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COMMENTARY
October 5, 2011
Money talks
The "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations - now franchising across the U.S. and Canada - are the latest fashion statement from the Left, for the fall political season, in a year that has already offered the Arab Spring, and the debt riots of Europe. North Americans hate to miss out on a trend.What can be said to these people? Where to start? If you honestly think the banks are making too much money, then you should buy some bank shares. They are freely available in the open market. And if you think all these profits are immoral, then get your friends together. Buy up lots of shares. Collect all these obscene dividends, and then: give the money to the poor and unemployed. No, I'm not kidding. The poor are unlikely to refuse. I have the honour to live among them (thanks to the ministrations of government bureaucracies, with initials like CRA and FRO), and I know them. They are not shy. They will take your money. Indeed, if you get to know them yourself, you will find that they are as human as bankers, and as greedy. Just not very successful. But hey, if they only had money. Because money talks. And it says what you tell it to say; it speaks for you. And the poor have their investments, too: cigarettes, liquor, candy, lottery tickets, widescreen TVs. And you can top up their investment funds. Or open a soup kitchen, if you prefer. Or stock the Sally Anne with clothes from Holt Renfrew. Or pay some poor kid's college tuition. It's your call. (I personally think a college education is, these days, about the most destructive thing you can provide for a kid, but that's just my opinion.) This is the unanswerable argument to the Left of all ages: Instead of trying to coerce someone else to do what you think is right and just (and every Left policy I have ever seen involved coercion of the non-Left), put your money where your mouth is. Go "liberate" cash by legitimate means (within the laws), then set an example in how you spend it. Give, until it hurts, to the most needful. And you can volunteer your free time into the bargain, for in my experience, you cannot begin to know who is most needful, until you have rolled up your pant legs and waded into action. Give the money instead to almost any "progressive" charity, and it will never get there. This is because, quite apart from corruption (which always exists when free money is floating about), the progressive idea of charity is agitprop. That is: give us your money, and we will lobby the government on behalf of the poor destitute victims whose plight is depicted so dramatically in our pamphlets. If you don't believe this, do your own research. Ideally, go right to the scene, volunteering, and find out who is on the street in Port-au-Prince, or Juba, and who is only on the street in Ottawa. (This is a good way to meet Christians, incidentally.) But now comes the disappointment. For I am recommending a course that gives none of the rewards craved by the cavorting young ego. There is none of the euphoria of street demonstrations, none of the easy applause (and easy sex) that comes from boldly posturing as one of the "good people," fighting against the "bad people." The rewards for doing something, where it counts, are different in kind; and they do not come easily. I look at all the faces of the young, made up as zombies, clutching that fake dollar-store money, and strutting down Wall Street. Most, obviously, college-educated: the final products of an educational system that imparts little knowledge but a lot of self-esteem. I look at the sheer smugness in those faces, of people who have never experienced real hardship. All demanding that someone else do something. For that is the nature of street demonstrations: a form of coercion, of public bullying. Getting yourself arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, by gratuitously blocking the traffic of the working stiffs, does not help anyone. It is a form of personal display, an act of whining self-righteousness that is intrinsic to the psychology of the bully. The attraction, to the copy-cat demonstrators across the continent, is "me too." This is the Left's answer to the Tea Party in the U.S. - a point made repeatedly through the liberal media, which themselves take pleasure in the analogy. The comparison is utterly false. The Tea Party types have not taken the streets, and their organizers have consistently struggled to maintain civility: to ostracize any member whose behaviour or loose talk detracts from the dignity of the movement. They are organizing to win elections, chiefly through the established Republican Party: to advance their cause by legitimate democratic means. And their rank-and-file consists, overwhelmingly, of grown-ups. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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