[This is a reprint of a post of mine from thirteen years ago. It was written on the occasion of the 4th of July, but it remains essentially relevent today in light of our nation’s trend toward socialism. There’s nothing new here…but for some people, it takes a bit longer to understand. So, this bears repeating.]
The Fourth of July has come upon us once more. A day off from that stressful job. A long weekend for some. Time for the summer kick-off. Time to get out there and enjoy the great outdoors, if only in the park or your back yard. Time to spend with family and friends. Time to eat, drink and be merry, before returning to the same old 9 to 5.
And somewhere in all that, we take a moment to recall the reason for this holiday: Independence Day! Hooray! This country that we live in began as a group of rebellious colonists, who went to war against the most powerful nation in the world. It was a real, shooting war — you know, one of those immoral, “war never solved anything” kind of wars. Lots of folks died because they wanted to be free from the tyranny of King George, III. And they were willing to fight, in order to assume the responsibilities of self-determination, rule themselves and be “independent”.
Frankly, I’m flabbergasted to think that anyone in America today would be celebrating “independence”. Flabbergasted, because everything that has happened in politics for at least the past 50 years points to an exponentially growing trend. Rather than celebrating independence, Americans seem to prefer being dependent upon government authority for everything.
America keeps electing leaders who enact programs to control every aspect of our lives. Instead of preserving “freedom of choice” as an aspect of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” America has opted to allow mothers to murder their defenseless, unborn babies, but not let anyone have a choice as to whether or not to purchase healthcare insurance. And there’s no freedom of choice for those who oppose paying for abortions because of their religious or moral convictions.
How can anyone who has paid any attention to politics and the news lately think that America values independence? America doesn’t want freedom of speech or freedom of religion because so much about speech and religion is offensive. And we don’t like being offended. America believes that political correctness should define the limits of what we say and what we believe in. America believes that we all should be told what we can and cannot say. That means we must depend upon our leaders to codify political correctness for us, and clearly delineate what is permissible.
Or I should say, permissible permissiveness. America wants every aberrant sexual practice to be deemed socially appropriate. Never mind the cultural traditions of civilizations for thousands of years. Never mind the Bible. Never mind God. Those appear to be the things America wants to be independent from: traditional history, the Bible and God. A great deal of time and effort is spent in our courts and legislative bodies to rid ourselves of “restrictive”, “hateful” and “bigoted” influences such as Biblical traditions, so that everyone can do what they want, without being made to feel guilty.
America wants to be dependent upon a big, powerful government that will take care of everyone from the cradle to the grave. A government that has a seemingly endless supply of money to dole out. Never mind that it comes from confiscatory taxation. America believes it is great because of the uneducated, ignorant laborers who keep everything working from their position on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Never mind the employers who pay them. Don’t ask where the money will come from when their money is depleted by increasing wages, increasing healthcare costs and increasing taxation.
America doesn’t worry about things like that. It’s happy just being dependent. America forgets little details like when people who couldn’t afford buying a home in the first place lost their homes, or when pensioners lost their pensions — all because some organization that was “too big to fail” stole their money. Big government reneged on their promise to these people — as they always do. And yet American morons continue to believe that big government will bail everyone out and we’ll all live in glorious, politically correct ease — My oh my! Pie in the sky!
And one day, we’ll all be safe on the streets and in our homes — not just because smoking tobacco has been eradicated (while smoking pot for medicinal purposes is OK) but because private gun-owners will have been done away with. Then, America can depend on Homeland Security and it’s associated police forces — both local and international — to keep us safe and protected. They’ll even come inside your home to make sure you’re safe. Yes, America loves its dependence on Big Brother.
Two questions: 1) Why not rename the 4th of July holiday “American Dependence Day”? and 2) Are the almost half of all registered voters who didn’t vote happy now?
[UPDATE] This morning (7/4/13) I got a forwarded email consisting of Thomas Sowell quotes. I did searches on each quote and found them all attributed to Thomas Sowell on reputable sites. They are included here.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
I think this man [Obama] really does believe he can change the world, and people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians.
It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you’ve earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.
One of the consequences of such notions as “entitlements” is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.
There’s Something Funny About This.
It was 1951. I was six years old when my parents bought our first TV set. From the start, one of my favorite shows was Time For Beany, a children’s puppet show that introduced the characters Beany and Cecil, later featured in an animated series. Voiced by Stan Freberg, Cecil’s full name was Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent.
In a running gag between the two, one would comment, “That’s funny”, and the other would ask, “Funny haha or funny peculiar?”. So, I learned at a very young age that depending on the context, “funny” could mean different things. Just realizing that fact was funny in itself…funny haha, that is. In other words, there’s always been something “funny” about comedy.
Take, for instance, the comedy and tragedy masks: two opposites that together represent Drama as a whole. As art represents the meaning of life, comedy and tragedy alone can only represent half of that meaning. It is when they are taken together that they are able to represent the complete human drama.
The German word Schadenfreude refers to laughing at someone’s else’s troubles or mishaps. That’s why we laugh at pratfalls and bloopers. We see someone else suffering from their own foolishness or vulnerability, but instead of feeling compassion, we laugh. Slapstick acts have capitalized on this phenomenon forever. Think Punch and Judy or The Three Stooges.
It is a fact of reality that our human response to tragedy is very often to laugh. One reason for that is to give us relief from the anxiety life gives us. It is not healthy to take every little tragedy so seriously. We need to be able to laugh at ourselves. Proverbs 17:22 says, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” And that is the true benefit of comedy: keeping our spirit from being crushed.
When I was a child, America was experiencing a golden age of comedy. So many truly gifted comics were everywhere: on TV, radio, stage and screen. Trending jokes and funny bits spread like memes. Everyone laughed at them. It brought us together as a society. Audiences were diverse in every respect: young and old, rich and poor, religious and secular, even — if you can possibly imagine it — Democrat and Republican! We all laughed together — at ourselves and at each other. Despite all the cigarette smoking, we were more socially healthy back then.
But our social norms were changed. We were told we couldn’t say certain things about certain people. We were no longer to make fun of them. The mask of comedy was removed. The only acceptable option left was the mask of tragedy. First came “political correctness”. Then came “wokeness”. The paradigm changed from freedom of speech to “permitted” or “approved” speech. We went from being open to the idea of every diverse, adult opinion having entrée into the market place of ideas, and respecting the right of everyone to evaluate for himself what was being said, to the dictatorial idea that everyone must be told what they can and cannot say.
For instance, the word, “himself”, as I’ve just used it, began to be considered sexist, chauvinist and somehow denigrating to women. The so-called women’s lib movement began demanding language changes to reflect “equal rights”. (Although, for thousands of years most languages had used the masculine form to include both genders equally, such as “Man” and “mankind” for the entire human race). That didn’t matter to Progressives. Americans became convinced that we needed to make changes in our language to prevent any perceived discrimination.
But, like all social engineering, they took it too far. When I worked for the Postal Service my official title was “Mail Carrier”. But in personal conversations I referred to myself as a “mailman”. Politically correct friends would correct me by saying, “Don’t you mean a “mail person“? To which I replied, “I’m a man! It’s not sexist to call myself a mailman.” But by that time, a man calling himself a man had become “offensive” and even “toxic” to a significant portion of society. The women’s liberation movement was never about equality. It was about disrupting society by pitting women against men. It was part of the international communist movement’s plan to erode American society from the inside by dividing us into groups. A trend which has been intensifying for well over half a century.
It may seem like I’ve gone off on a tangent, but not so. My point is that the plan of wokeness is to kill comedy by not allowing us to laugh at our foibles. Forbidding certain kinds of jokes is the most insidious form of tyranny there is. It takes away your freedom to laugh. Remember, laughter is how we stay mentally healthy. It’s how we keep from going off the deep end. But that’s exactly what’s happening today. So many young people have no sense of social cohesion. Violence and destruction have become their go-to means of communicating the terror of a tragedy they no longer are allowed to laugh at.
When I was a young man I had the happy experience of being in a production of the musical comedy, Once Upon A Mattress. First performed off Broadway in 1958, it became a Broadway hit in 1959-60. Our production, several years later, stayed true to the original. One of the characters in this musical is King Sextimus the Silent. As his name suggests, he was a bit oversexed, but unable to speak. He compensated for his muteness by chasing the young ladies in the court across the stage, in the style of the Marx Brothers.
In those days that type of burlesque schtick was considered funny. The normal, average response of an audience to what we would now call sexual harassment was to laugh. Why? Because normal people know that chasing a girl to pinch her is childish, unacceptable and outlandish. It’s laughable in the same way that comedic portrayals of drunks are laughable. In such cases, no one is seriously making fun of alcoholism or denigrating women. The intent of performance art is to choose to laugh at tragedy, rather than be destroyed by it.
Modern performances of Once Upon a Mattress are downplaying the business of King Sextimus chasing the girls. It’s considered too offensive. The rule of not being offensive has replaced the rule of being funny, which I see as a cultural loss. It’s a good thing to be free to laugh out loud at “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. But woke standards are not allowing us that freedom.
Another example — part of that two-mask conjunction of comedy and tragedy — speaks to the poetic license of theatrics that allows serious concerns to be viewed through the lens of the romantic. It is the musical, The Fantasticks. Opened in 1960, it ran for 42 years with 17,162 performances, making it the world’s longest-running musical (according to Wikipedia).
It’s a wonderful musical about love, family, and the romantic urge of youth to explore all possibilities versus the painful reality of life’s struggles. For me, it epitomizes the “magic” of theater”. One song in the Fantasticks (It Depends on What You Pay) used the word “rape” to describe a staged kidnapping. The singer (El Gallo) clarified that what he meant by “rape” was in the literary sense an abduction — a staged abduction. The idea was that by pretending to abduct the girl and letting the boy rescue her, she would be impressed and see him as a hero.
But PC thinking – the parent of woke thinking – found this unacceptable. Just the word “rape” itself was enough to make it too offensive to continue. When they made a movie of the musical (1995) the word (and the song) had been removed. By now, our society was reaffirming the conviction that we must not laugh at (or even discuss) anything that can be considered offensive.
However, there is one irreconcilable, glaring problem to this type of censorship. What is offensive to you may not be offensive to me. And what is offensive to me may not be offensive to you. I may not laugh at your jokes, and you may not laugh at mine. So, the question arises, how do we deal with such conflicts? Traditionally in America, we have balanced freedom of speech with our prevailing social mores. That is why Progressives have used a two-pronged attack of both restricting freedom of speech while changing social mores.
In order to obtain protection against offense, you must belong to an approved minority group with the status of being discriminated against by the majority. The majority has no such protection. It is deemed perfectly OK to say anything offensive against the majority. They are ridiculed and mocked for their religion, their morals, their appearance, their behavior, the way they talk…no jokes are seen as unacceptable as long as they are about men or whites or heterosexuals or conservatives or anything traditional.
Where we used to have true “community” — the naturally diverse blend of all who comprise a neighborhood or city — now we have mobs of unhappy, unhealthy people so focused on those who offend them that they cannot be civil in their dealings with any other human beings outside their group. When they are by themselves they won’t even acknowledge or return the greetings of passersby. They say nothing and don’t even look at you. This is not healthy. It’s not normal. But it’s exactly what the social disrupters want.
We have a generation of people now who have no idea how to constructively interact with others. They know how use their devices but they don’t know how to be a human being. When they get together, they are drawn to violent, destructive, anti-social behavior. They don’t know how to be concerned for the good of all. They’re too offended to laugh at each other. Too focused on themselves to laugh at life’s little tragedies.
This is nothing to laugh at.
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