Welcome back to Adventures in Egoism. Friday, the 26th, was my birthday, so to celebrate it. I decided to drive somewhere else that took me a long time. :-) I hopped in my car on Thursday at 11:00 AM and drove 7.5 hours to Berkely, right outside of Oakley and San Francisco. Speaking that night was Dr. Gary Hull of Duke University. Dr. Hull gave an enormously wonderful lecture relating the destruction of the embodiment of America's ideals (life on earth, prosperity, property, freedom, and happiness) to the anti-American (anti-life) ideas that flourish in America's schools (mainly selflessness and altruism). It was called: The Ivory Towers Destroyed the Twin Towers.
One of the main questions Dr. Hull asked was "Why do the terrorists hate us?" But that was superceded by the question, "Why do our own intellectuals hate us? He relayed to the audience of about 200 people that if a mother or father were to ignored the responsibilities of raising their child completely, that the child would soon die or be killed by making bad choices and said parent would then be charged with criminal negligence. But what if the parent were to encourage the child to do everything that is wrong and evil? Then the child would most certainly die or end up in jail, and the parents would be charged with manslaughter of sorts.
And that is exactly what our own intellectuals are doing. They are rejecting the basic beliefs that have made America as prosperous as it is, and instead, they turn to philosophies that have stagnated people for decades, even centuries such as Communism, collectivism, spiritualism, and altruism.
These people who teach America's future generations are people who hate everything American for the crime of being American (they hate the good for being the good). These are people who teach that Americans should give up their hard earned money to support people who haven't earned it on the belief that "we owe it to them." It is these same people who have told us that so-called 'big-business' is the enemy. They teach us that to grow is evil, but to stagnate is good.
Dr. Hull best explained America by quoting an inscription from one of the Towers, "Aim high, then deliver." He explained how Americans were not satisfied with how long correspondence took. So we created the Pony Express, then the telegraph, the telephone, and now videophones. "We aimed high, then delivered." He continued on with how we found months to travel across countries and between continents unsatsfactory, so we created cars, then trains, the airplane, the Concord, and finally space ships. "We aimed high, then delivered." Dr. Hull explained how other countries and people blame America for their own stagnation, but continued by saying that those countries were stagnating long before America was founded. He stated that the American values are what has made America's brief life so vibrant and beautiful, and that only by upholding these values can her life continue.
Dr. Hull finished by summing up the Pacifism of the last fifty years that led up to the attack on the Towers. He said that America did nothing when its oil wells were nationalized in the 1950`s, that America did nothing when her soldiers were bombed in a bunker and her embassies were attacked. He said that America blew up empty buildings in response to major attacks on US assets such as the sinking of the U.S.S Cole. Then he told of the very gate keepers of our country who, unable or unwilling to grasp the American concepts of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, trample over these by saying such perverse things as, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter (Reuters)," and "Despite our loss, we cannot judge (NY Times)."
And who, now do we blame for the act of war committed on Black Tuesday? What are we doing to prevent it from stopping again? We are blaming airport security and arming our pilots. But what we should be doing is stripping our schools of freedom-haters, and Anti-American lectures. We should be tearing down the ideas that destroy the most wonderful (but not yet perfect) society on earth. We should be ridding ourselves of the infection as well as the disease.
This lecture was great. And it was the first I had attended of that kind, but certainly not the last. But I still had to drive back to Los Angeles. The amazing thing is that my car has not blown up yet. :-) I am very happy about that. All in all, I had a great birthday and it's great to be 19!
