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Must Love Liberty Exclusive to STR January 3, 2007 I’m
delighted to report that I received an excellent response to “Must
Love Pasta,” the singles ad for my anarchist son.
In fact, I got more reader responses to it than many of my
previous columns. I know
what you’re thinking: Damn, I should have thought to write that
ad--I could have written it!
Well, the early bird still gets the worm, my friend.
Sometimes it pays to be a head-job; it costs me a lot of sleep,
but my little mind, which never stops, generates lots of ideas.
(Admittedly, they’re not all good ones.) Don’t
email me asking if I’ll construct an ad for you just yet.
While it’s always pleasant to hear from readers, the response
to This
prompted a line of inquiry: where
are all the female anarchists, or at least, anarchist
sympathizers? I’m
pretty sure they can read, use a computer and are not all already spoken
for. We can’t hope to
change anything without first examining it.
I can’t say for sure, but here I offer you my answer to the
question. To maximize your
reading enjoyment, hum with me now, Peter, Paul and Mary style: “Where
have all the young girls gone, long time passing…” A
great many Americans are of the Christian persuasion, which doesn’t
necessarily preclude the love of liberty, but it doesn’t help.
(I admit that I pick on Christians a lot; it’s nothing
personal. If they didn’t
try to throw their weight around so much, they wouldn’t find
themselves such a target.) If
we were completely honest here, we must admit, and I’m pretty sure
that Christians themselves would also admit, essentially, that they are
not notoriously open-minded about faith or spirituality as say, Hindus
are. Even though race,
color, nor creed were no stumbling blocks for Jesus, believers today
actually consider open-mindedness a transgression as an article of their
faith. For instance, it
would be fine with me if my mate believed on the Lord Jesus as his
personal savior. It would,
in all likelihood, not be fine with such a theoretical mate if I did not
believe. I’m
afraid it gets worse. Not
only are non-believers wrong, “deceived” as they say, true believers
have basically declared a jihad against freedom in general because they
are afraid. In other words, all people should only be able to do what
believers think they should be able to do; the milk of human kindness,
civil rights and mutual consent be damned. Basic laws of physics (every
force creates its own counterforce), the law of unintended consequences
and reality are also to be damned. As
Christians just about have the conservative market cornered, I’m
afraid we lose about half the females to intolerance.
I can offer no solution beyond this insider information.
Keep humming though: “Where
have all the flowers gone, long time passing?” Luckily
I’m a two-time loser – a recovering Christian and a
recovering liberal. As such,
I see what I believe to be the flip side of the problem. True liberals
(not political whores) are compassionate, sensitive people.
A
lot of women are liberals. A
woman’s brain is hardwired with an enormous corpus
callosum, compared to a man’s.
It’s the part of the brain that connects the left and right
hemispheres. It provides the
ability to multi-task (something most men are not nearly as good at as
the average woman.) The
larger corpus callosum also allows women to more easily practice
“groupthink,” which can be very useful.
For
instance, my husband gets out of bed in the morning for work, gets
dressed, touches all the bases in his routine and is out the door.
A woman has a plan before her head hits the pillow, which answers
the question, “How can we all get where we need to go tomorrow, and
what do we need to bring with us?”
The corpus callosum allows women to notice things outside the
immediate, such as dirty socks on the floor, the empty dog bowl or the
trash that needs to go out, all on the way to answer the phone. Liberals
are “feeling” people; they feel feelings, they are interested in
feelings, they talk about feelings and they worry about the feelings of
other people. This might
sound funny to someone who isn’t a “feeler,” but I’m not joking.
Some people are wired this way.
They are often creative and make good writers and artists.
If I weren’t one of these feeling people, I wouldn’t get it
at all, so I don’t blame you for finding this humorous.
All you non-feelers, you’ll have to trust me on this.
It’s not something we do to avoid real work.
Feeling is real work, vital work to people, women, like us. Ayn
Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” is completely lost on these women
because it’s not “nice.” It’s
not that they’re stupid. They’ve
been indoctrinated into emotional dependency, culturally and by years of
government schooling: a lifetime of being taught not to think, to be
nice, even if it means nailing yourself, and everyone else to a cross.
For
instance, I have a dear liberal friend who, over the years, has been
involved in various employment situations and life experiences.
It’s as if she has two opposing and absolutely separate thought
streams in her mind. Each
time she personally encounters a bureaucracy, whether it is the Head
Start, Immigration, government schools or any kind of welfare program,
she readily admits it is an utter failure.
However, she usually votes a straight Democrat ticket.
In fact, I have no doubt that voting for Hillary for president
would be a personal highlight for her.
What
am I to do? I understand her
desire for compassion and enjoy her company, so every time an injustice
comes up in conversation (something which happens more and more lately),
I seize the opportunity. I
simply ask her if this is what she wants to pay for with her tax
dollars. It’s a start. Most
liberals do not take the time to examine the handout philosophy very
much, because a long, hard look will reveal the glitch in the basic
premise of their pipedreams called democracy, equality and fairness.
These are based on the initiation of force, and therefore,
invalid, useless, immoral and unsustainable in the long run.
It would be terrifying for a feeler to see that the operating
system they’ve relied on for a lifetime is really not nice at all, but
violent and very, very dangerous. They
would feel bad, something to avoid at all cost.
They must keep promoting their “compassionate” government
because that’s how they’ve been doing it! It
would hurt too much to face the truth and to stop.
(When we discuss this insanity, my husband says he’d pull his
hair if he had any left.) Here’s
a good example of what I mean by the virtue of selfishness.
My kids learned early on that most home school group activities
are so micromanaged by well meaning adults that they are simply not fun.
Recently, an “unorganized” softball field became available to
us once a week for a couple hours. One
mom said she was only securing the field for the children at the request
of her son; that the games would not be run by adults.
Sis was leery, but with pickup games around here going the way of
the A
lot of kids turned out for it. All
the moms sat down while the kids poured onto the field and eagerly began
organizing themselves. I
could see the children were hashing out a game plan that would be fun
and workable. You could feel
the vitality. Teams
were chosen based on spreading out the known talent.
As always, someone had to be picked last.
At this point one mom, probably the one whose kid was last,
jumped into the fray to control it.
She couldn’t bear the moment.
She thought it meant something about her kid, and therefore her.
She decided that she would be the decider.
She picked teams of pairs.
How
could she not see that she had to pick some pair last too?
That she was initiating force to achieve a social goal?
Fairness is about honesty and mutual cooperation, not some third
party’s idea of equality mixed with initiating force.
The last pair she chose wasn’t the one containing her kid.
Being picked last either means something or it doesn’t.
The kids gave it no meaning, the decider gave it tremendous
meaning. Being
picked last means nothing, aside from the fact that there are always
kids who are older, stronger or better at some particular sport.
How could she not see how she was telling the children quite
openly that she did not trust them, when she wasn’t being trustworthy
herself? The activity
quickly died out for lack of attendance.
They lost my girl to that game and we lose roughly the other half
of the female population to this type of insanity. I’m
not saying men or women are right or wrong.
We’re wired in certain ways.
We all have natural egoic challenges to being loving and free.
A woman is not necessarily more loving because she minds other
people’s business, and a man is not necessarily more free because he
chooses to live unconsciously. (I’m
not talking about my husband here, really honey!) I
work mainly from home. My
home schooled kids, my husband and I have a pretty good time together.
The highlight of a typical day is one of us coming home with a
good story. Our humor tends
to be inbred, though, in that there are a lot of things we just can’t
talk to most people about, or at least not for very long.
Many people in our culture are sadly lacking a sense of humor.
Religion is for sure out of the question as a topic for
discussion. It’s the third
rail of pleasant conversation--touch it and everyone’s sense of
happiness goes right out the window. Along
the same vein, naturally, is politics.
This is a subject with tremendous potential for fun.
The words and actions of politicians vacillate between the
utterly absurd/ridiculous on one hand and the utterly horrifying on the
other. Even the horrifying,
though, does not necessarily preclude opportunity for fun. Years
ago, a friend told me, during a dark time of my life, to make sure that
I always find something to laugh about, no matter how dark that humor
has to get. That friend had
survived the suicide of her teenage son, so when she gave me advice
about life, I listened. Anyone
who can pick herself up and dust herself off after that kind of
unimaginable suffering knows something.
Nothing nearly as horrifying as that had ever happened to me, so
I figured I had no excuse when it comes to enjoying life, and I must
insist on doing so no matter what. Since
then I have been honing my ability to laugh in the face of life and its
rawness. It’s a truly
useful skill. You can laugh
or you can cry. Sometimes
you have no choice but to cry, but sometimes you do get to choose.
Like Ferris Bueller says, “Life’s short.
You have to get out and enjoy it once in a while.” In
my social intercourse with other people in the world, which is pretty
limited at times due to my own choosing, this happiness philosophy is
just about useless. The War
for Terror emanating from the Washington Whore Party has proclaimed
victory, despite the ongoing tragedy in Admittedly,
not everyone falls squarely under the banner of liberal or
conservative--they are merely useful terms for exploration and
discussion. Both groups are
fear-based. They are afraid
of other people’s freedom, and this carries over into their politics,
which is dangerous for the rest of us.
The
fear mongers have destroyed liberty, much of life and they’re closing
in on happiness fast. The
fear factor is big business, and it’s the single cause of the shortage
of anarchist females. “Where
have all the young girls gone, long time passing? *“Where Have All The Flowers Gone” Lyrics by Pete Seeger
Retta Fontana is an atheist, anarchist, baker, potter, parenting teacher and a student of forex.
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