David McElroy

Do people on the political left really want to help folks? Or do they just want to make sure everyone suffers equally?

A friend of mine is applying for admission to some elite northeastern U.S. colleges, and he found himself on a tour of one of them last weekend. Something he heard from the tour guide says a lot about the way the modern liberal mind works. (I’m using the word “liberal” not in its classical sense — which would have meant what we call libertarian today — but in the mainstream “progressive” sense.)

While explaining information about the campus dorms at this very liberal school, the tour guide said:

“The two new dormitories have air conditioning, but it’s not used in any of them, because the administration doesn’t think it’s fair for some dormitories to have air conditioning while the rest don’t.”

You just can’t make things like this up.

Those on the left don’t seem to care that medical progress will be slowed dramatically by turning more of it over to state price controls and rationing — as long as everybody is forced to suffer the same kind of care. They don’t exactly say that, but it’s clear what their priorities are. This is true across the board with them, it seems.

My friend pointed out one exception to the egalitarian rule. The administration building from which the college president issues his pronouncements on shared student suffering is air conditioned — and it’s used regularly.

Bessie has lived her entire life in fear.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely correct, but she’s at least lived her life just on the edge of fear. She can go from relaxed and happy to tense and terrified in a split second. She’s not just scared of people who might try to hurt her. She’s even scared of the one person in the world who’s fed her and taken care of her for two and a half years — me.

I wrote about Bessie’s sister, Molly, last week. You can read that story if you’d like, because most of it applied to Bessie, too.

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When news came Friday that there had been a bloody attack in Norway, many people assumed that it was done by Islamic terrorists of some sort. Those assumptions produced the kind of hate-filled displays such as the one you see at the right. If the copy is too small to read, it says:

“MUSLIMS ATTACK PEACEFUL NORWAY: WAKE UP CALL FROM HELL!

Once again proof that appeasement does not work! The time has come to declare World War III on Islam. The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.”

(The complete page is still online as I write this, but it might disappear.)

As it turns out, the attacks were actually carried out by a self-described conservative Christian Norwegian with blond hair and blue eyes. This sort of spoils the script for those who are eager to blame everything in the world on the people they hate.

The world is a far more complex place than many people realize. It seems that most people have a script in their heads about the way the world works. Their confirmation bias makes them only see the things that fit their script. The rest is simply ignored, as though it doesn’t exist. It’s bizarre, but it seems to be part of human nature.

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