Progressives vs. Life
Yesterday, I received an e-mail from my old friend Tony Bauer, former co-host of the best political talk radio show they ever made (which explains why it is no longer made), replying to my recent observations about the inherent infantilism of progressives, particularly as relates to the easygoing justification for the mass slaughter of abnormal babies on the grounds that they are “not the child that the mother had wanted.”
With reference to the increasing eugenics push in Europe and North America to eradicate Down Syndrome by killing all fetuses that seem likely to be born with this condition, and the emotional argument to the effect that people with Down Syndrome are a burden to their parents, and even throw embarrassing public fits, Tony notes:
I have seen so many Down Syndrome people who seem to be happy and amazed as they see the ocean, or watch a game, or simply shop for food with their parents. I suppose some of them occasionally “throw a fit” in public, but what modern progressively spoiled brat hasn’t?
A fair point. Heck, I’ve thrown fits in public a couple of times. I suppose my mother (or wife, as the circumstance might have it) could have ripped my head off and thrown my remains in a trash bag at the time. Or if she (or she) had had a crystal ball and been warned that I might someday do such an embarrassing thing, she (A or B) might just have killed me in advance and been done with the whole problem.
That, after all, is the progressive way: foresee a problem and solve it — by killing the source of the problem, criminalizing his existence, or divesting him of all his rights, property, and means of defending himself against his rightful punishment for the evil of being imperfect (on today’s progressive terms, that is, which have nothing to do with any historical or even moderately adult notion of good and evil, and which will of course change tomorrow).
The mental block that allows such non-reasoning to run amok in the progressive mind, as I have explained many times, is the rejection of the principle that one is responsible for the consequences of one’s voluntary actions — at least not when those consequences happen to be inconvenient or suggestive of a possible hinderance to one’s future “freedom,” i.e., random pleasures. (As I have also pointed out recently, progressive infantilism knows no boundaries of superficial political affiliation, as Ayn Rand, an idol to many Republicans and Libertarians, fell into exactly this irrationality on the topic of abortion.)
The denial of the reality of life’s consequences is perhaps the most aggravating and insurmountable absurdity of the run-of-the-mill progressive indoctrinee.
“I’m pregnant. I didn’t want this result. Therefore, I am not to blame for this result, and can in no way be held responsible for this result.”
You could multiply this exact logical structure in a hundred ways that any ordinary progressive would easily see as an invalid argument: drunk driving, leaving a child baking in a locked car, etc., etc.
But even after all those examples, if you then reintroduced the abortion case and said, “See? Same logic? So how about this?” the progressive would still look at you as if you were out of your mind.
“But I didn’t want this result. Therefore, I am not to blame for this result….” Brick wall.
And this shortcoming or convenient blindness of the progressive mind is no isolated weakness. It bespeaks a basic, comprehensive derailing of the maturation process. For as I have discussed at length recently, among other places in a series of articles entitled “As I Lay Living” (read Part One here), life cannot fully be lived, let alone understood, except as a unified, continuous whole, fully owned and willed, which is to say that the meaningful life is, in a sense, nothing but “consequences,” and purposive living the willing embrace of these consequences, most importantly (because most difficult) the redemption of those actions and outcomes which, in their immediate context, seem most irredeemable.
