Taking Care of Your Own

Take care of your people, get some of them fed
Hide the ones in trouble out under your bed

— Robert Hunter, from “One Thing to Try”

When I was young, my father drummed into me some of the basic principles that he hoped would guide me through the coming minefield of adulthood:

Balance your checkbook.

Shake hands with a man, but not with a woman unless she offers her hand first.

Never drive more than ten miles an hour over the speed limit.

Don’t put yourself in a position where you owe your friends money.

And, most important of all:

Take care of your own.

I understood that last one to mean that I had a responsibility to my kin and to those I cared about. Feed them, clothe them, house them, lend without hope of return, and maybe even bail them out of the slammer. The exact parameters of “taking care” were never specified — there are limits to what you are expected to do for your own, after all — but a lot is required of you.

They’re your people, and you take care of them.

And who, exactly, are “your own”?

Wife, children, mother, father, sisters, brothers — those are obvious. Grandparents, grandchildren. Maybe also uncles, aunts, first cousins, and your closest friends. Your next-door neighbor, provided he’s not a deadbeat.

Is that it, or are there more people that you have to take care of?

After I grew up and my thinking capacity matured a little, I worked out a hierarchy of caring, in the form of a series of concentric circles.


At the center of all the circles is the one you care most about — yourself. Next comes the nuclear family, then the extended family, then the clan, then the tribe, and then the nation. Beyond the nation are the whole human race, other species, and finally the cosmos at large.

You could call these “relationships of obligation”, and your obligations form a declining gradient as they move outwards. The extended family demands less of an obligation than the nuclear family, the nation less than the tribe. Your obligation to other species is to use them as food or raw materials. To the cosmos at large you have no obligation at all.

These priorities are based in instinct, and until very recently they were reinforced by cultural practices that developed over millennia of human interaction. There’s an obvious evolutionary advantage to the arrangement — your DNA has a lot more interest in taking care of its own alleles than worrying about totally alien genes.

But the intellectual fads of the last half-century have required us to care as much about children in Bangladesh as we do our about own offspring. A landslide in Paraguay must elicit from us the same emotional response as does our teenager when he totals the family car. The unwanted pregnancy of a slum dweller in Passaic demands as much attention as that of our middle-schooler.

Why?

Why should the tribulations of distant strangers be as important as those of people near and dear to us? What requires us to care about the sufferings of faraway people whom we will never meet?

The answer is obvious: Nothing.

Neither evolutionary biology, nor tradition, nor common sense would dictate any concern for distant peoples with whom we share neither kinship, language, nor customs.

The imperative to empathize with distant alien peoples is an artifact of our times, a product of the strange and inverted moral structure that has emerged out of the wreckage of the twentieth century.
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You’ll notice that in my introduction above I left out any mention of God or religion. That was for two reasons.

Firstly, I respect the sensibilities of secularists and atheists among our readers, so the argument in favor of “taking care of your own” was made without reference to a Higher Power.

Secondly, an argument from a Christian perspective would run into objections based on New Testament scripture, and I prefer to deal with those separately.

So let’s consider the biblical justifications “Christian” multiculturalists use to support their positions. I’ll pick the most likely candidates.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:31)

Notice that Christ was asking us to love our neighbors. In the original context, this meant His fellow Jews — not the Greeks, nor the Romans, nor the fishermen of Lampedusa. Your neighbor, the fellow who lives over the hill from you, is the one you are required to love and watch out for. You are not responsible for the well-being of the residents of Aquitania or Cappadocia.

The modern Multiculturalist circumvents this difficulty by inventing a “global village” for us to take care of. But that wasn’t what Christ had in mind.

But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. (Matthew 5:39)

This refers only to insults. Christ was not exhorting the faithful to bare their necks to those who would kill them.

Not only that, in its original Jewish context, the turning of the left cheek to one’s adversary was in itself an insult, since the left side was considered evil or unclean. As an equivalent insult, waving to a modern Arab with your left hand is roughly analogous.

But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. (Luke 6:27-28)

This is probably the strongest scriptural support for modern pacifism and multilateralism. But you’ll notice that the passage is more about the believer’s internal state than it is about action in the world. It’s not a call for surrender or submission, but a call to love even those who are the most unlovable.

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:14)

The key word here is “friends”. Of course, if you buy into the modern Multicultural myth, the whole world is a village and everyone is your friend.

For a change of pace, let’s consider a few passages demonstrating that Christ was not an absolute pacifist.

But know this, that if the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched and not allowed his house to be broken into. (Luke 12:39)

Jesus expected that a householder would be watchful and not allow his house to be broken into. How could he do that if turned the other cheek to the burglar?

When the strong man, fully armed, guards his courtyard, his property is undisturbed. (Luke 11:21)

Once again, Christ expected the householder to be armed and ready to defend his premises.

But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you do not have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. (Luke 22:36)

Jesus was instructing His disciples to carry a sword with them. What did He expect them to do with it? Cut the bread for their evening meal?

No, like anyone else of His time, Christ expected that a prudent man would be armed and ready to defend himself.

The reason why Jesus never specifically dealt with self-defense and protecting one’s family is that such matters would have been part of the common culture and hardly in need of discussion. No one needed the sanction of Messiah to protect his wife and family. That was a given.

But let’s imagine, just for the sake of argument, that a not-so-bright disciple asked Jesus this question: Lord, is it right for one who believes in You to use force to defend himself and his family against those who would do them harm?

What do you think Jesus would have said?

I’m guessing that the answer would have run something like this: I tell you truly, no one who fails to take care of his own people may enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Father has given him a precious gift in his wife and children; if he cannot be trusted to protect them, how may he be trusted with the much more precious gift of eternal life?

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Christianity managed to flourish for almost two thousand years in a multiplicity of cultures without entertaining the theological perversion known as Multiculturalism.

However, we have fallen into grievous times, and nowadays the leaders of mainstream Protestant denominations — not to mention the Archbishop of Canterbury — tell us that our Christian faith requires us never to use force to defend ourselves, our families, our homes, our communities, and our nations, and that we are evil and somehow racist if we do so.

Violence is deemed immoral in all circumstances, so that when a belief system that has no such compunctions appears on the horizon, good Christians are enjoined to lie down and let the barbarians roll over them. The shades of dozens of popes, millions of the faithful, and valiant martial Christians such as Charles Martel and Jan III Sobieski must be recoiling in horror at the actions of their spiritual heirs.

So what brought us to this sorry pass?

Part of the problem obviously arises from the combined collective shame of the Holocaust and the historical enslavement of black Africans. We live in a post-Christian age, and there is no secular sacrament through which we might confess and receive absolution. In order to purge the stain of these sins from our non-existent souls, we must forever renounce anything that smacks of “racism”. But the guilt persists, and the scope of the sin continues to grow, until we reach the point that taking care of our own becomes a racist act.

Caring for one’s own people and culture is thus proscribed, leaving collective self-annihilation as the only logical endpoint to this postmodern morality tale.

The process is made worse by the degraded state of modern intellectual culture. The last two or three generations have seen a coarsening of education and a steady erosion of the ability to think logically. On highly-charged topics such as racism, debate is deeply irrational, and the issues can only be reacted to, not analyzed. All stances on contentious subjects must needs be emotional, and the more emotional your responses, the more proof that you are morally correct in your position.

It doesn’t matter that the end result violates instinct, traditional ethics, prudence, and simple common sense. The pristine purity of one’s moral stance, as validated by the group, is all that counts.

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So what is to be done?

How can any of us overcome the entrenched social attitudes that suck all arguments into the black hole of “racism”?

As an old hippie, my natural tendency is to resort to gonzo scripture and quote Ken Kesey:

You’re playing their game…. There’s only one thing to do…. and that’s everybody just look at it… and turn your back and say… “f**k it.”

In other words, the racism gig is only effective if you buy into it. If you refuse the assignment — if you deny the validity of the conceptual framework behind the accusation — then you can see it for the phantasm that it truly is, and it will disappear.

This could be considered cutting the Gordian knot, except that the racism charge is much flimsier than a rope. It’s gossamer, a mere cobweb in front of your face.

Brush it away, and what do you see?

Well, first of all, you’ll notice that racism is a normal aspect of human nature, and that everyone possesses it to some degree or other, whether they acknowledge it or not. It is an instinctual condition, built into our psyches by millions of years of evolution. Like many other instinctual drives — aggression, sexual desire, greed for the possessions of others, etc. — it needs to be kept under control. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

Aggression, when channeled properly, allows human communities to be strong, self-contained, and well-defended.

Sexual desire forms the basis for the most successful institution in human history, the nuclear family.

Sublimated greed becomes a drive for achievement and status, and helps improve the general welfare of the entire community.

Each of these impulses can be destructive, but when humans are socialized properly, instinctual drives become subordinate to the will of the individual, and to the common good.

And so it is with racism. When completely socialized, the instinct that manifests itself in “racism” is transformed into taking care of your own.

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To take care of your own obviously implies a dedication to those people who are genetically most closely related to you. But, as anyone who has ever adopted a child from a different racial background can attest, the instinct to protect your own people is flexible, and is not solely determined by race or bloodline.

This was brought home to me a by an incident that occurred a number of years ago when I was working in the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, a.k.a. Northern Virginia.

Arlington, Fairfax, Springfield, and Alexandria are among the most Multicultural municipalities in the country. They are host to Vietnamese, Iranians, Hondurans, Somalis, Koreans, Nigerians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Mexicans, Afghans, Filipinos, and many other ethnicities that I can’t recall. Since the days of my youth the area has changed so radically that you can walk through virtually any strip mall and rarely encounter a native English speaker.

One night I was standing in a checkout line in Magruder’s (an upscale supermarket), and feeling very homesick for the backwoods of Central Virginia, because I was constantly surrounded by foreigners. When the man in front of me reached the cashier — a Korean woman — I noticed that he wore a military uniform.

Then when he spoke, it turned out that — thank God! — he was an American. I wanted to embrace him and thank him for rescuing me from the slough of Multicultural despond.

But it didn’t occur to me until I was walking out of the store a few minutes later that the soldier was black.

The definition of “your own” is an elastic one, and race isn’t always the deciding factor.

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Once you have accepted the heretical notion that there is nothing inherently wrong with the impulse behind racism, several other categories of crime must be considered in a different light.

1.		Nepotism. The tendency of public officials to offer members of their extended family positions in government becomes completely understandable. This in no way vitiates official vigilance against nepotism — in fact, it would urge a strengthening of safeguards, since the impulse to nepotism is now seen as a universal human trait, and therefore to be expected.
2.		Corruption. Although official corruption is sometimes driven solely by pecuniary gain, more often than not it is motivated by taking care of one’s friends. Once again, the motive for such crimes becomes understandable and normal, even though prudence requires legal sanctions against its manifestations.
3.		Residential segregation. Sociological studies indicate that people of all races will naturally tend to form neighborhoods and communities that are ethnically homogeneous. This, too, can be seen as normal, and not as an injustice that has to be “corrected”.

I invite readers to discover other activities that are reviled and put beyond the pale by Multicultural orthodoxy, but which become normal and acceptable — even if civic prudence demands that we guard against them — when viewed in this light.

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When you brush the cobwebs of “racism” from your eyes, you’ll notice that only white people can be racists. Arabs, Africans, Asians, American Indians, and Australian Aboriginals are never racists. There is even a theoretical framework — Critical Race Theory — which codifies this assertion. According to this Marxist dogma, only groups that are privileged within the traditional power structure can be racist; hence “brown” people are exempt from all stigma in this respect.

Common sense tells us otherwise. Anybody in the South who lives in a mixed racial community — as most of us do — is aware of racism against whites by black people. I have personally been subjected to racial antagonism and insults on the part of some of my black neighbors. But other neighbors are friends and treat us normally — like white people, they are a mixed bag when it comes to racial attitudes.

Yet black racism is rarely publicly acknowledged, especially by whites. Judging by the MSM, it doesn’t exist. The only people who discuss it are right-wing extremists and dyed-in-the-wool racists like me.

If you want proof of the strength of racial solidarity among American blacks, consider the reaction of black conservatives to the candidacy of Barack Hussein Obama. Armstrong Williams is a prominent American conservative who happens to be black. To give you an idea of his conservative credentials, he sometimes fills in on the radio for Rush Limbaugh when the latter is on vacation.

So there’s no way that Mr. Williams would support Barack Obama for President of the United States, right?

Think again:

Black conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams has never voted for a Democrat for president. That could change this year with Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s nominee.

“I don’t necessarily like his policies; I don’t like much that he advocates, but for the first time in my life, history thrusts me to really seriously think about it,” Williams said. “I can honestly say I have no idea who I’m going to pull that lever for in November. And to me, that’s incredible.”

Just as Obama has touched black Democratic voters, he has engendered conflicting emotions among black Republicans who are far fewer in numbers…

“Among black conservatives,” Williams said, “they tell me privately, it would be very hard to vote against him in November.”

Since Barack Obama’s political positions are obviously repugnant to him, Armstrong Williams is considering voting for the senator solely because of his race.

He’s taking care of his own.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a laudable motive.

But when a white person does the same thing, it’s RACISM.

Or fascism. Or Nazism. Or xenophobia. Or any one of a number of other vile ideological positions which polite (i.e. white) society deems beyond the pale.

This is the ideological fever from which we must recover. We need a strong dose of political quinine, so that we may awake cool and lucid, and realize that the raging behemoths we saw in our febrile fantasies are only hallucinations. We have nothing to fear from them.

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OK, the cobwebs are gone. The racist bugbear is vanquished.

Now let’s look around and inventory the damage that a half-century of rampant Multiculturalism has done to the social and political landscape of the West.


You’ll notice that received wisdom condemns the seven innermost relationships of obligation:

• The self,
  
• The nuclear family,
  
• The extended family,
  
• The clan,
  
• The tribe,
  
• The nation,
  
• And even the human race

Only other species and the cosmos at large merit our solicitude. All concern for the other seven circles — those with whom we share the most kinship — is considered vile, racist, and humanocentic, and must be expunged from our collective psyche.

This is instructive, because the nation is the largest unit to which the instinct for “taking care of your own” is applied. Humans may display some preference for the entire species of homo sapiens, but generally speaking our instinctive preferences stop at the level of the nation, the largest group with whom we share language and cultural practices.

For the last eighty years or so, the mutant variant of Marxism known as Multiculturalism has systematically deconstructed family, tribe, clan, and nation. The entire Gramscian enterprise depends on the eradication of these institutions, and the sins of “racism” and “sexism” were devised to aid in their destruction. When none of them functions any longer, then Western Civilization will have been effectively destroyed, and the construction of the New Soviet Man — or rather, the New Multicultural Sentient Entity — may begin.

This is why it’s important from the point of view of the dominant ideological regime to destroy the impulse to take care of one’s own. If you are taking care of your own — which would accord with your natural instincts and your basic impulses as a member of a family and a community — then you cannot serve the larger cause, which is the supranational State.

Your inclination to serve your family, your community, and your nation — in that order — is not acceptable. That’s why the sin of racism was devised, so that millennia of instinctive behavior and cultural training could be eradicated.

Adolf Hitler and Bull Connor came in very handy for the Marxists who took charge of our political and cultural institutions in the wake of World War Two. The Austrian corporal and the redneck from Dixie helped disarm all the traditional redoubts of the West. Thanks to them, taking care of our own became a thought crime.

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I propose a conscious, pro-active decision to overcome all these decades of indoctrination.

I propose the positive affirmation of “racism” as a natural human instinct which must be socialized and controlled, but which is not inherently evil.

I propose that we proclaim our loyalty to those closest to us: to our local communities, to our provinces and states, and to our nations. These are the entities that we hold dear, that represent what we are, and that have the only legitimate claim to our allegiance.

I propose that we refuse the poisonous taxonomies of the Left that have been foisted upon us for the last four generations. We must recover our traditions, our roots, and our heritage. Each subset of the West has its own distinct identity which it can claim as its birthright, even while recognizing the legitimacy of all the other branches. This is a true celebration of diversity.

I propose a refusal to accept the indignities and abominations that are handed out to us by our cultural betters with the intention of branding us as racists.

I propose that we draw back the drapery and expose the Man Behind the Curtain.

I propose that we take care of our own.