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A Happy Warrior?
I want to be a happy warrior.
I’m greatly troubled by the state of our country. I know that I’m not alone in this. I’ve found it easy to lose hope, at least briefly. But I worry that if I give in to the counsel of despair, I won’t be able to find the motivation to make whatever small contribution may be within my power.
I think that there is reason for hope. Sure, we have a pretty bad president. On the bright side, he’s not very competent and may even be slipping into senescence. Sure, the opposition controls both houses of Congress. On the bright side, their majorities are thin, and they haven’t been able to pass much of their agenda. Sure, we may see another bad decision out of SCOTUS at any time. On the bright side, we have the strongest conservative majority in my lifetime. Even if we put the sometimes unreliable chief in the middle, the count is currently 5-1-3.
More importantly, I see reasons for hope all across the country. I haven’t seen them in person, but I’ve read reports from many of you and in the news media. We see employees refusing to comply with an unwise vaccination mandate. We see parents and others taking action against critical race theory in the schools. We see President Biden’s approval rating plummeting — from around +9% just four months ago to around -8% today.
I recently saw one small positive sign in person. I went to a local convenience store about a week ago. We don’t have a mask mandate in the Tucson area, so the customers were unmasked, but the employer apparently was requiring its employees to be masked. There were three ladies working in the store at the time, all wearing masks.
All three of their masks had somehow fallen down below their noses. Oops! Sorry, boss, my bad!
Then there’s the hilarious “Let’s go, Brandon!” That has to be the meme of the year, maybe the meme of the decade.
While it sometimes seems that the last election was just a few weeks ago, we have another one coming up in barely more than a year. I think that the Republicans have good prospects in 2022. I think that there’s a chance of giving the Dems a real pasting.
I think that this outcome is much more likely if we can put aside some of our differences on the political right and resolve ourselves to act optimistically, even if we don’t always feel it. I want to see all of us acting like happy warriors, starting with me.
I don’t know how to get there from here. I’m going to start trying to be more positive and less argumentative. I’m going to try to stop relitigating the past and focus on moving forward productively. I’m going to focus on finding consensus with good folks like you, rather than dickering over minor areas of disagreement.
I don’t think that this will be easy for me. Jon Gabriel may be the King of Stuff, but I may be the King of Dickering. [And yeah, I know that I’m opening myself up to someone using the strikethrough function there … ]
I did appreciate some of the things that Chris Christie said in last week’s podcast. I was initially disinclined to listen to him, but I overcame this and gave him a chance. He said a couple of things that annoyed me, but he also had some good points, in my view. I was particularly impressed by his leadership in a group trying to counter the sort of electoral “dirty pool” that the Dems used so effectively last time around. I don’t think that I can do anything to help that effort, but maybe some of you can.
I think that we still have a shot at turning things around. Even if I’m wrong about this, I don’t see how it can hurt to try. So for my part, I’m going to put despair on the shelf until election day 2022.
Happy warriors unite! Eeyore delenda est! :)
Published in Elections
I’m with Chesterton — I’m a happy pessimist. All things are passing away, including this once great country. But, I don’t rely on politics for my hope or happiness. This (time and) place isn’t my real home.
Misery loves company, which I think is supposed to mean people who are miserable like sharing their misery and increasing their company.
On the other hand and a more positive one, there is comfort in knowing other people feel the same way you do or going through the same thing you are experiencing. A nurse told me once that patients in a ward will often start comparing their pain, injuries, and ailments and I got the impression from her, she thought it helped them or maybe she knew this to be a known medical thing.
I think this first sentence tells it all. I want to be a happy warrior. But I’m not.
Some excellent points!
I say, that even as bad as things seem to have gotten under Biden, we are still better off than nearly any other country on Earth, both politically, and economically. I see the current chaos as temporary. The polls are more massively in our favor than I think I’ve ever seen in my three decades as a conservative. I don’t know about Y’all, but I’m charged up!
I’ll drink to that!
Seriously, I think this is the best thing I’ve read all day. Thank you.
Charged up for what? To win the mid terms a year from now? After the damage that’s been done in just 10 months, with more than a year to go, sweeping the mid terms won’t be enough to undo the damage. Even if the Rs that are elected are motivated Conservatives, which is unlikely.
Also assuming an honest election. Also unlikely.
We will have much to deal with between now and then. Any moments I would have spent worrying about the mid terms will be spent worrying about and protecting my family.
For my part, I am hopeful that the American people are waking up.
My hope for my country stems from a belief — a gut feeling, perhaps — that there is a large reservoir of people who are becoming increasingly frustrated with the progressive project.
I’ve been surprised on more than one occasion by the number of normal people who have never heard the term “woke” and don’t know what it means. Most of us know people like ourselves, talk to people like ourselves, and probably assume that most people are like us.
I don’t think most people are like us. That is, I think we here on Ricochet are a peculiar subset of America. I think most of America is busy, distracted, uninformed, trusting — just not into politics. I think the left is increasingly making that an impossible state to maintain.
That’s my hope.
What damage are you referring to that cannot be undone?
Yes, and if we win the mid-terms we can repeal 0bamacare, too.
You are right! Most people don’t sweat every single Supreme Court decision or executive order the way baseball fans anticipate every pitch from Jacob DeGrom. It is good to be reminded that there are other things out there in life sometimes.
We can give support, encouragement, and public praise to the Leviathan Ankle-Biters among us. I just now read through all three pages of the prestigious awards made in an old blog I did in the days before Ricochet. Even after all these years, I didn’t find any of them cringeworthy:
https://www.reticulator.com/category/leviathan-ankle-biter/
I’m not sure my husband’s business will survive with just the past 10 months of damage, let alone another year. The last remaining domestic manufacturer of a type of construction equipment, BTW.
How many thousands and thousands of small businesses are in the same situation? The ones that survived the pandemic shut downs, only to be crippled by the supply chain.
You think those businesses are coming back?
Newsflash, the economy isn’t a light switch that you can turn off and right back on.
Millions of children have been mal served with their education, with massive educational and psychological damage. What’s going to undo that?
Churches have abandoned their flocks – you think those people are going back to church?
Families are facing very tough economic times, inflation is going to destroy those close to the edge
Citizens have correctly abandoned all faith in just about every institution. They’ve been getting peed on and told it’s raining for far too long.
You think a mid term going the way of the Rs is going to undo any of that?
Thank you. I needed that laugh
My recollection is that the main objection to Obamacare was the mandate. The mandate was repealed.
It also seems strange to me to predict that future Republicans will not repeal Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which hasn’t even been passed yet.
Federal spending was rolled back after 2010. The “path to citizenship” law was blocked by the Republican house. We got some border wall. Illegal immigration was way down. We got a lot of good judges, and three good SCOTUS Justices.
Further, Republican control of Congress would at least block Biden’s agenda. No matter how many bad ideas they may enact this Congress, you can count on them to do more damage if they remain in control, I think.
For some people it became the main objection, or at least the main objection that seemed to offer a channel for defeat.
0bamacare was terrible on so many levels. It was effectively the the final controlled implosion of the the entire medical profession and medical insurance industry.
It literally banned health insurance in America. That was bad. That hasn’t been fixed. (Enlightening Ricochet thread on the subject here.)
Look, it’s not like we became Eeyores for the sake of being Eeyores, rather this is what twenty years of betrayals and Failure Theater begets.
Imagine you’ve been a trench soldier, fighting for decades against a ruthless and absolutely aggressive enemy. You’ve watched as the enemy has made advance after advance, claimed hill after hill, and the best your side can claim is that you’ve managed to stall some of the enemy advances. It’s been over 20 years since you forced the enemy to retreat on anything (the 1996 Welfare Reform Act). Some of their advances have been incremental, others (Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, DACA) have been massive.
Your officers not only seem incapable of turning back the enemy, but a lot of them like to brag about their ability to negotiate surrenders with the enemy. (“bipartisanship,” “working across the aisle,” the Paul Ryan budget deals, the Gang of Eight)
A while back, a new general on your side actually started making a little bit of progress in countering the enemy. But the leaders on your side hated him. (“We don’t want to win if it means winning under a man like that.”) His own officers undermined him (Romney, Sasse, Flake). Some defected to the other side. (Kristol, French, et. al.)
And now the enemy is preparing its most aggressive offensive ever. And the leadership on your side is so weak, its only hope is that a pair of skeptical officers on the other side will hold it off.
Some of the soldiers have come up with a nice war-chant (“Let’s go Brandon”), but the officers are still dithering.
Before I can be a “happy warrior,” I need to be convinced that what I am being asked to fight for isn’t a lost cause.
I remember a podcast where Peter Robinson complained about the way the GOP kept telling us to “wait”. I am tired of waiting. Since Bush was elected, the mantra has been “Wait until X and then we will fulfill our promises. We just can’t do it now”. X could be getting the House, Getting the Senate, Getting the White House, Getting more people in the Senate, etc. There was always another election that had to happen before the GOP could really do what it said it was going to do.
People follow winners. Cheerfully dying on the battlefield under losers is not the essence of being a Happy Warrior. Provide victories. Keep promises. Keep the faith with the voters and don’t act like grifters. But we don’t get that. What we get is contempt, derision, and an attitude that they are owed fealty somehow. Since that is the attitude of the GOP, I have no faith that any elections will matter. They have not so far. It is not reasonable to tell me “this time it will be different” any more than listening to a communist telling me that.
And don’t forget the flood of socialists coming over the southern border. Will Republicans have the, um, b-b-b- courage to round them up and send them home?
To ask is to answer.
After thirty plus years of open borders, I think we know the answer to that. The Donor Class likes the cheap labor, and the Republican Party likes the Donor Class. Classic case of capitalists selling socialists the rope.
If I can’t be a happy warrior in a lost cause, I doubt I can be a happy warrior when winning, either.
With all due respect, I don’t see any of those things you mentioned as being permanent or “unchangeable.” Your husband’s business and many others may not survive. Does that mean they will all sit home and live off the dole for the rest of their lives? We’ve had major upheavals in the business world ever since the country was founded and it did not cripple us economically. On the contrary, we only got better. Don’t forget, the largest single increase in history of our National Gross Domestic Product occurred right after the majority of lockdowns were lifted more than a year ago.
Children have lived through depressions, disease epidemics, world wars and lost fathers in battle in this country and it hasn’t damaged our national psyche in the past.
I don’t see religious people abandoning their faith just because some bureaucrats shut down their place of worship for part of a year. If that was enough to stop a believer, then they weren’t very serious to begin with.
Back in the 1970’s inflation was double what it is now, and we recovered to have almost no inflation for three decades.
Citizens have abandoned faith in institutions long before Biden became President, which was only nine months ago.
This all assumes that the only thing that doesn’t change is the character of the people. Not true.
The fastest growing “religious” group in the US is Nones — no affiliation — virtual, if not actual, atheists. How many young people do you know in their 20’s and 30’s who intend never to have children in order to “save the planet?” I know some in their 40’s past childbearing age who made that decision long ago.
If we can just stop letting the leftist education system claim all the Baptist and Catholic kids, the future is bright.
That’s it. This comes down to spiritual warfare (and is why I’m opposed to anyone sending their kids through the public education system — “liberal” or conservative). The Left (which is synonymous with the devil in my book) is claiming our kids’ souls.
There’s a movement afoot among Catholics to start a Rosary Crusade (naughty word alert!) to pray for the conversion of the U.S. We used to pray for the conversion of Russia (many still do), but that just shows how far America has fallen.
Conrad Black: Is America in Irreversible Decline?
Video lecture
Good. We don’t want those people breeding. This is why I’m grateful that Zafar is gay. He shouldn’t breed and pass on his anti-Western opinions to the next generation.
Everything you say, and most the comments, and we have to be prepared to pull out and form a new nation after they win, fraudulently or not.
You wish it were that easy.