Much of the left's behavior involves destroying accepted norms. Their actions go far beyond the hippies of old and the damage they caused in their day.
We have a family friend, a rabbi, who has a good sense of humor. In Israel, one often rides next to a taxi driver rather in the back of the cab. One day, he was traveling in a cab and had a conversation with the driver.
“What’s the purpose of driving?”
“To get someplace.”
“If so, why do you have brakes?”
With those words, the driver slammed on the brakes and almost threw the two of them out of the car. After thinking a while, he said that braking is an integral part of driving and allows for controlling speed according to the conditions. I was reminded of this story when the pro-Hamas brownshirts burned an American flag outside of Union Station in Washington this week.
The violent protesters really had several options in front of them. The best one would have been for them to stay home. After that comes peaceful protesting, something that they do not understand. But as to the flag present where they were, the smart move would have been to fly the Palestinian flag underneath the American flag. It would have signaled some level of patriotism with a desire for a Palestinian state. They could have taken the American flag down, folded it respectfully and handed it to a Park Ranger before flying their colors. But there are no brakes with these people. It was not enough to simply remove the flag of the country whose benefits they enjoy every moment they breathe on American soil. No, they had to burn the stars and stripes on live TV and hang a flag of a non-existent terror state in its hallowed place. All the while, they demanded death to Israel and the United States. If it’s such a miserable country, why don’t they simply go away and back to their third world dumps?
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Much of functional society is based on goodwill. Here in Israel, like in countries throughout the world, store owners schlep their goods out each morning to put them in front of the shop and bring the goods back in each evening as they close. Having goods outside in the absence of cameras or a dedicated worker can only work if one lives in a society where stealing is rare. Either due to religious, legal, moral or personal reasons, people generally do not steal. The stuff is there for the taking. But people do not take it. This arrangement allows a store owner to sell a lot more than he can fit in his tiny store. If half of the dresses vanished before noon, the store owner would be out of business before the end of the week.
The brakes of old have worn out. As we see throughout the U.S., stealing has become normalized. Billions of dollars of merchandise are taken without payment from stores from coast to coast. It is a situation that cannot last. So, some stores close up shop, others put everything behind locked glass doors, while still others try to increase store security. On my last trip to Vegas, the local branch of Kroger (Smith’s) was building a massive “store within a store”. I asked why and was told that a lot of the smaller items like lipstick was being stolen, and they believe that they can reduce theft by putting such goods in a separate, more monitored space.
When the brakes come off of society, many institutions that were taken for granted no longer function. Doctors, who from time immemorial have been enjoined to do no harm, routinely remove healthy tissue from children and cause their sterilization in order to fulfill a demented fantasy that boys and girls are interchangeable like so many chopsticks. The Secret Service, police, and armed forces put women into jobs that reduce the overall safety of either a protected VIP, a community, or a unit all in order to check boxes for a DEI administrator. A society with brakes knows when and where to stop, when one should not go in a direction that will harm the overall good of whatever community is involved. When the moral and legal brakes stop working, almost anything goes. We thus have the crazy situation of homeowners fighting illegal squatters to gain access to that which is rightfully theirs. One can close his eyes and imagine the 1800s west, where the sheriff, deputies, and local muscle would drag the offenders out and give them an hour to get out of town. Not anymore. Today, squatters have the rights and it is up to the rightful owners to prove that their deceased parents’ home or the like is really theirs.
In the 1970s, censors for the three major networks worked hard to restrict both language and nudity on TV. There were brakes as to what a child might hear or see when watching television. When public TV began to compete with cable where no such limitations existed, those brakes were also removed. There is almost no limit in the race to the bottom in all forms of culture.
In every facet of our world, the professional left—sometimes alone, at other times with Islamists and others—is trying to rip apart the standards that have served society for generations. I still remember the fights for Title IX and the flourishing of women’s sports at all levels—only to be destroyed by men with personal issues who find it gratifying to defeat girls and women in sports. The Marines begged the Obama administration to be excluded from the requirement of integrating women in combat units after a two-year study showed that it led to both performance and social problems. They were denied. The left wants to remove every aspect of religion-based societies and replace them with interchangeable men and women and new gods of science and climate change.
I drove a Tesla and tried to understand the dynamic braking system. With it, one gets a feeling for the balance between accelerating and braking. Society needs the same. The US could go to the moon because it had a socially conservative society which allowed for and encouraged such progress. Only the best were chosen as astronauts. Today, incompetents would be selected because it would make people feel good that black, trans, and wheelchair-bound astronauts were selected. The left wants to get rid of the brakes and destroy Western society. Keeping Kamala Harris out of the White House would be a good first step to applying the brakes to their plans.
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