When nothing is working...

watch what they do and ignore what they say

Wow. We’re nearly half-way through the month of May. November looms. Politically, we all know what this means. Even those among us who pay scant attention can feel something enormous building. It is difficult to keep the coming storm in context, and nearly impossible to ignore.

Voices from the left have already become more shrill and demanding. They will only get louder and crazier as the day of reckoning draws closer. Bad ideas die hard.

For nearly half of a century I have remained pretty much on the sidelines when the topic of abortion is debated. I knew in 1973, when I was fifteen years old and Roe was decided, that there would be no happy middle, no understanding reached that all sides could agree upon. It is not possible that a baby can simultaneously be both the most precious thing in our universe and an inconvenient clump of cells that can be disposed of moments before birth. Ideologues have staked out the extremes—no action can be taken once the sperm meets the egg, ever, on one end; and at the other, a viable human being, fully capable of survival outside of the womb, can be killed because the mother has changed her mind about being a mother, even in the delivery room. Of course, very few people hold either view sincerely. There is a lot of space between four, eight, or a thousand cells dividing and dividing again, beginning the process of building a human, and an infant moments, or even days, before birth. That’s where the real debate lies. Ideologues ignore this at their peril.

The Democratic Party’s stand on abortion, as laid out in the legislation just proposed by Chuck Schumer (ironically named “The Women’s Health Protection Act”) and rejected by the Senate is decidedly extreme. The bill endorses abortion throughout a pregnancy, right up until the very moment the baby is born. In the womb? Safe to kill. Outside? A living human with all of the rights that entails. As if, in the perfectly progressive world, midwives will be equipped with the tools of the abortionist and ask, well into dilation and as the baby is crowning, “You sure about this? You don’t have to do this. We can end this now.”

I suspect that to most people this image is horrific. Most people (I suspect) are more or less comfortable with abortion before a fetus is recognizably human, and then increasingly leery thereafter. The default position on the pro-choice side seems to be that extremism is required to counter the crazy pro-lifers, but will never happen. Really? Then why propose it?

Here’s something to keep in mind: Ideologies do not care about people. The ideal may purport to, but always, when the rubber meets the road, ideologues choose the idea, the message, over actual human beings. We’ve seen this again and again throughout recent history. It is the service to ideology above all else that allowed Mao to kill outright or starve millions upon millions of Chinese during the Great Leap Forward. It made the Killing Fields of Cambodia possible, Holomodor in the former Soviet Union. The debacle of Venezuela and Cuba. All the result of individuals, ideologues, who fell in love with their own theories and decided that the ideal mattered more than niceties like actual lives, results, and reality. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.

And this is why the Biden administration has been, and will continue to be, an unmitigated disaster for everyone in the country. Ideology is more important to those around Biden (who actually make the decisions that matter) than results, the lives of the citizens, or needless suffering. Examples are easy to come by. The disgrace of Afghanistan. The abject bullshit that is BLM and critical racial theory and the thousands of black Americans who have died in lawless cities the policies inspired by such idiocy have created. We can just pick an item from the litany of bad news and the cause is always the same. Fentanyl. Fuel prices. Inflation. Food shortages. Supply chain failure. The homeless mentally ill. It is always ideology first and foremost. Eggs get broken. People needlessly suffer and die.

When you serve ideology, reality doesn’t matter much. Sure, a kid can grow up as a male, with testosterone coursing through his system as his skeleton develops, his hips, his musculature—but if he decides after this has happened that he feels like he’s a woman? Well, ideology dictates that he is a woman, and if this gives her an unfair advantage over women who did not benefit from growing up as boys? So be it. Some eggs have to be broken. And if this spells the end of women’s sports and the Olympics becomes a two-tiered competition between men and then between women who were formally men? Oh well. Eggs and omelets.

This principle is important to understand when people pretend to be fighting for “equality”, or “justice”. They are not. In fact, they care no more about equality and justice than they do about the people, the real people, their policies harm. They are acting in service to their ideology and will say and do anything to advance it. By their works, you will know them. I’m not certain even they are aware of this. I find it difficult to imagine people being so consciously evil.

Don’t be fooled. Ideologues do not mean what they say. They have no fealty to truth, to fairness, to logic, or to their fellow humans. They serve an ideal. Period.

Treat their declarations and demands accordingly.

They are catching on to the fact that their ideology is not popular in the real world, where people live and die, and they are very frightened. Frightened people make poor decisions, so we are likely to see some doozies in the coming months.

Don’t take it personally. They don’t mean what they say. You and I are just eggs for the omelet, after all.

Peace.