Won’t Someone Please Think of the Government?

The government is what they had really been talking about all along when they flipped through their roster of victims, Mother Earth, illegals, criminals, welfare queens, drag queens, and put their solutions on the table, solar panels, open borders, open prisons, free stuff and pronouns.

Social justice really means more government. It’s only government that can get rid of the racist highways, rising (or falling) temperatures, the isms and the phobias, save the planet, keep cities weird and raise up the wretched, huddled masses yearning to never work a day in their lives.

Every form of victimhood is government misspelled. Whatever the question, government is the eternal answer. And now the answer is being questioned not in rhetoric, in op-eds, position papers or FOX News commentaries, but by being taken out in the middle of D.C. and sliced up.

The media has scrambled to make portions of the government identifiable and relatable as it had done for Central American gang members, murderers on death row and six foot tall men who want to play professional sports against five foot tall women, but this is just too much.

There are women who write love letters to serial killers, school shooters have fan pages and there’s a booming market in Hitler memorabilia, but there’s nothing relatable about the gov.

All the stories of USAID contractors weeping their way back to America, the EPA bureaucrats who fear that they may have to get real jobs and the Department of Education hacks who won’t know what to do without their end of the year office furniture buying orgies have touched no one.

“I would love to leave, but I don’t know where I’d go,” a bewildered State Department employee told Politico. He had perhaps heard of the concept of the private sector, but in D.C. such things are one with Santa, the Easter Bunny and a balanced budget as stories you tell little children.

What is one to do when not working for the government? You may as well ask the caged bird to look up at the big blue sky instead of the rusting bars and bowl of turgid water. Just don’t ask the average American outside the bedroom communities of Virginia to wear black for them.

761,358 Americans lost their jobs last year. And their jobs were generally of the kind in which they worked for a living and had their salaries paid by private enterprises, not taxpayers.

Americans have never liked the government much, but then what people ever have? The difference was that over 200 years ago, their ancestors did something about employing measures that ranged from generous applications of tar and feathers to tax collectors to gathering with guns on the tops of hills and shooting at the whites of the eyes of redcoats.

Even all these centuries later, Americans remain unsympathetic to the travails of government.

The media, that is to say the communications arm of the government, would like us to be very upset that $5 billion in funding for electric car chargers (of which a mere 55 have currently been built at the rate of a nice $90 million a charger) have been cut off by the Trump administration.

The public is told to demand that half a billion in foodstuffs and grain be shipped by USAID to Somalia, Afghanistan and other even less nice parts of the world. And the public shrugged. It is told to be agitated that $900 million in Department of Education research must be set aside.

A St. Louis school district where only 1 in 5 children can read will not be getting its electric buses. Can’t you ignorant rubes see what the government does for you, the media prods.

Unlike old school class warfare, very little of this has to do with any portion of the public. And even welfare queens look down on government bureaucrats as by far the bigger parasites.

The proper attitude in D.C. is to look at.$236 billion in “improper payments” in one year and shrug it off as the cost of doing government business. And the public has long since also learned to shrug it off as government corruption. But that hasn’t fostered any affection for the trillion dollar budgets or any conviction that government spending ought to be sacrosanct.

When congressional Democrats take the government hostage semi-annually and threaten a government shutdown (as they are planning to do next month), the public only cares because they are told that it will affect them personally. But very little of the DOGE business now being enacted affects anyone except government employees. And there is very little that the great army of government employees does that is of any interest to anyone other than themselves.

If the Department of Education, the EPA and most of the rest of the morass of government were to disappear tomorrow, the effect would be as negligible as the impact of USAID being rolled into a rug and shipped back to whatever third world country it came from was on Americans.

Some might optimistically believe that it would free up trillions in taxpayer money (but such optimists have never seen more of D.C. than the museums) but the one thing it would not do is significantly affect the lives of most people. Some would be freed of assorted regulatory burdens (that would probably soon be supplemented by even more state regulatory burdens) and only the lifetime career employees would hang around D.C. like canaries with busted cage doors.

Making the case for them is easy for members of Congress, but hard for anyone else.

Crazies admire serial killers and terrorists because they appear to be moved by some great and terrible passion, but the expanding government bureaucracy is where leftist activism ends. If the purple haired shouter in the street with a keffiyah draped over their pronoun buttons and Che t-shirts is where the movement begins, the big gray brutalist buildings are where it ends.

And the Trump administration is proposing to sell off those buildings to the highest bidder.

Activism, no matter how evil, can be inspiring, but there is nothing inspiring about 22,000 square feet of office space, stacks of Hammermill paper and rows of printers all producing enough government regulatory documents that they could be used to build a paper bridge to the moon.

Communism was exciting when Lenin and Stalin were shooting children, but by the 80s, not even the most die-hard Communist could make the Kremlin seem like anything except the headquarters of a stolid tyranny run along ossified rules by drunken elderly bureaucrats.

D.C. is our Kremlin and nobody outside that government citadel cares for it very much.

“Won’t someone please think of the children,” is a timeless classic. “Won’t someone please think of the working class” had a pretty good run for the Left. Even recent variants such as “Won’t someone please think of the cartel members” and “Won’t someone please think of castrating the children” scored points in parts of San Francisco, but “Won’t someone please think of the government” won’t play anywhere outside of Washington D.C.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/357275568178361339/comments/default