How Romantic

Romanticism can be a very good thing. Without it we'd live in a completely logical world and that would be pretty dull.

But when "romance" takes over your thought-processes to the exclusion of any logic or reality, well, then you have become a liberal.

I know that it has been posited a million times that Liberals "think" with their feelings, but I think romanticism comes closer to describing their real thought-process. Maybe they're one and the same and/or inextricably linked, but I'm no philosopher and live closer to the logical side of the equation. Or maybe I just ain't too bright.

At the place I work, Wal-Mart is probably our largest customer, so we pay very close attention to what they're doing. Today somebody e-mailed me an article about Wal-Mart's "Neighborhood Markets".

You may not know about Neighborhood Markets because they're only in 10 or 15 cities around the country, but they're smaller versions of the Wal-Mart Superstore. They're usually about the size of your local Walgreen's drug store. They're not nearly as profit-driven as their Superstores are.

But, of course, the Left is protesting even them, accusing them of (what else?) destroying the "Mom & Pop" stores of "small-town" America.

When the Left envisions "Mom & Pop" stores on "Main Street", what they see is a little storefront with a wood & glass door that has a bell mounted on it so that Mom and/or Pop can give you a big smile when you walk in the door and ask you if you'd like to sit by the woodstove and "warm yer bones for a bit".

In other words, a completely romanticized vision that hasn't existed since at least the 1960's. We have plenty of small towns in Minnesota, but in my 40 years I remember maybe one or two places that could have been considered even close to that vision.

They don't care that you have to pay more at M&P's General Store, they just want that warm, fuzzy feeling. The poor people that they constantly say that they're standing up for save money at Wal-Mart, but that never occurs to them, nor do they care. That warm, fuzzy feeling they get is all that matters.

Or how about Communism (I know, kind of a big leap there)?

When the Liberals envision Communism, they don't see the Gulags of the Soviet Union. They don't see the hundred million people that have been killed by Communist regimes. They don't see the poverty and shortages of goods that always result from Communist systems.

What they see is a system where everyone gives everything to the government, and this benevolent government splits it up into absolutely equal amounts and distributes it to "the workers". Kind of like a kindergartener bringing in a bag of candy and having the teacher distribute it to the students.

They never realize that in the real world, some people are corrupt, some people hunger for power over others and some percentage of "the workers" don't want to work and never will. It's really rather ironic that they never realize those things, because it's usually their side who are most guilty of those very things. If only they were running things, everything would be perfect!

But with romanticism comes blindness to reality.

- The Exile