The Death of Liberalism

The death of Liberalism was played out recently live on TV, and broadcast around the world via satellite. After Hurricane Katrina we gazed in amazement at perfectly healthy and obviously well-fed people, pleading and begging for someone to save them. Apparently oblivious as to why they couldn’t help themselves, they immediately turned on President Bush, as if to say, “Big brother, stay out of our lives, until we need you to pull our pans out of the fire”.

The problems of New Orleans were also blamed on poverty, but in retrospect this answer falls short. With welfare, Social Security, free health care, and access to a free education, how can we say anyone in America is suffering through poverty? As I child for a few years I experienced this so-called poverty, after my Dad became disabled. With disability checks for him, my mom and 3 children amounting to nearly $2000 a month, plus food stamps, my father still struggled to make ends meet. I can recall eating chicken and bologna a lot, and once doing without turkey for Thanksgiving. For a while we lived in a housing project that was always in a state of disrepair.

The root of course is not poverty, but a loss of hope and initiative. If we can always depend on the government to solve our problems, what reason is there for us to get up in the mornings, and give something back to society? Of course the same excuses were given in France during the Muslim riots there. The justification was racism and poverty, but more likely it was shear boredom that incited the rioting by the “youths” of France. It is like this throughout the Middle East. Most terrorism experts will tell you that the majority of radicals are not poor but come from middle class to wealthy Arabs, including Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bib Laden. They feed on the dissatisfaction and idleness of the masses, kept in a state of universal welfare bought with the oil money of the West.