Winston Churchill understood the dark underbelly of what the socialists’ obsession with equality leads to when he said, “The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” The progressive–socialist–environmentalist left that has taken over the Democratic Party seems intent on making sure that Americans aren’t able to escape or avoid getting their share of misery.
Here are a few examples:
Recently, a man visiting San Francisco as part of his work for a high-tech company had his car window smashed and thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment stolen from his vehicle. When Snehal Antani, the CEO of the company, tweeted that he’s hesitant about opening an office in such an unsafe city and that his colleague was traumatized by the incident, the tweet elicited a very strange response.
“Is that what the suburbs do to you? Shelter you from basic city life experiences ...?” Hamasaki wrote.
Apart from the fact that, for all Hamasaki knows, the victims live in another city rather than the suburbs, how can a former law enforcement officer defend crime as “basic city life experiences”—as if crime is the norm, and you must be some sort of spoiled baby if being a victim of crime upsets you.
Hamasaki seems to hold suburbanites in contempt. How dare they feel they should be able to go about their business unmolested in American cities like they (mostly) do in the suburbs. Hamasaki is looking at the situation exactly backward. Instead of expecting suburbanites to accept crime as a normal part of urban life, he should be striving to make public safety and the protection of individual rights as normal in the city as in his stereotypical suburbs.
This mean desire to share misery—to spread it around more equally—is similar to the way the left tolerates and even makes excuses for the riots that periodically happen in response to an unjust, criminal incident, such as when the Minnesota policeman killed a handcuffed George Floyd. People were understandably angry. They demanded justice. But does being angry give anyone the right to burn or loot the property of innocent citizens? What justice is it that punishes the innocent for the crime of the guilty? The way Democratic mayors and national politicians stand aside and permit wanton destruction indicates the twisted notion that allowing injustice to run amok and inflict suffering on the innocent is a legitimate avenue to justice.
Another group of innocents who are routinely victimized in America with the support of the left is our children. The transgender political movement is working overtime to inject sexually jarring content—drag queen performances, pornographic books, etc.—into schools’ libraries and classrooms. I’ll say something here that will drive the trans/non-heterosexual crowd nuts, but it’s the truth. Every gay person with whom I have been friends suffered a traumatic sexual experience (specifically, molestations or parental abuse) at a young age that scarred them and altered the trajectory of their lives. Such vile deeds were wrong. They were unjust violations of innocent children.
Again, the question arises: Is justice served by sharing the misery—by depriving even more children of their innocence because others were so victimized? While we have compassion for those individuals who have been robbed of their innocence, the societal goal should be for the reduction, if not elimination, of such traumas. Yet, instead of trying to curb the misery of pedophiliac behavior, militant trans activists want to universalize the sexualization of psychologically vulnerable young children by imposing potentially traumatic thoughts and images on them. (For decades, motion pictures have been rated to shield impressionable, undeveloped psyches from exposure to explicit sexual images.) Working to impose a mental sexual overload on children not mature enough to handle it comfortably is a pedophiliac agenda. Targeting the innocence of childhood is a form of child abuse, yet the left supports it.
One particularly obnoxious way in which trans activists work to increase suffering of others in the name of some weird sense of “social justice” is by invading female sports. Understandably, Americans, motivated by an innate sense of fair play, are pushing back against this practice. They see no reason why female athletes, who have trained and worked for years, should be deprived of achieving their goals by people with male bodies who announce, “I now identify as female.”
The American left today practices a warped sense of justice when they push for policies that inflict pain or misery on innocent Americans who want nothing more than to be free and to go about their lives unmolested, whether by government or by other people. We all would welcome a perfect world where nobody suffers, but such an ideal is beyond our capacity; however, there’s no moral justification for socialistic politicians to implement policies designed to impose penalties on people who have done nothing wrong. Such policies are sadistic, mockeries of justice, and just plain mean.
