By Bela “Bill” Suhayda
John Fitzgerald Kennedy suffered severe back pain his entire adult life, first due to a football injury at Harvard and then when his P.T. boat was rammed by a Japanese Destroyer during World War II. In excruciating pain, on a dark night, he swam 3.5 miles towing an injured crewman by clenching the man’s life vest strap between his teeth as he lead his surviving crew members on a grueling marathon swim to the nearest island.
After the war Kennedy became a Massachusetts senator. And while convalescing, after multiple back surgeries, he wrote “Profiles in Courage”… a book about individual heroism and those who displayed it.
One of the most amazing displays of individual courage I’ve witnessed in recent years involved a young middle school wrestler in Oswego. First, you should know wrestling is not for wimps. It’s grueling hand to hand combat. What made this young gladiator so noteworthy to everyone watching was that he was missing the lower parts of both legs below the knee. Even more stunning…he was missing both of his hands.
As a wrestler and coach for 30 years of my life, I had only heard about such things before. It was astounding to watch this young boy and how he compensated for his physical deficits. I didn’t see him win any of the four matches I watched him wrestle last season. But he wrestled effectively, coming within a few points of winning two of the matches. As he left the mat, he put on his prosthetic legs without assistance.
The first emotional reaction many of us have when seeing an event like this is pity. But I’m sure it wasn’t pity motivating this young boy to join the wrestling team. And I’m sure pity is not what this young man wanted from his coach or the audience after losing a match. I’m sure he understands it is the difficult things we work to overcome in our lives that build resilience, toughness and ingenuity. Victimhood has no place in success.
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and other socialists, love victimhood. They create victims of those who were never victims before. And it’s done for votes. We continue to have greater numbers of victim groups in our country. Entire races of people are considered victims. LGBTQ+ groups, ethnic groups, disability groups, even age groups are being classified victims by the socialist left. They’re creating a victim culture. And there are more to come. Most assuredly, the young Oswego wrestler nor Kennedy considered themselves victims of any kind.
Labeling people victims can have cynical psychological affects. Calling people victims will change their perceptions of what they’re able to do. Labeling splinters our society, which is the end game for socialists. We used to treat victimhood at an individual case by case level, not by groups. The DSA and socialists are using victimhood to fracture our society. “Divide and Conquer” destroys nations. (See Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution for details.)
Self-reliant problem-solving individuals don’t fit in with Socialism. Dependent, unimaginative, group conforming fearful people do. Socialists create fearful, dependent, group thinking, and poverty populations. Why? Because they’re easily controlled. This is why socialism always fails, Mr. Charles Coddington!
Socialists destroy the independent creative mind of their people. Incentives are destroyed when workers work only for government, not themselves. Socialist governments control the means of production not CEO’s. There is no private sector in a communist state! Government owns everything, especially the people! (See Venezuela, Cuba, China, and former USSR.)
You’re not allowed to be all you can be under communism. You’ll be what big brother tells you to be. You won’t say what you’re not supposed to say, or there will be a knock at the door. This is why Socialism fails, and freedom always prevails!