Recently, I had a text-message conversation with a friend about what happened to America, the country of my childhood dreams. She asked, “Are you sorry you came?” I replied, “No. Just sad.” She said, “Me, too.”
I came to the U.S.A. in 1972. Between the happiness of just having married the love of my life in Japan and arriving here in July of the same year, I could only describe America as pure heaven. After all, this was the land of opportunities, Lassie, and wholesome Disney movies.
During the last decade or so, things began to change drastically in America. Or perhaps it was already on a gradual path to where we are today, and I simply didn’t recognize it until recently. Some say that the insidious change was initiated by Woodrow Wilson, Democrat, during his presidency from 1913 through 1921.
As an adult immigrant, I often wondered why students in America were being allowed to graduate from high school without having mastered the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. And why American community colleges were teaching what I had already mastered in high school in Japan. (For the record, my husband, having been educated through high school in rural Wisconsin, had the same experience as mine when starting Junior College that so much of what was being taught was essentially a review of his high school courses as well.) In today’s competitive world, it is as if the teachers’ unions are working for foreign countries to help destroy America’s competitiveness by purposely dumbing down the youth population.
Worse, I could never have imagined, for instance, that teachers were brainwashing our own kids (now adults) in schools, covering age-inappropriate topics and glorifying communism, neither of which has any business being taught in schools in the U.S.A.
With the widespread wokeness today, I speculate that teachers’ union heads, along with countless other American elites, may have been accepting bribes from foreign communist entities, namely Chinese, to systematically ruin American children’s ability to think for themselves ever so gradually and, by extension, America’s future as well.
As it turns out, our own family has not been immune to what has been happening in the larger society, either. I never understood why our younger son chose to go through a transgender operation. By the time I found out about it, it was too late and, therefore, I had no say in the matter at all. By then, David and I had already been estranged from him for quite some time – long enough for him to have been influenced by others who could care less about the long-term impact of his youthful decision. The rest of our family members were “happy” about his transformation. I bit my tongue and pretended to be happy for him – because he was supposedly happy with his decision. No matter how I reacted, it wouldn’t have mattered since it was already too late to do anything about it.
There is something terribly wrong with what has become of this country. In many American schools, a lot more emphasis is placed on transgenderism and social justice than on learning the basics – to be a functional member of society.
Worse, especially those with fragile and sensitive minds – such as our younger son – were being brainwashed into thinking that transgender operations would somehow solve all their “perceived” problems. Completely unbeknown to us (parents), school psychologists were promoting this type of inhumane, unthinkable “cure” for vulnerable youths – as if to perform an experiment on human lives on a massive scale through the school system. Again, it makes me wonder what role the teachers’ unions have been playing on this unthinkable movement. For the record, I had not even heard of the word, “transgenderism” until what had happened to our son.
The Left has been good at fooling ordinary people into supporting their agenda. They accomplish this with benign-sounding names and/or expressions. For example, when I first heard the expression, black lives matter, my immediate reaction was, “Of course, they do. Why should it be any different for black people than for anyone else?” Only when I began seeing their violent behaviors, did I begin to realize that BLM was not just an expression, but an organization founded by trained Marxists/communists. Who knew?
The Left has been brainwashing countless people who have yet to develop the ability to think for themselves. Like criminals and thugs, they find easy prey in schools. When people resist, they go on the attack and/or cancel them. In some cases, people are losing their livelihoods. This makes people go along with the Left’s nonsense – just to keep food on the table for the family.
Today, our First Amendment rights are being ignored on many levels. The Left does not engage in logical discussions. Instead, they resort to labeling people and silencing them. Such tactics are so childish yet, unfortunately, effective in today’s upside-down society. For fear of being labeled as racists or whatever else, instead of standing up against the woke culture, many people are going along with it. Even corporations are finding it easier to become woke themselves than to uphold the traditional values. This is NOT the America I believed in. When push comes to shove, I hope that the Supreme Court has enough backbones and power left to uphold the Constitutional rights of all Americans.
I could never have imagined that a half-century after arriving in this “land of the free,” even Disney could become a symbol of the hideous woke culture. Enough is enough. I hope the silent majority with common sense is starting to wake up.
