I've listened to the Southwest Airlines ads enough that they rubbed off on me. At the end of their jingle as presently constituted, they announce that "You are now free to move about the country." Although that concept doesn't belong to them necessarily, it reflects very much the values of the land as I will attempt to illustrate.
This morning on Yahoo I read that the Burmese death toll from the recent natural disaster may top 40,000 people. What the stories don't tell you is why so many people stood vulnerable to lose their lives in something which though serious rarely causes that high of a death toll in the civilized world.
The people in Burma and nations like that live under dictatorships that keep them shackled in poverty. Under the auspices spouted by liberals in this country, the powermongers in those countries centralized everything to the benefit of everyone except the general public. As they focus power, influence, pelf, oversight, control, etc., in the hands of an elite few, the rest are relegated to an existence that depends on their ability to eek out an existence by the sweat of their brow. Given that the lowlying coastal plain is the only place fertile enough for them to easily grow enough food to survive, they accumulate there, vulnerable to the unfettered bufferings of storms that inevitably sweep that section of the world.
Poor people in communist nations and dictatorships have no hope, no liberty. They remain at the mercy of demagogues, fearing the power they wield and the threats they levy, for only the elitists at their national helm can help them, and those same elitists can do them much damage. This type of government-populace relationship is not that far gone from our own hemisphere, said loss occassioned by the rise of democracies. Our free governments replaced regimes with concern for everything except people. Monarchies of Europe were equally oppressive, boasting that same attitude of the oppressors shown by Tim Curry's character Cardinal Richelieu in Disney's Three Musketeers (1998) when, after Rochefort kills a peasant caught stealing from his coach he announces with relish, "One less mouth to feed". The leaders of Burma, according to Rush Limbaugh's show yesterday, will probably see this as a windfall that will help their nation be more prosperous now that 40,000 of its impoverished, malnourished, and maladjusted citizens that otherwise drain their resources no longer constitute a draw.
At one point in this nation, our regime reflected similar values. The time of the gunslinger and the "wild, wild west" reflected the disinterested dissembling of our leaders for the welfare of the denizens. At least in America, given our gun laws for instance, you could defend yourself when the government abdicated its responsibility appertaining thereunto.
Even in the absence of strength, because Americans are not shackled by poverty, limited by nationalization of industry, and burdened with tax obligations, when threatened with extinction, they could pack up and move west. The west came to symbolize opportunity for everyone through his industry to not only subsist but thrive if only he had the gumption without interference by the legislature, without fear of confiscation, and without being relegated to the consistent drudgery of subsistence agriculture. Many of them just survived, but unlike in Burma nobody stood in their way.
Fortunately, this type of idealism still permeates at least the messages presented by Walt Disney Pictures. Their movies celebrate the opportunity made possible by the Americas by which any man may make a better future for their children. In his soliloquoy on his ship, Jack Sparrow offers this rationale for why he seeks to regain it, "What the Black Pearl is is freedom." It enabled them to go and do what they wished, no man to call master, no obligations to an oppressor.
We continue to see horrific disasters because government keeps people in poverty. Kept low by the liberal government of New Orleans, the poor people there continue to live largely bereft of their previous comforts after Katrina. However, even the poor in America have it better than the poor in other countries. For one thing, they are still alive.
This morning on Yahoo I read that the Burmese death toll from the recent natural disaster may top 40,000 people. What the stories don't tell you is why so many people stood vulnerable to lose their lives in something which though serious rarely causes that high of a death toll in the civilized world.
The people in Burma and nations like that live under dictatorships that keep them shackled in poverty. Under the auspices spouted by liberals in this country, the powermongers in those countries centralized everything to the benefit of everyone except the general public. As they focus power, influence, pelf, oversight, control, etc., in the hands of an elite few, the rest are relegated to an existence that depends on their ability to eek out an existence by the sweat of their brow. Given that the lowlying coastal plain is the only place fertile enough for them to easily grow enough food to survive, they accumulate there, vulnerable to the unfettered bufferings of storms that inevitably sweep that section of the world.
Poor people in communist nations and dictatorships have no hope, no liberty. They remain at the mercy of demagogues, fearing the power they wield and the threats they levy, for only the elitists at their national helm can help them, and those same elitists can do them much damage. This type of government-populace relationship is not that far gone from our own hemisphere, said loss occassioned by the rise of democracies. Our free governments replaced regimes with concern for everything except people. Monarchies of Europe were equally oppressive, boasting that same attitude of the oppressors shown by Tim Curry's character Cardinal Richelieu in Disney's Three Musketeers (1998) when, after Rochefort kills a peasant caught stealing from his coach he announces with relish, "One less mouth to feed". The leaders of Burma, according to Rush Limbaugh's show yesterday, will probably see this as a windfall that will help their nation be more prosperous now that 40,000 of its impoverished, malnourished, and maladjusted citizens that otherwise drain their resources no longer constitute a draw.
At one point in this nation, our regime reflected similar values. The time of the gunslinger and the "wild, wild west" reflected the disinterested dissembling of our leaders for the welfare of the denizens. At least in America, given our gun laws for instance, you could defend yourself when the government abdicated its responsibility appertaining thereunto.
Even in the absence of strength, because Americans are not shackled by poverty, limited by nationalization of industry, and burdened with tax obligations, when threatened with extinction, they could pack up and move west. The west came to symbolize opportunity for everyone through his industry to not only subsist but thrive if only he had the gumption without interference by the legislature, without fear of confiscation, and without being relegated to the consistent drudgery of subsistence agriculture. Many of them just survived, but unlike in Burma nobody stood in their way.
Fortunately, this type of idealism still permeates at least the messages presented by Walt Disney Pictures. Their movies celebrate the opportunity made possible by the Americas by which any man may make a better future for their children. In his soliloquoy on his ship, Jack Sparrow offers this rationale for why he seeks to regain it, "What the Black Pearl is is freedom." It enabled them to go and do what they wished, no man to call master, no obligations to an oppressor.
We continue to see horrific disasters because government keeps people in poverty. Kept low by the liberal government of New Orleans, the poor people there continue to live largely bereft of their previous comforts after Katrina. However, even the poor in America have it better than the poor in other countries. For one thing, they are still alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment