Emily

nurse. auntie. 🇺🇸🦅❤️ “Do the next thing.” -EE

[Tom Holland @holland_tom]

"For there's nothing as powerful or as great
As when a husband & wife, united by oneness of mind in their thinking,
Keep their home together—a great bane to their enemies,
A blessing to their friends, & their renown is on everyone's lips.”

Odysseus' great praise of marriage.

[Dave Scarangella @DaveScarangella]

Tonight, as I do every year at this time, I’ll be raising a glass to a scared young man, who 82 years ago was preparing to go ashore on the beaches of Normandy as part of an event code-named Operation Overlord.

D-Day.

I can’t imagine what was going through his mind. I’d be scared to death and I’m sure he was too. But in that first wave was a 21-year-old Private First Class from Henry County, VA by the name of Allen Homer Sink.

Fortunately, he would survive that initial wave, participate in battle until it ended in August, then come home to marry and raise a family of four, including two daughters after the war ended.

He would also become my father-in-law until his death in 2006.

His nickname for some reason was “Hank” and when I asked him how he got it, he said some guy in the Army said he “looked like a Hank.” From the time I first met him, he was a salt-of-the-earth man who was never afraid of anything. He was a carpenter by trade, and he’d stand up on the tallest roofs, grab bumblebees with his bare hands when they tried to persuade him to move elsewhere, and never be bothered by anything.

His hands were tough and leathery, but he was a softie. He spoiled his children, complained when my mother-in-law would gripe about something involving one of his alleged misdeeds, and always thought he was fooling everybody when he snuck around the back of the house and lit a cigarette, a habit everyone opposed but he could never part himself from.

He could talk your ear off for hours at a time, and I always suggested he become a greeter at Wal-Mart when he retired because then he could talk all day to strangers and none of them would – like his wife and daughters often did – tell him to be quiet for a few moments. Yet for all his love of talking, there was one subject he just wouldn’t discuss.

June 6, 1944. Omaha Beach.

In 1998, when he was 76 years old, the subject came up again. The movie “Saving Private Ryan” came out and the beginning was gruesome. Reviews said it was incredibly realistic to what really happened that day. I asked Hank if he wanted to go see it.

“No,” he shook his head. “I don’t ever want to see any of that again.”

He did offer that he remembered the night before when troops were loaded into the boats for the amphibious assault. He said it was raining and that once everyone was in place, they gave everybody ice cream and told them to try to get some sleep. Then the next thing he knew, they were waking everybody up telling them to stay low and head for the beach.

No, that doesn’t sound like somebody drugged the ice cream. Not at all.

That’s all he would say about the subject, and he never said another word about it until the final months of his life. Alzheimer’s would gradually rob him of his mind, and as his condition deteriorated, memories of the past would briefly spill out. One evening he thought I was his commanding officer and he was back at Normandy. It is the only time I ever saw him where he appeared to be scared. Ever.

It reminds me every day of something I had unknowingly taken for granted. The greatest generation did fight in and win World War II, then did incredible things over the next 50 to 60 years after the war. But many carried unspeakable memories from the War, ones they would never talk about and carry inside them to their graves. Those veterans lost a piece of themselves in battle they would never, ever, get back.

I mean, how can you at the tender age of 21 storm a beach, see friends die only a few feet from you, wonder each night if you will wake up alive the next morning and then return home a year later and try to pick up on the same normal life you had before you left? I told him once that after seeing “Saving Private Ryan”, I understood why he was never afraid of anything; after you’ve made it through something like that, everything else pales in comparison.

So tonight, I raise a glass to Hank and the 150,000-plus men, who like my father-in-law, were very young, very scared, and still charged that beach, paying a price that even for the survivors would last the rest of their days.

Rest In Peace...

[Novelle art. @artistryhere]

.

[SOVEREIGN AWAKENING @SovereignAwaken]

@tailopez Every day, you choose either courage or cowardice. And every day you cement your choice within your personality. If you choose the path of cowardice, you soon become blind to yourself and turn to mindless comforts to sedate your woes.

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

The intimacy of being understood

[love drops @lovedropx]

-Anaïs Nin, 1939

[Emily @emlu989]

Been fighting a sparrow obsessed with my truck for 3 weeks. You name it, I’ve tried it. Rubber snakes, fake owls, pinwheels, mirror covers… I need a man with a BB gun and good aim.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Teddy Roosevelt, what to do when you're feeling weak

[Darwin to Jesus @darwintojesus]

Why bad people know very little about badness

[𝕭𝖎𝖗𝖉𝖞 𝖛𝖘 𝕭𝖆𝖇𝖞𝖑𝖔𝖓 @mary_got_grace]

Please stop pretending that being a “Good Christian Woman” means you don’t have messy thoughts, a temper, or a sex drive that doesn’t just turn off because you’re single. We have created this plastic version of faith that leaves no room for the actual human experience. You can love Jesus and still be frustrated with your life. You can be faithful and still feel like you are failing. God wants your messy, raw, unfiltered honesty, not the curated Sunday morning mask you wear to feel acceptable or validated online.

[Andy Frisella @andyfrisella]

You know exactly what you're capable of…

...And yet you keep choosing to stay exactly where you are.

You know deep down who you could be, should be and need to be.

You also know you aren't even close.

You've seen glimpses of it.

You know that disciplined, focused, determined, confident bad ass motherfucker is in there.

You've literally experienced it.

Then you went right back.

…And you wonder why you feel like shit?

You wonder why you are so frustrated with your life?

When you can clearly see the gap between who you are and who you could be and you fail to become that person you are guaranteed to be miserable.

That's what eats you alive.

You know what needs to be done.

You know that superior version is in you, you feel it and it's time to become it.

....And if you don't do it, be prepared to be buried with a mountain of regret for ignoring what you could have been.

The time is now.

You won't get another chance.

[Athenian Stranger @Athens_Stranger]

The greatest blessing a man can receive in life is to have a great father

And whether or not he has such a father, the greatest gift he can give to his own children is to be one for them

In comparison to that, nothing else matters very much

[Meredith Thornburgh @MCMCD_]

Something Jocko said on a podcast I was listening to c. winter 2020-2021 changed my life—he was recounting how someone once asked him “what he says to himself” to get himself to do all the crazy disciplined stuff he does (up before 4am working out every morning, etc) and he was like that is the EXACT wrong question, you need to get out of the mind and into the body, you need to learn how to move the body by just going around the mind, let it scream and protest while you drag yourself out of bed, you cannot be held hostage by having to get the mind on board before you do anything

[Emily @emlu989]

@lisavsworld 💯 I feel like I’m doing something wrong when I tell my friends I’m not interested in a man because I’m not physically attracted to them. Is this not a normal requirement?

[Emily @emlu989]

https://t.co/Dz8gPbnEo6

[The Knowledge Archivist @KnowledgeArchiv]

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”

― Camille Paglia

[Pat Stedman | Dating & Relationship Coach for Men @Pat_Stedman]

Of course there is a good man shortage. I don't know how anyone in the manosphere could possibly dispute this in good faith.

But there is definitely also a good woman shortage as well.

Good, mentally stable / cooperation-oriented PEOPLE in general are less and less common today. You see this not only in romance but across all societal domains, like business. The West is becoming culturally low-trust like the 3rd world except it has the added issue of being socially atomized, so you can't even depend on a tribe. No wonder people are losing their minds.

This breakdown is human capital is really the reason so many people are not getting married, and why single people 30+ in particular are having such a hard time.

Healthy people get married relatively early because they are able to pair bond and don't mess around. The healthy ones who remain find it worse and worse as time goes on, not only because their net options decrease, but because the pool of options remaining have proportionally higher amounts of people with broken attachment patterns.

This has the effect of either psychologically damaging these healthier people, or making them give up on dating altogether to protect their sanity. It takes remarkable resilience to tolerate dating people when you are continually dealing with people whose main objective is to use you and waste your time. It's like going to a Bazaar in Morocco to buy a rug. Rather than deal with the constant scamming and fakery you think maybe you just don't need one.

This is why it's likely at least half of people are not going to get married in the current 20-40 year old cohort. Most of these single people are not emotionally capable of sustaining a relationship let alone a marriage with children. Maybe 25% of the ones struggling are willing to self-reflect and change/heal, and will benefit from practically being exposed to more options (these are the people I basically try to draw in and work with). But the remaining 3/4s lack the will to change and are basically lost causes.

The only positive argument you can potentially make about all of this is that the people who do get together and have large families will eventually reshape culture, as they and their values will inherit the world. By the 2040s all this fragmentation should reverse, and society and demographics should stabilize.

The next 15-20 years though are an enormous genetic bottleneck and cultural transition period. You will have to find a way to get through it, and mostly on your own.

[ol’ stocky ⛳️ @oldstocky]

This is my ideology

[Emily @emlu989]

@vegansince96 @YukonStrong @TheTempleWhip @LiveAction @grok Won’t eat meat because animals have feelings. Ok with killing babies for personal gain. 🤯

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

I didn’t expect The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis to hit so hard..