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How Did Liberals Get So Uptight?
July 30, 2013
Category: Society > Government and Politics
Liberals are worrywarts — global warming, women, gay rights, and always doing the right thing. Conservatives don't have this problem. Get rid of government is all you need to do, so keep your eye on that prize and keep eating BBQ, hunting anything that moves, and the Lord will take care of the rest.
Quick! When you think PC, what comes to your mind? Liberals, of course. So-called "progressives" are the ones who freak out about too much sugar, fat, trans-fats, germs, car-seats, playground risk, and a thousand other issues. Why is this? Why are liberals always worried, whether it's about disease, war, the status of women, gender, and civil rights?
Liberals certainly don't have as much fun as conservatives who, without batting an eye, tuck into BBQ, a nice fatty rib-eye, and a second slice of gooey chocolate cake. Right-wingers kill animals for sport, throw their trash into one big bin, are never shy about cracking ethnic jokes, and simply don't sweat the small stuff.
For "progressives" every aspect of daily life has to be parsed, examined, filtered for political purity. Read a newspaper? Think of the trees. Eat fish? Worry about mercury and fish-angst on the hook. Of all the words outlawed by worried liberals (leads for dog leashes; 'otherly-advantaged' for handicapped), laissez-faire is the most scurrilous, insensitive, and backward term ever.
Laissez-faire means go ahead and eat the whole box of cupcakes; let your children use the metal slide and the seesaw; duck when someone shoots at you, don't ban guns, speed when you can, toss your cigarette butts over the side, and don't rein in your animal kids at McDonalds.
So, where did this all come from? First of all, liberals see the world as flawed but perfectible. Conservatives see it as shit happens, get over it, life is a necessary Purgatory; we are all predestined anyway, so why bother?
Second, liberals tend to be better educated than conservatives. When you have Yale, you have reasonableness, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other rationality, tolerance, and fairly-considered opinions. When you have squirrel meat, corn pone, and Bible-thumping, life is simple, uncomplicated, and predictable. You worry about the roof leaking, paying for a new transmission on your pickup, and staying one step ahead of the IRS — not about global warming.
Put most simply, Eastern Establishment liberals have more time on their hands to worry about the environment and playground safety and to badger and hector the rest of us.
It is one thing for liberals to be the new self-appointed Chicken Lickens; but it is another thing altogether to spread their contagion like measles. Liberal panic once started spreads through the "progressive" community like the flu or imaginary diseases, not unlike a classroom of students who all get "sick" but are only suffering mass hysteria.
Unreconstructed sixties liberals are simply unable to let go of the idealistic, utopian, and unrealistic vision they had fifty years ago. They are still bleating on about social causes, expressing their outrage at every possible blip in this imperfect world. There is still waaaaay too much racism, sexism, capitalism, materialism, anti-intellectualism in the world, they say, and it is their job is to lead the Crusades against them.
So, being a conservative is a lot more fun. They can say 'Bah, humbug' and combine their trash, unrepentantly drink a few dry martinis before tucking into steak dinner, smoke, drive SUVs, and escape to the most privileged enclaves they can find — far from the hectoring Left.