Our Sunday newspaper had an insert for Parade Magazine. Parade is one of the most Liberal ‘magazine-ettes’ in America (Cleveland Amory is a contributing editor, for gosh sakes), but I always read it. To never read a word written by the ‘other side’ is to be ignorant and misinformed. It might even be stupid!
The lead article in yesterday’s Parade was about criminals in America. The main thesis was that we in America incarcerate a very high percentage of our citizens, and their inescapable binary conclusion was that we (Americans) are either the most evil people on earth, or that something is sadly amiss and we shouldn’t be incarcerating all those poor folks because many didn’t need to be there.
Those were the only two conclusions provided. In fact, that conclusion was
stated as “clearly, one or the other has to be true”.
Sirs, I’d suggest a third alternative, one that your Liberal brains apparently
are incapable of conceiving.
I suggest that America incarcerates more criminals than any other civilized
country on earth simply because we have more Freedom than any other civilized country on earth. Freedom means many things; it is expensive; it is precious; it is a word bandied about by many countries but rarely practiced. Even here it is not practiced perfectly, not even close. But if the degree of freedom of all the world’s civilizations were ranked from the beginning of time, America would be first by a huge margin. No civilization in history has ever had the freedom we have now.
While some of our freedoms have undoubtedly evolved since the Founding Fathers dreamed all this up in Philly 231 years ago, I’d still challenge anyone to find a civilization where each citizen was more free than this one.
Freedom means many things here, but one thing it means is the freedom to screw up! If you spit on the sidewalk in Hong Kong you get a few years in a really bad prison. If you steal in Saudi Arabia more than once you get your hand cut off. Freedoms there are restrictive. America allows you more freedom to do anything you want …… including evil … than anywhere on earth.
And because we have that degree of freedom many of us are too lazy to make our own way, or too selfish to avoid instant illegal gratification, or too ignorant to know there is a better way, or just plain too evil to care. And, duh, these just happen to be the guys that get sent to prison in batches large enough to make liberals squirm.
I assume the alternative to incarcerating them, according to the liberal, is to just simply ignore their actions and let them reign free in society, boding
whatever ill they can conceive. I don’t honestly know what they would suggest as an alternative.
I for one am convinced our prisons are UNDER-crowded. I come to this conclusion because criminals are roaming the streets this very morning!
I wish all prisons were run like the one in Maricopa County, AZ. The sheriff
there has the right idea about ne’er-do-wells. Look it up.
As an important sidebar, it continues to amaze me the degree of difference in how we Americans have come to view our world. The chasm is deep and probably already uncrossable.
But I refuse to buy into the Guilt Trip that Liberals continue to try and force
on me……
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