Guest Post by John W. Whitehead
It’s been a hard, heart-wrenching, stomach-churning kind of year filled with violence and ill will.
It’s been a year of hotheads and blowhards and killing sprees and bloodshed and takedowns.
It’s been a year in which tyranny took a step forward and freedom got knocked down a few notches.
It’s been a year with an abundance of bad news and a shortage of good news.
It’s been a year of too much hate and too little kindness.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Now we find ourselves approaching that time of year when, as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, we’re supposed to give thanks as a nation and as individuals for our safety and our freedoms.
It’s not an easy undertaking.
How do you give thanks for freedoms that are constantly being eroded? How do you express gratitude for one’s safety when the perils posed by the American police state grow more treacherous by the day? How do you come together as a nation in thanksgiving when the powers-that-be continue to polarize and divide us into warring factions?
It’s not going to happen overnight. Or with one turkey dinner. Or with one day of thanksgiving.
Thinking good thoughts, being grateful, counting your blessings and adopting a glass-half-full mindset are fine and good, but don’t stop there.
This world requires doers, men and women (and children) who will put those good thoughts into action.
It says a lot (and nothing good) about the state of our world and the meanness that seems to have taken center stage that we now have a day (World Kindness Day) devoted to making the world more collectively human in thoughts and actions. The idea for the day started after a college president in Japan was mugged in a public place and nobody helped him.
Unfortunately, you hear about these kinds of incidents too often.
This is how evil prevails: when good men and women do nothing.
By doing nothing, the onlookers become as guilty as the perpetrator.
It works the same whether you’re talking about kids watching bullies torment a fellow student on a playground, bystanders watching someone dying on a sidewalk, or citizens remaining silent in the face of government atrocities.
There’s a term for this phenomenon where people stand by, watch and do nothing—even when there is no risk to their safety—while some horrific act takes place (someone is mugged or raped or bullied or left to die): it’s called the bystander effect.
Historically, this bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings.
So what can you do about this bystander effect?
Be a hero, suggests psychologist Philip Zimbardo.
Be an individual. Listen to your inner voice. Take responsibility.
Recognize injustice. Don’t turn away from suffering.
Refuse to remain silent. Take a stand. Speak up. Speak out.
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation,” stated Holocaust Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1986. “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, too many Americans have opted to remain silent when it really matters while instead taking a stand over politics rather than human suffering.
That needs to change.
I don’t believe people are inherently monsters. We just need to be more conscientious and engaged and helpful.
The Good Samaritans of this world don’t always get recognized, but they’re out there, doing their part to push back against the darkness.
For instance, earlier this year in Florida, a group of 80 people formed a human chain in order to rescue a family of six—four adults and two young boys—who were swept out to sea by a powerful rip current in Panama City Beach. One by one, they linked hands and stretched as far as their chain would go. One by one, they rescued those in trouble and pulled each other in.
There’s a moral here for what needs to happen in this country if we only can band together and prevail against the riptides that threaten to overwhelm us.
Here’s what I suggest.
Instead of just giving thanks this holiday season with words that are too soon forgotten, why not put your gratitude into action with deeds that spread a little kindness, lighten someone’s burden, and brighten some dark corner?
I’m not just talking about volunteering at a soup kitchen or making a donation to a charity that does good work, although those are fine things, too.
What I’m suggesting is something that everyone can do no matter how tight our budgets or how crowded our schedules.
Pay your blessings forward.
Engage in acts of kindness. Smile more. Fight less.
Focus on the things that unite instead of that which divides. Be a hero, whether or not anyone ever notices.
Do your part to push back against the meanness of our culture with conscious compassion and humanity. Moods are contagious, the good and the bad. They can be passed from person to person. So can the actions associated with those moods, the good and the bad.
Even holding the door for someone or giving up your seat on a crowded train are acts of benevolence that, magnified by other such acts, can spark a movement.
Imagine a world in which we all lived in peace.
John Lennon tried to imagine such a world in which there was nothing to kill or die for, no greed or hunger. He was a beautiful dreamer whose life ended with an assassin’s bullet on December 8, 1980.
Still, that doesn’t mean the dream has to die, too.
There’s something to be said for working to make that dream a reality. As Lennon reminded his listeners, “War is over, if you want it.”
The choice is ours, if we want it.
I was traveling somewhere in rural Southern California in my ’64 Corvair with my San Antonio rose as a slip cover sitting beside me. Her grandfather owned a liquor store in S A. Her O-6 father eventually let me drive his 911 – a thrill not since rivaled.
A biker, who looked sorta like a young Mel Gibson flagged me down on the long lonesome highway to tell me my rear wheel lugs were loose and the tire was wobbling. I had wondered what the unfamiliar noise was. He helped me as I tightened the nuts. I thanked him and asked if I could do something for him. He said, no, thanks, just play the good deed forward.
A score and a decade and a half later I told my cut-out the story. She grasped the idea as quaint.
I went on to tell a bit more, as she was in training for Section 8 and the Dooley Corp.
I proposed a club. Not unlike Fight Club. The first three rules was do not talk about the (fight) club. You only share it with those you know to be reliable and trustworthy – even with your life. The rule was to fight against injustice and cruelty anywhere you saw it and be an aid to those who are less fortunate. Be it the bully who threatens his girlfriend in public or to help the little old lady across the street, or help out a child who is in need of positive leadership. It was a bit freaky when the movie Fight Club came out as the theme was similar but with a much darker and brutal motivation. The schizoid protagonist’s dilemma was not lost on me.
When the movie Play It Forward came out I was touched ( but not by KS (kevin spacey)) as it sorta personified the tried, true and sometimes trite idea I embraced in 1968.
So Suzie, I realize that you probably didn’t mean to type Play it forward several times and you know that Pay it forward was the concept in play so I don’t want to comment on that. But you have used this reference several times now and I can’t seem to find anything meaningful in it so I guess I will just have to ask you.
What is Section 8 and the Dooley Corp?
Thank you for pointing out my error. It is just my automatic mind running with the thought – and saying play instead of pay.
As to the other question. I have teased our troupe with the two entities.
As I have said before my first job at Emory U was at Dooley’s Den – the campus snack bar. I was hired for my experience at McD’s where I was a night manager and general trouble shooter for the small corp owned by a retired O6. They wrote a recommendation for me when I applied to Emory and I can assure you it said I walked on water and could leap a building in a single bound. I had worked at half a dozen stores in SoCal. Even in Compton where my gang (car club) had free pass to go where we wanted, no hassles. It was a different world back then. I made friends and connections in Compton.
After I exposed the biddy cafeteria worker as the embezzler of the funds from Dooley’s Den cash drawer I was hired at the blood bank of the teaching hospital. There I saved the hospital from a gypsy curse and ushered the dying king of the gypsies into the next world. I described the ceremony previously here and do not feel like repeating it. So I assumed the mantle of the king of the gypsies by acclamation of the family present for his death watch. The hospital forbid candles in the room where there were gas outlets for bunsen burners. I protested and hospital relented and allowed the candlelight ceremony to proceed. The family canceled the curse and asked I be the last one to draw the blood of the dying don. hocus pocus expialidocious as I sucked out the blood with ceremony and pomp. Enter Bulgaria and Romania with spooky events… Yes we steal children, not physically but we infect their minds with other ways of being that appear to be a better way to live. Many join rather than rot in a stultifying existence.
Dooley makes an symbolic appearance on Emory campus each year by a student wearing a skeleton costume. I dated and loved the daughter of the first man to don the costume on campus. There is real skeleton in the anatomy department that previously was carted around campus. So Dooley is the mascot of Emory, signifying the Lord of Misrule – who judges all from the perspective of history.
You can see a sculpture of dooley at this link. He is seen in the second post down on the link
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lord-Dooley-Statue/261135870647058
I formed a group called The Dooley Corp. It is an answer to Skull and Bones who seem to have fermented half the problems of this world. Those who are inducted/join the Dooley Corp are committed to correct the course of history now faltering on the track.
Section 8 is about Zen Warfare. I discussed section 8 for 30 years with my SAC pilot father who worked with Ian Fleming, testified in the Kennedy investigation, was the creator of fighting techniques for AF survival school and shitz too much to mention. He slowly discovered the secret behind the now defunct camp located in St. Teresa, Florida. He finally told me to take it if I had the chance. So I did. The first person I enlisted was Wayne Dyer. He was the base psychologist at the black ops base of 5000 active duty and dependent people – Karamürsel. – where I was stationed for two years and ran covert ops across Turkey, Africa and Europe. He was busy writing his first book, Your Erroneous Zones. He is very zen if you are not familiar with the recently deceased author and lecturer. I will leave it to your imagination how zen warfare proceeds in the modern world. I will tell you I have had more help than you can imagine with my various ops that I have run around the world. There are various references to section 8 and the number 8 in history and movies. I say they are part of the plan to direct misinformation to weaken those who challenge the good ole USA and it’s core values. There is no pay but the rewards are great. Like Fight Club, the first three rules are: do not talk about section 8….
Counting Time in a sideways 8
Can you see the truth while tempting fate
When fabled stories with myths pervade
Behind the fore head where love invades
Enough for now.
99% true
The four tenets
time4teeth
light a light
Good job Rob. Aren’t you glad you asked?
Y’all should leave the good doctor alone. He’s taken waaaaaaaay too many pulls on the nitrous after hours.
Bwahahababa
It’s to late .I chose not to be nice and kind to the ” other ” treasonous son of a bitches .I have no common cause with these trailors .
Luke 6:31 And as ye wish that men should do to you, do ye also to them in like manner.
Did you say “do them in a like manner” 🙂
Quoting Lennon’s communistic and atheistic song ‘Imagine’ hardly inspires confidence…
Big fan of the ‘pay it forward’ movement.
“Engage in acts of kindness. Smile more. Fight less.”
“Even holding the door for someone or giving up your seat on a crowded train are acts of benevolence that, magnified by other such acts, can spark a movement.”
Doesn’t have to be a grand gesture, or involve great sacrifice…as the author stated.
For me, it’s a smile, and holding open the door at the post office, especially to people of color, as it’s not expected by them from people of a different race. Pleasant surprises like that help bust the myth that everybody in a certain group can be stereotyped in negative ways.
Another one is to leave spiritual inspirational print-outs of good lessons I’ve collected through the years, that might just be the tiny miracle someone needs at that time in their life.
He works in mysterious ways sometimes, and I’ve been on the receiving end a few times in my life.
Good post, Admin. We needed it, IMO.
For me, it’s a smile, and holding open the door at the precinct , especially to people of color.
and again, you get me laughing.
Kindness, love, and gratitude are most important at all times…
The Economist Went There – Shockingly Un-PC Study Shows Whites Work Hardest, Longest
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-20/economist-went-there-shockingly-un-pc-study-shows-whites-work-hardest-longest
I’m with BB – I’m waiting for the pay back.
I’m with BB and Dutch.
That’s because blacks know if they get fired for any reason they’ll just start screaming ‘You rassis!’
Alright. I’m sold. Next time some convention of bitter feminist harridans is in town, I’m going down and holding the door for all of them. I’m sure they’ll be appreciative.
Once a month I prepare a home cooked supper for a bunch of old guys and we sit around, eat at these long tables, talk, rest a bit, have some pie and coffee, play cribbage and then all head home. It’s free,and the guys, though elderly, are all very interesting, salt of the earth, movers/shakers from back in the day and extremely grateful for the meal. Its a win/win for everyone and it helps keep the community bound together in one small way for next to nothing.
Don’t Misunderstand me .I am very nice and kind to most people in my own Tribe.I don’t come into contact with many Liberal Progressive types except the ones in my family and when they come over I usually leave .I keep the peace for Mom .I very seldom speak to Blacks unless they speak to me.I am not friendly towards them and I think they know it .Same with Muslims.I am friendly and kind to most whites. Don’t know or come into contact with Jews.
After reading that, why do I feel I just got out of church?
Why do I feel I was preached AT?
That being said, much of what he says is decent advice. For an individual. Not for the nation … there is no hope.
“Imagine a world in which we all lived in peace.” Sure. But. here’s the thing. That’s just fucken stooopid. Just like Lennon’s song.
Fuck that. People suck.