Our Threatened Freedom

Are We Running Low on Ideas to Spend our Money

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 125-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 125

Dictation Name: Vol. J - Part 08 - Are We Running Low on Ideas to Spend our Money Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Are we running low on ideas to spend our money? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

I wonder sometimes if our planners sit up thinking of ways to test our patience. Some of their projects are really amazing ones. The community development project of the Department of Housing and Urban Development has come up with a choice one. Baltimore has a well-known block, several blocks longs, of strip-joints, adult bookstores or pornography shops, peep-shows, and the like. A total of 338,000 is being spent in this area to make it more attractive to customers. The pavement is being cut at various points to make tree-planting possible, and wheel-chair cuts have also been made in the curbs. Apparently someone has decided that it is discrimination to make it difficult for the physically disabled to visit their porno shops. The owner of one strip-joint says, however, according to ‘Human Events’, quote, “What’s really needed is sexier bras. You think Washington can help there?” Unquote.

Perhaps I am unkind and am doing our bureaucrats an injustice. Maybe what we need is more concern for despised or neglected forms of American life. Let’s help them by suggesting better means of spending money.

Why not park benches on Skid Row, so that our unfortunate people there can have something besides the pavement to sleep on? Or is that too practical and worthwhile a suggestion? Why not a national museum somewhere close to the Department of Housing and Urban Development of old-fashioned {?} or outhouses, which are becoming a fast disappearing form of Americana? Has H.U.D have no concern for our American past?

For some of us old enough to remember the days between World Wars 1 and 2, one of the most common aspects of American rural life was the farm mule. I don’t understand why our Washington politicians do not erect a national monument to the mule. They have a lot in common. Both are stubborn in resisting orders and both are impotent and sterile.

Perhaps I am too hard on politicians. After all, Will Rogers said that he’d never met a man he didn’t like. However Will Rogers never spent too much time in Washington D.C. We Americans have a good sense of humor, this is the reason we can live with our politicians in Washington D.C. But perhaps it is a mistake to poke fun at Washington.

I’m reminded of a story told years and years ago, by Mississippi Congressman John Allen. A confederate cavalry colonel was leading his regiment in a gallant retreat with the Yankees in hot pursuit. Some of the Confederates were turning now and then to fire at the Yankees. The colonel then gave this command. Boys, stop that shooting, it just makes them madder.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.