Life’s Lessons

SOCIALISM “DOESN’T WORK”

by OPOVV, ©2013

(Nov. 15, 2013) — The thing about growing old is that one tends to avoid the mistakes of the past. I think each of us is an individual of the past, present, and future product of errors in judgment: we each have our own unique way of stumbling through life. I certainly wouldn’t make the same dumb mistakes you’ve made, nor you mine. That said, there is a world of advice out there that would do us all good, if we’d only listen.

Books have been written, quotable quotes abound on the follies of us humans, but most of life’s experience have to actually be experienced first-hand for the good advice to finally penetrate our stubbornness. “Don’t touch the stove, you’ll burn your fingers” is a case in point.

There are subtle examples of advice that would best be heeded, parables written on how to live life.  These tidbits of advice certainly didn’t come cheap; just ask anyone with a DUI and listen to the tales of woe on how much a DUI actually costs. Any application that is marked “YES” to the question “Have you ever had a DUI?” is an automatic denial, even if the DUI occurred twenty years ago.

There are other guideposts that mark the mature from the immature, and these markers aren’t measured in time but in integrity, of honoring oneself, of comparing your inner worth to others: what is, when all is said and done, your price? There is nothing more telling than when the love between two people is gone: wasting everyone’s time and adding to an ever-growing scar so that before too long the spark of life is absent from the soul that can be seen plain as day when you look into the other’s lifeless eyes.

In many instances, but not all, a book-learning education has distinct advantages over an equally adept person. A student of history, for example, learns early on that one requires multiple viewpoints to finally reach the kernel of truth of what it really was like, what really happened sometime in the past, with the most obvious example being the Holocaust of World War II. At this time in our human history we are able to discover overwhelming evidence that the Germans did indeed run death camps as factories, producing corpses by the millions.  But what if your resources were of one mind, that the National Socialist Party was a peace-loving and benevolent group of people, just as the Muslims portray themselves today?

In today’s Western Civilization, the guidepost is that of the Bible, a book that has a lot of common sense in order for people to live in peace and harmony. Yet Christians are feared and made targets of hate and death because many people fail to grasp that it’s actually possible to do unto others as you would expect to have done until you; that a person can live a life of peace, free of envy, hate, revenge.

Liberalism only works as long as the ignorant can be kept in check; that the masses have no exposure to other realities, other possibilities, like a pair of blue jeans or an Elvis Presley record in the former USSR. Socialism looks good on paper, but the reality speaks otherwise: it doesn’t work, and there’s no possible way to sugarcoat a dismal failure, to hide the abuses, such as Obamacare being for the masses, but not for the Bourgeois (Congress).

OPOVV