A Reminder On The Fourth

It is the 230^th birthday of our nation, one founded upon inalienable rights and laws based upon those rights. It seems that common sense was far more common back then than it is today. I'd like to think that the Founding Father's realized that this might be the case and set up our government to help minimize the effects of such a lack. That's one reason why we can amend our constitution, but why they made sure it wasn't easy to do so unless 75% of The People agreed it should be changed. While it hasn't always worked – the ill-advised 18^th Amendment is a good example – the errors mostly corrected themselves.

While people across America are celebrating the birth of our nation, there are also those within our nation actively working to dismantle or even destroy this, the greatest nation on the earth. For the most part they were born and raised here, yet they see it as their duty to take something that has worked far better than any system before it and twist it into something unrecognizable. In many cases their motivations are not evil, but they have deluded themselves into believing that in order to reach some kind of Utopian ideal that only they can see they have to destroy something they misguidedly see as evil. Almost every nascent totalitarian state has used a variation of the phrase “burn our way to a new paradise.” And every time people have been foolish enough to follow the path of those preaching such an idea they have come under the power of some group that instead brought about hell upon earth. These folks are no different, though they may not use the exact phrase above. They are still dangerous. They want to squander the hard-won freedoms so many have died to protect.

Since these misguided souls don't have armies of followers to spark a revolution, they take a different path, trying to destroy by guile, propaganda, innuendo, fabrication, and legal machinations what they cannot destroy with brute force.

These tactics have a number of names: political correctness, moral relativism, historical revisionism, speciesism, and romantic primativism.

Political Correctness: It is another form of fascism, something George Orwell warned us about in his novel 1984. By changing the language one can change thought. Political correctness allegedly seeks to make language less offensive by changing labels. But it also removes the capability to offend those that badly need to be offended because their actions are reprehensible. By eliminating the bad connotations of language, we also remove the good. Good and evil cease to be defined, meaning that evil can flourish while good whithers away. Whether they realize it or not, the PC crowd is aiming to do just this. But in our society their efforts to offend no one has ended up offending everyone. It is perhaps by this mechanism that political correctness will meet its long overdue and richly deserved demise.

Moral Relativism: Also called moral equivalence, it seeks to equate unrelated actions to each other on a moral level, such as saying that the actions of President Bush in regards to Iraq are no different than those of Adolph Hitler in Europe. But if President Bush's actions were the same, then there would be millions of dead Iraqis, bombed out cities, and death camps all over Iraq. The same type of claim has been made equating the detention center at Guantanamo Bay to Auschwitz. But there are no gas showers, no crematorium ovens, no slave labor, no starvation diets. But there is no moral equivalence. It is purely rhetorical, except to those making the claims. But then, those making the claims usually have no understanding of history, nor do they wish to.

It is these who also try to apply late 20th/early 21st Century morality to events that happened 100, 200, 300 years or more in the past. It is this that leads to....

Historical Revisionism: Taking historical events and reinterpreting them using the aforementioned late 20th/early 21st Century morality, applying modern day motives to those living in the past. I find it incredible that historical revisionists can read all kinds of present day motives into historical figures despite well documented writings – including diaries, journals, and letters – and research into historical records that show otherwise. But that doesn't stop them for making claims that at first glance appears to make sense, but once some thought is put into it, the claims are revealed for the tripe they are.

Speciesism: This ties in closely with moral relativism. This particular delusion leads people to believe that all species have the same rights as humans. To some of the more radical believers, human rights should be below that of all other creatures and forms of life. These folks show their hatred of their fellow human beings, wishing nothing less than the total destruction of humankind in order to make up for some perceived wrongdoing. One place they have found a foothold is here in America, where they have the right to spout their ridiculous catechism.

Romantic Primativism: This is related to historical revisionism. In their hatred of modern times, the Romantic Primativists have come to believe the lie of the “Noble Savage”, living in harmony with nature rather than defiling it. The problem is that the Noble Savage exists only in literature. Primitive human existence can be described in three words: brutal, short, and nasty.

They have every right to believe what they believe, even if it is short-sighted and destructive in ways they are incapable of understanding. They have little understanding of human nature and believe that everything would be perfect if everybody thought the same way they do, or worse, that everybody already thinks the same way they do.

But let's not let that bother us today. Today is the day to celebrate the creation of something unprecedented in history:

A successful republican democracy that has stood the test of time.