Here’s a little song I wrote
you might want to sing it note for note
don’t worry be happy
In every life we have some trouble
when you worry you make it double
don’t worry, be happy……
-Bobby McFerrin
Last week in Milwaukee Wisconsin the two remaining candidates for the Democrat Party nomination for President of the United States, Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, faced each other in a debate. It wasn’t a debate as much as it was a whinefest and reading from lists about how much America stinks.
According to Sanders, “There is massive despair all over this country.” We have low wages, the highest rate of childhood poverty in the world, inadequate health care, people don’t have enough money for food, seniors are chopping up pills to make them last longer. For her part Hillary said immigrants are living in fear, there’s systemic racism, police brutality, sexism preventing women from getting equal pay, LGBT people getting married on Saturday and get fired on Monday because of it.
On and on it went…. an increase in alcoholism, addiction, earlier deaths, people not living as long as their parents lived, coal miners wondering, if their country has forgotten them. Whine, despair, hopelessness, we stink, whine, this country is horrible, whine some more.
Never mind the fact that their party has been in control of Washington for nine of the past ten years, together Bern and Hil spent two hours explaining what a terrible place America is. According to Sanders this place SUCKS for all but the top one tenth of one percent. More optimistic in her assessment, Clinton spreads the blanket of contentment out all the way to the top one percent.
It’s far from unusual behavior for the progressive left. Log some e-miles and you’ll quickly discover that many, many progressive liberals sure are upset. They call into talk shows, bang away on keyboards and post comments that ultimately come back to the basic premise of, “America is unfair, immoral and if you don’t know it – you are an idiot!”
Hard left ultra-liberal/progressives seem to exist in a constant state of discontentment. It’s not that they never smile, have no friends and just sit around in the dark sulking all day. It’s not so much that they’re ‘unhappy people’ as much as they’re constantly unhappy with their own, their nation’s and the world’s situation. Since they’re seldom if ever happy with the way things are they’re always on a war path to change things.
Think about how our president campaigned and won. “Hope and Change” was his slogan for the 2008 election. Prior to his first swearing in he quipped, “We’re just five days away from fundamentally changing America.” Why the need for all this change? You typically want to change something if you’re not happy about its current state. This is the mantra of left-wing liberalism, “We’ve got to change all this because the way it is now stinks.” And it seems to be how they feel about virtually everything.
Obama rode in on promises of changing our healthcare system, promising coverage for everyone. Within two years of his swearing in he signed the “Affordable Care Act.” Did that make liberals happy? No. Now, as a centerpiece of his campaign, Bernie is touting his “Medicare for All Act.” The change we just got isn’t enough, so we’ve got to change the change in order to make things better.
Conservatives basically want to be left alone. While they believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility and limited governmental intrusion, left-wingers want their preferences to become law as a way to impose their belief system on everyone.
As a conservative, if you don’t want to purchase a 40-ounce soda you simply don’t purchase a 40 ounce soda; you get a 20 ounce instead. But if a left-wing liberal doesn’t want a 40-ounce soda, what do they do? They seek to pass laws so that nobody can purchase a 40-ounce soda.
A conservative doesn’t think prayer prior to a high school football game is appropriate (not that a true conservative likely would), he simply withholds his child from the prayer session. A left-wing liberal with the same thought goes to war over it. “We’ve got to end that practice! Not only my children, no one’s children should be out there praying!” They lawyer up, contact the ACLU, write letters to the newspapers and are out standing on the capitol steps waiving signs decrying how NOBODY should be able to engage in behavior they themselves don’t want to.
This list goes on and on. They’re perpetually not happy with something and so seek to pass laws to make their level of unhappiness the rule of the land for EVERYONE, whether everyone else was also unhappy about it or not. Left-wing liberalism is a perpetual state of “This sucks, we need laws to change it to the way I want it to be!” And if you don’t want things to be the way that I want them to be then you’re an idiot, a racist, a Neanderthal, or most likely, all of the above.
Consider former New York City (uber-left) mayor Michael Bloomberg as a case-in-point. In his twelve years as mayor he forced through laws regulating sugary drink sizes, table salt in restaurants, smoking limits and a gaggle of other restrictions and regulations. Entire websites have been created to track everything banned by Michael Bloomberg.
Though they’re getting ‘hope and change’ by the buckets full right now and have been for seven years, hard lefties are simply not happy. Visit left-wing websites, blogs, Facebooks, Bernie and Hillary’s campaign sites and what do you see? People ranting and railing about virtually everything. We’re out of Iraq yet on these sites posts are dedicated daily to “George Bush and Dick Cheney’s phony war on terror.”
The “Affordable Healthcare Act” is the law of the land and is being implemented as you read this, yet rather than celebrating lefties invest massive amounts of time directing their ire toward the party that didn’t vote for it. Rare is the leftist blog or column filled with praise, adoration and thanksgiving toward this awesome nation of ours. About 99.96% of the time it’s some version of “this sucks!”
Were it not for being discontent with the present state of things. Were it not for the constant drive to change things so that “I’ll be happier with them” left-wing liberalism would cease to exist. Even the most casual perusing of various progressive organization’s websites results in discovery of extremely consistent themes. They are ALL, all about change. There are literally thousands of such organizations and websites all obsessed with changing. Consider the “Advancement Project” (literally one I picked randomly from thousands). The final sentence of their mission statement, “We use innovative tools and strategies to strengthen social movements and achieve high impact policy change.” Prominent on their “About Us” page? “Our theory of change.”
One can’t help but to wonder if sooner or later people get tired of all the sucking on lemons. When does the point come where things have changed enough that now we’re happy with them? My guess? Never!
Derrick Wilburn is the Founder and Chairman of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives and American Conservatives of Color.
He is a sought after speaker/presenter, and is also a renown author and columnist, contributing columns and editorials to the Colorado Springs Gazette and Colorado Common Sense News. He can also be read nationally on American Thinker, Allen B. West and the Tea Party News Network.
His online videos may be viewed on the ACofC YouTube channel and he frequently delivers the Tea Party National Weekly Address.
