When you are self-absorbed, you can’t see the forest for the trees

Life provides lessons for us in unusual ways. Occasionally, it is someone totally missing something obvious that provides the lesson. Here is a very good example of that.

A photograph posted on Facebook shows a woman holding up a sign. The sign says: “I have a Master of Arts degree in Women’s Studies. However, the only job I can find is as a bartender at a local restaurant. I owe over 60k in student loans. I am forced to rely on food stamps and WIC to support my son. Is this the ‘American Dream’ I worked so hard for? I am the 99 percent occupywallstreet.org.”

The lesson is there for all to see, but the woman – let’s call her “Ms. OWS,” – not only didn’t learn from her experience, she didn’t even suspect there was a lesson there. That experience was only an opportunity to complain that America hasn’t provided a better life for her.
The lesson that unless you are independently wealthy or have someone to support you while you go to school, you don’t borrow 60 grand to pursue a degree in a subject area that will not equip you to support yourself and your child and pay for the education that you have just received totally escaped her notice.

Like the make-believe class college kids used to joke about, “Underwater Basket Weaving,” Women’s Studies, is not a viable career field. To prepare for supporting yourself you study accounting, engineering, computer technology, law, medicine, chemistry, elementary or secondary education, or one of the other majors where jobs are available. But Ms. OWS, probably without a gun to her head, instead chose Women’s Studies.

The Occupy Wall Street movement with which Ms. OWS so closely identifies, includes some pie-in-the-sky idealism, like:
    •    The right to economic justice, including a living wage for all, regardless of the job, or the level of skills or experience one has
    •    Debt forgiveness for all debts
    •    Free college education
    •    Open borders

These goals are not merely unrealistic; they are dangerous. None would be good either for the country or for its inhabitants. Someone has to pay for the higher wages, the free college education, and the debt forgiveness, and that won’t be the people who think about life like Ms. OWS does; it will be the people who approach adulthood responsibly, and prepare to take care of themselves.

Movements like Occupy Wall Street seem to attract those disaffected souls who, for whatever reason, have not learned what life is about, expect to be provided for, and become indignant when life does not provide to them the rewards to which they believe they are entitled, due to nothing more significant that they were not aborted and draw breath.

Like Ms. OWS, they float through life indulging in the things they like, neglecting to seek out things that will prepare them for life as a responsible citizen, and then contributing to society and the wellbeing of our country.

Perhaps it’s not entirely their fault. We have a segment of our society that imagines it is possible to achieve Utopia, and a large group of pandering vote-seekers all too willing to promise it to them, and who provide a few goodies at taxpayer expense in return for votes and a cushy career in government.

And then there’s government, itself, at all levels. Even in cases where young people show some initiative, and take steps to help themselves, they are often thwarted by bureaucratic absurdity, as in these examples reported by The Daily Signal:

** Chloe Stirling started a business in her kitchen called “Hey, Cupcake!” In addition to selling her goods to friends and neighbors, she donated some to charitable events, including a fundraiser for a student with cancer, and delivered cupcakes to residents in a senior home. Not good enough! Illinois health officials declared that she lacked the necessary permit to operate and told her to close up shop.

** A zoning official in Holland, Mich. shut down a 13-year-old’s hotdog stand because he was supposedly competing with nearby restaurants.  Nathan Duszynski had planned to sell hotdogs to raise money for his disabled parents. The boy’s mom has epilepsy and his dad has multiple sclerosis. Within minutes of opening his stand, a zoning official ordered him to cease operating because he lacked a license.

Bah! Humbug!

Is this a great country, or what? On the one hand there’s a substantial number of people who think they are entitled to whatever they think they are entitled to, and lack the motivation to get off their duffs and earn their rewards, and on the other hand people in government stupidly apply rules to punish young people who take the initiative to earn something through work.

But then there was a pleasant breeze of tolerance and common sense wafting its way north from Dunedin, Fla. where 12-year-old T.J. Guerrero operates a lemonade stand to raise money for summer activities with his friends and family. After one neighbor complained to the city, Mayor Dave Eggers visited the stand, enjoyed some lemonade, and praised the youngster’s initiative.

Perhaps all is not lost. But we must be vigilant.

The “progressives”: Advancing un-American ideas for fun and profit

They once called themselves “liberals,” but as practiced here in the U.S. through the years that word gathered lots of negative energy, casting adherents in a bad light, so they changed their moniker and now call themselves “progressives.”

But the term “progressives” is a misnomer, unless you consider it progress for America to slowly abandon the freedom that was once our hallmark, and move instead toward being more under the thumb of an increasingly over-reaching government.

To demonstrate how off-the-mark some progressives’ thinking is, consider the following:

On ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” a frequent guest named Kevin Blackistone said that football games should not include the singing of the national anthem during the pregame, calling the “Star-Spangled Banner” a “war anthem.”

Mr. Blackistone was addressing controversy over Northwestern University’s American flag-themed football uniforms, designed to raise money for the Wounded Warriors Project. In the “Buy or Sell” show segment he said he would “sell” the uniforms: “I'm going to sell it for the same reasons. If you sell this along with me, you should also be selling the rest of the military symbolism embrace of sports. Whether it’s the singing of a war anthem to open every game. Whether it’s going to get a hotdog and being able to sign up for the Army at the same time. Whether it’s the NFL's embrace of the mythology of the Pat Tillman story. It has been going on in sports since the first national anthem was played in the World Series back in 1917. And it’s time for people to back away.”

Mr. Blackistone clearly is a man who neither understands nor cares for America.

And this from Mary Margaret Penrose, a Texas A&M School of Law professor, who expressed her frustration with the fact that President Barack Obama has failed to pass more gun control since the crime at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Prof. Penrose said gun laws should be decided on a per-state basis, versus the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The beauty of a states' rights model solution is it allows those of you who want to live in a state with very loose restrictions to do so." She went on to say that her problems with the Constitution are not limited to the Second Amendment, and advocates in her law courses redrafting the entire U.S. Constitution.

Is advocating abandoning the supreme law of the land acceptable in helping law students learn about and understand our system of laws?

More wisdom from the halls of academia comes from Professor Noel Ignatiev of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, who tells his students things like this: “If you are a white male, you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer, you’re a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world! They only murder, exploit and oppress non-whites! At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He’s good for nothing. Slavery, genocides against aboriginal peoples and massive land confiscation, the inquisition, the holocaust, white males are all to blame! You maintain your white male privilege only by oppressing, discriminating against and enslaving others.” He suggests that all white males should commit suicide.

Two thoughts arise from this; first, we should enthusiastically applaud the professor’s recent decision to stop “teaching,” and second, since he is a white male, ask why he is still alive and see if he will continue to be a hypocrite, or if he will follow his own advice.

Not to be outdone in the expression of un-American ideas, The Washington Post had its own expert academic opinion from Jonathan Zimmerman, who professes history and education at New York University.

“Barack Obama should be allowed to stand for re-election just as citizens should be allowed to vote for — or against — him,” he wrote. “Anything less diminishes our leaders and ourselves.”

The professor must have missed that part of his history education when Congress proposed an amendment to the Constitution to limit the president to two four-year terms, and why it did so. The 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, following FDR’s election to four terms, having been approved by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. It prevented the likely possibility of a “president for life” evolving and creating a situation like the one the Colonies suffered under that led to armed revolt. A “president for life” is not unlike a monarch.

Maybe he thinks monarchy is superior to the form of government the Founders created, the obligation of which was to guarantee basic freedoms to the people it was created to serve. If it’s oppression he wants, there are many countries to which he can relocate.

A major feature of progressivism is to limit the liberties our ancestors fought and died for in the naïve hope of creating a perfect society. Over the last century or so they have chipped away enough of the protections and guarantees that the system doesn’t work as it was designed to, and their solution is to continue to destroy it, rather than to restore it.

If our government does not protect us from ourselves, who will?

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg literally believes he is his brother's keeper, and in fact the keeper of all the millions of New Yorkers and visitors to the city. He was thus compelled to ban the sale by restaurants and other venues of sugary drinks in doses larger than 16 ounces, citing an ethical mandate for someone to do something to protect people from themselves.

Such feelings are at the root of boundless dictates from governments at all levels, and are frequently the product of folks who believe not only that they know better than we do what is best for us, but also feel led to control our behavior for our own good.

However, New Yorkers may rest marginally easier now that a state Supreme Court Judge has properly ruled that the Bloomberg Ban is "arbitrary and capricious," and is now null and void.

This penchant among the nation's nannies produces varying degrees of damage. Some actions, like the Bloomberg Ban, are relatively harmless, merely restricting the personal liberty our Founders provided for us to pursue happiness.

Others, like the ban on Edison's incandescent light bulbs that have served us economically and dependably for well more than a century, have more serious effects. The newly mandated compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) are said to use less energy and last longer than their predecessors, but are far more expensive, do not fit in many fixtures that incandescent bulbs do, and contain mercury, a substance that in emissions from coal burning electricity plants is viewed with great alarm by environmentalists, but is just peachy in CFLs. If you are unfortunate enough to break one of these bulbs, you must declare a minor hazmat emergency and execute a rigorous, time consuming and inconvenient cleanup routine. None of this is deemed nearly as important as the minuscule reduction in electricity use that CFLs provide, however.

Hyped-up environmental fears have spawned legions of regulations and initiatives, among which is the development of green cars that either run on electricity, or hybrids that alternate between conventional gasoline power and electricity. At the heart of this movement is concern over those dastardly carbon emissions produced by burning gasoline and diesel fuel. Electric cars emit no carbon dioxide and hybrids only do so when operating in gasoline mode.

We are told that if we do not take dramatic action immediately to reduce carbon emissions, the world will heat up and it will be even worse than the sequester. But the degree to which the activities of humans affect the world's temperature is a subject of (excuse the term) hot debate among scientists, and the evidence thus far -- when all the fraudulent and contrived data is omitted -- fails to support the doomsday prediction.

Nevertheless, President Barack Obama thought this was important enough to set a goal of having 1 million green cars on the road by 2015. But like CFLs, green cars are not consumer friendly, and sales in 2012 totaled a mere 50,000, well below what is needed to achieve Mr. Obama's goal. Consumers do not trust the immature technology and do not like their higher sticker prices.

Worse, you aren't told that environmental benefits are far less than we've been led to expect. A report by the National Center for Policy Analysis discusses the problems, noting that while electric cars do not contribute to "global warming," that is true only in the sense that they do not emit carbon dioxide. Building an electric car produces more than twice as much carbon-dioxide as building a conventional car, and because electric vehicles use electricity typically produced with fossil fuels, it indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon dioxide per mile compared with 12 ounces for a conventional car. Buying a green car that costs a lot more, uses an untrusted technology and contributes very little to environmental improvement holds little appeal for most people.

A Cato Institute report quoted former president Ronald Reagan: "Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves," and then suggested that "today’s policymakers would do well to heed Reagan’s words," noting that "Lawmakers at all levels of government have shown increasing contempt for personal responsibility and an increasing tendency to employ the power of the state to influence behavior. Government today pressures us to avoid risks, even risks that many of us knowingly and willingly take. There seems to be a consensus among nanny-statists that, with enough public service announcements, awareness campaigns, and social engineering efforts, Americans will start behaving as the nanny- statists want them to."

Yet, the nannies in both the public and private sectors ignore evidence that Americans prefer to think for themselves, enjoy the personal liberty we were given, and pursue happiness as we decide to, even if there is some risk attached to it.

Don't lie to us about the condition of the environment to gain control or force foolish changes to how we live, or force us to eat better or act differently for our own good. Just go away and leave us alone.

A Powerful Movie

By Thomas Sowell

8/22/2012

Years, and sometimes decades, pass between my visits to movie theaters. But I drove 30 miles to see the movie "2016," based on Dinesh D'Souza's best-selling book, "The Roots of Obama's Rage." Where I live is so politically correct that such a movie would not even be mentioned, much less shown.

Every seat in the theater was filled, even though there had been an earlier showing that day, and more showings were scheduled for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I had to sit on a staircase in the balcony, but it was worth it.

The audience was riveted. You could barely hear a sound from them, or detect a movement, and certainly not smell popcorn. Yet the movie had no bombast, no violence, no sex and no spectacular visual effects.
The documentary itself was fascinating, as Dinesh D'Souza presented the story of Barack Obama's life and view of the world, in a very conversational sort of way, illustrating it with visits to people and places around the world that played a role in the way Obama's ideas and beliefs evolved.

It was refreshing to see how addressing adults as adults could be effective, in an age when so many parts of the media address the public as if they were children who need a constant whirlwind of sounds and movements to keep them interested.

Dinesh D'Souza's own perspective, as someone born in India who came to America and became an American, provided a special insight into the way people from the Third World often perceive or misperceive the United States and the Western world.

That Third World perspective is Obama's perspective, D'Souza demonstrates in this documentary, as in his book -- and it is a perspective that is very foreign to that of most Americans, which may be why some believe that Obama was born elsewhere.

D'Souza is convinced that the president was born in Hawaii, as he claims, but argues that not only Obama's time living in Indonesia and his emotionally charged visits to his father's home in Africa, have had a deep and impassioned effect on his thinking.

The story of Barack Obama, however, is not just the story of how one man came to be the way he is. It is a much larger story about how millions of Americans came to vote for, and some to idolize, a man whose fundamental beliefs and values are so different from their own.

For every person who sees Obama as somehow foreign there are many others who see him as a mainstream American political figure -- and an inspiring one.

This D'Souza attributes to Barack Obama's great talents in rhetoric, and his ability to project an image that resonates with most Americans, however much that image may differ from, or even flatly contradict, the reality of Obama's own ideological view of the world.

What is that ideological view?

The Third World, or anti-colonial, view is that the rich nations have gotten rich by taking wealth from the poor nations. It is part of a much larger vision, in which the rich in general have gotten rich by taking from the poor, whether in their own country or elsewhere.

Whatever its factual weaknesses, it is an emotionally powerful vision, to which many people have dedicated their lives, and for which some have even risked their lives. Some of these people appear in this documentary movie, as they have appeared throughout the formative phases of Barack Obama's life.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is just the most visible and vocal of a long line of such people who played crucial roles in Obama's evolution. When Jeremiah Wright thundered about how "white folks' greed runs a world in need," he captured the essence of the Third World or anti-colonial vision.

But many of the other mentors, allies, family and friends of Barack Obama over the years were of the same mindset, as this documentary demonstrates.

More important, the movie "2016" demonstrates how so many of Obama's actions as President of the United States, which D'Souza had predicted on the basis of his study of Obama's background, are perfectly consistent with that ideology, however inconsistent it is with the rhetoric that gained him the highest office in the land.

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