It just occurred to me that one of the primary strategies of the Left is to keep hope alive. The problem with this is that it requires a willful suppression of disbelief. In other words, the truth.
I happened upon a story in NPR this morning, forwarded to me by one of my lefty friends. And it asked the question about whether or not 'we' ought to find a different way to talk about 'obesity'. I put obesity in quotes because it's very difficult in our mediasphere to think of obesity outside of the way it is being defined every day. The NPR headline raises the issue in the way it assumes we all come to any understanding whatseover, by altering the terms of the 'discussion'.
Let me be startlingly clear for a moment. Fat people are ugly and unhealthy and lazy and it's all their fault. This is something I learned in kindergarten. Fat people should be ostracized. This is something I learned in the second grade and practiced with gusto. I was right, and I've always been right, and it didn't take the mind of a 10 year old to figure all of that out. Except I was as cruel as a child can be, with my little 3 ounce fists, and American political correctness is seeking to overturn such cruelty with their billion dollar charities and megawatt broadcast stations.
NPR would have us all wait until some collection of grad students chasing their own degrees came up with a white paper explaining to us in $10 words the list of diseases etc, that are indicated by 'obesity'. And then we can all sound professional and well-informed (thanks NPR) by our discussion. But we are not all professional and we don't all need to sound well-informed over chardonnay. It's a simple biological fact and it's something we human beings inherently know. People are unattractive for a reason. Poop smells bad for a reason. Ice cream tastes good for a reason. There is no point inflating the value of all those reasons with high-falutin' words and pledge donations to public radio UNLESS
Unless high-falutin' words and pledge donations to public radio are organized to keep the public in a state of suspended disbelief in our own human knowledge and common sense.
If 'we still have a long way to go' and 'the discussion must be kept going' and we must 'keep hope alive' it means that we sit around doing nothing until the proper regime tells us that what we always hoped for despite the odds is now 'True'! Or at least indicated by a groundbreaking study at a famous university, or by a new comprehensive survey by a famous pollster.
Do you get what I'm saying? Hope is the suspension of disbelief in common sense. Hope should be dashed to bits by certainty and that's what science is for, but certainty is the enemy of the ever-shifting discussion and the media impressarios of short attention span theater whom it serves. That's why you can't say 'fat people are ugly and unhealthy and lazy and it's all their fault.' It's to obvious and certain.
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