Shticker Shock
If present trends continue, will obstetricians who slap babies on the tush to get them to start breathing face charges of child abuse?
My Greatest Generation parents told me about the days before television, when people listened to radio programs. On one show, Fanny Brice portrayed a character, Baby Snooks, who was forever asking the question “Why Daddy why?” Indeed the question “Why?” came to mind on Sunday morning when I sat down at the computer to place my weekly grocery order, whereupon I was greeted with major sticker shock.
Virtually every item on my regular list had increased in price by about 10%, except for large eggs, which shot up from $3.99 a dozen just a week earlier to $6.39 a dozen. My first reaction was to speculate that large corporate supermarkets feel safe to resume raising prices now that the American electorate has demonstrated that it’s concened more about abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and who did what on January 6 than it is about trifles such as inflation, energy, crime, open borders/unregulated immigration, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the damage to the innocence of elementary school children down to kindergarten age by teachers and librarians pushing pornography, drag queen shows and the like. Unfortunately, I have no evidence to support this view, and as we all know, anyone who presents an unsupported non-Leftist viewpoint risks being tarred and feathered and run off the Internet on a rail.
Nevertheless, I was motivated to ask other “Why” questions about commonly occurring “shtick” [tricks], a sampling of which follows.
- Why did President Biden exclude the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and its leader, Mort Klein, from the recent White House conference on fighting antisemitism?
- And why, if the president is serious in this regard, does he nominate a seemingly endless parade of anti-Zionist antisemites to high positions in his administration, especially the State Department? In particular, why did he elevate Hady Amr, whose animus against Israel is blatantly obvious, to be in charge of Israel and Palestinian affairs?
- Why do K-12 teachers and librarians, the great majority of whom are women, who traditionally safeguarded the innocence of children, participate in the premature sexualization of children, including pornographic literature and videos and drag queen shows? And why do they promote confusing young children about their gender identity?
- On the other hand, why do our institutions of higher education encourage their young adult students to behave like children, having to retreat to safe rooms with beanbag chairs and hot cocoa if they hear anyone express a view they disagree with, or more likely in recent years, throw a temper tantrum that manifests itself in shouting down or even physically assaulting speakers they disagree with?
- Why do children’s hospitals and their staff persist in violating their oath to do no harm to patients by providing “gender-affirming care” to children even as young as three, which includes prescribing puberty blockers or hormones, performing chemical castrations, and surgically mutilating normally healthy bodies with lifelong consequences? There is substantial evidence that in the majority of cases, gender dysphoria resolves itself during adolescence, not to mention the memoirs of individuals who have gone through the transformation process and now regret having done so. For this reason I have suspended contributing to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, despite the good they do in other areas, so as not to be associated with what to me falls under the category of child abuse.
- Why are America’s parents so afraid to speak up on behalf of their children? For a brief moment in the state of Virginia in November 2021, the “mama bears” rose up to protect their cubs, but have since been silenced. And why do voters in so many school districts continue to re-elect school board members who go along with the woke agenda?
- Why are the bored billionaires from the World Economic Forum obsessed with controlling the thoughts and actions of the eight billion inhabitants of planet Earth? What do they gain from making us all give up our cars, give up single-family homes and move into high-rise apartment blocks like 1960’s style public housing, restrict flying on airplanes while the Davos crowd continues jet-setting around the world, and perhaps even give up air conditioning, all based on an over-hyped climate change crisis created by elevating a Swedish teenager to being the world’s leading authority while ignoring scholars such as Bjorn Lomborg who contend that the world doesn’t need such a drastic response.
- Finally, why does so much of corporate America think that the Chinese system of “authoritarian capitalism” (“totalitarian state capitalism” would be a more apt description) is preferable to the American constitutional system, which many of us regard as the best ever devised by human minds?
Indeed, why?