First Posted 15-Aug-2015
It is fashionable, lately, to claim that everything is a right. I have a god given right to keep my toilet seat up in my house and visitors are being oppressive and racist if they challenge that. I have an inalienable right to put the kitchen towel on the handle for the oven door instead of hung on the handle for the refrigerator. I have a right to eat in the living room slouched down in my easy chair. It is also fashionable to throw a tantrum if there is a hint of dissidence that defies the sacred doctrine of the left.
Paraphrasing James Rustler, “In our age of Totalism . . . there is no middle. One must either love something with all of one’s heart and be willing to work tirelessly for its benefit, or (clearly) one must hate it and wish to see it destroyed with maximum force. By no means can there be any in-between. This paradigm is a tool of control, one common in history, but particularly loved by Puritans, which means that it is now primarily in the hands of the puritanical left. Few want to be seen as so heartless or vicious as to hate something, or, commonly, some group of people enough to wish destruction upon it. And so, accepting the Totalist frame, most people feel compelled to insist that they do love it, and would bear any burden for its betterment. They dare not take the risk of being painted as a villain (which these days usually means someone who doesn’t believe in the sacred dogma of equality).”
The left seems to have run out of gas. They’ve hit our emotional wall and all their shrieking and fist pumping isn’t getting the response they hope for. Instead of putting the tantrum on pause and perhaps trying to understand why we stopped giving a rip they have doubled down on the same old same old. The best they have are some 60-something white folk who pine for 1969 and Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza and their Uncle Tom friends trotting out the same three protest songs by the Weavers. The pitch is the same, evil government, evil corporate robber barons (Wall Street this time), evil rich people are stealing from the 99%. So, what we need to do is destroy all that and give it to the poor. Right. Yeah. Liked the Cultural Revolution? Happy that local gangs and mafioso will get all that cash? No? Why?
This is my reason for quoting Rustler–the left seems to think that the same sort of total allegiance, total worship of the cause, total tantrum when they don’t get their way is the answer, the way to win, the way to refill the gas tank. It isn’t. Tantrums become background noise after a few minutes. Even the epic emotional storms I lived with when I was married can be acclimated to such that nothing short of murder will burp the level of arousal. For the bodies the level of arousal has achieved a permanent zero. That’s where I am with the left. I’m not a body or I couldn’t type this. But my level of arousal is near zero in spite of their bluster.
Absolute Zero
When you start claiming that everything is a right you make “rights” into a farce. When everything is a right, nothing is a right. I have a bit of experience with this in my relationship to my Dad and with my ex-wife. Billary’s shades of red to pink promises that this time they’ll try harder and get it right don’t do it for me. When everything has to be your way or no way without deviation you become a clown that no one respects.
Totalist kings become clowns no one respects and will be dead in a decade. We have a multi-trillion dollar government with millions of lines of regulation that has become a farce. We have spent 19 trillion dollars on the war on poverty since 1935 and the left acts like no one has done anything for the downtrodden peeepul. The annual resource dump into our public schools is under way and a lot of parents wonder what’s happening to all that stuff that we donate. We have a president that isn’t funny because he has set a course which if left to its own momentum will destroy our government. But, the left in this election has lined up in town halls and public squares to sing Weaver songs and declaim the evils of capitalism again. Their declaration of the problem is the same tired rhetoric about the evil big corporations, the evil 1% and the need to make everything fair. Their answer is more of the same socialist populism that got us here. Woo.
Their complaint is that we aren’t fawning fans of this pabulum being pitched by Obummer, Billary and Sanders as the answer to the problem(s). We aren’t totally in love with politicians promising free education, free health care, redistribution of wealth, confiscatory taxes and all the rest that we have had for over a hundred years of socialist democracy. I was all righteously indignant about this the first time I posted it. Now I think I just want a nap. Wake me up after the revolution so I can plant my garden. Where’s my VHS tape of Stanley Burke?
You need new friends. I don’t hear pleas for “free stuff” here in Arizona, a decidedly weird state where legislators want to let students bring their guns to class “for protection,” but never ask, “from whom,” their teacher?
As a Cal graduate – twice – we were encouraged to listen to ALL sides to an argument. I didn’t hear the raucous demand for “free stuff” that you describe, or the insistence that we choose sides. Who are the people you are listening to?
If you’ve were listening to BOTH sides you would have noticed that the Republicans gave notice even before Obama was inaugerated that their single focus was to make him a one term president and to resist any legislative initiatives he makes. Didn’t matter what the topic was. Looks like they were successful, doesn’t it, although the ACA (affordable care act), with modifications demanded by the Republicans, did become law.
If you vote for a Republican, expect that they will go after what “free stuff” we have actually paid for through our taxes – Social Security and Medicare, and most likely get us into another mid east war. They’re upset that Obama hasn’t “Bomb, bomb, bombed Iran.”
Another mid-East war. . . There is a rather noisy & visible minority among Muslims that want a war as a step toward their belief in an ability to bring about Armageddon and beyond that, Paradise. Our next president, regardless of party affiliation, will have them to deal with. The Republicans are just the shiny toothed socialists who pretty up their propaganda so it doesn’t appear to be so red. Both parties are not making any noises about smaller, more effective government with any credibility. The stuff we paid for? Stolen from us by a century of smiling, corrupt politicians who borrowed it for their own purposes. The government is broke. We either spend within our means as a nation or your stuff paid for through our taxes will be nothing more than words written on wind and water.