Are We Angry Or Afraid?

Headline: “US Murder Rate Continued Grim Climb in 2021, New FBI Estimates Show”

Headline: “63% of Likely Wisconsin Voters Oppose Restrictive Livestock Regulation”

Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote: “Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life. To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state…coercion, to be secure abroad and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be free from the daily drudgery of mere survival.”

Because I think the usual baskets we get thrown into—“left” and “right” are just sloppy shorthand, I often think about how we actually sort ourselves out vis-a-vis what’s going on in the news.

One way to think about it: Are you afraid or angry.  Chances are, you are some of both, but tell me which one is your primary reaction, and I have a good idea how you’re voting.

Is your view of government that it should pick you up when you fall, supply what you don’t have, remove risk from your path?

Do you see a government that isn’t doing enough? Or one that is doing too much?

California is expanding $1,050-per-month GBI checks. Are you glad the government is “helping you pay for inflation”?

Or mad that government policies, on everything from currency to central banking to spending, foisted that inflation upon you. And now, with the shrewdness of a hoary card player, they are figuring out who to take money from and who to redistribute it to, for maximum political popularity?

Everywhere I look, I see politicians lecturing us that we no longer need “fossil fuels”, and then, with the scarcity they created, they are on bended knee to countries we despise and are despised by. Or yelling at us to hurry up and “go green”—with no accounting for how, how to afford it, supplies, infrastructure, etc.

Telling people to go green is about as realistic as telling them to flap their arms and fly.

I see the mismanagement of foreign relations and military interventions covered up with massive “aid packages” to other countries, while having the audacity to tell us we don’t pay enough in taxes if we want infrastructure.

The progress we have made, and they once presided over, is suddenly out of fashion, or racist, or somehow unwoke. Hence, places once safe, from streets to schools, become dystopian and dysfunctional.

Civilization looks pretty fragile in its former strongholds.

Does it make you afraid or angry?