This december i’m taking my own advice and thinking like a conservative every Tuesday. Consistent with some psychological research, I feel happier, more secure, more certain of things. I feel, well, right.
I smiled the Tuesday Michigan passed its “Right to Work” laws. “Right to Work” sounds so freeing. I want the right to work! I don’t want to be banned from working by union thugs. Without these laws, decent people like Tim Cratchit would be banned from working. With these laws, Tim Cratchit (and most of us) can sit in the tank with a half-scrap of coal, and full confidence he has the “right to work.” And he won’t get to pick good old Mr. Scrooge’s pocket every 25th of December, I dare say.
I smiled the Tuesday the senate rejected the UN Disabilities Treaty. Same as Christmas Eve Scrooge, I want people to be treated fairly—especially business people. As Oklahoma Senator Inhofe said, “I do not support the cumbersome regulations and potentially overzealous international organizations with anti-American biases that infringe upon American society.” I shared his concern about our sovereignty. Most of the countries in the UN don’t buy enough of our stuff or actively seek our destruction. It’s just un-American to agree with a collection of third-world thugs and European wing of the Illuminati.
The fact that the treaty was based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, negotiated by President Bush’s team and advocated by Republicans Bob Dole, John McCain and Dick Lugar, didn’t persuade me. Lugar? He consistently tried to negotiate away our right to work on as many nuclear warheads as we want. Mr. Dole and Mr. McCain lost some skin in combat, but they also lost presidential elections.
Those old losers have no skin in the game now. As aging disabled veterans, they should know that the UN Disabilities Treaty and recently defeated veterans’ jobs bill might give preferential treatment to a particular class of citizens: disabled veterans. That’s tyranny. Disabled veterans fought for freedom and the right to work, not for the tyranny of the nanny state.
Tuesdays I fear falling off the fiscal cliff with socialist lemmings more than the rising seas. I’m more worried about the real wars on terror and Christmas than the fictional wars on workers and women. I lose interest in contemplating the morality of drone strikes and advanced interrogation techniques. I become piqued at the immorality of punishing success with the whip of taxes, and angered by the audacity of threatened teachers strikes that would leave our poor children in ignorance. I’m fine with putting the Center for Race Relations in the Jesse Helms Federal Building.
It’s the season for Christmas miracles, and a couple of them happened on Wednesday, December 4th. Filled with the spirit of Christmas, director Tom Briggs and Thalian Association invited Special Olympians to a special free pre-opening night performance of “Miracle on 34th Street.” Usually, when I take my spirited special daughter to events that require self-control, people stare at her or worse. Dads are sensitive about how people treat their daughters, especially when their Special Olympian daughters tend to giggle and laugh and sing whenever the spirit moves them. The ensemble marveled! The production glowed! The story and singers hit all the right notes! And no one stared at my daughter, as if to ask why she and spirits of her kind were allowed to walk the earth among the truly living.
I laughed like Scrooge on Christmas morning. Witnessing the “miracle” reminded me the Jesse Helms Federal Building sounds as right as Germany’s Joseph Goebbels School of Communications. The spirit of Christmas can never be at war, but our veterans deserve far better from us for their service. Unions and teachers aren’t pushing us off the fiscal cliff. In fact, the fiscal cliff isn’t that high. It’s only as high as the walls we build between ourselves. When we tear down the walls, the cliff might actually be a small step forward.
I don’t dread next Tuesday, the day itself, because I know that every Christmas Eve good old Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge goes to bed as a conservative and awakes Christmas morning as a laughing liberal. I laughed again—“the father of a long line of laughs!”
