The Leftist mindset: "Something has to be wrong with this and need fixing"

Perhaps you've heard about Seattle renaming Columbus Day "Indigenous People's Day".

From government classrooms, this manifestation of hatred for one's own culture made its way to city council and became law:

Progressives always have hated Christopher Columbus, viewing him as nothing more than a white, genocidal monster who enslaved natives and spread disease to wipe them out.

It’s really almost as stupid as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” sounds.

Like a lot of stupid ideas, this one came from the schools. In the days before the city acted, its school district did. The school board passed a resolution that included, but was not limited to, this nugget of dumb, “WHEREAS, the School Board seeks to combat prejudice and eliminate discrimination and institutionalized racism, and to promote awareness, understanding, and good relations among indigenous peoples and all other segments of our District…” (Read the whole thing, it’s all amazingly crazy.)

A parade of progressive grievance groups threw support behind it, and the city council passed the change 7-0.

Councilman Bruce Harrell said, “We are celebrating the triumph of the indigenous people. We are not reveling in the pain of our past, but indeed rejoicing in the triumph… In honoring Indigenous People’s Day we are honoring the best of our self, the best of the city.”

This politically correct garbage stems from progressives’ hatred of the fact that Europeans more than 500 years ago figured out the planet had another half. They seem to think no one would have ever made it around the globe had it not been for Christopher Columbus.

And the whole thing is yet another example (like the one I gave in my post yesterday about how Jews became oppressors and Palestinians became the oppressed in progressive eyes after the 1967 Six-Day War)  of how the Freedom-Haters glom onto groups upon which they can confer Beleaguered Victim Status and serve as champions for, completely ignoring the fallen humanity they share with everybody else:

Progressives also depict the western hemisphere prior to 1492 as a Utopian paradise devoid of strife, war and problems. Indians were not a Utopic people; they had wars just like the rest of the world. What they didn’t have was any significant technological, industrial or weapons advances in centuries. Europeans were, by far, a better equipped and armed people. That’s hardly their fault. Were the tables reversed, the history would’ve been too.

Daniel Greenfield wrote a post at Sultan Knish recently about this phenomenon.  Freedom-Haters by nature have this compulsion to spoil the party, to find some egregious flaw in stable societal situations:

The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness. 

It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.

Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness. 

Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness. 

The left does not think that anyone should be happy. It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.

Differences between men and women?  Unjust!  No matter that it's the natural order of things!   Technological advancement?  Far outweighed by environmental damage!  Wage gaps between executive-level and entry-level positions in companies?  Greed!  A fixed pile of money being hoarded!

In any example of the FHer enterprise of undoing Western civilization, one finds this impulse.

Kind of puts the lie to all those insipid messages about "just breathing and being happy in the moment" that Freedom-Haters routinely post of Facebook.  That's just to soften up the unsuspecting so they don't notice the Great Leveling Enterprise going on around them.