Cheerfulness vs envy and resentment
Nearly everyone, after that first perfect love is lost, can mope around and feel sorry for themselves, and whine and moan and ham it up like a bitter broken-hearted Gloria Swanson bitch. But hopefully, there comes a time for all of us when the penny drops and you realise that being cheerful and optimistic is actually easier and more fun than being miserable and pessimistic.
Trouble is some adults never outgrow their teenage pout-fests and become nagging prudes, sour puritans, nasty Nazis, weak and dependent socialists, power-crazed communists and insane Islamic terrorists always seeing the world through lenses of negativity and paranoia, as a cess-pit of frustration, oppression and terrifying dangers.
Well, this world can sometimes be not all that nice and comfortable and it's definitely not perfect. And we can never escape sickness and death. But it's not all that awful and the beauty nearly always outshines the bad. There's a lot more loveliness to enjoy than ugliness to abhor. And a cheerful, grateful attitude can do more good than any whining and moaning ever can.
So why have the supposedly utopian-minded and once upbeat "liberals" become so angry, bitter and hateful? Because they have run out of ideas (some of which were fairly good and some of which were really bad) but all of which have been shown to be based on coercion and manipulation and not on true (Lockean) liberalism - optimism, belief in one's individual sovereignty, the joy of hard work and sensible unpretentious creativity.
Today's "liberals" aren't liberal at all. In the 1930s the Communist Party in the USA decided to use the word "liberal" whenever they meant "socialist" because they knew that Americans did not like the beehive groupthink mentality of the Soviet Socialism in Russia or the National Socialism in Germany as they detested any curtailment of their individual freedoms.
So, American socialists re-invented themselves as "liberals" and have taken over the Democratic Party. Everyone knows that the Dems are now a socialist party. Some of us don't mind too much because we're willing to compromise with the wusses and sissies who like having a big nanny government. And some of us don't like it at all. But most of us realize that the Democratic Party, socalled "liberals" and socialism are here to stay because at least half of the human race never outgrows its juvenile sulkiness.
That doesn't mean that we'll stop telling the wusses to grow up and face reality. No one's going to harm you in the USA except criminals and they're not in the majority. Most of us are decent people who aren't going to kill you or steal from you or bear false witness against you or, as the most "fevered imaginations" might think, send you to concentration camps in Alaska.
Most of us are not power-crazed egomaniacs. We are quite happy with the little bit of power and control we have over our own lives and circumstances. It's only insecure and frightened people who crave power over others and most of us are happy, comfortable, contented and confident enough not to feel insecure and inadequate.
And most of understand that the best thing we can do for others is to be cheerful and kind not bitter and angry. We also know that we can't help others of we haven't got anything to give. So, we work hard and get rich. A lot of us think the USA is great (no, not perfect - just not so bad really) and we don't want to change anything too much or too quickly. I guess that makes us "conservatives."
Like Thomas Paine, we think government is a "necessary evil" not a panacea. And like John Locke, we believe that "the only purpose of government is to protect private property." We like having our legal guns because we know that the criminals definitely have illegal ones. We like being free to worship God as we please and pursue our happiness in the privacy of our own homes as we wish as long as it does not harm another.
We like owning our own homes - preferably forty acres (and throw in the mule coz it's cheaper and more reliable than an SUV) and running our own businesses and we mostly vote Republican (even if we're independent or libertarian) because it's the lesser of two evils.
Trouble is some adults never outgrow their teenage pout-fests and become nagging prudes, sour puritans, nasty Nazis, weak and dependent socialists, power-crazed communists and insane Islamic terrorists always seeing the world through lenses of negativity and paranoia, as a cess-pit of frustration, oppression and terrifying dangers.
Well, this world can sometimes be not all that nice and comfortable and it's definitely not perfect. And we can never escape sickness and death. But it's not all that awful and the beauty nearly always outshines the bad. There's a lot more loveliness to enjoy than ugliness to abhor. And a cheerful, grateful attitude can do more good than any whining and moaning ever can.
So why have the supposedly utopian-minded and once upbeat "liberals" become so angry, bitter and hateful? Because they have run out of ideas (some of which were fairly good and some of which were really bad) but all of which have been shown to be based on coercion and manipulation and not on true (Lockean) liberalism - optimism, belief in one's individual sovereignty, the joy of hard work and sensible unpretentious creativity.
Today's "liberals" aren't liberal at all. In the 1930s the Communist Party in the USA decided to use the word "liberal" whenever they meant "socialist" because they knew that Americans did not like the beehive groupthink mentality of the Soviet Socialism in Russia or the National Socialism in Germany as they detested any curtailment of their individual freedoms.
So, American socialists re-invented themselves as "liberals" and have taken over the Democratic Party. Everyone knows that the Dems are now a socialist party. Some of us don't mind too much because we're willing to compromise with the wusses and sissies who like having a big nanny government. And some of us don't like it at all. But most of us realize that the Democratic Party, socalled "liberals" and socialism are here to stay because at least half of the human race never outgrows its juvenile sulkiness.
That doesn't mean that we'll stop telling the wusses to grow up and face reality. No one's going to harm you in the USA except criminals and they're not in the majority. Most of us are decent people who aren't going to kill you or steal from you or bear false witness against you or, as the most "fevered imaginations" might think, send you to concentration camps in Alaska.
Most of us are not power-crazed egomaniacs. We are quite happy with the little bit of power and control we have over our own lives and circumstances. It's only insecure and frightened people who crave power over others and most of us are happy, comfortable, contented and confident enough not to feel insecure and inadequate.
And most of understand that the best thing we can do for others is to be cheerful and kind not bitter and angry. We also know that we can't help others of we haven't got anything to give. So, we work hard and get rich. A lot of us think the USA is great (no, not perfect - just not so bad really) and we don't want to change anything too much or too quickly. I guess that makes us "conservatives."
Like Thomas Paine, we think government is a "necessary evil" not a panacea. And like John Locke, we believe that "the only purpose of government is to protect private property." We like having our legal guns because we know that the criminals definitely have illegal ones. We like being free to worship God as we please and pursue our happiness in the privacy of our own homes as we wish as long as it does not harm another.
We like owning our own homes - preferably forty acres (and throw in the mule coz it's cheaper and more reliable than an SUV) and running our own businesses and we mostly vote Republican (even if we're independent or libertarian) because it's the lesser of two evils.
posted by Joubert at 12:17 AM
The Alliance
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