A morality play is playing itself out across America, most visibly in California, and the scribbling that follows almost literally writes itself. We start from what I’ll call the backdrop story.
A 6-year-old girl noticed a strange “capsule like” growth on a shrub outside her family’s front door. It seemed to pulsate in and out. The little girl, curiosity guns blazing, asked her father what it was. “That’s called a cocoon, Darling,” explained her father. “There’s a tiny baby moth inside, fighting to break out of the cocoon and begin his life as a real regular moth.”
The young girl was totally enraptured with this little dollop of nature study. As a matter of fact, she couldn’t resist making herself part of the drama. Although only 6 years old, she was already a liberal Democrat, in that she concentrated her pity on the baby moth inside that cocoon fighting to get himself born. “Why should that little-bit-of-a-thing have to fight for its freedom?” she said, as though quoting the liberal handbook verbatim. “I’ll get one of Daddy’s used razor blades and make it easy on that little fella.”
So she did so, gingerly slicing an escape hatch in the cocoon so the moth could avoid hardship and proceed with its mothly trajectory.
She thought she was helping the moth. In fact, she was killing the moth. The moth needed to fight its own way out, so the exercise could provide it with the strength that it needed to lead the life of a healthy, fit moth. The “well-intentioned” girl was denying the moth a necessary phase enabling the moth to do its mothly thing. She was denying the moth essential preparation for that mission.
The parallel with the real-life story is irresistibly illuminating. Imagine, now, our cameras focusing in on the homeless crisis bedeviling California and a growing collection of elsewheres. None of those driven by the quasi-religious zeal to make life easier and less unpleasant for the homeless mean to do harm. They all mean quite the opposite. And even though the would-be do-gooders are all much older than 6, they nonetheless fall victim to the identical liberal trap. Oh, how good it feels to alleviate human suffering! What a joy to show we are sensitive to our neighbors’ misfortune! Let our “high-mindedness” be a badge assuring one and all that we answer to the call of compassion and not the ice-cold unconcern of those who’ve trained their moral eyesight to avoid noticing the homeless, and whose battle cry seems to be “Never associate with unfortunate people.”
Not a single grownup responsible for the disaster of the homeless meant for things to take this catastrophic turn. It’s too bad – here we are anyhow. Instead of giving the homeless aid, comfort, encouragement and relief, they have unwittingly converted clusters of the homeless into obscene hissing snakepits, highlighted by growing towers of human excrement and zombified addicts stumbling around in squalor and diseases that haven’t been heard of since biblical times.
Society pretends to hate clichés. Society is very hypocritical. A cliché is a verbal celebrity forever enshrined in the lexicon of those who strive to use occasional splotches of color in their communication. Consider the following clichés that are rattling the bars of their incarceration cells, begging to be allowed to come out and play. If you are part of the elitist bigotry against clichés, please forgive me, but they are far too appropriate to leave uninvoked here. They are “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and “No good deed goes unpunished.”
At no point did one single self-appointed champion of the homeless intend the ever-deepening grotesqueries that have been unleashed. Instead, they meant to say “Let me give you a hand, Brother.” They did not intend to say “Welcome back!” to the bubonic plague!
