The Prom and Regret

 I'm getting older.

I went to high school in the 1970s. It was a time and place where we parked our pick-up trucks in the school parking lot with a gun rack in the back window with two long guns cradled in it. We had things like corporal punishment and parents who spanked you even after you got paddled by the teacher at school in the class room in front of all your classmates. The times were clearly different, but even so we still had to deal with mean girls and bullies, ugly pranks and general teenage stupidity. Just like today.

In my high school there was a certain girl who was not all that attractive. She was one of many, but for whatever reason she seemed to get targeted a bit more than most. She was smart and talented, but she did little to improve her standing due to her clear social clumsiness. She had a group of friends, though, and seemed to do well nevertheless.

Then, despite her social flaws and unattractiveness, a classmate invited her to the Junior-Senior Prom. Understandably, she was very excited. This was the school's social event of the year, as it is most everywhere in the US.

Of course, like most every girl, she went out and bought a beautiful dress for the occasion. She got her hair done. She put on her make up very tastefully, and got ready for the big evening.

The day of the prom arrived. The excitement at school was palpable. Then, her date informed her that his car had broken down and he would be unable to pick her up to take her to the prom. He would meet her there, he said. And she was dropped off at the venue by her parents, and she waited. But, her “date” never showed up. She obviously had been pranked. Rather cruelly.

She sat alone at a table in a very dignified fashion, but clearly sad. And she was the subject of many whispers and pitied glances. I was a senior that year. And I had my date. But, despite my status as a football letter man and running on the track team (field events because despite being fit, I was very slow) and being a senior, I was far too concerned with what others thought of me. So I just shook my head and felt sorry for her, joining in the glances and whispers.

Today, over forty years later (although it honestly didn't it didn’t take me THAT long for me to understand this), I realize that I should have gathered together my tight group of friends and one-by-one, asked her to dance. It WAS a dance, after all. And it really didn't matter how poorly any of us danced.

I have no idea as to if she would have danced with any of us. None. But, I should have asked. I should have gotten my friends to do the same. But, I didn’t. I was selfish and an idiot back then, caring far too much what others might think. Except her. I may still be that way today, but certainly not as bad as I was as a teen. I hope.

I understand that today she is married and a grandmother. I’m happy for her. And I wish I was a stronger, more confident boy back then. And, in retrospect, imagine the impression I would have made to all the high school girls watching me and my friends. We would have melted hearts. Not that such is anywhere important today. In The Great Scheme, I have no clue if it would have made any difference. But, it would have been right and proper.

I only can hope that someone young sees this, realizes that most peoples’ opinions are garbage, learns from my lesson, and does the right thing. And not just at the prom.

Why Is AIDS Not An STD?

I’m getting older. We all do every day; it’s a fact of life. When we’re young we question things and we allow ourselves to soak up knowledge and ideas and opinions. These things, of course, form us and eventually help to make up who we are.

When I was young, in my teens, I was lucky. When it came to Sexually Transmitted Diseases, we called it Venereal Disease in those days - “VD.” We were pretty lucky I’ve learned. “The Clap,” the slang term used for all VD, could all be fought with drugs, and there were only a couple or three. I only knew one person who had contracted it by the time I left college at the age of twenty.

Then came Herpes. Now Herpes scared us, because it’s not curable. It wasn’t as bad as the others, but sores all over you when you were trying to impress the opposite sex were not at all helpful. It was a nuisance then, and is now manageable with drugs, but it was a venereal disease. Interestingly, VD was treatable for years much like Herpes is today, though no cure was known until the advent of antibiotics in the name of Penicillin and the like in the 1940’s.

Through it all, though, we had condoms, which many of us used anyway because The Pill wasn’t 100-percent effective. But condoms kept you more-or-less safe from parenthood and likely disease-free.

Then, in 1981, a strange series of ailments began to pop up in the male homosexual population in places like New York and San Francisco. Soon dubbed Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), then soon after Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in an effort to recognize that it could infect heterosexuals, it was quickly recognized as a sexually transmitted disease, or ‘STD.’ In this age of the ‘politically correct,’ which I prefer to call the ‘politically confused,’ STD sounds nicer than VD. But, by any measure, AIDS is “an illness that has a significant probability of transmission by means of sexual contact.” At THAT is and was the definition of VD.

Now, AIDS is a disease of choice and of morality. Except for a very small group, AIDS is transmitted by immoral behavior. And it is because of this that AIDS is NOT VD! That’s right. Gonorrhea, syphillis, and herpes are VD. But AIDS is a disease that affects lifestyle. Mind you, immoral lifestyles can be affected by VD, but most are curable. AIDS to date is not.

AIDS has affected the homosexual community dramatically. Now the homosexual community will never admit that their very choices are what drives the AIDS epidemic, nor would the Free Love Generation of the sixties have done so either, I’m sure. But it IS these choices that have caused the spread of this horrific disease. As an example, one of the small groups noted above, those who suffered from hemophilia, have suffered disproportionately from AIDS. Hemophiliacs have a deficiency in the agent that causes blood to clot, and desperately require infusions of clotting agents. Once known as ‘bleeders,’ these innocent people received clotting agent that was a cocktail extracted from the blood of many, including AIDS-infected homosexuals, many who knew they were sick. But, in many cases these infected people donated plasma for money. As a result, many hemophiliacs were infected and died of AIDS. The homosexual community generally ignored their plight, as did the media. Hemophiliacs are well represented in the media, mind you.

I am continually heart-broken when I see a young heterosexual person on TV, a talking head for HIV/AIDS, explain how they never thought they were in danger. How it was ‘just once,’ or he/she didn’t know their partner was infected, or even worse – I don’t even know his/her name. These poor victims are trotted out by AIDS activist organizations and used to somehow make us all believe that we can catch this horrible disease, just by being heterosexual. They’ve been victimized twice – first by the disease and then by the activists.

I will readily admit that a huge group of heterosexuals in the Third World have contracted AIDS. But, without a doubt, the underlying reason that it has spread there is through prostitution, an inherently immoral act. Throughout the world today, if a married couple is free of AIDS, and stays monogamous, the chance that either will contract the disease are so infinitesimally small as to be unreadable. These are facts.

AIDS is caught almost exclusively but those who are participating in immoral acts, many of which are aberrant or abhorrent. This includes homosexuality, drug use, multiple sexual partners, anonymous sex, and the like. These are simple truths. And until we begin to look at AIDS as what it is, a Venereal Disease, it will continue its toll.

"Trust" Is Not a One-Way Street

So, what changes to the US government system would actually restore international trust? This was a question someone posted on Quora, a website for people to ask questions and get answers. Like most sites, it started off with a noble and great concept to allow people to find information that was difficult to access elsewhere. Today not so much.

But the question was posed. So, I thought I'd answer with a blog post.

America was founded through rebellion. A nation of dreamers, cast-offs, the flotsam and jetsam of most of Europe, they rebelled against the norm and threw off the yoke of absentee leadership, totalitarianism, and monarchism. Outside of Switzerland and tiny San Marino the US is the oldest democratic republic on the planet. America was for most of its history a nation of rebels, innovators, thinkers, and doers.

And because of this history, there has never really been ‘trust’ toward America. Americans didn't follow the rules. They made up their own. They even made up their own sports. Baseball, basketball, gridiron football are all American sports either made up or modified by making up new rules.

So, the world never trusted the US. They only needed America. And that began in the late 19^th Century with the massive industrialization of America's economy.

The Western Allies needed America in World War I for food, arms, and finally military manpower. All of Europe and Asia needed the US during and after World War II. Without American arms, food, and energy the allies (Britain, Australia, China, France, and the USSR) would have struggled mightily to replace their losses and build a modern military large enough to defeat the Axis. The, the American Marshall Plan rebuilt nearly the whole of Western Europe after the war. The US rebuilt Japan and the Philippines, too. They would also rebuild South Korea after that war.

Even now, America is the single greatest donor nation on the planet. Whenever there is a natural or even man-made disaster, Americans arrive in droves with food, water, medical aid, and equipment and technology to help clean up and rebuild. And the US does all this with less than four percent of the world's population. Yet it produces a quarter of the world's wealth. There are more Europeans (even without Russia, Ukraine, and the Caucasus) than Americans, yet the Americans STILL outproduce Europe. Whether it is defense, technology, food, or whatever, respect has NOTHING to do with it. The world needs the US far more than America needs the world.

Canada, Europe, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan have been living under the US taxpayers’ largesse and the American defense umbrella that those same American taxpayers have paid for since 1945. The Philippines essentially got rid of any strategic defense 20 years ago and is now scrambling to recover with the recently aggressive actions of China. Europe has a huge lack of strategic air and sealift capability, naval capability, reserve forces, nuclear weapons, armor, etc., and depends on the US to keep Putin's big, bad Russian Bear at bay.

Today, President Trump has called them all out. He and many other Americans are sick and tired of subsidizing ‘international trust’ that is only a leech on America's finances and prosperity. And the planet concurrently criticizes on a constant basis the very nation that affords them the ability to subsidize mediocrity and sloth, hate and protest, and even barely-disguised police states.

America has shown the planet far more trust than that given the US, except when America is needed by the world. They DO trust that the US will be there when they are in need. Real international trust is a joke when it only goes one way. 

And frighteningly for America's 'friends' that joke stopped in January 2025.

It's Out There. Go See It.

It's kind of weird how we can live in a place for years and never actually see or understand it. It was only last summer that I went to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. This is the location generally accepted to be the reason for and the place of the opening salvos of the US Civil War in 1961. My family moved to South Carolina in 1972. So, yeah, it took me 52 years to actually see this place that was to be so pivotal to American history.

And it's the same here locally. On a beautiful Saturday, Leap Day, 29 February 2020, I drove out to the Battle of Camden site to visit for the first time ever. That only took 48 years, despite the fact that it's barely a day's horse ride a way (about 25 minutes by modern car).

The battle here in 1780 is thought by some historians to be the high-water mark of the British effort to retain the American colonies. British strategy has shifted south in the American colonies to the breadbasket. Believing that control of the agriculture of the are would help strangle the American rebellion, British moved major operations to Georgia, and North and South Carolina. Additionally, there were strong monarchist feelings in the South, so much so that the British command believed that they could easily raise Loyalist units to easily win the South.

 

The British took the two major Southern posts, Savannah and Charleston, capturing large amounts of Colonial troops as well as munitions, equipment, and food. It was a powerful blow against the Patriot cause and forced the Americans to enter into major partisan and guerilla operations.

 

It is said that across the colonies around a third of the population was loyal to The Crown. The were the Loyalists. It is countered that a third were pro-independence, or Patriots. The final third wanted nothing to do with any of it and hoped to just be left alone to try and build their lives in peace. Instead, the war turned into a bloody, violent, vicious and ugly civil war that saw much of what we today would describe as war crimes. These sort of tactics pushed many into the hands of the Loyalists or the Patriots.

 

And so it was that in the sweaty, tick-infested cauldron of a wilderness north of Camden, South Carolina that American forces were routed in a sharp battle led by British Lords Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis, Lieutenant Colonel James Webster, and Colonel Francis Edward Rawdon-Hastings. I will not bore you with tactics and maneuver, but suffice it to say that despite outnumbering the British Redcoats nearly 2-to-1, Colonial forces suffered over 1900 killed or captured out of 4000 engaged. British losses were 324 killed, wounded and missing out of their 2100. 

 

American General Horatio Gates, the hero of the Battle of Saratoga, was humiliated. At the height of the battle with his flank collapsing and being overrun, he mounted his horse and fled headlong to Charlotte, North Carolina. He was rightly removed for cowardice under fire. Nearly all Colonial military stores in the South were lost. And German mercenary Major General Johann von Robais, Baron de Kalb was mortally wounded while leading Maryland Patriot forces.

Recently, fourteen war dead from the battle were recovered at the battle site. One was a Highlander of the  British Army's 71st Regiment of Foot, unofficially known as Fraser's Highlanders, and another was a Native American Loyalist militiaman from North Carolina. The other twelve were Continentals. They were all reburied in 2023 with full military honors, with the Highlander's remains handled by an honor guard of the The Royal Highland Fusiliers flown in from the UK for the event.

 

photo by insidegmt

 

In 2021, the City of Camden unveiled a new statue to de Kalb at the Revolutionary War Visitor Center in the southern part of the town. The German military liaison to the United States attended. It is at least the third monument to the general in the area. 

 photo byemergingrevolutionarywar.org

 

The area around the battlefield today is generally referred to as the Baron DeKalb (or 'BDK') community.

And while it was a decisive and overwhelming American defeat, at the same time it's Pyrrhic value would lead to the eventual defeat of Britain in it's rebellious American colonies at Yorktown, Virginia, barely 14 months later.

 

So, the only advice I can give you is to look around your community and find those places you've ignored or just haven't seen. There's is a lot of history out there. Go see it. Take the kids. It'll be amazing.

Trump 2.0

Let me please tell you what I believe. And please, also, read all the way through the first paragraph.

I believe that the Democrats manipulated the 2020 presidential vote in such a manner to win the presidency for Joe Biden. They were able to use COVID-19 restrictions, social media censorship, illegal changes and manipulation of state and local election laws, mainstream media bias, and many other means to accomplish this. It was stealthy. It was discrete. You don’t have to agree, but the single most important fact is that Biden was sworn in and became the 46th president of the US in January 2021.

And that was the first mistake that the Democratic Party did.

The Party, from the lowest levels all the way to the Oval Office, then launched a concerted and highly focused campaign to make Donald Trump irrelevant through the courts and the media. But, sadly for those same Democrats, President Joe Biden (or the people manipulating him, as some have argued) then grossly mismanaged his role to such an extent, and used the government to attack his political rivals so overtly, that a groundswell of the American electorate occurred. 

And that was the second mistake of the Democratic Party.

That groundswell would then push candidate and former President Trump over the electoral line to be re-elected as president in a surprising, even shocking, electoral and popular victory in 2024

There were other factors, too, but those are the general facts.

Whatever the truth, beating Trump in 2020 was the single most disastrous thing that the Democratic Party could have possibly done. Why? Well, if Donald Trump had been re-elected in 2020 he would have continued to change the direction of the federal US government in a plodding pace that would continue to be hamstrung by Democrats and certain Establishment Republicans. He likely would not have accomplished in the next four years what he then accomplished in the first four weeks of his second term. He would still have been hamstrung by his vice president, a clear member of the Republican Establishment. Too, his cabinet of traditional Republicans and newer talent, along with their and his lack of understanding of the manner in which Washington, DC, operated would have greatly slowed him down.

One of the most important things to understand is that Donald Trump is a businessman. He has spent a lifetime analyzing his business performance. For six decades he has done this in order to improve business and personal outcomes. He, or one of his businesses, have been bankrupted on more than a few occasions and he has analyzed his mistakes and come back more successful and wealthier than ever. This was not coincidence, serendipity, or luck. It was analysis, assessment, and adjustment. He even wrote books on it.

And he was insanely popular prior to his presidential campaign announcement and his trip down the golden escalator. He counted as friends people like Oprah Winfrey, the two George Bushes, the Clintons, Al Sharpton, Chris Christie, and Jesse Jackson among many others. He understood to some extent the political world. Until, of course, he ran against all those people in 2016 and suddenly found dozens of proverbial knives in his back from those same people, as well as a system of politics that demanded homage to the system.

So, for his first four years in office, he struggled to understand the system and the politics of the beast he now led. Then Biden won the office in 2020. The next election cycle in 2024 was the culmination of eight years (2016–2024) of analysis of his many errors as an outsider, non-politician, and non-swamp-rat status in the Swamp of Politics. He analyzed his errors on the campaign trail as well as in office all in anticipation of being re-elected. This analysis intensified during the four years of 2020-2024. 

So, with a new understanding of what would meet him if he were re-elected, Trump in 2024 already had in place a plan and an idea, if not a long list, of the type of people he wanted running the Executive Branch. Understand that it was in place long before election day. And these people were all so different from the people that he THOUGHT he could trust in his first term. This time around, he KNEW he could trust these people because they have the same beliefs in America, its people, and the nation's inherent greatness.

Today, Democrats and Establishment Republicans are running about with their hair on fire just trying to keep up with Trump. They cannot. And he is putting in place the government that he wants, with the staff he trusts, with lawyers he can rely upon, and has decided that Democrats and the media can all just go to Hell. And he does not care one iota what the pundits, the politicians, or the media say. He was elected on what he feels was a plain and obvious plan and promise to America to change the government for the better. And reports say he frequently consults a list of promises he made on the campaign trail to ensure he stays on track.

And that is the problem for Democrats and Establishment Republicans. By defeating Trump in 2020, and failing to bankrupt him, jail him, or kill him on two occasions they have made the very monster they feared he could be.

Donald Trump 2.0 is as much the making of the Democratic Party, and to a certain extent the old Republican Establishment, as it is Donald Trump. Democrats can only hope that they learn the lessons that are right in front (or behind) them.