Author: James Pasley

History of St. Patrick’s Day

HISTORY.COM EDITORS

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated annually on March 17, the anniversary of his death in the fifth century. The Irish have observed this day as a religious holiday for over 1,000 years.

On St. Patrick’s Day, which falls during the Christian season of Lent, Irish families would traditionally attend church in the morning and celebrate in the afternoon.

Lenten prohibitions against the consumption of meat were waived and people would dance, drink and feast–on the traditional meal of Irish bacon and cabbage.

So, who was St. Patrick?

St. Patrick was born in Britain—not Ireland—to wealthy parents near the end of the fourth century. He is believed to have died on March 17, around 460 A.D.

Although his father was a Christian deacon, it has been suggested that he probably took on the role because of tax incentives and there is no evidence that Patrick came from a particularly religious family. 

At the age of 16, Patrick was taken prisoner by a group of Irish raiders who were attacking his family’s estate.

They transported him to Ireland where he spent six years in captivity. (There is some dispute over where this captivity took place. Although many believe he was taken to live in Mount Slemish in County Antrim, it is more likely that he was held in County Mayo near Killala.) 

During this time, he worked as a shepherd, outdoors and away from people.

Lonely and afraid, he turned to his religion for solace, becoming a devout Christian. (It is also believed that Patrick first began to dream of converting the Irish people to Christianity during his captivity.)

After more than six years as a prisoner, Patrick escaped. According to his writing, a voice—which he believed to be God’s—spoke to him in a dream, telling him it was time to leave Ireland.

To do so, Patrick walked nearly 200 miles from County Mayo, where it is believed he was held, to the Irish coast.

After escaping to Britain, Patrick reported that he experienced a second revelation—an angel in a dream tells him to return to Ireland as a missionary. Soon after, Patrick began religious training, a course of study that lasted more than 15 years. 

After his ordination as a priest, he was sent to Ireland with a dual mission: to minister to Christians already living in Ireland and to begin to convert the Irish.

Familiar with the Irish language and culture, Patrick chose to incorporate traditional ritual into his lessons of Christianity instead of attempting to eradicate native Irish beliefs.

For instance, he used bonfires to celebrate Easter since the Irish were used to honoring their gods with fire.

He also superimposed a sun, a powerful Irish symbol, onto the Christian cross to create what is now called a Celtic cross, so that veneration of the symbol would seem more natural to the Irish. 

Although there were a small number of Christians on the island when Patrick arrived, most Irish practiced a nature-based pagan religion.

The Irish culture centered around a rich tradition of oral legend and myth. When this is considered, it is no surprise that the story of Patrick’s life became exaggerated over the centuries—spinning exciting tales to remember history has always been a part of the Irish way of life.

He may be known as the patron saint of Ireland, but Patrick was never actually canonized by the Catholic Church. This is simply due to the era he lived in.

During the first millennium, there was no formal canonization process in the Catholic Church. 

After becoming a priest and helping to spread Christianity throughout Ireland, Patrick was likely proclaimed a saint by popular acclaim.

In the centuries following St. Patrick’s death (believed to have been on March 17, 461), the mythology surrounding his life became ever more ingrained in the Irish culture.

Perhaps the most well-known legend of St. Patrick is that he explained the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) using the three leaves of a native Irish clover, the shamrock.

More than 100 St. Patrick’s Day parades are held across the United States; New York City and Boston are home to the largest celebrations.

Since around the ninth or 10th century, people in Ireland have been observing the Roman Catholic feast day of St. Patrick on March 17.

The first St. Patrick’s Day parade took place not in Ireland but in America. Records show that a St. Patrick’s Day parade was held on March 17, 1601 in a Spanish colony in what is now St. Augustine, Florida.

The parade, and a St. Patrick’s Day celebration a year earlier were organized by the Spanish Colony’s Irish vicar Ricardo Artur. 

More than a century later, homesick Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched in New York City on March 17, 1772 to honor the Irish patron saint. Enthusiasm for the St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York City, Boston and other early American cities only grew from there.

Over the next 35 years, Irish patriotism among American immigrants flourished, prompting the rise of so-called “Irish Aid” societies like the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick and the Hibernian Society.

Each group would hold annual parades featuring bagpipes (which actually first became popular in the Scottish and British armies) and drums.

In 1848, several New York Irish Aid societies decided to unite their parades to form one official New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Today, that parade is the world ‘s oldest civilian parade and the largest in the United States, with over 150,000 participants. Each year, nearly 3 million people line the 1.5-mile parade route to watch the procession, which takes more than five hours.

Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Savannah also celebrate the day with parades involving between 10,000 and 20,000 participants each.

Up until the mid-19th century, most Irish immigrants in America were members of the Protestant middle class.

When the Great Potato Famine hit Ireland in 1845, close to 1 million poor and uneducated Irish Catholics began pouring into America to escape starvation. 

Despised for their alien religious beliefs and unfamiliar accents by the American Protestant majority, the immigrants had trouble finding even menial jobs.

When Irish Americans in the country’s cities took to the streets on St. Patrick’s Day to celebrate their heritage, newspapers portrayed them in cartoons as drunk, violent monkeys.

The American Irish soon began to realize, however, that their large and growing numbers endowed them with a political power that had yet to be exploited.

They started to organize, and their voting block, known as the “green machine,” became an important swing vote for political hopefuls.

Suddenly, annual St. Patrick’s Day parades became a show of strength for Irish Americans, as well as a must-attend event for a slew of political candidates.

In 1948, President Harry S. Truman attended New York City‘s St. Patrick’s Day parade, a proud moment for the many Irish Americans whose ancestors had to fight stereotypes and racial prejudice to find acceptance in the New World.

As Irish immigrants spread out over the United States, other cities developed their own traditions. One of these is Chicago’s annual dyeing of the Chicago River green.

The practice started in 1962, when city pollution-control workers used dyes to trace illegal sewage discharges and realized that the green dye might provide a unique way to celebrate the holiday.

That year, they released 100 pounds of green vegetable dye into the river–enough to keep it green for a week. Today, in order to minimize environmental damage, only 40 pounds of dye are used, and the river turns green for only several hours.

Although Chicago historians claim their city’s idea for a river of green was original, some natives of Savannah, Georgia (whose St. Patrick’s Day parade, the oldest in the nation, dates back to 1813) believe the idea originated in their town.

They point out that, in 1961, a hotel restaurant manager named Tom Woolley convinced city officials to dye Savannah’s river green.

The experiment didn’t exactly work as planned, and the water only took on a slight greenish hue. Savannah never attempted to dye its river again, but Woolley maintains (though others refute the claim) that he personally suggested the idea to Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Today, people of all backgrounds celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, especially throughout the United States, Canada and Australia.

Although North America is home to the largest productions, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated around the world in locations far from Ireland, including Japan, Singapore and Russia.

In modern-day Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day was traditionally been a religious occasion. In fact, up until the 1970s, Irish laws mandated that pubs be closed on March 17.

Beginning in 1995, however, the Irish government began a national campaign to use interest in St. Patrick’s Day to drive tourism and showcase Ireland and Irish culture to the rest of the world. 

One icon of the Irish holiday is the Leprechaun. The original Irish name for these figures of folklore is “lobaircin,” meaning “small-bodied fellow.”

Belief in leprechauns probably stems from Celtic belief in fairies, tiny men and women who could use their magical powers to serve good or evil. In Celtic folktales, leprechauns were cranky souls, responsible for mending the shoes of the other fairies. 

Though only minor figures in Celtic folklore, leprechauns were known for their trickery, which they often used to protect their much-fabled treasure. Leprechauns have their own holiday on May 13, but are also celebrated on St. Patrick’s, with many dressing up as the wily fairies.

While St. Patrick’s Day is now associated with wearing green, parades and beer, the holiday is grounded in history that dates back more than 1,500 years.

Much of what is known about St. Patrick’s life has been interwoven with folklore and legend.

As I stated earlier, historians generally believe that St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was born in Britain (not Ireland) near the end of the 4th century.

At age 16 he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and sold as a slave to a Celtic priest in Northern Ireland.

After toiling for six years as a shepherd, he escaped back to Britain. He eventually returned to Ireland as a Christian missionary.

Among the legends associated with St. Patrick is that he stood atop an Irish hillside and banished snakes from Ireland—prompting all serpents to slither away into the sea.

In fact, research suggests snakes never occupied the Emerald Isle in the first place. There are no signs of snakes in the country’s fossil record. And water has surrounded Ireland since the last glacial period. Before that, the region was covered in ice and would have been too cold for snakes.

Another Irish legend centers around the shamrock, a three-leaf clover, that has been associated with Ireland for centuries.

It was called the “seamroy” by the Celts and was considered a sacred plant that symbolized the arrival of spring. According to legend, St. Patrick used the plant as a visual guide when explaining the Holy Trinity. By the 17th century, the shamrock had become a symbol of emerging Irish nationalism.

The meal that became a St. Patrick’s Day staple across the country—corned beef and cabbage—was an American innovation.

While ham and cabbage were eaten in Ireland, corned beef offered a cheaper substitute for impoverished immigrants.

Irish-Americans living in the slums of lower Manhattan in the late 19th century and early 20th, purchased leftover corned beef from ships returning from the tea trade in China. The Irish would boil the beef three times—the last time with cabbage—to remove some of the brine.

Corned beef and cabbage is one of the most popular meals to eat on St. Patrick’s Day. However, it’s not necessarily a traditional Irish recipe, as cows in Ireland were used more for their milk than their meat.

That changed in the late 1600s, according to Smithsonian Magazine, when cattle exports to England lowered the cost for salted beef production.

“The British invented the term ‘corned beef’ in the 17th century to describe the size of the salt crystals used to cure the meat, the size of corn kernels,” according to the magazine.

Ireland became a major corned beef producer for England and other countries because its salt tax was cheaper than England’s and it had large numbers of cattle. However, many of the Irish people still could not afford the meat for themselves.

In the 1800s, Irish immigrants in the U.S.—many of them in New York City—were able to acquire beef for themselves, primarily from Jewish butchers.

“The corned beef they made was from brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. “Since brisket is a tougher cut, the salting and cooking processes transformed the meat into the extremely tender, flavorful corned beef we know of today.”

These Irish immigrants were the ones who helped to shape St. Patrick’s Day into a cultural celebration that goes beyond its religious origin.

And of course, that celebration had to come with a special meal. “The immigrants splurged on their neighbor’s flavorful corned beef, which was accompanied by their beloved potato and the most affordable vegetable, cabbage,” Smithsonian Magazine says. “It didn’t take long for corned beef and cabbage to become associated with St. Patrick’s Day.”

In 1991, Congress proclaimed March to be Irish-American Heritage Month. It honors the achievements and contributions of Irish immigrants and their descendants who are living in the United States today.

As of 2020, nearly 10% of the U.S. population (or roughly 30.4 million people) claims Irish ancestry, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s more than the population of Ireland itself, which is around 5 million people.

Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, is the U.S. county with the most people (438,350 as of 2019) who claim Irish ancestry. And in 2019 there were 111,886 U.S. residents who reported their birthplace as Ireland. 

There are several cities in the U.S. whose names have an Irish theme. For instance, there are places in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and other states with the name of Shamrock. Plus, there are several cities named Dublin, including ones in California and Ohio. 

More whimsical Irish-themed towns include Emerald Isle, North Carolina, and the township of Irishtown, Illinois. Other locations feature the name Clover.

In closing, here are a few interesting St. Patrick’s Day facts to remember.

• Saint Patrick didn’t wear green. His color was “Saint Patrick’s blue.” The color green became associated with St. Patrick’s Day after it was linked to the Irish independence movement in the late 18th century.
• Despite his Irish notoriety, Saint Patrick was British. He was born to Roman parents in Scotland or Wales in the late fourth century.
• According to Irish legend, Saint Patrick used the shamrock as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity, father, son and holy spirit, when he was first introducing Christianity to Ireland.
• Saint Patrick is credited for driving the snakes out of Ireland, but according to the fossil record, Ireland has never been home to snakes as it was too cold to host reptiles during the Ice Age. The surrounding seas have kept snakes out since.
• There isn’t any corn in the traditional St. Patrick’s Day meal of corned beef and cabbage. The name is a reference to the large grains of salt historically used to cure meats, which were also known as “corns.”
• Saint Patrick was born “Maewyn Succat” but changed his name to “Patricius” after becoming a priest.
• Irish immigrants began observing St. Patrick’s Day in Boston in 1737 and the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in America was held in New York City in 1766.
• St. Patrick was never officially canonized as a saint.

So, there you have it folks. Hopefully, you have all learned a little something about St. Patrick’s Day and its rich traditions here in the US and will have a better understanding of the celebrations and the huge parade that will take place this coming weekend here in Lake Ozark.

Have a great time and be safe!

Callers? Do you have any St. Patty’s day stories you would like to share?

With what we are currently seeing come out of Washington D.C., one must ask the question. What is the purpose of government?

At the turn of the 20^th century, there were two major schools of thought. On one side, you had the social Darwininsts.

They believed in the concept of survival of the fittest and applied it to society and economics.

Rich are rich because they are more fit for business than poor people.

Big business and cutthroat tactics are justified because my business is more fit than yours.

They promoted Laisse Faire economics. “Live and let live, let nature take its course. In other words, no government interference in business or the economy.

In the area of world politics, my country is more fit than yours therefore it is ok if I destroy you in a war.

On the flip side, we saw the rise of the Progressive movement under Teddy Roosevelt. The Progressive opposed Darwinism and saw the plight of the common man and said the only way to fix things was for the government to step in and take control of society.

They pushed for government control of business and the economy.

They promoted federal welfare programs, public education, trade unions, economic controls on businesses and they pushed for federal regulations pertaining to nearly every aspect of American society.

All this was being promoted as a way to protect the little guy from people like the Carnegies, Vanderbilt’s, and Rockefellers.

Now folks, I will say right here that they both had it wrong. The problem is, both sides wanted it all one way or all the other.

So again, what is the role of government?

For the Founders, thinking about government began with the recognition that what man is given by nature — his capacity for reason and the moral law discovered by reason — is, in the most important respect, more valuable than anything government can give him.

However, the Founders thought that civilization is indispensable for human well-being. Although government can be a threat to liberty, government is also necessary for the security of liberty.

As Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But since men are not angels, without government, human beings would live in “a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.”

For the Founders, then, Government is always and fundamentally in the service of the individual, not the other way around.

The purpose of government is to enforce the natural law for the members of the political community by securing the people’s natural rights. It does so by preserving their lives and liberties against the violence of others.

In the founding, the liberty to be secured by government is not freedom from necessity or poverty. It is freedom from the despotic and predatory domination of some human beings over others.

Government’s main duty for the Founders was to secure that freedom — at home through the making and enforcement of criminal and civil law, abroad through a strong national defense.

The Progressives regarded the Founders’ scheme as defective.

They rejected the Founders’ conception of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of the individual pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state.

In accordance with their conviction that all human beings are by nature free, the Founders taught that political society is “formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good” (Massachusetts Constitution of 1780).

For the Founders, government was to be conducted under laws, and laws were to be made by locally elected officials, accountable through frequent elections to those who chose them.

The Progressives treated the social compact idea with scorn.

For the Progressives, it was of no great importance whether or not government begins in consent as long as it serves its proper end of remolding man in such a way as to bring out his real capacities and aspirations.

So, elections really shouldn’t matter. We, the government, know what is best for society.

For the Founders, government had to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.

A society like the Founders’ that limits itself to protecting life, liberty, and property was one in which, as Progressive President Woodrow Wilson wrote with only slight exaggeration, “all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform and say, ‘Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else.'” Wilson thought that such a society was unable to deal with the conditions of modern times.

Wilson rejected the earlier view that “the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible.”

He stated that a government of this kind is unjust because it leaves men at the mercy of predatory corporations. Without government management of those corporations, Wilson thought, the poor would be destined to indefinite victimization by the wealthy and that previous limits on government power must be abolished.

In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns.

First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on.

Second, government must become involved in the “spiritual” development of its citizens — not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment (“conservation”), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture. Does any of this sound familiar folks?

The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison).

The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. They had confidence that modern science had superseded the perspective of the liberally educated statesman. Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing.

Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. Government had taken on the vast responsibility not merely of protecting the people against injuries, but of managing the entire economy as well as providing for the people’s spiritual well-being.

Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.

What democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s will into concrete policies. It is not hard to see the connections between the progressive movement of the past and our current situation.

This is why I keep pushing for people to be more involved in local and state elections.

Whether one regards the transformation of American politics over the past century as good or bad, the foundations of that transformation were laid in the Progressive Era. Today’s liberals, and the teachers of today’s liberals, learned to reject the principles of the founding fathers from their teachers, the Progressives.

So how did we get where we are today? The progressive movement taught our current liberals some simple steps to follow. This is how it works:

Step One – Dramatize and Talk up the Problem

How many times have you heard that the problem is big business, corporate greed and Wall Street? The rich are getting richer while children are starving in the streets. We are constantly bombarded with this nonsensical narrative.

Look at the riots last summer,

Step Two – Make sure that no proper debate happens

What we get are sound bites, nothing more. No serious debate ever takes place. Both sides immediately revert to mudslinging and name calling, then move on to the next issue.

Now we have outright censoring on social media.

Step Three – Use the Mainstream Media and Public Institutions –

Do I even need to go here? We see media bias today like we have never seen throughout our history. I do most of my research on European news sources because I cannot get the true uncensored info here in the U.S.

Step Four – Use the Education System to Indoctrinate Children –

Our schools have become a breeding ground for the teachings of the progressive movement. Common core and the liberal takeover of our colleges and University have created an entire generation of young people who are totally clueless when it comes to the founding principles of our great nation.

The Covid pandemic played right into the hands of the progressive movement by taking education out of the hands of our teachers and standardizing what is taught to our kids through on-line learning.

Step Five – Legislate and get the Government to spend more money.

Here, the Progressives outdid themselves. They were successful in pushing through four constitutional amendments in a short span of roughly 10 years: the Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a direct income tax (This provided the money they needed); the Seventeenth Amendment, establishing direct elections to the United States Senate (This shifted power from the States to the Federal Government); the Eighteenth Amendment, imposing prohibition (This demonstrated the power now wielded by the Federal government in imposing social reform) ; and the Nineteenth Amendment, (Giving women the right to vote and progressives a huge number of political activists willing to join their cause for social reform).

See some similarities? Higher taxes on corporate America (16^th Amendment), election fraud (17^th Amendment), government mask mandates and business shut downs due to COVID-19 (Prohibition), and a huge influx of potential new voters thru open immigration policies (19^th Amendment).

Step Six – Intimidate –

Get into a discussion with a modern progressive and see how long it takes before you are told you are ignorant or labeled as a sexist, a racist, a bigot or a homophobe.

The irony here is that in the name of tolerance progressives impose their intolerance and tyranny.

Everyone in society is to be treated fairly and with dignity – except those who don’t agree with the progressive agenda! 

Good grief, just yesterday I heard that they are going after Dolly Parton because she won’t take a stand on politics. You can be persecuted simply for doing nothing! 

And what about the entire range of targets brought forth by the new cancel culture?

So folks, I find this interesting. Two years ago, I shared these six steps outlining how the progressive movement took control at the turn of the 20^th century.

Do you not find it fascinating that we are seeing the same program being implemented at the turn of the 21^st?

Have we learned nothing or are we simply doomed to sit back and watch history repeats itself again? 

In the past several months i have told you about the concerns i have with the direction our current education system is headed.

The removal of statues, revisionist history, cancel culture and just last week dr. Marvin Schulteis and I shared our research on the latest movement to remove certain books from our schools.

What would you say if I told you that this same situation has happened in the past?

Nazi Germany? The Soviet Union? Communist China?

Nope. All of those guesses would be wrong.

The answer is it was carried out by our own federal government in an effort to completely eliminate the thoughts and culture of people living here in the United States.

This federal program specifically targeted a group of people who opposed the policies of our federal government.

Does this sound familiar?

The people targeted were the American Indians.

The federal government had tried for years to forcibly make the Indians bow to the will of the federal government. Troops were sent in, forts were built, and thousands of people died.

All to no avail. The Indians were fierce fighters, excellent tacticians, and utilized guerilla warfare to their great advantage.

In 1874 an American expedition under col. George Armstrong Custer, entered the Sioux country in the black hills, and discovered gold.

Americans now demanded the Sioux land and American troops were sent in to protect miners who now flooded the region.

Red Cloud told his warriors it was hopeless to fight and pushed for peace.

But the young warriors including Red Cloud’s son joined the camps of Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa holy man, and Crazy Horse, the leading Oglala Sioux war leader.

Custer now headed for these camps along the river which the Sioux called greasy grass and the whites called the Little Big Horn (Montana).

Custer attacked with a force of 600 calvary.

About 2000 Indians were waiting for him.

Custer and all his men were killed.

The Sioux could win battles but not wars.  The Indians always proved more than a match for the soldiers.

What did the Indians in was that they had little time between battles to hunt for food, dry meat, and prepare hides.

The army now chased the Sioux throughout the winter, guided by Pawnees and Crows who were bitter enemies of the Sioux.

Pawnees and Crows could find the Sioux when the whites could not.

The war ended in the winter of 1876 –1877 , not through a great battle but by simply wearing the Sioux out, who now surrendered with their families.

Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse took the remainder of their followers to Canada, but even they eventually returned

Crazy Horse wound up on a reservation and did not take well to that way of life. Constantly at odds with the authorities, Crazy Horse was killed by bayonet wound from a soldier in a guardhouse scuffle on sept. 5, 1877.

Sitting Bull would die years later shot down by Indian police, sent out to arrest him  for his support of the ghost dance movement.

Ghost dance movement- religious movement led by Paiute holy man named Wovoka.  Said there would be a day that Indians would raise from the dead and all white men would disappear and that the buffalo would return.

The religion said you must not hurt or harm anyone, and you must not fight.  Indians were to dance in a large circle calling to the spirits of their ancestors.

If their faith was strong enough, the old world of their fathers would return, the whites would vanish, and the buffalo would return. This was called the ghost dance.

The murder of Crazy Horse led to a long string of battles that came to an end with the slaughter of the remaining Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee South Dakota.

By 1876, only the Apaches stood in the way of complete American control of the west.

In the late 1860’s and early 1870’s most of the Apaches had settled on the reservations.

Victorio of the Mimbre Apaches and Geronimo of the Chiricahuas Apaches were the last to resist being put on a reservation.

Victorio escaped from the reservation in 1879 and conducted raids in both the U.S. and Mexico before he was finally cornered and killed by Mexican soldiers in 1880.

Geronimo as well escaped the reservation in 1885 and led a reign of terror until he was captured on September 4, 1886.

Once captured, he and his people were moved first to a reservation in Florida, then Alabama, and finally to a reservation in Ft. Sill Oklahoma in1894.

Geronimo now became a popular attraction for parades and expositions (1904 worlds fair) My grandmother saw him there.

Even with these US military victories over the Indians, above all else, the Indians were strong willed and refused to be broken.

From the beginning of the Indian Wars, it became apparent that the military simply could not eradicate the entire Indian problem in the west.

So, what could be done?

During the 1850’s and 1860’s the eastern protestant churches pushed for an end to the atrocities being committed on the Indian people.

Bishop Henry Whipple, (not Mr. Whipple of Charmin TP fame)of the episcopal church was one of the first reformers to dominate American Indian policy after the civil war.

He was convinced that the only way the Indians could survive would be their rapid adoption of Christianity and Anglo-American culture.

Whipple told Congress that Indian administration must be reformed.

Whipple’s followers called themselves friends of the Indians and argued that Indians were inferior to whites not because of their capacity to learn, but because they were like children-they were still advancing up the ladder of civilization.

Therefore, reformers believed that for Indians to survive, they had to shed everything that made them Indian.

If the Indians refused, reformers would have to force them to do so for their own good.

Indian culture was to be destroyed in order to save the Indian people.

Reformers sincerely believed this was a policy of kindness, honesty, and justice.

So folks, let’s stop right there for a second. The federal government agreed with the reformers that the best way to handle the Indians was to destroy their culture.

The saying was, “Kill the Indian, Save the man”.

I must ask the question. Is what we are seeing today a policy of “Kill the Conservative, save the man?” Am I too far out there?

Let’s go back to our story and you decide.

The federal govt backed this policy and turned over the management of most Indian reservations to the churches.

President Grant in 1870, now invited the churches to nominate people to run the reservations and Congress created a board of Indian commissioners to oversee the administration of Indian affairs.

In opposition to this reform movement were those who wanted to give the army total control over Indian affairs.

Reformers staved off army control but the army continued to kill Indians.

By 1880 the majority of Indians in the American West had either been killed or put on reservations.

Most Indians on reservations now depended on government payments and rations for their survival. Again, sound familiar?

This dependency gave the government absolute control over the Indians.

Between 1881 and 1897 the bureau of Indian affairs doubled in size with nearly 4000 employees

The bureau now became centralized under the leadership of Carl Schurz, Sect. of the Interior under Pres Rutherford B. Hayes.

The Indian bureau now launched a direct assault on Indian culture by withholding rations, imprisonment, forcibly cutting men’s hair, seizing children for schools, physically breaking up religious ceremonies, and seizing religious objects

Reformers backed the prohibition of Indian religious practices and now turned their attention to the Indian children

The reformers believed that the key to civilizing the Indian nations was to educate the children.

They felt that if they could educate the children, the old religions and cultures of the Indians would eventually just die out as the kid grew up and took control of Indian society

Does any of this sound familiar folks?

The most famous of the Indian educators wasRichard Pratt

Pratt was an army officer in charge of Kiowa and Comanche prisoners sent to Florida after the red river wars in Northern Texas.

In 1879 based on his success in educating Indians, he convinced the government to establish the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania

At Carlisle, Pratt adopted the policy of isolating Indian children from their tribes, forcing them to speak English, and follow Anglo American customs

Reformers believed that until they eliminated existing Indian beliefs, they could not assimilate Indians into society.

It was Pratt who stated “the goal is to kill the Indian and save the man”

Needless to say, the boarding school system failed to achieve the results it desired

Some students returned to reservations without skills

Others returned with skills that couldn’t be used on a reservation

Many students now found themselves out of place in communities whose religions and beliefs they did not understand

Wait. What? The schools taught the kids lessons that isolated them from the culture of their parents?

Surely that couldn’t happen now. Or is it? Is this what cancel culture is striving to achieve?

Finally, the schools were expensive to maintain and were not providing the results Congress had hoped for.

The reformers now also pushed for a program which would take Indian lands and convert them to private property.

The reformers believed that as long as Indian lands were held as common property, Indians would continue with their tribal customs

Also, as Indian populations declined, the reformers felt that the Indians held too much land for them to function efficiently

Therefore, the reformers now pushed through programs which would take this “excess land” and sell it to white settlers.

This process was known as “severalty” (ie severe the land from the reservation)

The main severalty measure was the Dawes act

Dawes act – submitted by Senator Henry Dawes of Mass. in 1887.

Indian lands would be divided up and each Indian head of family was to get 160 acres which would be held in a trust by the government for 25 years.

The decision to divide up Indian lands rested with the President of the US, not the Indians.

If the president decided to divide up a reservation and sell off the excess, there was nothing the Indians could do about it.

In 1881 Indians held 155,623,312 acres.

In just 9 years, 1890, they held 104,314,349 (51 millionacres lost)

By 1900 the figure was 77,865,373 (half of all indian lands)

Between 1887 and 1934, the Indians lost another 66 percent of their allotted lands.

The only exception to the Dawes act was that of the 5 civilized tribes of Oklahoma who obtained an exemption from the act.

Settlers now wanted the Oklahoma territory and pushed for severalty of the 5 civilized tribe’s land holdings.

The problem was, these Indians had successfully set up a community in which every Indian had a home of his own, and there were no paupers in the nation

These Indians owed no one, had built a capitol, schools, and hospitals.

With no problems to point to, reformers now used the Indian’s success against them.

So, the Indians were damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Resist and the federal government would call in troops, comply and you were forced to give up your very identity including your beliefs, language, and culture.

Is that where we are today? Has the federal government given up on fighting those who resist far left policies and now see the success obtained in the past by focusing on the children in an effort to obtain compliance from the parents?

Are they just waiting for us old folks to die out and let the next generation of kids, indoctrinated in our colleges and universities, to take over?

I hate to burst their bubble, but if they would study their history, they would see that the whole Indian reform movement failed.

Why? You can indoctrinate the kids, tear down the statues, burn all the books, and censor those who speak out, but you will never be able to keep the people from privately speaking to their family, friends, and associates.

That is how the Indian culture survived. Behind closed doors, grandma and grandpa shared their beliefs, language, and culture with their kids and grandkids who then passed it on to the next generation.

Reformers contended that the Indians, while successful, had gone as far as they could go as a civilization.

In 1893, the Dawes Commission ruled in favor of severalty of the civilized tribe’s lands

When the Indians resisted, Congress passed the Curtis act of 1898 which unilaterally terminated all tribal governments in the united states.

In 1903 the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had absolute power to regulate Indian affairs even when congressional actions violated existing treaty provisions

Indians were now seen as incompetent children for whom the government was responsible.

So folks, once again, I think history is repeating itself.

Is the goal of this new “Woke” society we hear so much about an effort to break the will and remove the culture of the conservative, patriotic, populace of the United States?

If it is, they are following a playbook that worked extremely well from the1860’s into the early 1900’s.

The American Indians have survived but look where they are today. Is that our future as well? 

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55039/how-the-disrupttexts-movement-can-help-english-teachers-be-more-inclusive

How the #DisruptTexts Movement Can Help English Teachers Be More Inclusive

Katrina Schwartz in an interview on KQED an NPR station in San Francisco on January 5^th , 2020

 According to Ms. Schwartz, most English teachers love to read and share the literature that has touched them over the years. They want their students to value and love reading, too.

But sometimes the books adults love aren’t the stories that resonate with young people, for all kinds of reasons. As U.S. classrooms become more racially and culturally diverse, many students don’t see themselves reflected in the literature their teachers hold up as worthy of study, stated Ms. Schwartz.

The recent National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference offered numerous sessions featuring authors with traditionally marginalized identities, as well as teachers who are working hard to change how and what they teach.

Almost every session with this focus emphasized that educators interested in doing this work need to first examine their own beliefs and biases before jumping into the work.

Some of the leaders of this conversation are four educators of color– Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Kim Parker and Julia Torres.  They’re the founders of the #DisruptTexts Twitter chats and website, and authors of a forthcoming book.

Every Monday, they post reflection questions about texts commonly taught in high school under the hashtag #DisruptTexts. Over the course of the week, teachers respond to the questions, and engage with one another, in a “slow chat” that doesn’t require everyone to be online at the same time. When the chat is over, the organizers archive the chat and summarize some of the reflections and ideas that emerged.

“It’s about creating an equitable and inclusive curriculum, notice that I did not say diverse,” said high school English teacher Tricia Ebarvia, as she kicked off a session about the core values of the #DisruptTexts movement in a packed ballroom at NCTE.

Ebarvia urged educators to think carefully about the message their current curriculum sends to students about whose voices and stories are worthy of academic study.

Now folks, we have been teaching the writings of the Greeks and romans for over 1000 years.

I would like to know how these people now think that they have the power to determine what is worthy of academic study.

Ebarvia and the other founders have seen enough interest in this conversation that they’ve distilled it into four key pillars of their movement.

Pillar #1: Continuously interrogate our own biases to understand how they inform our teaching.

“Folks tend to skip over the necessary stage of interrogating themselves before jumping into diverse texts,” said Julia Torres, a #DisruptTexts founder and teacher-librarian in Colorado.

Bias often shows up in knee-jerk reactions to discussions about changing the texts students read. And if teachers haven’t considered the factors that influence their thinking, or how their experiences and upbringing might inform what they do in the classroom, then adding new texts to the curriculum won’t be as transformative for students as it could be. After all, teachers set the tone; they’re the models and wield power over students’ lives.

“Literature written by white authors tends to exclude or misrepresent the experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),” Torres said. “We want own-voices texts. And there are lots of authors who will back up that desire.”

She also urged teachers to think carefully about how much space they create in their classrooms for students to voice discomfort with specific texts or their opinions about alternatives. “We have to really consider how are we rewarding conformity and punishing resistance,” Torres said.

As teachers dig into self-exploration work at the foundation of the #DisruptTexts movement, Torres boils it down to five points:

1. Figure out where you are. Be honest about where you are. Recognize people won’t all be in the same place.
2. Look for tools that will help you expand your world with your students. Listen to students.
3. Be honest with yourself about whether you’re creating ways for students to push back safely.
4. Consider ways to empower students by involving them in the practice of decolonizing thinking.
5. Recognize the ways we are all complicit in perpetuating systemic oppression and consequently responsible for dismantling it.

Pillar #2: Center black, Indigenous, and voices of color in literature

A quick search of the most commonly read high school texts turns up a lot of white male authors: Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Poe, Hawthorne.

“So much of our literary canon is centered on the white gaze and written by white male authors,” said Lorena Germán.

The dominance of white-authored texts in the curriculum is a problem for Germán and the other #DisruptTexts founders. They don’t see those stories connecting with their students, and worse, some of those stories actively exclude their students.

“It is for white people, by white people, and about white people,” Germán said. “That is the message that is received. That is the message I received in school.”

Germán urged teachers to find books that explore “the intersections and the margins,” to look for complex identities that resist stereotypes. She’d like to see teachers fill what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas calls the “racial imagination gap,” the implicit message, even in fantastical works, that people of color are the villains and monsters.

Intentionally replace some texts. “There are some books that in and of themselves are problematic,” Germán said. “They feature characters that are straight-up racist or sexist. That is true. We can replace those texts.”

Pillar #3: Apply a critical literacy lens to our teaching practices

“It’s not just about having a checklist of diverse books,” said Tricia Ebarvia.

Ebarvia explained that at its core, critical literacy is understanding that the world is a socially constructed text that can be read and analyzed like other texts.

“There is no neutral,” Ebarvia said, which means school is not about acquiring knowledge, but rather thinking deeply about the meaning we ascribe to that knowledge.

Critical literacy is not a unit of study, but rather a way of reading the world. When teachers help students to read the world critically it can open up powerful conversations. It may even give students permission to share their lived experiences, or ways they do and don’t see themselves in school texts, in unexpected ways.

Pillar #4: Work in community with others, especially BIPOC

“Community is built on accountability,” said Dr. Kim Parker. She urged educators to work at de-centering whiteness in schools and in the curriculum.

She called on white educator allies to lift up the voices of BIPOC colleagues, especially those who don’t already get a lot of attention.

“We’re not trying to save anyone,” Parker said. “We’re trying to be in service with.”

That means honoring the knowledge and power in the community, the connectors, and the ways of getting things done. Be humble. Listen.

She called on white educators who believe in this work to stand up for it to administrators, parents, and other teachers.

So there you have it folks. We have already seen how political science and history are slowly being removed from the classroom while statues are torn down in nearly every public square in America.

Now we see this new movement designed to remove the writings of the greatest minds in the history of all mankind, simply because of the race or ethnicity of the authors.

Is this benefitting or harming our children?

So here we are dealing with a new president who is cranking out executive orders nearly every day.

Article from the Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org/political-process/heritage-explains/executive[JP1] -orders

But what exactly is an executive order?

And why was it such a big deal, for example, that President Biden moved to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation using his executive powers? By the way, Obama did the same thing.

Put simply, an executive order is a type of written instruction that presidents use to work their will through the executive branch of government.

From George Washington on, our presidents have issued many forms of directives, the most familiar being executive orders and two others: Presidential memoranda and presidential proclamations.

One proclamation, the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, is taught to students in school with some oversimplification, “freed the slaves.”

Each of these forms may direct the actions of government officials and agencies, and possibly affect the legal rights and responsibilities of private parties.

The main difference between them is that federal law requires, with few exceptions, executive orders and proclamations “of general applicability and Legal effect” to be published in the Federal Register, where federal regulations are published. Other directives may be published or not, at the president’s discretion.

Under our system of government, the president’s authority to issue such orders (or to engage in any other form of unilateral executive action) must come from the Constitution or federal law. Put another way, an executive order can be used to execute a power the commander in chief already has. It can’t be used to give the presidency new powers.

In particular, Article II of the Constitution assigns the president the roles of commander in chief, head of state, chief law enforcement officer, and head of the executive branch. The president has the sole constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and is granted broad discretion over federal law enforcement decisions.

“He has not only the power, but also the responsibility to see that the Constitution and laws are interpreted correctly,” Heritage Foundation scholar Todd Gaziano wrote in 2001.

When the president lawfully exercises one of these responsibilities, scholars generally agree, the scope of his authority to issue executive orders and other directives is especially broad. As such, Congress has little ability to regulate or limit that authority.

When a president’s authority comes from power granted by statute, Congress is free to negate or modify that authority, or pass legislation to nullify the order itself, because the Constitution empowers Congress to make the laws that govern us. Still, the president has to sign the law enacting that change, unless Congress is able to override his veto.

Federal courts also may strike down executive orders that exceed the scope of the president’s authority, as an appeals court did with President Bill Clinton’s order forbidding government contracts with businesses that employed strike-breakers, and the Supreme Court did with his order requiring the government to use foreign languages in providing federal benefits and services.

This is why it was so important to gain the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and why the Democrats want to stack the court with liberal judges. The Supreme Court has the power to declare Biden’s Executive Orders as unconstitutional.

Washington and his successors as president have issued thousands of executive orders.

The State Department began numbering them in 1907, working from files going back to 1862. The Federal Register Act of 1936 built on that effort. Today, the official number is close to 14,000.

Washington issued a total of eight executive orders in his two terms, while John Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe all issued only one. Presidents who issued the least also include Thomas Jefferson (four) and John Quincy Adams (three).

Lincoln, with 48 executive orders, was the first to approach 50. Ulysses Grant with 217 was the first to break 200, and he held that record until Theodore Roosevelt came along (1,081). Other leading issuers of executive orders include Woodrow Wilson (1,803), Calvin Coolidge (1,203), Herbert Hoover (968), and Harry Truman (907).

The record holder by far, though, is Franklin Roosevelt with 3,721—five of which the Supreme Court overturned in 1935. Other modern presidents and their tallies include Dwight Eisenhower (484), Lyndon Johnson (325), Richard Nixon (346), Jimmy Carter (320), Ronald Reagan (381), George H.W. Bush (166), Bill Clinton (364), and George W. Bush (291), Barack Obama 276 and Donald Trump 220.

Congressional Latitude

Scholars say Congress has some latitude in defining the procedures the president must follow to exercise executive authority. Even so, the Constitution imposes some limits on the lawmakers’ ability to micromanage the president’s decision-making and enforcement of laws.

The constitutional separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches not only supports but limits a president’s authority to issue executive orders and other directives. So some friction naturally occurs.

It’s important to consider that the measure of abuse of this presidential authority isn’t the total number of directives, but whether any were illegal or improper.

While Reagan and both Bushes—all Republican presidents—issued significant numbers of executive orders, conservative scholars argue that Democrats Clinton and Obama routinely overstepped their authority to issue such directives in areas where Congress had not acted.

During the Obama presidency, Congress frequently clashed with the executive branch on his use of executive orders and other unilateral actions that he undertook. Obama, however, isn’t the first president to face a backlash.

Some of the more controversial executive orders or actions of the modern presidency include:

1933

Franklin Roosevelt’s orders forbidding the hoarding of gold during the Depression and, during World War II, giving the military authority to confine Japanese and German Americans to guarded camps.

1948

Truman’s 1948 order racially integrating the armed forces, and his 1952 order putting all steel mills under federal control.

1957

Eisenhower’s order desegregating public schools.

1961

John F. Kennedy’s order requiring government contractors to “take affirmative action” to hire and treat employees without regard to “race, creed, color, or national origin.”

1996

Clinton’s multiple orders allowing preferential treatment in federal contracting based on race or ethnicity in 2000, and authorizing the government to take private land under the Antiquities Act of 1906 (including his 1996 designation of 1.7 million acres in Utah as a national monument).

2001

George W. Bush’s 2001 order restricting public access to the papers of former presidents, and his 2008 order directing federal agencies to ignore future budget earmarks that lawmakers don’t vote on and include in legislation that passes.

In the case of Obama’s action granting amnesty to illegal immigrants and allowing them to apply for work permits, states asked the federal courts to step in and halt this executive amnesty. And they did so, at least temporarily, pending future rulings on whether those actions were constitutional and should be permanently applied.

Conservatives argued that Obama used executive orders to achieve results he failed to get through Congress, not only on immigration but on issues such as health care, gun control, cybersecurity, energy, the environment, education, and gender identity, among others.

Now, as I said, U.S. Presidents have issued executive orders since 1789, usually to help officers and agencies of the executive branch manage the operations within the federal government itself.

Executive orders have the full force of law, since they are typically made because of certain Acts of Congress, some of which specifically delegate to the President some degree of discretionary power (delegated legislation), or are believed to take authority from a power granted directly to the Executive Branch by the Constitution.

However, these perceived justifications cited by Presidents when authoring Executive Orders have come under criticism for exceeding Executive authority at various times throughout U.S. history. In other countries, similar edicts may be known as decrees.

So, are Executive Orders Constitutional?

In Article I Section I of the Constitution it is clear that all legislative powers reside in Congress.

The Executive Branch has the responsibility to execute the laws passed by Congress.

An Executive Order is not legislation. It is an order issued by the President to enforce laws passed by the Congress.

While Executive Orders are not mentioned in the Constitution it has been a precedent for a President to issue Executive Orders that he deems to be necessary and proper.

This is where my good friend Marvin Schulteis and I have had some interesting discussions over a few cocktails.

The “Necessary and Proper” clause in the Constitution found in Article I Section 8 was not intended to give Congress and the President the authority to do whatever they felt was a good idea.

This clause meant that Congress had the authority to pass any legislation that was necessary and proper to implement the powers delegated to the United States in Article I Section 8.

The President is the Chief Administrative Officer of the Executive Branch of Government and has the authority to implement policies and procedures that are necessary for the administration of the duties and responsibilities that have been assigned to him by the Constitution.

Policies and procedures passed by Congress are called laws and affect all of the people. An Executive Order is a policy or procedure issued by the President that is a regulation that applies only to employees of the Executive Branch of government.

Any Executive Order that has any effect on individuals that are not government employees is a violation of Article I Section I. Whenever the President issues an Executive Order that extends to all of the people. Congress has a responsibility to the people to veto any Executive Order that has any effect on nongovernmental employees.

When a President issues an unconstitutional Executive Order and Congress allows the order to stand they are violating their oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Executive Orders have two main functions: to modify how an executive branch department or agency does its job (rule change) or to modify existing law, if such authority has been granted to the President by Congress.

Again, Executive Orders are not mentioned by the Constitution, but they have been around a long, long time. George Washington issued several Presidential Proclamations, which are similar to EO’s (Proclamations are still issued today). EO’s and Proclamations are not law, but they have the effect of statutes. A typical modern Proclamation might declare a day to be in someone’s honor.

A typical EO might instruct the government to do no business with a country we are at war with. Executive orders are subject to judicial review, and can be declared unconstitutional.

Again, this is why everyone is looking to the Supreme Court.

Until 1952, there were no rules or guidelines outlining what the president could or could not do through an executive order.

However, the Supreme Court ruled in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, that Executive Order 10340 from President Harry S. Truman placing all steel mills in the country under federal control was invalid because it attempted to make law, rather than clarify or act to further a law put forth by the Congress or the Constitution.

Presidents since this decision have generally been careful to cite which specific laws they are acting under when issuing new executive orders.

Wars have been fought upon executive order, including the 1999 Kosovo War during Bill Clinton‘s second term in office. However, all such wars have had authorizing resolutions from Congress.

The extent to which the president may exercise military power independently of Congress and the scope of the War Powers Resolution remain unresolved constitutional issues, although all presidents since its passage have complied with the terms of the Resolution while maintaining that they are not constitutionally required to do so.

Use of US military assets by President Barrack Obama by executive order in the 2011-2012 overthrow of Khadafi in Libya was never approved by any Congressional resolution, the one exceptional case in US history.

Critics have accused presidents of abusing executive orders, of using them to make laws without Congressional approval, and of moving existing laws away from their original mandates.

Large policy changes with wide-ranging effects have been enacted through executive order, including the integration of the armed forces under Harry Truman and the desegregation of public schools under Dwight D. Eisenhower.

One extreme example of an executive order is Executive Order 9066, where Franklin D. Roosevelt delegated military authority to remove any or all people (used to target specifically Japanese Americans and German Americans) in a military zone. The authority delegated to General John L. DeWitt subsequently paved the way for all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to be sent to internment camps for the duration of World War II.

Since the Democrats now have control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, why all of the Executive Orders?

The simple answer?

Enacting bills into law is really, really difficult, and if Congress had to agree on every single detail before sending it to the president’s desk for a signature, they would never get any of these changes made.

But by passing Executive Orders that are more general in nature, and relying on agency expertise to fill in the blanks, everything gets done much quicker.

So basically it is easier. Congress tell Biden what they want, and he writes an executive order. Done deal.

So, hopefully you now have a better understanding of what an executive order is and what can be done to stop it.

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Just last week a caller asked if I could do a show on Taiwan. It shows how sharp our listeners are. Sure enough, Taiwan has just now popped up in the news.

According to the Taiwan News — Fifteen Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday (Jan. 24), marking the 20th intrusion this month.

Two Chinese Army Air Force Y-8 anti-submarine warfare planes, two SU-30 fighter jets, four J-16 fighter planes, six J-10 jet fighters, and one  Y-8 reconnaissance plane conducted sorties in the southwest corner of Taiwan’s air defense zone, according to the Ministry of National Defense (MND).

In response, the Taiwan military scrambled fighter jets, broadcast radio warnings, and deployed air defense missile systems to track the Chinese planes.

The 15 Chinese planes on Sunday are the highest number of planes spotted on a single-day in Taiwan’s air space so far this year.

Since mid-September of last year, Beijing has been regularly sending planes into Taiwan’s air space. Most instances occurring in the southwest corner of the zone involved one to three Chinese aircraft, usually reconnaissance planes.

The U.S. military announced on Sunday the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group (TRCSG) had entered the disputed South China Sea on Jan. 23 to promote “freedom of the seas.”

According to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, “The carrier is on a scheduled deployment to the U.S. 7th Fleet to ensure freedom of seas, build partnerships that foster maritime security, and conduct a wide range of operations.”

So what do the Taiwanese have to say about this?

Taiwanese military analysts said Sunday (Jan. 24) the weekend’s record number of Chinese military planes flying into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) symbolize Beijing’s commitment to the “one China” principle and also serve as a test for the Joe Biden administration.

Have I not said that the rest of the world is watching our internal strife and would soon challenge us?

Lin Ying-yu, an assistant professor at the Institute of Strategic and International Affairs at National Chung Cheng University, said there were three major reasons behind the air space incursions: diplomatic, military, and “transfer of internal pressure”.

In terms of diplomacy, Lin pointed out that Beijing wanted to convey to Washington that no matter which party is in the White House, Democrat or Republican, China’s policy toward Taiwan will never change.

Militarily, the exercises were in response to the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group conducting operations in the South China Sea on Saturday.

Lin speculated the strike group’s training may have included submarines, thereby explaining why Chinese H-6K bombers were seen armed with anti-ship missiles.

Regarding internal pressure, Lin said that Beijing hoped to divert attention from a recent increase of COVID-19 outbreaks across China.

By conducting military operations, it would demonstrate to its citizens the Chinese military has not suffered from the epidemic and is still able to fight. 

Lieutenant General Chang Yen-ting a retired Air Force deputy commander, stated the Chinese incursions into Taiwan’s airspace on Saturday and Sunday are akin to “hitting three birds with one stone.”

Chang observed that in contrast to former President Donald Trump’s unpredictable style, Biden’s approach to regional diplomacy seems easier to grasp. Therefore, China dispatched its military planes as a “stress test” to see how Biden would react.

Chang also pointed out that although the H-6K bomber is a slow aircraft, it is a variant designed for offensive missions with a maximum range of up to 5,000 kilometers. The presence of such a plane proves the Chinese Air Force has transformed from a defensive air force to an offensive one, he stated.

The retired commander said that China’s operations were “obviously targeted toward the U.S.” and were meant to “militarily intimidate Taiwan.”

Chang suggested that Taiwan must avoid any incidents that could spark an all-out war.

Good grief folks. All-out war with China? Who are theses guys? Why does everyone seem focused on Taiwan, an island 100 miles off the coast of mainland China?

Well how about a little history?

An article by Kallie Szczepanski, found at ThoughtCo .com in August of 202 gives us some of the facts and history of Taiwan.

When Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, they signed control of Taiwan over to mainland China.

However, since China was embroiled in the Chinese Civil War, the United States was supposed to serve as the primary occupying power in the immediate post-war period.

Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, the Koumintang Party, disputed American occupation rights in Taiwan and set up a Republic of China (ROC) government there in October of 1945.

After the war, the Taiwanese people greeted the Chinese as liberators from harsh Japanese rule, but the ROC soon proved corrupt and inept.

Who is Chiang Kai Shek? Glad you asked.

In 1925, Chiang succeeded Sun Yat-sen as leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, known as the Kuomintang, or KMT. As head of the KMT, Chiang expelled the communist arm of the party and succeeded in unifying China.

Under Chiang, the KMT focused on preventing the spread of Communism in China and fighting increasing Japanese aggression.

When the United States declared war on Japan in 1941, Chiang and China swore their allegiance and assistance to the Allies.

You heard me right. Chiank Kai Shek was our ally in WWII.

He and his brother in law, Sun Yat Sen were fighting a civil war in China prior to the outbreak of the war. The Koumintang Party of Chiang Kai Shek was fighting against the old samurai class of warlords who ruled China at the time.

Now not wanting to be left out, the Chinese Communist party now jumps into the civil war.

So, Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek are fighting Samurai warlords and communists in the civil war prior to WWII breaking out. Sun Yat Sen died and leadership of the party now passed to Chiang Kai Shek.

Chiang Kai Shek wants a parliamentary form of government like that of the British.

Seeing the internal strife of the civil war, Japan saw it as the perfect opportunity to attack and take China.

When the world war breaks out, we now ally with Chiang Kai Shek in fighting against the Japanese invasion of China.

See what I am saying?!

After WWII the Chinese civil war resumed and in 1946, Communist forces led by Mao Zedong, a.k.a. Chairman Mao, overthrew Chiang and created the People’s Republic of China.

Chiang Kai Shek and his party now fled to Taiwan.

From 1949 until his death in 1975, the exiled Chiang continued to lead the Koumintang government in Taiwan, recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate government of China.

Chiang Kai-shek never relinquished his claim over mainland China; likewise, the People’s Republic of China continued to claim sovereignty over Taiwan.

The United States, preoccupied with the occupation of Japan, abandoned the Koumintang in Taiwan to its fate, fully expecting that the Communists would soon route Chiang Kai Shek’s party from the island.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, however, the US changed its position on Taiwan.

President Harry S Truman sent the American Seventh Fleet into the Straits between Taiwan and the mainland to prevent the island from falling to the Communists.

The US has supported Taiwanese independence ever since.

This brings us to the Cold War period and I found more great info in an article by Lauren Mack at ThoughtCo.com written on Aug. 28, 2020.

US military intervention forced Mao’s government to delay its plan to invade Taiwan. At the same time, with US backing, Chiang Kai Shek’s regime on Taiwan continued to hold China’s seat in the United Nations.

Aid from the US and a successful land reform program helped Chiag Kai Shek’s Republic of China government solidify its control over the island and modernize the economy.

However, under the fear of ongoing civil war, Chiang Kai-shek continued to suspend the ROC constitution and Taiwan remained under martial law.

Chiang’s government began allowing local elections in the 1950s, but the central government remained under authoritarian one-party rule by the Koumintang party.

Chiang promised to fight back and recover the mainland and built up troops on islands off the Chinese coast still under Taiwan’s control.

In 1954, an attack by Chinese Communist forces on those islands led the US to sign a Mutual Defense Treaty with Chiang’s government.

When a second military crisis over the ROC-held offshore islands in 1958 led the US to the brink of war with Communist China, Washington forced Chiang Kai-shek to officially abandon his policy of fighting back to regain the mainland.

However, Chiang remained committed to recovering the mainland through an anti-communist propaganda war.

After Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975, his son Chiang Ching-kuo led Taiwan through a period of political, diplomatic and economic transition and rapid economic growth.

In 1972, the ROC (Chiang’s party) lost its seat in the United Nations to the People’s Republic of China (Mao’s Party).

In 1979, the United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei Taiwan, to Beijing China, and ended it military alliance with the ROC on Taiwan.

That same year, the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which commits the U.S. to help Taiwan defend itself from attack by the PRC.

Meanwhile, on the Chinese mainland, the Communist Party regime in Beijing began a period of “reform and opening” after Deng Xiao-ping took power in 1978.

Beijing changed its Taiwan policy from armed “liberation” to “peaceful unification” under the “one country, two systems” framework. At the same time, the PRC refused to renounce the possible use of force against Taiwan.

Despite Deng’s political reforms, Chiang Ching-kuo continued a policy of “no contact, no negotiation, no compromise” toward the Communist Party regime in Beijing.

The younger Chiang’s strategy for recovering the mainland focused on making Taiwan into a “model province” that would demonstrate the shortcomings of the communist system in mainland China.

Through government investment in high-tech, export-oriented industries, Taiwan experienced an “economic miracle” and its economy became one of Asia’s ‘four little dragons.’

In 1987, shortly before his death, Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in Taiwan, ending the 40-year suspension of the ROC constitution and allowing political liberalization to begin.

In the same year, Chiang also allowed people in Taiwan to visit relatives on the mainland for the first time since the end of the Chinese Civil War.

Under Lee Teng-hui, the ROC’s first Taiwan-born president, Taiwan experienced a transition to democracy and a Taiwanese identity distinct from China emerged among the island’s people.

Through a series of constitutional reforms, the ROC government went through a process of ‘Taiwanization.’

While officially continuing to claim sovereignty over all of China, the ROC recognized PRC control over the mainland and declared that the ROC government currently represents only the people of Taiwan and the ROC-controlled offshore islands of Penghu, Jinmen, and Mazu.

The ban on opposition parties was lifted, allowing the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to compete with the KMT in local and national elections.

Internationally, the ROC recognized the PRC while campaigning for the ROC to regain its seat in the United Nations and other international organizations.

In the 1990s, the ROC government maintained an official commitment to Taiwan’s eventual unification with the mainland but declared that in the current stage the PRC and ROC were independent sovereign states.

The Taipei government also made democratization in mainland China a condition for future unification talks.

The number of people in Taiwan who viewed themselves as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese” rose dramatically during the 1990s and a growing minority advocated eventual independence for the island.

In 1996, Taiwan witnessed its first direct presidential election, won by incumbent president Lee Teng-hui of the KMT. Prior to the election, the PRC launched missiles into the Taiwan Strait as a warning that it would use force to prevent Taiwan’s independence from China.

In response, the US sent two aircraft carriers to the area to signal its commitment to defend Taiwan from a PRC attack.

In 2000, Taiwan’s government experienced its first party turnover when the candidate of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chen Shui-bian, won the presidential election.

The Communist Party regime in Beijing worried that Chen was moving Taiwan toward legal independence from China and in 2005 passed the Anti-Secession Law authorizing the use of force against Taiwan to prevent its legal separation from the mainland.

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait and slow economic growth helped the KMT return to power in the 2008 presidential election, won by Ma Ying-jeou. Ma promised to improve relations with Beijing and promote cross-Strait economic exchange while maintaining the political status.

Despite this thawing in relations between Taipei and Beijing and increased economic integration across the Taiwan Strait, there has been little sign in Taiwan of increased support for political unification with the mainland.

While the independence movement has lost some momentum, the vast majority of Taiwan’s citizens support a continuation of the status quo of de facto independence from China.

So there you have it folks.

Taiwan and China have been at odds since the end of WWII. We have said we will continue to support Taiwan, but now we have a new president who has shown he is willing to work with China.

What do you think? Should we cut our losses and throw Taiwan under the bus?

Or should we stand our ground and risk WWIII?

History often provides unpleasant answers to questions we are afraid to ask…

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

Those are the words of Marcus Tillius Cicero as written by Taylor Caldwell in her book Iron Pillar, the story of the fall of the Roman Empire and the statesman Cicero who tried in vain to save the republic he loved from the forces of tyranny.

So where is America today, are we destined to retrace the steps of Rome and other fallen empires?

Again, we can look to history for clues, if not the answer…

In an article by Marty Robinson Posted October 17, 2019 on the St. Paul Research web page:

The following quote attributed to Scottish history professor Alexander Tyler in 1787 University of Edinborough, seems to portray an accurate reflection of what has occurred during our 200+ years of existence as a democracy.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

• From bondage to spiritual faith;
• From spiritual faith to great courage;
• From courage to liberty;
• From liberty to abundance;
• From abundance to selfishness
• From Selfishness to complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy to dependence;
• From dependence back into bondage

“These words were written two years before George Washington became our first President.

Tytler discovered the average lifespan of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200-250 years, while always progressing through the same 9 step sequence he outlined.

Some examples:

• Assyria (859-612 B.C.): a 247-year reign.
• Persia (538-330 B.C.): a 208-year reign.
• Greece (331-100 B.C.): a 231-year reign.
• The Roman Republic (260-27 B.C.): a 233-year reign.
• The Roman Empire (27 B.C.-180 A.D.): a 207-year reign.
• The Arab Empire (634-880 A.D.): a 246-year reign.
• The Mameluke Empire (1250-1517 A.D.): a 267-year reign.
• The Ottoman Empire (1320-1570 A.D.): a 250-year reign.
• Spain (1500-1750 A.D.): a 250-year reign.
• Romanov Russia (1682-1916 A.D.): a 234-year reign.
• Great Britain (1700-1950 A.D.): a 250-year reign.
• The United States of America (1776-?): 243 years and counting.

Today this is referred to as “The Tytler Cycle,” or “The Fatal Sequence.”

Is this not where America is heading today?

According to the Aspen Institute, the Democrats proposed “Green New Deal” will cost between $52-$93 trillion over ten years—an estimated $600,000 per American household.

Their proposed “Medicare for All” program would cost approximately $32-$38 trillion over the first ten years, according to studies by the American Action Forum, the Mercatus Center and the Urban Institute.

And we recently witnessed an entire stage full of Democratic candidates for president raise their hands in unison promising their government healthcare plans would also cover undocumented immigrants…

And it will not end there…

Because with socialism, it never ends until they run out of our money to redistribute.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) has just proposed her new “Just Society.” It’s a platform of five bills and one resolution that will “build a just society to protect our communities and uplift our neighbors.”

Her program will impose rent control nationwide, raise the national poverty baseline to $38,000 per year, place paroles on all welfare programs and provide the entirety of American health and welfare services to all illegal aliens whether they want them or not.

But it doesn’t end there, because as always, this is about moving America away from nationalism and self-rule, into global governance, where we’ll be ruled by unelected international bureaucrats as in the failed European Union…

As AOC’s pact would also require the United States to sign an “international agreement” that stipulates all people have the right to fair and just conditions of work, social security, and an adequate standard of living, including the guarantee of adequate food, clothing, housing and healthcare.

And before you give AOC any credit for these being new and original ideas…

Let me introduce you to the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Richard Cloward and Francis Fox-Piven were Columbia University professors who created what is now referred to as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”

First published as an article in “The Nation” magazine in 1966, it was a strategy to overwhelm the public welfare system in order to create a crisis so large, that it would lead to the replacement of capitalism with socialism.

And their strategy nearly worked…

U.S. welfare recipients increased from 4.3 to 10.8 million from 1965 to 1974, including one million welfare recipients alone in New York City, which led to the city filing bankruptcy in 1975, nearly pulling the entire state down with it.

And today, over 50 years since Cloward & Piven initially proposed their plan, the strategy is alive and well…

You saw it with the flood of organized caravans of illegal immigrants overwhelming our southern border in an ongoing attempt to collapse our welfare system, while tipping the scales of the 2020 election in the Democrats’ favor… by creating a permanent voting class dependent on their promise of free social programs.

And it’s not just about overwhelming the welfare system and creating a permanent voting class for Democrats…

President Barack Obama used it with “Fast & Furious,” an attempt to undermine the 2^nd Amendment by flooding Mexico with illegal U.S. firearms…. unleashing a barrage of gun violence among Mexican drug cartels to be blamed on America’s 2^nd Amendment.

And you can see the tentacles of Cloward-Piven in the Green New Deal as well…

As the new “greens” are really nothing more than the old “reds.”

Writer Jeannie DeAngelis may have said it best in a recent article in American Thinker…

“While the lyrics to the socialist song may have changed, the Marxist melody remains the same.”

So, which will it be America?

Will we rise to the occasion as our forefathers have done time and time again… answering the call to become one of America’s greatest generations?

Or are we destined by Tytler’s “Fatal Sequence” to become its last?

Doomsayers for many years have been predicting the decline and fall of this country.

 Yes, the future is bleak.

Our problem is that we don’t really learn from history. George Santayana said that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The philosopher Hegel said, “What experience and history teach us is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”

Or as Winston Churchill said, “The one thing we have learned from history is that we don’t learn from history.”

Words we often hear are: “It can’t happen here,” or “Our country is different.” But the reality is that nations are born and die just like individuals. They may last longer than the average person’s lifespan. But the reality is that nations also die.

As I said earlier, history has shown that the average age of the great civilizations is around two hundred years. Countries like Great Britain exceed the average while other countries like the United States are just now reaching the average age.

Each of the great civilizations in the world passed through a series of stages from their birth to their decline to their death. Which brings us back to the nine stages.

These are the nine stages through which the great civilizations have gone. Notice the progression from bondage to liberty back to bondage. The first generation throws off the shackles of bondage only to have a later generation through apathy and indifference allow itself to once again be enslaved.

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota points out some interesting facts and correlations between the above passage and the 2008 Presidential election of Barack Obama:

Number of States won by:

Democrats: 19
Republicans: 29 

Square miles of land won by:

Democrats: 580,000
Republicans: 2,427,000 

Population of counties won by:

Democrats: 127 million
Republicans: 143 million 

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:

Democrats: 13.2
Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: ‘In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare…’ Olson believes the United States is somewhere between the ‘complacency and apathy’ phase of Professor Tylter’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the ‘governmental dependency’ phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal immigrants and they are granted the right to vote, then we can say goodbye to our country and freedoms in fewer than ten years.

The world is full of the debris of past civilizations and others are known to have existed, which have not left any debris behind them but have just simply disappeared.

So, Let’s review:

A society starts out in bondage, meaning no or very limited freedoms. Now faced with an exceedingly difficult situation (bondage), they turn to religion and religious faith. Through this they achieve the courage they need to fight for and win their freedom. Next, through the benefits of freedom, they achieve an abundance in material things.

Now we start into the other side of the circle/cycle. We get selfishness and laziness setting in. Then we get apathy and finally dependence. Then we arrive back up at the top with bondage again.

So folks, based on what I have shared with you today, Where do you think we are on Tytler’s Cycle?

I think we are somewhere between Apathy and Dependence.

For most people, Christmas is all about the presents. But how did such a supposedly sacred holiday become a festival of greed?

Not many people know the history behind Christmas gift giving, and it will probably shock you.

This year, Americans will spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 billion dollars on Christmas, but most people have no  explanation for why they are buying all of these gifts.

Those that are Christian will tell you that they are doing it to celebrate the birth of Christ, but gift giving on this holiday actually originated long before Christ was born.

Others will tell you that they are just following tradition, but most of them have absolutely no idea where the tradition of Christmas gift giving originally came from.

The truth is that most people simply don’t care about the history. They are just excited about all of the stuff that they are going to get on December 25th.

But you all know me. I just can’t pass up the chance to talk history. So here we go.

In early America, there was no Christmas gift giving. In fact, the Puritans disapproved of celebrating the holiday, and in some areas the celebration of Christmas was actually banned by law.

On May 11, 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature even went so far as to officially ban Christmas and gave anyone found celebrating it a fine of five shillings.

The legislature stated the ban was needed “For preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries, to the great dishonor of God & offence of others. It is therefore ordered … that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.”

The ban remained in place for 22 years until it was repealed in 1681 after a new surge of European immigrants brought a demand for the holiday.

However, opposition to the holiday lingered well into the 19th century, when many New England children were required to attend school on Christmas Day.

But weren’t the Puritans Christians?

Didn’t they want to honor the birth of Jesus?

Of course, they were Christians. They took their faith incredibly seriously. But they also knew their history a lot better than we do.

Most Christians do not realize this, but Christians did not celebrate anything in late December for the first 300 years after the time of Christ.

The only people that celebrated anything at that time were the pagans.

Some of you may be aware of the great Roman celebration known as Saturnalia.

But most people don’t know that our tradition of gift giving can be traced back to that holiday.

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the God Saturn, held on the 17th of December and later expanded with festivities through to the 23rd of December.

The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves.

Eventually, the Romans began holding a festival at the end of Saturnalia on December 25th called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, which means “the birthday of the unconquered sun”. 

Throughout the empire, the “rebirth of the sun” was celebrated. The winter solstice was past and now the days were starting to get longer again.  It was therefore a logical time to honor “the rebirth of the sun god”.

When the Roman Empire legalized Christianity in the early 4th century, the Roman government began to put a lot of pressure on church leaders to fit into the broader society.

So eventually the birthday of the Son of God was moved to the time when the rest of society was celebrating “the rebirth of the sun god”. 

December 25th was first celebrated as the birthday of Jesus in about 336 AD, and in the year 350 AD Pope Julius I officially decreed that Christians would celebrate that day from then on.

Of course, Jesus was not actually born in late December.  The evidence that we have indicates that he was most probably born in the fall.

The only reason people celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25th today is because the Catholics of the 4th century wanted to appease the pagan Roman government and the pagan culture at large.

In the Middle ages Christmas was a two-week period of celebration from Christmas Eve to the twelfth night of January 6th, hence the Twelve Days of Christmas Carol written in 1780. 

In the middle ages, the twelve days was a time of feasting, parties, and of course the giving and receiving of seasonal gifts. 

The Christmas gifts would include generous lords giving items such as clothing and firewood to their serfs.

The origin of the English word ‘Christmas’ is from the Old English middle age ‘Cristes Maesse’ which literally means ‘Mass of Christ’. 

Over time, the practice of gift giving during late December faded, and by the early 19th century the big tradition was to open presents on New Year’s Day.

But then merchants saw an opportunity. According to historians, advertisements for “Christmas presents” began appearing in newspapers in the United States in the 1820s.

During the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to sell holiday trinkets and gifts in the streets, from carts and stalls.

Children liked this way of celebrating Christmas. It was around 1840 that children began to hang their stockings by the fireplace, according to the Connecticut Historical Society.

New York’s population grew nearly tenfold between 1800 and 1850, and during that time elites became increasingly frightened of traditional December rituals of “social inversion,” in which poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the streets, abandoning established social constraints much like on Halloween night or New Year’s Eve.

These rituals, which occurred any time between St. Nicholas Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on December 6th) and New Year’s Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving European discontent during the traditional downtime of the agricultural cycle.

In a newly congested urban environment, though, aristocrats worried that such celebrations might become vehicles for protest when employers refused to give workers time off during the holidays or when a long winter of unemployment loomed for seasonal laborers.

In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy men who called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of traditions for this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations out of the city’s streets and into its homes.

They presented these traditions as a reinvigoration of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York during the colonial period.

Using two story collections written by Washington Irving, their most well-known member, these New Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on St. Nicholas Day and New Year’s Day until another member of the group, Clement Clark Moore, established the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his enormously popular poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night Before Christmas”) in 1822.

The St. Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem was like the other traditions the Knickerbockers borrowed and transformed.

His delivery of presents to children gave department stores a helping hand in selling toys, and by 1888, children were invited to meet a real live Santa at these stores.

By the early 1900s, newspapers even carried Page 1 stories about how Santa in his sleigh, filled with gifts, was on the way to reward those well- behaved children.

Around this same time, Charles Dickens‘,  “A Christmas Carol”, became a hit as it spread throughout the nation in 1867-68.

Being cheap and stingy at Christmas time would convey that you were too much like that money- grubbing Ebenezer Scrooge.

The myth of Santa, family rituals, and the desire to be generous have helped make this the most giving time of the year. The average consumer is expected to give 24 presents and spend about $900, according to the National Retail Federation’s survey.

However, for all the efforts of businessmen in the 1800’s to exploit the season, Americans persistently attempted to separate the influence of commerce from the gifts they gave.

What emerged was a kind of dialogue between consumers and merchants.

Americans started wrapping the gifts they gave. The custom had once been merely to give a gift uncovered, but a present hidden in paper heightened the effect of the gesture, making the act of giving a moment of revelation.

Wrapping also helped designate an item as a gift. Large stores began to wrap gifts purchased from their stock in distinctive, colored papers, with tinsel cords and bright ribbons, as part of their delivery services.

Over time, Christmas gifts came to be associated with a mythical gift giver in cultures all over the globe.

Of course, in the United States this mythical gift giver is known as “Santa Claus”.

So, what about this whole Black Friday mess?

Historians believe the name started in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. Bus drivers and police used “Black Friday” to describe the heavy traffic that would clog city streets the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers headed to the stores.

Businesses, however, didn’t like the negative tone associated with the Black Friday name. In the early 1980s, a more positive explanation of the name began to circulate.

According to this alternative explanation, Black Friday is the day when retailers finally begin to turn a profit for the year. In accounting terms, operating at a loss (losing money) is called being “in the red” because accountants traditionally used red ink to show negative amounts (losses).

Positive amounts (profits) were usually shown in black ink. Thus, being “in the black” is a good thing because it means stores are operating at a profit (making money).

Well, even in the first decade of the 20th century, people and organizations began to criticize this new pattern of gift-giving that had emerged in America.

Given the poor quality of the gifts and the considerable time that it took to purchase, wrap and deliver them, no wonder Progressive Era reformers looked for alternative ways to celebrate the holiday that were less burdensome and more gratifying.

That’s right folks, even back then, the liberal progressive movement was there telling us how things should be.

Their movement paved the way for Christmas cards, which became the ideal small gift for acquaintances and business associates.

A survey of the mail system in 1911 reflected the shift, showing that the total number of items posted had increased while their total weight had dropped significantly.

In 1906, the Consumer’s League formed the Shop Early Campaign to discourage last-minute purchasing, a practice that strained everyone in the retail trade.

The league also pressured stores to maintain regular store hours throughout the holiday season so that their employees could fully enjoy the celebration.

They maintained and publicized a list of stores that complied in the hope of encouraging shoppers to choose them over stores that placed more burdens on their employees.

In 1912, Progressives also established the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (known as SPUG).

 Its goals were to curtail the presentation of gimcracks (showy but shoddily made gifts), and to curb the practice of store clerks giving presents to their supervisors (which they felt were “extorted” rather than heartfelt).

The general success of the Progressives in reforming Christmas, as well as previous efforts to mold the festivities, shows that the celebration can be changed, just like any other cultural phenomenon.

Now folks, the first Christmas in a coronavirus world will be a season like no other, with governments urging people to rein themselves in to stop another deadly wave of the pandemic.

But, for you kids out there, I want you to know I have done the research and the Corona Virus will not stop Santa Claus from traveling the world and handing out gifts because he is immune to COVID-19. I got that information straight from a World Health Organization (WHO) official.

 “I understand the concern for Santa because he is of older age,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s lead on the crisis told a press briefing, responding to a journalist’s question about whether the gift-bearing figure, known for his grey whiskers and big belly, might not be at heightened risk from COVID.

“I can tell you that Santa Claus is immune to this virus,” said Van Kerkhove, who herself has two young sons. “We had a brief chat with him, and he is doing very well, and Mrs. Claus is doing very well, and they are very busy right now.”

So, there you have it. Santa is coming to Lake of the Ozarks!

You may have to wear a mask or you might not get to travel like you always do. But Santa is magic. He is immune to this stuff and just like he has done for hundreds of years, he will visit your home on Christmas Eve.

So put out the milk and cookies and have a safe and blessed Christmas!

My family and I are looking forward to it.