Dan Krotz – Our Constitutionally guaranteed rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are routinely taken as licenses for every manner of excess, especially in today’s political environment. And, contrary to the absolute confidence of all the True Believers on social media, it is hard to imagine voluntarily giving any of their candidates an operator’s license.
What makes these licenses excessive is their isolation from the fact that every right flows through a series of obligations or duties grounded in common decency, common sense, and thoughtfulness. It is these obligations or duties that we refer to as responsibilities.
By way of example, Bernie Sanders says that we ought to have the right to a free college education. I agree with him, but also know that such a right is the equivalent of the right to be thin. Attaining a free BS, or an optimal body weight for that matter, involves a number of devilish details that can actually include ideas like handicapping smart people – or skinny people – the way we do race horses and jockeys. Kurt Vonnegut described such a world in a short story from his collection, Welcome to the Monkey House.
Bill Clinton proposed a similar college education free-for-all, but in that inimitable Clinton way, added a supply-side dimension that guided thousands of young people into expensive remedial wildernesses, for-profit diploma mills, and high interest loans that have kept them poor and uncredentialed into middle age. What Mrs. Clinton believes is not quite clear, but it will certainly involve some sort of Sanders-like rhetoric during the campaign, and if elected, a thorough testing of various free-market winds prior to implementation.
As grim as this sounds, it hardly compares to the decency-free, sense-free, and thought-free Monkey House constructed by the Republican candidates. The clearest idea they’ve presented so far is that all the bathrooms in the Monkey House will be strictly sex-segregated, no Muslims can pee in them, and if you’re still scared you can take your gun in with you.
We can’t be sure who’ll clean them since there won’t be any immigrant labor around but, by golly, the GOP promises to Make our Toilets Great Again. What a deal.
Har Harumph har-har. What an entertaining picture of proposed political intent made clear with a practical, everyday example! And I was brought up to think potty talk was all wrong. Thanks!