ALAN writes:

Here is a good illustration of how some American women helped to advance the Permanent Leftist Revolution.

In 1972, Cynthia Larson, 19, was hired by a private company to work as a “Santa’s helper” in a shopping center in Ames, Iowa. Was she content with that job? Not at all. What she wanted was to be Santa Claus, not “Santa’s helper.”

[UPI, “Woman Wants Santa Claus Job, But Company Won’t Hire Her,” The Raleigh (West Virginia) Register, Nov. 27, 1972]

Evidently the company looked upon that idea as absurd, which of course it was. They refused to accept her application to work as Santa Claus. But did that stop young Cynthia? Not at all.

Christmas is far from the mind at the moment, but the cause espoused by Larson, we live with every single day.

That Cynthia and her Libber-comrades got their way in American life — at the expense of the rights of business owners and to the benefit of increasingly powerful central government — was less a result of the Women’s Lib movement than of inaction and acquiescence by millions of Americans who opposed that movement, and especially of widespread abdication by American white men of their proper patriarchal authority. Such men proved thereby how easily they could be induced to surrender their rights.

Larson grew up in the Revolutionary 1960s and, like millions of other young women who served as cannon fodder for the Permanent Leftist Revolution, she absorbed the vocabulary and ideology of “Liberals” who claimed that “discrimination” was unspeakably evil and “non-discrimination” unqualifiedly good. Their role in the Revolution was not to think but to absorb and recite slogans. She may not have been a witting agent of that Revolution, but young women like her were just as useful.

Countless young American women in the 1930s-’50s would have been happy to be hired to work as Santa’s helper. But not women like Cynthia in a Progressive Age: They were determined to go where no women had gone before, and they were going to do that not by their own effort but by enlisting the police power of the State.

It was no coincidence that Cynthia conceived her whim to play Santa Claus at the same time when Helen Reddy’s hit record “I Am Woman” was playing on radio stations across the country.  “I am woman….hear me roar…,” she sang, and no doubt Cynthia heard that roar and wanted to join the chorus of Libbers.

She could have placed an ad in the “Positions Wanted” section of the newspaper classifieds. And she could have dressed up as Santa Claus and stood in any city park or public building and waited for somebody to overlook the patent absurdity and hire her to do what she wanted to do.

But persuasion was not what Cynthia and her Libber-comrades had in mind. They did not want to persuade people to accept their ideas in an open marketplace where people could choose to listen to them or laugh at them and walk away. They wanted to compel them. In effect, Cynthia and her ilk wanted government to hold a gun to the head of all private businessmen and company owners to force them to hire people they did not want to hire. Cynthia and her ilk did not like ideas like individual rights, free association in an open marketplace, and limited government, none of which could have helped her to acquire a job that no one wanted to give her.

They wanted private businesses to have the right to say,“Yes, we will hire you”, but not the right to say, “No, we will not hire you.”  The simple fact is that such an arrangement erases rights and substitutes coercion-by-government in their place. A right to say YES without an equal and corresponding right to say NO is not a right at all but a constraint imposed on some men — who do not practice coercion –by other men who crave it. It is the antithesis of moral, political, and economic freedom. There is no moral, political, or economic excuse for such a constraint. Any excuse claimed for it is an example of the defense of the indefensible.

That Cynthia and her Libber-comrades got their way in American life — at the expense of the rights of business owners and to the benefit of increasingly powerful central government — was less a result of the Women’s Lib movement than of inaction and acquiescence by millions of Americans who opposed that movement, and especially of widespread abdication by American white men of their proper patriarchal authority. Such men proved thereby how easily they could be induced to surrender their rights.

If Cynthia had owned a business, would she have invited the State to decide for her whom she should hire?  But she never asked herself that question. She was on a mission. She was going to join a Revolution. “There’s no doubt I can do it,” she told a reporter about her ability to play Santa Claus. That, of course, was immaterial and irrelevant. The crux of the matter was:  Who decides? Cynthia and her ilk had no reluctance to erase the right of business owners to decide for themselves — and transfer that power to what Albert Jay Nock in 1935 called Our Enemy, The State.

Unfortunately for decent Americans who do not practice or sanction such coercion, there are two groups against whom they must be constantly on guard: Those who want to give orders, and those who agree to take them. “Liberals,” Feminists, “Progressives,” Socialists, and Communists are prominent in the first group. “Conservatives” are prominent in the second group.

Both groups can be depended upon to erase whatever few rights Americans might imagine they still possess. The latter group —consisting largely of “Conservatives” who have managed over the span of my life to “conserve” nothing — allowed the former to erase their right to discriminate — as seen in the above example and countless others like it. And decent Americans — those who don’t want to give orders or take orders — can be confident that the “Conservatives” will continue to allow the “Progressives” to erase more and more of their rights until they have none left.  We are nearly at that point now.

Please follow and like us: