By Tim Dunkin
Living in the United States is great. You can say what you want, own what you want, shoot almost anything you want – it's like a dream that's too good to be true. It can fairly be said that the United States of America has offered an unprecedented level of prosperity and freedom to more people than just about any other political system in the history of the world. After all, we don't see any evidence that the ancient Sumerians were laying rubber in from of any Dairy Queens with any 1969 B.C. Mustangs, am I right? But yet – things are not what they ought to be. The bloom's coming off the rose, and a lot of folks are wondering why.
Well, I'm here to answer that question, or at least to wave my arms around in a distracting fashion so that you think I'm answering it. Why are our lives becoming more obnoxious and difficult? Why do Americans just seem...more annoyed than we used to? Well, find out below. We've got a lot of people in our country who are actively trying to make our lives more difficult, dangerous, or at least aggravating. These include...
#6. Gay Activists
They're just looking to redress past injustices that they have suffered at the hands of haters who just couldn't stop hating. The bane of right-wing conservatives and Christian fundamentalists everywhere, these guys are not going to stop until you accept them for what they are. Which is loud and proud. And usually running naked down a public road at a pride parade, trailing a dog leash and a string of balloons behind them.
How they're making America worse
Have any of you ever had a family member, maybe an uncle or a cousin or something, who got a bad break in life, and maybe you didn't treat them as nicely as you could have in the past? Then, when that family member starts seeing it turn around, instead of being willing to live and let live, he just wants to keep pushing you, guilt tripping you, doing everything he can to try to mau-mau you into giving him everything he wants, all because he had it rough in the past, and you weren't exactly helpful to him back then?
That's pretty much what gay activists are like.
Keep in mind that I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill gay person who isn't an activist and isn't intent on shoving his or her personal lifestyle choice into our faces. I'm talking about the folks who are "professional gays." They're the ones who are driving the whole gay "marriage" agenda, for instance. And these guys aren't content to simply have equal rights under the law. They don't want to live and let live – they want to make sure that every last one of you witnesses the power of this fully armed and operational rainbow-colored Death Star.
The first thing to keep in mind is that gays are that way because they chose to be. Yeah, yeah, I know that everybody and his brother getting government funding has tried to "prove" that homosexuality is genetic, but the results have been, uh, less than convincing (like those from that guy back in the 1990s who completely faked a study purporting to show that the hypothalamuses in gay men were structurally different from those in straights). Homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, and there's really no good reason to think otherwise.
Another thing to keep in mind is that gays already have equal rights with everyone else. There's not a single constitutional right, for instance, that straights have that gays do not. Gays can own guns like anyone else. Gays can tell the cop who pulled them over to buzz off and get a search warrant like anyone else. Gays can post ridiculous, bigoted nonsense against Christians on internet forums just like anyone else can. Also – and more to the point – gays have the exact same access to the institution of marriage as straights. The exact same. A gay man can marry the same set of people that a straight man can. Not being able to marry another guy is no more a violation of his rights than it is for a straight man to not be able to marry a 13-year old girl, or a horse, or his co-worker's wife. Like it or not, it's the same deal.
But it gets better. As it turns out, many prominent activists supporting gay marriage are doing so with an ulterior motive – destroying marriage as an institution, in and of itself. This isn't just something that fundamentalist Christians are saying, either. For example, Sally Kohn, over at Salon, says as much herself when she rejects marriage as an outmoded social construct that should not be preserved. There really and truly are people in the gay marriage movement who are helping to drive it because they know it will deep-six marriage as an institution. Because we don't need a millennia-old stabilizing force that has been shown time and time again to curtail the violent impulses of masculine aggressiveness and help to socialize children to norms of civilized behavior, or anything.
You know how a lot of people don't like things like prayer in school because they say it's all about people who've made a certain lifestyle choice forcing other people to officially accept and codify that lifestyle choice? It's sort of the same thing here. When professional gay activists push for gay marriage, what they're essentially doing is forcing people who haven't made their lifestyle choice to grant official government recognition to their lifestyle, and doing so by warping one of the most basic and fundamental human institutions in the process. So the next time some left-winger thinks he has a "gotcha" and snidely asks you how two guys getting married hurts your own marriage, tell him that, yes, destroying marriage as an institution is, actually, going to have a pretty severe impact on your own marriage.
#5. "Civil Rights" Leaders
Now the average person might ask, "Who doesn't respect the brave, stolid souls who are even now standing up to the injustice of systematic racism in our foul, hateful country?" Well, actually the average person wouldn't ask that, but someone who confuses Jesse Jackson for a genuine civil rights leader like Martin Luther King, Jr. might. I mean, seriously, what kind of lowdown jerk is against civil rights???
How they're making America worse
What is consistently one of the things that Americans will say they most wished our nation had? More unity. Less division. Fewer people throwing their blocks at each other because of differences that adults ought to be able to overlook, or at least live with. America is a large and diverse country. There will be people who are different from you – who will look different, who will believe differently. Most people, to a greater or lesser degree, can deal with this. If people would stop focusing on bad things done in the past and start working together for a better future, it would be good news for all involved.
Yet, "civil rights" leaders like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and a host of imitators all across this country seem like they are set on making this not happen. When they're not shaking down businesses on spurious pretexts of "racism," they're actively encouraging rioting, violence, and division. It's almost like these guys want for Americans to be at each others' throats.
And why wouldn't they? Division and grievance-mongering are how these guys make the payments on their $50,000 Cadillacs.
Can you imagine what would happen to the empires these guys have spent decades building if Americans actually decided that they weren't going to let race divide them anymore, that we were going to look forward to a better future instead of dwelling in the mire of the past? Poof! These guys would be as broke as Greece after being denied their latest loan application by Germany, if Greece had to fend off multiple, concurrent paternity lawsuits.
Essentially, these guys – who have sort of arbitrarily declared themselves to be the "leadership" in the African-American community even though I don't think they ever had a vote on it – thrive on strife. They help to keep their own people down, stuck in the past, because it benefits them financially to do so. The more America starts becoming a post-racial society, the less relevance these guys have to just about anything. This fact was noted by none other than Shelby Steele, who observed that the civil rights establishment's failure to pressure the Zimmerman trial jury into finding Zimmerman guilty was proof that they were losing their mojo. And we should agree with Shelby Steele, because he's one of those smart, intellectual types who write for newspapers like the Wall Street Journal.
#4. Political Correctness Fetishists
We've all met this type before. No sense of humor. Sighs huffily whenever you tell jokes about Polish people. More often than not, they've managed to infiltrate their way into some sort of human resources position, or else they're the pet of the maddeningly liberal professor who just spent the entire last class period blaming global warming for the Spanish genocide against the peaceful, heartwarming Aztecs (did I say heart-warming? I mean heart-eating). They want you to be just like them, whether you want to be or not.
How they're making America worse
Nobody likes a bully. Yet that, ultimately, is what political correctness fetishists are, except that instead of punching kids half their size and taking their lunch money, they accuse people of "racism" or "homophobia," force them to take sensitivity training, and get to punish them when they complain about it.
There has to be an inverse relationship between the extent to which "PC" has infiltrated our society and the level of trust and respect people have for each other, or even how much they like one another. That's because when people are constantly being hectored about this, that, and the other, and are being accused of one of the many "-isms" and "-phobias" out there for essentially not conforming to the radically unrealistic lifestyle expectations of a few inordinately influential left-wing nuts, this is the kind of thing that doesn't sit well with people. People resent it. It's a form of psychological bullying, and people can recognize it for the psychopathic garbage that it is. People don't like having to guard their every word, their every email, even their every thought on the off-chance that some humorless ninny will be offended by something that normal, reasonably intelligent people wouldn't even think twice about.
Back in college, I had a good friend who was from one of the more shall we say...rustic...parts of our state. One time during a conversation, the subject of "Indians" came up, and my friend asked, "Dot or feather?" Okay, so this wasn't the most sophisticated way to frame his inquiry, but he meant the question genuinely. That was just his way of asking for clarification in the most concise manner possible. I thought it was kind of funny. He didn't mean anything bad by it – he was actually a pretty good guy and had a lot of sympathy for Native Americans because of the very real injustices that they have suffered for, well, pretty much all of American history. He wasn't being racist or derogatory. Yet, if he'd said that at just about any company in America, he'd have been in the unemployment line so fast it would have broken the sound barrier. No opportunity to explain what he meant, he'd have just been gone.
But at least the creepy political correctness types make life equally miserable for everyone, right? It's not like some people would get a pass on making blatantly racist or sexist comments, just because they belong to a certain race or gender, right? Certainly, nobody would get away with going on national television and calling Tea Party supporters "white crackers"? Oh wait.
Therein lies the other problem with PC – it's completely, utterly, selfishly hypocritical. Belonging to the right group gives you a free pass to break rules that other people would be crucified for. Charlie Rangel spitting up on 70% of the country like a bile-ingesting hyena? No problem. Meanwhile, Paula Deen sees her life destroyed for admitting she used the "n-word" back when Super Mario Bros. was cutting edge gaming technology, even though she has gone out of her way to repent of it and make the mandatory public contrition. You know how it was a bad, bad thing when law and society were deliberately stacked against minorities and other out-groups? It's just as much so now that they're trying to stack it against the rest of the people in the country.
#3. Anti-Gunners
The problem with guns in this country is crazy and spiraling out of control, right? Wacko gun nuts are murdering each other in the streets like they were Doc Holliday playing Modern Warfare 3, aren't they? And we've got to do something about it! These unfortunate souls really, truly believe that if left unchecked, the profusion of guns in the hands of the mouth-breathing chimpanzees known as "American citizens" will result in mass shootings every day. Surely these folks have our best interests at heart, and just want to help keep us safe, right?
How they're making America worse
Wrong. Gun control advocates are actually responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in this nation, and the victimization of millions more. There's really no other way to put it. The goal of the gun control movement is to disarm the American people. In their more candid moments, they will admit that they want to take away all guns from Americans. Many sincerely believe that the government should have a monopoly on the use of force.
In addition to all of those bothersome problems with getting this agenda to pass constitutional muster, the other snag in universal disarmament has been the fact that Americans are really attached to their guns. Americans like to hunt. Americans enjoy target shooting. Most of all, Americans like to be able to defend themselves and their families and homes against criminals who don't obey gun control laws (what a bunch of weirdoes, hunh?)
As it turns out, your average armed American citizens are pretty good at stopping crimes using their personal firearms. Some estimates range as high as 2.5 million crimes a year that are stopped by armed citizens. Stories abound daily of violent crimes that are prevented by guns in our hands. Intuitively, people can see and understand that the places where gun control is the tightest are also the places with the most crime, so the laws obviously don't work as advertised.
You may not know this, but the crime rate has actually been falling over the past two decades from its peak in the mid-1990s at the height of the so-called "Crack Wars" (which had nothing to do with plumbers, by the way). Not coincidentally, the mid-1990s were when many states started to loosen their restrictions on owning, carrying, and using firearms by citizens. States because to relax their concealed carry laws, and laws such as "stand your ground" and the castle doctrine started to be more common. As more people owned and carried guns, the crime rate dropped. Virginia is seeing this happen right now – people are buying guns in record numbers, and the state's crime rate is falling.
Now comes the fridge logic part to all of this: If more guns in the hands of armed civilians means less crime and less victimization, then it stands to reason that fewer guns in the hands of armed civilians means more crime and more victimization. That's basically what the gun control crowd is asking people to do – make themselves victims. The anti-gunners want to take us back to the bad old days when thousands of more Americans a year were robbed, raped, and murdered.
#2. "Moderate" Republicans
"C'mon now, let's be reasonable. Surely we can come to an amicable solution where we give you every last thing you want, and you pretend to be our friends for a couple of weeks, right?" These are the watchwords of the so-called "moderate" Republican, aka RINOs, aka worthless, spinal-deficient jackalopes. Given a disproportionate amount of face time on the nightly news, these guys have virtually become the face of the Republican Party to the point where millions of Americans are too embarrassed to be seen with an "R" on their voter registration card.
How they're making America worse
We've all heard the old saying, "Those who believe in nothing will fall for anything." In the case of "moderate" Republicans, it really is true. There's never been a hill that these guys have decided to die on in the pursuit of standing on principle. Shoot, there's never been a hill these guys have been willing to get a paper cut on if it was suffered while trying to do the right thing. With them, life is one long, poll-driven stampede from one momentarily popular political fashion statement to the next. Everything is relative, nothing is hard and fast. These folks couldn't even give you a straight answer if you asked them if we should ban the fiery sacrifice of living infants to a statue of Molech.
Ultimately, this is what makes "moderate" Republicans more exasperating and dangerous to this country even than liberal Democrats. With the lefties, at least you know where they stand. There's some consistency that you can expect out of them. Granted, they may be consistently stupid, wrongheaded, ill-conceived, and downright evil, but at least you know where you're at with left-wingers. With the establishment type Republicans, this isn't the case. One day, you're typical RINO may be strong on protecting the Constitution because he read a poll showing that Americans support gun rights and "stand your ground" laws or that they oppose allowing gays to force businesses to cater to gay marriages with which they disagree. The next day he's backtracking because he saw a push-poll from an advocacy group that said the opposite. It's kind of scary to think that many of our legislators likely decide how to vote on laws on the basis of which websites they happened to surf that morning.
The unfortunate result of having more folds than a laundry basket is that the RINOs help to facilitate all of the bad, horrible things the Democrats are doing to this country. Not only that, but by cooperating with them, these "moderate" Republicans help to give the Left political cover so that the blame can be spread around. Mitt Romney found this out to his detriment last year when he basically had to forfeit the widely unpopular ObamaCare as a political issue since, lo and behold, he was its spiritual godfather through his own MassCare program, from which many of the worst parts of the federal legislation were drawn.
From the Democrats' perspective, it's a win-win: They get what they want, and they have a bunch of Republican patsies who can take the fall for it while still being vilified as "right-wing" because they're Republicans and all that. Of course, they're allowed to get away with this because of...
#1. The Mainstream Media
Some nations have Baghdad Bob. Some countries have Tokyo Rose. We have ABCNNBCBS. Proving that we're not so different from other men, Americans also get to enjoy propaganda outlets that ruthlessly toe the government's information line (provided there's a Democrat in the White House).
How they're making America worse
Cynicism is a corrosive thing. It's like the sulfuric acid of thought processes. Believe me, I know. That's why it's such a bad thing, despite how much some people pride themselves on being cynical. When you have a country whose entire public discourse is marked by cynicism, that's not good for the long-term health of the nation. Yet, the mainstream media outlets in America seem like they were tailor-made to breed cynicism on the part of anyone who bothers to pay attention to current events.
Believe it or not, the problem is not that the mainstream media are almost monolithically left-wing (even Fox News is "conservative" only in the sense that Taco Bell is authentic gourmet Mexican cuisine). In and of its self, it's fine that these outlets contain and display their own biases. Indeed, the press has always been that way. Look across America and see how many newspapers contain the names "Republican" or "Democrat" in them to get an idea of how partisan the press has always been, especially back in the Industrial Age when mass newspaper printing was really taking off. You don't really need to guess where the Podunksville Democrat leaned politically – it's pretty much right there on the tin.
The problem – and what breeds the cynicism – is that these media outlets nevertheless try to maintain the fiction that they are neutral, impartial, unbiased, objective reporters of the truth. Nearly anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows this is not the case. Not when journalism schools crank out graduates who believe their job is to "change the world," rather than to "report about dancing dogs on Yahoo News." If pushed, most media personalities will adamantly maintain that they're simply fair-minded reporters of events, and that it's not their fault that these events just so happen to coincidentally substantiate the Left's self-contained bubble of reality. Most people don't buy it, which is why the media ranks so low on the list of trusted institutions in this country. Good grief, the banks are beating them!
Yet, we can't necessarily say that the media are lying – because dishonesty requires a knowledge that what you're saying is, or at least probably is, untrue. Rather, we can chalk up the disconnect to the lack of self-awareness on the part of most everyone in the mainstream media. These folks really and truly do not seem like they understand that there is a whole world around them that is made up of normal people who don't operate on the same set of assumptions that the media do.
So when Chris Matthew's thinks he's being cogent for apologizing "on the behalf of all white people" for the outcome of the Zimmerman jury's decision, he exhibits a complete lack of perception that most white people in the country agreed with that outcome – as did a not insignificant share of black Americans too. He knows that he and his media buddies – the only people he interacts with regularly who aren't refilling his water glass – were appalled by the decision, so he assumes that everyone else was as well. And on the occasions where these media types become dimly aware that other people in the country disagree with them, or even exist, well, who really cares what a bunch of slack-jawed yokels in flyover country think, anywise?
And therein lies another reason for our cynicism about the media – the faux elitism of the people who think they're informing us. This is America. We're supposed to be equal and stuff. Even if you're better than everyone else, you're not supposed to say so. Even if you're a Nobel-prize winning physicist who just discovered efficient cold fusion in between sessions of conducting Beethoven's 9th Symphony for the Boston Philharmonic and teaching Chuck Norris some pointers in kickboxing, your vote still counts for just as much as the guy who thinks the Honey Boo Boo family are sterling role models meriting the closest emulation.
With the media, you have people are usually wrong in just about everything they assert, and who have the nerve to talk down to the rest of us as if we didn't have any other outlets for information besides themselves. Regardless of your political inclinations, that just isn't cool.
© Tim Dunkin
Living in the United States is great. You can say what you want, own what you want, shoot almost anything you want – it's like a dream that's too good to be true. It can fairly be said that the United States of America has offered an unprecedented level of prosperity and freedom to more people than just about any other political system in the history of the world. After all, we don't see any evidence that the ancient Sumerians were laying rubber in from of any Dairy Queens with any 1969 B.C. Mustangs, am I right? But yet – things are not what they ought to be. The bloom's coming off the rose, and a lot of folks are wondering why.
Well, I'm here to answer that question, or at least to wave my arms around in a distracting fashion so that you think I'm answering it. Why are our lives becoming more obnoxious and difficult? Why do Americans just seem...more annoyed than we used to? Well, find out below. We've got a lot of people in our country who are actively trying to make our lives more difficult, dangerous, or at least aggravating. These include...
#6. Gay Activists
They're just looking to redress past injustices that they have suffered at the hands of haters who just couldn't stop hating. The bane of right-wing conservatives and Christian fundamentalists everywhere, these guys are not going to stop until you accept them for what they are. Which is loud and proud. And usually running naked down a public road at a pride parade, trailing a dog leash and a string of balloons behind them.
How they're making America worse
Have any of you ever had a family member, maybe an uncle or a cousin or something, who got a bad break in life, and maybe you didn't treat them as nicely as you could have in the past? Then, when that family member starts seeing it turn around, instead of being willing to live and let live, he just wants to keep pushing you, guilt tripping you, doing everything he can to try to mau-mau you into giving him everything he wants, all because he had it rough in the past, and you weren't exactly helpful to him back then?
That's pretty much what gay activists are like.
Keep in mind that I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill gay person who isn't an activist and isn't intent on shoving his or her personal lifestyle choice into our faces. I'm talking about the folks who are "professional gays." They're the ones who are driving the whole gay "marriage" agenda, for instance. And these guys aren't content to simply have equal rights under the law. They don't want to live and let live – they want to make sure that every last one of you witnesses the power of this fully armed and operational rainbow-colored Death Star.
The first thing to keep in mind is that gays are that way because they chose to be. Yeah, yeah, I know that everybody and his brother getting government funding has tried to "prove" that homosexuality is genetic, but the results have been, uh, less than convincing (like those from that guy back in the 1990s who completely faked a study purporting to show that the hypothalamuses in gay men were structurally different from those in straights). Homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, and there's really no good reason to think otherwise.
Another thing to keep in mind is that gays already have equal rights with everyone else. There's not a single constitutional right, for instance, that straights have that gays do not. Gays can own guns like anyone else. Gays can tell the cop who pulled them over to buzz off and get a search warrant like anyone else. Gays can post ridiculous, bigoted nonsense against Christians on internet forums just like anyone else can. Also – and more to the point – gays have the exact same access to the institution of marriage as straights. The exact same. A gay man can marry the same set of people that a straight man can. Not being able to marry another guy is no more a violation of his rights than it is for a straight man to not be able to marry a 13-year old girl, or a horse, or his co-worker's wife. Like it or not, it's the same deal.
But it gets better. As it turns out, many prominent activists supporting gay marriage are doing so with an ulterior motive – destroying marriage as an institution, in and of itself. This isn't just something that fundamentalist Christians are saying, either. For example, Sally Kohn, over at Salon, says as much herself when she rejects marriage as an outmoded social construct that should not be preserved. There really and truly are people in the gay marriage movement who are helping to drive it because they know it will deep-six marriage as an institution. Because we don't need a millennia-old stabilizing force that has been shown time and time again to curtail the violent impulses of masculine aggressiveness and help to socialize children to norms of civilized behavior, or anything.
You know how a lot of people don't like things like prayer in school because they say it's all about people who've made a certain lifestyle choice forcing other people to officially accept and codify that lifestyle choice? It's sort of the same thing here. When professional gay activists push for gay marriage, what they're essentially doing is forcing people who haven't made their lifestyle choice to grant official government recognition to their lifestyle, and doing so by warping one of the most basic and fundamental human institutions in the process. So the next time some left-winger thinks he has a "gotcha" and snidely asks you how two guys getting married hurts your own marriage, tell him that, yes, destroying marriage as an institution is, actually, going to have a pretty severe impact on your own marriage.
#5. "Civil Rights" Leaders
Now the average person might ask, "Who doesn't respect the brave, stolid souls who are even now standing up to the injustice of systematic racism in our foul, hateful country?" Well, actually the average person wouldn't ask that, but someone who confuses Jesse Jackson for a genuine civil rights leader like Martin Luther King, Jr. might. I mean, seriously, what kind of lowdown jerk is against civil rights???
How they're making America worse
What is consistently one of the things that Americans will say they most wished our nation had? More unity. Less division. Fewer people throwing their blocks at each other because of differences that adults ought to be able to overlook, or at least live with. America is a large and diverse country. There will be people who are different from you – who will look different, who will believe differently. Most people, to a greater or lesser degree, can deal with this. If people would stop focusing on bad things done in the past and start working together for a better future, it would be good news for all involved.
Yet, "civil rights" leaders like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and a host of imitators all across this country seem like they are set on making this not happen. When they're not shaking down businesses on spurious pretexts of "racism," they're actively encouraging rioting, violence, and division. It's almost like these guys want for Americans to be at each others' throats.
And why wouldn't they? Division and grievance-mongering are how these guys make the payments on their $50,000 Cadillacs.
Can you imagine what would happen to the empires these guys have spent decades building if Americans actually decided that they weren't going to let race divide them anymore, that we were going to look forward to a better future instead of dwelling in the mire of the past? Poof! These guys would be as broke as Greece after being denied their latest loan application by Germany, if Greece had to fend off multiple, concurrent paternity lawsuits.
Essentially, these guys – who have sort of arbitrarily declared themselves to be the "leadership" in the African-American community even though I don't think they ever had a vote on it – thrive on strife. They help to keep their own people down, stuck in the past, because it benefits them financially to do so. The more America starts becoming a post-racial society, the less relevance these guys have to just about anything. This fact was noted by none other than Shelby Steele, who observed that the civil rights establishment's failure to pressure the Zimmerman trial jury into finding Zimmerman guilty was proof that they were losing their mojo. And we should agree with Shelby Steele, because he's one of those smart, intellectual types who write for newspapers like the Wall Street Journal.
#4. Political Correctness Fetishists
We've all met this type before. No sense of humor. Sighs huffily whenever you tell jokes about Polish people. More often than not, they've managed to infiltrate their way into some sort of human resources position, or else they're the pet of the maddeningly liberal professor who just spent the entire last class period blaming global warming for the Spanish genocide against the peaceful, heartwarming Aztecs (did I say heart-warming? I mean heart-eating). They want you to be just like them, whether you want to be or not.
How they're making America worse
Nobody likes a bully. Yet that, ultimately, is what political correctness fetishists are, except that instead of punching kids half their size and taking their lunch money, they accuse people of "racism" or "homophobia," force them to take sensitivity training, and get to punish them when they complain about it.
There has to be an inverse relationship between the extent to which "PC" has infiltrated our society and the level of trust and respect people have for each other, or even how much they like one another. That's because when people are constantly being hectored about this, that, and the other, and are being accused of one of the many "-isms" and "-phobias" out there for essentially not conforming to the radically unrealistic lifestyle expectations of a few inordinately influential left-wing nuts, this is the kind of thing that doesn't sit well with people. People resent it. It's a form of psychological bullying, and people can recognize it for the psychopathic garbage that it is. People don't like having to guard their every word, their every email, even their every thought on the off-chance that some humorless ninny will be offended by something that normal, reasonably intelligent people wouldn't even think twice about.
Back in college, I had a good friend who was from one of the more shall we say...rustic...parts of our state. One time during a conversation, the subject of "Indians" came up, and my friend asked, "Dot or feather?" Okay, so this wasn't the most sophisticated way to frame his inquiry, but he meant the question genuinely. That was just his way of asking for clarification in the most concise manner possible. I thought it was kind of funny. He didn't mean anything bad by it – he was actually a pretty good guy and had a lot of sympathy for Native Americans because of the very real injustices that they have suffered for, well, pretty much all of American history. He wasn't being racist or derogatory. Yet, if he'd said that at just about any company in America, he'd have been in the unemployment line so fast it would have broken the sound barrier. No opportunity to explain what he meant, he'd have just been gone.
But at least the creepy political correctness types make life equally miserable for everyone, right? It's not like some people would get a pass on making blatantly racist or sexist comments, just because they belong to a certain race or gender, right? Certainly, nobody would get away with going on national television and calling Tea Party supporters "white crackers"? Oh wait.
Therein lies the other problem with PC – it's completely, utterly, selfishly hypocritical. Belonging to the right group gives you a free pass to break rules that other people would be crucified for. Charlie Rangel spitting up on 70% of the country like a bile-ingesting hyena? No problem. Meanwhile, Paula Deen sees her life destroyed for admitting she used the "n-word" back when Super Mario Bros. was cutting edge gaming technology, even though she has gone out of her way to repent of it and make the mandatory public contrition. You know how it was a bad, bad thing when law and society were deliberately stacked against minorities and other out-groups? It's just as much so now that they're trying to stack it against the rest of the people in the country.
#3. Anti-Gunners
The problem with guns in this country is crazy and spiraling out of control, right? Wacko gun nuts are murdering each other in the streets like they were Doc Holliday playing Modern Warfare 3, aren't they? And we've got to do something about it! These unfortunate souls really, truly believe that if left unchecked, the profusion of guns in the hands of the mouth-breathing chimpanzees known as "American citizens" will result in mass shootings every day. Surely these folks have our best interests at heart, and just want to help keep us safe, right?
How they're making America worse
Wrong. Gun control advocates are actually responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in this nation, and the victimization of millions more. There's really no other way to put it. The goal of the gun control movement is to disarm the American people. In their more candid moments, they will admit that they want to take away all guns from Americans. Many sincerely believe that the government should have a monopoly on the use of force.
In addition to all of those bothersome problems with getting this agenda to pass constitutional muster, the other snag in universal disarmament has been the fact that Americans are really attached to their guns. Americans like to hunt. Americans enjoy target shooting. Most of all, Americans like to be able to defend themselves and their families and homes against criminals who don't obey gun control laws (what a bunch of weirdoes, hunh?)
As it turns out, your average armed American citizens are pretty good at stopping crimes using their personal firearms. Some estimates range as high as 2.5 million crimes a year that are stopped by armed citizens. Stories abound daily of violent crimes that are prevented by guns in our hands. Intuitively, people can see and understand that the places where gun control is the tightest are also the places with the most crime, so the laws obviously don't work as advertised.
You may not know this, but the crime rate has actually been falling over the past two decades from its peak in the mid-1990s at the height of the so-called "Crack Wars" (which had nothing to do with plumbers, by the way). Not coincidentally, the mid-1990s were when many states started to loosen their restrictions on owning, carrying, and using firearms by citizens. States because to relax their concealed carry laws, and laws such as "stand your ground" and the castle doctrine started to be more common. As more people owned and carried guns, the crime rate dropped. Virginia is seeing this happen right now – people are buying guns in record numbers, and the state's crime rate is falling.
Now comes the fridge logic part to all of this: If more guns in the hands of armed civilians means less crime and less victimization, then it stands to reason that fewer guns in the hands of armed civilians means more crime and more victimization. That's basically what the gun control crowd is asking people to do – make themselves victims. The anti-gunners want to take us back to the bad old days when thousands of more Americans a year were robbed, raped, and murdered.
#2. "Moderate" Republicans
"C'mon now, let's be reasonable. Surely we can come to an amicable solution where we give you every last thing you want, and you pretend to be our friends for a couple of weeks, right?" These are the watchwords of the so-called "moderate" Republican, aka RINOs, aka worthless, spinal-deficient jackalopes. Given a disproportionate amount of face time on the nightly news, these guys have virtually become the face of the Republican Party to the point where millions of Americans are too embarrassed to be seen with an "R" on their voter registration card.
How they're making America worse
We've all heard the old saying, "Those who believe in nothing will fall for anything." In the case of "moderate" Republicans, it really is true. There's never been a hill that these guys have decided to die on in the pursuit of standing on principle. Shoot, there's never been a hill these guys have been willing to get a paper cut on if it was suffered while trying to do the right thing. With them, life is one long, poll-driven stampede from one momentarily popular political fashion statement to the next. Everything is relative, nothing is hard and fast. These folks couldn't even give you a straight answer if you asked them if we should ban the fiery sacrifice of living infants to a statue of Molech.
Ultimately, this is what makes "moderate" Republicans more exasperating and dangerous to this country even than liberal Democrats. With the lefties, at least you know where they stand. There's some consistency that you can expect out of them. Granted, they may be consistently stupid, wrongheaded, ill-conceived, and downright evil, but at least you know where you're at with left-wingers. With the establishment type Republicans, this isn't the case. One day, you're typical RINO may be strong on protecting the Constitution because he read a poll showing that Americans support gun rights and "stand your ground" laws or that they oppose allowing gays to force businesses to cater to gay marriages with which they disagree. The next day he's backtracking because he saw a push-poll from an advocacy group that said the opposite. It's kind of scary to think that many of our legislators likely decide how to vote on laws on the basis of which websites they happened to surf that morning.
The unfortunate result of having more folds than a laundry basket is that the RINOs help to facilitate all of the bad, horrible things the Democrats are doing to this country. Not only that, but by cooperating with them, these "moderate" Republicans help to give the Left political cover so that the blame can be spread around. Mitt Romney found this out to his detriment last year when he basically had to forfeit the widely unpopular ObamaCare as a political issue since, lo and behold, he was its spiritual godfather through his own MassCare program, from which many of the worst parts of the federal legislation were drawn.
From the Democrats' perspective, it's a win-win: They get what they want, and they have a bunch of Republican patsies who can take the fall for it while still being vilified as "right-wing" because they're Republicans and all that. Of course, they're allowed to get away with this because of...
#1. The Mainstream Media
Some nations have Baghdad Bob. Some countries have Tokyo Rose. We have ABCNNBCBS. Proving that we're not so different from other men, Americans also get to enjoy propaganda outlets that ruthlessly toe the government's information line (provided there's a Democrat in the White House).
How they're making America worse
Cynicism is a corrosive thing. It's like the sulfuric acid of thought processes. Believe me, I know. That's why it's such a bad thing, despite how much some people pride themselves on being cynical. When you have a country whose entire public discourse is marked by cynicism, that's not good for the long-term health of the nation. Yet, the mainstream media outlets in America seem like they were tailor-made to breed cynicism on the part of anyone who bothers to pay attention to current events.
Believe it or not, the problem is not that the mainstream media are almost monolithically left-wing (even Fox News is "conservative" only in the sense that Taco Bell is authentic gourmet Mexican cuisine). In and of its self, it's fine that these outlets contain and display their own biases. Indeed, the press has always been that way. Look across America and see how many newspapers contain the names "Republican" or "Democrat" in them to get an idea of how partisan the press has always been, especially back in the Industrial Age when mass newspaper printing was really taking off. You don't really need to guess where the Podunksville Democrat leaned politically – it's pretty much right there on the tin.
The problem – and what breeds the cynicism – is that these media outlets nevertheless try to maintain the fiction that they are neutral, impartial, unbiased, objective reporters of the truth. Nearly anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows this is not the case. Not when journalism schools crank out graduates who believe their job is to "change the world," rather than to "report about dancing dogs on Yahoo News." If pushed, most media personalities will adamantly maintain that they're simply fair-minded reporters of events, and that it's not their fault that these events just so happen to coincidentally substantiate the Left's self-contained bubble of reality. Most people don't buy it, which is why the media ranks so low on the list of trusted institutions in this country. Good grief, the banks are beating them!
Yet, we can't necessarily say that the media are lying – because dishonesty requires a knowledge that what you're saying is, or at least probably is, untrue. Rather, we can chalk up the disconnect to the lack of self-awareness on the part of most everyone in the mainstream media. These folks really and truly do not seem like they understand that there is a whole world around them that is made up of normal people who don't operate on the same set of assumptions that the media do.
So when Chris Matthew's thinks he's being cogent for apologizing "on the behalf of all white people" for the outcome of the Zimmerman jury's decision, he exhibits a complete lack of perception that most white people in the country agreed with that outcome – as did a not insignificant share of black Americans too. He knows that he and his media buddies – the only people he interacts with regularly who aren't refilling his water glass – were appalled by the decision, so he assumes that everyone else was as well. And on the occasions where these media types become dimly aware that other people in the country disagree with them, or even exist, well, who really cares what a bunch of slack-jawed yokels in flyover country think, anywise?
And therein lies another reason for our cynicism about the media – the faux elitism of the people who think they're informing us. This is America. We're supposed to be equal and stuff. Even if you're better than everyone else, you're not supposed to say so. Even if you're a Nobel-prize winning physicist who just discovered efficient cold fusion in between sessions of conducting Beethoven's 9th Symphony for the Boston Philharmonic and teaching Chuck Norris some pointers in kickboxing, your vote still counts for just as much as the guy who thinks the Honey Boo Boo family are sterling role models meriting the closest emulation.
With the media, you have people are usually wrong in just about everything they assert, and who have the nerve to talk down to the rest of us as if we didn't have any other outlets for information besides themselves. Regardless of your political inclinations, that just isn't cool.
© Tim Dunkin
