It's Only a Pop Song - A Pragmatists Analysis of "Imagine" by John Lennon.

So much of the present-day woke mentality is steeped in the brew of a Popular song by written by John Lennon, plus a rather uninformed view of the Summer of Love and the philosophy of the Hippies of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But it is most important to understand that "Imagine" is a Pop Song, not a serious world-view.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

Commentary: Fluffy words... Heaven, Hell, sky... nothing particularly seditious here, but if you want to try communism because John Lennon said that it's easy if you try, don't believe it for a minute.  Communism and Socialism has failed miserably the world over.  It's history is marred by human rights violations that persist to this day in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela and everywhere that it's been attempted. Socialism is utter nonsense. My naive 16 year-old step-son asked me why we need to have money in the world?  He also wanted to know why a house isn't free.  He finds these concepts easy to imagine. Well, I explained to him that no one is going to build a nice house for you if there is no financial incentive why would they do that.  You would have to build the house yourself. You'd have to be expert in all of the trades that are necessary to build your house: structural architecture, procurement and supply chain management, planning, design, Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning, Plumbing, Framing, Drywall, Painting, Tile Work, and the like.  Most people in the United states live in very nice homes and apartments that would not be available if everything was free.  Furthermore, who would manufacture automobiles, build roads, highways street signs and street lights without the exchange of currency?  Finally, who is going to grow your food.  In short Capitalism enables specialization, so that one person doesn't have to do everything under the sun in order to achieve a good life.  If there is no currency, who will operate the government and what is the benefit of being a public servant?

Imagine all the people
Livin' for today
Ah

Commentary In the original recording, John Lennon sings, "Ahaaaa..."  This is an Aha moment all right! If you live only for today, then you are not striving to better yourself for tomorrow. You would likely develop into a morbidly obese person carrying 100+ pounds of fat if you don't take care of your body while you are living for today.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Commentary: This is what Christians and Jews alike ought to fear!  "... and no religion, too" If there were no countries, then who is going to decide which side of the road that you should drive on?  who decides where the highway ends.  How would you even travel from one place to another if you wanted to visit:

1) Your cousin in the old country

2)  Your parents

3)  Your high school pals.

4)  Mount Everest.

5) Etc.

This is not to infer that killing or dying for a cause is a good thing.

Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace
You

Commentary:  This is an inverted predicate.  You should live your life in peace!  All must strive to live your life in peace.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Commentary: "One world is enough for all of us" - with apologies to The Police (the band).  That is until the population exceeds the capacity of the planet....Furthermore, China is not interested in the "one world" mantra.  They fully intend to dominate this world and annex as much land as possible, whether it be Taiwan, the Philippine Islands, Indonesia, Japan and even Alaska (if they can get their hands on it!)

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Commentary: Another plug for socialism.  I repeat.  who will build your house if there are no possessions?  Will you even own or have control over your house when you live in it? Enough said.  Imagine that there is no house.  No streets, highways, bridges, no clothes, no food.  We'd be living life just like our Cro-Magnon ancestors. In caves.  Everyone would be hungry.  As for "A brotherhood of man" - This is utterly chauvanistic!  Why not a sisterhood?

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You...

Commentary: Well, if we have no houses, no possessions, no food, we would indeed be sharing all the world, but much like Cro-Magnon did!

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

Commentary:  ... And the world will live as one... what? One society... no.  One anarchy...Precisely!

The history of nations is that we engaged in discourse about the purpose of society and social change.  The problem that we have today is a minority of the people are dictating what changes will be implemented, and I don't care for this nonsense.  People less educated than I are dictating what is right and what is wrong.  That is a problem... a big problem, because I don't consider myself exceptionally well educated.

The insanity of Marxists in Americal

 

Here's an hysterical post from one of my Marxist, former high school classmates. I thought to break it down. 

The following explains why this is utterly pie-in the-sky:

1) This Marxist propaganda piece commences, "No one wants to work anymore" As if this is a wholly new idea?  Unreal! These are the musings of a 16 year old, not of a grown adult.

2) It Continues:

"Nobody ever wanted to work. We wanted to be productive, be creative, be part of a community, be supported, be validated, and have the time and space to truly rest. Nobody actually wants to trade in hours of their life to "earn" necessities."  Perhaps not, but we wanted to eat and make a comfortable life and this also requires communities and cooperation.  The free market with some assistance from the church aided villages in achieving improvements in the quality of life.

This quote reflects a naïve lack of understanding of sociology and of the formation of social groups from the early and ancient beginnings of human societies and through the present, not to mention a tremendous ignorance of the literature of social science and the notion of the Social Contract as written about by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Why did humans form social groups in the first place? Self-preservation had a lot to do with it! There was the importance of defending oneself and one's offspring from predators. Social groups formed essentially as small protection syndicates. Rules quickly followed.

It is a simple fact that I don't form a group with you to provide protection for you and get nothing in return. Each party to such partnership has a value that they receive for their contribution to the partnership. Perhaps it is a mutual protection-syndicate: You watch my back - I've got yours? 

From these rather individual social contracts, societies grew by sharing work whether it be joining a collective hunt for food, tending crops, gathering nuts and berries, teaching children the skills that the community had honed over many years, etc.

Further on down the road, people learned that there must be some contribution by all in the community to ensure that no one was slacking in their obligations to the community. The early notions of work were established. This provided an accounting of what each member of the tribe contributed to the collective in exchange for the benefits that the collective provided. In part this was to ensure that the collective might survive in both good times and bad times. Slackers were also bad for the morale of the collective, and they would often be turned away from the collective.

In fact, it turns out that the church bell came into being as European agrarian villages evolved and a single timekeeper was needed to alert the community when it was time to tend crops and cattle   The church found an opportunity to integrate into existing social structures by building churches with a church bell to be tolled hourly throughout the day a number of tolls to alert the villagers as to the hour of the day, this allowed the community to coordinate time to commence work in the fields, and the proper time when villagers were permitted to conclude their workday. In short, human history clearly contradicts this notion that people don't want to trade their time for necessities.  Further on down the line factories had a whistle blow which signified the time to start the work day.  Similarly, schools,  have a buzzer to indicate the start of the school day and the start of each class period.

Rousseau's social contract was an effort to maximize the notion of human freedom. In doing so, he arrived at the recognition that people do sacrifice some independence and freedom in exchange for the benefits they realize from the society, and furthermore, in this desired social contract, everyone will be free because they all forfeit some rights and impose the some duties in exchange for some privileges. Rousseau argues that it is absurd for a man to surrender his freedom for slavery, and this is quite true. The challenge with Marxism is that far too much is surrendered to the collective and only the elitists of the collective flourish.

The notion that we don't want to exchange our time for necessities is totally ignorant. Long before any of us were born, brilliant people grappled with this very question, and concluded that indeed we do enter into this social contract willingly, specifically for the benefits that we all realize from the social contract.

Another question that deserves some mindshare is what exactly are necessities? Clearly Marxists will pursue a strategy of maximizing the list of items that are necessities. Society provides for the necessities of protection, safety and security, without which there is no foundation for the other things that we may perceive as necessities. Eastern philosophies have a simple measure of necessities:

- Earth

- Sun

- Shelter 

- Water 

- Food

Tell me what is this Marxist definition of necessities, and what exactly are we content to trade our time for? How exactly do we distinguish necessities from luxuries? Ultimately, if no one is willing to work for necessities, how, pray tell do the rest of us obtain the necessities of life? Imagine, no Toilet paper, no bread, no salt, no sugar, no butter and no meat, not to mention, no vitamins, no kitchenware and no running water. If you think this is fiction, just go to one of several thousand cities and towns throughout the globe where running water is considered a luxury.  A few of these are as follows:

1) The Northeast ghetto of Bangkok, Thailand,

2) Tolyatti in the Russian Federation Province of Samara.

3) Many parts of the Republic of the Philippines.

4) Many parts of India and Malaysia

5) Many places in Africa, including: Ethiopia, Nigeria and Ghana, Somalia, Congo and Rwanda.

There are parts of the planet where prostitution remains the only reliable source of income for a woman.  I feel that this is an undesirable outcome, but a common outcome in socialist countries.

So, I repeat, where do we draw the line between what is a necessity and what is a little more. Clearly progressives in the USA have designated medical care as a necessity. While I do not reject that medical care is a necessity in the present day, I simply don't understand who determines what is medically necessary and what is not in a socialized medicine model.

That's just for starters. Compound the question by taking away the incentives that people have to pursue medicine as a profession and what are you left with? Fewer options for medical care and a lower quality of care. What is the incentive to work as a nurse, a janitor or an executive of a hospital if we've socialized all medicine and all necessities? Quick answer is that there is no incentive for doing this work!

I am an Arizona Walkaway

 I have posted my WalkAway Story on the now-defunct National Walk-Away Facebook Pages.  It is not my interest to post any more historical explanations for why I Walked Away from the Democrat Party.  What I am concerned about is where I'm going rather than where I have been.  With this context, I am sharing my personal manifesto of what it means to me to be a #WalkAwayAZ:

#WalkAwayAZ.  - What it means to me

We are #Walkaway.

We are Patriots who love this country.  We believe in the melting pot that made this country great.  We pledge allegiance to the Flag and our hearts beat strongly for our national Anthem. We are either immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, but we are all Americans.

A) We do not condone racism, but neither do we divide the people of this country by the color or texture of their skin, their ancestry or their religion.  We hold these truths self-evident that all human beings are created equal.  This does not mean that they are equal in every way or even that they must be made to be equal.  This equality is embodied in the core freedoms that our founding fathers prized:

1) Freedom of religion

2) Freedom of peaceful assembly

3) Freedom for the pursuit of happiness

4) Freedom from taxation without representation.

B) Because we love our country, we also love our planet.  We are not ignorant of the threat that global warming represents, but we do not fear global warming.  Rather we have faith in human ingenuity and we believe that through science and diplomacy we can achieve a global solution to this global problem; however, we do not buy into the doom and gloom notions that life on earth will cease to exist in 12 years.  

We are not living in some fictional apocalyptic movie.  We don't live our lives running from our fears and we do not allow fear to influence our decisions. We do what we can to reduce the damage that we do to the earth, and our conservation should be rewarded, not used as a whipping post to further erode our country and our society.

C) We hold dear the notion of the free-market economy.  It's rules are rather simple and everyone has the opportunity to succeed within the free market if they participate.  Those who take life seriously, and who utilize their God-given talents to earn a wage  will benefit form their labors.  We are objective and understand that Capitalism is not perfect, but it is the only system that provides any semblance of giving the workers control over the means of production.  In fact it manages to do this far better than any form of socialism or Communism has ever achieved.  Just ask Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg how Capitalism has worked out for them!

D) Despite it's challenges, The American experiment still stands as a shining gem and an example to the rest of the world of the importance of rugged individualism and free markets as a means of creating a high standard of living for all of our citizens.  So much are we admired, that people from all over the world would gladly risk life and limb to live here!

E) We believe in securing our borders, because we learned on 9/11/2001 that there are those who wish to destroy our way of life. We also understand that it is wrong to syphon the talent from the nations in central and South America.  It is far easier to develop policies that contribute to the economic development of those countries so that they may benefit from their own experience with capitalism.  We also understand that the alternative is to push those countries towards communism which is not in the interest of a strong United States of America.

F) As proud #WalkAway Arizonans, we know that there is indeed a Crisis at the southern border.  It is a humanitarian crisis, a public safety crisis and a public health crisis.  It is a crisis that arises from the instability of the governments south of our border, and from reckless policies of the Biden/Harris administration which led to tens of thousands of migrants arriving at the border wearing "Joe Biden" T-Shirts! You simply cannot make this stuff up.

G) We recognize that China is a totalitarian regime and they are willing to attack their own citizens as they have done to the Uighurs, as they have done in Hong Kong, and as they have done in Tianamen square.  We also recognize China as a dangerous regime that released a biological weapon from the Wuhan Institute of Virology killing nearly 3.5 million people throughout the world and more than 1/2 million fatalities in the USA. We also have legitimate concerns that this was done intentionally and we are distraught that the Biden Administration doesn't care to investigate the root cause of the pandemic or the ties that Dr. Anthony Fauci has to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the illegal funding of gain-of-function research, which likely is responsible for the extermination of millions of people throughout the World.  We are baffled why the Woke party, with their abundance of outrage has no outrage over the global human toll of this virus, but is aghast at the mere 600,000 who died within our borders. 

On a personal note, I have my own COVID-19 experience to share: On March 31, 2021, my youngest sister died - not from COVID, but from Cancer. I still remember when Denise called me to share her diagnosis On April 20th, 2020.  I remember my emotions as I asked her how she would navigate cancer treatment during COVID, she just sighed and vowed to fight with all hear might.  Although  she didn't die from COVID, COVID was certainly culpable for her death.  Denise was hospitalized at least 9 times during her battle with stage 4 cancer.  The COVID restrictions in the hospitals were utterly ridiculous.  Hospitals are thoroughly expert in reducing the transmissions of contagions within their facilities.  They've been doing it for decades with nearly non-existant contagion transmission in hostpitals. But the COVID restrictions barred any visitors from being with my sister when she was recovering from Chemo-therapy or during the various emergency hospitalizations that she endured during the months prior to her passing. 

Every opportunity that I had to speak with her by telephone, I took!  I tried to distract her from her own struggles and steered her away from any topics that would cause her stress or sadness.  My sister passed away at the far too young age of 48, leaving behind her loving siblings, her devoted husband and a 9-year old son, Dwayne.  Through the experience with my sister, my family experienced a very profound relationship with COVID.  There are two situations that highlight this:

1) COVID in my home.  Unbeknownst to me, my wife, or my step-son , we all came down with COVID following a December trip to visit the second of my three younger sisters in Las Vegas.  We each recovered from COVID in early January of 2020, long before anyone had ever heard of COVID we recovered at home without an emergency-room visit and without an urgent care visit.  An antibody test conducted by my family Physician confirmed what I knew was true.  This was a blessing, because we were able to visit my sister at her home when she was between hospitalizations.  We visited nearly every weekend.  We visited her with confidence that we would not place her at risk even with her weakened immune system, because there was no possibility of us exposing her to COVID in the months after we had recovered.

2) Denise's first Chemotherapy treatment.  Denise went to the hospital on May 28th, 2020 for her first Chemotherapy. Denise had been upbeat prior to the treatment knowing that it was her best and perhaps only hope for a recovery. we spoke with her by telephone prior to the treatment and even for the first 12 hours of her treatment.  During the course of her treatment, she became comatose - her body unable to handle the strong does of medicine that she had been prescribed.  Further compounding the issue was the fact that it was the Memorial Day weekend and the hospital was short-staffed. Our calls to Denise and to the hospital went unanswered for 2 days.   On the 3rd day we were informed that she was comatose and that the Doctors had decided to stop her treatment early hoping that she would revive from this inadvertantly medically induced coma.  Fortunately, she did revive and recovered, but the heartache that we all experience not knowing was truly unbearable.  Furthermore, my dear sister's isolation from family and friends made her hospitalizations most painful.  I am angry about COVID, very angry and I want answers.  I think that we are entitled to know:

1) Exactly how it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

2) Why they were conducting gain-of-function research there, and 

3) Why the CDC and NIAID  were routing research funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third-party firm on the authority of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The world deserves answers to these questions.

#WalkAway Arizona!!!

We Simply cannot let the Democratic party sabotage this country.  They are insidious, but they are not invincible.  We need to urge others to walk away as we have, but not only to walk away but to walk beside us towards a better future for our country.