ALAN writes:

Recently I spoke with a woman who grew up in St. Louis in the 1950s, as did I.  She was educated in Catholic schools, as was I, but in neighborhoods far apart.

She told me she had two aunts who enjoyed shopping downtown. They did not drive, so they depended on the streetcars or buses to take them downtown and back.  Occasionally they took a taxi.

One day, she told me, they called a taxi company and said, “White driver, please.”

Can’t you hear the “Liberals” howling “Evil and indefensible!”?

It did not seem that way to my acquaintance when she was a girl in the 1950s. But it seems that way to her now. She professes to be shocked by what her aunts said.  She seems to think it was a BAD THING to say and to do.  That, of course, is the standard “Liberal” dogma that has been pounded into Americans for the last 70 years.  Apparently my acquaintance absorbed that dogma and now believes her aunts were guilty of WRONG-THINK and WRONG-SPEAK.  Apparently she sees nothing wrong when government busybodies forbid Americans today to make and act upon the kinds of choices her aunts and other Americans made routinely in the 1950s.

Excuse me, but I see everything wrong with it. I contend not only that there is nothing wrong with “White driver, please”, but that her aunts had an inalienable right to say it and stand by it.  It is an exercise in freedom of choice. It does not prevent anyone else from choosing any taxi driver he desires.

To believe otherwise is, in effect, to annul common sense, the principle of individual rights, freedom of choice and freedom of association in an open marketplace, and the principle of limited government.  And for what?  For the limitless expansion of government power on the pretext of “hurt feelings” claimed by people who want something for nothing.

If you think you do not “discriminate”, think again.  If you are alive and want to remain that way, then you must discriminate endlessly.

The greatest achievement of the Communist-engineered “Civil Rights Revolution” of the 1960s was to make the word “discriminate” into a catchword whose very mention causes Americans to react like Pavlov’s puppies.

My acquaintance once worked in a department store.  When she made a sale, did she choose what the customer purchased?  Did a bureau of government busybodies choose it?  Or did the customer choose it?

Who pays for the goods?  Who pays the taxi fare?  Yet according to a standard that she now finds acceptable but would have appalled her aunts, the customer must pay but must also defer to orders issued by government busybodies.

In matters where Americans once understood, asserted, and defended their rights, their descendants now agree to surrender those rights and take orders from government busybodies.

If my acquaintance wanted to buy a purse or order breakfast, would she allow government busybodies to choose for her or to dictate her range of choices?  If she hired a man to paint her house, would she permit government busybodies to choose the color and color scheme or would she make those choices?

If her aunts had requested a feminist cab driver with tattoos and green hair, would she oppose that choice?  Or a black driver who speaks Ebonics?  Then why does she accept that dictum on other matters?  Isn’t that called a double standard?

To engage a taxi is a simple matter between two parties.  It hurts no one, robs no one of anything, and does not require or involve third-party busybodies.  Americans understood this 70 years ago—before the Great Brainwashing undertaken in the 1960s on the pretext of “non-discrimination” and “anti-discrimination”.  To abandon that understanding is to set the stage for government busybodies to meddle in every area of life and limit or dictate the range of choices for citizens in matters that are no one else’s business.  But Americans abandoned it long ago, so they richly deserve the consequences.

I can imagine my acquaintance saying that her aunts’ request was unfair to blacks.  But why stop there?  Wasn’t it also unfair to Asians, Latins, Indians, Eskimos, and Martians?  And to zombies and morons?  And horses and mules?  Presumably her aunts preferred a driver who could read traffic signs.  Wasn’t that unfair to illiterates and poor white trash?

The astonishing thing is not that her aunts believed they were living in a free country and that freedom of choice and freedom of association were their inalienable rights, but that their niece imagines there is anything wrong with that.

The problem with people — like my acquaintance —who are essentially decent and capable of good judgment on many other matters is that they accept by default the premises and ideology of our greatest enemies—meaning:  Communists and Socialists.  They want to be “fair”—to people who want something for nothing or, worse, want to destroy us.

There is no such thing as a “right” to be hired or to associate with people who want nothing to do with you or to be given something you have not earned.  Neither you nor anyone else is “entitled” to any such things. They must be earned.

The “non-discrimination” bandwagon was led by Socialists, Communists, and “Liberals”–in response to which the “Conservatives” showed how utterly useless they are.  They agreed to hop aboard and provide an echo chamber for whatever slogans “Liberals” concocted, proving thereby that they have the moral-philosophical strength and substance of tapioca.   [Excuse the comparison, which I admit is unfair to tapioca.]  Name one “Conservative” who will defend an American citizen’s right to say what her aunts said in the 1950s and to act upon it.

The truth is that Americans’ liberty and individual rights were far greater and more secure in 1950s America than they have been since the 1960s.  Unlike then, Americans today cannot do the simplest things — choosing a doctor, a cab driver, a school for their child —without getting approval from government busybodies or choosing from a range of options dictated by those busybodies when they hold a gun to our head, a gun they call “non-discrimination law”.

Of course no one has a right to hold a gun to your head.  To accept a command not to discriminate is to accept a command not to think.

Unfortunately most Americans — including “Conservatives” — not only accepted that command but agreed to hold that gun to their own heads and those of everyone around them.  Then, in an act of astounding inconsistency every July, they applaud themselves for the “freedom” they foolishly imagine they still possess.

I like to imagine what my father and uncle who fought in World War II would say today, 80 years later, at the sight of “Conservative” women and feminized men who are perfectly happy not only to throw those rights out the window but also to apologize for their ancestors who enjoyed and exercised those rights in a nation that was safer, more civilized, and more secure in 1945 than it is today.

“Non-discrimination” and “anti-discrimination” laws are but a preliminary step by collectivists toward consolidating their power to run everyone else’s life. To collectivist busybodies, the greatest enemy is an individual who thinks and chooses for himself instead of assenting to choices made for him by self-anointed world-improvers.

Lawrence Auster was one of the few modern commentators who had the wits to see that the “civil rights” revolution of the 1960s was a turning point in the surrender of rights and the capitulation to government tyranny called “non-discrimination law”; and the moral courage to say that such laws must be repealed and abandoned if Americans want to reclaim their rights and political liberty.

He got it right when he wrote “The basic principle of antidiscrimination laws is that people can’t be allowed to govern themselves.”  [ “In the Civil Rights Trenches”, View from the Right, July 3, 2002 ];  and when he wrote that “non-discrimination is the ruling—and in its essence totalitarian—principle of the West, crushing everything that is not in conformity with itself…  It is non-discrimination that is being used to break down every institution, to dissolve the nation and its identity, to Islamize Europe, to crush the most basic liberties of free association, to stun people’s minds…so that they become disoriented and demoralized and incapable of resisting the leftist state.  It is the systematic destruction of everything that is…..”  [“The Power that Controls Our World”, View from the Right, June 17, 2008 ]

Name one “Conservative” who has come anywhere close to expressing those judgments.

And what is the alternative to self-government?  What is the alternative to individual rights?  What is the alternative to free, uncoerced choice, and free, uncoerced association in an open marketplace?  The alternative is:  A government of busybodies to dictate or restrict every decision you make.

Why should we be happy to possess fewer rights than our parents and grandparents did?  Why should we be happy to have the burden of innumerable government busybodies trying to run our lives?

Words like “inclusion” and “inclusive” are the latest variations of the collectivist quest for tyrannical power.  Such innocent-looking words are code for Communist power-lust.  We should “include” among those we must associate with — so say the Communists and the “Liberals”—people who want to rewrite our national and cultural history, erase our rights, kill us in our beds, or enslave us under a Communist World Government.  What could be more squishy feely-good to world-improvers than forcing us to “include” those people in everything we think and do?  Accordingly, to show how agreeably “inclusive” you are, I suggest you “include” such people in your life by inviting them to your home for tea and crumpets — along with a few thugs, vandals, bank robbers, car thieves, and murderers, to add a little spice to the occasion.

The witless, Pavlovian response of “Conservatives” to propaganda for “inclusion” makes old-fashioned Liberals look good by comparison.

To appreciate the rights and liberty that Americans once possessed, I suggest reading the classified “Help Wanted” ads in American newspapers from the 1950s.  Of course “Liberals” and Communist-trained agitators want us to believe that such ads were unspeakably evil and indefensible.  What they mean is:  Those ads and the frame of mind they reflected were a roadblock to their plan to establish a Communist World Government by which they would impose upon us the kind of tyrannical power exemplified in “non-discrimination” laws and more recently in the great COVID hoax and fraud.

It is also worth reading such ads because they reflect a 1950s frame of mind in which the disciplined and precise use of words was highly valued among businessmen and merchants. Many such ads specified “white”, others stated no preference, others stated “white or colored”, and others stated “colored” — the free market in action.  Many blacks and whites found gainful employment through those classified ads–those, that is, who wanted to work instead of be given something for nothing.

Freedom of thought, speech, choice, and association in an open marketplace—with no gun pointed at anyone’s head—is something Americans possessed and understood in the 1950s that their hipster descendants gave away and that today’s dumbed-down generations are too witless even to imagine.

Historians a thousand years from now may study records of life in ancient America and try to comprehend how people who inherited a sophisticated technological civilization could also be stupid enough to imagine that something as common and necessary as “discrimination” could be legislated out of existence.

Never have so many Americans shown themselves to be so compliant in response to that gun held to their heads.  A nation of sheep, indeed.

— Comments —

Peter writes:

This post was so well written and to the very point that we for far too long missed/tolerated.

My prayer is that God will make us/keep us strong and allow us to defeat this evil. Only if many or most of us stand up and speak out against this evil, yet it may take another approach if it is too late for standing up and speaking out.

God bless you, sister. Keep up the fight. We know the end of the story. God has a plan and a purpose; we must trust His time and follow His direction. God gave us minds, bodies and souls and we need to use all three. There may be many or a few of us; however, we have the power of our God to guide and protect us.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

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