I was born in 1934. In 1936 my parents, I and my older sister moved to the fields of a brand new, very modest community of Highland Park in German-Irish Roman Catholic St. Paul, Minnesota. My dad was a pharmacist who owned his own drugstore. Mother worked there part-time but also ruled our household with her German Lutheran fist until I entered high school in 1948.
I think I was five years old when I first heard her preachment when confronting me regarding something important she needed to know…”Never you forget, Glenn Ray. You can never escape your God!”, with the deliberate intention of suggesting God was a she, and I was looking at her.
Of course, she was right….One cannot escape ones conscience if one is forced to develop a conscience.
I never heard a political word coming from this very, very capable but not formally well educated but gifted human female animal. She graduated from school, eighth grade, that is, at age 13 when she entered the adult world of her day, 1919, as a cashier at Friedman’s Super Market in downtown St. Paul.
I met Dennis Prager via radio in 2004 late during the John Kerry effort to infect the country with his presidency.
Dennis has been part of my aural and intellectual life ever since. Dennis is an American conservative teacher and prophet who happens to be a Jew….a religious one to boot.
I first became acquainted with “Jewishness” when I was seven, the spring after Pearl Harbor. It became my duty to distribute invitations to neighbors on both sides of our street for group Spring and Fall gatherings. Catholics, Methodists, and Lutherans…..attended as if one; an aggressive in-ones-face Evangelical Baptist and a Jewish family were different. Aggressive Muriel Peterson always brought her family of three and silent husband, good soul, quiet, shy carpenter, Wilbur, and her Bible…from which she would read passages from the New Testament before eats could begin.
The Jewish family, the Nehenskys, never showed up. After the war a second Jewish family moved in across the street. Neither family ever joined any community picnic or any other gathering despite always invited. I delivered the invitations every year until the gatherings ended in the late 1940s when most of us kids reached high school.
Our neighborhood public elementary school was built a few years before the War began. On the hillier portion of its boundaries, the eastern side, there was greater wealth. The houses there were larger and more expensively decorated. The largest ‘minority’, that is any group acting in any way noticeably different from others, was Jewish….accumulating to about 15% or slightly more of our elementary school enrollment.
I wasn’t keenly aware of very much of anything in those days. I did the best at what I was told to do. I loved learning and saw it as entertainment…..except I couldn’t read story books of any and all sizes. I couldn’t discern letters and suffered consequences popular in those days before dyslexia was invented. There were advantages, however. I loved that stuff the teachers made noise about. I could read newspapers at home about the war…..headlines, maps, showing Nazi and Jap invasions and successes with arrows, cutlines, and geographic names. I had relatives in the navy at the Pacific front. I traced maps off of atlases and fell in love with whatever the globe offered.
In Mrs. Lucille Jaeger’s 3rd grade class I was told to go to the black board early in the year. She had heard, she said, that I could draw maps by heart. (She already had much proof, as did the entire class, that I couldn’t read books.)
“Can you draw an outline map of the United States on the blackboard for us, Glenn?”
Totally unaware this would become my debut into our community Jewish world, I entered stardom in that class by agreeing, “Yes”….with the following “of course” unsaid but demonstrated in the attitude I carried with me as I approached the blackboard. It was my day at last….after all of the times I had been humiliated by my inability to read and the clumsiness of my attempts to cover up when I was forced to read ‘out loud’ to the entire class….while standing up facing the humiliation alone, all alone.
It took me about two minutes to run the chalk around the blackboard to map out very accurately the outline of our beloved country…..so accurately that I then asked Mrs. Jaeger if she’d like me to draw the boundaries of all of the States as well….(There were only 48 of them then. Alaska and Hawaii would have been out of my league.) I even already knew the state capitals and the European ones as well….generally one of those useless things one never forgets.
I started the boundary lines from West to East….When I got to the Mississippi River, she thanked me, and asked the class for an applause.
Thereafter, I began to collect a lot of Jewish classmates, the buddy kind. It was a nosier bunch of kids than those I usually played or hung around with….many already in-ones-face with the smarts, the glib, the confidence they practiced at home. Christians then were culturally different….taught to be quiet, polite, unaggressive, to possess humility and self control especially around adults.
I was not allowed to enter two of my Jewish buddy’s homes for I was a goy, a Gentile, I learned later, but I never gave a moment’s thought to it. In high school I was “Jewishly” popular in algebra, geography, history, Latin, and Botany and English Grammar. But the girls of all backgrounds and even most of my Jewish buddies in classes where English was the elementary requirement to read Dickens, Jane Austen, Thackeray, et alia, shunned me as if I were a plague carrier. Only once in my four years of high school English did I star….
…..In 9th grade when we were required to read some Shakespeare including the Merchant of Venice, a relic from some other century with gifts of teaching and love of beauty, commanded our class of 36 students, mostly boys.
She lectured every day….first explaining the themes of each act she loved best, and then with the music of her tone and language recited by memory all of the most powerful and beautiful words of the most beautiful ever put to pen for the ear and the mind to behold…..such as the following below from a previous article at this site titled: “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous”:
In “Merchant of Venice”, I learned when Miss Wicker expressed Shylock’s questions: “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” It was 1948.
Our once beloved America has been deeply damaged, perhaps destroyed in my lifetime. THE MOST HUMANE RELIGION EVER ‘INVENTED’ MY MANKIND HAS BEEN THE PROTESTANT CHRISTIANITY GATHERED BY THOSE DEAD WHITE MALES TO BUILD A NEW WORLD OF LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, OUR CHRISTIAN FOREFATHERS. Its greatness even bent then authoritarian European Catholicism to accept its liberties.
And yet, it also has created the nation’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual decay, the ObamaTime rot we now endure. We lost our religious core, the thinking animal’s classic battle of good versus evil.
Leading America’s culture demise in my generation in order of damage done, is the church itself…primarily the Protestant variety, empty of inspiration, empty of male knowledge, learnings, and wisdom, replaced by dead end and simple-minded feminist and Marxist imaginations and ugly politics, and in a rather distant but powerful second place, the militancy of the atheistic, leftwing Jew among America’s citizenry….the Alan Dershowitz crowd and its countless numbers of leftists, atheists, arrogant haters of American Christianity, who now so dominate the nation’s academia, news, and entertainment industries.
Barack Obama, the devious and devoted Islamist in the White House so dangerous to world Jewry and American values, still received 70% of the Jewish vote in both of his runs to corrupt further the country’s religious and moral values, its leadership and honor in the world. I find this all rather remindful of the Germany led by Adolph Hitler in the early 1930s before his atrocities became real life, when he still played Obamalike games of deceit and design leading his National Socialist Party and becoming Germany’s Chancellor.
Conservative American Jews are on the other hand, Godsent to us. Dennis, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, oh so many more of these wise and inspirited American thinkers and evangelists for human liberty and dignity.
I was blessed to be “Christian born and raised” in this lonely America of human life. It came with discipline and orders I learned in public elementary school, to become as learned as possible, for, they instructed, amassing knowledge would make me closer to God, and a better voter at the ballot box. AMEN!
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