You climb the mountain to see the world. You don’t climb the mountain so the world can see you. – Maureen Dowd

If you know anything about child psychology, you know that children are all ego all the time. To a child, attention is a zero-sum game. The more you get, the better your chance of survival. Which means you’d better make yourself as visible as possible and grab all the attention you can.

American politics has become the same way. Twitter too. Coincidence? Come on now; you know I don’t believe in coincidences.

In Maureen Dowd’s aptly titled piece, “Scaling Wokeback Mountain,” the NY Times columnist has a message for AOC, especially the millennial Rep’s habit of making everything about her, “You climb the mountain to see the world. You don’t climb the mountain so the world can see you.” True, but that’s not how children like AOC see it.

Dowd adds, “Disagreeing with the Squad doesn’t make you a racist.” Also true. But then, branding POTUS a racist gets a hell-of-a-lot more attention than civil debate (ICYMI, the Squad = Reps AOC, Omar, Tlaib and Pressley).

According to the Washington Examiner, “CNN and MSNBC have collectively called President Trump or his tweets about four freshmen progressive members of Congress ‘racist’ over 1,000 times since his ‘go back’ tweet was sent.”

As long as the liberal media continues to serve up bloody red meat from the identity politics carcass and the masses continue to feast like their very existence depends on it, the Squad et al will continue to act like children, political discourse will continue to devolve, and so on.     

Which brings us to the presidential debate where Kamala Harris scored major woke points with fellow Dems by ripping poor old Joe Biden for saying he had a civil working relationship with a couple of longtime segregationists in Congress decades ago.

Maybe Harris remembers things differently than I do, but I experienced both sides of the forced bussing equation (a few white kids getting bussed into an all-black/brown school, and vice versa), so forgive me for pointing out that in both cases it was an unmitigated disaster.

Not that segregation was a good thing, mind you. Just saying government can’t and shouldn’t even try to mandate diversity. The same goes for corporations, as they’re just beginning to find out. It’s supposed to be a free country. That’s not how freedom works.

More to the point, identity politics is creating more racial division than we’ve had since before the civil rights movement. I mean, if you can’t even have a civilized debate without playing the race card – crying that every disagreement is about the color of your skin – how is that any better than segregation?        

When will all this whiny wokeness end? I guess when all the Dems get to the top of the mountain and suddenly awaken to the realization that everyone to the right of AOC has had enough of this childish nonsense, it’s Wednesday, November 4th 2020, and Trump was reelected in a landslide.   

Image credit Matthias Weinberger / Flickr