Liberalism Kills Communities

Remember this week when it comes time to vote in November. What we’re seeing across America is what Democrats have created coming to fruition; it’s the natural end result of a progressive philosophy that works overtime to absolve individuals of their responsibility and place blame on others for political advantage. It’s rage for the sake of motivation to vote, to hate, to not think. It has worked for progressives in the past, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t work for Democrats now. But in order to work, it has to destroy. Liberalism, progressivism, or whatever they choose to call the Democratic Party’s agenda, kills.

It kills people, it kills businesses, it kills communities.

The first two are obvious, the last one may be less so. The political left spends a lot of time tossing around the word “community,” but they don’t mean it the way you likely understand it. It, like so many other words bastardized by leftists, has been redefined to be more useful to those who seek to use it to empower themselves. The new progressive definition of community kills actual communities; it was designed to do so.

Growing up, your community was where you lived, the people and places in your immediate area. When riding bikes was all the rage, I remember the thrill of combing the sides of the road the morning after the 4th of July with my friends looking for anything with a wick – the firecracker, bottle rocket, smoke bomb, or whatever – that slipped through some adult’s fingers in the darkness and excitement the frenzied night before. We’d gather them up, and with matches swiped from some adult (seemed like everyone smoked then), we set off to find a safe place to blow them off.

That “safe place” was not needed because we were concerned with our physical safety. No teenage boy is aware of that concept. It was needed because if we were spotted lighting off fireworks, let alone playing with matches, we were in trouble. The idea of losing a digit or eye wasn’t even a fleeting thought, avoiding getting in trouble was all-consuming.

My group of friends and I pedaled off to find a place where no adult could see us because almost every adult was the on-ramp for a pathway back to one of our parents. And that pathway ended with getting in trouble. We never did find that elusive foolproof place. After a couple of bangs, zooms, and pops, one of our parents would use the cell phones available at the time – going into their backyards and yelling their kid’s name, the siren call from nature’s intercom of either dinner or trouble – and the fun was over. If one of our parents knew, they all would soon.

Our community looked out for everyone in it. What we spent our time trying to thwart was actually what helped keep us healthy and sometimes alive. One time, we found a beat-up dirt bike laying in the woods. It had been trashed and crashed, was probably stolen and abandoned after being ridden to near-destruction. But we could make it run. The brakes didn’t work, neither did the throttle, which was stuck on full, but it could be started. It could also be stopped, sort of, by pulling the sparkplug wire off the plug and killing the engine as everyone sort of grabbed you as you slowed, or by simply jumping off of it and allowing it to crash. We found it, it was already trashed and all bent, so who cared?

After a couple of days, someone either talked or we were spotted on our makeshift track, about 10 feet of which was visible from the K-Mart parking lot, and the party was over. Our glorious motocross careers over before they began.

It was annoying at the time, as getting in trouble always was. The draw of that dirt bike, like the appeal of the fireworks stashed in the hope that we could return to them later (they were usually scavenged by some other gang of friends who then unsuccessfully set off to find their perfect place), was unrelenting. But it was soon replaced by something else stupid and self-destructive in the circle of a prepubescent boy’s life.

That definition of community is largely gone now. It’s not unusual for people to not really know their neighbors, but to not care at all about them or their kids. The word has been redefined away from meaning your immediate area where you live to now focusing on the least relevant, least interesting part of any human being: their immutable characteristics, like skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. All the things the left uses to define who someone is and how they should think or vote.

The progressive philosophy would have you care more about what happens to someone with whom you share any of these traits than you would your next-door neighbor who doesn’t. And it’s working.

We hear all the time about the white community, the black community, the Hispanic community, the gay community, the trans community, the whatever way you can think of to divide people community; they even subdivide people further – the black trans community, for example. Anything you can imagine, any difference that can be thought of and used, is.

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