Seduced by Change

From American Thinker:
Barack Obama won the presidency based upon the theme of change. We already live in a world of constant change, and we assume too easily that change is good. Politicians, professors, pundits, self-proclaimed champions of the oppressed -- those with vested interests in change -- repeat the lie that change makes things better. But these cheerleaders of constant change are unhappy people, by and large. Certainly there are some areas of human life in which change is good -- who would want to go back to the medicine or dentistry of fifty years ago?

But, surely, if there is one idea that should have been debunked in the last century it would be the idea of beneficent progress. The First World War was dramatic and catastrophic progress. The Bolshevik junta in 1917 was progress in the direction of omnipresent police state and slave labor camps. The Second World War was progress along the road to genocidal madness and global war. Ghastly diseases and debilitating physical conditions are "progressive," and that means change that is bad.

AIDS, pornography, broken homes, prostitution and increasingly vile violent crimes are changing America by progressively making life worse. Television, what Ray Bradbury once called the Medusa that turns 100 million Americans into stone for six hours each day, is progression toward puerile images supplanting serious reflection. The oceans of frantic, frivolous, and foolish news and entertainment stories that drown out all real sentiment and cognition are constructed around our foolish infatuation with change and our pathetic trust in progress.

The overthrow of the Shah of Iran was not benign progress. The degradation of Islamic rage into homicide bombers is not progress. The construction of the largest death camp in the world in North Korea is progress into the Inferno. The expansion of government in America to the point that it increasingly swallows up all other resources is progress toward bankruptcy. The very notion of progress as essentially good is false. (more)