"Someone already had"

Via Protein Wisdom by way of Maggie's Farm, a former leftist describes a change of heart:
Peace Corps did not focus on the "small beginnings" necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. "Only intolerant oppressors judge others' cultures."
I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people's clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love." Delousing homeless people's clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.
Later, the author became a teacher in depressed Paterson, N.J.:
My students know -- because they have been drilled in this -- that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.
And to close, a quotation from a commenter:
"You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me."--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

3 comments:

Gringo said...

Everyone who leaves the left has his or her own reasons, but there are often reasons in common. I certainly can identify with a lot of the ten reasons listed. A further point: in my case, conclusions which I had reached years before resurfaced when I decided to leave the left.

Over a decade after I left high school, I stopped voting for Democratic Party Presidential candidates. Out of a "plague on both your houses" mentality, I commenced voting for Third Party candidates. Yet years ago in high school, I had voted for Harold Stassen in a straw poll, which could be seen as a "plague on both your houses" vote even then.

My first vote for a Republican Presidential candidate was in response to Democrats' fondness for the Sandinistas. I had too much experience in Latin America, and also too much book learning, to fall for the Sandinistas. Yet there was a tie back to my New England hometown, as my hometown had an inordinately high number of refugees from Iron Curtain countries.

The article talks about lefties loving the working class in the abstract but hating it in the actual. I experienced this when I attended a regional high school in a town that was better educated and more affluent than my hometown. At the regional high school, people from my hometown were labeled "dumb farmers." I learned at an early age- well before I left the left- that the in-group looking down at the out-group was not confined to "redneck white Southerners" looking down on blacks.

Ymar Sakar said...

Change the world or change yourself. Can't have everything, like the creed says in AMerica.

Ymar Sakar said...

In human society, Gringo, there must also be a group at the top and a group at the bottom.

If there isn't one, humans naturally make one up as they go along.

Thus those who seek to change the world, want to fight against the universal power of entropy and order.

Those who want to change themselves first, merely switch around which group is at the top. The one that deserves to be, obviously.

Generally, there are two ways to climb the social ladder. Poison and sabotage everyone above you, then ascend like Hussein the God of all things rich and poor. Or, build yourself up by changing and improving yourself through merit or virtue.