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Robin Smith: The ideology that permeates the Center-Left is supposed to be “progressive.” Yet the policies that come from these supposedly forward-thinking elites push our culture into a mindset that dwells on crisis, decline, rationing, and mediocrity — all of which drags us backwards.
Recent polling reflects the wide embrace of socialism that redistributes wealth to all regardless of effort or work and centers on “investment” through government control that is characteristic of shortage, corruption, and even illness. In Venezuela, its citizens are emaciated from the lack of food. There’s no fuel, and showers are even a luxury. But socialism is the new darling of the losing Left.
Medicare for All will guarantee government-controlled health insurance that, in other nations, has proven to result in excessively long waits for services and limited access to innovation and top-quality health care and medicines. The open-border approach to immigration is turning some U.S. cities into landscapes that feature the rise of measles, tuberculosis, mumps, polio, the bubonic plague, and widespread illicit drug use in massive homeless camps.
But, again, the intelligentsia on the Center-Left declare The Progressive Way to be that which protects the rights of all for a future of bliss.
The same crowd is angrily fighting the War on Climate Change. This group is composed of entitled, guilt-driven individuals who operate on the wrong-headed belief that authentic progress, mobility, and achievement are mutually exclusive to good stewardship of environmental resources that are changing and resilient. In other words, if you believe that the best for individuals is self-reliance, the honor and dignity of work, or wealth and mobility that comes with personal responsibility, you’re dangerous. To “progressives,” the best way “forward” is to ensure scarcity and minimalism because humanity is the enemy.
Look no further than the recent New York Times article informing the masses that an individual enjoying air travel of 2,500 miles will be responsible for melting 32 square feet of Arctic ice. The same piece features this assertion from the University of Tennessee’s Professor John Nolt: “The average American causes through his/her greenhouse gas emissions the serious suffering and/or deaths of two future people.” Nolt’s analysis is based on his calculations that the average American generates about 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent a year.
And, if you’re someone who likes cruises, you’re the biggest offender. Compared to flying by jet, those who sail around on even the most efficient cruise ships are supposedly belching out three or four times more CO2 per passenger mile, says Bryan Comer, a researcher at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation.
The message of the NYT’s piece: Either buy carbon offsets at “carbon kiosks” available at airports like San Francisco’s to assuage your guilt or just don’t travel by plane and surely get off those cruise ships. When asking just how harmful one vacation might be, the article’s author, Andy Newman, wrote with dread, “You can’t see the face of the unnamed future person whose coastal village you will have helped submerge.”
This entire mindset is so very sad — to see generations of otherwise intellectual beings mired in fear that the very breath they exhale, containing carbon dioxide, is poisoning our planet. While indoctrinated to view humanity as the enemy, a life of limitations is demanded. Because the curriculum of our modern culture equates progress with destruction — all with little if any mention of the massive climate changes and continental shifts that occurred prior to the world’s population growth or burning fossil fuels with the advent of the combustible engine — many are convinced that development can’t occur with a sustainable community or that advancement can happen without apocalypse.
On Friday, an article looking at “apocalypse anxiety” noted the biblical doomsday scenario — Judgment Day after the war to end all wars on earth with a returning Messiah who would divide humanity into believers for heavenly reward and non-believers to a damned eternal separation. For many modern folks, this age-old belief has now been replaced with a climate catastrophe. As the alternative online news site, Metro.co.UK published, the return of Christ is seen as “unlikely” to be the End of Days but is now replaced by another end-of-the-world scenario. “We are absolutely sure doomsday will come when climate change melts the ice caps and rising seas swallow our civilisation. And if that doesn’t happen, a killer computer will wipe us off the planet — as long as we manage to survive the inevitable nuclear war, alien invasion or global pandemic.”
The greatness of humanity is being eclipsed by the angst and fear of “progressive” politics, which is moving us into a disgruntled mediocrity. Instead, let’s choose to believe in greatness and make true progress while stewarding our wonderful planet. ~The Patriot Post
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