A Lesson for Our College Kids about Socialism

I'm a devoted husband, father, doctor, proud American, and serious Jew. I'm 63 years old. I have kids who recently graduated college. I've been around the block a bit, experienced a lot, read and learned a lot. One thing I've noticed is that many in our colleges and universities are now interested in socialism and leftism. Many Americans my age will look at that and be full of dismay and anger. They say, "This is not what American young men and women should be embracing. How could these young people be so ungrateful?"

I don't have anger about it. I have understanding. Here is why. The more you leave behind childhood, the more you realize you never really leave it behind. When the most confident, mature men and women come wheeling into an emergency room scared and sick, most of the time, you see the needy, vulnerable kid there coming out. It's a compassionate and sensitive doctor's responsibility to recognize that part of the patient and address that child spirit with comfort and hope. And that's what this socialism is pretty much all about. It's about the frightened child inside us who doesn't want to go out into the big, scary world. It's about that part of ourselves that just doesn't want to give up Mom and Dad caring for us. It's about the Jews who want to go back to Egypt so they can be taken care of again by their slave-masters, so they don't have to face the demands of caring for themselves as they travel forth. But we must leave home and go forth as men and women into an uncertain, tough, beautiful, but often scary and tragic world. There is no choice. Trying to remake the reality of life on Earth leads to very bad things. That is what America, this country that has given so much, is all about. It's about adulthood, maturity, and liberty. You can't grow up; you cannot be free; you can't be a happy man; you cannot build a good strong society and lead a truly rich human life by channeling that child inside. Socialism is the world of the child. It is the world of "Take care of me, Mom and Dad State. Make the State big and powerful so it can give me free stuff — free daycare, free food, free savings for retirement, free school and college, free birth control pills." It's understandable, this attitude. I have it deep inside me as well. When unleashed on society's economic and governing systems through socialism, all that childishness does is spill out and wreck things, like a nation-sized kid with a massive temper tantrum. That's why Cubans live in slavery-lite on $25 a month and bring their own sheets to their dirty run-down hospitals. It's why Venezuelans are today sifting through garbage cans to feed their kids. Its why a billion people in communist China and the old Soviet Union lived for decades in forms of slavery, grinding poverty, perhaps celebrating the apple or orange they might get a couple of times a year. It takes gritty, hard, American, adult sweat and tears, risk and initiative, maturity and self-denial to create anything that's good. It takes the adult American ideology of small government, massive liberty, and protection of private property. It takes the adult realization that nothing is free; everything takes expense and hard work. It takes, in summary, the adult world of capitalism, not the child world of socialism to get us those iPhones, Boeing 737s to fly us cheaply all over the world, clean water from our sinks, MRI scanners just down the road, and blueberries in winter at Whole Foods. All this stuff disappears, or becomes available only to the politicians who lord it over us, if the child is unleashed and told to run the place with socialism. Bernie, Barack, Ocasio-Cortez, and the great majority of our college professors and administrators are the children in adult bodies who have arrived on our shores with their socialism. They have taken over the Democratic Party, our universities, Hollywood, and our public government-monopoly schools. Soundly reject them and their ideology if you want to lead a decent, dignified American life. Embrace American adulthood. I understand the allure of socialism and leftism. I don't make fun of those who ascribe to them or their thoughts. I just encourage everyone to channel who he is meant to be — not the child he always carries with him. Let people take care of themselves and the people around them as brave, strong, and free American adults. Mom and Dad are really gone from your lives. The big, iron-fisted State of socialism and leftism will not and cannot replace them. All leftism, in all its forms, from communism to Democrat socialism, does is keep us small, weak, dependent, impoverished, and very un-free little boys and girls.