I’m a recovering engineer. I’m in a 12-step program, I meet regularly with my fellow afflictees, and I seek counsel frequently. However, despite my most strenuous efforts, these steps are having only limited effect on my disorder and I see very little improvement.
The root of my problem is that I am hopelessly addicted to facts and definitions. Definitions that do not change over time and at the whim of an increasingly liberal government. Definitions that are fact-based and not merely a matter of opinion. This, of course, remains a continuing problem for me as I try to make my way in a world of changing definitions and shifting meanings.
For instance, I have a real problem with the term “undocumented worker” that is increasingly used in place of the more precise – and fact-based term – “illegal alien.”
As a “definition-obsessed” engineer, I define alien as “foreign person” and illegal as “an unlawful act.” In short, a foreign person who has committed an unlawful act by entering our country illegally.
This is in sharp contrast to an “undocumented worker” which seems to describe someone who has missed some minor step in acquiring some small bit of paper work.
Is this the direction that we are moving in? Redefining criminal acts to appear less heinous, less morally reprehensible? Are we soon to redefine bank robber as one who makes an unauthorized withdrawal? Trespassers and burglars as uninvited guests? Drug dealers as unlicensed pharmacists? Robbers as merely overly aggressive panhandlers? Because if it is, my recovery will take a long, long time.
But maybe this is not the trend. Because I am starting to hear some voices in the wilderness. They are still somewhat muted but the voices of the Rand Pauls, the Marco Rubios, the Paul Ryans, the Chris Christies and others are rising above the fray. I hear the voices of 30 Republican governors… I hear voices in the House of Representatives…
And many are making sense. They base their opinions on logic and commonsense instead of feelings and wishes. More importantly, they are defining problems on the basis of fact and not opinion because they know that a problem cannot be addressed and fixed until it is defined.
And others are starting to listen…and to agree…even some of the leftist liberal media… Who would have thought?
So maybe, just maybe, my fact-based, logic-directed, definition-afflicted disorder is not an illness after all. Maybe I am not in recovery. And shouldn’t be. Maybe the country is in recovery.
Let us hope…
Dick
