The Patriot Post® · Victims, Not Heroes
I’m not sure when the confusion began, but it may have been on 9/11/01. There were plenty of heroes around that day, including the first responders — the New York cops and firemen – who raced into burning and collapsing buildings, and the passengers on United flight 93 who rushed the terrorists.
But the people who perished in their offices or were forced to leap from the roofs of the two towers were not heroes. They were innocent victims who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, just folks doing their jobs, expecting to go home to their families at 5 o'clock. It doesn’t diminish the tragedy of their deaths, but there is nothing heroic about being a victim and it’s time we stopped conflating the two.
Heroism requires going above and beyond. It calls for risking life and limb, preferably on behalf of others. Perhaps because left-wing politicians have made a habit of playing identity politics, cashing in on the mostly imagined slights of various groups, we now place a higher value on victimhood than on valor.
In a way, by magnifying the grievances of blacks, Muslims, homosexuals, Hispanics, transgenders and college-age infants, we are, in a sense, handing them participation trophies. At least when they’re given out to 11-year-old benchwarmers, the kids did have to show up and want to be on the team; they just weren’t good enough. But if you’re seated at your desk tabulating your expense account when a hijacked jetliner crashes through the wall, you’re not a hero. You’re just unlucky.
Donald Trump displayed his usual good judgment when he skipped the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and, instead, spoke at a rally in Michigan, surrounded by several thousand fans. Had he attended the Resistance rally in Washington, D.C., he would have been expected to sit there and smile, as he told the crowd, while a dais full of his enemies raked him with nasty comments being passed off as humor.
As it was, a black comedian nobody had ever heard of, Michelle Wolf, aimed her snarkiest remarks at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s usually astute press secretary, who decided, for some bizarre reason, to show up. At least most of the folks in the audience didn’t reward Wolf’s insults and incessant f-bombs with laughter, the way the ignoramuses in the studios of Stephen Colbert, Joy Behar and Jimmy Kimmel, inevitably do.
In stark contrast, the predominantly white audience at Trump’s rally cheered enthusiastically when the President mentioned that black and Hispanic unemployment rates are at historic lows. But that won’t stop the Democrats from labeling them with their “Make America Great Again!” baseball caps rubes and racists.
I know there are those who’d like to see us going to war with Russia, Iran or North Korea, but, for my part, I’d prefer to see us taking up arms against liberals.
At the very least, we have to take the threat of rampant liberalism more seriously than we presently do. In fact, I think we should begin sending conservative missionaries into liberal enclaves in order to bring the truth to the savages. After all, religious missionaries don’t write off those in Africa and Asia because they realize that depending on where you happen to be born and raised, you may never have heard of Jesus. Well, if you’re born and raised in places like New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Berkeley, L.A., Detroit, Minneapolis and Baltimore, you may never have heard anything but left-wing propaganda.
I’m not saying the task will be easy, but at least, unlike missionaries in cartoons, you’re not likely to wind up being boiled in a large stew pot. You are more likely to be mugged or being forced to dodge liberal talking points tipped with curare.
But that’s a small price to pay for attempting to being illumination where only darkness and dumbness have previously existed.
We conservatives should all take heart from the fact that Kanye West, a black man, recently had the guts to announce his bromance with Donald Trump; and Candice Owens, a black woman who has been actively trying to free her fellow blacks from the plantation known as the Democratic Party, pointed out: “The only thing you need to do to have power is convince others that they have none.”
We might not ever be able to totally undo the harm that liberals have wrought, but if we can do anything at all, it might seem negligible, but it could be meaningful. After all, nobody ever bought Playboy for its stories and articles, but were it not for the skin magazine, a lot of people would never have been introduced to the likes of Ray Bradbury, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut.
Although as a reader reminded me the other day, I tend to focus on negative news, I do occasionally try to ferret out the positive. God knows it isn’t easy, but I was delighted to hear that yet another liberal icon has been swept up in a sex scandal. News veteran Linda Vester has belatedly accused Tom Brokaw in rather graphic fashion of forcing his unwanted attentions on her several years ago. Naturally, he has denied it, but her re-creation of his disgusting behavior was nearly as visual as the photo of geeky Al Franken groping a sleeping Leeann Tweeden.
I know that some of you are surprised that I admit to being conflicted when it comes to abortions. Understand, I am as appalled as anyone that the GOP has done nothing about cutting off the $500 million tax dollars that the feds annually send to Planned Parenthood.
The reason I’m conflicted, though, is because I can’t bring myself to say I think it’s a bad thing that every year 350,000 black babies are not born to single women, and that another 600,000 aren’t born to women who resent or hate the fetuses in their bellies.
After all, fetuses, we’re told, are sensitive to their mother’s diet and her mood. We have even heard that if their mothers spend time listening to classical music, they’ll be born with an affinity for Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. So, why, should we be surprised if after spending nine months where they’re not wanted, let alone cherished, they grow up to be rapists, serial killers and liberals?
In this day and age, when most colleges and universities have shown themselves to be indoctrination centers that would have been right at home serving as re-education camps for Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, it astonishes me that conservative alumni continue to send them checks. But I find it even more troubling that the size of the checks are so often determined on how well their football and basketball teams have been performing.
That is stupid when Democrats do it; unpardonable when it’s conservatives.
When author Annie Dillard heard that ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects, she wrote: “It’s hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harnessing, disfiguring, or totally destroying the other ninety percent?”
I realize she was referring to those tiny cancerous cells invisible to the naked eye, but I believe she has perfectly described those people who go by various names, including Democrats, liberals, leftists, progressives, socialists and communists, and do so much more harm to the planet’s environment than automobile emissions, strip mining and Michelle Wolf, put together.