In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enlil unleashes torrents of rain. The floodwaters rise swiftly, consuming villages, fields, and forests, drowning living creatures in their path. The devastation is immense, a once-thriving world reduced to a waterlogged wasteland, bodies floating lifelessly on the surface. The flood leaves desolate silence in its wake. Even the gods express regret and sorrow at the overwhelming loss of life.
In the world beyond myth, Hurricane Helene has wreaked mass destruction across the southeastern United States, particularly in North Carolina. The storm brought catastrophic flooding, with Asheville and surrounding areas being hit the hardest. Floodwaters have destroyed homes, wrecked infrastructure, and triggered mudslides, leaving many trapped or missing. There are reports of bodies floating down rivers and stuck in trees. Heads and limbs are being discovered under debris.
The media says there’s more than two hundred dead. But the sense I’m getting from citizen journalists is that the death toll is in the thousands. Damage to bridges and power grids has hindered rescue and recovery efforts. Observers are describing biblical-level devastation.
Desolate silence is what meets many of the victims of the hurricane when they reach out for help from the government. Biden assured a reporter that everybody is getting everything they need. They’re happy across the board, he said. He said this after being reminded that a hurricane had occurred. He admitted to being unsure of which storm the reporter was talking about.
Perhaps Biden was thinking about the millions of illegal aliens he and Kamala Harris invited into our county—and the millions of dollars his administration has provided them at the expense of native-born Americans and the naturalized citizens who follow the law.
Harris talks a great deal about equity. Not everybody starts in the same place, she says, therefore we—that’s you and me—need to give some people more so that we can all end up in the same place. This is why I have referred to the Vice-President as Kamala Harrison Bergeron, after Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian future world based on this idea.
However, this isn’t equity. It’s something else. If you were reminded of Karl Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” it’s not even that. Marx wasn’t an identitarian. Nor was he a corporate shill. What Harris is talking about is the redistribution of resources and value based on an ideology that sees the world not in terms of people but in terms of groups. She will decide which groups get more than others. And who those groups are is no secret.
Equity only works as an equality principle in a society based on individualism when the differences between groups are intrinsic, such as in the case of women’s rights (as we have seen, progressives don’t care about women’s rights, privileging the desire of dangerous and delusional men over the needs of girls and women). That’s why the application of equity identified in FEMA’s “Goal 1” is discriminatory and unjust: because it treats individuals as concrete personifications of abstract groups and then makes decisions on that basis that differentially affect their lives.
The problem of white privilege means that the millions of native-born whites suffering from Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina deserve less government aid than the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio because Haitian migrants start off in a different place.
freedom and reason 