Friday, August 23, 2024

Busybodies For All!

The human mind is a fickle thing. It will become captivated by just about anything whether worthy of such attention or not, at least for a little while. The current political season is a great example of such a tendency. It has been just over a month since Kamala Harris managed to bump Joe Biden off the Democrat Party ticket, without winning a single primary vote, and become the party’s new presidential candidate. As if by magic, overnight she went from having an approval rating that was even lower than Biden’s (somewhere in the 20’s) to quickly becoming the darling of the left. From being disregarded and soundly criticized even by the leftist media, to becoming the superwoman of everyone’s dreams.

Harris’ ascendance demonstrates that our society has become a sound bite society par excellence. It only takes a focused effort by the media, and not a particularly intense one at that, to turn an imminently mediocre individual into the hottest star in the political firmament. Suddenly, the individual with the aforementioned low approval rating and one who managed to get about barely 1% of the vote during the 2020 Democratic primary, is now the best thing that has ever happened to our country.

Part of this turn of events is the fact that people in our nation are enamored with the idea of a part black, part Indian woman becoming president. It is my belief that such a mindset was what originally propelled Barak Obama to the presidency. Obama was a man who had little to show for his senate career. He did not have anything particularly outstanding about him. The fact that a minority candidate made him appealing to the masses who wanted to finally break the hold that while males had on the presidency. Thus, he became a symbol for a nation wanting to tell itself that it had broken the chains of prejudice. Suddenly, many people were willing to vote for someone with little to commend him simply because the idea of having a minority president was too good to resist. Once he was in office, his mediocrity came quickly to the fore. Under Obama, race relations in our country were worse than they had been in probably 50 years. Remember “if I had a son he would look like Treyvon Martin” and the “beer submit”? Obama’s signature “accomplishment,” Obama Care, has done more to wreck the already cumbersome and inefficient health care insurance system than just about any other legislation.

And so, we arrive at the current season. The allure of having a female president may just be too strong for many to pass up. Many will no doubt be thinking that voting for such a person will demonstrate that they are enlightened and sophisticated. A person whom more than 70% of the population seemed to completely disregard just a few weeks ago, is now in the lead in many polls. The fact that the policies that she embraces will continue to wreck our country and will further the deterioration of our society is of little consequence, some think, in order to finally have a woman president. Just to mention one of those policies, Harris thinks that price controls are a good idea. Something that has been tried by communist and socialist societies time and time again and which has proven to be disastrous time and time again, is one of the important aspects of Harris’ agenda. She also complains that Trump would give tax breaks to corporations and the rich, the obvious implication being that taxes should be increased on those folks rather than lowered.

If Harris were an economics student, she would get a big fat F. Why? Because making corporations’ price of business higher means higher prices for those further down the line, the ones that the Democrats supposedly want to help. Southwest, Citi, Walmart will simply raise their prices and interest rates in order to recoup the losses from having to pay higher taxes or wages. Not only so, but if prices are controlled by the government, many will simply cease producing goods because the cost of doing so will be too high to sustain and their profit margin will shrink into oblivion. That will in turn lead to shortages which will, once again, lead to higher prices and the circle will continue to perpetuate itself. Is that so difficult to understand? For the left the answer apparently is YES!

I must admit that it is tempting to despair in the light of such developments. It is not easy to see the headlong rush of many of our fellow countrymen to go over the proverbial cliff and not be affected by it. The uncertainty of the nation’s future causes us to pause and wonder where it will all lead. However, we would do well to always remember that little three letter word “but”: But we have God on our side. As the amazing passage in the Psalms tells us:

“If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us:

Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us:

Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul:

Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.

Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.

Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” (Psalm 124:2-8, KJV)

 



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