Liberalism Kills Communities

Article by Derek Hunter in "Townhall":

Remember this week when it comes time to vote in November. What we’re seeing across America is what Democrats have created coming to fruition; it’s the natural end result of a progressive philosophy that works overtime to absolve individuals of their responsibility and place blame on others for political advantage. It’s rage for the sake of motivation to vote, to hate, to not think. It has worked for progressives in the past, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t work for Democrats now. But in order to work, it has to destroy. Liberalism, progressivism, or whatever they choose to call the Democratic Party’s agenda, kills.

It kills people, it kills businesses, it kills communities.

The first two are obvious, the last one may be less so. The political left spends a lot of time tossing around the word “community,” but they don’t mean it the way you likely understand it. It, like so many other words bastardized by leftists, has been redefined to be more useful to those who seek to use it to empower themselves. The new progressive definition of community kills actual communities; it was designed to do so.

Growing up, your community was where you lived, the people and places in your immediate area. When riding bikes was all the rage, I remember the thrill of combing the sides of the road the morning after the 4th of July with my friends looking for anything with a wick – the firecracker, bottle rocket, smoke bomb, or whatever – that slipped through some adult’s fingers in the darkness and excitement the frenzied night before. We’d gather them up, and with matches swiped from some adult (seemed like everyone smoked then), we set off to find a safe place to blow them off.

That “safe place” was not needed because we were concerned with our physical safety. No teenage boy is aware of that concept. It was needed because if we were spotted lighting off fireworks, let alone playing with matches, we were in trouble. The idea of losing a digit or eye wasn’t even a fleeting thought, avoiding getting in trouble was all-consuming.

My group of friends and I pedaled off to find a place where no adult could see us because almost every adult was the on-ramp for a pathway back to one of our parents. And that pathway ended with getting in trouble. We never did find that elusive foolproof place. After a couple of bangs, zooms, and pops, one of our parents would use the cell phones available at the time – going into their backyards and yelling their kid’s name, the siren call from nature’s intercom of either dinner or trouble – and the fun was over. If one of our parents knew, they all would soon.

Our community looked out for everyone in it. What we spent our time trying to thwart was actually what helped keep us healthy and sometimes alive. One time, we found a beat-up dirt bike laying in the woods. It had been trashed and crashed, was probably stolen and abandoned after being ridden to near-destruction. But we could make it run. The brakes didn’t work, neither did the throttle, which was stuck on full, but it could be started. It could also be stopped, sort of, by pulling the sparkplug wire off the plug and killing the engine as everyone sort of grabbed you as you slowed, or by simply jumping off of it and allowing it to crash. We found it, it was already trashed and all bent, so who cared?

After a couple of days, someone either talked or we were spotted on our makeshift track, about 10 feet of which was visible from the K-Mart parking lot, and the party was over. Our glorious motocross careers over before they began.

It was annoying at the time, as getting in trouble always was. The draw of that dirt bike, like the appeal of the fireworks stashed in the hope that we could return to them later (they were usually scavenged by some other gang of friends who then unsuccessfully set off to find their perfect place), was unrelenting. But it was soon replaced by something else stupid and self-destructive in the circle of a prepubescent boy’s life.

That definition of community is largely gone now. It’s not unusual for people to not really know their neighbors, but to not care at all about them or their kids. The word has been redefined away from meaning your immediate area where you live to now focusing on the least relevant, least interesting part of any human being: their immutable characteristics, like skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. All the things the left uses to define who someone is and how they should think or vote.

The progressive philosophy would have you care more about what happens to someone with whom you share any of these traits than you would your next-door neighbor who doesn’t. And it’s working.

We hear all the time about the white community, the black community, the Hispanic community, the gay community, the trans community, the whatever way you can think of to divide people community; they even subdivide people further – the black trans community, for example. Anything you can imagine, any difference that can be thought of and used, is.

Your gay neighbor, for example, is encouraged and conditioned to care more about what happens to someone 2,000 miles away who also happens to be gay, than they are encouraged to care about what happens to anyone across on their block who isn’t. One could impact them directly; the other would never be known to them were it not for liberals hyping it as if it’s all that matters in the world.

What happened to George Floyd is horrendous, and the officers responsible should pay dearly. But it’s no more or no less horrendous than what happened last year to Tony Timpa, who you’ve likely never heard of. He was killed by a police officer kneeling on him as others stood around joking too. It, too, was caught on film. You haven’t heard about it because he was white; his death didn’t fit the liberal narrative, so it was ignored as a local story.

It is a local story, but so is Floyd’s death. If you didn’t know either of them, your life was not impacted by either tragic event. All the virtue signally celebrities and public posturing by politicians in the world will not change that.

What they will do is empower further the very same people who’ve exploited and benefitted from previous tragedies. It’s good for ratings, it’s good for fundraising, it’s good for clicks and votes. Nothing changes because this is the change these “leaders” wanted: people being angry. Anger and fear are the best way to override logic and rational thought; they are the tools of manipulation.

The Democrat media spent days calling rioters “mostly peaceful,” while standing near burning buildings and looted businesses. It wasn’t until they became the targets that they started to care things had gotten out of control and lives were being ruined. “The violent protesters are from out of town,” they said. It’s highly unlikely someone carting a 70-inch TV out of Target was heading to the UPS Store to ship it back to Portland.

It is true that a lot of the agitators are from out of town, but they aren’t just from ANTIFA strongholds and Black Lives Matter headquarters. They’re from newsrooms in New York and Washington, D.C. They saw an opportunity to further stoke division against Republicans, who hold zero power where Floyd’s death took place. They saw ratings, they saw November and Donald Trump. They’ve spent years piling up barrels of gasoline and took another opportunity to flick a cigarette butt into it.

I could cite statistics about how more unarmed white people are killed by police every year than any other group (they’re all in my book), but that doesn’t matter. We’re dealing with emotions and an unscrupulous left that has declared any fact inconvenient to be racist. We’re dealing with well-funded professional agitators and protesters who know exactly how to whip up an angry mob. And we’re dealing with feckless leaders who are willing to let cities commit suicide for their political causes. (How’s Ferguson, Missouri, doing these days? You don’t know because it’s no longer useful to the left.)

Care about what happens in this country because you’re a citizen of this country, period. Your neighbors and where you live are your community no matter what the people around you look like or do. I care that a man was killed. His skin color is irrelevant. If you only care about a death that shouldn’t have been based on whether or not the victim looks or identifies a certain way, you’re the racist. You’re the bigot.

Society isn’t out to get or keep anyone down; society doesn’t know or care that any of us exist – it just is. Your life is 99 percent the culmination of the actions you’ve taken and the decisions you’ve made, nothing more. You either accept that and live your life accordingly, or you end up being trampled and used by the very people who are telling you that you can’t get ahead without electing them to keep those evil societal forces at bay. Because if it were really out to destroy these “communities” Democrats proclaim themselves to be the champions and defenders of, I’m not sure what “society” could have done differently to destroy lives than Democrats literally have done with their generational political control. Liberalism kills.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2020/05/31/liberalism-kills-communities-n2569753