The OK Salvadoran
Quicko.
There's this dead good story in the Bible somewhere, called "The OK Salvadoran". It's about this bloke who is set upon by Trump supporters, gets mugged and beaten up and is left for dead in a pool of blood and vomit near the entrance to the men's restroom in a shopping mall in Baltimore. Well, after about ten minutes a Nobel prizewinning economist with a recessionary chin and anti-austerity beard comes along, glances at the bloke and makes a mental note to mention him in his weekly syndicated column as an example of the failure of current government policy to stem the rising tide of social unrest. He then disappears into the gents. A few minutes later, a Social Justice Warrior with green hair and gender-fluid eyebrows happens past on the way to the Preferred Pronouns' Toilets, which are next door to the Gents. Seeing the half-dead man lying on the ground, one is immediately triggered, as the sight reminds one of a deeply traumatic childhood experience of lying in the playground gasping for breath, having just been stereotyped as "bossy" by someone one thought one could trust to always say nice things. So one immediately organizes a demonstration, attended by nine people, calling for the no-platforming of anyone who disagrees that trigger warnings are needed in such circumstances. The demonstration is a moderate success, garnering six thousand YouTube views, several retweets and a seat at the United Nations. A few minutes after the demonstration has dispersed, a guy from El Salvador emerges, stumbling, from a nearby patriarchy. On seeing the man on the ground, he rushes over, applies an improvised tourniquet to the profusely bleeding right arm, updates the hapless victim on the latest score of the Chicago Cubs v. Los Angeles Dodgers match, and calls an ambulance on his cellphone. The Nobel prizewinning economist, meanwhile, is sitting on the toilet staring glumly at his own cellphone, on which the following text message can be read:
SORRY, THIS WONT WORK. YOU COLLECT HAMSTER FRIDAY. RED PANTIES NOT ACCEPTABLE. JANICE.
The moral of the story? Well, I may be wrong but it seems to me it's saying that being decent to people is what counts, and the rest is just fluff. Also, that you can be decent to people even if you are from El Salvador and have sticking-out ears. And finally, that to be decent you don't necessarily have to have a plan to kickstart the economy, or a blueprint for a better society. The better society, if there is one, is you.
Surprisingly (if you are me) or unsurprisingly (if you are clued up) this is not the majority view. According to the majority view, you cannot be OK, you must be good, and to be so you must dismiss people's voluntary choice as borderline irrelevant, and strenuously support some variant of the great consensus, which says that good things have to be done by governments, not people, and the means by which these good things are done must be coercive, not voluntary. It is this majority view that caused you so much dismay in School Debates, wherein every motion presented smuggled in a House and a Should, e.g. This House Believes that People Should Replace Their Gas Cookers. It didn't matter whether you agreed with the motion or disagreed with it, what mattered is that you had been mentally transported to Shouldistan, the country where anyone's business is everyone's business, where there is nothing wicked or obscene about deciding things for other people, and where nothing you did or felt or believed as an individual mattered until it had been validated by the empowering tribe. Thus are we inducted into a society where everyone is at once individually irrelevant and collectively empowered - the opposite of what your mild and magnificent nature understands and instinctively reaches for.
A pox on 'em. There are some much better ideas knocking about.
There's this dead good story in the Bible somewhere, called "The OK Salvadoran". It's about this bloke who is set upon by Trump supporters, gets mugged and beaten up and is left for dead in a pool of blood and vomit near the entrance to the men's restroom in a shopping mall in Baltimore. Well, after about ten minutes a Nobel prizewinning economist with a recessionary chin and anti-austerity beard comes along, glances at the bloke and makes a mental note to mention him in his weekly syndicated column as an example of the failure of current government policy to stem the rising tide of social unrest. He then disappears into the gents. A few minutes later, a Social Justice Warrior with green hair and gender-fluid eyebrows happens past on the way to the Preferred Pronouns' Toilets, which are next door to the Gents. Seeing the half-dead man lying on the ground, one is immediately triggered, as the sight reminds one of a deeply traumatic childhood experience of lying in the playground gasping for breath, having just been stereotyped as "bossy" by someone one thought one could trust to always say nice things. So one immediately organizes a demonstration, attended by nine people, calling for the no-platforming of anyone who disagrees that trigger warnings are needed in such circumstances. The demonstration is a moderate success, garnering six thousand YouTube views, several retweets and a seat at the United Nations. A few minutes after the demonstration has dispersed, a guy from El Salvador emerges, stumbling, from a nearby patriarchy. On seeing the man on the ground, he rushes over, applies an improvised tourniquet to the profusely bleeding right arm, updates the hapless victim on the latest score of the Chicago Cubs v. Los Angeles Dodgers match, and calls an ambulance on his cellphone. The Nobel prizewinning economist, meanwhile, is sitting on the toilet staring glumly at his own cellphone, on which the following text message can be read:
SORRY, THIS WONT WORK. YOU COLLECT HAMSTER FRIDAY. RED PANTIES NOT ACCEPTABLE. JANICE.
The moral of the story? Well, I may be wrong but it seems to me it's saying that being decent to people is what counts, and the rest is just fluff. Also, that you can be decent to people even if you are from El Salvador and have sticking-out ears. And finally, that to be decent you don't necessarily have to have a plan to kickstart the economy, or a blueprint for a better society. The better society, if there is one, is you.
Surprisingly (if you are me) or unsurprisingly (if you are clued up) this is not the majority view. According to the majority view, you cannot be OK, you must be good, and to be so you must dismiss people's voluntary choice as borderline irrelevant, and strenuously support some variant of the great consensus, which says that good things have to be done by governments, not people, and the means by which these good things are done must be coercive, not voluntary. It is this majority view that caused you so much dismay in School Debates, wherein every motion presented smuggled in a House and a Should, e.g. This House Believes that People Should Replace Their Gas Cookers. It didn't matter whether you agreed with the motion or disagreed with it, what mattered is that you had been mentally transported to Shouldistan, the country where anyone's business is everyone's business, where there is nothing wicked or obscene about deciding things for other people, and where nothing you did or felt or believed as an individual mattered until it had been validated by the empowering tribe. Thus are we inducted into a society where everyone is at once individually irrelevant and collectively empowered - the opposite of what your mild and magnificent nature understands and instinctively reaches for.
A pox on 'em. There are some much better ideas knocking about.
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