I hope that your year has started off as well as mine. Since we had covid on Christmas, we had our Christmas celebration on New Year’s Day, with Karen’s brothers and their families coming to the house to feast and exchange gifts.
So I started 2024 off with a Merry Christ-year! (Which I generally prefer to a Merry New-mas, though your holiday mileage may vary.)
As always, on the cusp of a new year, one’s mind naturally turns to marking the passage of time, and looking backwards and forwards simultaneously.
When I look back on 2023, I’m extremely grateful for many things happening in my personal life – disproportionately so, given the perilous condition our nation appears to be in: a relationship with my Creator who loves and forgives me; the patient, smokeshow wife; the healthy and thriving kids; the envy of canine-dom in the form of Cassie the Wonder Dog; the chance to live in a state with the best governor in the country, etc.
And though I’ve said it before, I’ve probably not said it enough: the chance to sound off on the Cautious Optimism site has been a source of great comfort and joy in my life. I mean that sincerely: comfort and joy! (Yes, I’m still in a Christmas mood, since we just celebrated today, and the 12 Days of Christmas extend through January 5th.)
In December of 2016, the Great and Powerful CO invited me to contribute my occasional musings to this site, and since then I’ve had seven years of getting stuff off my chest, and lowering my blood pressure, and meeting so many great people. I can’t thank all of you enough!
If I can risk tainting the new year with a shameless plug…As regular readers know, when I post a new column here, I post the most recent column to my WordPress site, Martinsimpsonwriting.com. There you will find all of my columns going back to 12/16, as well as some pictures, a few short stories, and a few videos. If you like what you see there, you can click “subscribe,” and you’ll get an email notification each time a new column appears.
Looking forward, I’m going to be posting a handful of short stories I wrote during another life as a fiction writer, and a lot of pics of my (finally!) restored Victorian house, Rosewood. I’m also going to try to record and post at least one video a month on various topics of interest. (If anything is on your mind that you’d like to see discussed, please let me know.)
When I look forward to the next year in the life of our country, though, things are a lot more cloudy. In an election year when the stakes are so high and our national life so troubled and deteriorating, my fascination with politics – properly understood and undertaken – alternates with an increasing disgust with the grubby reality of politics as they are actually pursued.
When I’m in the latter mood, Wordsworth’s words sum up my instinctive distaste for public life: “The world is too much with us; late and soon/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
Since I’ve retired, I’m not as focused on getting or (hopefully!) spending. My big-picture concerns now require more focus on how I spend time than on how I spend money. And spending time thinking about politics and politicians can often seem a foolish expenditure indeed!
But as soon as I say that, I recognize that politics are shaping the world that my kids and future grandkids will live in, and so attention must be paid. Plus, it is therapeutic to mock dishonest pols and bad ideas. Besides, both Thomas Moore and C.S. Lewis said that the devil cannot stand to be mocked, and those guys knew a few things.
And if that applies to Satan, I’m sure it applies to his minions (i.e. most politicians) too.
But there will be a lot of time for mockery later. For now, I’d just like to point out at least one silver lining during our current national malaise.
Although some of our problems are definitely hard to solve – social security is going broke, our national debt is staggering, our universities need ground-up renovation – many of them really are not.
It’s amazing how many “crises” should be simple to solve, because they arise from logical errors that would be ended with the application of the most basic common sense. For example:
It’s not good to sterilize young people, or cut healthy body parts off because they are going through a phase of discomfort with their bodies and/or mental illness. (The defining characteristic of being young is going through phases, so don’t make permanent and irreversible physical changes!)
You get less of what you punish, and more of what you reward. So if you reward criminals – make excuses for their crimes, minimize their punishments (ridiculous plea deals, short or no sentences, no penalties) – you get more crime.
Giving a drunk a drink doesn’t help him, and most of our welfare system is the institutionalized form of buying alcohol for alcoholics. Stop that.
A country without a border cannot remain a country, and cutting illegal immigration by 95% is a very simple task. It’s very hard to stop the last 5% or so, but if you build physical barriers and man them with adequately armed officers, and then take into custody and either immediately jail and deport everyone you catch, the draw for future illegals will be stopped.
Law and order MUST be maintained throughout our society, and our current hands-off strategy seems literally insane to me. Allowing mobs of protestors to attack public and private buildings, and to close off major highways and bridges, and to terrify students and cops and paralyze major universities (just as allowing millions of illegals to break into our country and disperse throughout it) – all of these are voluntary choices.
Mind-bogglingly, inexplicably, and weapons-grade stupid choices!
Especially because, again, the solution is so simple and obvious, in every case:
When a-hole narcissists block a highway or bridge to paralyze a major city, give them a few quick warning honks, and then drive right through them. (If any of them suffer injuries but then have to wait a long time for an ambulance to reach them because of the congestion they’ve caused, they can use that writhing-in-agony time to reconsider their life choices.)
When pro-terrorist students riot and assault other students and university officials, expel them permanently and jail them immediately.
“But Martin,” I can hear you saying, “despite the brilliance of your words, the logic of your argument, your personal charisma, and (let’s not deny it) your knee-weakening physical attractiveness, we don’t have the resources or manpower to drive-over and pepper spray and jail and deport millions and millions of Biden-voting wastes of space!”
Yes, but we wouldn’t have to. We’d only have to demonstrate our determination to the first few troublemakers, “pour encourager les autres,” as the Frenchies say.
Picture this:
The first antifa thug in a crowd to throw a bottle at the cops gets a faceful of pepper spray and/or birdshot and then is cuffed and arrested…
The first BLM whitey-hater who storms a courthouse gets a bean-bag round to the groin and then is cuffed and arrested…
The first two arrogant morons who try to block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge are partially squashed in a game of human Frogger, and if they survive that, are cuffed and arrested in the hospital…
How do you think their co-would-be-revolutionaries would react after seeing that?
Or how about this: What if the two gender-confused, identified-as-male-at-birth “leaders” of a clot of cosplaying grievance-studies majors who attack a pregnancy-support center or Supreme Court justice’s house were arrested and taken to jail. And once there, they were photographed and printed and tossed into a holding cell – with their frosted pink hair and facial piercings, wearing a “Queers for Palestine” t-shirt over a gender non-binary skort — with a dozen recidivist criminals.
And the next day, after their rich yet feckless parents have bailed them out, what if they limped back to the collective and told their tearful tales of prolapsed this and bruised that, and how they discovered a whole new meaning of “misgendering” in jail…
What do you think would happen to the attendance at the next hate-filled leftist assault on a public institution or building?
Okay, that last example might be going a little too far. On the other hand, if we have to err on the side of either letting the rioters destroy our society, or letting criminals open a can of macro-aggressions on their temporarily incarcerated carcasses, let’s go with Door #2.
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, predictable and swift consequences will concentrate the mind of even the most mouth-breathing, AOC-IQ-level miscreants among us. So why haven’t we tried that lately?
Let’s learn the lessons of 2023, and make 2024 the year of re-instituting cause and effect, and reaping what you sow.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 