Arrival.

In his travels my grandfather told me he once encountered a man at an out-house who was dropping coins down the hole. My grandfather watched him drop nickels and dimes and quarters for some time. Finally my grandfather stopped him and asked why he was pouring so much money down the hole. The man explained to my grandfather that at first he'd been sitting on the stand when he accidentally dropped a penny into the hole. That not being worth the while to retrieve he decided to put enough money in to make the cost of getting his money back worth the trouble.

Most of us understand the concept of 'throwing good money after bad' without the need of a sparkling illustration. But obviously not all of us get it. Some don't make the leap from that to pursuing bad relationships, don't get the idea of doing something self-destructive and generally harmful, don't get over the myopia, the habit, or the pride that makes a wall we cannot penetrate. People do not have to be entirely stupid to miss the lesson involved, they just have to be unthinking and stubborn, they have to be to determined to continue regardless of the cost involved if that cost entails harm to the past that they think of as their lives. The following illustration is a little more up-scale, though the lesson is the same:

[T]he subject would continue to deliver higher and higher shocks in order to evader responsibility for shocks already given. Breaking off would require the subject to acknowledge, in effect, that everything done until the stopping point was bad, but continuing with the procedure can permit the subject to avoid any uncomfortable realization about the morality of his or her past performance.

Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate.
****

Why are people Leftists? Most are normal and decent people, one must assume, who are simply stuck in an emotional investment they cannot stop paying into from fear of losing all they've invested so far. But there comes a point when the harm done by normal and decent people doing the same old thing is enough to disqualify them from normalcy and decency. There comes a point that doing the same thing, regardless of how it might have seemed in the 60s is now nothing more than sheer evil, and they are not good and caring-sharing, concerned and nice people any longer. There comes a time, and it has come long ago, that normal and decent people have to accept the wrong turn they've made, and they have to reorient their visions and pursue the different, regardless of the loss of the past. Tough. It's part of being a mature Human being. Those who cannot do that, who continue to cling to the corpse of Leftism, are becoming increasingly irrational and disgusting, are often on the border of evil. We need have no sympathy or concern for those who act on past faiths and assumptions. The Left is clearly evil, and those who cannot or will not accept it are doomed to continue to perdition. That in itself wouldn't matter at all but for the fact that the murder they encourage by their lack of courage is evil and must stop. The individual's idiocy, myopia, or pride is of no interest to anyone; but the mass of this evil is a threat to the world in general. There's nothing nice about it. People who are Leftists are, regardless of their naive assumptions about themselves and the delusions they hold dear, evil people who create murder regimes and slave nations. In spite of all the feel-good rhetoric and moralistic posturing these people indulge themselves in, they are increasingly and obviously more daily, evil people. Those who support Islam anywhere, by defending the so-called rights of Muslims, are evil. They are not civil libertarians, not defenders of free speech, not anti-racists, not democrats, not normal and decent people. They allow and encourage a primitive fascism that destroys the lives of Muslims, that destroys the world of our beautiful Modernity, that kills innocent people for the sake of a phony liberal pose of self-indulgence.

It's time to accept that the blinders of willful self-delusion have to come off; that people are not excused from morality and decency just because they find their self-indulgent moralisms make them feel superior to the masses. The arrival point is here and now. There is nowhere else to go. I leave this with a wonderful piece of writing by a British traveler who makes his solitary way in admirable ways, his conclusion this:

Full of turmoil of movement, I had suddenly run out of destinations. I was looking for something. But it was no use. There was nowhere further to go. I had run into the brick wall of arrival.

Stanley Stewart, In the Kingdom of Genghis Khan.
****

Honest people will accept that they have made mistakes and that to continue is wrong. Those people are welcome to join us on Thursday evening at the Vancouver Public Library from 7-9 p.m. to sit in the Covenant Zone in the Atrium outside Blenz coffee bar. We talk. We'd like to listen to you. Friend, you have arrived.