The Wonder Springs Chronicle

R U Normal?

1 November 2010

R U Normal?

Pretty much everyone believes that they are normal, even though a great number of those reading this column would believe that the above question should be stated: “Are you normal?”

But for a long time now, we are told that if we don’t believe this and that — that we are not normal. Just a couple of years ago, most people thought so called progressives were normal people. That feeling applied to both Republicans and Democrats. The last president that you really would not call a progressive was Ronald Reagan, but even he was uber-progressive when it came to national defense and he used that progressivism to bankrupt the former Soviet Union.

In that light we all now know that Teddy Roosevelt was the first president that claimed the progressive title. Furthermore his New Deal cousin FDR, who turned the Hoover depression into the Great Depression, was mostly responsible for the changes that bring us to R U normal today.

But consider the following statements.

This is a center-right country.

The mainstream media basically has a liberal bias.

Fox News Channel is the home of totally conservative ideologues.

The Tea Parties are made up of racist bigots.

Barak Obama wants to turn this country into a socialist-communist country.

The country is basically polarized into conservative and liberal extremes.

This list could go on for pages from both the liberal and the conservative sides of the spectrum, even though that definition of liberal and conservative has basically reversed itself in the last century.

So really before we can answer the question whether you are normal, we must define what normal really means.

I don’t think it is too extreme to say that most Americans love their country. The crowds at Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally at the end of August and yesterday’s Restoring Sanity and Fear rallies, point to that reality. If those who think that this country is heading for some really tough times ahead and would like to quit the American game, understand there is really no place to go, for no matter where that might be you can’t really get out of the American game.

We chose the name Cult Football for this series because contrary to the World Series, where you watch a game while you wait for the real grass or to a lesser extent now, the artificial grass to grow, real smash mouth American football is the American game. In reality it is the residual of the long vanished frontier; that allows spectators to see the foe vanquished. This violence begins with pee-wees and continues up to the pros where the art form becomes and established cult.

Seriously however think for a moment about the realities of political polarization and being center-right and you realize that if the center-right is really the center of political thought, then it should be the center and the extremes of the far right and the far left would be exactly that. In reality there is nothing about the United States of America, as it exists today that is normal, other than some somewhat universal allegiance to the seasonal game of football.

So probably the proper question is not so much R U normal, but whether you want to become normal, and by extension do you want the country to become more normal in the process?

Assuming that this is a call to some sort of normal honorable sanity, where we would like to create a world without impending fear, where do we begin?

I would say that to begin that transition we need to restrain the pundits on both polarizing extremes from being the only voices that are given a voice.

Bill O’Reilly has created the cable news standard of success through what he has determined is “lively debate.” That is basically Fox News’ “fair and balanced” spiced up with a little heat, to use a cooking metaphor. However you spin the “No spin zone” was not created to create consensus but rather strife and controversy. So in the truest sense, common normality must forcefully be divided into Pinheads and Patriots.

But when you come down to the reality that the mainstream media is really nothing but a propaganda conduit for the uber-liberal progressive agenda, where do you turn? You surely are not going to get that moderation from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others.

The real mainstream view about this election is that the vast majority of the true normal Americans have no use for either the Republicans or the Democrats, and furthermore they really have little hope that the results of this election, just less than 48 hours away will change any of that.

Drifting back into real reality for a moment, the really spooky times, as we will discuss on Wednesday, begins with the Quantitative Easing (QE) that will take place after the Federal Reserve decides the QE extent — post election day plus one. This will take place not through legislative auspices, but rather under the rule of Ben Bernanke, who was trained in the debt consumerist mindset by Alan Greenspan and is an expert in the causes of the Great Depression, but not so much the alternative that lasted until WWII got us out of the mess.

We live in a world in which fiat money is defined as real money wealth and faux money cannot exist. Furthermore no national money in the world today exists in a world of natural physics or what we call at Wonder Springs — ecological energetics. All that really means is that globalism as it exists and is hyped today is really just a hopeful change, pretending to be something it isn’t, and never can be. So the spooky times will begin whether any of the normal people want it at all.

Truly it is time for the normal people of this country to become normal. Ask politely that Bill O’Reilly and other similar opinion shows, left, center, and right politically, give equal time to normal people pundits, a new common reality creation. It is time to seek common solutions rather than giving time to people to find their identity in being obnoxiously different, instead of seeking common solutions.

The big questions in America are what will happen to the president if his Democrats lose in a tsunami and a really big wave puts the Republicans in control?

I heard someplace that all the federal discretionary spending is less than the current budget deficit. Of course all that is somewhat determined by how you define discretionary spending, which leads to the fact that you can’t balance any budget without real austerity and an increase in revenue through some, perhaps radical changes.

Put another way, in a country where 70 percent of the economy is based upon consumer spending (much of it, at that past milepost — based upon debt alone), 16 percent on ever expanding healthcare, and 25 percent on federal government spending (3721/14623=25.4% estimate in $ billions: source — usgovernmentspending.com), spooky times are here. This is a true first for anyone alive today.

Then when you add in the religion that says money is a god for those who control the money supply, that money is really wealth, and it can be created through leverage ex nihilo, by access to major financial firms, we begin to see normal people as really someone important as we attempt to move forward.

I for one always considered myself to be quite normal. But now that I have been considered an extremist religious fanatic by those on both extremes of any human spectrum you might like to invent, the whole extreme concept becomes quite liberating. “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, and eating worms really isn’t that appetizing.”

Federalism, as it currently exists in our evolving former progressing society, doesn’t seem to make much sense because it was somewhat evil, but rather it is a very inefficient means of accomplishing anything. The first thing you learn about human enterprise is every level that a product or service passes through, generally increases the cost at least 10 percent, and more is better. That means if you give the federal government $100 the best you can hope for in return is $90. In reality that is true all down the line, and even those results are dependent upon political power. The more we eliminate the bureaucratic middle the more efficient and opportunity rich, our governance will become.

Now historically bankers were somewhat immune to this 10 percent rule and banks ran on a 2-3 percent spread, because what they lacked in margin they made up in volume. That all changed when they were freed from the need to hold the debt assets they created and could shuffle them off, not to Buffalo, but to China, Japan, Europe and anyone else who might believe that they really were a security based upon a sound cash flow annuity?

If you want to be normal as we move forward into uncharted waters (or some other wild west metaphor) quit with the leap of blind faith. Anyone who is not willing to look you in the eye and explain what they are doing; probably isn’t relying on real faith, but some means of marketing manipulation.

This, in the media world, somewhat describes the contrasting true power of the Glenn Beck brand. He has a new book out called “Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure.” I haven’t purchased the book but I did read the free chapter that his daily email linked, and checked out the hard copy in Walmart.

I have been passed a couple of his books from people who were given those gifts of enlightenment by his followers. In turn, I too have passed them on to the local library, without much more than looking through the pages, for they seemed to me a work overseen by a recovering drunk with ADD, which even a healthy dose of Mormonism could not overcome. “Broke” however seems to have developed beyond that level of juvenile talking points, even though the teachable moments seem to still exist.

Back in the beginning of the environmental movement when stationed in Germany, without the benefit or curse of television, I read a lot of those early eco-squeak books. After a number I was so bummed out on the process that I haven’t read any since. In essence they were 200 – 250 pages in length, 180 – 225 pages dealt with the problem, the remaining 10 percent dealt with some shallow solution to save the world. “Broke” seems to be broken into thirds, history, present reality, and solutions. What solutions I read seem to be abstract conservative talking points that have changed little from the Reagan years.

That means that Beck’s book is probably what used to be called a primer for the times that are ahead. Here at Wonder Springs we will continue with almost everything we post running almost 2000 words written at a high school level or slightly beyond. That makes the article demand way too much column space and acuity to be part of any mainstream media, but with limited writing skills, it takes me that long to tell a applicable story and not attempt to bore you into complacency.

Anyway as I now have so much to read, so little space for books, and have taken almost all of my other reading to the screen, instead of paper copies, I have decided to move most of my book reading to a soon to be purchased Kindle, so Beck’s “Broke” will have to wait for that reality.

Books, blogs, and teachable moments however, may be catalysts, but really provide none of the energetics of change, real teaching about the real applications of natural law and God’s common grace solutions to human problems do, but only if they become part of the framework of the human enterprise landscape. Here, within the Wonder Springs concept, we are attempting to provide those hands-on opportunities and make them workable.

Put in the context of how we are perceived in the world, our creationist, primitive, knuckle dragging concepts might just be what the lowly evolved need to make the world of better place. Surely those Social Darwinists who don’t quite understand the realities of the Five Essential Gs: God — Gold — Grub — Gumption — Guns. However such primitive learning might give them a proper context to move beyond the talking points of academia into some normal applications that the common folks could understand and adopt.

As we are about to learn from this election, which includes the president of United States of America, those who can’t do — teach, and hence really have little to say to the people who make the world we know operate. That until the second coming of Jesus, or the Rapture, means the good, the bad, the ugly, and for the spooky times we have now entered, is where being normal and all the baggage it carries with normality, will soon be considered a true blessing of God’s Providence.