It has been a terrible year so far. We had a pandemic that crashed a great economy, then a mixed-messaged lockdown and skyrocketing unemployment, followed by riots, looting, destruction of monuments and talk of defunding the police. My dad always told me that he was going to slap me into next year. I wish he were around to do it today.
"Woke" millennials in Philadelphia protested, demanding the city take down the statue of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky when word circulated among them that he reportedly beat up two black guys in the 1980s.
In retrospect we can get a sense of just how odd a year it has been. "Tiger King" is starting to seem normal.
Suddenly, fashionable cocktail party chatter is all about defunding the police. As a libertarian, I believe that if a service can be found in the Yellow Pages, government should not be doing it. So let's defund the entirety of government with its $1 trillion-a-year deficits, see what we miss, and hire it back. My guess is the police might be the only thing we miss.
All I know is that if Democrats abolish the police, driving my sports car drunk is going to be a lot less dangerous - for me.
Our taxpayer-funded government workers, who get their full pay while staying home, tell the rest of us we cannot go to work or to our businesses to make our living. We are in a world where government arrests business owners for opening their businesses but will not arrest looters who destroy someone else's business.
It might be easier to defund bad schools now that kids are being homeschooled and taking tests online. If this keeps up much longer, liberal teachers' unions fear that kids might start questioning their value and, even worse, might start thinking for themselves. I think kids will be better off being taught at home by day-drunks than being entrusted to the liberal education system that indoctrinates rather than educates.
Peaceful and mindful protests are great. And governments need to standardize rules on the use of force and weed out bad cops. We all agree. But it is hard to have a reasoned conversation with groups that are looting Nike stores and are frustrated trying to figure out that HDMI setting on their new 75-inch Vizio TV.
Was it Dr. King, Rosa Parks or Gandhi who said that in order to change society and effect true change, you must burn down the only Wendy's willing to open in your neighborhood?
Now those who want to take down statues, rather than contextualizing them, also want to decide what movies we can watch. "Gone with the Wind" in Atlanta will soon be replaced with "Gone with the Wendy's."
To make matters worse, Washington is getting involved. Now, when emotions are raw and folks are reactionary, is not the time to layer another hastily contrived law upon the heap of laws we have now. Let's take time and reason it out. Knee-jerk reactions by Washington to the attacks of 9/11 got us two worthless, trillion-dollar Middle East wars, the NSA, TSA and Homeland Security, and trampled the Fourth Amendment to give us FISA Court warrants to spy on U.S. citizens.
We are in this bizzaro world where millennials, celebs and the media are trying to "out woke" each other. White hipster art history majors with $125,000 of student loan debt and no jobs are there to interpret for us what African Americans are feeling. It's nice that these kids have taken it upon themselves to interpret the race dialogue we should be having. If successful, it may be the best articulation of black-to-white jive interpretation since Barbara Billingsley's role as a passenger in the movie "Airplane!"
While we are distracted, our enemies conspire. U.S. intelligence agencies say they uncovered a plot by Russia, China and the Taliban to just sit back and enjoy watching us implode.
Contact Ron Hart at Ron@RonaldHart.com or on Twitter @RonaldHart.