Don't Dance Too Heavily on Your Culture's Collapse

Barack Obama lately derided a McCain charge of socialism pointed in his direction by surmising ironically that he must have been guilty of socialist behavior when he divided a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich with a classmate in grade school. Disturbing answer, even as a joke—even as a weak joke. The charitable sharing of one’s possessions with those who have less is precisely what the welfare state of whopping taxation rates precludes. I may prefer to designate all my excess income for use by relief organizations targeting homeless children in Central America… but no, my government tells me that outfits like ACORN, which registers voters too lazy or stupid to fill out a form, have a preeminent claim upon my hard-earned cash. Sorry, children! The correct parallel to a socialist government is not one little boy’s dividing his lunch with another: it is the teacher who walks down the entire file of brown-bag-toting kids with yardstick poised menacingly overhead, confiscates most of every sack’s contents, and then redistributes the haul comme bon lui semble (holding aside an especially large pile for himself and his fellow teachers).

Of course, the whole firefight over taxation in this campaign’s closing days has preserved a Disney-like air of fantasy for those of us who must live in the real world. Here in Tyler, Texas (a place of residence NOT recommended by this writer), we property-owners will be paying much higher taxes no matter what level of income an Obama Administration may decide to spare. A new jail bond is almost certainly going to pass. I suppose it had better, because we’re already paying huge sums to “outsource” our criminals, the federal government having universalized certain standards of comfort for inmates which we cannot currently satisfy in our own bombarded facilities. Whom have we to thank for this predicament? Why, both major parties—Bush and McCain and Clinton and Obama and everybody else who insistently threw open our border with Mexico to a flood of sociopaths and narco-terrorists. I do not say that all illegal immigrants from parts south are prison-bound. But if even 2% of them are so, and a million stream across the border unscreened every year, then state prisons must absorb 20,000 inmates annually who would otherwise be tormenting Mexico’s streets. We should at least demand reimbursement for the upkeep of these social toxins from the Mexican government… but no, let’s just ratchet up the property tax of all legal residents, Mr. Fernandez as well as Mr. Schoenweiss, one more time.

Now tell me why I should care about my level of income tax. Tell me, while you’re at it, why I cannot opt out of social security or get a tax deduction for my medical premiums. I believe the “change agents” who want to redistribute wealth to poor people like me are the engineers of those particular sinkholes in my domestic economy.

Yes, my family is poor by just about any current economic definition. My wife and I together do not gross $70,000 in a year. On the other hand, I am white, and I am thus likely to end up paying the kind of “race tax” I described in my last entry. You don’t believe it? Really? Have you really not noticed that an enormous majority of blacks (viz. Colin Powell) has shifted to Obama’s side, and for the patent, even trumpeted reason that he is one of them? Not of them in philosophy or religious persuasion or educational level or even, in most cases, racial composition (for Barack, let us recall, is half white). He LOOKS BLACK, however—and somehow electing someone president who looks black is going to transform our nation. How, if not according to that same criterion of epidermal tint? Do you realize (as I did not until this very week) that a white is not supposed to pronounce the word “gangsta”—that a black has some kind of high moral authority to pummel him if he should attempt to commandeer “black culture” in this manner? Would you like to hear the long story (don’t worry—I’ll spare you) of how my son’s all-white baseball team was consistently and deliberately mis-scheduled and penalized all during a tournament in the Latino-rich Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie last weekend, including the evocation of rules never recorded in any printed source throughout the game’s history?

I have some wonderful kids as students who happen to be of African or Hispanic extraction, and I know they and I could live very happily together in a free society. I wouldn’t care if my child married one of them. What is truly about to happen, though, is that we shall not have a chance for this harmony. The base passions of the mob will be stirred by the crudest of appeals, riots will hit the streets, my students will shake their heads and hope for better times (always that ghost of HOPE drifting even over the rubble of the latest CHANGE), and… and I shall be standing at my door with a gun to protect my wife and child, just as if I were in Morelia or Juarez and I knew a cop could be a butcher as probably as a savior.

The dogs of war are yapping, my dears, and one more ounce of pressure releases their chains. Whatever happens this Tuesday, don’t rejoice. Don’t be that dense.