Robert Levy

As I explore the present, I can’t avoid comparing it to the past. The names change. The places and faces are never identical. But like a false backdrop behind the camera in a Zoom call, it’s only cosmetic. Essential reality never changes.

For instance, on March 7, 1965, a group of voting rights demonstrators blocked traffic as they walked across Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The marchers did not have a permit; so, the police ordered them to disperse. The marchers disobeyed the police and marched anyway. The result was called Bloody Sunday.

Similarly, a group of Canadian truckers blocked the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan. They were protesting for the restoration of their fundamental freedom to determine the extent of their own medical care.  As this column is written, the authorities, perhaps less violently than in 1965 but just as decisively, are preparing to break up the truckers’ protest.

Will it be another Bloody Sunday? No one knows. Yet, that is not the point. As on Bloody Sunday the ruling class will try to crush the flowering working class in the name of “democracy.” So, we ask as Pete Seeger asked, “When will they ever learn?”

The Bible warns government in Psalms 37:11, “The meek shall inherit…” The result will be “the abundance of peace,” not burning down buildings like ANTIFA did or deploying “Billy clubs” and handcuffs like Trudeau’s paramilitary. Unfortunately, the ruling elite always default to “knocking heads” or simply denying the meek their essentials such as food, gasoline and the freedom to honk a horn in peaceful protest.

Should we vilify government? Government controllers are acting as they have always done. American Homeland Security is joining with Facebook and Twitter in a Fascist union of government and industry to block the working-class protesters on both sides of the Great Lakes. Nothing is new.

On July 28, 1932, a group of World War I veterans called “Bonus Marchers” converged on Washington, D.C. They were peacefully demanding what we would call today a “stimulus payment” to blunt the reality of the Great Depression.

Like today’s Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, yesterday’s Herbert Hoover had enough of what he considered an occupation of Washington, D.C.  With bayonets. tear gas and only Major Dwight Eisenhower in opposition, Hoover ordered General Douglas McArthur and Major George Patton to evict the protestors. MacArthur was convinced that it was a Communist-inspired “insurrection” attempting to overthrow the federal government. Hence, Hoover and MacArthur felt justified in the resulting 55 injuries, 135 arrests and two deaths.

No, 1932 is not 2022. But, in 1932 as part of that Bonus March Insurrection, police officer George Shinault shot and killed two veteran “trespassing protestors.” That event was all too similar to the killing of veteran Ashli Babbit by a Capitol police officer on January 6, 2021. Do those events foretell the manner in which the American and Canadian governments will treat the truckers today?

It’s not all that complicated. As songwriter Noel Harrison wrote, such events are “like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel.” They rarely change. The formula is the same. 1) The meek challenge the land of the elite; 2) the elite label the meek as ‘insurrectionists” — “communists in 1932”, Nazi racists in 2022 — and, 3) the elite then utilize their police power together with their monopoly on legally-carried firearms to crush the protest.

The formula rarely varies. Only history judges the result.

At present, those results are mixed. In the case of the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, history quickly condemned the beatings on Bloody Sunday. Unfortunately, that same history never quite caught up with Patton or MacArthur. When it comes to Ashli Babbit and January 6, the “jury is still out.”

So, what about the truckers? Well, most of us who read the Bible want to side with the meek. Even agnostics would rather be a trucker than a “thug” for Justin Trudeau. Most of us believe in free speech and the right to peaceably assemble. Most of us will support those rights. But as for the government, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau should remember that those, like Hoover, who support the wrong side of freedom generally lose the next election.

“When will they ever learn?”

What most Americans want is to live in a nation where everyone civilly communicates with one another.

It has often been said that a common language is a necessity for a successful nation.

While the rule has its exceptions in places such as Canada and Switzerland, even those countries have established dominant languages the mastery of which is a condition precedent to success.

This argument became important in most of the United States until almost the close of the last century. Students were made to study and pass English courses from kindergarten through high school. Even children for whom English was a “second language” were guided toward success with special tutoring in the nouns, verbs, adverbs and participles that made up America’s lingua franca. For conservatives, along with secure borders and the maintenance of a “thin blue line” against criminal chaos, retaining English as the nation’s language was a matter of national security.

As the election of 2020 rolled into the reality of 2021, it became obvious that there was no danger that English would be supplanted as the nation’s primary method of communication. The woke were beyond demanding that classes be held in Spanish. Any language so gender-conscious that it tolerated separating the “Latino” from the “Latina” was not sufficiently cisgender. That the “woke” despised Standard English was a disposition to be expected. However, the elite wanted to replace it with “Woke English.” And, in 2021 they were hard at work just doing that.

This new “Woke English” is about as far from “Standard English” as is Standard English from the “Middle English” of Chaucer. When he wrote his prologue to Canterbury Tales, Chaucer declared, “Wan that Aprill with his shoures soute, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote,” During his time, every literate Englishman knew exactly what Chaucer meant. Today, most of the English-speaking world cannot even pronounce the words. And, that is the goal as “Woke English” now supplants our contemporary lingo.

For instance, if I read that “John and Judy fell into a state of passionate physical romance,” I might become confused upon learning, “They embraced as Ne and Xe would have done before Judy became a man and John became confused.”

According to the Division of Student Affairs, Department of Intercultural Engagement at UNC-Greensboro, the next sentence might conclude that their love was useless. Because John was just a Narcissist.  As such, “Zir just likes zirself.”

Actually, all this is quite Victorian.  Rules are being written for an upper ruling class which are designed to separate the “educated” from the “deplorable.” Those who learn the new ways can be accepted in polite society. Those who don’t are expected to make their presence scarce. In Victorian Times it was known as “breeding.” During Fascist Times it was called “eugenics.” Today, it is simply the use of language and custom to marginalize those who, like some in Victorian Times and some in Fascist Times, just do not conform.

A person who desires to change genders has, in fact, changed genders. Therefore, a “transgendered woman” includes a person with male parts who needs to be housed and bathed with other women. If a rape occurs, it is simply a problem between two women. Each should have counseling. Neither should go to jail. After all, it is not like a man raped a woman.

In Canada, to speak otherwise and advocate for the Biblical interpretation of two-gender heterosexuality is now punishable by five years in prison. And, to fail to report such must be a crime, too. In the “new” English, “Silence is violence.”

What most Americans want is to live in a nation where everyone civilly communicates with one another. Yet, “Woke English” is making that impossible. How can liberals talk to conservatives or Republicans talk to Democrats if neither side can agree on the biological definition of a woman or a man? Did America struggle to declare “all persons equal” just to be thrown back to a time when Liza Doolittle and Professor Higgins defined two worlds walled off by one language?

The real danger to our national security is that Americans are beginning to speak two different languages, both of which are laughingly called “English.” In effect, we are witnessing the ultimate thought control as the woke redefine reality through speech. If we are ever to recapture our nation, we must recapture its language and support the unifying force of a single, mutually understood Standard English language.