Gallant Apparently had a Vasectomy

I am completely out of touch with American values.

Months ago, I read that Kim Kardashian charges millions of dollars–“millions,” plural–to make one Instagram post. I think about that a lot.

To me, Kim Kardashian is a lewd, crass, self-destructive, highly toxic person, very like the sort of inexpensive prostitute you might see if you drove through a bad area of your city at 3 a.m. I see her for what she is. She is not very bright. She has no talents. She does nothing productive with her life, except for one typical leftist cause which will probably be destructive in the end. She has nothing interesting to say. If I knew her, I would avoid her, the same way I would avoid a female meth addict who propositioned me in a parking lot. There is nothing good to be gained by interacting with her, and she has an air of dirtiness about her.

Many of our celebrities are like that. If you went to an area where whores and drug dealers congregate, and you gave each one of them ten million dollars and put them on TV, they would fit right in with our current crop of media idols.

Kardashian’s popularity proves that a big percentage of Americans see her completely differently from the way I do. They crave Kardashian news. They want to be like her. They want to wear what she wears. They think her TV show is top-notch entertainment. They truly admire her. How can that be true?

I can’t absorb this. I can’t make my mind assimilate it. It’s like living in a country where people think horse manure makes a good corsage.

Instinctively, I have the incorrect feeling that everyone thinks Kim Kardashian is gross and trashy.

I am writing about her to illustrate my point, which is that my heart and the heart of the general public are completely different.

America is like a country of children without fathers. We reject the beautiful, protective lessons of the past, and we do as we please. We are making ourselves silly and weak.

Yesterday I found some neat videos on Youtube. I don’t know why they popped up. There were made over half a century ago. They were videos that used to be shown in schools.

The purpose of the videos was to help kids get it together and live like advanced human beings instead of savages. One video was about neatness and personal grooming. Another helped girls understand that promiscuity was self-destructive.

I decided to watch the video about neatness. I figured it couldn’t hurt. I had ample reason to feel that way.

I have often told people a story about my youth. My mother took me to a department store at the 163rd Street mall in North Miami Beach, to buy clothes. I would guess that I was about 11. A nice old Jewish lady waited on us. The lady tried to explain something to me. I can’t recall what it was. She decided to use an analogy, which I recall. She said, “When you take a shower, you don’t just stand there. You soap yourself up and clean yourself off.” She may have added more information. I don’t know.

Years later, I realized what she was trying to do. She saw that I was a dirty kid, so she was trying to give me a hint about hygiene. I will probably never remember what we were talking about. Maybe she was saying I should stand up straight while my pants were being measured, instead of slouching passively. She saw that I was in trouble, and she wanted to help without offending my mother, so she came up with something to say.

She could tell (or maybe smell) what I was doing in the shower. I used to get in, stand around, and get out. I didn’t use a washcloth. I was probably in junior high before I started shampooing my own hair. Before that, I didn’t think about it. Every so often, my mother would make he hold still while she did it for me, and the rest of the time, I didn’t concern myself with it. I didn’t realize I was dirtier than other people, and I thought my situation was normal.

Kids don’t automatically know how to bathe. Someone has to tell them.

My parents didn’t teach me much of anything. It’s shocking, when I think about it. They expected me to succeed, and they held me accountable, but they didn’t help. They didn’t show me how to do it. They expected me to figure it out all by myself.

Unbelievably, I learned something from the hygiene video, at my advanced age. The announcer said it was important to wash between your toes. I don’t do that. I haven’t thought about it, to tell you the truth. I just figured all that soapy water running down there would get the job done. I scrub my feet with a soapy cloth, but that’s all. This says something about my upbringing. Even at my age, it continues to affect me negatively.

I watched a few more videos. I thought they were fantastic. I felt sick, thinking how much they would have helped me when I was a kid. I felt cheated.

In truth, I was cheated. We owe kids our help. They can’t make it without it.

I also saw some videos in which people discussed life in the mid-20th century.

I assumed they would say they longed for a time when people had it more together. I fully expected them to say America was a kinder, more orderly, more peaceful place back then. Boy, was I wrong. All they could talk about was the “oppressive” atmosphere and the harsh rules. They truly thought things had gotten better.

Yes, things have gotten better, if “better” means a boy who has decided he’s a girl can go into a girls’ locker room and shower naked with actual females who have no say in the matter. Things are better, if having filthy language on billboards is good. If smoking dope in a park where kids can see you and smell the smoke is good, then things have gotten a lot better.

If self-discipline and honoring your elders are bad things, then life is much better than it used to be. If having babies out of wedlock is good, things are fantastic.

I have a thirst to see myself improved. It looks like most Americans are thirsting for the same things monkeys want.

My parents should have told me things. They should have explained Christianity to me and seen to it that I participated whether I wanted to or not. They should have given me a desk, a chair, and a lamp and said, “This is where you work in the evening. This is when you work. This is how you keep a schedule so you don’t fall behind. On this day every week, we will check and make sure things are going smoothly.”

I was very, very smart, so I was able to do well in school without self-discipline for many years. There were obvious problems, though. I always did long-term projects the nights before they were due, because I couldn’t plan. I started to do badly in math, because you have to study math continuously; you can’t cram.

I can’t tell you how many times I saw the sun come up because I was working on a paper or project that was due that day. If your son is doing this, you are failing him.

My dad used to come home from work, take off his shirt and pants, lie on the couch in the den, and watch TV in his underwear. My mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen and living room. My sister and I lived outside the house and in our bedrooms. That was our family life. My sister and I filled our time however we saw fit, within very loose rules.

When my sister was 14, she started stealing my mother’s car, driving to a bar on 79th Street, and sitting with men. She had a friend who lived a block north of us, and she would go, too. I wonder what the people who made the videos would have thought about that. They probably could not have imagined it happening. One of their videos cautioned girls about parking in cars with boys. It didn’t say anything about sitting in bars with grown men!

The Seventies were different. It was not that hard for a young girl to get a drink at a bar without getting carded. Back then, they sold cigarettes from unattended vending machines, too.

Youth is when you learn good habits. They become like servants to you. They poke and prod you to do the right thing. If you don’t have good habits, you have bad ones, and they prod you to do wrong. If you wait until you’re old to strive for good habits, you will have a much, much harder time, and you will probably fail.

I don’t know why I didn’t become a criminal or a beggar. It’s amazing that I did as well as I did.

My sister eventually became a criminal and a beggar.

It’s remarkable that my teachers were of no help. Even the best of them were useless. My schools could have taught kids responsibility and basic life skills, but they didn’t. Maybe liberal educators got rid of the lifestyle videos because they found them judgmental and old-fashioned. Liberals always work to destroy the character of young people.

My teachers weren’t afraid of teaching values. They can’t use that excuse. No one can say they felt the teaching of good values was the exclusive province of our parents.

They taught us nature was sacred, and that we had to be environmental extremists. They taught feminism and socialism. They told us the horrible, hedonistic self-immolation of the Sixties was very good. They only had scruples when it came to things like belief in God, honoring our elders, sexual purity, good manners, and self-discipline.

They were dupes and tools. I don’t know how else to say it. Most of them weren’t even good at teaching.

Maybe other people don’t hate America’s new ways as much as I do because they were raised better than I was. Maybe they didn’t have the problems I had, so they don’t appreciate the good things they got from self-discipline and solid values.

I feel very foreign when I think about these things. I never feel at home on this planet, but the sensation of being different is much stronger when my nose is rubbed in the distinctions.

One of the purposes of the rapture is to put us in a place where we are in sync with the beings around us. We won’t feel foreign in heaven, or even on earth if we return here to rule after the tribulation. We’ll be normal, and those who are not in our family will be the wallflowers and outsiders. That will be nice, at least for us.

If I could go back and change my childhood, I would want two things. I would want to be raised by people who were led by the Holy Spirit and full of knowledge about God, and I would want them to teach me how to live correctly. If I had those things, any other problems I had would take care of themselves.

One of the wonderful things about God is that he gives us a new beginning. You can’t go back and be eight years old again. You can’t grow up in a proper Christian home, marry your childhood sweetheart, raise a Christian family in your youth, and head into middle age with all that behind you. But you can become the kind of person you would have been had you started life correctly.

Sometimes I think about the disgusting and disgraceful things I’ve done, said, and felt, and I wonder how I would survive the shame if they were exposed. Then a thought comes to me: if, when those things are exposed, I can say I’m not that person any more, and I don’t do, say, or feel those things, then I won’t be so ashamed.

Because of God, I can have that.

I wish I could go live in a secure fortress with other Christians and only come out to get groceries. I really do. I wish I could live in heaven and only come down here during the day to work. America is extremely filthy, and it’s not going to change. We’re just seeing the beginning.

At least I don’t have to be part of it. I’ll be able to say I got off the field before it was too late.

Kids have absolutely no idea what to do with their lives. Your kids are extremely unlikely to figure everything out for themselves. If you don’t get in there and help them, you will surely be held accountable. You probably won’t like the results of your parenting efforts either.