A day in the garden of good and evil: Cuba shouts ‘Libertad’; America dances with death

By J.E. Dyer
A day in the garden of good and evil: Cuba shouts ‘Libertad’; America dances with death
Cubans mass in their streets for "Libertad!" - bringing the U.S. flag to clarify what they're rallying for. Video via Twitter

When it first dawned, Sunday, 11 July 2021, didn’t seem like it would turn out to be much.  At least the forecast was for a high a few degrees cooler than the last week in inland SoCal, but other than that, it looked like same old same old.

That was before the news began flooding out that the people of Cuba were surging into the streets shouting “Libertad!” and “Cuba Libre!” and demanding freedom from communist dictatorship.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Americans and others rushed to post messages of support, and spread the Cubans’ videos and on-scene reports.

Other Americans weighed in peevishly claiming that cries of “Libertad!” were a reaction to U.S. sanctions on the Cuban regime (which, like all our sanctions, exclude food and medical supplies.  We are not using sanctions to deny any COVID-19-fighting provisions to Cuba).

That was to be expected of the Left’s voices on Twitter.  Sadly, the same theme is being flogged from the State Department.

Meanwhile, the media voice in which leftist dogma lives the loudest had an exemplary take on the meaning of “Libertad!”

That’s screen-capped, by the way, in case the New York Times decides framing shouts of “Freedom!” as mere “anti-government slogans” wasn’t such a good idea.

But NYT probably won’t decide that.  NYT is so enchained in so-called “Great Reset” thinking, it has little hope of freeing itself from the mental straitjacket it’s locked in.  For NYT, there is no such thing as legitimately preferring more freedom to government coercion.  There is only being “anti-government,” as if deluded fools in Cuba are mindlessly objecting to basic police functions and laws against murder and theft.

Cubans know the difference between having some inchoate, “anti-government” animus and yearning for the freedom they are calling for.

They demonstrate that in part by waving the American flag, as the dissidents and shouters for freedom did in Hong Kong.  The Cubans know what they’re demanding.

It’s the New York Times that doesn’t know.

The Cubans have set before them this day life, and death.  They’re choosing life.

Meanwhile …

In the U.S., a sign of the choice still being ours to make came from an unlikely source.  At this interesting time, probably the least ambiguous video I’ve seen of the U.S. Capitol Police opening doors to 1/6 protesters and ushering them into the Capitol building began to circulate on social media.

That the USCP opened the doors cannot be in dispute, and it’s clear that several officers stood by passively and at least one is seen waving the crowd in.  The crowd enters peacefully, at a walk, with no violence whatsoever – and only after being invited through doors that open outward.

As I noted in the tweet, it’s a data point.  It’s a reality of the events of 1/6 that has to figure into our assessment of what happened that day.  It can’t be ignored.

Other aspects of the picture in the USA aren’t quite so encouraging.  For the umpteenth time, a commentator on a major news network weighed in to advocate “making it hard” on Americans to forgo vaccination.

Make ordinary life harder – heck, make it near-impossible – for those who decide vaccination doesn’t look like the smartest or lowest-risk choice.

If such ominous language were merely frivolous speculation, we wouldn’t keep hearing it all the time.  Yet we do hear it.  It accompanies the exhortation to get vaccinated so often that it’s clear it’s a bedrock principle of the vaccination campaign.  People keep saying it because they mean it.

As in the case of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, it’s Americans’ freedom of choice in the matter that they simply can’t bring themselves to be trenchant and conclusive about.  (Emphasis mine.)

Asked by [CNN} anchor Brianna Keilar if the administration was considering more aggressive measures to get more people vaccinated, Becerra hedged, saying he wanted people to have “as much freedom and choice as possible.”

“We want to give people the sense that they have the freedom to choose. But we hope they choose to live,” Becerra said.  [The survival rate for people who are infected with COVDI-19 is 99%.]  “We hope people make the right choices. We want them to have the right information, but we are America. We try to give people as much freedom and choice as possible, but clearly when over 600,000 Americans have died, the best choice is to get vaccinated.”

We’re being herded by mental and emotional appeals to do something there’s every reason to believe has already been done enough at this point, and in any case is still experimental, with emerging side effects that are non-dismissible for younger people and likely fatal for older ones.

Anyone who says even such mild words as I have uttered here is then silenced by social media.

It’s perfectly legitimate to be leery of a vaccination campaign that, when questioned or criticized, knows no boundaries of temperance or compunction.  And I haven’t come to this point lightly, or from a prior prejudice against vaccines.  Like most people, I appreciate them and think we need them.  But I don’t think involuntary injection should be inflicted on anyone (why would it even need to be?), and over time, it has been impossible for fevered advocates to hide that that’s where they’d be eager to go.

A choice is posed to Americans on another front as well:  a front as intrusive and “close to home” as the personal decision about vaccination.  Writer Leonydus Johnson, popular on Twitter for his blunt commentary, put it in perspective.

The U.S. federal government is asking friends and family to turn in people who they think may be – well, it’s not even clear exactly what they’d be doing, but the gist of it seems to be that their nearest acquaintances think they’re interacting with “extremist” material.

It’s all yada-yada’ed in euphemism.  But it boils down to an appeal to spy on the people you know best, let the federal government tell you what extremism is and what Karen would do about it, and then do that.

This isn’t the “See something, say something” campaign after 9/11, which was mainly about reporting strange activities you might observe from a distance as you went about your business.  “See something, say something” was about things like happening to see a garage nearby filled with way more ammonium nitrate than anyone could possibly need, or finding someone repeatedly in security areas without authorization at an airport, or someone looking furtive while snapping images of the perimeter at a local water treatment plant.

Spying on your friends and family, because your access to them is so intimate, is society-disrupting, soul-killing, Soviet-level evil.  And the true evil here is the government beckoning, and indicating that it encourages such evil and will not just be receptive to it but help you engage in it.

America is dealing with a lot of deadly stuff right now.  Perhaps the most deadly is the facts-on-the-ground implementation of Critical Race Theory.

It doesn’t matter what experts say it is (or, more accurately what they say it isn’t.  They’re much harder to pin down on what it is).  What matters it what it does.  And in its implementation in the media, the schools, and public debate, it divides people by race and urges them to see each other as enemies.

Americans naturally object to seeing their children taught in the schools to divide themselves by race and regard each other as enemies.  They’re really tired as adults, for that matter, of being assaulted by the same themes in politics and the media.

But the president of the American Federation of Teachers just doubled down on continuing the education establishment’s – including her union’s – implementation of CRT-derived instruction in the schools.  Her deceptive claim, staggering under its burden of unspoken premises: “We will teach the good and the bad.”

I can’t improve much on what I tweeted out on Sunday.

This is the speech of the serpent.  Literally: it’s the claim that if you don’t entertain both “the good and the bad” on the serpent’s terms, something you need is being withheld from you.

Yet there is no one who advocates hiding some truth you need, if it’s bad.  That implied premise goes unspoken, as it did in the Garden of Eden, because it can’t withstand the light of exposure.  It’s a false premise.

You’re not being asked to judiciously weigh good and evil, presented honestly.  You’re being asked to sell your soul and let the serpent tell your little children what good and evil are.

Oh, America, dearly beloved:  watch the Cubans as they flood the streets.  The green-canopied trucks are coming for them.  Don’t turn your eyes away.  Stand with them in spirit.  Pray for them.  Caudillos across Central America are sweating grenades right now, lest the regime in Cuba fall.

Here at home, know this.  What is set before us this day is life, and death.  Choose life.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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