it all works out. It takes work to live, and it takes a lot of work to live a good life. And sadly for stars like Whitney Houston, she not only deprived millions of fans a role model to look up to, but she denied herself a quality life that love, money, drugs, or any mindful fantasy could not give her. It’s a life lived in the pursuit of the wrong things that leads to such tragedies, and should provide a lesson for all the future ghosts that hover around us hell-bent on the same fate.
I’ll always remember Whitney Houston the for film The Bodyguard and her rendition of this song.
Too bad the words and actions of Whitney in that song only reflected an idea and not the actual words of a wise person. They are just sounds that come from the talent of a unique voice but lack the foundation of reality like so many stars of our age. Be cautious of what you let into your mind, because you are the sum of everything that you put into it.
John Kasich must be applauded for taking a very controversial stand against human trafficking in the early months of 2012. Human trafficking is modern slavery and it is an epidemic that I have covered extensively here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.
It is always a good thing when a high-profile personality like John Kasich puts light on an issue that has been purposely kept in the dark for many reasons. To review my other articles about this very important issue, please refer to the following links:
Sex trafficking is not a victimless crime. It is 100% modern slavery and is every bit as evil as the slave trade in the 1600’s through the 1800’s here in the United States. No group should point at that time in American history as a sin while all the while letting it continue in the modern age.
I believe so much in this issue that I opened my novel The Symposium of Justice with a form of sex trafficking being broken up by a vigilante. My editor at that time was so upset with me for refusing to take this scene out of the book that it cost me my relationship with that editor. Few people realize just how wide-spread this modern human slavery penetrates our social network, but it is an epidemic without measure.
Thank you John Kasich for putting yourself out there to bring this very important issue to the front of people’s minds.
P.S. shortly after I posted this story, the Governor sent me an email. It is as follows:
Dear Rich: Thank you for your words of support. Human trafficking is a horrific crime and we are going to take strong action to stop this from happening. I am proud and humbled to be serving as the 69th Governor of Ohio. As your Governor I will work to unite all Ohioans, and work towards the common purpose of creating new jobs and improving Ohio’s economy. Ohio is a great state. I believe in the future of Ohio and have faith in the people of Ohio. We invite your continued input on the journey. If there is any way my office can assist you in the future, please do not hesitate to contact me.
But why? How did this person come to sit with me at a school board meeting? How did we become friends in the first place? After all, this was a guy who used to be a levy supporter, and a very active volunteer at Lakota East. Well, it’s the fault of the Lakota School Board actually for not taking action to help the guy out when he had a problem. This guy came to the board and presented his case and the school did everything they could to cover it up. They took his wife aside and pressured her into signing her rights away out of fear that they would smear her for the relationship she had with a teacher at the high school who had instructed her daughter. This case went all the way up to the state board of education and still the story was contained. The teacher who sent very salacious emails talking about sucking, and doing the horizontal mamba with this little girl’s mother from a school computer didn’t get fired from his position for violating the trust of the teacher-student relationship.
Instead the principal of the high school sent the teacher in question to the other high school to help keep him employed and shut up the parents who had reconciled the incident between each other after a lot of pain. Even after the relationship had ended between the woman and the teacher the parasite continued to pursue the woman asking how “their” little girl was doing on papers sent home and on voice messages over the phone. It was the kind of voice message that sent shivers up the spine of the woman. It felt as if the teacher was “bullying” her into a position of control, and the teacher continued to do this for quite some time after the affair ended and the child was out of his class. Because in all reality, nothing really happened to the teacher, he just reported to a different building within the Lakota School System once the story was presented to the principal and school board.
Out of desperation and risking that I would shoot him just for stepping on my property, this father sought me out for help because he had nowhere else to turn. He wanted someone to be accountable for what this teacher attempted to do to his family. So I covered their story in greater detail in another article. Click Here to view that piece. Over time, we have become friends and I have gotten to know their daughter who is now out of school. After the incident with the teacher this little girl was repeatedly harassed by other students at Lakota. The bullying became so bad that the parents had to remove their little girl from a very respected activity due to the constant harassment, all of which is well documented with an extensive paper trail. Remember, this used to be dedicated Lakota volunteer who is very well liked and respected in the Lakota community, so the man has no reason to be inflammatory. Once the little girl graduated from school she once again thrived, and this was the 18-year-old woman who recently showed me around her house and shared with me her crushes that she had on her favorite movie stars. As she spoke to me I could not help but wonder what kind of evil would possess a teacher to use this nice young woman as a tool to seduce her mother into beginning a sexual affair. What evil would try to pry from this innocent girl facts about her father that the teacher could use to smear against the mother. And what evil could use the special needs condition of the young girl to demand audience from the very busy, and concerned mother who would do anything to make sure her daughter got what she needed in school.
So is there bullying going on at Lakota, and virtually every public school all across the country? YES! Of course there is. Public schools are notoriously class specific, and peer groups are created within a public school system to meet the various classifications of personalities. Because such a thing is a primal desire, to find likeness among peers, children will pick on those who are not like them and pound into shape those similar into a group collective. Individuality is frowned down upon by every member of the public school system, which is why I dislike public school and always have. But when the pressure gets to be too great that it translates into a student wanting to take their own life, then the situation is way out of control and has expanded beyond the realm of tolerance.
When I heard about the recent suicide at Lakota West, I didn’t want it to be another negative article to write against the Lakota School System. My heart goes out to the parents of this little girl. I don’t care what the situation was, a system that lets a girl think death was the only way out has failed the child and the family who trusted the school. And unfortunately it sounds like the girl was suffering from bullying at her school to such an extent that she thought she had no way out.
Since this story was reported by Channel 9 one time during the second week of February 2012 and nowhere else, facts are hard to come by. The letter that Lakota sent home to parents was nowhere to be found on their website, which seemed to be big enough news to dictate sending the letter home with kids. I did however see the article by the Enquirer about the new school board member Julie Schaffer promoting her “volunteerism.” But there wasn’t anything about this tragic death that occurred on February 8th in the paper that I saw, or on the Lakota site giving any specifics. That seemed strange for such a sad story.
I figured that the media and the school were just being sensitive to the family, and by keeping the story quit, they were being respectful to the grieving family, which I thought was appropriate. That is until I saw the comments online from Leslie Agoston who is a student at Lakota West and knows the victim. Here is the posting.
Leslie Agoston I am a current Lakota West High School student. And I know what the girl went through and how she felt. I too get bullied almost every day. And Lakota could care less they just sweep it under the rug. They just care about their “excellence” rating. If they just stopped for a second and realize how many kids are suffering from bullying an incident like this would have never happened.
That is an interesting thing for a student at Lakota to say? That comment eerily sounded like the situation my new friend who came to the school board meeting with me went through. The comment from the student implies that the administration at Lakota doesn’t care about the bullying that goes on. It backs up the notion that my friend is not the only one who suffered from some indiscretion involving bullying at the Lakota School District.
But what constitutes bullying? Was it bullying to use a special needs kid to sleep with a parent? Might the child have felt pressure from such a teacher into revealing family secrets through acts of intimidation? Was it bullying to tell the mother that unless she signed a document releasing the school of responsibility that “word might get around the community about her indiscretions.” And apparently the students at Lakota West are complaining about bullying being a rampant problem that nobody is addressing.
Well, for clarity on this issue, let’s look at what Lakota itself says the definition of bullying is according to their website.
Lakota’s Definition of Bullying
“Bullying” is defined as an intentional written, verbal, electronic, or physical act that a student exhibits toward another particular student more than once; and the behavior both (1) causes mental or physical harm to the student, and (2) is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive that a reasonable person under the circumstances should know will have the effect of: • Placing a student in reasonable fear of physical harm or damage to the student’s property; • Physically harming a student or damaging a student’s property; or • Insulting or demeaning any student or group of students in such a way as to disrupt or interfere with the school’s educational mission or the education of any student. http://www.lakotaonline.com/parents.cfm?subpage=2642
I know that my friend and his family suffered from bullying according to that definition at the hands of a Lakota teacher, a principal, and the school board members who knowingly let the issue slide through the cracks. They did not pursue termination of that teacher, but instead covered the issue up, which is consistent with the statement made by Leslie Agoston in her comments about the recent tragic death of her fellow student.
I understand that any organization with a lot of people and employees will be far from perfect. But we do expect perfection from an airplane pilot. If a pilot lands successfully 300 times then crashes on landing 301 that pilot would be held accountable, probably with the loss of their job at the very least. If there was a loss of life, there might even be a trial. The community of Lakota is employing an army of very well paid administrators, teachers and councilors to prevent tragic events like what Leslie described. It is also expected that teachers behave ethically without trying to have sex with the parents. The kids are watching how the administrators and teachers behave, and kids cannot be expected to be better than the teachers, can they?
It is a tragedy anytime a young person losses their life. It’s bad enough to consider whatever the sum of the conditions were that made the little girl want to take her own life. Again, my heart goes out to the family in the deepest way. And I truly hope that what Leslie said is not true, that this bully problem is not so epidemic within the Lakota School System that the situation could have been avoided with the skilled intervention of the highly paid mentors employed by the community. Because if it could have, then this suicide is a very serious issue for the school board to consider, and so far, all I hear them talking about is the passage of a new tax levy. They didn’t even bring it up at the school board meeting on February 13, 2012. They didn’t even say a prayer for the little girl or cover the issue in any way which would have been appropriate with such a large gathering. All these elements add up to be just another situation as what my friend experienced in his own family, a school that pushes all bad news under the rug to hide from the community.
I really hope I’m wrong, but something tells me that I’m not.
The biggest problem with the whole bullying issue is that the schools have painted themselves into a corner. They are not equipped to deal with bullying. Only a parent is, and sometimes the best way to eliminate a bully is to fight them. That’s how you shut down a bully. That’s how it’s been done for 10,000 years of human evolution. And if the child can’t take care of it on their own, the parents must step in and do it for them.
When my daughter was 9 years old she was picked on by a group of boys in the neighborhood who harassed her and her friends to no end. My daughter stood up to the bullies and one of the boys spit on her. My daughter was devastated by the embarrassment and came home very upset that a person would do such a thing to her, especially since the boy was much bigger than she was. That’s when the parent must step in and take control.
I put my daughter and all her friends in the car and went looking for the boys. I found them playing in the driveway of their house with the spitter’s father working in the garage, all of them were laughing as we pulled up. I made the boy apologize on his hands and knees to my daughter so my daughter would realize that I had her back and that if she ever got into a fix she couldn’t handle, that I’d be there to sweep it up for her. She needed to know that her father was there. Of course the boy’s father protested and wanted to fight me, which I openly accepted. Then he shut his mouth and went inside his house leaving his kids to fend for themselves, which scared the shit out of them. Their father had abandoned them when it mattered. Little things like that matter a lot in the art of living.
These matters are too complicated for schools to handle, yet they sell their services to the community as though they can. They are kidding themselves. Respect for human beings cannot be created through rules and regulations. Respect is earned, and standing up for yourself or your child is the way it is gained in the mind of the human being. There is no other way.
It is in this misunderstanding that bullying is an epidemic problem in public schools and parents who believe that the school system can, and will put children’s safety in the front of administrator’s minds are kidding with you. Administrators don’t have the intellectual capacity, or the fortitude to do such a thing, and the cost to society is great. The bully issue in public school is just another byproduct of an organized, overly specialized, labor force that has handcuffed parents into inaction because they assure society that all problems can be handled in the classroom. So parents believing they don’t have a right to get involved in the affairs of their children in school leave the job to the teachers and administrators that can’t even balance a budget, let alone handle complicated emotional issues with children who aren’t even theirs.
The schools know this. They know they can’t protect the children to the level they have sold to the public. Their primary concern is always how they are going to continue to gain funding from the community, so they are always focused on hiding unpleasant facts from the public rather than dealing directly with a problem. This is why Lakota didn’t even discuss the suicide of a student just four days later at the largest school board meeting I can ever remember occurring at Lakota with all the media in Cincinnati covering the event. The school board didn’t even acknowledge the tragedy, because the goal of the meeting was to convince the community of the need for higher taxes, not to actually deal with any tough problems like mature adults. This is the kind of behavior that has created most of the problems in public education. That’s how they got into trouble with my new friend. They sought to suppress the story rather than dealing with it directly.
The bullies of the world know this. They know that most of the parents, administrators, and teachers are paralyzed into inaction by rules and regulations that the bullies could care less about. So like the liberal gun laws that seek to remove guns from society in the aim of world peace, the progressive educators think that by employing more councilors and administrators that they can stop violence and the tendency of violence from the school environment. They can’t.
The answer is more parental involvement, less administrators getting in the way of a parent and their children, and encouraging justice where it’s appropriate. When a teacher does something wrong, FIRE THEM! When a child acts inappropriately, expel them! And when you hear and see reports from parents that violence is coming at their children in the school, don’t pass the reports to your PR director to hide from the public. Deal with them; deal with each and every report even if the parents are overly neurotic, because that’s what the community is paying for. If there is anything that can be learned from these tragedies it’s that there isn’t any replacement for good ol’ fashioned care and attention. Money can’t buy security and a clean conscious, only work can solve the problem and without the work, tragedies will continue to occur.
