OBEDIENCE TRAINING FOR COMPLIANCE

For most of us obedience training started early.

Early Baby Boomers learned from the boss, their old man, who learned it from his old man, then the Army.

But that lineup leaves out the goal of obedience: Learning how to treat people correctly, beginning with your momma.

Why momma?

The female version of the human species has been called the weaker sex, the fairer sex, and men as their protectors.

Those were the rules, made up by men.

They don’t apply to all women, just like being a protector of the weak and fairer doesn’t apply to all men.

During WWII women learned how much they could do without men around telling them every step of the way.

Again, not all women, not all men, but enough to set a standard.

After Johnny came marching home, things changed.

The boys needed jobs in a shrinking economy bolstered by the women in the war effort, and now slowing down.

 

After the war, most women returned home, let go from their jobs. Their jobs, again, belonged to men. However, there were lasting effects.

Women had proven that they could do the job and within a few decades, women in the workforce became a common sight. An immediate effect is often overlooked. These women had saved much of their wages since there was little to buy during the war.

It was this money that helped serve as a down payment for a new home and helped launch the prosperity of the 1950s.

Or they could go to college on the GI Bill.

 

Economic Obedience Training

Back then you didn’t need a shot in the arm to see the future.

Evil had been defeated once and for all.

The bad guys running the German government had been rounded up and sent to trial with mixed results.

 

On October 1, 1946, the Tribunal convicted 19 of the defendants and acquitted three. Of those convicted, 12 were sentenced to death. Three defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment and four to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years.

The United States held 12 additional trials in Nuremberg after the initial International Military Tribunal. In all, 199 defendants were tried, 161 were convicted, and 37 were sentenced to death.

 

One day you’re riding high in Nuremberg at a rally with hundreds of thousands of  loving fans; the next day you’re sitting in a Nuremberg chair listening to your death sentence.

The biggest shit-talkers of the era didn’t make it to the hangman’s noose. One used a gun to cap himself, the others sucked down poison.

But the numbers seem unusual to me.

At the height of WWII there were 13.6 million German soldiers and only 199 go to trial for their deeds.

I’ll do the math after rounding to 13 million and 200. What percent is 200 out of 13,000,000?

The answer is: 0.00153846154%.

 

Time Magazine says:

After the war, most ordinary Nazis—Gestapo agents, S.S. and S.A. auxiliaries, party members and government officials, as well as German citizens who embraced the party’s rhetoric—faded into relative obscurity and were able to create fresh false identities and make a clean break with their pasts.

They were aided by a silence within families and within the polity that persisted for decades.

When post-war trials against Nazis occurred, they generally ignored low-level functionaries and killers and aimed to convict only prominent members of the regime.

 

Why ignore the low-level killers?

Because Germany needed workers and officials to rebound after WWII, and they had a full cupboard  as long as you didn’t look at them too hard.

 

Handling The Truth

Today it’s hard to understand how a professional shit-talker can explain his failures as victories, call himself outside the elite while he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and still attract followers to his rallies after four years of whining about his unfair loss in 2020.

You’ve got to hand it to a guy who commands that kind of devotion in and out of government.

Once you normalize bullshit with repetition and volume, people let it pass.

The latest presidential debate is a good example where one man mumbled through the answers asked and the other used the questions as talking points for what he wanted to say instead.

If after four years of one guy cleaning up after the other while still building a record of accomplishments, we’ve learned a few things.

Hiring skunks and snakes for important government jobs is no way forward.

Hiring skunks and snakes to run a campaign the second time around is not a good way forward.

Just because an old hack says something, it doesn’t mean it’s the gospel.

After hearing about winning an election they lost four years ago, enough is enough.

After one presidential debate where the loser four years ago couldn’t quite say yes when asked if they’d accept the results of another election, enough is enough.

Who wants to see more posturing, more bald-faced appointees like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

 

On January 7, 2021, DeVos tendered her resignation as education secretary as a result of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, saying to President Trump in her resignation letter, “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation.”

 

 

Any hands up for the guy who lives by, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to?”

For the guy who likes people ‘seen but not heard?’

Any hands for the guy who knows more about women’s health than any woman or man?

Let’s try this:

How many hands up for the guy who sees the world through a lens of his own making, who is fearful of looking anywhere else?

The guy who sees fine people on both sides of an easy divide?

Most of all, who wants to get knocked out and left on the ground by a little ‘Nappy’ pumped up on the violent words from a soft old man trying to be hard?

Remember the good old days?