When I need a break from work I scroll through Facebook posts from friends and see all the leftist diatribes constantly being launched out into the world. Apparently they forget about their global warming concerns when it comes to running massive amounts of air conditioning with oil-generated electricity, chilling the server rooms where their caustic Facebook posts reside. Like my toddler son tugging hard on the toilet paper roll, amused as it spins fast and rolls down to the floor, the anti-conservative posts of my liberal friends freely roll out rapidly, producing smug grins and condescending chuckles from readers. But their arguments are usually filled with crap, fall flat on the floor, and others have to clean up the intellectual mess they have made. Conservative organizations and news outlets have to come in and correct the misinformation in an attempt to keep us all from becoming toddlers in a nanny state, where emotional tantrums about unfairness cloud people’s understanding of liberty—its importance and its fragility.
One pejorative post I saw on Facebook today read “I’m so patriotic I piss red, white and blue. My doctor said it may be pancreatic cancer. I told him to shut his commie mouth.” It pictures a muscular, bearded white man in a white T-shirt. He’s in a rural setting, holding an American flag in one hand and a shotgun in the other. I’m thinking to myself – OK, what exactly is this friend prompting me to get mad at here?
I’m exhausted trying to figure it out and likewise, it must be exhausting being a liberal, to argue against and condemn such non-specific targets as the subject in this photograph. I assume they are belittling people that are very proud to be American and who are very much opposed to communism. Classify the guy in the photo as an uneducated redneck if you wish, but does he threaten you? Does he steal from you? Does he control you? I do not perceive people out in the country with guns and flags a threat.
I do consider big government with its guns, operating under the “we know what’s best for you” flag, a definite threat. After all, the know-it-alls have created modern Detroit and Baltimore and have run up the federal debt to over 18 trillion dollars, which my sons and their children and grand-children will have to deal with. Going back to the text of the Facebook post, I have no idea what a doctor’s cancer diagnosis has to do with communism, but let’s say in reality a politician wants to make America a communist country, I hope to God millions of people will tell that politician to shut his commie mouth. I wish the right-thinking Soviet citizens would have told Stalin to shut his commie mouth before he went on to kill 50 million of their people and I wish that right-thinking Chinese would have told Mao Tse-Tung to shut his commie mouth before he went on to kill 45 million people within four years. In the McCarthy era, the accusations and tactics were overly aggressive, but the urge to shut the commie mouths of people in Hollywood was a noble campaign, due to the power they possessed to promulgate their dangerous views. I’m sure the French in the late stages of WWII were happy to hear American soldiers say “I’m so patriotic I piss red white and blue, and I’ve come to help you.” Likewise, I’m sure South Koreans were glad to see some crazy rednecks with guns pissing red white and blue in their stomping grounds in the 1950s. If they didn’t see those American soldiers, South Korea would be just another area controlled by China.
In a way, the two main political labels are mixed up when it comes to controlling behavior. Liberals want to legislate proper behavior, which is actually a conservative impulse similar to actions in mediaeval Europe or current Islamic Sharia Law. The stance taken by most Republicans, which should actually be seen as liberal, goes something like this: You are free to dislike, or even hate individuals or groups, and you are free to criticize them, and you are free to make a fool of yourself and to say things that upset the majority of your community. But you are also free to love and help out your brother. In other words, you are a free actor in this world even though it is understood that you run risks at every corner of making unwise decisions and saying foolish things. You have self-responsibility and the exercise of that self-responsibility includes judging and commenting on unfair and disgraceful conduct of your own, and of people around you, knowing that censure of detestable behavior coming from individuals such as yourself is better than censure coming from a powerful central government or central religious authority. That conservative stance, to let things happen freely, is really liberal in the true sense of the word.
Now I can hear the gears turning in liberal’s heads. They would argue, well if you just let people do whatever they want then things will slowly turn against the poor and un-empowered, homosexuals, women, Muslims and we will return to a society reminiscent of Jim Crow, where a dominant, white, male moneyed class controls and subjugates other classes and groups with impunity. I do not have this fear. The world has changed significantly and there is no turning back the clock to some of the blatant discriminatory practices that were part of our past. If that starts to happen, let us hope that the voices of liberty make their case against such a regressive movement. Let us continue to live in a society full of reasoned, intelligent discussion, and not a world of segregation, poll taxes, crooked judges, and lynchings.
If we are going to put passionate, emotional posts on Facebook, let us attack concrete things like burdensome taxation, rising federal and state debt, the dangerous creation of fiat money and the Federal Reserve deceptively inflating the economy, Islamic terrorism, the fact that a quarter of Americans are on food stamps, over-regulation of small farmers and other small business owners, and the inflexibility of K-12 schools to think outside the box and challenge big government mandates and labor unions etc. Those are big challenges, but there is plenty more be angered and indignant about. Instead liberals love to get people riled up against nebulous enemies and hypothetical situations. They demonize a pizza restaurant and its “bigoted” Christian owners for hypothetically not agreeing to cater gay wedding. They mock “stupid red necks” that live in fly-over country with their flags and stuff. They rail against the Koch Brothers controlling everybody and everything. They fight to end oppression, injustice, and the repressive, conservative culture—all causes that are either vague, hard to achieve definitively, or not obvious they are causing injury to anyone. I will admit that many conservative posts are petty, disrespectful and vague, but in general, the liberal’s modus operandi is to shame vaguely and get government to coerce specifically.
Spending the day with the flag-holding guy in the Facebook post may not seem enjoyable to you, my liberal Facebook friend. You may not like hunting, NASCAR, country music and Budweiser, and I hope the guy doesn’t coerce you to do any of those activities. You could just sit on his porch reading articles from Daily Kos on your iPhone. However, spending the day with federal regulators, prosecutors, judges and federal prison staff is more unenjoyable. The question of arbitrary state coercion versus an educated citizenry passionate about liberty goes to the heart of what America is all about. An unenjoyable day with a redneck does not compare with an unenjoyable day in the clutches of the central government.
