Hope and Hate

My home town offers a fireworks show, as do many communities large and small, every Independence day. I am fortunate to be able to watch it from my front porch, as I did this past Saturday.

Here is the denouement of twenty minutes of rockets’ red glare, with Mother Nature contributing a flash of lightning as punctuation. Apparently, Mama N was in the patriotic spirit that night.

As I watched, a glencairn of Old Forester 1920 in hand (really - can you get any more American than Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey?), I let my mind wander as it would. Among the idle thoughts that materialized in my brainpan were the realizations that, at that very moment, there were Americans royally pissed off that the nation they find endlessly and uniquely faulty was celebrating its semiquincentennial birthday, there were Americans royally pissed off that, from sea to shining sea, people were enjoying the unnecessary release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere... and that the overlap between those two sets of Americans was high.

I also realized that they’d be just as pissed if Kamala Harris were President, because they are incapable of not* hating anything that Americans enjoy.

Or rage-seeking in general.

Ponder this face-palm-inducing tweet:

English is an interesting language. I’m not the first to note that it’s three languages tossed into a blender, then liberally seasoned with a bunch of others. For this reason, or at least I suspect for this reason, there are many synonymous words that convey subtle, nuanced differences. I enjoy and embrace those nuances, and have a thesaurus hot-keyed on my Web browser so that, when I write, I can seek out words that more perfectly convey my points. Every so often, I come across a new word and add it to my stable.

Fun fact: Thesauruses are not commonly found or used for most other languages (Japanese is the exception). Ponder, for a moment, what that means.

Because I hope to convey my thoughts as precisely as possible, I don’t shy away from 10-dollar words. The people reading what I write are almost invariably doing so on devices that give them instant access to dictionaries, so I don’t see it as unduly burdensome. Some might not care for my sesquipedalian predilection for , but when you try to please everyone, you please no one. Really, I’m not doing it to show off or enhance the appearance of erudition (in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m doing it for fun in this post). I do mean it when I write that I look for the perfect word for each occasion.

This may cost me some readers, but so it goes. While I am very grateful to my paid subscribers, and the cash flow the blog generates motivates me to keep it going, I don’t do this to keep a roof over my head or food on my table. I can write as I wish, about what I wish, without having to bend the knee in pursuit of what sells best. That, by the way, is why I try to avoid pandering as much as possible, even though pandering would very likely grow my audience much faster.

So, my reply for mizteefranklin would be, should our paths ever cross, [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. Yes, the redactions are also me having fun.

I’d then tell her that her ignorance is not my problem.

The good thing about ignorance is that it is easily addressed. Ignorance is merely a state of being, not a pejorative. Others of her (presumed) lot, the people who wallow in -isms, are quite fond of screaming “educate yourself!” in response to any behavior they deem unacceptable, so they don’t consider ignorance unresolvable either. They err, however, in imputing ignorance via that demand. Truth is, many of us who don’t buy into their worldview know full well what that world view is. We choose to reject it, for one reason or another.

That world view is encapsulated in her tweet, by the way. It is the automatic assigning of blame to someone else. She (I presume her pronouns) won’t consider simply looking up a word she doesn’t understand. Or, for that matter, exercising her freedom to ignore whoever is using words she doesn’t understand. No, she demands that others alter their ways to accommodate her intransigence.

That’s if her demand is based on her own vocabulary inadequacy. If, as is so often the case, she is demanding others “simplify” their speaking or writing on behalf of third parties, she is committing an even greater act of narcissist solipsism. To presume that whatever oppressed group (in this case the less ‘abled’) is indeed what she believes and* needs her help is a summation of what’s wrong with the people who claim the cultural high ground.

I looked up mizteefranklin after I wrote all of the above. Her Tik Tok offers “Bedbound gardening grandma TV and Comic writer | Disabled Advocate.”

Two thoughts come to mind.

First - not understanding a word here or there is not, barring a broader cognitive disability, a “disability” in and of itself. As I already noted, ignorance is easily addressed, especially in the Internet age.

Second - writer and advocate? Easy to conclude that she is “white-knighting” here. Her anger at someone else using big words seems like a waste of energy and outrage, though. As I noted, if you don’t like someone’s use of big words, just don’t read what he or she writes. You can vote with your attention and non-attention.

Unfortunately, people like this are hard to ignore. Their outrage sparks both supportive and antagonistic responses. People inclined to “-isms” will jump on the bandwagon, happy to have something new to be angry about. The rest of us see this crap and instinctively recoil with OFFS or ‘what the hell is wrong with you’ or ‘do you really not have anything better to do?’

But, on or about the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we can choose instead to celebrate the greatest nation on the planet and in history... and most importantly, the values - rooted in individual liberty - that made it so. We can enjoy our fireworks and our bourbons and the sweet, sweet schadenfreude of knowing how much those piss off the people who only enjoy being pissed off.

American values are not only how we got to where we are, they remain aspirational. We can always do better and ask for better on the liberty front. We have a mountain of evidence that those values work better than any of the collective schemes the angry haters regurgitate at us all day, every day. Hope is healthier than hate, and while we should remain forever resistant to their illiberal and anti-freedom ways, it’s healthier for us to embrace the hope rather than wallow, like them, in hate.

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Just a bit more about that “automatic assigning of blame to someone else.” As I have often shared:

It’s the exaltation of victimhood, and an excuse to demand that others take care of their wants and needs. That’s on top of demanding that everyone speak, act, behave, and think as they demand.

It’s why woke and socialism are natural cohorts… and it’s why we who love liberty must forever resist both.