To Be Entitled Means To be Enslaved

I spent a few moments this morning watching a You Tube video of some fellow on Judge Judy.  He had gotten a couple of dozen thousands of dollars from some government agencies to go to college and become a driveling idiot whose only apology for his life was "I am Me!"  This, I suppose would be what would be praised in the circles which believe in Head Starts for the underclasses...always with the hidden understanding that the real purpose of such things for the "underclasses" is to keep them that way.

I don't really know how that may be proved, since I amn't a scholar.  But, I do see the results of such things as Head Start and free rides of all sorts on the back of tax paying mules.  I know what I see parading before me daily as I hand out pieces of chicken at my very important post-retirement job to wrecks who will have nothing better in their lives than a 60 hour a week minimum wage job behind a counter somewhere, and another one later on in the day behind another counter somewhere, a succession of girl-friends or boyfriends and five, six or seven kids with no idea who is what or who in their lives.  This is the harvest of 50 years of social experimentation in toleration, educational reform, diversity and inclusivity, rights and entitlement...to name but a few things.

I recall the day when CCNY decided not to require any entrance exams for freshman students, and the horrors that resulted from that, because they believed that they should open their doors to students who had not proven capable of passing them through no fault of their own.  NO FAULT!!!  Well, perhaps not.  But they sure as hell didn't do anything to deserve entry and all the remedial BS that necessarily went along with it.  However they were lied to and believed the lie, that they could with no effort at all become the best they could be; that they had a right to a college education and access to all of the things that a college education woudl give them.  They were, in a word, ENTITLED.

A friend of mine who IS a scholar wrote something that made me think some of the thoughts above, not that they hadn't already been bubbling along in my brain for some time.  He wrote in reply to someone who had said that liberal government programs bespoke a certain empathy for the poor which was lacking from the motivational philosophy of conservative politics.  He said this:

"The basic,fundamental distinction in the conflict of visions that we see is, loosely and generally speaking, the tension between liberty and equality.  What we have had, in the last 40 years, in many countries,including our own, is the enlargement of the government sphere with woeful consequences.

And about taking the LEAP OF EMPATHY for the POOR ------- more harm has been visited upon them from ill conceived policies on their behalf than from the indifference of conservatives.  When I read AMERICA and COMMONWEAL, I feel that I am in the company of people who are making hortatory appeals utterly unrelated to social and economic realities.  It takes more than rhetoric to make some accomplishments.  Look around you and behold the squalor and detritus heaved up over the last 40 years.  Why even JOE KLEIN,a standard run of the mill liberal,just wrote a column several months ago, in TIME, on the utter,abject failure of HEAD START.  Yes, that HEAD START!!  I could go on and on.  I will keep it short by conluding with this advice ------- go check out Pat Moynihan who said all this from the mid 60s when he was an LBJ advisor until his last days.  Such is/was the sorry,squalid state of the equalitarian LEFT in the U.S."

I like those terms, squalor and detritus.  Most of the campuses of the country are awash in it.  Most of the schools and most of the legislative chambers.  And, not to put too fine a point on it...most of the boardrooms and trading floors.

That fool on You Tube is not as rare a bird as one might think and more common than cat caca today; so do not laugh at him, the poor victim that he is .

Who is at fault?  You know the answer.