Perhaps the most disliked phrase ever to reach anyone’s ears is this one: “I told you so.” No one wants to hear it – ever. Many who’ve heard it have thereafter distanced themselves from him who said it, even if he was a close friend or beloved relative. But what gives “I told you so,” in all its succinctness, its cutting power comes from what the speaker forbore to say:
I tried to warn you.
You wouldn’t listen.”
And whether “I told you so” is delivered somberly, or with a hurt look, or with an air of superior wisdom has no bearing on its accuracy. If it’s true, it’s true.
The most piercing occasions of “I told you so” arise from tautological observations akin to “If it’s true, it’s true.” Here’s a currently relevant example:
Everything will be about race.
Ponder that one for a while, Gentle Reader. Does a refutation occur to you? I can’t come up with one. But we’re not left-wingers. Apparently they think it’s possible to make everything about race without everything being about race. A remarkable achievement, if they can pull it off.
Let’s have a few examples:
- What’s the priority here?
- At ‘Undoing Racism’ workshop, participants told ‘all white people are racist’
- Outrage ensues when four white students win MLK Jr. Day essay contest at University of Montana
- Six women quit Liz Warren campaign over 'culture' of racism — Warren blames 'legacy' of racism in the US
Read the stories, please. They border on incredible in the exact sense. Yet they really happened. Moreover, they’re not exceptional; they’re representative of the prevailing trend.
I’ve been there occupationally. That is, I’ve been peripherally involved in episodes in which an employee being told that his performance was unsatisfactory – in one case, that he was being fired for it – tried to allege racism on the part of his supervisor. The consequences are always ugly and destructive. No one profits, not even the racism-shouter. Yet it’s to be expected now that everything is about race.
Is there a Gentle Reader who could not have foreseen this?
The Left has done its damnedest to make everything about race.
The consequences were foreseeable.
Many of us told them so.
They chose not to listen.
Race, of course, was the entering wedge for the plague of identity politics that has expanded to encompass sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, creed, and lesser characteristics and allegiances. The Left, whose most important aspect is that of a coalition of hate groups, has sought to exploit every way in which Americans can be categorized. And of course they’ve blamed us in the Right for the resulting atmosphere of animosity and division.
As with many other social phenomena, it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The urge to laugh is strongest when the biter is bit by his own contrived grievance, as in the case of the Warren for President Campaign cited above.
Imagine this, if you will: imagine the reactions of the racism-shouters had Warren hired only Caucasians to work in her campaign. Imagine further the capital her opponents would make of it. Yet the practice of race-dominant hiring, sometimes called “preferential treatment” or “affirmative action,” is what opened her to the accusations leveled against her and her staff: it made attaining a particular level of cross-racial “diversity” more important than any other consideration, including talent, energy, and staff harmony. Talk about being caught between two fires!
This isn’t exactly new, either. Remember when Al Gore, during his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 2000, was accused of having “a low Negro quotient?” Remember who he hired as his campaign director immediately after that? Donna Brazile!
A microcephalic idiot could have foreseen where we’ve arrived after all this.
It will continue. It will probably get worse. The reason is not hard to find:
The Left has nothing to offer anyone that must not first be taken from someone else. Therefore it must create groups that see persons not in the group as enemies to be defeated, subjugated – and mulcted.
Race was the Left’s opening sally. It worked very well, for a while. It doesn’t work well today. Too many whites have disdained to accept the burden of guilt for things done by others long dead. Too many blacks have participated actively, even gleefully, in the brutalization of other blacks. And more and more American blacks are waking up to the knowledge that they’ve been shamelessly exploited.
The other fomented divisions have had some success as well. Yet present trends continuing, they too will fail their fomenters. Sooner rather than later, I hope; America has had enough of this and is anxious to get back to business. But time will tell.
Time will also tell us something about good sense and political courage: who is willing to say today that the politics of division will be the Left’s undoing, and who will be willing to say in the aftermath that it was all as foreseeable as tomorrow’s sunrise.
Just don’t expect the division engineers of the Left to admit that we told them so.
"The Left has nothing to offer anyone that must not first must be taken from someone else". That statement hit me like a ton of bricks. In a nutshell, that explains their entire message. How tragic.
ReplyDeleteENVY yes... and LUST and SLOTH and WRATH against those who preach restraint and morality and hard work and so on.
ReplyDeleteStupidity is a human trait, not necessarily a political Not all the left subscribe to the stupidity of identity politics. Only the liberal elite who have no other policies to offer (and the libtard media at CNN and MSNBC and their dupes). Check out the populist news analysis of Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti at TheHill.com -- Saagar particularly is very astute on this topic.
ReplyDelete"The Left has nothing to offer anyone that must not first must be taken from someone else" That observation is so on point that it should be enshrined somehow. I know I shall borrow it. Thank You Mr. P.
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