Unbelievable Things That People Believe

I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe. - Leo Rosten

If I had a motto, this would be it.  Our family motto is "Audeo!".  For those of you unversed in Latin, it does not mean sound, it means "I dare!".  It bespeaks of people who dared to dream big and make their lives better by doing what they thought would achieve that goal.  I come from Pioneer stock.  Both sides of my family came across the country during the Gold Rush and Western Expansion.  You could say, the Selzers, new to this country, having landed in Philadelphia in 1840, and the Dalys, Irish immigrants who came over God knows when, were poster children for Manifest Destiny.

Now, pull up a chair children.  We settled in Idaho, Oregon and California.  Some founded cities, some just grabbed their land and started farming.  I know we have to have succeeded because our history has been handed down through each generation. The emphasis always being that our forebears sacrificed much to achieve some level of success in the New World.  We should not squander that gift they gave to us.  I always accepted that meant that I needed to achieve more than the generation before me, which was kind of easy considering my mother and her sister are nothing more than vultures waiting for their father to die so they can grab money they didn't earn.  I'm pretty sure I could have been a serial killer and fulfilled that directive.

Many people believe that my family and others just like them are imperialistic slavers who killed the Native population and forced them from their lands.  Unbelievable.  My family didn't come over until the mid-1800's, abhorred slavery of any kind and to the best knowledge of our family history, didn't make a living selling Indian Scalps.  Granted, there could have been a vast, right-wing cover up, but considering that news like that got around in the small population of the Pacific Northwest, I doubt it.  We made our living mining, farming, ranching and we succeeded.  How do I know this?  Because I'm around and have heard the oral histories passed down. 

Progressive Liberals would come out weeping and wailing about how my family, both sides raped the land and killed the Native populace.  They would try to make me feel guilty, despite the fact that I, personally did not do any of the things my family did.  Their bravery and heroism is their achievement.  I'll have to make my own.  They honestly would believe that I was personally responsible for the Trail of Tears (although none of my ancestors settled in the Mid-Atlantic States now even saw a Cherokee in their lives) and the famine in Africa.  Yes, I am personally responsible for all of that.  Also, they believe, because I now live in Texas, that my family were slave owning, Mexican hating brash individualists who never gave the little guy a chance.

You don't believe in Santa Claus, too?  Unbelievable.

This is why I don't believe in reparations to ANYONE.  You find that unbelievable?  Let me show you why it's eminently believable, in point of fact.

As far as slavery goes, let me explain something right here, IT DID NOT START IN AMERICA.  I know, unbelievable as that may seem, people have ALWAYS enslaved other people as a cheap source of labor.  Clutch your pearls now sweetie, because I'm going to lay another hard, indisputable fact on you, Western Africans sold captured Africans to white slavers.  We didn't go in and hunt them down, drag them out of their stone age lives, their own did that to them.

Vikings, in other words, Scandinavians were the biggest slavers of white people in the whole entire history of this planet.  They enslaved people in pillaged towns and sold them in the Markets of Europe, Africa and Asia.  Most of England, Scotland and Ireland was peopled, in the Dark Ages by slaves from Middle Europe, brought there by Vikings to settle lands there.  Cheap labor.  Coming from British Isles and Middle-European stock, does this mean I should go hold a gun to the heads of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, demanding money for suffering I never experienced?  Unbelievable that anyone thinks this sort of thing much less speaks it and writes it down.  I'm going to chalk it up to another lazy assed Baby Boomer scheme to get money they haven't earned.

Should I be forced to pay reparations to people who never suffered slavery, whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents never suffered slavery?  F$ck no!  That is truly unbelievable.  What lies at the center of that thought process is whining and demanding more money for doing nothing, which is the trick of a lazy, no-good piece of shiftless shit.  Hey, go ahead if you want, but it says more about you than I think you wish known to the public at large.

Of course, belief in UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and Astral Projection is a given unbelievable!  It's the stunning stuff, like people who believe in redistribution of wealth, Marxism, free lunches and big government that still shock me.  Despite decades of seeing all of those things time and again, they keep thinking that they will get it right if just given one more chance.  Isn't that the definition of insanity?

Unbelievable.