Some people really do have too much time on their hands.
When you hear some of the reasons people give for this or that decision, it can boggle your mind. A few years back the California ballot contained a measure requiring parental notification before girls under 16 could receive an abortion. Now that sounds like a no-brainer to most people that I know — after all, a teacher in California can’t even give a kid an aspirin without prior written approval from a parent or guardian — but opposition to the measure was heated. What was the reason? Well, if the girl was pregnant by her abusive father, then she would just be violated all over again.
How Dumb Can You Be?
How many teenage girls seeking abortions are pregnant by their fathers? One percent? Fewer than one percent?
It’s time to realize that there is no Utopia. Society can never become perfect because people can never become perfect. A certain number of people will always fall through the cracks. They always have, they always will. Improving society is a numbers game — you go for the highest percentage you can get and then move on from there.
Sadly, people who have too much time on their hands spend most of it blocking real progress because it doesn’t constitute 100 percent perfection. Well I got news for them — IT NEVER WILL!
Nothing wrong with lofty intentions — No Child Left Behind, for example. It sounds great. It’s an admirable goal. But be realistic — no sane person could possibly believe that it’s 100 percent attainable. You set a goal, you go for it, and you do the best you can. Some child, somewhere, is going to be left behind. Unless you’re dealing with a classroom of 20 kids, you can’t keep track of them all. Not in the real world.. You try, but…there is no Utopia.
This irresponsible demand for 100 percent perfection causes more harm than good. A farmer in California loses his land because he kills a rat that happens to be endangered. Four firefighters (one of them a woman) are killed when environmental law forbids helicopters from dipping into a nearby lake to fight the raging brushfire that has them surrounded…because the lake contains a protected fish. These are real-world consequences of well-intentioned but poorly thought-out ideology.
There is no Utopia. It would be nice to protect every endangered species from extinction, but at what cost? Evolutionary scientists tell us that more species have already gone extinct than are currently alive. Maybe some species are endangered because their time has come. That may sound cold or cruel, but nature is very cruel and unforgiving. If you’ve ever watched a cat play with a rodent, or a video of a lion bringing down a zebra…it’s painful to watch. On the one hand, the predator has to eat, but on the other, the animal being killed suffers a horrific death. When animals in the wild become sick or injured, they frequently die of starvation. I can only imagine their suffering, and it breaks my heart. Where is PETA at such moments?
There is no Utopia. We can’t fix everything, and maybe not everything needs to be fixed.
Are You Shitting Me?
Environmentalists seem very concerned about animals, but if the animal in question is used for capitalistic purposes their concern seems to dwindle. Instead, you have outrage over “bovine gas”. That’s right, some environmentalists have decided that cow farts represent a threat to the planet. I guess only cows emit gas? Elephants don’t fart? Wildebeest don’t fart? Deer, antelope, elk, and moose don’t fart? Environmentalists don’t seem concerned about emissions from those animals, whose herds around the world run into the millions, but cows — that’s a real danger! All I can say is that it’s really a good thing we wiped out the buffalo a hundred or so years ago, or we’d all be swimming to work because the polar caps would have melted.
I love animals as much as anybody, probably more than most. It hurts me to see a dog or cat lying beside the road, killed by traffic. Animal “shelters” make me cry. But I have to live with the knowledge that there is no Utopia.
Unfortunately, some people seem to think that perfection can be achieved. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the majority of Americans were all for it. But within a few weeks, as casualties began to mount, the cry changed. Now the cost was too high! Did any of those people who were for the war, then against it, think we could bring down a dictator and liberate a nation without losing any American lives? War is all about killing. People die on both sides. You win a war by killing more of them than they kill of you. Did no one understand this?
Maybe in a perfect world you could win a war without firing a shot, but in a perfect world there would be no wars in the first place. There is no Utopia.
Emotions, Not Logic
The problem, in my view, is that too many people think with their hearts instead of their heads. Emotion rules and logic is rarely displayed. Far too few know anything about history, or the lessons to be learned from it. In the absence of such knowledge, they do not think, but simply react. They don’t seem to realize that the world is better now than it has ever been. It isn’t perfect, and never will be; many things need to be done to improve the lives of the underprivileged, but there will never be a Utopia. We can work toward perfection, but we need to understand that we’ll never achieve it.
But if we don’t start using some common sense, we’re more likely to achieve Dystopia than Utopia.
(Oh, and by the way — in the novel, the perfect nation of Utopia held slaves.)
–August 6, 2008
Private Thoughts 