WITHOUT COMMENT!

WITHOUT COMMENT!

© David Burton 2020

Without Comment
 


     Back in the Fall of 2019, two stories caught my eye. Both appear to say much about where America is rapidly going wrong. Herein, I repeat these two articles without comment. What are your thoughts?

WITHOUT COMMENT – Part 1

     “Here are some of the messages the left has been giving America’s young people:
     “— Your past is terrible, and your future is terrible.
     “The American past is a story of genocide, slavery, racism, patriarchy and colonialism. You should be ashamed of it.
     "As regards your future, your very existence is in jeopardy. You may well die at a young age unless society completely shifts from fossil fuels to wind and solar power. In fact, your future is so bleak you should probably not consider getting married and having children.
     “— If you are a girl, you should know that American society has contempt for you. You will be paid less than a man for the exact same work and exact same number of hours of work. You will have between a 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 chance of being sexually assaulted if you attend college. There is a glass ceiling that will prevent you from professional success. And professional success, not marriage and family, is what you should concentrate on.
     “That none of the above is true is irrelevant to the left. What is relevant to the left is that these messages make young women leftists — because they make them angry (virtually all leftists are angry), sad (there are happy liberals and happy conservatives but very few happy leftists) and lonely (singles are overwhelmingly on the left).
     “— If you are a young black, the most important thing for you to know is that this country loathes you — that racism is ‘part of our DNA,’ as President Barack Obama put it — and that just being black gets you suspended or expelled from school, shot by police, denied the vote whenever possible and disproportionately imprisoned.
     “Again, almost none of that is true. But a happy black — let alone a black grateful for being an American — is much less likely to support the left.
     “— If you are a young Latino, know the white majority is so xenophobic that if it could, it would expel you from the country.
     “— If you are a white male, you are the recipient of unearned privilege, and you are a racist.
     “— Boys and girls, you need to know from as young an age as possible that there is actually no such thing as ‘boys and girls.’ That is why your teachers have been told not to refer to you as 'boys and girls' but only as ‘students.’
     “— Young people, you should know that there is no God. So don’t look to God or religion for meaning. They are for the emotionally handicapped and for intellectual lightweights. For meaning, look to social action.
     “— Christianity, the religion of the great majority of Americans since America’s founding, the religion of nearly all your parents or grandparents, justified slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans and the persecution of gays. And in our time, most people who call themselves believing Christians are bigots and hypocrites. Whatever good was achieved was done so by believers with secular Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian values. Islam, on the other hand, has always been a religion of peace.
     “— Western civilization is nothing for you to be proud of. It is neither culturally nor morally superior to any other civilization or culture. And in many ways, it is worse: It is largely a record of persecution and genocide. That’s why you will no longer celebrate Columbus Day but rather Indigenous Peoples Day.
     “— Columbus Day will not be the only national holiday we will either erase or minimize in importance. Whereas Americans have always had meaningful holidays to celebrate and enrich their lives, you will have few or none (aside from Halloween). Previous generations found great meaning in Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. You won’t. Their birthdays are no longer celebrated. Throughout American history, July Fourth meant a great deal to nearly all Americans. They celebrated it with patriotic marches, parades and speeches. No longer. Anyway, America wasn’t founded in 1776: According to The New York Times, it was founded in 1619, when the first slaves arrived. As for Memorial Day, this once solemn day in which Americans placed flowers at the graves of those who died to preserve our freedoms, is just another day off. And most of the deceased probably died in vain anyway.
     “— You have few American heroes.
     “Hey, kids, America’s founders, known as heroes to every generation until the present one, were not heroes at all. They were rich white men who believed in patriarchy, the suppression of women and slavery. They were all racists, and some were rapists. In short, as an American, you have few, if any, heroes.
     “Only when one understands that the left — the left, not liberalism — has always and everywhere been a destructive force can one begin to understand what is happening to America. And the left has damaged no group more than America’s youth. Leftists speak about “the children” — but they care about “the children” as much as the communists cared about “the workers.” (Ref. 1)


WITHOUT COMMENT – Part 2

     “Three recent news items exemplify the depth to which our entanglement in political correctness clouds the way we see things: 1) the raid that resulted in the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; 2) the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden and the passing of former Michigan Congressman John Conyers; and 3) a Texas dispute over transgenderism.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

     “The reaction to the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was extraordinary. When Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 by an American Navy SEAL military operation, Americans of all political persuasions were jubilant. As one press account put it, it was ‘a nationwide celebration.’ Then-President Barack Obama was universally hailed for authorizing the elimination of the leading terrorist of the time.
     “Donald Trump was treated to a very different reaction when news broke that Baghdadi had been killed in a mission he had approved. First, we must mention the bizarre headline the Washington Post carried that called Baghdadi – whose forces publicly beheaded and burned alive hundreds of prisoners – ‘an austere religious scholar at [the] helm of Islamic State.’
     “Yes, in his early years, Baghdadi was an authority on Islamic history and law, but the headline defined him in those terms and appeared to invest his savage agenda with a kind of commitment to some otherworldly calling. It was as if the Post were embracing an argument that Baghdadi and his murderous ilk were somehow humbly doing G-d’s work by cleansing the world of non-believers and sin.
     “A New York Times story said the killing of Baghdadi ‘occurred largely in spite of, and not because of, Mr. Trump’s actions’ and that by ordering a withdrawal of troops from one section of Syria, Trump actually complicated plans for the Baghdadi operation.
     “A Newsweek story even suggested that at the time of his death, Baghdadi may not have been in charge of the Islamic State since a designated successor was chosen a while ago and might have already been in place.
     “Several Democratic 2020 hopefuls like Kamala Harris were concerned by the flamboyance with which President Trump announced Baghdadi’s death and urged that we not ignore the fact that, after all, a human being was killed. (No kidding!)
     “In a similar vein, CNN interviewed a former CIA analyst, Philip Mudd, who said that it was just wrong for the president to celebrate a death, no matter the individual. (Hitler, too?)
     “And so it went. Interestingly, as we went to press, the president reported that Baghdadi’s aforementioned designated successor had also been killed in yet another U.S. raid. We’ll soon see if the politically-correct Trump Derangement Syndrome will be as unaffected by this latter elimination as was the case with Baghdadi’s.

Joe Biden and Former Congressman John Conyers

     “In this Me Too age, in most polite circles it is almost unheard of that anyone would get a pass on even unconfirmed allegations of sexual harassment that become public knowledge. Indeed, these days it is commonplace for many prominent figures to see their reputations and careers crash at the merest hint of improprieties of this sort – regardless of what they otherwise achieved in their lives. We say 'almost unheard of' advisedly. There seems to be different rules for some favored folks in the name of political correctness.
     “Some months ago there was much ado about Democratic presidential aspirant Joe Biden having a history of being a little too familiar with women in the way he greeted them. The media and political elites shrugged: You know, it’s just old Joe being Joe. He didn’t mean anything untoward. After all, he has had a distinguished public career at the highest levels. The issue disappeared without a trace, and Old Joe is the current Democratic front-runner.
     “Fast forward to the death last week of former longtime Michigan Congressman John Conyers, a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Conyers, 90 years old at the time of his death, was forced by the Democratic leader of the House to leave Congress when some credible accusations of his having sexually harassed female members of his staff surfaced.
     “However, virtually all media accounts of his life dwelt almost exclusively on his concededly significant role in the civil rights movement with only a one- or two-line passing reference to the harassment allegations. The fact that he was a genuine American hero seemed to make the nasty stuff irrelevant.
     “It would appear that the people who want to remove all vestiges of revered figures of American history who have been accused of sexual misconduct don’t feel the same way about those who are in sync with their own politics.

Transgenderism

     “Finally, we draw attention to one of the more extreme recent examples of political correctness we can imagine. LGBT issues are all the rage today. Increasingly, people are arguing that it is improper for anyone, including parents, to attempt to coax a homosexual into becoming a heterosexual on the ground that neither is morally superior to the other. The same equivalency, of course, is demanded for same-sex marriages and trangenderism.
     “This week, a story emerged out of a Texas custody fight that is truly alarming. In short, a young boy has a mother who wants him to become a girl and a father who wants him to remain a boy. A jury trial resulted in custody being awarded to the mother, which makes her the predominant decision-maker for the youngster. The judge in the case, however, set aside the verdict and ruled that the mother and father have equal custody of the child.
     “A local newspaper account put it this way:
     “Six year-old James is caught in a gender identity nightmare. Under his mom’s care in Dallas, Texas, James obediently lives as a trans girl named “Luna.” But given the choice when he’s with dad, he’s all boy – his sex from conception.
     “In their divorce proceedings, the mother has charged the father with child abuse for not affirming James as a transgender, has sought restraining orders against him, and is seeking to terminate his parental rights. She is also seeking to require him to pay for the child’s visits to a transgender-affirming therapist and transgender medical alterations, which may include hormonal sterilization starting at age eight.
     “Where to begin? It is one thing to argue that gender or sexual orientation should be accommodated under the law. But surely it is quite another to say that genders are fungible and freely interchangeable. And surely we are going off the deep rails when we impose these radical theories on defenseless children.
     “All these news stories point to the need to honestly think through our assumptions.” (Ref. 2)

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References:
  1. ‘Your Past Is Terrible, And Your Future Is Terrible’: What the Left Tells Young Americans, Dennis Prager, speakingaboutnews.com/, 29 October 2019.
  2. Political Correctness Gone Hog Wild?, The Jewish Press, Pages 7 and 65, 1 November 2019.
 
  9 January 2020 {Article 395; Suggestions?_36    
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