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The World You’ll Come to Know

2 October 2008, 13:51, by David Glenn Cox

Individuals build institutions, why did your grandparents leave Russia? Could it have been Czarist oppression? Why didn’t they just do something about that one individual. History teaches us that those individuals who fight oppression are jailed for their ideas as well as their activities. My own Grandfather was arrested for inciting to riot, While watching a Ku Klux Klan parade in his town one of the Klansmen said “Cox! Join us!” and grabbed him by the arm. My Grandfather broke the Klansman’s nose and a riot ensued.

He pled guilty and served 30 days, the Klan in those days preached against the big three Blacks, Jews and Catholics and his mother was a Catholic. He acted as an individual but was charged as a group. The next time he was arrested was trying to break up a scuffle on a picket line; a company thug (An individual paid by an institution to create violence) had attacked a picketer half his size. My Grandfather went to his defense and was charged with assault and disorderly conduct based on the testimony of the thug, he was found guilty as well as the man first attacked.

To believe the monster has no head defies comprehension, to live in a cardboard shoebox diorama with labels like freedom, rugged individualism and personal integrity. Free to have no health care, rugged to have no heat and proud to support those who jet off to one of their eleven or twelve homes and who would wipe you from their shoe like dog crap without a second thought.

The reason that my own father had a difficult relationship with his father was because this individual spent countless hours fighting for his union and his family paid that price as well. But he never quit, he never backed down and he took the blows and served the time. Try and realize that he took the blows and served the time for others, so that others could have a better life even at the detriment of his own children. That’s courage, that’s fighting for economic freedom, individualism has it’s place but Christ didn’t come here to just save himself and individualism can just as easily be a synonym for selfishness.