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Identity Politics: Setting the Record Straight
Human beings are arrogant creatures prone to pessimism. We do not want to take responsibility for our own sorry circumstances or failures nor are we willing to simply attribute these things to chance. So we find others to blame and we invent conspiracies. The self is perfect, of course, but a victim. When in the company of others with similar failures and sorry circumstances, we find solace. When politicians step in to encourage our doubt and provide false state-mandated remedies, identity politics is born.
The American ideas of equality, liberty, self-reliance, opportunity, and perseverance are antithetical to the corrosive despair of victimhood. Our citizens are not victims, but individuals with the liberty and power, with the responsibility, to pursue their own happiness.
In the world of identity politics, a myth is promoted: happiness is an entitlement. It is not. Happiness is a pursuit.
Published in General
Unfortunately, despite the weight of Truth carried by your statement: Our citizens are not victims, but individuals with the liberty and power, with the responsibility, to pursue their own happiness, the New Left has decreed that any citizens who can point to their ancestors being enslaved, or their right to marry being neglected, now may demand total reparation.
And that reparation demands continual adherence to the constantly shifting decrees of the PC Identity crowd.
For instance, I caught a mere five minutes of the Stephen Colbert show a few nights ago. His guest was busy explaining how detrimental it is to the history of the USA to refer to the African Americans who were enslaved in the South until 1863 as slaves. Instead, we must refer to them as enslaved persons.
The guest had his reasons and they made sense. But this is just one more barrel a citizen must jump, until the terminology for an enslaved person is modified to some other interesting way of explaining their bondage. And there will always be one more barrel, until we barrel these people out of office.
Perfect pitch. Thank you.
I have a quotation on a yellowed 3” X 5” card apparently typed on an IBM Selectric. Can’t remember the source, but it hits home. “Those guys who wrote the Constitution, they were all nutters. They were occult, dilettante dabblers who knew exactly what they were saying when they said you had the right to the Pursuit of Happiness: ‘Good luck, boy.’”
I suspect that our governments victimize individuals and groups and it’s growing because government is full of arrogant creatures prone to pessimism about whatever they have authority over, so they pick vulnerables and gang up.