Victor Davis Hanson writes at Pajamas Media,
We live in an expanding culture of victimhood fueled by identity politics. Americans are supposedly saved from themselves by a new hipster generation of Silicon Valley zillionaires, socially aware techies, progressive government bureaucrats, crusading liberal journalists, and cranky, mostly irrelevant academics. So why do they not address the need for politically correct self-policing? Here are five examples of how postmodern do-gooders could help the nation in 2016.Read more here.
iPhone-induced Mayhem
The left believes a corporation or business is ultimately financially responsible for the unanticipated consequences of using its product. Smoke too many cigarettes and the tobacco companies are sued for knowingly having tar and nicotine in their products. We go after fast food and super-sized drinks for inundating unaware Americans with trans fats and processed sugar. Design flaws earn auto companies billions of dollars in recalls and fines.
But why do we ignore smart-phone companies? Studies supposedly reveal that texting or net surfing while driving is a greater impairment than is driving while under the influence.
...Shouldn’t a benevolent government agency in 2016—in the fashion that it regulates less-lethal handguns—go after iPhones to block their use while the user is in motion? Cannot Obama’s consumer protection bureaucrats put an “automatic motion shut-off app” on every smart phone? In one day last week, a vagrant with shopping cart walked into my bumper at a crosswalk while texting, a young woman slammed on her brakes in front of me during a bottleneck while texting, and a driver went off the road into the gravel. Again, all were texting. How about a microchip to turn these gadgets off once they are in motion? Wouldn’t that remedy be as humane and socially aware as trigger locks on new handguns? Could we register lethal iPhones?
The Diabetes Pandemic
One in three Californians admitted to the hospital for any reason is found to have type 2 diabetes. Obesity is a state plague. The poor and Latinos as well have obesity rates of 40% and suffer from skyrocketing type 2 diabetes—often requiring kidney dialysis (there are two such clinics now in my hometown). Undocumented immigrants arriving from Mexico (which has the highest obesity rates—70% of the population—in the world) are especially at risk—and discover that the America diet is no different from what caused the pandemic in Mexico.
The national health implications seem to rival those of the AIDS epidemic. Millions of the country’s residents are at risk for a mostly preventable disease that can be avoided or arrested by diet and exercise.
...Why, then, is there not a California public health campaign in Spanish and English to warn residents and Latinos especially of their greater risks? We talk loosely of the “Latino” vote as politicians pander to it by supporting sanctuary cities and open borders. Would it not be more humane to campaign on a public health crusade analogous to the AIDS efforts in the 1980s and 1990s? Why the relative silence about this pandemic that is zeroing in on an entire population?
Cyberrhea
Can you go to a website without an ad materializing or being redirected to a buy-something page? Have you noticed that if you buy snow gloves, Big Brother’s IP-address-sniffing ads for snow boots soon pop up on your news page? Check the weather once from your zip code, and suddenly you are told that you should subscribe to the Weather Channel. The blare of 1950s TV is nothing compared to your computer screen.
Why is it hard to stay on a news site but impossible to get off an ad page? Out of nowhere voices chime in about a buying a new phone. Videos jump in hyping the latest cable drama. Ads once on the margins now sneak into the middle of the screen—all this from the new generations that don’t wear flattops or wear wing-tips and square ties. What happened to their promises that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”? If they can cool the planet and lower the seas, and make half the graduating class valedictorians, surely the Masters of the Universe can stop the contamination of the Internet by 24/7 schlock selling?
Break Up White America
Have an ethnic boost of something other than “white,” and the road to victimhood and with it an edge in admissions and employment is supposedly enhanced. But in our multiracial and mixed-up culture, what is “white” other than a crude and inexact rubric that somehow includes darker Greeks and Armenians, but not lily-white Ted Cruzes?
Is Barack Obama more a “black man” than my authentically black Punjabi neighbor? So why not junk “white,” and let so-called whites, as others, fragment to rediscover their own sometimes distant ethnic identities?
...If the usage of just “Latino” or “black” is OK identification, without even the need for hyphenation, why not return to IDs like "Czech" or "Polish"?
...Barack Hussein Obama was no big deal when for a while he was Barry Dunham.
With exoticism comes advantage.
Cultural Disassociation
...If we are going to take stock of our pathologies and start an inventory of which culture is to blame for making us unhappy, then let us start with those foods, drugs, and practices that do the most damage. Yes, we can!
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