Look in the Mirror

President Trump and his MAGA base like to blame other people for all the problems we face. Drug problems are caused by Venezuelan and Mexican cartels smuggling fentanyl precursor chemicals such as norfentanyl, 4-AP and 1-boc-4-AP sourced from China onto unsuspecting Americans. Crime problems are caused by third world countries emptying their prisons of criminals and shipping them across Biden’s porous borders. Economic problems are caused by countries around the world taking advantage of America’s free trade policies to hollow out America’s manufacturing base by pouring goods into our country causing huge trade deficits that are impoverishing America. President Trump’s response has been to treat other countries (traditional allies as well as traditional foes) as economic and political actors who (aided and abetted by the American left) are working against America’s interests and its people.

The progressive left and its woke adherents blame America’s problems on historic racism that resulted in enslavement, colonization and genocide in our country and around the world. These policies were the inevitable result of a civilization and economic system based the greedy exploitation of oppressed black, indigenous and people of color (known as BIPOC) in America and around the world. This civilization was created and maintained by white men in order to dominate others across the globe. The left’s response has been to blame our problems on the oppressive Western Civilization, the capitalist economic system that powers it and the white men that created it (other than the sufficiently remorseful white men on the progressive left).

These two groups have declared war on each other. They do not view their opponents as fellow citizens with differing points of view but as enemy forces composed of unrepentantly evil people. Each side fills social media with vitriolic accusations against their enemies that no one outside their base believes. They take to the streets to oppose whichever group is currently in power. Violence is justified by the irredeemable nature of the enemy.

Some of you readers will belong to one or the other of these groups and will agree with me in my description of your enemies but will scratch your heads and wonder how I got your side so wrong. But this blindness afflicts us all. Those of us not aligned with the radical extremes blame MAGA and the progressive left for all our problems. But if you really want to blame someone, first you must look in the mirror. As Michael Jackson sang in his 1987 hit, Man in the Mirror, “If you wanna make the world a better place Take a look at yourself and then make the change.”

Let’s face it. It is not the Venezuelans that are causing our drug problems. They (and the Colombians, and the Mexicans and the Chinese and a lot of other folks) are only one-half of the equation. The other side of the equation is the ravenous appetite that Americans have to consume drugs. If and when President Trump stops the flow of drugs from Venezuela, that flow will be replaced by some new drug entrepreneur. Heck, we have been fighting the war on drugs for over fifty years – and we’re still losing. We are the reason there is a drug problem in the United States. If you snort cocaine at some glitzy party, you bear some responsibility for the tens of thousands of drug related deaths in Mexico, Central America and elsewhere.

And don’t blame your job problems on immigrants. All the jobs that used to be filled with illegal immigrants are now available thanks to President Trump’s mass deportations but they are not being filled by job hungry Americans. Those jobs are now vacant and crops are not being picked, hogs are not being slaughtered and trucks are not delivering produce because there is no one to do the work. We Americans don’t want those nasty low paying jobs especially because we have SNAP benefits and other welfare programs to tide us over.

And the workers with H1-B visas that MAGA wants to get rid of won’t be replaced by Americans either. We don’t have the skills or the training thanks to leftist educational policies from kindergarten to doctoral programs. Our kids want to study gender and ethnicity instead of electrical engineering and calculus. Hell, they can’t even make change from the cash register without looking at the screen to tell them which coins to grab. We don’t want to get out of Mama’s basement to get a job halfway across the country. Gen Z favors lifestyle over hard work. I presume their lifestyle will require copious amounts of welfare. Quite honestly a lot of us will be easily replaced by AI unless we take charge of our own education and training and make ourselves useful.

America is becoming as soft and useless as Europe. Europeans complain about all the tourists cluttering up their historic sites but, honestly, Europe has little more to offer than tourist sites. Their rules and regulations combined with net zero carbon goals suppress their commerce and industry. They pay the highest taxes in the world and are also the most highly indebted. This is the path America is heading on and our fate will be the same fate as Europe with one significant difference – we won’t have an America to bail us out and keep us safe.

We need to pay down our debt and use our taxes to make the country strong – not make our people dependent. I would be willing to pay more taxes if I knew the money would go toward achieving those goals. We also will need to ignore the politicians who offer us tax cuts or additional welfare benefits and elect public servants willing to tell us the cold hard facts.

Finally, we need to take a cold hard look into the mirror. We have become a corrupt and decadent people. We care more about Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour than national defense. We care more about fantasy football than work productivity. Gambling consumes our sports networks. We gamble on politics and gamble on crypto-currency. Sexual deviancy is celebrated instead of treated. The results are predictable, corruption, collusion, self-dealing, a collapsing birthrate and a sense of bewilderment. We don’t understand that freedom is not licentiousness. The flip side of freedom is duty. If we are to be citizens of a free republic we have a duty to be responsible participants in the management of our society.

We forget where we came from and how we got here. We know that we didn’t get everything right. There was slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. There was the Trail of Tears and broken treaties. But we worked hard and endured many hardships. We fought wars to end slavery and to liberate Europe. We fought a revolution to establish the concept that all men are created equal and that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights. Yet we are now in the midst of a bitter struggle that threatens to overturn and destroy all that we have created.

We are told by the right that America has lost its greatness and that only President Trump can make America great again. But greatness to the MAGA movement means winning a zero sum game of global power. But they don’t realize that the alpha male is always the target and the world they envision will be a dangerous place. They don’t realize that all the people around the world that are trying to come to America are not seeking wealth and riches. They are coming because they clearly see before them the liberty we take for granted.

We are told by the left that the problem is our Western Civilization. We are told that other cultures are equally valid and that America must allow the people of these cultures to incorporate their cultures into America. Bunk! It is one thing to enjoy the cuisine and art of different cultures and a different thing to overthrow the values and principles that made us what we are. There are a lot more people coming here to take advantage of America’s Western culture than Americans moving to other countries (even with Trump as president). People coming to America must assimilate and accept the values and principles for which we fought a bloody revolution. But before these immigrants can become citizens of America we must show them by the example of our behavior what it means to be good American citizens.