In this From the Mound, the writer examines thought patterns that have been conditioned for decades
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“I was always taught to be strong
Never let them think you care at all
Let no one get close to me
Before you and me”
Musiq Soulchild - “Teachme”
Released in 2007, “Teachme” was the second song from Musiq Soulchild’s fourth studio album, “Luvanmusiq,” an album that truly brought out the love song in Musiq’s strong soul vocal quality.
Taalib Johnson was born in Philadelphia and took the stage name Musiq Soulchild in the late 1990s just before signing for his first studio album released in 2000. “Luvanmusiq” was his first album with Atlantic Records after leaving his first recording label.
“Teachme” focuses on a man explaining to his female partner that he needs some grace in expressing his deep feelings because he was always told that “real men” should keep deep feelings hidden. It’s a common thing that many men still face. Author Jason Wilson has a tremendous collection of books and men’s meetings where he encourages men to embrace their emotions as part of true manliness, not some sort of defect in that pursuit.
Wilson said recently on a podcast, “The ‘Alpha Male’ movement is one of the most lost movements of the modern man, but it has deep roots that were conditioned into the society and simply needed a spark to explode into execution.” He went on to explain that a host of different things could truly be the “spark” he spoke of on an individual basis - the rise of social media, the emboldening of fringe groups of society, and political and social leaders encouraging such actions, among others - all really coalescing at the same time led to the explosion of the Alpha movement.
For anyone who feels that anything happening in today’s world is new or different, understand that groundwork has been laid, often for multiple decades, to get where we are.
Sixty-one years ago yesterday, Jan. 31, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sent a proposal to Congress to set up a unified Food Stamp program that would coordinate three different federal (and dozens of state) programs that were each doing a piece of what would eventually be included in the Food Stamp Act of 1964. Almost immediately, opponents began to sew the seeds that any programs that would provide assistance based on income would lead to a population that no longer works, rampant fraud in the system, and reliance on the government at a large scale.
If you just nodded your head and said, “…and that’s exactly what happened,” well, this column is for you.
The numbers bear out that federal assistance programs have significantly lower fraud rates by participants than fraud rates on things like income tax filing, loan applications, and while not part of those studies, I’d wager if you could include social media profiles and resumes on a study of fraud, they’d both rank significantly higher. The truth is that, in most studies, 97-99% of all distributed funds are to qualified participants. Often, those studies have found what we have been experiencing in South Dakota recently - more fraud is initiated by staff than the participants in the programs, though even that number is significantly low.
All this is a preface to the comments on almost every story about the federal funding freeze that was written in such a way that it could have shut down funding for benefit programs for seniors, children, the disabled, and so many others. After the backlash, the White House attempted to backpedal and say that none of the groups mentioned above would have been affected, but courts immediately disagreed, including two judges who Trump had originally appointed who put a halt to the freeze before the White House withdrew the order.
Many of the comments on stories about the freeze and the eventual court overturn were of a similar ilk - “Get a job!” “Good! Quit stealing my tax money!” or “Can’t afford your iPhone and new car now. Boo hoo!”
Exactly the sort of comments and mindset that years and years of conditioning have led people to believe about those who utilize such programs. Heck, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was in the midst of a press conference claiming that “the majority of” government assistance recipients were dishonest to get more funds from the federal government when a reporter asked him if his family was also dishonest to get more money, as Ryan had often told the story of his upbringing when his family received federal benefits to supplement the family’s income after the death of his father. Needless to say, Ryan stammered to the end of the press conference at that point.
A similar conditioning has happened with immigration and immigrants in general.
For decades now, our leadership in Washington and on state levels have attempted to demonize those who were immigrating to the country, especially those who would come across the Southern border.
All the while, those same leaders were making the immigration to citizenship process more tedious, with more paperwork and hoops to jump through along the process, not to mention cutting staffing and funding for services for those who were truly attempting to do things the right way.
Studies have always shown that the heavy majority of illegal immigrants in the country came through legal means - a student visa, a work visa, etc. - and then either overstayed their visa without anyone ever checking or were caught up in the process of attempting to renew in a bureaucratic nightmare of a system just to continue working or studying.
One area farm worker on a work visa told me at the State Fair two years ago that he struggled with supporting Gov. Noem, despite considering himself a Republican, because he had personally reached out to her office at least six times to extend his work visa as he attempted to navigate the citizenship process, but her office never returned a call, let alone provided any assistance.
In a state with less than two percent unemployment, that number is likely going to go down even further, and many companies will be left scrambling just to keep the lights on as immigrant workers who are here legally and fuel many of the industries of the state are deported in wide-ranging deportations without nuance. Articles on those deportations are met with comments saying, “Come here legally if you want to stay!” on social media or in comments sections of articles about the ongoing raids over the last week.
Interesting that no one in favor of the sweeping, generalized deportations likes to mention the Native American children who were gathered up in one recent raid or the children of a naturalized citizen who were detained because they didn’t have proper paperwork with them at school.
History shows us that horrific acts like these are always sitting below the surface of our human condition, unfortunately. It only takes the right environment to bring those long-conditioned incorrect assumptions to action.
Unfortunately, we seem to be in that sort of environment right now. God help us.