The Young Conservatives of Texas at Texas A&M University joined students across the country in remembering the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On the week of the anniversary of the attacks, YCT A&M created a memorial in the Academic Plaza comprised of 2,977 American flags, one for each person tragically killed in the attacks.
“Seven years after the tragic terrorist attacks, it is important that all Aggies take a moment to remember those who died on 9/11,” said Tony Listi, chairman of the YCT A&M Chapter. “We should never forget the price of ignoring the deadly terrorist threat posed by radical Islamic extremists.”
Each year Young America’s Foundation helps students across the country properly remember the anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks through its 9/11: Never Forget Project. Young America’s Foundation began this program in 2003 when it discovered that most college campuses were either completely ignoring the anniversary of the terrorist attacks or scheduling a politically-correct activity instead.
Over 180 schools across the country are participating this year in the 9/11: Never Forget Project.
For more pictures and media coverage see the following:
[W]ho would have ever thought that Texas A&M would have a Hispanic female president? Not its founding fathers, that’s for sure.
According the the convocation website, the purpose of Freshman Convocation is “formally welcoming students to the beginning of their academic career at Texas A&M University.” It is supposed to “provide students with the opportunity to begin their college career in the same, significant, positive manner in which they end their college career.” Welcome to Texas A&M, a university with a horrible past! What a great way to welcome freshmen in a positive manner!
Apparently, a lack of the protein melanin in her teachers inhibited Professor Brown from learning:
Keep in mind that I didn’t have a course that focused on blacks until I went to college, which means that my entire education up to that point was predicated on my ability to decipher knowledge from people who looked nothing like me.
Oh no! Those enigmatic white people! Why won’t they get a tan so I can learn a little better?!
A little less than halfway through the speech she couldn’t help but bring up slavery and “keloided scars“. What the heck does slavery have to do with welcoming freshmen to campus?!
She went on to talk about liberal internationalist gobbledygook:
And if you learn only one humanistic lesson in college, let it be how to become a good global citizen.
Last time I checked there wasn’t a global state in which all human beings participate as citizens (thank God!). Why do liberal professors insist on teaching students things that are contrary to the obvious?
Apparently, in true Marxist fashion, Professor Brown longs for a return to the turbulent and violent college campuses of the 60s and 70s:
While there have been several events in recent history that might cause students to feel disenfranchised, I often suggest to them that one of the reasons for their disaffection might be their lack of exposure to the history of student protest in this country and abroad.
And last but certainly not least, she made a veiled accusation of racism against former students:
Texas A&M graduates are often ranked high for their loyalty, but low in their acceptance and awareness of cultural diversity.
Sorry, but not all cultures are created equal. Cultural relativism is a pernicious sham.
Many parents have already expressed their outrage over Brown’s speech and hopefully more will continue to do so.
Why is Obama accepting the fundraising services of a wacko racist anti-Christian Muslim who is in bed with the Saudis?
In the following video, Percy Sutton says that Khalid al-Mansour “is raising money for [Barack Obama].” (Sorry about Sutton’s slow talking but please stick with it to the end.)
Sutton is a San Antonio, Texas native and former civil rights attorney who represented Malcolm X, who was Muslim. Sutton actually went to Prairie View A&M as well, so there is an Aggie connection here.
This Obama fundraiser, Al-Mansour (aka Donald Warden), also born in Texas, mentoredHuey Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panthers, a violent black Marxist organization of the 60s and 70s. (As if the Weather Underground wasn’t enough for Obama!) He also became a top lawyer for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and OPEC in 1977. He now resides in San Antonio as well, apparently.
Al-Mansour is radically anti-Christian:
“…the Church Fathers were the architects of apartheid…. The church participated in discrimination. The church participated in segregation. But in South Africa the church designed it!”
For the correct analysis of the relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition and slavery please see my post.
Like Jeremiah Wright, al-Mansour has a warped, racial view of the Bible:
A long version of his racist, anti-Christian diatribe:
Well, well, looks like liberals actually do believe in the existence of something called obscenity. No, it’s not pornography. It’s not government financial support for disgusting and sacrilegious art. It’s not any of the vulgarities that characterize modern culture.
Profits and salaries are obscene! Of course! Money is obscene! How could we conservatives be so blind? Sure, one can know obscenity when one sees it.
The fact of the matter is that it is not any of government’s business how much profit any business makes, regardless of size and productive capacity. If workers at a certain company feel that they are not compensated enough or that their superiors are excessively compensated at their expense, then they are free to quit and seek another job where their talents are more justly compensated.
You see, the market works. It rewards companies that allocate their profits where such funds are most needed and deserved. A company headed by a CEO who takes a larger salary than is necessary or just is only hurting himself and his company. He is taking away funds that could be reinvested in the company to increase future earnings and maintain a competitive advantage over other firms. He is also driving good and talented people, human capital, away to other companies who will more justly compensate such people. Or at the very least (or worst?), the CEO is creating justified bitterness and complaining among employees who feel they are not receiving their fair share. This corporate cultural disruption can only hinder productivity and competitiveness.
The capitalist system works. We don’t need government stepping in and creating unintended problems.
But what unintended problems? asks the naive liberal and statolatrist.
Glad you asked. Wealth creation (before it can even be distributed) is really a product of reinvestment of profits. The most successful and wealthy corporations reinvest their profits in human, technological, and various other kinds of capital. Thus the corporation uses its money to make even more money for all its stakeholders! Wealth grows at a rapid rate with such freedom to make wise investment choices.
Now what do you think happens when the government comes along and confiscates “obscene” or “windfall” profits from corporations? It stifles this wealth-creating reinvestment! It puts these corporations at a competitive disadvantage nationally and globally. Ultimately, it hurts the working man who depends upon the success of his employers and their ability to reinvest in him and his productivity.
What makes you think the government can more effectively reinvest the profits of companies within a particular industry or generally throughout the economy?!
You think that politician in D.C. knows anything about creating, marketing, and distributing a product or service? Hate to break it to you, but most of those politicians graduated from law school, not business school or the school of hard knocks. They are mostly lawyers who are talented in using the law to coerce others and steal the fruits of their labor. They are skilled in marketing of a certain kind (read: demagoguery), but they have no know-how in producing any great physical product. I’d like to see Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and other liberals get oil out of the ground, refine it, and then distribute it worldwide! Last time I checked, they weren’t petrochemical engineers of the caliber that Texas A&M produces.
Conservatives are not opposed to learning about other countries and cultures around the world. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. Americans need to be aware of the diversity of beliefs around the world and what their implications are for international relations. In fact, such knowledge can increase the peace and prosperity of the US.
However, international awareness can easily devolve into cultural relativism, a form of moral relativism. And this is what conservatives vehemently oppose. In an atmosphere of multiculturalism, mere knowledge often devolves into mindless, politically correct, approval and appreciation of morally inferior elements of certain cultures.
Moreover, though, conservatives believe that younger generations of Americans hardly have any knowledge of their own heritage. Young people do not learn about and understand the value of Western civilization that has been passed down to us from Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian traditions. They do not understand the ideas and reasoning that went into the Founding of America. SO, with this in mind, why should young people be traveling abroad and studying other cultures when they don’t even understand their own cultural heritage?
The American, ignorant of his own heritage and the reasoning behind it, is unable to think critically about other cultures. And this inability will lead to confusion and error. And such confusion and error will weaken the US and the values and beliefs that have made it great.
I’d like to end with this very interest commentary on international travel by G.K. Chesterton:
“I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labor and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger-the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.
Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travelers are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences.”
Texas A&M University is truly unique among this country’s universities, especially among public universities. While every college student or alum has some affection for its alma mater, especially surrounding its sports teams, A&M creates a community and a spirit that is not dependent on sports or even rivals, though those elements are certainly not neglected.
No government controls and regulates the Aggie Spirit (a useful, benevolent imitation of the Holy Spirit). This spirit of service and charity is a tradition, a heritage that has been successfully passed on to each incoming freshmen class. There is an institution in place to teach and inculcate this spirit into the newcomers: Fish Camp. And if one didn’t go to Fish Camp, it is hard not to receive the spirit by cultural osmosis from those who have. The Aggie Spirit is a heritage with a noble purpose.
Aggies more than anyone should know the power of local communities or private voluntary associations to take care of their own with the addition of a little leadership and courage. This phenomenon plays out all the time within Aggieland, within the student body and its myriad of voluntary organizations. Whether it is serving the local community at Big Event, or other community service groups on campus, or raising awareness and educating the student body on a variety of political issues like MSC SCONA and Wiley, Aggies know the power of freely given service and charity.
Student organizations, unlike government agencies and bureaucracies, do not tax former students and threaten them with audits and coercion. Student organizations do not threaten their members with fines or jail time. Rather, students respect what belongs to another Aggie (no matter how wealthy they are) but ask graciously for his or her generosity. Students appeal to the common spirit that binds all Aggies together and fellow Aggies respond in turn.
Consequently, it puzzles me when my fellow Aggies exercise their political privileges in favor of more federal government taxation, regulation, and intervention, which stifles service and charity. Government, as it is now, stifles leadership; indeed, it stifles everything that the Aggie Spirit represents and embodies. Why do so many Aggies abandon their heritage, their very spirit at the ballot box? Why do so many Aggies substitute collectivism for community?
The Young Conservatives of Texas at Texas A&M University joined students across the country in remembering the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On the week of the anniversary of the attacks, YCT A&M created a memorial in the Academic Plaza comprised of 2,977 American flags, one for each person tragically killed in the attacks.
Conservative Colloquium 