Congresswoman Ilhan Omar declared during a press conference yesterday that America’s “system of oppression” must be “dismantled.” She identified our political and economic systems, as well as the criminal justice system, as perpetuators of this oppression.
While listening to Omar deliver one of her trademark soliloquies about our evil and oppressive country, one wonders what exactly is this oppression she speaks of? Who is being oppressed and in what way are they being oppressed?
Omar is not the only one painting such a dystopian picture of our society. This is the message we hear all across the Left — from the protesters and riots, from Hollywood, from academia, from the media. Take this article just published by Teen Vogue, claiming that the United States is “by every indication, more committed to death, subjugation, and grief than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To prove the point, the author (who, for the record, goes by the Twitter handle @SatansJacuzzi) points to the recent but unconnected murders of two women. A vague attempt is made to link their deaths to racism. But what the esteemed Satan’s Jacuzzi neglects to mention is that both women were killed by black men.
Why didn’t the author use more useful and relevant examples of black women killed by white men? Probably because such cases are exceedingly rare. Despite America being, as the piece says, “a vast tapestry of death,” the fact is that white people rarely kill black people. The reverse is also true. As FBI statistics show, the vast majority of blacks are killed by blacks, and whites by whites. Interracial murders do occur, but very rarely, and the rare black-on-white murder is twice as common as the reverse.
And yet people are marching through the streets with signs screaming “Stop killing us.” A writer for the Atlantic is more specific, saying, “I want white people to stop killing us.” We are supposed to believe that black people are being hunted and gunned down in the street by racist whites, but this epidemic of racial violence is almost entirely imaginary. It’s a fable that is being repeated over and over again, from all corners of society, until people are persuaded just by the force of sheer repetition.
Even McDonald’s is getting in on the act. The fast food chain recently tweeted a video of a “trans woman” pleading with the public to “stop killing us.” Once again, the plea is unnecessary. The supposed problem of anti-trans violence is a myth. Trans people are murdered — just like people of all groups are murdered, given that we are mortal beings living in a human society — but almost all of the murders are tied to domestic violence, prostitution, or drugs. Bigotry rarely has anything to do with it.
McDonald’s is not alone. A great many of the largest and richest corporations in America have adopted the far-left talking points of Black Lives Matter and done their part to spread the misinformation to the public, which is not exactly what you’d expect in a country supposedly committed to the oppression and extermination of racial minorities. Indeed, corporations are so firmly on the side of the alleged “oppressed” that Colin Kaepernick has been able to parlay his oppression into multi-million dollar partnerships with three major corporations. He now has deals in place with Disney, Nike, and Netflix. Not a bad kind of persecution, if you can find it.
Not every allegedly oppressed person is as rich and (unduly) admired as Kaepernick. But, statistically speaking, almost everyone in this country is richer, freer, and more comfortable than almost everyone else who has lived on Earth at any point in history, anywhere on the globe. We all enjoy an unprecedented amount of freedom and luxury. Some of us more than others — we can’t all be as privileged as Colin Kaepernick — but even the most economically disadvantaged in our society still have liberties and luxuries unknown to the poor and downtrodden elsewhere on the planet and throughout history. None of this means that we should be complacent or accepting of actual injustice when it occurs, but it does make you wonder why now, of all times, and here, of all places, we should be seeing crazed mobs burning cities and calling for the dismantling of the system that has made them historically secure and comfortable in the first place.
I think the answer is that struggle is a basic human need. Humans, it turns out, must have something to struggle against, fight against, overcome. Humans need, even, to suffer — if only in manageable doses. What we cannot do is sit still, luxuriating in our comforts, and remarking on how easy we have it. We cannot be happy that way. Decadence is not quite as fun or fulfilling as we thought it would be. We need a struggle of some kind, but in modern society, there aren’t many forms of struggle immediately on offer. So we have to create one for ourselves.
There are two ways to go about this: the healthy or unhealthy way. The healthy way is to set out to do constructive and meaningful things that are difficult and require sacrifice. The most obvious and important example of this is starting a family. By starting a family, you make your life far more complicated, but in the bargain you get love, meaning, purpose, and an escape from loneliness.
And then there are the smaller undertakings, the little things people can do to purposefully make their lives a little harder than they need to be. Gardening, hunting, fishing, fixing your own plumbing, changing your own oil, making meals from scratch, etc. Modern society has provided much easier ways to obtain the practical benefits of all of these kinds of things, but we do them anyway, because it takes effort, and healthy people find value in putting in the effort. It is work largely for its own sake.
There was a time of course — the majority of human history, in fact — when people had no choice but to do everything the hard way. If you wanted something built, you had to build it. If you wanted something to eat, you had to grow it, kill it, or catch it. And we notice that in those times, there rarely were people marching through the streets over imaginary oppression. They had their struggle. They lived it every day. There was no need to create any new ones for themselves. Because every other human need was not automatically met, the human need for struggle was always met.
But what happens when someone rejects all of the fruitful and constructive outlets to satisfy this need? Then they resort to self-martyrdom and persecution complexes. For a lot of people, this means randomly ruining their relationships, creating drama where it doesn’t need to be, and convincing themselves that everyone is out to get them. They thrive on gossip, envy, and feelings of personal offense and injury. They are likely to find supposed backstabbers, cheaters, liars, and fake friends everywhere they go, because that is how they see the world; it is the struggle they have made for themselves. “Why can’t I find an honest man,” a woman of this sort will lament. The answer is that she can find an honest man, and quite easily, but she doesn’t want to. She has found meaning in her manufactured struggle, and she doesn’t want to let it go.
The protesters are in this camp, doing a version of this same thing. They fulfill their need for struggle by making up elaborate mythologies about oppression and persecution. They convince themselves that they are in a fight for their lives against the murderous racists and oppressive bigots who lurk around every corner. It’s all hallucinatory, a mirage for people whose freedom and luxury has made them thirst for struggle the way a man in the desert thirsts for water. But mirage or not, they will hang onto it and no mere fact or statistic will be allowed to interfere. They are determined to take vengeance on America, even if America never did anything to them but give them everything they could ever want or need. The irony is that if they succeed, if they actually do tear this country down, dismantle it, then the luxury and freedom and comfort will disappear, and they will finally get the authentic version of the oppression they so desperately want.
And once they have it, they will quickly decide that they don’t really want it. But then they will no longer have a choice. All they will be able to do is lie in the bed that they have made.