The California Flinch

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

I have been a resident of East Tennessee for two and three quarters years now, but I still  suffer from a deep-seated “California flinch.”  What I mean by “California flinch” is when I dare express a conservative opinion, I expect to be attacked so I flinch to try and avoid the punch.  In early September I mentioned a stream of DMs I had been receiving.  Of course they were from California.  I was being verbally attacked despite the fact that I had not spoken to this individual since I left California.  The flinch is real because the attacks are real.

I was reminded of the flinch last night – watching TV.  My wife and I rarely watch live TV anymore, but we ended up hunting around a bit last night and happened upon a replay of “Opry 100: A Live Celebration” which was a three hour show put on back in March from the two venues that have hosted the Grand Ol Opry radio program.  We happened upon it as Carrie Underwood paid tribute to Randy Travis.  For the uninitiated, Randy Travis was one of the biggest names in country music in the 80s and 90s, but then he suffered a stroke and movement and speaking have been impossible to difficult for him ever since.  Underwood sang one of his biggest hits with him sitting front row.  Towards the end she comes down to the audience and holds the microphone in front of Travis who sang the last word of the song.  The audience, most of them country music legends, were on their feet, and like me bawling like a baby.  It was deeply beautiful and deeply moving.

But then I flinched.  I could hear the diatribe in my head, “All those white people singing that redneck, racist music….”  The flinch tried to rob me of the beauty of that moment.

And now, here we sit with far left liberals no longer satisfied with merely producing a flinch and stealing beauty – now they have taken a life.  And I reflect on all the beauty that Charlie Kirk will not see or experience.  He was so young.  And yet all those that keep trying to tell us he somehow deserved it or brought it on himself are still not satisfied.  They carry on in their ugliness and try to suck all the beauty out of the world.

If they succeed in stealing all the beauty, they win.  We cannot let them.  We cannot allow our lives to be consumed in battle with their ugliness.  I need to lose the flinch.  We need to continue to find the beauty, even in our current blood-stained reality.