Alienation from the Left

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Rachel Alexander

Although the Left has successfully convinced itself that its own philosophy is the most compassionate one, it has not fooled everyone. This is because the Left's idea of compassion is not compassion at all - it is an arrogant, elitist way of treating fellow human beings.

The Left's version of compassion is to extract money from everyone else in society and use that money to set up government programs to redistribute money to the needy people in society. All this is done without the "generous" people on the Left ever having to donate a penny of their own take-home pay or interact with the poor and despondent members of the community. They are able to "practice charity" without ever really doing anything charitable. This deceitful method allows the Left to remain segregated in the safety of their lofty, ivory towers, appearing to care about the fact that most people will never share their privileged surroundings.

In order to silence any opposition to their authoritarian redistribution schemes, the Left portrays those who point out the failures of these programs as "selfish" or "uncaring." However, these types of hate tactics rarely succeed in persuading anyone to join their philosophy and actually make people want to distance themselves from "the Left."

Most of the Left's critics are part of the "evil Christian right" - the Left's catchall phrase to characterize anyone who disagrees with them. The Left does not like the "evil Christian right," because the "evil Christian right" believes in helping people on an individual basis; getting to know them, helping their families, spending time with them.

It is ironic that those being attacked by the Left do not attack back because they actually are kind, compassionate people. It is telling that Larry Flynt and his ilk on the Left are smearing the top Republicans, but the Republicans are not going after top Democrats.

Through its name-calling tactics and its influence in raising taxes to exorbitant levels, the Left has been able to reduce the individual generosity of the "evil Christian right" to a minimum.

Consequently, society is dotted with the products of the Left's false compassion. Soup kitchens and clinics are a prime example. Often, the service is poor and the workers are rude and do not care because they are paid minimum wage and are serving the government, an abstraction, not the people. Instead of genuinely caring people who volunteer their time and money to help the needy, the Left has successfully replaced most of them with underpaid workers who may only be working there because it was the only job available.

Another area where the Left falsely professes compassion is affirmative action. The Left insists on admitting minorities into higher education based on their skin color, not their grades and test scores. This makes the Left feel like they are completely remedying the problem of minority underachievement because they think that accepting enough minorities to equal their percentage in the population solves this problem. Unfortunately for the minority students, this method does not solve the academic gap, and it stigmatizes them.

The real problem lies in why minority high school students' grades and test scores are lower than white students. The Left condescendingly assumes that minority students are not capable of bringing their scores up to the level of white students, and refuses to adopt any programs that might truly make a difference for minorities in grade school.

For example, school vouchers present a caring, well thought-out solution that would allow poor minority students to attend expensive private schools where students are pushed along a highly competitive track, resulting in higher grades and test scores.

Yet the Left opposes school vouchers, preferring to be a slave to the public schools' teachers' unions than to actually consider that perhaps it is the public schools that are defeating the minority students, not the students' innate abilities. Moreover, dissenting voices are automatically labeled "racist," thus silencing debate over a complex and pressing matter. Self-congratulations take the place of serious concern for the problem at hand.

It is tragic that elitism passes for compassion nowadays.

Meanwhile, frighteningly large numbers of poor and needy people in society continue to slip through the cracks while the Left remains "moral in intent."