On Muscle Strains, Arterial Bleeds, and Discernment Regarding Modern Political Discourse

Topic: Perspective

Last July, my eight-year-old son Eli challenged me to do a front flip from a springboard at a crowded pool.  Eli is agile, which is certainly not a trait he inherited from his old man, and has very athletic tendencies that make him a quick study at new sports, or in this case, stunts and tricks.  Eli was also not quite 4’6” and 55 pounds at the time, or more than 2 feet and 180 pounds from matching me on the tale of the tape, and as such, flies through the air like a novice acrobat.

I resisted his pleas as he showed one diving technique after another and rubbed salt in my wounds by demonstrating a backflip.  I was more than happy to show him that, yes, I could execute not only a basic dive, but even a big, arcing, graceful swan dive that barely left a ripple on the surface of the water.  Still, it wasn’t enough.  The boy had to have his flip.  Caving to the pressure like a Republican congressman, I climbed that short ladder, measured my paces, returned to the back of the board – step, step, skip, preparatory jump, and - - -

Success.  I was 38 years old and just turned my first front flip in at least 15 years, while being substantially larger and spending little time in a pool compared to years gone by.  There was just one problem – as I left the springboard, my left calf muscle stretched itself to a length the seemed to match that of my entire leg.  I felt the pain while in the water as my miniature namesake celebrated the greatness of that ill-advised flip, and paddled over to the ladder, only to have extreme difficulty exiting the pool.  To say the least, I was almost completely hobbled and incapable of bearing the slightest weight on that leg.  I was confident the muscle was torn, and the massive bruising seemed to confirm my fears.  Application of a gauze wrap and alternating between ice and icy hot was the best my limited field medicine techniques could handle, and I did all I could to avoid the doctor, hobbling my way from one corner of the country to another until at long last, the muscle healed.  I had sustained only a strain.

A strain was not enough to force the cancellation of even one event or meeting for me.  Had I shattered my femur or broken my neck from diving into a shallow pool, the outcome would have been drastically different.  I consider this sort of self-triage like discerning the difference between a pulled muscle and an arterial bleed, and how the same spin applies to what I’ve come to believe about our geopolitical world, which influences my overall ideology.  I no longer readily identify as a conservative, though nearly all my personal views are going to reside to what we consider the political right of practically everyone who reads this article.  For example, I oppose all wasteful spending, 100% of foreign aid, and personally want all illegals back in their respective countries pronto, and I excuse no reason for infanticide.  What I believe about what will happen with those respective issues through the lens of reality is a different story.

Conservatism is a failed ideology, primarily because its obedience to rigid dogma untethered to pragmatism has resulted in its inability to scrutinize a changing world and to conserve anything.  Most of the legacy conservative voices who grew up around a fantastic American President, Ronald Reagan, are still waiting a little longer for the demographic groups who abandoned George Bush in 1992 to come back around more than three decades later when we can’t even conserve women’s sports or the right to run a family-owned business when a virus escapes a lab in an election year.  To them, the Cold War never concluded.  This doesn’t stop people from taking it personally when forced to confront the merits of holding such a system of belief when identifying solutions to decades-old problems independent of ideology appears to be the only way to save our country from the risk of suicide Abraham Lincoln warned would one day appear.

Before proceeding, let me set the record straight.  I do care about women’s sports being delegitimized – I have two daughters, and on that note, I do care about the abortion issue, though I consider such prevalent barbaric ideology to be as much of a sign that we have brought judgment upon our own heads as I do a political problem to be mitigated.  I do care about fiscal problems, especially when they involve sending billions to the world’s welfare cases who divide the spoils for personal enrichment.

Those things are muscle strains.  They may cause widespread devastation and decay, but ultimately can be reversed given enough time and that great wild card, elections that reflect the will of a pissed-off, fed-up people.  Muscle strains eventually heal given enough rest (time) and remediation.

Arterial bleeds, on the other hand, destroy the nation and everything it stands for.  I consider there to be four major issues that qualify as arterial bleeds that put our country on the path to national extinction:

I.                             Free and Fair Elections, whereas without them, the people have no say in a government purported to be of, by, and for the people, turning citizens into subjects and forcing them as hostages along for the plunge.

II.                         Trade Favoring Americans, rather than trade deals arranged for the enrichment of political cronies and at the expense of the working class, who loses factories and other manufacturing-based economic centers, and at the expense of the nation, which in the event of a legitimate worldwide conflict would be incapable of sustaining total war, requiring the means to support our own production of equipment, ammunition, bombs, aircraft, watercraft, and vehicles.

III.                      A Closed Border, which is a basic concept understood by all nations until the past three decades when it was realized that an open one would impoverish the minority working class, leading them to depend on a benevolent government, and provide an unending supply of cheap labor for corporations and donors.  The country is now subject to literal foreign invasion and is suffering under cartel activities and associated flow of dangerous drugs and trafficking activities.

IV.                     Military Restraint, which requires the nation to stop interfering in world affairs and sending service members to die in wars that cannot be won, such as the Global War on Terrorism, the Vietnam War, and anything else that can be dreamed up as tensions rise on the other side of the world.  Research the decline of the Roman Empire to fully understand the lasting impact of a welfare-warfare state.  This viewpoint does not mean I embrace full pacifism, but I came to believe sincerely that the military should be used to defend the homeland, not to be put into action because a series of fulfilled contingencies (the Taliban takes over Pakistan, then takes over India, then amasses 50 aircraft carriers, then must penetrate the east Asian seawall, and then poses a threat to U.S. possessions), when in reality a more effective way of combatting terrorism is to prevent immigration from unskilled people groups from countries that don’t embrace western ideals of freedom.

How exactly did I realize that conservative, even though I’m a very right-wing person, is a poor way to describe what I believe about political solutions?  When I realized the issues above are nation-threatening arterial bleeds, and none of the solutions to fix them come from conservative talking points.  It is not conservative to expect people to vote in person and on a sheet of paper, not any more than it is conservative for TSA to check your ID at the airport, or for the observer of your urine sample to ensure the sample came from your body.  It is not conservative to insist on jobs staying in America, when a few decades ago, you’d have been preserving jobs of people who voted largely with the pro-Democrat unions.  It is not conservative to suggest closing the border and deporting people here illegally – communist and socialist strongholds have the strictest border policies in the world.  Finally, it is not a hallmark of conservative thought to pull troops out of unwinnable wars. Even the hippies who shouted at my Dad at the airport in the 1960s knew that.

Muscle strains heal.  Arterial bleeds result in certain death if not immediately mitigated.  America’s annoying muscle strains, while troubling and perplexing, are deliberately seeded through media and select mouthpieces to keep the division at full throttle in this country.  People arguing everything in terms of red and blue fail to see the erosion of our national sovereignty caused by the national arterial bleeds that have resulted because our government sold out to global interests, and our politicians are influenced by compromise or financial control by foreign nations – including some a rapidly increasing segment of the American public are coming to realize are not our allies. 

Social issues do matter, but they are here because of the decline of morality and would improve if the hearts of the people turned back to faith and away from caring about what celebrities have to say about what they should support.  Times of societal change and revivals in or departures from faith come and go, and have for some time, but the most extreme, polarizing issues have been elevated to the forefront of the American mind in order to keep the people fighting – in order to keep those outrage monologues and segments alive for one more evening – all while the American birthright is being negotiated away by a few thousand political and cultural elites from a few dozen countries.

The distraction is real, and its comes in the form of muscle strains.  The sellout is also real, and identifying those arterial bleeds provides a blueprint for the freedom fighters of the modern age to live to fight another day.

Author’s Note: I encourage everyone to form their own opinions about what is going on in the world and to challenge themselves on everything they’ve been taught to believe about how the world runs today.  Laser focus is essential for identifying plausible means of solving key problems that impact our world.  If you’ve found this piece interesting and valuable, please share it, and please consider signing up as a paying member to this journal in order to support my mission.  Thank you.