Tag: culture

Father’s Day 2025: The Importance of a Father’s Role

On By kingsjesterIn PoliticsLeave a comment

On this Father’s Day 2025, I was thinking this morning about what a difference fathers make the lives of, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, young minds full of mush.

The Bible tells us that the job of parents is to lead children in the way in which they should go.

The Bible was talking about the nuclear family, mother and father, the only ones who can biologically procreate.

Mankind being fsllen creatures, along the way, have corrupted this nuclear family, sometimes innocently, other times for cultural and political purposes.

What I mean by that is the fact that in modern cultures, and along the way in history, different aspects of human sexual proclivities and cultural bias have attempted to convince men that it’s okay to have multiple wives and that the biblical representation of husband and wife can be replaced by husband and husband and wife and wife, or even a single parent.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson decided that the government could take care of struggling black families better than the father and mother, the corruption of the Black family unit began.

Today, almost 75% of black children are born under wedlock, robbing them of the richness and fullness of the traditional family unit.

Sure, other uncles and family friends can try to substitute for the father role, but it’s not the same.

Without a father in their lives to teach boys how to grow up to be a man and to counsel them when they become one, males in our society a lot of times lose their way as to what their responsibilities are as a man.

My own father knew what his responsibility was toward me and I am thankful and grateful that God put him in my life.

I’m also thankful and grateful that God let him survive jumping out of a perfectly good boat on Normandy Beach on June 6th, 1944.

What I’m trying to say this morning is that a society rots from within without the guidance of both fathers and mothers in the lives of children.

If you do not believe me, look at all the protests yesterday and the ones we’ve seen recently as Americans are protesting on behalf of those who have sworn to kill us because we are Americans Americans and our closest ally, as well.

Does that make any sense to you?

On this Father’s Day, I wish every child had a father who was active in their lives, and I wish a Happy Father’s Day to all of the American Dads out there.

Until He Comes,

KJ

A Matter of Indoctrination

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, Politics1 Comment

I was watching “Fox and Friends” this morning and they were talking about how this present generation of students responded in a poll that 1/5 of them belonged to the “Alphabet Community”.

You know the one I’m talking about. Those who were referred to as being of an “alternate lifestyle” until recently.

When I was in college in the late 1970s, I took a course on it that was called “The Sociology of Deviant Behavior”.

Americans are facing the fact that for students have been by social engineers disguised at teachers, who have been filling young minds full of mush with political and social ideas that run not only against what traditional American society has viewed as normal but the political ideas themselves are traitorous.

The murderous sociopath who turned Russia into a Marxist Nation, Vladimir Lenin, stated that if you gave him your children for 8 years he would turn them into Marxists.

That single statement fully explains how we got into the predicament we are facing as a nation.

American parents have allowed the schools to teach their children the opposite political, social, and cultural ideology of Traditional American Society, purposely indoctrinating them to rebel against Traditional American Faith and Values.

What I find quite revealing is that now that those who have been purposely indoctrinating our children are being caught and called on the carpet for it, they act as if they have done nothing wrong.

Their reaction reveals them to be the ideologues which we are all doing them as.

Yes, there are still great teachers out there who still believe in America. They want to educate our children but they are constricted by the system which they are teaching in and by pressure on them to conform.

The good news is, I believe that we will be seeing local school board members who claimed that parents had no say as to what their children were taught voted out and concerned parents voted in to take their places.

That is a good start. However, we’ve got to go out there and vote out all of those Marxist Ideologues who would enslave Americans as their “New Proletariat”.

This is not just a fight to regain cultural and societal norms.

There is a fight going on between “Princes and Principalities”

This was foretold by Jesus Christ, whose entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey we will remember on Palm Sunday.

I have read The Book and I know how this ends.

Tbat being said,I believe we are called upon to “fight the Good Fight” until then.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Today’s Pop Music and American Society: From “All You Need Is Love” to Keying Your Boyfriend’s Car

On By kingsjesterIn Entertainment, Politics2 Comments

thBWVX9WHUMusic hath charms to soothe the savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. – William Congreve (1670-1729)

Can music also bring out the evil in mankind, as well?

On Thanksgiving Day, as I was watching the Macy’s Parade with my family, I suddenly realized that I did not know any of the performers lip syncing their songs on the floats, except for Pat Benatar (bless her heart).

Additionally, I heard at least one song that was entirely inappropriate for that family-friendly, nationally-televised event.

What is going on with Pop Music?

John Stonestreet, writing for his website, breakpoint.org, posted the following article on November 12, 2015…

Good guys are out of style. If you’ve been to the movies any time in the last decade, you know that Hollywood has replaced the superheroes of yore with antiheroes—depressed, broody, supposedly “relatable” characters with a past. Whether it’s the angst-filled teenage protagonists of “Twilight” or a black-suited Spiderman doing Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever strut, it’s become almost cliché to bring our heroes down to our level rather than aspiring to theirs.

With a handful of exceptions like Marvel’s Captain America, the entertainment industry just doesn’t create uncomplicated, morally straight characters anymore. Even Superman recently got a makeover. Director Zack Snyder’s reboot offered us a troubled Clark Kent in a bleak, visually desaturated film where the Man of Steel doesn’t hesitate to kill. And the same holds true in pop music, where artists who once sang about falling in love now storm on stage and sing about wrecking their ex’s life.

A quick glance over YouTube’s top music videos reveals a wall of singers grimacing, glowering, and growling at us. Heavy eye-shadow, aggressive postures, black clothing, red smoke, sneering expressions make it look like these performers—many of them young women—want to mug us instead of entertain us. Writing at the Daily Mail, Jo Tweedy asks the obvious question: Why do all of these singers look so angry?

Whether it’s Beyonce’s now-infamous Super Bowl halftime performance or Miley Cyrus’ descent into “Wrecking Ball” wrath, these performers “prove that rage is very much all the rage for pop stars.”

But it’s probably Taylor Swift, the 25-year-old country singer who took the pop scene by storm a few years back, who best illustrates how angry modern music has actually become. Swift started out a few years ago writing songs about unrequited love and teardrops on guitars. But in more recent hits like “Blank Space,” “Shake it Off,” and “I Knew You Were Trouble,” the music icon tells haters and potential heartbreakers to back off. “Boys only want love if it’s torture,” she complains, and warns would-be suitors that she’s “got a blank space” on her “long list of ex-lovers,” and would be glad to write in their names.

And then there’s her biggest new hit, “Bad Blood,” a breakup number accompanied by an especially warlike music video that won the VMA’s top honor last year. It features guns, explosions, rocket-launchers, even mixed martial arts. I’m not kidding. Swift herself looks every bit as angry as the Amazon that she plays.

“So why does white hot anger seem to be such a big feature for today’s stars when they’re on stage?” asks Tweedy. One London pop choreographer answered: “…the anger is simply a way of getting noticed,” a way of “trying to stand out,” she said. “[It’s a way of] saying, ‘…you will book me for that next job.’”

So, no surprise, a lot of it comes back to marketing and publicity. We saw this with the release of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” that sexy has taken a sadomasochistic turn in order to sell more books and movies.

But what if there’s more to it than just marketing? In “The Screwtape Letters,” C.S. Lewis’ professorial devil offers advice on how to get humans, especially men, to confuse aggression for beauty.

“…the felt evil is what [the patient] wants,” he explains. “It is the visible animality or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he likes,” and which “play[s] on the raw nerve of his private obsession.”

And I can’t help wondering if on another level all this bad blood is due to the sexual revolution itself. Could it be that some pop stars—especially women—really do resent the way the industry has objectified and turned them into sex symbols? Attempting to tether human dignity to sexual freedom leaves many feeling as if they must be sexually aggressive to be known, and others as if their value is secondary to other’s desires. Either way, it helps explain why pop culture seems to be popping a gasket lately.

I remember the summer after I graduated college in December 1980. I bought a brand new 1981 Mazda GLC, had a Pioneer Tape Deck installed to play in all four hidden door speakers (a big thing back then), bought a cassette tape of “The Beatles Love Songs”, and played it until the tape broke.

Music has always affected my life and played a major part. I sang in church choirs, leading services, singing in quartets, and solo, for over 30 years and have played acoustic rhythm guitar since the age of 19…a long time ago.

Music can indeed soothe us. It can inspire us…in both good ways and in bad.

It has the power to bring us to our knees in worship of the Living God…or make our hands “clinch in fisteous rage” (American Pie, Don Mclean)

It can advise us to “treat her like a lady” or find us hanging out, “down on Main Street”.

At this time in our country’s history, when morality has become relative and ethics situational, we find our souls crying out for soothing, but instead, we find Pop Music and “so-called” Country Music, actually manufactured in New York City (pronounced like they do in the Pace Salsa Commercials), advocating meaningless one-night stands and encouraging the debasement of the human soul, instead of its ability to rise above any obstacle in its path that might hinder individual achievement.

With all of today’s over-produced, under-written Pop and Country-Pop Music flooding the airwaves of both broadcast and satellite radio, Americans my age wonder where all the great songwriters have gone to?

Where are the “Good Vibrations” that the young people of this generation so desperately need?

Evidently, even though “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, we have left them “Sittin’ On The Dock of The Bay”.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

November 2014: A Chance for Redemption (A KJ Op Ed)

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, Politics3 Comments

americaneagleflagYou and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, “The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.” – Ronald Reagan, Address to the nation, October 27, 1964

I miss the country I used to know.

The America that was respected all over the world. ..”One nation under God…indivisible…with liberty and justice for all”…where children were raised to love God and country and were taught that anyone could be successful in this great land, if they worked hard enough.

When did the American Dream turn into our National Nightmare?

I know it wasn’t during my parents generation. After all, they were the greatest generation. When all of our American Heroes returned home from World War II, they set upon the task of building a better life for themselves and their families. Then, somewhere along the way, as things got better and better, things started to change for the worse.

Remember how they referred to the Kennedy Administration as Camelot?

It was because there was still a hopefulness in America…an unbounded optimism that we could not only make a difference in our own nation, but that we could go out and make a difference in countries not as fortunate as ours. Then, after the tragic assassination of JFK, something changed. President Lyndon Baines Johnson somehow turned the country’s optimism into pessimism, concerning the future of minorities in our nation.

He told America’s minority population that they could not achieve the American Dream of their own accord. They had to be assisted by a benevolent nanny-state government.

This pessimism became entrenched in the very fabric of our society, as young people began to tune in, turn on, and drop out, protesting the Vietnam War and the very parents who brought them into this world in the first place.

As this pessimism continued in the 1970s, it turned into a malaise during the Carter Presidency,. as Carter’s Domestic and Foreign Policies proved to be failures.

After the debacle of the Carter Presidency, we were waiting for something good to happen…and it did.

A plain-spoken gentleman from the Midwest named Ronald Wilson Reagan told us it was time for “Morning in America”.

This country experienced a resurgence in national optimism and international stature during President Reagan’s 8 years in office. Then, when he left, things started to unravel once again. We endured a sexual predator in the White House and the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil.

And now, after 6 years with an inexperienced community organizer occupying the Oval Office, America is facing challenges domestically and in the field of Foreign Relations, that we have never seen before.

However, our domestic challenges are not just of a political nature. They are moral and cultural challenges as well.

The faith of approximately 70% of our population is being attacked on a daily basis by a government whose founding documents reference Our Creator.

Additionally, those of us who believe God’s Holy Word, as found in the Bible, are being called bigots and are being marginalized as being out of touch with the viewpoint of the majority of America’s population.

Even, if we clearly are not.

Meanwhile, all around the world, America has lost stature, because we have a president who does not believe in American Exceptionalism and would rather bow to other world leaders then look them in the eye and represent America from a position of strength and as a World Power.

As we head toward the 2014 Midterm Elections, it is up to us as Americans to decide what kind of country we want.

Do we want to return to an America that is fiscally sound, with a culture and character that is admired all over the Free World?

Or, do we want to watch the “Shining City Upon a Hill” continue to tarnish and decay as those who are supposed to be serving us, serve themselves instead, while following, intentionally or unintentionally, the failed nanny-state philosophy of Marx and Lenin?

On January 25, 1974, Ronald Reagan spoke the following words in a speech which has come to be known as “The Shining City Upon a Hill” Speech…

Somehow America has bred a kindliness into our people unmatched anywhere, as has been pointed out in that best-selling record by a Canadian journalist. We are not a sick society. A sick society could not produce the men that set foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth above us in the Skylab. A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not produce the men who went through those year of torture and captivity in Vietnam. Where did we find such men? They are typical of this land as the Founding Fathers were typical. We found them in our streets, in the offices, the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms.

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, “The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.”

We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth. 

This November, this country will, once again, make a choice.

I pray that it is the right one.

Until He Comes,

KJ