Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Miserables, Indeed”

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February 6, 2013

Miserables, Indeed

Hatched by Korso

Anybody remember ol' "Baghdad" Jim McDermott, the Democrat representative from Washington? Well, just in case you forgot about him, he recently dropped by C-SPAN and had this rather amusing exchange with a caller:

We’re in a very difficult period right now because we have a lot of people who suddenly think it’s all about "me." And it isn’t about "me." It’s about "we." If we don’t take care of one another and we say everybody’s on their own, then it will simply fall apart as a society, become a mob scene as it was in Paris. If you go see Les Misérables, you can see what the country can become if you don’t have equity in the society.

Now contrast that with another eyebrow raiser I came across whilst perusing Twitter, which perfectly encapsulates the modern leftist mindset:

My husband and I just ended our debate about having children. To breed or not to breed, this was the question — and it had been ticking like an egg timer in the back of my head for 15 years...
I wanted it to be a decision we made, not one made for us by chance or time. I turned to friends with kids for advice. “Feel free to convince me to your side,” I told them. Leaving a legacy and crazy joy, they said. I bow down to their personal sacrifice. It is an enormous gift for society to raise an educated, productive, ethical, moral child...

We have decided we have other things to give to the world. We won’t be having kids. We choose to be childless in Seattle.

Anybody else see the contradiction here?

I'm sure there will be any number of feminists and environmentalists lining up to praise Sharon Chan for not burdening herself and the world with a child, and Jim McDermott would probably be one of them. But how exactly does that attitude square with the collectivist notion of "taking care of one another," lest we all end up on the barricade singing a chorus of "Upon These Stones"?

Note how even Chan acknowledges that raising a child to be a productive citizen would be a huge gift to society -- and yet she refuses to do so. Seeing how it's awfully hard to produce a society of people who take care of each other without actual people around to do the work, isn't Chan -- an exemplar of liberalism -- shirking her duty to her fellow citizens by not pitching in?

And therein lies the problem: After years of cultivating a "me first" culture that elevates selfish needs and desires to a kind of virtue, now McDermott and his ilk turn around and expect a generation of perpetual adolescents that he has helped create to suddenly cowboy up and put their fellow man ahead of themselves. Sorry to tinkle in your Wheaties, Jim, but that just might be expecting too much of folks who can't even be bothered to go about the business of begettin'.

Welcome to the world of unintended consequences.

Hatched by Korso on this day, February 6, 2013, at the time of 6:20 AM