I’ve noticed it during my college years and into my 30-year stint in teaching. Noticed what? It is the values and outlook of people divorced from many of the very real cruelties of life. These people live in an insulated social womb, free to think of the wilderness, for instance, as a park. Quiet, leafy suburbs and districts of swank penthouses, and jetting from suburban high school or elite prep school to higher ed to white-collar status, allows flights of fancy and grand ideas similarly divorced from the real world. The pampered lifestyle breeds pampered politics and pampered voting patterns.
It reminds me of my last visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, Ca., and the view of the park from the fifth floor of the park’s hotel. Anaheim by the first decade of the 21st century had become a grimy and seedy place. Inside the park’s fences, it was an oasis surrounded by an increasingly man-made dystopia.
Sadly, the cosseted life produces the stilted politics that abets the breakdown of civil order and broad prosperity. The love affair with “sustainability” and “equity”, for example, is an attack on upward mobility for anyone but themselves. It’s how just yesterday’s savagery becomes today’s victims in the minds of many on our college campuses. It’s how the gradual warming of the climate after the Little Ice Age can be turned into a full-frontal assault on your car and home appliances, and the pursuit of single-family residential for me, but not for thee. It’s how workers, shoppers, residents, and businesses must flee the gauntlet of the drug-addled, mentally troubled, and troops of barbarous urban youth that are allowed to congregate under the banner of “compassion” and “tolerance” and “social justice”. It’s how the call of “rights” now includes teenage genital mutilation. It’s come full circle: the eradication of the dangers of the real world incubated new dangers of the real world.
I’ve referred to this naïve and blinkered social set as the “REI crowd”. Recreational Equipment, Inc., (REI) epitomizes a business model for these babes in the woods. They don’t sell guns. They sell the great brands that keep you comfy as you walk through and sleep in nature, not a thing that’ll stop an apex predator that resides in that nature. Forget about bear spray. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it . . . . Well, let’s just say that at that moment nothing really matters, except a helicopter ride to a trauma center if you’re lucky.
E.g., REI recently tried to equate nature-love with “gender equity”, a trendy cause for those who devote much of their disposable income on trendy hiking paraphernalia. Watch it below. Then, on the accompanying post, look at nature’s reality. The experience must be similar to the hellscape that they’ve created for themselves inside their bubble.
RogerG