This What Educational Failure Looks Like (UPDATED)

The expression is that “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

This one is the ultimate intellectual expression of the American Left. In it, one sees the contempt that they have for other people’s achievements, and those who help perpetuate society by safeguarding those achievements and keeping the peace. Any discussion of the inconvenient truth that no matter WHO leads it, Marx/Commu/Socialism will never work is wasted on people who can find eloquence in excrement.  They are blind to a political and economic system that allows the individual to “pursue happiness” by taking responsibility for their own destiny, rather than being yoked to a collective standard chosen by other people.

I have had exchanges with some of the #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) supporters this week on Twitter.  All condemn the “greed” of Wall Street, while being completely blind to their own envy and sense of entitlement to what these “evil” greedy people have. They rail against corporations for their lack of “accountability to the people”, and refuse to acknowledge that corporations answer to their shareholders and the government, and were designed that way, instead of focusing their attentions on the people who were always intended to be accountable to them: elected officials.

They tell their sob stories of hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt for their MFA degrees and living in parents’ basements, unable to get food stamps for their cats, or jobs that allow them to pay back their student loans. Each adds their plaintive voices to a chorus of whiney stories that call themselves “We Are the 99%” as opposed to the evil, greedy 1% of rich people who they feel entitled to “take” from. I’d call them “We Are The Falsely Entitled”. They talk about “new” economic models where workers have a say in how businesses are run, and how they have to “collapse the system” in order to build a society that is “fair” and doesn’t pick winners and losers, which is utter nonsense.  If society didn’t pick winners and losers, then you should be able to go to the corner store and purchase an ice cold Chrystal Pepsi for yourself.  They are immune to the suggestion that it is reasonable and understandable to be angry about a government that picks winners and losers, when its role is to act as referree.

This insistance on “firness” is the expression of the naive and those blinded by envy, both of whom are eminently willing to surrender a potential that they have been tricked into thinking that they do not have, or that they are too afraid to command for themselves, to people only too willing to harness for their own ends. In either event, their childish notion of “fairness” pervades their demands and beliefs. A fairness that betrays opportunity for a physical equality, doled out by beneficent “rulers” who decide what is best for all and make it the assigned task for society.

But what I find the most offensive is that this segment of society, clinging to their Noam Chomsky readers, talking about the need for greater Democracy everywhere, and approving of every new law made by activist federal courts over the last 40 years utterly rejects the Democratic apparatus we already have.  It is urgent to “collapse the system” because “The Corporations” make all the choices for them, leaving the voter with only Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee when the time comes to cast the ballots. When you point out the flaws in this thinking, such as the success that the Tea Party had in backing and electing candidates in 2010, they only offer the electronic equivalent of a blank stare, followed by “That can’t be right. I saw all about the Tea Party is bad on MSNBC.”

When you suggest that if they really are the 99%, then it should be any problem for them to field and elect their own candidates, the only response is mumbling about corruption. And when you suggest that they simply don’t have the right to “collapse” a system that everyone else in society relies on, and has built their lives around, then they don’t have much to say at all, other than to condemn you as one of the 1% or as someone being led by the nose by that 1%.

As ridiculous as they appear to be, their ignorance and their appetites are dangerous. This is a mob that largely has no understanding of civics, of their political history, both the one that is their birthright, and the one they stupidly embrace, and yet believe that society can and should provide them with a life free from want, difficulty, or hard labor. They demonstrate no understanding that the democracy they cry out for is, at its core, only what 50%+1 wants, or that without safeguards for the minorities that are part of the system they want to collapse, they will inevitably be part of the 49%. While I don’t want to spare them the impact of learning that lesson firsthand, I do not want to live in the environment that would teach them, because revolutions are messy, and the temptation for the rest of the world to interfere is too great.  That means that we HAVE to engage them, and let them know that they are nowhere near being 99%, and that the only reason this has gone on this long is because the rest of us had to get up and go to work in the morning.

More excremental elloquence for Rutherford:

Yes, Rutherford. By ALL MEANS, let’s hope they form a caucus.