Good morning! I'm on the train into the city. I haven't written in awhile – been trying to travel lighter and go easy on my back. This laptop is small and not super heavy, but along with everything else I already carry it adds up.
There are only a few days until my boss leaves and a new store manager comes on. I'm pretty nervous about that. The keyholder who was giving us crap has disappeared and been terminated for job abandonment so I've gotta get hiring.
I wanted to talk a little about a shirt I saw the other day, and an interaction I had with a girlfriend. My Facebook is full of people from this state who have moderate to severe leftism. My state has moderate to severe leftism.
So the other day I was invited to hang out with my boyfriend's best friend's girlfriend at her condo and watch movies and do girl things. It was actually a lot of fun and I like her and her boyfriend. She ordered Chinese food and we watched some cool movies.
At one point, she invited me to the groupchat for the girlfriends of this friend group, which I didn't know existed but which is super cool. My boyfriend's friend group is pretty big and it'd be cool if all the girlfriends knew each other.
So she was explaining the girls to me and at one point she was talking about one of them and said, “But we don't really talk to her anymore.”
Here we go. “Uh oh – why not?”
“Well she's” – whispers – “a republican.”
GASP “NO.”
I really couldn't believe the conversation I was having. It told me so much about the people in this area of the country.
She was so confident that A) being a republican is bad, B) I certainly couldn't be one and C) it's okay to give out personal details about someone's life that she literally randomly told me she didn't really speak to a girl because of that difference of opinion.
So I did my best to tune these things out. I just said, “OMG, I mean like, even if you are that kind of person, it's not a great idea to go around talking about it.”
And she goes, “I know, it's one thing to have a different opinion, it's another to actually talk about it.”
I'm like, “Ugh, right? Time and place.”
That was all. I had done such a good impression of a shocked leftist learning that some people are evil that we didn't say another word about it.
I don't think she was trying to gauge me at all. She actually didn't have a hint of intention to make me uncomfortable or call me out. She genuinely felt she was safe here, that there were no prying republican ears.
I'm glad no one told her about my political leanings, but if I'm going to be friends with her I think I'll need to take down my party from Facebook.
This interaction just made me nervous. I want to be friends with these people, but I know it will involve a lot of lying. My boyfriend already knows what I think about this stuff, but I don't want it to get out. I'm a good actress and I can pretend to be outraged if I have to, but it's exhausting.
This sort of leads me to my next topic – I saw a girl on Facebook at some kind of rally wearing a shirt that said “Insulin is a human right.”
The sheer amount of stupidity in a post like this astounds me. I would like to work through my thoughts on it here if you don't mind.
Insulin is a human right. It echoes statements made recently by the socialist party in this country, namely Bernie Sanders and his “Healthcare is a fundamental human right.” Housing is a human right, clean water is a human right, jobs are a human right.
No, they're not. Do you have any idea what you're saying?
Say that insulin is a “human right.” What does a human right mean exactly? It means that something belongs to you. Life is a human right because your life belongs to you. Liberty is a human right because your freedom is yours. The pursuit of happiness is a human right because aside from taking away the rights of others, you are entitled to try anything you need to make your life what you want it.
So – insulin belongs to you. You have a right to it. Okay – so now that it's a human right, what do you do? Well, you march up to a drug company, right? And you demand that it hand you the insulin you need. Or you go to the government and you say, I need insulin. I have a human right to insulin, so you need to provide it to me since it's your job to protect my rights.
And then the government goes to the drug company and says, we're taking this person's insulin. The drug company gives it up freely because the government showed up with guns.
So the government steals something that someone else owns and gives it to you. And you're cool with it because instead of the someone else being like you, they own a company instead, or they have a share of the company, or they own stock.
Saying that you have a human right to something means you believe you're entitled to the product and the labor it took to produce it. You will make people work and pay them nothing (or some amount they don't agree to) and take what they made you. Or instead of getting your own hands dirty, you will use the government as a weapon to use against them.
We have a word for that, and it's slavery. We really don't want that here and we tried really hard to eradicate it and it needs to stay away.
Healthcare is a human right. What does that mean?
It either means that A) doctors must treat you at a price they don't agree to if you cannot pay or B) the government must take money away from other people and give it to the doctor and then the doctor can treat you. The first one involves enslaving the doctor and forcing them to provide you with labor against their will, which is abhorrent. The second involves you using money you didn't earn and took away from your fellow citizens to pay the doctor, which is abhorrent but more people are cool with it because you got the government involved and that must make it okay because the government would never do something bad. That's what socialized healthcare is.
If your first instinct is “But what if the person's situation is bad, and they need insulin to survive.” Then you're a goodhearted person but you don't understand what you're advocating for. You genuinely want to help people and be good to them – but that doesn't make stealing other people's money okay. Good intentions cannot be your justification for violating someone's liberty.
My dad has diabetes and used insulin for a long time. When it became too expensive, he went on a diet designed to minimize his need for it. He hasn't needed any for a few years now. Never once did he try to claim he was entitled to the product of someone else's work. And if this changed your mind at all about whether I have the grounds to be making moral claims about the situation, you should reanalyze that, because again, it's a slippery slope when someone's situation makes you rethink your sense of right and wrong.