Posted on 01/18/2014 3:58:02 AM PST by Kaslin
Saying that life is hard is kind of like saying the sun is hot, water is wet, or noting that politicians lie a lot. It's so obvious that anyone who's paying attention already knows that it's true. That being said, life's even harder when you're working under false assumptions that have been drilled into you by your teachers, college professors, Hollywood, and politicians in D.C. Much of what liberalism drums into the young skulls full of mush simply isn't true and millions of lives have been ruined by people finding it out the hard way. The good news is that the truth is out there if you're willing to look for it and not accept the easy answers that make you feel good.
1) You are a special little flower: We live in an "everybody's a winner," don't use red ink, don't offend anyone, participation trophies for everyone era where we build up self-esteem as much as possible. Then the college student who just went $100,000 a year in the hole to get a women's studies degree from a prestigious university finds that she's not even a stand-out at the $10 an hour job she only got because her father knew someone. This leaves her angry and baffled as to why she doesn't even merit a raise, much less a promotion. When you have that experience, it's easy to retreat into bitterness or video games where "greatness awaits" in a simulation where you get to restart over and over until you win. Contrary to what young Americans are taught in school, "experience trumps brilliance," hard work beats talent, and most people value you for what you bring to the table right now, not how wonderful your teacher said you were for "trying hard."
2) Social Security and Medicare will be there for you: Young Americans are expected to pay into Medicare and Social Security, but the programs aren't going to be there in their present forms when they get old enough to use them. In other words, we're defrauding young Americans. We're telling them to pay today so they'll be taken care of when they get old, but we have no intention of ever allowing them to collect. Unless there are massive changes made to our entitlement programs, most young Americans should expect to work until they die. Let me repeat that: if you're 25 years old, you will not get to retire at 65 like your parents because you will have to work until you drop dead. When there's a 100 trillion dollar difference between what we already owe and the money we're collecting to pay it, that's not even a legitimately arguable proposition. If young Americans would like to receive more than sack cloth and an occasional bowl of gruel from the government once they get long in the tooth, they should be demanding entitlement reform.
3) Faith isn't relevant anymore: Hollywood almost universally makes Christians look bad in TV shows and movies, liberalism has become reflexively hostile to Christianity, and militant atheists work overtime to attack people of faith. Yet and still, this nation has been a success in large part because of Christianity. If not for this nation's Protestant work ethic, fundamental Christian decency and biblically inspired dedication to human rights, we would have never been so successful. That doesn't mean all Christians are good and all atheists are bad because that's certainly not true, but Christianity offers up a moral order to the universe that atheism is incapable of going, by its very nature. Although I have known some wonderful people in my life who didn't believe in God, on the whole I've found that Christians (and observant Jews for that matter) are happier, more stable and are generally just better human beings than the people who don't believe. Contrary to what Hollywood would tell you, Christianity doesn't keep people from "doing all the fun stuff" in life, it just steers them away from sins that are "fun for a season," but that will do a lot of damage over the long-term. Few things will turn out to be more integral to your happiness and success as a human being over the long haul than your faith.
4) The government is your friend: As a general rule the more contact you have with a government, the more miserable you will be long term. Some politicians, government workers and well-connected corporations that land big contracts are exceptions to that rule, but you're probably not in any of those groups. For you, the more the government gets involved in your life, the worse off you'll be. Those college loans? The government expects them to be paid. That welfare and food stamps? It's not much money, it comes with a lot of strings attached and you'll have to degrade yourself by leeching off of your fellow citizens to get it. Ronald Reagan once said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’" He wasn't wrong about that.
5) Morality doesn't matter: It's ironic that Christianity is regularly attacked, it's considered bad form to talk about morals, and we worry more about offending people than doing the right thing; yet we're shocked at how degenerate our society has become. You want a society with no moral code, where no one is ever made to feel bad about doing disgusting things? Well, then you should expect school shootings, welfare fraud, a deterioration of marriage, women having five children out of wedlock with four different men, perverted politicians, etc., etc., etc. When you say morality isn't welcome, you don't get to pick and choose which dearly held precepts are trampled into the dirt in the public square. If you want your kids growing up in a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, buy into the idea that morals don't matter and you'll be doing your part to make it a reality.
6) Politicians are investing in your future: There really was a time in American history when the people and the government were living with one foot in the present and one foot in the future. As a practical matter, that just doesn't happen anymore. Our political differences are so stark, our government is so big, our debt is so out of control and the quality of men the American people have sent to D.C. is so low that everything is about "the now." It's about what gets them through the next news cycle, the next scandal or the next election. There's not a single Democrat in D.C. who cares about what happens to you if you're not his relative or campaign contributor and sadly, most of the Republicans aren't any better. The only people in politics that are genuinely fighting tooth and nail to protect future generations of Americans are the decidedly unhip Tea Party and its allies in Congress. They've been relentlessly smeared for that because people who are frittering away the future loathe nothing more than people who expose how small and selfish they've become.
7) The world owes you a living: There was a time in America when, "The world doesn't owe you a living," was probably the mother's favorite phrase to repeat to her child after, "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?" However, we've moved past that and now everyone seems to believe that if he gets a college degree, he’s owed a cushy, fulfilling job and all the cool stuff his parents had after a lifetime of work. Unfortunately, that's the wrong answer, kiddo. For most people, all a college degree entitles you to is THE CHANCE to find a job where you’ll be allowed to start proving yourself for low pay. If you're expecting more than that and daddy isn't going to give you a VP slot at his company, then don't be surprised if the world adjusts your expectations the hard way.
8. The GOP is evil and always disrupts what government wants to do.
9. The GOP has moved far right while the Dems have never changed.
Why 69 years?
1945,the end of WWII. From that point on, slowly but with increasing pressure the dumbing down of the children began.
And....The K-12, compulsory-use, single-payer, and socialist-entitlement schools established in the 1850 made it easy for them to do that.
What do these government schools teach children? Answer: To be comfortable with government compulsion and socialist-entitlement. One to two generations after their establishment the nation had Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Oh wait! They would have been graduates of the newly established K-12 compulsory-use, single-payer, and socialist-entitlement schools!
SS schools ( Single-payer and socialist-entitlement schools)
Those who put Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt into office were low information voters. And...Guess what? Most of them were attendees at government run K-12 SS schools ( single-payer and socialist-entitlement schools).
We’re from the government and we’re here to help you.
Quite right SS schools were up and running to take the advantage that they took and successfully used after 1945. If they could have done it sooner they would have but after 1945 they had the raving German Nationalist Hitler to lend a bad cast to Patriotism.
See the tagline.
According to Reagan's former Undersecretary of Education, Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt's book, the deliberate dumbing down of america, it was long before that, but the realms in which it was accomplished were selective.
Stalinists lie. ALWAYS.
Hey, a liebertarian!
They lie if they call themselves “conservative”.
Lying is permissible among all sects of leftism, even libertopians
A law doesn't have to be easily enforceable to effectively say, "society says this is wrong." Such a statement goes a long way toward compartmentalizing and rending the practice of such anti-social behavior to an insignificant sub-culture.
Full Definition of ENTITLE
1
: to give a title to : designate
2
: to furnish with proper grounds for seeking or claiming something
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I maintain that according to definition two Social Security and Medicare are the TRUE entitlements because those who pay for something should be entitled to receive what they paid for. The word has been corrupted so that people no longer give it its true meaning, calling something that people have not paid one penny for an entitlement and then being insulted when someone says that what you DID pay for is an entitlement seems absurd to me.
How did an entitlement come to be regarded as the same as a scam? It used to be that if you told someone he was “entitled” to something it meant that he had damned well earned it or at least was the legitimate heir to it, not that it was being given as charity. Anyone who said that someone was entitled to be supported by the state would have been regarded as out of his mind.
Ayn Rand warned long ago that one of the main tools of the left is the corruption of language and they have certainly done a fine job of it, conservatives have allowed the left to convince them that “entitlement” means whatever the left claims without bothering to even think about the fact that for centuries it has meant the opposite.
You couldn’t be more right ... good post.
Either you should enforce a law or not have it on the books. If you intend to enforce a sodomy law, then the level of intrusion into people’s lives would be excessive.
Keep in mind you said ‘virtually never’ which is a translation for selectively and that means you have given carte blanche for the state to inflict coercive power on a whim (which means treating people will pull differently with people out of favor).
But I will state that when SCOTUS struck down the sodomy laws in the most recent case on the subject, they did it by pulling it out of their rear end. There was no real justification since such laws were fully within the rights of states to pass. There was even a fairly recent precedent to the contrary which they tossed with no justification.
It is also apparent to me that you are putting the cart before the horse. The social mores have changed, and that was not a function of the law. The changes in laws are a function of those changing mores.
The real truth is that when you create intrusive laws to enforce the morals you want, you merely create the tools that people with other views on morals to impose their views in the future.
You must be a progressive.
But it’s not the downward spiral of morality causing the school shootings, it’s the guns fault.
Possibly the best vanity on FR ever.
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