FAREWELL TO A GREAT MAN

Guest Post by Archaeopteryx Phoenix

My father is lying in front of me, dying.

He was a Dartmouth, UVM medical school graduate, army doctor, head of internal medicine at a large hospital, self-taught furniture maker, self-taught sailor and yachtsman, consummate craftsman, maker of model ships and cars, meticulous in his upkeep and maintenance of his tools, cars, tractor, and home.

He no longer is eating and has been without food for over a week. He sips water and sucks on small sponges dipped in ice water. His only intake is the liquid methadone every 6 hours and liquid morphine as needed for the agonizing pain he experiences when he moves his left leg or arm. Imagine watching a person waste away in front of you, the weight falling off them until they look like a Union soldier in the Andersonville prison camp. And imagine that this person still has their full mental faculties, even as the methadone places their mind in a waking dream state.

Sixty percent of the time, it looks like every breath will be his last, his chest barely rising and falling, eyes rolled back up into his head, whites showing, mouth open.

Thirty percent of the time, he is living in another world, his eyes staring at the ceiling, using one hand to manipulate unseen objects in the air above him. He’s already partly in the spirit world, sometimes intently telling us things that seem important to him, “Take this book. Remember, I have a medical background. Don’t let them write in it. It has to have the notes correctly written.” But there is no book. Then his head falls back and he gives up.

The amount of skills and knowledge lost when he dies will be immense. He kept meticulous notes and files of everything he learned and everything he maintained. A file for the 1984 John Deere tractor, a file for each piece of equipment, each grandchild, each car. This was his trademark. A fellow physician wrote him a letter saying how they were sorry to hear of his failing health, and how his pre and post-operative writeups were clear, detailed, thorough, and, most importantly, legible.

He was a natural craftsman, his brothers also being artists, wooden boatbuilders, and also extraordinary craftsmen – also self-taught, and simply for their own pleasure. His 78 year old brother, ex-psychiatrist, is building a 15 foot, two masted, sailing canoe out of wood with canvas over the wooden fuselage-like hull in his basement. He’s built twenty-odd foot wooden sailboats by hand, alone, but also small ship models no larger than your hand, and he hand carved each piece out of wood – not from a kit.

The loss when these men die to society is immeasurable. I made models and have some talent, but can’t hold a candle to their level of skill.

My point is this – White men are natural craftsmen and builders. What were plastic model kits for boys? They were like training wheels or primer books – meant to take the mind and skill level of the average White child and let them begin to learn about tools, materials, engineering, quality, paint, glue, and the artistry of crafting and producing the elemental building blocks of White civilization. These model kits, and legos, and erector sets, were to coax the growing mind of a White child to their natural ability to engineer and create. And White children were drawn to these model sets, the use of tools. It was like standing on the shoulders of giants – the finished, engineered, and highly crafted ship, airplane, or car was shown to them on the front of the box, as it was produced in real life, and you only had to learn to recreate it, while customizing it in however you liked.

Model making was the hands-on, self-taught, school for young White boys to which they naturally gravitated. No one had to encourage them. There were no government incentives to make models. It was a pure form of learning of productive skills that would last them a lifetime, and benefit society and the civilization that they helped to construct.

That world is now fading, those skills having been replaced by cheap imports and machines. The pleasure of craftsmanship being replaced by the immediate short-term dopamine hits of social media, pornography, video games, high fructose corn syrup, and 900 channels of mindless entertainment.

[I just gave him his 1.5 ml of methadone and .5 ml of haliperidol.]

The real triumph was not the mass killings in World Wars that White men were deceived into fighting (and are continually lauded by the media for our ability to fight and die in manipulated events), the real triumph of White men was every small act of craft, every small instance of learning, every act of construction, all the constant reinforcement and rebuilding of the dikes and ramparts of civilization, the intentional production of quality, the drive to create and design clever fixes for human problems of farming and of life, the endless inventiveness, the mastery of tools and toolmaking.

And now all that, and Western Civilization as a whole – a construction of European Whites – lies dying in front of me, wearing a diaper, reduced to skin and bones, still intent on relaying important memos and notes about maintaining the world and home he created.

The refrigerator and their master bathroom are filled with the past and current medications that accompany an agonizing death – bottle of hydrocodone, fentanyl patches, bottles of morphine, methadone pills, stool softeners, diapers, and in the background the ever present pssh and whrr of the oxygen machine in the hallway.

I wish I could show you some of his work.

It was magnificent. An entire lifetime.

Almost done.

And all I can do is watch and care for him as he dies in front of me.

The pathos on all levels is overwhelming.

This, on my micro scale, is what we are losing on a macro scale.

-----------------------------------------------------
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.)

Click to visit the TBP Store for Great TBP Merchandise