By Marion Algier – AskMarion
A little while back, I wrote about how our children and future generations can’t miss or value what they don’t know, what they don’t understand and what they never even learned or heard about. This is obviously common sense as well as the basis for the American Progressive movement, which has roots in Socialism, Fabianism, Marxism and a long list of other “isms” whose leaders all knew if you can strip away people’s allegiance to Country, Family and Religion you can reprogram the upcoming youth and the disenfranchised to follow the newest version of the power elitists’ plan whatever it is… right now it is globalism, and our government is full of Progressives who have been united in the dumbing down and manipulation of the populace of America for several generations now.
When you talk to Millenials most don’t know much about history, American or otherwise, most don’t go to church, and most don’t even know much about the background of their own families which generally includes a lack of solid holiday and personal traditions.
Then we, people who know history, love America and the Constitution, go to church or synagogue etc., and who value and want to pass on their family, American, and religious values and holiday traditions scratch our heads when younger people don’t understand why those are important; why they only read escapist and fictional (often dark) books and movies… if they read at all; and why they don’t believe in God or think it is a big deal when a Christmas Tree, Menorah, or worse yet a copy of our Constitution or the Ten Commandments can no longer be displayed in public buildings or the local town square.
We, from the ‘The Greatest Generation’ to the Baby-boomers to the parents right now missed the boat. Everyone was too busy to notice that what made America great and what kept us free and united was being stripped out of our educational system, our activities and our daily lives and was being replaced my mind-numbing activities that were often more fun or just distracting yet often smattered with underlying anti-traditional messages or Propaganda… a book (Kindle)… by Edward Bernays that is a must read for everyone. We stopped talking to each other about things that matter and we stopped passing on to the each next generation what was important to us both personally and collectively, but the Progressives were busy filling the vacuum. And with all the new media, what mattered most has virtually been lost, re-written or replaced in the minds and lives of many in the present and will be lost to most in future generations.
Instead of teaching our children how to dream, how to think critically, how to search for knowledge, how to believe in things that are not always tangible tangible (from God to Santa Claus) and how to find the magic in the every day things of life, like bookstores, by both sharing from each of our hearts, histories and memories and by being an example, we are relegating our children to learn from educators who think individual and critical thinking are passรฉ, from an American media who promote sex, violence and propaganda for our government, and from each other… a generation raised on social media, video games and often with little ‘live’ social interaction. And instead of promoting our kids to develop their imaginations, which can lead to the development of future writers, movie-makers, inventors and even scientists, we are stifling their creativity by putting them into socialistic-style schools which promote conformity so everyone will think, act and be alike, so not to hurt anyone’s feelings. And we are robbing children as young as kindergartners of their time of innocence and beauty and replacing it with sex-education (awareness) classes that produce confusion and ugliness for psyches far too young to have to deal with that topic.
Recently I came across the article Views – The Wonders of Bookstores (below) by novelist Richard Russo. It is this kind of love for knowledge, tradition (including types of medium) and special places and memories that we are no longer cultivating:
Local hero Three Lives & Company has been charming readers since 1978. [Photo: Christopher L. Smith]
Novelist Richard Russo pays homage to the shop where he fell in love with reading — and to the crucial role bookstores can still play in our lives.
The first great bookstore in my life wasn’t really a bookstore. Alvord and Smith was located on North Main Street in Gloversville, N.Y., and if memory serves, they referred to themselves as stationers. I don’t recall the place being air-conditioned, but it was always dark and cool inside, even on a sweltering summer day. In addition to a small selection of books, the store sold stationery, diaries, journals, and high-end fountain and ballpoint-pen sets, as well as drafting and art supplies. The shelves went up and up the walls, and I remember wondering what was in the cardboard boxes beyond my reach. The same things on the shelves below? Other, undreamed-of wonders? Alvord and Smith was a store for people who—though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time—had aspirations beyond life in a grungy mill town. It was never busy.
Because she worked all week, my mother and I ran errands on Saturday mornings, and Alvord and Smith was usually our first stop. There, I’d plop down on the floor in front of the bottom two shelves where the children’s books were displayed: long, uniform phalanxes of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, as well as the lesser-known but, to my mind, superior Ken Holt and Rick Brant series. I can still remember the thrill of coming upon that elusive number 11 or 17 in my favorite series, the one I’d been searching for for years, now magically there, where it hadn’t been the week before, filling me with wonder at the way the world worked, how you had to wait to the point of almost unbearable longing for the good stuff in life.
Coming out of Alvord and Smith, blinking in the sunlight, you could see all the way down Main Street to South Main, where the gin mills and pool hall were. Outside these stood dusky, shiftless, idle men, flexing at the knees and whistling at the pretty women who passed by. Occasionally my father was among them. Later, when I turned 18, I would join him in those same dives. Like the stationery store, they were cool and dark and mysterious, and for a while I preferred them, though I never really belonged. That’s what I’d felt as a boy, sitting on the floor at Alvord and Smith, touching, lovingly, the spines of books: Here was a place I belonged.
Many people love good bookstores, but writers? We lose our heads over them. We tell stories about them. We form lifelong attachments to our favorites. We do not hate e-books—well, okay, some of us do—but we owe our careers, at least my generation of writers do, to the great independents, so many of them long gone now. Those that remain gamely continue to fight the good fight, even as customers increasingly treat their stores as showrooms, then go home and surrender to the online retailer’s chilly embrace. They point and click and, without meaning to, undermine the next generation of writers and the one after that. Because it’s independent booksellers who always get the word out (as they did for me).
I’m an old fart, of course, more at home with paper and print than touch screens, and yes, I agree with those who argue that in the end it’s more about the message than the medium. But to me bookstores remain places of wonder. Like libraries, they’re the physical manifestation of the world’s longest, most thrilling conversation. The people who work in them will tell you who’s saying what. If you ask, they’ll tell you what Richard Russo’s up to in his new one, but more important, they’ll put in your hand something you just have to read, by someone you’ve never heard of, someone just entering the conversation, who wants to talk to you about things that matter.
Excerpted from My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers). Richard Russo’s latest book is Elsewhere: A Memoir (Kindle).
Online media… from novels to textbooks can be lost, changed and rewritten over-night. In fact at many of the colleges and universities, the professors now have the ability to edit the books online that they assign to their students without notice. That should be frightening to everyone! Instead of teaching from original sources we are allowing liberal professors, or professors of any bent, to re-write any authors’ works.
And what about photos… How many people do you know that no longer print their photos and somewhere along the way have lost every single one because they weren’t backed up?
And the art of letter writing, keeping journals or even sending a quick handwritten note with a card or photo is almost extinct. Yet how many beautiful and tragic histories would we not know if someone hadn’t kept a bundle of love letters (Kindle) or found the diary of a little girl named Anne Frank (Kindle)?
What if over night the grids we are all connected to mysteriously go off line, through a manmade or natural disaster? What would you have left if every form of media and communication you have and had was on your computer, your phone, your a kindle type device? Verses… what would you have left is you had printed photos, printed books, handwritten letters and journals? It is certainly something to ponder!! One only needs to watch Mad Max (Trilogy) or The Book of Eli [Blu-ray] to promote that thought process…
If you look at every aspect of American life, you will see the changes and many not for the better. It has been a process that has been going on for a long time, but with the election of Obama and the appointments of his like minded-administration, the process has been accelerated not only in speed, but into a final phase. Below is just a short reminder list or where we are and what has changed:
Things we thought to be impossible in America are now daily events and the window to change all this is becoming ever smaller! For anyone who doesn’t believe that just checkout these Headlines from the past 24-hour news cycle:
Yet most people, unless they watch Fox Cable News, Fox Cable Business News, TheBlazeTV (on TV or online) or get the information from the blogs and Internet. It has gotten so bad that even liberal Jon Stewart said on Obamacare’s Sebelius: ‘Maybe She is Just Lying to Me!?!’ Ya think?
And if there is any hope of turning this cycle around it lies in the laps of grandparents, concerned parents do know and see what is going on, patriotic American willing to stand up at every opportunity, history buffs, educators who haven’t been brainwashed and pulled into the Common Core myth and the religious community who need to engage our youth, our children and adults willing to listen immediately.
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