If you cannot run your own life well, how can you run the lives of others?
As today is the anniversary of the death of Harper Lee, authoress of the magnificent American classic To Kill a Mockingbird, I was reading passages from that novel and its companion book — published only about a decade ago — Go Set a Watchman. In the latter, which is essentially a rougher version of her acclaimed classic, Lee wrote, “Don't you study about other folks's business till you take care of your own.”
It struck me all of a sudden that this quote perfectly encapsulates most modern political and social movements. We see it even among those we agree with — how some Christians seem bent on worrying about the faults of everyone but themselves, how some conservatives form their opinions on a purely reactionary basis, or how some Republican politicians seem determined to let victory escape them as they worry about all the least pressing matters — because it’s easier to complain than to be in control.
Lee’s quote seems to have a similar meaning to that of Christ’s injunction in Matthew 7:5, “Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam in thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” And while there are people who love to preach without practicing in every group and religion, some ideologies make constant interference in others’ business a focal point. Leftism is the perfect example.
Indeed, leftists have transformed “studying about” and interfering in others’ business into practically an international pastime and an official modus operandi. Leftists never solve problems. They create problems, then insist they must take more people’s money or expand government into more private sectors or invent still more programs for running and disrupting others’ lives.
Recommended: Experts Slam Mamdani’s Disastrous Tax Plan
In the U.S., for instance, no Democrat mayor, governor, congressman, or president ever leaves his town, state, district, or country better off. He never effectively repairs infrastructure, strengthens the military, prevents wars, lowers unemployment, or does any of those useful things over which he has power and to which he has a duty. No, all their policies focus on wrecking or running others’ businesses, whether by over-regulation, unjustifiable taxes, weaponized justice, welfare, foreign regime-changing, etc.
That same mentality extends to ordinary leftist citizens as well. During COVID-19, obese nurses and health officials who couldn’t even control their eating lectured other people about the necessity of wearing masks and taking experimental vaccines because they said so. Blue-haired harpies and illiterate students now take to the streets to protest ICE even though they themselves cannot pass tests or hold down a job.
Brainwashed college students lecture escapees from Communist countries about the wonders of Communism. LGBTQ-identifying individuals who would be executed in Gaza rally to protest in support of Gazan terrorists. All of these people are constantly meddling in someone else’s business instead of running their own.
But leftists also behave this way because they refuse to acknowledge their own past failures. To borrow another quote from Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, we might say, “As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons.”
