Duct Taped to a Chair
What we are witnessing is like being duct taped to a chair and being forced to watch a toddler play with a loaded gun.
I am tired, as I am sure many are. My brain is right on the edge of being fried from the persistent assault of lies, hypocrisy, contradiction and just plain stupid that flows like a river from the left these days. In truth, that river has always run, it is just that it as reached flood stage for the first time in my adult, politically aware life.
As the Chairman of our County GOP, I am getting grief from somebody every day.
I saw a meme today that pretty much sums up my mental state. It said what we are going through is like being duct taped to a chair and being forced to watch a toddler play with a loaded gun.
That mental image perfectly describes my angst and anger toward anyone who would give a toddler a loaded gun, my drive to stop the child from killing himself or me and my panic that I cannot get loose to do anything about either of them.
We are in the middle of a war.
Not physically, but mentally.
It is a war of the mind.
We are taped to our chairs and are forced to watch the toddlers increase the power and reach of the surveillance state, openly assault the Bill of Rights as they throttle speech and censor anything they consider “misinformation” and attack anyone not part of their clique as a virulent racist. I was looking through a presentation that was part of a training class attended by our local high school teachers (it came to me via a local whistleblower) and it included the “anti-racist” themes of ditching the idea of a colorblind classroom environment (they must pay special attention to race because race differences are the problem – seems kind of KKKish to me) and that to deny they are racists proves they are (nice example of Kafkatrapping there).
The late Donald Rumsfeld, said “you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I do not know how we win this war – there are too many people, who, through miseducation, agitprop, and unearned self-satisfaction, are so mentally unprepared for what is coming, it is going to be a heavy lift. My faith in humankind is ebbing these days.
I think the chaos coming out of the responses to the “pandemic”, some of which resembled a nihilistic doomsday cult but many of which were purely political opportunism, has eroded my confidence in people.
I am beginning to think Malthus was right.
Over 200 years ago, Thomas Robert Malthus proposed that catastrophes such as famine, disease and war are the manners in which Nature culls population. Western Civilization has largely found ways to avoid such catastrophes – or at least to blunt them. That is a wonderful accomplishment – and if one is truly honest about it, the reason for this is that the ideas of individual social and economic freedom are what unleashed the power of the human mind in a scale never seen in world history.
We are undeniably the healthiest, most prosperous, most free, and most mobile world that has ever existed (and those things are distributed more widely than ever before) but I must wonder if our very prosperity is our greatest enemy. I also must wonder if there is a valid Malthusian perspective where truth and reason are concerned. It seems while painful catastrophes like the Great Depression and WWII did cull the population, they also served to cull from society the irrationality, unseriousness and triviality that are so celebrated in our intellectually lazy society today. Life and death choices have a way of doing that.
I have previously written about the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who made observations about social class in the late nineteenth century, His idea that there is a “leisure class” that holds “luxury beliefs” seems entirely applicable today. In “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, he stated that the “leisure class” – affluent people – display their membership in the upper class with their material accouterments. For example, expensive designer clothing or driving an Aston Martin convey such “membership”.
But I think that Veblen’s theory applies across all economic and social classes – as always, there is a segment of each social and economic class (upper, middle, lower), who send the same signals to their cliques that they are moving up. That is why we saw looting of certain stores during the recent “protests” and the theft of flat screen TV’s and other luxury goods first before basic sustenance needs were stolen. It is why Starbucks sells drums of awful coffee at inflated prices. The term “spendthrift” comes to mind.
It is also why we see people on the left do and say stupid things. Willingness to be absurd in service of their ideology signals membership to their peers.
I drifted toward a negative perspective over the past few years. I think it started about midway through the first George W. Bush term due to how the Democrats, having recovered from their momentary brush with reality after 9/11, saw political advantage in every single wartime setback and chose to honor their 60’s anti-establishment roots by ripping America and every citizen who expressed a little patriotism to little, tiny pieces. That experience changed me. It hardened me and it caused me to believe that my opponents were not just my opponents, there are people out there who despise me and my way of life.
I have assigned several motives to that degree of hate but in all honesty, I do not know what drives it – it is seemingly something different every day – although the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments seem to sum up about two thirds of the hate I can identify, the rest is just too irrational to even begin to try to define. That last third is like being in a den of snakes – no matter where you turn you are bound to be bitten. Your denial of a thing is proof of your guilt. It is an end to any legitimate debate because the side who invokes this strategy silences you with their position that no matter what you say, they are right, and you can never be.
That is the logic trap we are in today.
I just want it to stop – but it is not going to stop. The left believes we are wounded and is circling in for the kill.
Our only choice is to fight.