As I watch from the sidelines the gridiron back and forth on all-things-Corona, I am reminded that we are beyond the apex of “government owes me everything” -type thinking. It is now embedded in the genes of our youth. Players on the field seem downright pissed off that our government didn’t stress hand-washing before all this living hell broke out, that it didn’t have millions of test kits at the ready, that it hasn’t moved fast enough to ensure RV’s in Walmart parking lots or drive-thru testing at your local Walgreens. It’s almost as if we have forgotten that the world is made up of 7 billion individuals, and not just a series of powerful state institutions. The triumph of the Nanny State writ large.
This of course plays right into the Socialists’ hands. Indeed, the China Virus is a marketing plan that they didn’t think of but are goddamned glad came along.
In the Socialist’s mind, nothing is greater, more omnipotent, more plenipotentiary than the State™. (I think that The Bern is similarly trademarked). Not even a god, or to my mind, The God. Nothing. And to the extent that Socialism lives what it preaches, nothing is great than the individual. Nothing. Not even God.
The trouble has been and will continue to be the diminution of the individual inside of the Socialist State. These idiots, these “useful idiots” we call Berners, or “The Squad” (AOC, et. al.), don’t get it and never will. They are sucked in by the promise of a worker’s paradise. Like work has ever been, and never will be, anything other than “work.” It is spelled w-o-r-k and not p-l-a-y. They don’t get, largely because they haven’t been taught history, that they will become slaves to the State™.
I’d rather be a slave to my God.
This paragraph from a recent National Review article sums up my thinking:
Religion not only offers answers to the most powerful, definitive, and ultimate questions of human existence and purpose. It anchors individuals in a particular authoritative tradition defined by doctrinal orthodoxy and refined through multi-generational practice. People released from these bonds are capable of believing anything. Thus, socialism has returned at the same time as climate apocalypticism, transhuman and transgender ideology, anti-vaccination movements, Antisemitism, conspiracies, and ethnonationalism. In this climate of relativism and revisionism, where the most outlandish theories are a Google search away, both Marxism and Utopian socialism seem credible. Nothing is too absurd.
In the end, it is as it should be. No civilization has lasted as long as ours. It was only a matter of time.
I’m actually kinda glad that, at age 63, I’m on the way out.
Have a Corona Day.
You cheery bastard. We have a ways to go before the last hurrah. Pretty hard to dominate the person and soul when it has a higher allegiance than themselves or another human.
PS-Thx for the bday greeting.
Grant D. Ashley