The Smoke Break

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The Newest Enemy Of Liberals: Best Friends

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One thing that stands out about progressive liberals is their fear.  Perhaps their greatest fear is that they aren’t good enough to make the cut, so instead of working on themselves, gaining knowledge, building skills, they take the wasteful tack of tearing down others to their level of incompetence.  It is the root cause of entitlement mentality derangement syndrome and why His Transparency was able to successfully cloak a skimpy resume accompanied with the false message of “hope and change”.

But the truth is that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  To get ahead you have to work hard, and you often have more failures than successes.  What we see in our schools today, however, is a rigid “no failure” posture.  Johnny didn’t study for Friday’s test as hard as Janey and therefore can’t properly answer all the questions?  That’s ok.  It’s not really Johnny’s fault (or even his parents’ fault) so we’ll give him a pass.  As the years roll on, Johnny continues to be coddled like some hot house flower and is eventually graduated with a serious lack of knowledge and skills but a strong sense he can do no wrong and that he’ll be taken care of regardless his effort or outcome.  Janey, too, is left with a sense that effort doesn’t really matter; both are left lacking the skills required to push ahead when the going gets tough or any understanding of accomplishment or the pride that comes with it.

In the real world, Johnny would be deemed incompetant and passed over for his lack of knowledge.  Indeed, this is the reality now faced by the current generation of our coddled graduates; is it any wonder that young people voted for President Walking Eagle in record numbers?  He is a walking, talking poster child for this twist on the Peter Principle (the theory that a person will rise to the level of their incompetance).  And it is this reality that the progressive liberals fight with tooth and nail in their fear-filled howls of protest against “big business”, “oligarchies”, and “greedy corporations”.

Now, if attempting to equalize outcomes isn’t bad enough, progressive liberals are dangerously taking this idea even farther.  Marc Thiessen points to an article in The New York Times that has outed their latest “we, the sheeple” ideology:  best friends are a bad thing.

…the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

To be sure, bullying has as much place in the schoolyard as it does at the dinner table or in the board room, but to use the fear of bullying in our schools to deny children the means of learning how and when to trust others by deliberately stripping away their opportunity to form close bonds with one another is both absurd and dangerous.  Not receiving an invitation to your best friend’s birthday party does not have the same ramifications as not receiving an offer for a much-needed job.  Yet it is through dealing with such tough denials by others from within the safety of the family that we learn the skills needed to survive and, indeed, to thrive.

“No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a treacherous and betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a treacherous and betraying friend,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist who is an author of the book “Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children.”

While in can be argued that schools are one of the most important environments in which our children learn social skills, it is not the school’s responsibility to control a child’s relationships unless it directly interferes with the school’s primary directive:  the teaching of information.  The responsibility for managing a child’s relationships properly belongs to their parents; a responsibility American society continues to abdicate to others with dangerous agendas at greater and greater risk.

When Left Isn’t Right

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This whole mess in which we find ourselves is made up of numerous strands, each interwoven with the others.  But underneath the fabric it creates lies perhaps the real root cause and that is an overall shift in cultural norms.  Certainly the media has always had a rather liberal bent; indeed, liberalism is rather the media’s very DNA for it has historically been the herald of every people’s movement away from tyranny and abuse.

When the media moves as far to the left as is the case in America and such overarching abundance as is found here deteriorates into materialism, things quickly begin to sour.  Andrew Klavan is a screenwriter, author, and contributor at PajamasMedia and one of his recent posts looks at the souring American culture from a unique perspective.  I recommend it highly.

But it was one of the comments on this piece that caught my attention.  One “Paul from Hamburg” posted, “The coverage of the tea parties did have one positive effect. It is now incredibly easy to separate the serious journalists and commentators from the Democratic shills:  Anyone who said “tea bag” can’t be considered a journalist.”

Touche.  In a nutshell, this statement authenticates Klavan’s exhortations to set aside the need for validation from those who wish the country to have only a single voice and to pursue excellence in the creative arenas based on the time-honored principles that are now so often met with ridicule.

For it is only by standing up for what is right and doing what is right, in all areas, that we can make the positive difference so desperately needed to save this country.