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A Liberal Thanksgiving

Is there anything liberals and conservatives are both thankful for today?

by
J. Robert Smith

Bio

November 26, 2009 - 12:17 am
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Here’s an idea. Celebrate President Barack Obama. Yet another Nobel Peace Prize winner, the president can be celebrated for just wanting peace. Better, liberals can celebrate the triumph of lofty rhetoric over action, as personified by Obama. You see, actions can be measured, and liberals don’t fare very well in that department. The economy stinks, public schools in a lot of places stink, the government’s finances stink. Stick with high-blown rhetoric; it never stinks.

Better idea — health care. That’s it. Liberals can toast the president, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi for bullying through, at least to this point, a government-run health care scheme that a growing majority of Americans don’t want and a fair number despise. Yes, if Reid can just move a health care bill through the Senate to conference, then liberals will get what they’ve wanted for decades: Direct direct control over virtually every American’s life. Another dirty little secret is that health care reform is mainly about power and control.

Maybe liberals can just thank God for their blessings. Then again, no. Plenty of liberals either don’t believe in God. God is, after all, a construct of the primitive mind. Ancients needed to imagine God to make sense of events in the natural world, to come to grips with the finality of death. Many liberals appreciate that life is a random chance, a cosmic accident. Here today — poof! — gone tomorrow. Let’s forget about God.

Better to celebrate relativism and its endpoint, nihilism. This is something liberals can jump in with both feet and really celebrate.

The “anything goes, if it feels good, do it” ethos that rose in the mid-sixties is still with us, stronger than ever.

In music and movies and TV, sexuality has no higher value than doing it for pleasure — with anyone and, increasingly, anything. Women are objectified more today than in Marilyn Monroe’s heyday. Violence on the big screen, small screen, and particularly in gangsta rap is gratuitous and rampant. Life, you understand, now imitates (so-called) art. And all of this has spilled over into our communities and turned too many kids into wastes.

With every passing day and week and month and year, the cultural left delivers hammer blow after hammer blow to the mores, religion, conventions, and fundamental decency that has underpinned American society. But given that American society is corrupt, unfair, rapacious, exploitative, gluttonous, boastful, and self-righteous, knocking it down a bunch of pegs is quite a good thing. Creative destruction, liberals might call it.

The rest of us may think it’s about pushing the nation from the pinnacle into the pit. But that’s all relative, isn’t it? You celebrate Thanksgiving your way, and liberals celebrate it their way. A toast to that, anyone?

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J. Robert Smith is a contributor to American Thinker. He is a public affairs consultant with a practice in Alexandria, Virginia.
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