Louis Roney: Dirty words

I’ve never been a prissy guy, and I’ve heard plenty of rough talk in football shower rooms and aboard Navy ships. But the dirtiest words that I sit up and listen to with righteous indignation are words that suggest negative predictions for the American way of life and the concomitant destruction of me and those I love. One word that I most detest is “appeasement.” This word suggests shameful compromising with high principle.

In the late ’30s, when England’s Arthur Neville Chamberlain was chanting his “Peace in Our Time” after he had sold democracy down the river in Munich, I was banding together with a few other late teenagers at Harvard, looking hard for a Winston Churchill who, unfortunately, arrived a bit late on the scene.

Similarly, good-guy Marco Rubio is presently ruing the fact that our forces came too late on the scene in Libya.

Late… Always too late! “Gettin’ there fustest with the mostest” is alleged to be a traditional American motif, but for a long time we seem to have forgotten both the words and the tune.

Regardless of what you may hear from some appeasement-minded lamebrains, the possession of the power to defend the right is the best way to keep the wrong inactive.

I believe the presence and the actions of a guy named George Soros, who should have been silenced long ago, may be metastasizing into dozens of dangerous tentacles with hundreds of lethal stingers.

We try to raise our kids to be good by telling them constantly “not to do wrong.” We don’t, most of us anyhow, wait until the kids are 30 and are headed for the hoosegow.

I can still hear my mother’s voice saying to me, “I mean, right now!” Appeasement by shortsighted though well-meaning parents produces hooligans.

Appeasing Herr Hitler cost the world 50 million lives. And yet there seem to be voluble American appeasers urging us to have patience with evil, long enough to get us all into the same place where the spirit of Neville Chamberlain is residing these days.

You see, I didn’t like World War II one bit. When it was all over I thought that we had learned at least one lesson: The well-prepared strong are not often picked on by those who know they themselves will be wiped out. (There is always, however, the possibility of a few suicidal nuts.)

On the wall of our old Boy Scouts hut on Lake Killarney in Winter Park was painted, “Be Prepared!” Being ready for any eventuality saves lives — maybe your own.

In the Scouts manual “Scouting for Boys “ Founder Robert Baden-Powell explains the meaning of the phrase: “The Scout Motto is: BE PREPARED which means you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your DUTY.

Be Prepared in Mind: by having disciplined yourself to be obedient to every order, and also by having anticipated any accident or situation that might occur, so that you know the right thing to do at the right moment, and are ready and able to do it.

Be Prepared in Body: by making yourself strong and active and capable of doing the right thing at the right moment — and do it.”

’Nuf said!