• AOC claims that many allegations of smash-and-grab robberies “don’t pan out.”
• Bette Middler claims that Trump should be prosecuted for “attempted murder.”
These two reports illustrate perfectly the proverb: “Those who are kind to the cruel will in the end be cruel to the kind.”
We all have a limited amount of sympathy. I’m sure Mother Teresa had more than I do, but even hers was finite. Wisely, she budgeted her sympathy and spent it on the poor in the slums of Calcutta. The rich and middle class needed sympathy, too, but she used hers on those who needed it most.
From this wise use of sympathy, we descend to the unwise, or the downright foolish. Congresswoman AOC, tone deaf as always, declares that many of the smash-and-grab robberies did not occur. Apparently she lacks access to both TV and the internet. Videos of these crimes are everywhere. Store clerks and customers are intimidated and injured. A security guard was murdered. Stores close, including vitally needed drug stores. But the progressive mind – if you can call it a mind – as exemplified by AOC, shrugs all this off as if it were the poor stealing bread, and not the antisocial stealing Louis Vuitton.
And then we come to Bette Middler. She read the allegation that Trump tested virus positive before the last presidential debate in 2016. But the test was repeated using a more reliable method, and it proved negative. So there was no basis for Middler’s accusation. But even if the second test were positive, attempted murder? The dread of Covid is so strong in some people that murder is seen as an appropriate word. Studies show that progressives are more afraid of Covid than are conservatives. Why? Less religious? This world is all there is? Who knows? But it is a fact.
The old proverb is correct. Those who squander their sympathy on the “disadvantaged” hammer-wielding robbers of jewelry stores have none left when it comes to those who hold conservative views. None at all.
