David McElroy

There’s a war in this country between people in love with consumerism and those who seem dead set on stopping it. I’m a conscientious objector in that war, because I’m not on either side. I defend the right of people to be as shallow and materialistic as they want to be, but it doesn’t mean I like it.

Few things symbolize our consumer culture the way the Christmas buying season does, and the focal point of that season seems to be the traditional opening — the day after Thanksgiving that we’ve come to call Black Friday.

Three days ago, I wrote about the efforts of anti-consumer activists — who I’d say are downright socialist in their orientation — to stop people from buying from major companies on Black Friday this year. The people waiting in line for a Black Friday sale here Thursday night certainly didn’t believe that big companies were dictating anything to them. It’s when I look at these two groups — the materialist-oriented throngs of shoppers on one side and the anti-consumerist socialist activists on the other — that I realize just how ambivalent I really am about this. I don’t like or agree with either side.

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Why are U.S. troops still in Afghanistan? Can anybody come up with a coherent, logical and pragmatic reason? I can’t. All I know is that the longer they stay, the more we’re turning former allies into enemies.

Early Saturday morning, U.S. forces killed 28 Pakistani soldiers, but that’s about as far as agreement goes on what happened. The Pakistani government claims the attack was unwarranted and unprovoked. An unidentified western official claims the attack on the Pakistanis was self-defense. In the meantime, Pakistanis are in the streets protesting, as you see above. I don’t know who’s right. We’ll probably never know the facts. Either way, though, we’re managing to turn millions and millions of people against us. Isn’t it time to declare the mission over and pull out?

The stated purposed for invading Afghanistan was to destroy terrorist training facilities in the country and to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. Well, bin Laden is dead and we’ve destroyed the facilities that concerned us. We’re not going to accomplish anything else, contrary to the bluster of various politicians about completing the mission.

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One of the common rallying cries you hear among people at Occupy Wall Street is, “This is what democracy looks like!” If you understand what democracy ultimately means, that should scare you.

As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn said, “Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.”

Freedom is what matters, not whether the majority gets to make up rules for the rest of the population. Remember that freedom and democracy aren’t the same thing.