Addicts in America
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This isn’t about wealth or class. Some of the wealthiest men in this country, like Warren Buffett, are parasites who feed off taxpayer money. Some of the poorest men and women work hard for a living and put back more than they take out.
It’s not entirely about race, though partly it is because the black community and some other minority groups, have become addicted to something more toxic than heroin or cocaine, and they feel entitled to take and take because some of their ancestors were once slaves and because there was once segregation in the South and because they feel certain that white people look down on them. It’s not about gender, though the collapse of the family has put more of the burden on women and tried to fill that gap with social services.
It’s about community. It’s about who we are as a country. It’s about the America of the people who feel ashamed when they aren’t doing their best to work and the America of the people who feel ashamed when they don’t take the system for every penny they can. It’s about who feels that they owe and who feels that they are owed.
The left talks about community a great deal, but their vision of community is a giant till where everyone is forced to put their money and their bureaucracy decides how many people get to keep what percent of their money and how many get to keep other people’s money. There is none of the individual responsibility that makes a community work, only the obligation to follow orders all the time for the greater good. There is no community, only ranks of addicts waiting to be taken care of.
The essence of a community is that its individual members feel a sense of responsibility toward one another. Without that sense of responsibility, we all become takers, tuning in to listen to the latest government announcement to learn how much we can expert to make and how much we will lose. We become experts at wheedling government officials, we all become lobbyists and a lobbyist is a paid representative for someone else’s addiction.
It is the ego that defines the addict, that terrible sense of need that becomes the mirror of the self, and for all the talk of community, it is that need and that accompanying fear that the need will be cut off, that defined the Democratic National Convention, with its special pitches to the most addicted groups, promising that unlike the Republicans, we will never cut off your supply. At least not until we start running low and all the apartments of the people with money are broken into and then we’ll have to start deciding who gets the good stuff and who gets a death panel.
Liberalism has defined entire groups by their need, their addiction to the supply of government, and taught them to feel an angry entitlement to their welfare checks. It has taught them that they are good people for wanting to take other people’s money and that anyone who doesn’t want to give them what they want is a bad person. This is addict moralizing, the spectrum of moral behavior in which the only thing that exists is the need and the barriers to meeting that need.
Addiction goes by different names now. Racism is one of them, but there are many names and they all mean the same thing. “I want,” the koan of addiction, the incantation that becomes the identity of the addict as the one who needs. “I scream, you scream, we all scream for more, more and more.” The rhetoric, the talk of privilege, the academic papers, are only the complex rationalizations of addicts, their mechanical arguments for doing what they want and taking what they want.
This kind of addiction is unsustainable. It is personally unsustainable, it is communally unsustainable and it is nationally unsustainable. A nation where takers begin to outnumber givers cannot endure. It has no future and barely has a present. A nation run by a ‘former’ cocaine user who is forever tossing out schemes for fixing everything that have all the substance of an addicts’ plans to get clean is in deep trouble.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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