Another Piece of the Puzzle Is Glaring At Us

I’ve been working on an examination of the concept of Utopia and of those who seek it and believe they can achieve it. It was inspired by commenter MoreNuancedThanYou in comments to “The Nature of Evil.” It’s not half done.

And then I read Our Curmudgeon’s screed for today: Repeal the Laws of Economics!

In it he wrote:

“Were the ACT-UP idiots to get what they've demanded, twenty years from today there wouldn't be an AIDS sufferer loose anywhere in the world. They'd all be dead or quarantined awaiting death.” [emphasis in the original]

Economically Our Curmudgeon would be right. It would be hard to find any cures for anything, let alone AIDS, given the sort of medical establishment our Post-modernist effete are longing to foist upon us.

But I think he’s wrong about the continued existence of AIDS victims.

Given the way things are today, I think he underestimates the power of our Politically Correct officials and overestimates the chances of rebellion by the rest of us.

Dear Curmudgeon: Can't you see where, were the ACTUP crowd to succeed in their demands, their physical outcome would not be permitted to become as bleak as you paint it? The rest of us would simply be forced to put up with less health care. Considerably less. The PC crowd would see to it.

You ask: "What would be their basis? And what do you mean by ‘considerably less’?"

I will try not to get too involved.

PC officials will make rules on the same basis that we allow them to champion the "rights" of all their pet groups at the expense of everybody else's rights.

Unlike those of us who have a grasp on reality, I've come to the conclusion that PC officials are actively seeking Utopia. As you so often chronicle, they are building Utopia to their specifications. You also know too well how much of a big deal they make of equality. Well, I contend that equality in achieving happiness is the Utopian's ultimate measure of success.

However, time and again, they find that they cannot succeed in making everybody happy. But they’ll not be deterred, by gum. So they instead resort to the next best thing: making sure that everybody is somewhat unhappy.

They have been attempting to do that for quite a long time now with wealth redistribution schemes. This nation has “poor” whose annual “income” (that is, in all forms of assistance) exceeds by far the working middle class’s income in most of the rest of the world.

I sure hope it’s dawned on not a few of you what I’m seeing here: by what standard would compel the PC official to shrink from employing the same approach in offering health care?

You actually think AIDS victims will merely die off because drugs that could keep them alive them will not be found? No, no. The AIDS patients must, eagerly, be kept around. Their usefulness as a pet group is too great. You are thinking in too limited a fashion, my dear Curmudgeon. You are thinking along morally defunct, non-Postmodern lines of thought. For surely it would not take long for some super person to ask “by what right do the rest of you claim to have access to untainted blood?”

Do I really have to spell it out?

These "Utopians" could very well demand that our blood supplies be statistically rigged to match the percentage of AIDS patients in the country (or even the world).

I’m going to end it right there.

And if some of you -- geniuses I am sure -- think that it is me who is mad, go reread the short story Harrison Bergeron (the link has it in full) and recognize that Vonnegut wrote that long before the Politically Correct became the bold bastards we’ve allowed them to become.