January 15, 2001

 

EASY TO BE HARD

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So much for bi-partisanship and healing. It was back to politics as usual for the Linda Chavez nomination. No doubt, she could have been a bit more forthcoming on the details of her relationship with illegal alien Marta Mercado, but all indications are that she was motivated first by charity.

This whole business evoked an astonishingly revealing song from the otherwise trite and forgettable late 1960's musical "Hair." For those too young to remember, the plot, if you can call it such, concerns the activities of a group of hippies in Greenwich Village. The play ends with the Army induction, and simulated death, of Claude, the most normal of the bunch.

Midway through the first act, Sheila, a protester from NYU, gives a yellow satin shirt to her sweetheart Berger, a firebrand recently kicked out of high school. He becomes angry for no apparent reason, and tears up the shirt. She then sings "Easy To Be Hard," decrying this and other acts of cruelty. But far from the usual "Man's Inhumanity to Man" bromides, this song focuses on the contradictory behavior shown by many liberals: They profess to care about mankind at large, but show little regard for individual people.

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice

Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend

How much easier it is to speak of big concepts, and mostly unattainable goals, than to actually help out someone like Marta Mercado. If feel good charity via Big Brother originated long ago with FDR, it still fools most of the people most of the time.

FDR, who sent the evacuation ship St. Louis back to Nazi Germany, and allied himself with flagrant segregationists, is somehow beloved by Jews and Blacks.

Bill Clinton is somehow good for Women, but is simultaneously not good for any particular woman.

The greatest damage of third party faux charity, though, is not the creation of false historical portraits of certain political figures, or the formation of favored victim groups. It isn't even that a mechanism is created whereby Government can become oppressively large, and taxation reach confiscatory levels. The real tragedy is that the concept of charity is lost.

Many of those who attacked Chavez could not comprehend the notion that she could have been acting out of personal compassion. Doesn't she already pay her taxes or belong to some photo-op charity group?

Many of those of the Religious Left will invoke Jesus' name to justify government-forced charity.

"...whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:40)

But this admonition can only be interpreted as people performing individual acts of charity, for nowhere does He tell us to give our alms to Caesar, who will then act on our behalf.

Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no


 

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