Dmitry Kosyrev
“A little one was walking down the street, turning blue and trembling all over…” – in reserved times, not a single decent newspaper in many countries could do without such a Christmas and New Year publication. Then good people let the little one into the house, warmed and fed, and then it turned out that he was someone’s lost brother or son – a classic.
Today in America the classics are different. Here is the story of a kind Catholic grandmother who sent her granddaughter a letter for Christmas saying she was praying for her. But the granddaughter, who considers herself a boy and demands to be called Michael, threw a vicious tantrum about this. What you just need to see – especially since she was hysterical on the video: based on maximum publicity. In response, the grandmother humbly said that she would pray even harder for her granddaughter.
This is not a case, but a system. Religious publicist Dennis Prager wrote a column about the fact that now in all of the United States, but primarily in democratic territories, there are hundreds of thousands of grandparents whom children will not invite to the festive table and who will not be allowed to see their grandchildren. Because the older generation are conservatives (Republicans and others), the younger ones are liberals (progressives, leftists, and so on), and such grandfathers should not be allowed near their grandchildren. In addition, it got to the point that such families do not see each other for years.
Further, Prager denotes the difference between the two worldviews. For example, it is inconceivable that a conservative would keep someone away from their grandchildren simply because that someone voted for Biden. And for a liberal, this is the norm. Because the more to the left a person is in his convictions, the less he is inclined to think that for him there is some kind of moral code (that is, decency) – and especially a religious code.
There is such a verdict here: liberals suffer from inadequacy of conscience precisely because they hate religions – any, except their own liberal one. The leftist, no matter what filth he does to other people, has a clear conscience. Add: pristine. They do not need any gods, because if you answer only to your conscience, then you can somehow deal with it. But a person, even an unchurched one, but with religious thinking and values – he would never do this to his parents, even if they have different political convictions.
Further: leftist beliefs give rise to ingratitude, moral arrogance, make you think that you are a permanent victim of something and someone, and as a result, cruelty to people. And this happens in the USA for the most part with graduates of colleges and universities: they are taught this way. In the early USSR, if you look closely at our revolutionaries, there was something very similar.
And then Prager wrote a second column on the same topic, because he received the full program from the liberals. He was simply flooded with responses to the first column – and in the second he quotes them en masse. Just one example: “Conservatives are whining mean people, and kids don’t want to listen to their racist, homophobic, sexist and other speeches, much less let their children have any contact with this rubbish.”
In America, this is a specificity – the age factor. Prager, as if by default, assumes that we have a generation gap, that is, always all the older ones are conservatives, and the younger ones are liberals. And he expresses one interesting thought: what if everything was the other way around?
There is such a country on the contrary: it is called Russia. It is very noticeable that liberalism and other pro-Westernism in our country is rather a sign of the older generation, the one that grew up on the dreams of the Soviet Union joining the beautiful civilized West. The fact that only Ukraine entered there (with well-known consequences) upsets them, and the same vicious tantrums arise, like the girl named Michael.
But younger generations – here we have the phenomenon of sociological “striping”, approximately like the Soviet puff marmalade. There is also a layer of classical and very Western liberals of 30-40 years old, but it strongly depends on the place of residence (for example, a big city) and profession. Basically, in our middle and very young groups of the population, conservatism prevails. This, we recall, is the ideology of rejection of mass social experiments on entire societies for the sake of making them happy, that is, rejection of what the American left is doing today.
And in this our “marmalade” there is a struggle between shades of conservatism and patriotism. Some patriots are such “conservatives” that there is nowhere to the left: they would break the whole society through the knee for the sake of its conservatization. There are many young Stalinists among them. These are people who did not live in the USSR and therefore believe in a fairy tale about a kind society of mutual assistance, where everything was free, the poor and destitute were not seen, and all the little ones were allowed into the houses.
And here it is appropriate to recall the anecdote about how a teacher instills all sorts of values in children.
Teacher: Hello, today we will talk about political beliefs. Let’s build a lesson like this. To begin with, let everyone introduce themselves, approximately as I will do now: I am Pavel Stepanovich – and I am a liberal.
Voices in the class: I’m Masha – I’m a liberal… I’m Seryozha – I’m a liberal… I’m Vovochka – and I’m a Stalinist.
Teacher: Vovochka, how is it and why did this happen?
Vovochka: Yes, it’s very simple. My father is a Stalinist, my mother is a Stalinist, all my friends are Stalinists, and I am also a Stalinist.
Teacher: Vovochka, well, it’s also impossible, you must be able to develop independent thinking in yourself. Just imagine if your father was a criminal, your mother was a prostitute, and all your friends were gay. And who would you be then?
Vovochka: Well, then I would probably be a liberal.
