And I got to thinking of the old Charles Atlas ads–I think he was the one–who had the guy kick sand in a guy’s face on the beach in front of his girl. What was his solution? To become a better man.
What is today’s solution? To bitch on the internet, post negative comments, maybe hack somebody’s social media, and dream of a day when an omnipotent government will allow you, weak and bitchy as you are, to be as cruel as you want.
And I think of the Left. They like to accuse us of lacking humanity, of not even being human beings.
But think about this: on the right and in the very large middle nobody likes to talk about, people look back in time and see ancestors. They see people like them. They can picture the Greeks arguing in the Forum. They can see the Roman Senate. They think of the many kings and queens of Europe (and for that matter, Africa and elsewhere). They can picture living in a log cabin, how hard life must have been. They think back to their parents, and grandparents, and their parents, in a very long chain of humanity. And they feel kinship with them
It is not necessary to agree with everything done in the past to feel a communion with it. All human beings sin, some greatly.
Most normal people live in this sort of world. They are nested, in a sense. They feel kinship with the human race, with humanity as a whole, through the prism of their particular history. They feel closer to people like them, and more distant from people who appear radically different, but in this country at least, we give everybody a fair shot. That is what our parents did, in their own way, as did their parents, on back to the beginning.
They did, in other words, what they thought was right. All people who feel ANY kinship with the human race whatsoever recognize that we all make mistakes, and that people and nations change over time, hopefully in a positive direction. If a person makes one mistake, they do not become their mistake. We look at the big picture, because God only knows what we would have done in their shoes. Quite possibly something much worse.
But the Left is not like this. It is an ahistorical creed. It is a belief system which cannot look backwards and see anything but continual sin, but which when it is honest, cannot look forward either and actually see the utopia they talk about in their time travel brochures.
It is a place with no beginning, and no real end. It is a place of infantile rages, helplessness outside the group, individual moral disempowerment, and continual struggle. It is a place you can only remain if you are convinced everything everywhere else is much, much worse. This is why it is so important to demonize conservatives and moderates continually and in the most aggressive, nasty, ugly terms.
There is no humanism in Leftist orthodoxy. There is no place for living human beings. There is no place for concrete outcome oriented policy. There is no place for operational intelligence, outside the sphere of getting and keeping power.
You cannot live in this world and not give up the bridges you were born with, which tie you to your past, to a shared humanity, to a shared understanding that to err is human.
The Left has to rewrite history, in the same way they lie about what they want for the future.
So I would say again, as I have from time to time: there is something inhuman about this entire process, about the group shouting and screaming, about the demonic and continual rage, about the complete rejection of reason and logic and the practical process of understanding how things actually work.