Tranquility amidst the cacaphony of world problems. Finessing Toastmasters

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There are many voices screaming at us, relentlessly informing us of the problems of the world.  Their voices are incoherent, in conflict with one another, yet only a few are altogether wrong.

Some people claim there are groups trying to thin the human herd by vaccinations, championing alternative sexuality choices and childlessness.  Probably true, but on the other hand, the human herd may be too numerous.

While the evidence is that while we can feed ourselves, we are overwhelming the wild populations of about every species on earth.  There are no great extinctions now.  Those are a thing of the past - as our species spread to virgin territory and ate the naïve wildlife of Australia, Madagacar and the Americas.   Nonetheless, there is no doubt that we are putting pressure on the habitat of just about every wild animal in the world.

There is concern about the environment. The concern that carbon dioxide is causing global warming in my mind is wrong. It has almost nothing to it. On the other hand, the problems we are bringing about through the burning of fossil fuels are very real. Witness the air-quality issues in China and India.

Human beings are becoming redundant. Computerization, robots and artificial intelligence have reduced the number of meaningful jobs, making both manual labor and clerical workers superfluous. The sidewalks of America are tented with extraneous people who are simply no longer needed in the industrial economy. The same is true in Western Europe.  The richer the economy, the stronger the impetus to replace the native-born with immigrants.  Their cheap labor is in turn being replaced by machines, leaving us to cope with two numerous, mutually hostile and disenchanted groups.  Witness what’s happening on the streets of France and England as I write.

The discouraged, unappreciated, underprepared redundant people are easily attracted to many vices, among them the age-old curse of alcohol, recently legalized marijuana, opioids, and a slew of new designer drugs and simple time-wasters like video games. We are becoming nations of addicts. On the positive side, these people don’t often reproduce.  Overpopulation is becoming a non-issue.

There are so many obvious contradictions in the world around us. What should we do as individuals?

I find comfort in traditional wisdom. I love this piece can this concluding piece from Desiderata. A century old, the text takes all this sweeping panorama of confusion and provides useful advice for how to lead our lives.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

I find comfort in religion. Religion contends that divine grace to save us. And past, when nothing else has seemed likely, divine grace does seem to have appeared to carry us through. The human race survives.  Running the 23^rd Psalm or the Lord’s Prayer through my head brings me comfort.  The events taking place in today’s world are vastly beyond my power to understand, much less to control.  I cannot explain them to my children.  Yet I need to raise the children to be optimistic and follow in the steps of their peoples and ancestors.  It takes faith.

The question for me as an individual is what to do with my life.

I appreciate the truth tellers. In this time of lies, there is a lot to be said for people like Robert Malone Jessica Rose Peter and Ginger Breggin, Matt Crawford, Joel Smalley and others who have been telling the truth bravely.  Many only emerged with the Covid plandemic, but others such as Michael Schellenberg and Andrew Wakefield have been doing so for decades. I applaud them and appreciate them. They are alerting us to the dangers, and we thank them.

They are a brave lot.  Governments try to shut them up.  They are deplatformed, heckled, prevented from meeting.  They lose their jobs.  Friends cut them off.  Their motives are questioned – sadly, at times by each other.  They are called “controlled opposition” and “limited hangouts.”  And yet they persist, calling the attention of all who would listen to the numerous problems they see, among them:

• Coercive Covid 19 preventative measures, especially vaccines

• Coercive measures in the name of public health, such as childhood vaccines

• Coercive measures enforced ostensibly to curtail climate change: carbon taxes, elimination of gas-powered cars, 15-minute cities

• Central bank digital currencies

• Biometric ID programs

• Coercive diversity programs and failure to enforce immigration policies

• Elimination of personal freedoms of speech, assembly and movement

While I appreciate them, I note that their focus is primarily on solving present problems, in the present timeframe for the benefit of the present generation.  They overlook the intergenerational, evolutionary issues.  Succinctly put, if there are no children in the rising generation, their concerns are moot.  The problems that vex them will disappear as they and their opponents die off.

I choose to have faith that these problems will resolve, or at least transform themselves significantly during the time in which my children reach adulthood.  People will wake up to the dangers of vaccines.  Those who have been vaccinated, predominantly those of the liberal persuasion who accepted them, will see accelerated mortality and their already shrunken fertility will fall even further.  Gender confusion, female empowerment, drug proliferation and other forces will serve as a Darwinian force, once again allowing only the fittest to survive.  They being relatively few, my children will grow up as part of a significantly smaller population cohort.  The population pyramid, already topheavy, is becoming a spindle.

An economic collapse – which appears to have kicked off with a market plunge just today, August 5, 2024 – will scrub a lot of DEI nonsense out of the economy, eliminate a number of McJobs and reorient us to traditional virtues including hard work.  It will put the squeeze on hoards of freeloaders who have been living off of the fat of the overfed populations of the West, sending immigrants back home and pushing bums out of welfare hotels and into poorhouses.  Society will be cease attempting to satisfy the fantasies of the bleeding hearts.

I am an observer, not an advocate.  That’s what I expect will happen.  My job is to prepare my children for a world in which there are many fewer people to accomplish what needs to be done, and in which, AI notwithstanding, there is still a demand for an intelligent human workforce.  A world with a newfound appreciation for traditional values, and for women who hold those values and have a desire to raise children to share them.

How to do it is an interesting challenge – a topic for many future blogs.

I delivered three speeches on Saturday: Introduction to Art Talkers, Composing a Speech and Performing a Speech.  I got away with being somewhat subversive.  I said that we have two objectives – helping people develop their public speaking skills and giving them practice with English. 

When the Toastmasters Pathways program was rolled out six years ago, they ballyhooed it as serving five teaching objectives: leadership, management, interpersonal communications and self-confidence as well as public speaking.  Those objectives have been lost down the memory hole.  I had to go back to a 2018 speech to find them.  Toastmasters simply had, and has, no way to help people with anything other than public speaking.  Yet the program they built on this shabby, shaky foundation remains in place.  They don’t have the honesty or self-awareness to recognize it as a failure.

At any rate, as you will see if you watch my presentations, what I describe as our club’s plan for helping members learn public speaking has very little to do with Toastmasters International.  This should concern them.  They should have the courage to cut their losses and go back to the simple program that worked for 95 years.  Meanwhile, we will survive by doing so ourselves.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man got over a week-long summer cold without ever feeling sick.  First time that’s happened.  Eddie is back from camp and doing his summer homework.  The girls are amusing themselves.  Oksana let them set up a stand outside the mom-and-pop grocery on the corner a quarter mile away to sell cherry plums from our tree.  Leave two girls, just shy of 7 and 4, all by themselves on our main street?  Would not do it in almost any other country, but here it worked.

Graham