Sunday, March 1, 2020

A Teachable Moment


This past week there was one day in particular where it got to within a cat’s whisker of fifty degrees. While for some that may be frigid, comparatively speaking, for us, it is downright balmy. There was no way we could spend such a glorious day indoors, so the wife and I decided to take the girls to the zoo.

They’re still at that age where animals of any sort are exciting, and the look of wonder still bursts through from time to time. I know that this will be short-lived; I know that soon there will come a day when they will want nothing to do with the zoo or with watching penguins waddle about as though unaware of the mass of people staring at them.

After spending a good bit of time in the reptile and fish exhibit, mostly because it didn’t have the animal odor of the ape exhibit, we decided we would visit the big cat exhibit. Although the lion was somewhere in a corner sleeping, and the hyenas were doing likewise in their enclosure, the tiger was fully awake, pacing by the glass separating the onlookers from its fangs.

This was a big boy. All of four hundred pounds of muscle, sinew, claws, and fangs, with a hungry look in its eye as it paced, and paced, then stopped to spray the window once in a while, marking its territory. I propped my youngest, Malina, up onto a small outcropping so she could get a better view, and without hesitation, she proceeded to slap the glass and yell here kitty, kitty, kitty as loud as her lungs would allow.

Although the zoo called it the big cat enclosure, my daughter referred to the tiger as a kitty, and stuffy shirts wearing tweed jackets insist that the tiger is part of the feline family, it didn’t change or alter the reality that what was pacing behind the glass was a lethal killing machine. Shakespeare was right, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but a cow pie by any other name would smell as foul.

For some unexplained reason, we are at this moment in our country bending over backward, trying to split hairs over the difference between socialism, communism, and yes, the latest, democratic socialism. The difference between the three is the same difference between calling a tiger a big cat, a kitty, or feline. When it comes down to it, it’s all semantics.

Whatever you want to call it, the end result is the same, every single time. Whether you call a tiger a kitty, a feline, or a big cat, put it in a room with anything it considers prey, and it will tear it asunder.

It’s not as though we haven’t seen the results of the bill of goods attempting to be sold to the American people. Every time it’s been tried, it has failed! Every time it’s been tried, it’s ended in tyranny, subjugation, hunger, poverty, genocide, suppression, persecution, and countless other things that no sane person would voluntarily want to live through.

And yet, we’re being told that a tiger is not a tiger; it’s nothing more than a kitty, to be petted, and scratched under the chin. We are being told that this time, this tiger will not act in a manner consistent with every other tiger, but that he will be something contrary to its nature.

If you believe it long enough to get into the same enclosure with the tiger, it will be too late, and there will be no going back. Same goes for democratic socialism, or as it’s known in other nations where it’s been tried, communism. 

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

1 comment:

Steve Hollander said...
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