Forget The Eagle; Maybe The Ostrich Should Be The West’s Symbol
By Ann Huggett (07/02/03)
The evening started out innocuously enough. My husband and I were invited to attend a neighbor’s casual dinner through my brother and sister-in-law. The kids and moms were doing their noisy thing in the kitchen and dining room: making drinks, cooking up chili, baking cookies, squealing about which non-talent in Hollywood has a crush on so-and-so and what to do for sunburn. It was the usual mindless stuff.
The kitchen was so crowded that John and I retreated to the living room to talk as best we could over the noise and to enjoy the 9-acre view. That’s when the first sign of trouble started: the drink I was handed by my sister-in-law, the drink with the good thick head, wasn’t the tangy beer I expected but some ghastly, sickly-sweet concoction of seven-up, orange sherbet, and lemonade! My request for vodka to put some punch in my punch was greeted with the derisive, “Not in this house!”
Then the Lord of the Manor walked in. Although we knew the wife, this was the first time that we had met our host. He seemed sane enough until he opened his mouth. For the next stultifying 2 hours we were regaled with do-it-yourself home repair stories complete with descriptions of clay pan soil analysis and what types of sump pumps work best for basements. This smug, humorless man, with the cold, dead eyes, wasn’t interested in anything beyond his own little domain.
Fortunately, before my eyes completely glazed over, my brother showed up from work and joined us. We did the usual family small talk while eating but, once dinner was over, our host commandeered the conversation back to his interests.
Fearing for my sanity, I changed the subject and started talking about world events and conservative news sites on the Web. What a mental breath of fresh air! The whole world at one’s fingertips! Great ideas, essays and debates available to anyone, no matter what their level of political sophistication. British news! American news! Australian and New Zealand news! Canadian News! Book and movie reviews! Freedom from the politically correct likes of ABCCBSNBCCNNMSNBC! A fun time is guaranteed for all!
Was this new subject of any interest to our host? Not by the scowl on his face!
He greeted my brother and husband’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Web as an alternate source of news with the same contempt. Figuring one picture worth a thousand words, I immediately offered to show him what we were talking about on his computer so he reluctantly took us to his home office.
Pulling up a favorite site, I took him straight in to the Forum Index and asked him to pick a topic. He wasn’t interested. Huh? Not interested? How could anyone turn down International news or news from Israel, New Zealand, or Canada? Didn’t he know there was a war on? It was all over the second I asked that question. It was like I had thrown boiling water on a cat.
And that’s when we got “The Lecture”. Our host paced angrily around the room, disclaiming on the folly of concerning oneself with events over which we were powerless. As far as he was concerned, politics to him meant getting potholes fixed in the local roads. My husband, brother, and I, who are rabid news junkies, looked at each other in stunned disbelief.
How can anyone be so willfully ignorant in this day of mass communication? On what does he base his vote come election time? How can he guide his family and protect them from the creeping socialism infecting the Western World? How can he calm their fears and tell them what pitfalls to avoid in the big, wide world? And why the heck didn’t I verbally rip him a new navel for being such a gross ignoramus?
Manners kept me from verbally attacking a man in his own home for the rules he sets. What can you say to somebody who not only doesn’t know what is going on in the world but also doesn’t want to know? Especially when you’re in his home and he’s just handed you a book on digging septic tanks? How do you get through to him?
All I could think of was that scene in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Present pulls back his robe to reveal two shriveled, starving children to Scrooge. Their names are Poverty and Ignorance. Scrooge is frightened of Poverty but is warned by the Ghost to fear Ignorance more.
Dickens was very right in his choice of what to fear more. Poverty can be either temporary or a lifetime but it doesn’t define a man’s soul. Poverty can be overcome and you don’t need money so much as perspective. Just because one don’t have the cash flow of our new breed of elected aristocrat or talentless, corporate hyped entertainer for the masses doesn’t mean they’re poor. Poverty is a circumstance, not a character flaw.
Ignorance, willful or otherwise, warps and twists humanity. Unscrupulous men through the ages have understood that knowledge is power and have conspired to keep the majority of mankind powerless. Ignorant people are easily manipulated and made into pawns to do their masters’ bidding.
Imposed ignorance on an unknowing population is not the fault of the individual. That person can be excused his ignorance especially if he takes steps himself to learn what has been withheld. For that person there is hope and growth. Some one in the dark can reason themselves out of that darkness if they start asking, “Why?” then go looking for answers.
To turn one’s back deliberately on knowledge and to deny the effectiveness of the individual is the worst form of ignorance and anathema to Western Civilization. This attitude constricts the mind and kills discovery. It denies awareness of oneself as a rational human being capable of action. When one is striped of autonomy like that, one retreats into a tiny, miserable, smug little world.
One expects to see this coming from Islam and socialism since both are very similar in attitude to truth, knowledge and individualism. Truth, to the socialist is a plastic tool, which changes to accommodate an ever-shifting vision of cosmic justice as defined by over-educated, worthless elites. Truth to a Muslim is whatever his fatuous mullah tells him it is. Both socialism and Islam completely reject any knowledge that contradicts their version of reality even when that reality is the actual hard-core, rock-bottom truth. Islam and socialism hate the concept of the individual and demand subservience to group think. Socialism and Islam are a match made in Hell.
However, One does not expect to see it coming from Mr. Average in either the US, UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand because Mr. Average has no excuse. The information is there. We are inundated with it. If we choose to purposely ignore it like our host, we condemn ourselves to failure and ultimate defeat against two of the most vicious enemies Western Civilization has ever seen: Socialism and Islam.
Back at the party, my blessed brother did some quick thinking and announced that he had to go home and would we like to leave with him? We apologized to our host and beat a hasty retreat. Will I ever be invited back to discuss sump pumps? The answer is a resounding NO!
(Printer friendly version) Email: Ann Huggett
