Cousin George

Cousin George finally won his trial in Florida.  The liberal media has made a career of his supposed guilt, whipping the mob into a lynching frenzy each day on MSNBC.  And so when the verdict came, I naturally  had to watch MSNBC to see what they had to say.  First was Al Sharpton who has added this case to his Twana Brawley success.  Sharpton is the epoxy guy.  He makes sure that someone with a chip on  their shoulder doesn't let it come off. He was quick with a disclaimer of how the only reason he went to Florida to agitate for the removal of the district attorney was the family’s sincere pleas over the mismanagement of the police department.  No, sir.  Al didn’t see this as a chance to gin up racial stuff.  He didn’t see himself in the cameras and limelight.  He wasn’t interested except to hold hands with this poor family.  Al’s a minister.

 

And then came MSNBC’s bevy of commentators of African descent.  All agreed that this trial would have had a completely different outcome if there had been just one Afro-American on the jury.  Because the jury, evil bunch of white Hispanics, could not know what black people have gone through.  (“Nobody knows, da trouble I seen.”)  In other words the jury didn’t buy the template of an innocent and unarmed child of 17 who simply went to the store to buy snacks and was walking home when he was gunned down in cold blood by the crazy-ass cracker.  Which reminds me, I am a white Hispanic.  We had a Mexican foster daughter.  I learned a lot about Latino culture in the process.  Have Mex friends now. There you go.  “White Hispanic.”  

 

The exercise of having 9 different teenagers grow up under our roof of different backgrounds, the mentoring of kids without moms and dads taught us a lot about development.  Travon Martin was living with his mother in Miami and visiting his dad in Sanford.  They were divorced and so he was a kid raised by a single mom.  Travon had spent little time with his dad and evidently had joined gangs in Miami.  The fighting culture and the troubles at school were not allowed as evidence in the trial, though drug use was briefly noted in the toxicology report of the autopsy.  The defense lawyers said it was unknown as to why Martin decided to begin beating up on Zimmerman. That’s quite true.  But if I could guess, I’d guess that here was a young man, trying to prove himself by being ‘tough’ and deciding to teach that crazy-ass cracker a lesson with his fists.  If he had a close dad or uncle advising, they would have taught him to “watch your fists and prove it some other respectable way.”

 

But just as the race templaters had concerns about the lack of African representation of the jury, I was a bit concerned that they were all females.   Well, now that said, let's say that we appreciate the women who were on the jury.  If Americans don't like jury duty and illegals do the jobs Americans don't want, do we put them on juries?   However, do women understand men having fights?  Female fights are mostly a war of words.  Man fights are physical. Often it is hard to say and fruitless to say who started it.  Some guy says something or gestures something that the other finds offensive.  Insulting words lead to a push-off, then a fist flies and a take-down. Usually male fights don’t escalate, because men realize what is at stake.  Somebody gets a sharp punch in, and the fight ends as quickly as it starts.  It is the females in nature who fight to death over their threatened young--and young men who don’t know how bad a true fight can turn out.  Which is evidently what happened when Martin pinned cousin George to the ground.  Tragedy happens easily if you are foolish.

 

None of this matters if the jury has the particulars of the case and the law in mind.  None of the character assassination matters either.   It doesn’t matter if both guys profiled one another, who followed who, what state of mind anyone was in.  Maybe Zimmerman was a race-hater cop-wannabe of the highest order.  Maybe Martin was racist too.  What legally matters is what happened in the fight.  If Zimmerman was threatened with his life or even great bodily harm, he’s desperate to defend himself even to use a gun.  Only Bob Beckel disagrees with this. Burly Bob thought that Zimmerman was a wuss.  He should have just taken a beating and laughed it off. Just a little dust-up.  Manly fisticuffs.  (Tell that to the women of the jury!)  

 

I also understand the politicians.  Sanford is 31% Afro.  (Try not to think “S-A-N-F-O-R-D-period”) The mayor and city fathers were scared of that voting block.  So too was the governor of Florida who decided that the duly-elected district attorney and sheriff  didn’t know anything because they weren’t charging Zimmerman with murder.  The Afro-American vote matters.  Likewise our President decided to cast a verdict 17 months ago.  (It was a campaign year and any issue that can gin up the vote) “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”  Nothing like identity politics.  Hey, maybe I should say, “If I had a cousin, he would look like George.”              

Fathers

Albert Speer notes in his huge book of recollections about Hitler and Nazism that the German high command thought the Americans were no big deal when they entered the war on the other side.  A bunch of mongrels of impure race, unable to get along and accomplish anything, was the analysis.  D-day put an end to such talk.  Speer, as German Industrial Minister, watched the Americans simply swamp the Nazi industry by a factor of ten, in planes and tanks and just about every other weapon.  And far from being wimps, they challenged relentlessly, in the Battle of the Bulge, in the Operation Cobra breakout, in Sicily and in crossing the Rhine. 

            Men are supposed to grow up to be dangerous, take risks and be society’s providers. When Igor Sikorsky, inventor of the helicopter, made a bomb at age 8, and detonated it on the front porch blowing out all the windows of the house, his mother said, “Wait until your father comes home.”  Dad came home, laughed at his son’s audacity and suggested that in the future they build the bombs together—after they’d fixed windows.  My own dad used to announce the day we would work cattle as “time for a rodeo.”  And the time I wished out loud that I could climb that massive Sycamore tree, 100 feet, tallest in the timber, my grandfather told me to climb on the hay stacker and he would give me a 20 foot head start up the trunk.  Psychologist John Eldridge calls this quest for risk the Cowboy Stage of a man which typically peaks in the pre-adolescent but really continues throughout a lifetime. Dads encourage the cowboy risk. Moms usually just worry about the behavior. 

            Followed by the cowboy stage comes the warrior.  Warriors become accomplished in something.  They achieve.  They find their purpose.  When little Charlie Curtis ran for help when the Cheyennes were about to attack his own tribe of Kaws, he ran 65 miles in 19 hours and no one could figure out how such a small boy could do this.  His own tribal elders called him aside and questioned.  He attributed it to determination and divine intervention  to give him strength.  The elders, all of whom had done dream quests as young men, understood and were much impressed.  The kid had passed muster and went on to be Vice President of the United States.  The Kaw tribe took a second look at his Christian faith.  Being an accomplished warrior can only be awarded by a father or a group of men.  No woman can tell you how to be a real man. 

            Creation requires all of us to submit in humility to a purpose and order larger than ourselves.  That is the lesson of warriorhood.  You can be accomplished but you are never a god.  You need God as a guide and the rest of humanity as a team in order to survive.  And that is what those men of D-day had despite being just a couple years removed from the Grapes of Wrath.  The Nazis were wrong.  These Americans hung together.  Japanese pilots marveled that the Yanks had inferior planes but flew in such formations that they were unstoppable.  The Germans knew their equipment was better.  The Yanks had not been ready for the war. But their cowboys-turned-warriors were.

            And men know they need God as a moral compass.  Teens with no dad turn to peers, and a bunch of insecure boys make up the rules as they go along.  There is no real morality when this happens. But real men are noble and virtuous.  

            In all that we know about military history, it is not the technology or the the equipment or the spit and polish that makes the winner.  It is the espirit de corps, the discipline, teamwork and determination that constitute about 90% while technology matters 10%.  Charles Martel and the Franks were correctly thought to be dumb, ill-equipped barbarians by the Moors.  “They stood like a wall” against the Moorish cavalry at Tours because they had been trained to fight together and fought for their lives.  The same was true of American backwoods militia at Cowpens in the Revolutionary War.

            There is still a highly successful military in the United States.  There are still highly successful young men coming out of intact families.  But there is the growing minority of boys with no dad.  Nobody cheers their  tree-climbing or when they successfully tear down the chicken house.  Nobody salutes their stamina when they stuck their head out the iced-over cab of a truck to drive home 10 miles in -40 weather.  Nobody told them to go apologize for insulting an elderly lady.  And so those kids are gangstas, seeking peer approval when no Army, no dad gives it.  Peter Drucker told a nation who didn’t listen in 1970 that they would pay for the divorce culture with maladjusted and listless workers in the future.  And with little inner moral compass.

            That, Speer says, is what was at the core of Hitler’s monstrosity.  He was a boy fighting his Jewish origins, determined to prove himself a German man, but attempting it in frightening ways—wild oratory, radical socialism, and persecution of Jews and others who weren’t Germanic. Speer himself, more or less roped into the Nazi regime when they needed an industrial minister to supply the war, was always an outsider to the strange, depraved inner circle of Hitler.

 

           I guess that leaves me no great fan of the nanny state.  Men, according to feminazis are just inseminators.  But who will teach the kids to be honorable and brave?  Instead we get much higher probability for drop outs and druggies, rapists and unemployeds. Even a father like Huck Finn's humorously bad dad who cussed everything and everybody, seems better than none.