Heroes In Search Of Quests
June 27, 2012 6 Comments
A number of recent government initiatives, from Bloomberg’s large soft-drink ban, to crackdowns on kiddie lemonade stands, to the various localities mindlessly cracking down on or taxing plastic shopping bags, have helped throw into sharp relief what I now can see is one of the biggest problems we face as a society: A serious dearth of important, heroic things for ambitious, busybody egoists to accomplish.
Where prior successful societies might have sent these people off to be officers in faraway wars, or to go convert savages to the faith, or to captain ships on long explorations, or to slay heathens in the Holy Land, or to the Moon, or something else meaningful and heroic, now we concentrate them into oak-paneled city councils and Roman-columned state houses with literally nothing heroic for them to do all day when they get there. Nothing, other than to try to enrich themselves as much as possible so they will feel good in comparison to the other would-be heroes around them who also have nothing heroic to do. So what do we expect? Of course some of them will run all over the place in search of plastic bags to slay, Mr. Pibb cups to shrink, lemonade stands to angrily overturn in the name of the one true Gov’t.
Something like Obamacare is just a larger-scale instance of this malady, of course. For decades now, an entire faction of people have been obsessed with the pedestrian, insular issue of how to get some people to pay for other peoples’ doctor visits. For some busybody egoists, this single issue has practically dominated their ambitions and hopes for their entire adult public lives! The fact that if Obamacare is struck down they’re not going away only proves my point. They literally have nothing important or heroic to do. This is what they’ve hit upon, it’s all they’ve got and they’re sticking with it: the reshuffling and reallocation of everyones’ doctor bills.
If we as a society could come up with some kind of Hero’s Quest program to keep all these people harmlessly occupied and content with how Heroic they’re being, yet without bothering the rest of us, it would do us all a world of good. Come up with a tiered neverending system of medals for them to collect and pin to their lapel or something. Big ceremonies for each new medal. Whatever it takes, just as long as it keeps them the hell away from the rest of us.
Spot on (or thereabouts).
Hey, isn’t there some “freedom index” of countries? I hope they downgraded America from “free” to “mostly free” or some such thing. A country in which – because of the law, police/officials/courts – a kid can’t have a lemonade stand and in which a man can’t smoke a cigarette in a cafe, even if the cafe owner would like him to – is not a free country. Nobody should pretend it is. They can argue “it’s a Good country” (and that’s debatable) but free? No.
Problem is, the hero’s quest has to be both noble and easy. Because the real problems in this world — you know, AIDS in Africa, child prostitution, poverty in Bangladesh, that sort of thing — require some real, meaningful sacrifices. Or, at least, travel to areas where they’ll go a few days without ac and endure only 3G speed for the iPad. Think Marlowe heading down the river in search of Kurtz, but much hipper.
And we can’t have that. After all, what’s the point of putting in a hard day’s work saving the world if you can’t brag about it down at the Whole Foods later on that afternoon?
So we’ve got to make it easy enough that they’ll never be more than a few blocks away from an aromatherapist and a wifi hotspot, but, you know, not so easy that they can knock it off in a few days and resume pestering us about “healthcare.” Ideally it would be something with a huge government bureaucracy attached — again, what’s the point of helping the needy if you can’t force the American taxpayer to do it for you? — that gives sinecure jobs to lazy, surly, unproductive union goons (I repeat myself 4x, of course), but that isn’t a huge economic drain on the country.
Therefore, I propose the creation of the US Department of Economic Justice. The idea is to redistribute wealth by raising taxes. But here’s the kicker — the redistribution takes place in real time, and only to those people, and in those amounts, that they contribute. All staff positions are filled by interns, who get to put “social justice” and “government service” on their grad school apps. Everything is done over the web, and so what you have is a bunch of latte-sipping twentysomethings saving the earth by electronically taking money out of taxpayers’ accounts, then putting it immediately back in to those same accounts. They get to go to work in a nice government building and blog on Kos about how they’re saving the world from evil RethugliKKKans, and we get to go on about our lives.
The building, and all the MacBooks therein, would cost a bit, no doubt, but I’m willing to kick in my share. What say you?
Healthcare is one of the few real heroic causes left. People suffer and die for the crime of being born sick. Working to solve that is more noble then selling financial derivatives people don’t need to shills that don’t understand them.
Interestingly, your response basically illustrates my point for me. I have nothing to add. Thanks,
asdf: surely fighting “global warming” is also worth mentioning as one of the only heroic and noble causes. We’re talking comic-book “fighting to save the planet and its inhabitants” stuff here. It doesn’t get nobler and heroicer than that.
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