“Turning me on, turning me off
Making me feel like I want too much
Living with you is just putting me through it all of the time”
-- From the Genesis hit “That’s All”, 1983
Anyone who’s familiar with this classic early 80’s Genesis song can still hear Phil Collins’ voice crooning the lyrics, a song that brings back many pleasant memories from that time period when Ronald Reagan was president and America was still America, not the distorted and fundamentally transformed pathetic twenty-first century “woke” version that we’re living with under senile president Joe Biden. The song itself clearly refers to the on and off nature of personal relationships, but these days, “wanting too much” also seems to apply to our economy and the shortages that have cropped up everywhere.
“Turning it on, turning it off, making me feel like I want too much.” This doesn’t exactly match the song’s words, but substitute a light or furnace switch for “me” and the understanding is the same. In today’s America, our betters, otherwise known as our elected leaders, are lecturing us that simply wanting to live life in relative comfort within the confines of our own homes or out on the roads is akin to being greedy and not caring about the environment.
There’s been a lot written of late about runaway inflation and the escalated cost of just about everything around us. Fuel prices are perhaps the most striking and noticeable of all, as local gas stations are now demanding close to $3.50 a gallon, and we’re told the rates are only going up from here forward. Once the season’s cold weather hits with its full force and there’s greater demand for heating oil, natural gas, propane and whatever else ordinary folks use to equip their homes with a livable atmosphere, there’s no going back.
And don’t forget all those fossil fuel burning utility plants churning out electricity. There ain’t enough sun and wind to do the trick, and likely never will be.
Yet, in my experience, liberals are the biggest consumers of fossil fuel power that I know. In modern day parlance, that’s called “hypocrisy”.
No matter. Last week president senile Joe spoke in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania (likely after a taxpayer funded, carbon belching ride on Air Force One) to tout his and the Democrats’ various “infrastructure” proposals. During his rambling delivery, Biden talked a lot about AMTRAK and his dreams of building an interconnected rail network all across the nation. He predicted such a dreamy project would take “millions of cars off the road.”
Senile Joe mumbled about his decades of riding trains to and from work, as though everyone in the nation should automatically desire to junk their automobiles and adopt the local public transit system as the best option for getting from point A to B. Of course, last week’s news of a woman being sexually assaulted on a subway train by an illegal alien -- while no one helped her -- doesn’t exactly brighten the prospects for such a wish.
It’s all part of the powers-that-be preaching to Americans that we should settle for less, just because they say so. It’s bad to want too much. Tammy Bruce wrote at The Washington Times:
“We’ve gone from deplorable, racist, White supremacist terrorists to whiny, scary, clingy, selfish shoppers. Just like ‘climate change,’ we are the perfectly malleable distraction for whatever the latest Democratic indoctrination requires.
“The Reader’s Digest version of this new and desperate Democratic Party narrative is easily reduced to, ‘Just shut up and take it.’ This has been the sentiment of idiot leftists and their enablers the world over for generations. When incompetence and malevolence result in predictable and obvious disasters, just blame the victim! You know, it’s like we all tripped and were rude enough to fall onto the Democrats’ knife.
“Our current Biden debacle of a lack of workers, debilitated ports, scores of cargo ships stranded off the east and west coast of America, and inflation across every sector, including food, housing, energy, are not the result of ‘the pandemic,’ they are the unnatural result of disastrous decision making by human beings. These are the tiny tyrants who don’t care enough to think about the harmful impact of their irrationality or do think about it and get excited.”
As always, well put, Ms. Bruce. There’s nothing like a reformed liberal Democrat -- like Tammy Bruce -- to forego mincing words and get straight to the point. The condescending attitude of leftists is truly revolting. How dare senile Joe devote a major portion of his infrastructure “speech” to talking about his own fun times on the train. People who are familiar with Biden’s background have heard ad nauseum the tall tales about his commute in his senate days. Yawn.
Perhaps Biden was attempting to emulate Donald Trump, who frequently deviates from the script at his rallies to relate personal anecdotes from his own fascinating life. Trump the entertainer and lifelong media personality knows how to tell stories, which is why he’s so good at it. Senile Joe, on the other hand, is just a privileged doofus who can’t go three sentences without stammering about something he did fifty years ago.
Imagine senile Joe in the socializing room at a care facility. Put another patient across from him and a checkerboard between them on the table and let the two dither for a few hours like little children at a playground. That’s how they take care of themselves in today’s White House, for sure.
Biden’s attitude would be humorous if it weren’t so incredibly insulting. Why would it be the government’s mission to do anything to take millions of cars off the road? Any stats or research to back this up, Joe? Is owning a car and driving yourself wanting too much in the elites’ eyes? Or is going to a store and hoping to see shelves filled with consumer goods a bad thing, too? Capitalism makes life better, doesn’t it?
I have a family member (through marriage) who grew up in the old Soviet Union. He described how when he was a child, women would have to wait in line to go into a supermarket, only to find it mostly devoid of anything to buy once their turn arrived. He said people were so desperate for western products that we could’ve financed an entire trip there if we’d packed a few extra pairs of blue jeans and a VCR to sell.
The Soviet citizens had enough money -- there just wasn’t anything to buy with it.
Is this where we’re headed in the U.S.A.? Thanks to generous federal subsidies buried in the gargantuan Democrat spending bills, Americans might have cash jingling in their pockets but not much to trade for it. Out of control inflation will make everyone’s bank account feel smaller, too, but leftists aren’t bothered by the notion. Wanting to buy things like a car, or gasoline, or heat for your house or Christmas presents for your family -- that’s all wanting too much.
Besides, construction of new train lines would generate its own problems, wouldn’t it? Mass transit takes decades to put in place. First there would be numerous and redundant environmental impact studies, dealing with NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) lawsuits, lands purchased through eminent domain, affirmative action-dominated contract bidding, cost overruns, fights with government unions, begging Congress for more money, etc.
It’s hard to see how more trains will save us any dollars in the long run. Name one public transit system that regularly pays for itself or makes money. Anyone? Anyone?
And why should we want less anyway? The oft-cited reason is because of “climate change”, the theory that western capitalist countries produce too much carbon which allegedly heats the atmosphere, and somewhere down the road, will melt the polar ice caps and drown everyone too close to the coastline. To alleviate the coming disaster, senile Joe would have us riding trains to work instead of those polluting four-wheeled indulgences described as cars.
Biden is headed to an international conference in Glasgow, Scotland, later this month to powwow with other world leaders on “climate change”. They’ll ride their non-carbon neutral jets to the island nation (Great Britain), pose for photo opportunities, make doomsday speeches about how human beings want too much and are slowly flogging ol’ Mother Earth to death with our excessive population and preferences for “stuff” and cheap energy.
The ruling class might even emerge from the conference with some sort of agreement by which individual nations agree to place restrictions on themselves, in essence promising to try and curb the appetites of their citizenry for comfort and basic necessities. Who knows? Maybe even China will offer some sort of concessions towards “renewable” energy, and then go and build another couple hundred coal-burning power plants to spite the whiners.
You can bet that 18-year-old Swedish brat Greta Thunberg will be hanging around Scotland at the time, perhaps even dressing up like Braveheart’s William Wallace and threatening to charge the conference center with a wooden sword on high unless the attendees agree to stop using lights and heat. But only if the media’s watching!
Or is this all wanting too much?
Those of us who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s learned to appreciate the promise of America, where wanting more and aspiring to earn more so as to buy more wasn’t considered wanting too much. It’s a contemporary misconception that the goods purchasing public needs to get by with less. That’s the real problem. It’s part and parcel of living in Joe Biden’s world.
Joe Biden
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Joe Biden administration
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AMTRAK