A liberal blogger once proposed to me that if I and my fellow conservatives had lived in 1776 we would have taken sides with the loyalists against the continentals. Interesting. Given a fair analysis of the times it is quite possible that I would have been pro-British. But that’s not really the point of the blogger’s proposition, is it?

His implication was that today’s progressive movement somehow compares to the colonial independence movement. That’s just bogus. The term progressive may imply forward advancement but there is little if anything enlightening about the progressive movement. Its underlying goal is to sidle ever closer to a socialist State and to eventually surrender all personal freedoms in order to relieve ourselves of the burden of personal responsibility. In short it is the antithesis of an independence movement. If this is true the question then becomes, ‘Why would anyone go there?’

The numerous complexities of this question cannot all be addressed in a single post but it is important to at least try to scratch the surface on a few of them. Does this movement have a master mover behind it? Is it conspiratorial? Do people involved in it understand its ends? What motivates this movement’s main promoters? The answers to these questions are entirely bound up in the nature of human psychology; the need to dominate, the need to be dominated and the pathological need to control one’s own destiny.

I struggle to resist Ayn Rand’s conclusion that mankind engenders an impulse to self-destruct. This is counterintuitive to all things in nature. Every living thing is designed to reproduce, to regenerate, to fight for survival and to carry on its species. Man is clearly not an exception to this rule. Yet I cannot ignore what I observe as obvious self-destructive behavior in societies throughout history. Our own generation, world-wide, is a prime example of a species bent on death by its own hand.

It is not hard to see that carried to its ultimate ends socialism can only bring economic crisis and social chaos. You only have to visit the low income areas of our large cities to grasp the realization that people are entirely willing to accept the most meager State handouts to spare themselves the responsibility of pursuing their own self-support. They could not possibly care less that others have worked hard and taken risks for the handouts they usurp. Under easy government dependence assistance quickly comes to be viewed as an entitlement – something these dependents somehow believe they have a right to. That “right to other people’s money” soon declines to a “demand for other people’s money” – at the point of a gun in the streets. That is human nature. It always has been and always will be the result for rewarding sloth. Leftists will not accept this reality and will not even permit its discussion.

In tribal societies of the past socialization often did work but it never operated in the goody-goody atmosphere imagined in rainbow liberalism. Sloth was never permitted in communal tribalism. Death or its equivalent, banishment, was the certain reward of slackers and petty thieves. In large societies like the old USSR similar penalties were resorted to in order to keep socialism viable for as long as it was. A measure of brutality has always been the price of sustaining socialist systems. Every hippy commune of the 60’s eventually succumbed to these realities – even though most of them were subsidized with government checks and/or were living from the dumpsters of capitalist excess.

But I want to be more specific. Barack Obama wishes to institute full blown socialism in this country. What did Barack discover in his “community organizing” experience that he thinks we should all embrace? Barack’s carried out his community organizing activities in a neighborhood I have some knowledge of. The place is called “Altgeld Gardens”. It is a community on the southernmost edge of the city of Chicago.

In 1969 one of my brothers was a rookie cop in the police district that included the Gardens. Special operational procedures were in place for that area due to its utter lawlessness. To begin with regular patrols were not authorized there. Officers were only expected to enter the neighborhood in response to distress calls. In such circumstances a squad car carrying at least two policemen was required. Procedure in such cases required the officers to park not less than a block from the call, turn out its lights and observe activity until and if further action was called for. One night my brother and his partner responded to one of these calls and, according to procedure, were sitting parked and dark at the end of the street waiting to see what developed.

What developed was a bullet through the back windshield. Fortunately neither man was hit and the only injuries were a couple of scratches to my brother’s partner from flying glass. Needless to say there was not much of a follow-up investigation. Altgeld Gardens was and still is an isolated no-man’s-land where the residents live by a code of law that is all their own. To what degree that may have changed I am not willing to personally explore.

I have had a couple of experiences of my own with Garden life. I once made an accidental turn into the area only to discover that there was no direct passage through it. I had to relocate the entrance by which I had come in. And – call me Nancy – but that was one of the most intense fifteen minute experiences of my life as I shrank into my car’s upholstery while trying my best not to look white.

My most shocking experience with Garden life came one afternoon in 1982. As I was driving across the Steel Bridge that passed over a river running through the Gardens I glimpsed a girl standing at the rail with her baby. At almost the same moment I saw a state trooper jump out of his car at the end of the bridge and begin running toward the girl. The moment she spotted the trooper she threw the baby over the rail and jumped in after it. As I recall the girl’s body was recovered but the child’s was never found.

This is life as it exists in government sponsored hell. Mr. Obama knows this life better than I do. I’m quite certain that while he was there “organizing” he managed to press the government to dump huge amounts of tax-payer cash into that hole. But so far as I’ve heard nothing what-so-ever has been accomplished in the direction of making that community self-sufficient. It has only been organized for the systemized extortion of government cash.

And so I end this post with the question I began it with: ‘Why would anyone go there? If spreading the wealth around means the same thing to President Obama that it meant to Obama the community organizer do you really think I’m going to allow myself to be dragged there without a fight? And why, in God’s name, do you insist on dragging my entire country down to these depths in the first place?

More later.