America the Beautiful
David Haggith

How will we make America beautiful again?

Because it’s the Independence Day weekend, I’m going to provide a little more of today’s content through easy-to-watch videos and humor to go nicely with your weekend, and I’m going to take a different approach in my own editorial today as well.

Roughly sixty years ago, when I was a kid and never realized that ugly suspenders would have to be worn someday, not as a fashion choice (God forbid), but as a necessity because my butt would disappear and fail forevermore to hold my pants up when I’m working outdoors even with the help of a belt that no longer has anything to hitch a ride on, we had a saying that, for me, still embodies the heart and soul of what it means to be an American:

I may not agree with your opinion, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to express your opinion.

I may have been back in elementary school when I first joined others in saying that, but I meant it, and so did other kids; and I’ve considered it the fundamental characteristic of what being an American means all of my life. And that, more than anything, is what I believe we’ve lost in America on all sides.

Today, politics, whether conservative or liberal, has let go of that central tenet. On the Left, the woke will strip you of your livelihood if you express the wrong opinion. They’ll shun you if have the wrong opinion. Things are no less hostile on the Right, which has sadly become even more noticeable inside the halls of congress than out on the street, as Republicans lay savagely and self-righteously into Republicans for not being Republican enough. 

My experience of America was much better when both sides were not so hostile. With my old experience of America still holding a warm place in my mind of what my country used to be and what I think it should still try to be again, the only article I’ve highlighted below is on this topic for this weekend because, if we could make that the focus of what it means to be American again this Fourth-of-July weekend, we would be building back a better America and making America a great place to exist in freedom again.

The essence of that article is this: We need civil discourse back in our society, and the only way it will happen is within ourselves, which is the American way. We can change ourselves. We can’t change others even though we think we can … and must. As pioneers, we were a sturdy, independent lot of self-made people. I’m sure we will never return to the easy nation of largely shared religious beliefs or political ideals that are barely even taught in schools anymore or social norms that are intentionally sabotaged in schools, but we can treat each other respect and, in that process, discover what our belief systems still hold in common, and we can still build on that commonality if we don’t try to forcibly change each other.

The methods of such change in a nutshell—all targeted at this one principal American ideal—are:

• Dialog with people of different beliefs about those beliefs, but make it your firstpriority in the conversation, not to change the other person (because you probably never will anyway) but to understand them and build an enduring friendship.
  
  
• Find the common ground between you, even if you are very different in nationality and social/religious background. Finding the points you still have in common, not only builds some respect for the other person, but reinforces your own sense of what is important based on broadly shared beliefs.
  
  
• Embrace America as an imperfect creation that has been endlessly changing from day one. People may nostalgically think, “We were once a Christian nation,” and forget that the very time period they are harkening back to was also the time of the Wild West, which was quite clearly not so very Christian but, in fact, pretty starkly anti-Christian in many ways. That is not to say there was not a lot more in common around Christian beliefs back then, but there was always a lot that was way out of sorts with those beliefs, too.
  
  
• Anchor your judgment of other people on their character and not on their beliefs or on what group they belong to (religiously or politically).
  
  
• Cultivate ideals of character in yourself—such as honesty, humility, patience, responsibility, tolerance, courage, gratitude, self-discipline, and respect for the lives, rights, property, and choices of others.
  
  
• Choose liberty over power, persuasion over force because that is what America is. That is democracy. You can persuade people, but you have no right to force their choices.
  
  
• Live life as though politics is merely a piece of life and not what your life is most about. Life is about intact families, vibrant and voluntary associations, community engagement, loving relationships, and institutions that have nothing to do with politics. If you could genuinely live those ideals, you’d live a great life, no matter what your other beliefs are. Don’t let politics come in the way of the more important aspects of life, itself—building your family, building strong relationships with neighbors, etc. Of course, that is easier if they decide to approach you from these same ideals, rather than see you as someone to browbeat into their own political correctness. Still, you cannot change them, only yourself.

I don’t write this list, based on the highlighted article below, to preach at others but as bullet points to think through for myself, as well, what is most important this weekend about “being an American” if we are ever going to get back to that America we once loved to live in … or, at least, the one that I loved to live in and was patriotically proud of as a child. 

One of the simple high points of my Fourth-of-July festivities was in walking to the fireworks displays yesterday when an East-Indian man with a strong accent stepped up to me from where his family was gathered as I was walking through a parking lot and said with a big smile, “Happy Fourth of July. I hope you have a great Fourth-of-July weekend.” His past was obviously very different from mine, but he valued America’s independence, too, as was evident by his happiness in celebrating that day from the tailgate of his pickup with his family.

As you can see in the graph below, paying subscriber growth over the past year came in two spurts (in December and again in the spring) when I ran sales, but for all the months after each sale, the growth rate diminished to being less steep than the entire period prior to the sale. After the first sale, the slope dropped to half of what it had been. After the second sale, the slow flatlined. I ended each period where I would have been, had I never run a sale at all, but seen the same growth rate. That follows the idea of sales just bringing growth forward by taking away some from the future. (And each time, you are making less revenue because people are coming in at a lower price.) For the past several months (since early April), there has been zero growth. In fact, after hitting a plateau in late May and June, The Daily Doom has actually been, for the first time, losing in the total number of paying subscribers:

While The Daily Doom has never hit a level of support that justifies the time spent on it, the fact that paying subscriptions grew every single month, kept me at it in hopes that by retirement age (about a year and a half from now) it would become a decent supplemental retirement income. I won’t be able to continue to justify the time spent if this decline continues, and I’m not sure what the reason is for the decline. I’ve heard from other Substack authors that they’re seeing the same thing; so it may not be anything I’m doing. It could be the economy, causing everyone to whittle back on paying subscriptions, though I once thought this topic was by nature recession-proof because that is when people would most want accurate takedowns of what is happening in the economy.

It may be Substack has reached out successfully to so many well-known authors who have made Substack their primary publishing venue that small names like myself are getting lost in the cracks between the big names.

It could even be that Substack is throttling down on alternative voices that don’t speak liberal ideology, but I hate to think that is the case (and have no knowledge that it is, though it is certainly the kind of censorship I experienced quite openly in the past as I was told specifically by Google or by publishers that Google was shutting down the very pages I was writing from their search-engine results due to my take on Covid.)

For whatever reason, the Substack model is no longer working well for me. Your thoughts about this problem would be appreciated in the comments below. For that reason, I’ve made this edition of The Daily Doom fully open to everyone so everyone can comment.

Seeing the Great Recession Before it Hit

My path to writing this blog began as a personal journey. Prior to the start of this so-called “Great Recession,” my ex-wife had a family home that was an inheritance from her mother. I worked as a property manger at the time, and near the end of 2007, I could tell from rumblings in the industry that the U.S. housing market was on the verge of catastrophic collapse. I urged her to press her brothers to sell the family home before prices dropped. The house went on the market and sold right away — and just three months before Bear-Stearns and others crashed, taking the U.S. housing market down for the tumble. Her family sold at the peak of the market.

 

 

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