A Rant

Kate took the What SciFi crew do you best fit with quiz and found she was a good fit with the crew of the Serenity from Firefly. She wasn’t familiar with the show or the movie however and said she didn’t know what it meant to be a good fit for that crew. I was very tired and tried to get some sleep but woke up after about an hour and couldn’t get back to sleep unless I ranted.

Firefly, the series and Serenity the movie take place in a future where the liberals have won completely and utterly. The government is our friend. The government knows what’s best for us.

This is a world where the phrase, “We’re from the Government and we’re here to help” isn’t met with distrust, but welcomed and believed.

This is a world where failing schools, while publicly denounced, are privately welcomed because they result in an ignorant electorate who believes that the Government is there to help.

This is a world where the “right” to privacy is highly regarded, especially that most sacred “right of privacy”, the one where an expectant mother can void her womb whenever she wants for whatever reason she wants, without notifying anyone even if she is under the age of majority – especially if she is under the age of majority – up to the time that the “contents” of the womb could possibly take a breath.

But this is also a world where the government has its grubby hands in everything else that one could possibly have a “choice” about. They tell you that you can’t eat or cook with trans fats (even though they previously told you that trans fats were better than real fat for you).

They tell you that you can’t serve or eat fois gras because its cruel to geese, but abortion is fine, it’s not cruel to unborn children.

It’s a world where a woman running for the post of President of the United States can say, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good,” and she’s applauded.

The crew of the Serenity looks at the Government official and shuts the door in his face when he rings the bell and says he’ll help. They are, actually, pirates. They believe in individual choices, the free market, and the less government interference the better. They are, in other words, conservatives or libertarians rather than liberals. Small government, big individuality.

It feels to me that some people are so full of self-loathing that they can’t accept that. America, at only 231 years old, is too young to be better. We’ve lorded it over the rest of the world for so long that it’s only fair that we roll over and play dead and let the rest of the world walk all over us until the end of time to make up for it all.We “stole” the United States from the Mexicans and the Indians after all. By the way, didn’t the Spanish “steal” much of Central and South America from the indigenous peoples there? Isn’t that why Spanish is spoken almost everywhere south of the US border except for Portuguese in Brazil? Why bother America? Go get Spain to give “your” land back.

Plots of land all over the world have changed hands time and time again by invasion, conquest or outright purchase. Sometimes those purchases, in hindsight, look as though one party got the better of the other. Sometimes they did. Sometimes it was accidental, sometimes by design, but that’s life. How many times have you been bested in some kind of arrangement? How many times have you bested someone else? Here’s the kicker: How many times have you NOT tried to get the best part of a deal for yourself? Be honest. We’re all selfish and want what’s best for ourselves. We may try to be altruistic, but way down deep we’re in it for ourselves. There’s nothing really wrong with that either. We help others along the way and there’s nothing wrong with that either.

We want to be better than others. We want more than others. Some of us work towards those ends. Some don’t. Some decide that they want something and just take it. Others of us trade for something we want. We trade our services for money, we trade the money for goods or other services. Those people trade with other people. The world turns.

We’ve seen playground games banned at elementary schools because many of the games have winners and losers. We’ve seen schools drop Valedictorian because, as with the movie Highlander, “there can be only one.” If I recall correctly my graduating class from high school had 235 members. Only one was class valedictorian. It wasn’t me. I didn’t feel left our or even a “lesser” person than whoever the valedictorian was. I was just glad I didn’t have to give a speech in front of the whole graduating class, most of the teachers and all those family members!

We are doing a grave disservice to our children by removing competition from school. Starting before a child even graduates from high school, competition is a fact of life. One must compete for and win a spot at college of one’s choice. One must compete for jobs and promotions. Even in middle school kids compete for boyfriends and girlfriends (even though they aren’t aware they’re competing). We need to give our children the tools they need to survive and learning to compete and deal with the losses and the wins is one of those tools.

I was thinking about the fact that in “cruel and unusual punishment” those who file suit or just rail against it forget the word “and” in the middle. Cruel is a very subjective word. For instance, here in the US, we consider stoning and lashing to be cruel, but elsewhere in the world those punishments are not viewed so.

Elsewhere in the world, those punishments are also not unusual. Even for what those in the West would consider, at best minor crimes, and at worst no crime at all. But we must accept those punishments elsewhere in the world because that’s “their culture” and as such, must be accepted. God forbid (oops, can’t mention God) that Americans would be proud of their country and consider that maybe, just maybe, our culture might be just a leeeeetle bit better than another.

In this country, incarceration is generally a “usual” punishment for convicted criminals. Some may think it’s cruel, but it is, indeed, usual. I seem to remember a case where a prisoner filed a pro se suit because he wasn’t offered the choice of French dressing with his salad. He thought it was cruel not to offer him that particular choice. Some may consider death by lethal injection cruel. It may be so. But it is hardly unusual. In many states where the death penalty is in force it is the only method of execution. Hanging or the electric chair, while they may be cruel, were not unusual at the time. Beheading was once a very usual method of execution – by the sword, the axe, or the guillotine.

I have more subjects to cover and may expand on these, but the antihistamine is kicking in and I’m ready to hit the sack. More later.