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Bob, this is all good and well and Peter’s sharpshooter-like remarks are on target and Painfully insightful and jammed pack with forethought and good honest white intent as usual; but who the hell has been posting the Mantra lately? Anyone? Or have we given up the assault and taken to the trenches with cards and brandy and dreams of scantily clad women? I mean, just who the hell is manning the fort anyway?

Comment by Mark

ME:

Mark, you and I are fighting the more usual version of the Alamo and Thermopylae and Valley Forge. It was easy to be in World War II when everybody was being called, but how did the few at the Alamo manage to hold out to the death when they knew that their fellow Texans were not helping them because THEY “had lives.”

These are the times that try men’s souls. Every week I read one or two SF Sustaining Member posts that say, “I am a brave warrior, but somebody was mean to me so I’m taking my marbles and going home.” So if anybody wants to be offended, let me give them the chance.

One of the few posts I have rejected was old guy complaining about being asked to account for his blog entries. It went on about how tough a life he had led. He could have posted the Mantra twenty times with less effort.

I am sure that Shari and Elizabeth and others routinely drop money into the collection plate at their respective churches which is a tiny percentage of the amount that church spends fighting capital punishments or demanding race-mixing in diversity programs or backing Israel. But if one asked them to give our cause as much in a year as they drop into the collection plate in a week they would be appalled.

Someone says he is always putting the Mantra in. I doubt it, because if he were he would be getting some feedback that he couldn’t resist repeating here.

I may be wrong about all of this. But I was a professor and I used to tell my students, “Forget the excuses. I not only know them all, I’ve USED them all.”

So what can I do about it? The rational thing for lone warriors to do is to go home. I asked people to double up with you and no one did.

But I am looking for intellectual heirs, and I am finding and making some here. I need to get ideas out. So I concentrate on that. I use what I’ve got and it took me YEARS to get THIS group.

I would prefer that people made our battle at least on of their top ten priorities, but they won’t. This is Bob and Mark’s problem, the one the World War II Generation never had to face, the problem keeping up one’s MORAL courage. During WWII there were draft dodgers but they were universally despised or in prison for opposing the war.

As opposed to this rally-round-the-flag WWII stuff, which is relatively easy, a REAL fight, the fight in which you make history, is the one where you have to be there alone, and keep on fighting as if your people were not just lying there like broken dolls.

That is the way most important fights are REALLY won. It is NEVER the people who want to wait for a torchlight victory parade who win the REAL fights. The Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, was made a brigadier general, but at one point his entire army consisted of eight men getting eaten alive by mosquitoes in the swamp. I am sure their family was telling them, as mine told me, decade after decade, that I was a damned fool to keep doing this.

Going out and fighting for your people when they refuse to fight for themselves, or join the other side, is irrational and shows that one isn’t Truly Shrewd.

The Truly Shrewd person has a life. He never joins in until people like us have made the movement.

But Mark, those of us who do this despite everything are the ONLY people who make history. We are the ONLY people who have power.

Those who learn here will eventually teach. One has to settle for what one has, and this is the best I have ever been part of. Keep hitting them, Sarge, some may actually DO something sooner rather than later.

But they should not think they are fooling me, and you should not think I don’t know what I’m doing.