Does She Realize What She Says

Read this opinion piece from Georgie Anne Geyer and consider what she says:

Think Outside Your Self

When I read it there are two possibilities that occur to me. It is possible that she doesn't know what she has said there. Or, it is possible that she knows exactly what she is saying.

The former implies simply an ignorant liberal trying to wax philosophical about the Carter-esque "malaise" which engulfs the country. That's pathetic but it isn't malignant. The latter means that she is a professional propagandist using the language of collectivization to indoctrinate her readers to acceptance of a new social paradigm. Since Ms Geyer is making the big bucks, I've got to lean toward the second, more significant interpretation.

The problem is not so much that we are in decline, but that we are in decomposition. The country doesn't hold together because we don't hold together; we see everything in terms of only ourselves.

We shouldn't be concerned with ourselves as individuals but rather in terms of what we can contribute to the collective. We should orient ourselves to doing what we can do best and then knowing that the collective will provide for our needs as others do what they can as well. A crude paraphrase but hauntingly familiar.

Every working country needs citizens at certain crucial levels to accept leadership and not parse every demand with the imperial "me." Otherwise, a country becomes ungovernable because no leader can impose decisions.

That scares the hell out of me. It screams for subordination to someone's idea of "leadership" and it simultaneously denies the wisdom of a republican form of government responsive to the people. It recalls the governance of a Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin with imposition of decisions and acceptance of the will of the state.

The problems we face today are amorphous. They are not things like a pirate attack, or a Hitler or a Stalin, or even (God forbid!) a nuclear bomb. They are slow, gnawing problems that eat away quietly, even silently, at our society's coherence – overpopulation, unassimilable immigration, poor education, poverty among the young, households without fathers, collapsing infrastructure. They don't inspire to action; they inspire to go to sleep and wake up next year.

See, there is no threat of an attack from an outside source any more. There is no international threat from other places in the world such as Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung-il. Nuclear weapons don't pose a threat so don't worry about Iran or Syria. The agenda is boring and it takes a transcendent leader like the Messiah to deal with them: "overpopulation"--who could argue against abortion?; "unassimilable immigration"--we simply aren't assimilating, it isn't about the borders; "poor education"--just need to get a federal bureaucracy working on that; "poverty among the young"--let's send them some money to make them less impoverished; "households without fathers"--I wonder what's causing that?; "collapsing infrastructure"--maybe we can run the stimulus programs like Rocky movies and have roman numerals up to VIII or more.

Either Ms Geyer is a communist propagandist or she's incredibly naive. The choices are unattractive whichever one we make.