Half Past the Month
Testing the Boundaries of ‘Extremism’
“Our mission is to marshal the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues at the state and municipal levels.” — the Indiana Policy Review Foundation
A COLUMNIST at the Indianapolis Star is said to have privately described members of our foundation as “extremists.” Fair enough. In our 33 years we have never quarreled with how others might label us.
That said, a review of the Gannett Company’s positions as expressed in editorials and in front-page articles by “explainers” (a new journalism title) puts any calumny from that quarter in perspective.
It may be fun for journos born after the fall of the Iron Curtain to imagine a society that takes from each according to his or her commandeered bank account and gives to each according to his or her politically determined need. They wouldn’t want to live there, though. It is unnatural — so much so that governments that have tried to enforce such an abominable arrangement have had to shoot, hang, starve or guillotine (whatever was cheaper) half their citizenry.
That would strike some as extreme.
And what is normal about thinking you can pick your sex as easily as changing a Hollywood wardrobe? Ditto for a world where mothers, normally the very model of altruism, are told they can kill inconvenient children, or where “family” is defined so broadly it welcomes dysfunction. Or determining criminal arrest, prosecution, incarceration and now even healthcare by demographic vector?
How about rewriting the history of a great nation to conform to a worldview formed in a bull session in a sophomore dorm? Or suspending the laws of economics to ignore the dynamics of private property and the differences resulting from labor, ambition, opportunity, productivity and choice?
Who believes they can reorder a scout troop, a corporate board, a school staff, a police department or a congress on the basis of melanin count and somehow maintain functionality or, for that matter, civil peace? Do we need to mention the surrender of national borders to random immigrants?
How about those who think that given enough time and money they can teach monkeys to talk? Or refuse to consider the most recent discoveries in physics and cosmology because at the moment those disciplines favor a theist rather than an atheist explanation of the universe? Who have never questioned a theory of life’s origins put forward almost 200 years before the invention of electronically enhanced microscopy.
Finally, we do not argue with the Star that both culture and education can change human society for the better. We would try to explain, however, that these evolve within a framework that is prescribed by divine will, natural law or both.
Is that extreme?
If so, the more of it the better before this nation falls flat on its face. — tcl
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