Editor’s note: Patricia Reed, like me, grew up in a time when our roles in society were clearly defined. Good times. We have a perspective that younger people apparently do not have and what we’ve witnessed, over the years, is what appears to be a concerted effort, by some, to redefine our roles in society. “To what end?”, one might ask. Read on as Patsy ruminates over the direction many of us see as fatally flawed…
There are times when it just kinda clears the air to state the obvious, so here goes.
The sex of a human fetus is determined at the moment of conception--in other words, at the very millisecond that a new human being enters the universe. That seems to indicate that God--Mother Nature--Science--whoever or whatever is in charge of said universe--intends for the binary division of humanity into two separate, complementary categories (which in English we call male and female) to be primary and definitive.
After all, those two categories are needed—both of them, working together in complementary, not interchangeable, not undefinable, roles—to perpetuate the human species. That's kinda important. So it is not surprising that every culture and society that has ever existed anywhere on the face of the earth since time began... has used the primary categories of male and female as its basic building blocks.
For millions of years. On every continent. In every climate. In every language. (Gender binarism is NOT an American or “European” invention!!) Every society has had binary, complementary sex roles. The specific content of those roles has varied according to the physical climate and other features of the environment in which a given society found itself. (Because that's all a culture is--it is an adaptation to a particular eco-niche.) If the environment changes, the culture changes.
When the people in one natural or cultural environment move to another one (whether by choice, by chance, or by some form of coercion), they change their culture accordingly. When one group of people encounters another group of people with different cultural features, they learn from one another and take from one another what they want to take (or in some cases, are forced to take).Thus the Wokespeak notion of "cultural appropriation" is idiotic. To be human is to learn, to exchange... ergo, to "appropriate." To speak of "white culture" or "black culture" is likewise idiotic. Culture has no color.
The thousands of different cultures on the vast African continent have mostly been developed (originally) by black people. And yet, they are all different--according to the thousands of different eco-niches that different groups of African people, most of whom happen to be black, have found themselves in. To take another example...when we are in the Arctic, we all dress more or less like Eskimos. Duh! And by the same token, when an Eskimo visits the Kalahari Desert, s/he sheds all that polar-bear fur and strips down to... well, to essentials... very quickly. Again, we are stating the obvious but it seems to get forgotten.
Over eons of time and across thousands of miles, sex roles—and the families that are built from those sex roles, and the nations that are built from those families-- have been a cultural constant, albeit with considerable variation in their manifestations. In some societies (such as Western industrial society), women can and do assume formal leadership roles in the political realm. In many societies, they cannot and do not.
In any case, as a society thrives and prospers (should it be among the more fortunate ones), it can add a lot of cultural bells and whistles as it goes along—religion, science, art, literature, architecture, medicine, sports, advanced technology. All the things that make us glad and proud to be human, the things that make life a great adventure. Each society has every right to take pride in the particular bells and whistles that it has developed, and to use and share them for the good of mankind.
But, until very very recently... there were no societies ever, anywhere, that denied the primacy of binary, complementary sex roles. The “discovery” that such roles are totally immoral, or totally imaginary, or whatever we are currently pretending them to be—that “discovery” is very recent... and completely unique to us, the children of the modern industrial West. Wow. Aren't we special?!
Yes, we are. Special. Also stupid. Very, very stupid.
A society wherein the formerly universally recognized and honored categories of man and woman are deemed interchangeable, indistinguishable, and ultimately undefinable is not a smart society. It is not a moral society. It is not a healthy society. It is a society that is committing suicide.
When we strip humanity of the fundamental markers shared by all of humanity, we basically strip humanity of humanity. We turn human beings into bots, ciphers, empty vessels that can be filled with whatever nonsense the people who happen to currently hold political power, want to fill them with. Today those people fill us with this set of idiotic ideas. Tomorrow they empty us of these idiotic ideas and fill us with new ones that make us even more “manageable”. We become empty vessels for their manipulation. We have no intrinsic, definable human nature to be true to.
We thus allow that echelon-- the favored few who have all the power-- to become, for all practical purposes, superhuman. (Garden of Eden forbidden fruit, anyone?) Which effectively means that everyone else—that's us-- becomes subhuman. We subhumans are entitled to nothing. And we return that lack of respect with interest. We respect nothing (except raw power). We don't respect ourselves, and we don't respect each other. Without freedom, without agency, the category “human” has had its dignity emptied out. The concept of “human rights” is rendered meaningless.
Even then, yes, there will still be a global society of sorts, for a little while. It will be hell on earth, but it will survive for a little while. Not for long, because the absence of any recognizable features of any viable human community—like families and local jurisdictions and real, honest-to-goodness countries-- will ultimately be fatal.The people in global power will soon abuse their power to such an extent that the “society” which they rule, will quickly lose its ability to self-correct when it starts to go off course (as all societies do quite frequently). So the global kleptocracy will make errors that are literally fatal and it will die off, in spurts or all at once, in a range of disasters... from supply-chain collapse, to war of all against all, to the spread of bioweapons. Etcetera. Use your imagination.
Let us pause here to note-- to prevent misunderstanding-- that a society which is sufficiently wealthy and stable, can probably tolerate a fair deal of variation as far as individual adherence to behavioral norms. In other words, a society that is reasonably tolerant of aberrations from its norms can still be a resilient society, a vibrant society. It can be a “nice” society. Even a “fun” society!
But it's one thing to tolerate moderate aberrations from societal norms regarding fundamental issues like sexual binarism. It's another to pretend that there are no valid norms, and that therefore aberrations are not aberrations. Or, to go even further and pretend (without offering any substantive proof or even rational argument) that the aberrations are somehow morally or functionally superior to the norms.
In the United States of America we managed to create, a couple of hundred years ago, a society which managed to bring much happiness to many people since then. Things were never perfect and probably never will be-- they never have been anywhere and probably never will be anywhere-- but this is the place where people came to by choice, whenever and wherever they had any choice. The people who made that choice, and continue to make that choice, came in all colors (and continue to come in all colors).
The indigenous peoples who were already here, sadly had to make difficult, sometimes impossible changes; their situation was and continues to be a tragedy. It's also a special situation regarding the case of those people who were brought here as slaves. But even the people who suffered these hardships and injustices did not choose to leave. Of course that doesn't mean that more cannot be done. It simply means that focusing on one corner of a canvas and ignoring the totality of the large and vibrant painting that has been created overall, makes no sense. It does nobody good.
I will say it again. A society where men and women are deemed interchangeable, indistinguishable, and ultimately indefinable... is not healthy for children and other living things (as we used to say when I was a fire-breathing liberal in the sixties). Likewise, a society where children are not even protected from such horrors as hypersexualization, involuntary mutilation, or rampant exposure to fatal and/or disabling substances like fentanyl.... is clearly not healthy for children and other living things. And a society where children are taught-- in school, no less-- that their value and worth is defined by their race is most certainly not healthy for children and other living things.
The people who are pushing such agendas have their reasons. But none of those reasons are worthy of our respect, let alone our supine acquiescence. The globalist kleptocracy has managed to get control of the mass media, the social media, the educational system, all the organs of opinion formation-- and thus to portray itself as something glorious. It is not glorious. It is hideous.
The globalist kleptocracy does not have our best interests at heart, nor the best interests of our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or young friends. By failing to mount any effective resistance to the kleptocracy's agenda, we are walking very close to a very dangerous precipice—and throwing younger generations right off it.
I'm personally not optimistic that we can avert that precipice—we have already allowed things to go too far-- and I have a lot of intelligent company in my pessimism. But still, some of us must still be clinging to a few shreds of hope.
After all, if we weren't... we wouldn't spend a beautiful afternoon on a beautiful holiday weekend writing anguished pleas like this one!
— Patricia Reed
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