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Quote of the Day for Wednesday, December 15th, 2010:

From a USA TODAY article today by Donna Leinwand, discussing “Dear Santa” letters received this year at the main NCY Post Office:

A single mother of a girl, 8, and a boy, 2, wrote that she recently lost her job. "I am unable to buy my children toys and clothes," she said. "Santa may you help me with my family?"

It’s not that I lack sympathy for this young woman, or imagine this was anything less than a desperate act, but should we really be less than dumbstruck ourselves at the notion of adults writing letters to Santa? And according to the article, this is no anomaly.

I suppose it could be construed as a rational act if they have some reasonable expectation that someone like the Post Office workers in the article might actually read and respond to their request, but is this what we’re reduced to? Can their alienation from society – and God – really be so complete? This seems to occupy a place somewhere between sending a message in a bottle and buying a lottery ticket. Then again, neither of those acts involve phony religious sentiments offered to a “spirit of giving,” or some such thing.

It seems that The Great Entitlement Society has hit another bump in the road to paradise lately. Seeing California in the throes of economic meltdown has been one thing, but watching the Greeks taking to the streets to clash with police in frustration over government austerity measures that threaten the leisurely lifestyle of public sector “workers” who collect 14 monthly paydays per year until retiring at age 57 is breathtaking. Where do these clowns think the money to bankroll them is going to come from, and how is it that they are entitled to it? Well, as it happens, they think they have some entitlement to fleece the Germans, and are even willing to invoke WWII to justify what I guess is some craven attempt at reciprocal or retributive criminality. No small part of this, of course, is played by the reality that the Greeks, like so many other moderns, have contracepted and aborted their way into demographic irrelevance.

Apparently not to be outdone, however, are public education beneficiaries in the U.S. who targeted Thursday as a national day of protest over the diminishing availability of funds to underwrite or subsidize their learning experiences. It’s a little hard for me to get my head around their thinking. The economy is tanking, so tax receipts are diminishing at all levels of government as less money changes hands in the private sector, so there is less money in the public coffers to pay for services and entitlements, so they think they should protest that the world is treating them unfairly?

I don’t know why they don’t just offer to pay more out of their own pockets: that would not only ameliorate the unconscionable crisis of their lacking expected perks, but would prove a glorious example to the rest of us of how enterprising Americans have always accomplished their goals. “Put the $ where our minds are” one of these signs reads… to which I can only reply: What money? Whose money? Your money? My money? More proof, as if any needed, that we have raised a society of people who think public goods come from a big wet-nurse in the sky, called “they.”

"Where do the legal meanings of such elemental concepts as ‘birth,’ ‘death,’ and ‘family’ take shape?" she asked. "Largely in state courts.”

SJC chief justice says state courts are in crisis – The Boston Globe

Margaret Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, opining on the criticality of the state courts to the orderly functioning of society.

This is the woman primarily responsible for fabricating the legal right for homosexual couples in Massachusetts to call their partnerships marriages. I find it disturbing enough that she believes the courts competent to define (or, more correctly, to redefine) such “elemental concepts” when they present themselves for consideration, but to realize that she apparently thinks the proper role of the courts is precisely to meddle in such transcendent areas is mind boggling. What hubris. What arrogance. What inanity.

It’s been said that fools will rush in where angels dare not tread. Here, Justice Marshall is anxious for more money to be allocated to the courts, so that she can rush in to more redefinition of such elemental concepts. I’m afraid I’d rather see criminals roaming the streets than see Justice Marshall given any more opportunity to pervert and subvert the legal (and hence cultural) meanings of such elemental concepts as ‘birth,’ ‘death,’ and ‘family.’ If an economic crisis can manage to shut down this dysfunctional SJC, then I’m all in favor of economic crisis. The very last thing we need is a judicial system bent on corrupting the foundations of our civilization in the name of some moralistic (!) vision of nonsensical, self-indulgent hedonism. What a pox on society….