By Will Dabbs, MD
It’s a piece of cheap concrete. This innocuous chunk of rubbish was a gift from a friend who was there. It’s the sort of thing that would incense you should you bounce over it in your car. If you came across it on a walk, you might absentmindedly kick it to the side of the road to make sure nobody else tripped over it. The thing is just garbage. However, it is also so much more.
It is exactly 3.7 inches thick. There are impressions from the rebar that actually gave the structure its strength. You can assess its quality or lack thereof with your fingernail. A decent scratch is all it takes to free a bit of the stuff. There’s a reason for that.
Politics
Socialism and communism are forever in the national consciousness and for good reason. We’ll use these two terms synonymously today. Purists will invariably object, but they can get over it.
It’s currently a mid-term election cycle. Most every Tuesday we get reports of political primaries across our great land. Shockingly, the communists are still holding their own. Like petulant teenagers, we Americans seem incapable of learning from past mistakes.
Communism is based upon a single flawed assumption. Karl Marx and Company were convinced that humanity was innately good. Marxists believe that people, if left to their own devices, will do the right thing by their fellow man. That is objectively, demonstrably false. God told us as much, if you need an authoritative opinion.
Humanity is broken to its core. The only things that shape behavior in a positive direction are fear of consequences, a desire to better one’s personal lot, and Jesus. To believe otherwise is magical thinking.
Evolution in Building Materials
That reality is profoundly manifest in this scrap of communist concrete. In capitalistic societies, if you make bad concrete, then folks will buy the other guy’s concrete. Eventually, economic Darwinism rewards the people who work hard while ignoring the concrete-making slackers. Not so in communist countries.
Under a communist regime, the government tells people to make concrete. In pursuit of efficiency and equity, there is no competition. In the absence of competition, there is no impetus to optimize quality. You make concrete to the lowest acceptable standard simply because there is no reason to make it any better. Your job is secure whether you make great concrete or mediocre concrete.
Human beings are lazy. Every last one of us. Nobody is going to stay late making epic concrete when it pays no better than the crappy sort. It would be inhuman to do so.
Political Pigments
The real message, however, is found in the paint. One side of this discarded chunk of rubble is whitewashed with some kind of cheap, chalky substance. The other is a multicolored amalgam of vibrant spray paint. Some 3.7 inches separate the two sides. That was the demarcation between freedom and slavery. A mere 3.7 inches stood between oppression and liberty … between life and death.
At least 140 people gave their lives during the Cold War trying to broach those critical 3.7 inches. They bled out and died hanging on barbed wire in failed efforts to get from the whitewashed side to the spraypainted side. The chalky white side faced the communist East; 3.7 inches away, folks were free to deface the Berlin Wall to their heart’s content. That was a pretty important 3.7 inches. This was a fairly vital chunk of concrete. There is a certain deep gravitas to be found here … a timeless message most powerful.
Home-Grown Insanity
Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner is the poster child. There are many others, but he is just such low-hanging fruit. In the annals of cartoonishly bad political candidates, Mr. Platner checks all the boxes. And yet actual Americans inexplicably voted for him anyway.
The man had a fist-sized Totenkopf tattooed onto his right breast. Not a stylized shadow of the real thing, an actual Totenkopf—the same emblem that adorned the peaked caps of the SS death camp guards. Tattoo artists should have to swear a solemn oath never to ink a Nazi death’s head onto human skin. It should be a prerequisite for graduation from tattoo school. That’s one everyone regrets … absolutely everybody.
Graham Platner is most likely not an actual Nazi despite what he had literally emblazoned upon his chest. Curiously, it seems he is apparently not a real oyster farmer, either, but that is neither here nor there. Platner was just a stupid young Marine. I have known dozens of them. They do inane things in their heady youth—stuff like joining the Marines and then getting tattoos they later regret. What Graham Platner undeniably is, however, is an unrepentant communist. His quote was, “I got older and became a communist.” He actually thinks the folks who built that concrete wall were the good guys.
The common thread to every communist everywhere is that they feel the reason communism has failed every single time it is has ever been tried is that its practitioners were simply doing it wrong. Since the days of Marx, 94 million people have lost their lives to communism. If gifted the reins of power, Graham Platner, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Rashida Tlaib will not do it any better. A fist-sized scrap of concrete taught me that.
