A Study in Contrasts

Your favorite Peasant had a wonderful, and rather interesting
Memorial Day.

Every Memorial Day I head over to Elm Grove, a lovely and
charming village which I have loved since boyhood. Living
in nearby New Berlin and later Brookfield, and having attended
high school with a few chums from The Grove, as the locals call
their quaint community, I discovered their wonderful Memorial
Day parade and except for the years that I lived out of state I have
attended this parade every year. The usual features of such a parade
are always present ---  marching military honor guards, local celebrities
and politicians, beauty pageant queens, and decorated military
heroes riding in classic cars; floats with bands playing, students from
a local martial arts dojo, members of a village gardening club,
staff from the village library and such; the village police and
firefighters in their respective vehicles; some villagers walking
their dogs, both clad in red, white and blue decor for the occasion,
and clowns doing delightful stunts. But this year, the parade had
an entrant that they never before had, at least to my memory.
And they certainly stood out!

The Waukesha County Democratic Party sent a contingent to march
in Elm Grove's Memorial Day parade. They marched right down
the main street of rock-ribbed, unabashed, proudly conservative
Elm Grove, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by God-knows-
how-many to one.

No blarney, about fifteen members of their party marched with their
party banner, nearly every one of them carrying an American flag,
some also carrying signs which said things like "patriotism" and
"veterans". And the crowd became very silent. Everyone just
quietly and respectfully watched as the Dems marched by. No one
yelled any obscenities, any threats, any slurs of any kind; no one
threw garbage; no one charged at them to assault them; no one
so much as gave them the finger. Everyone was very polite.
All of this in this bastion of conservatism and small-town values
and virtues, a community which would give a lefty anything from
conniptions to apoplexy.

Now contrast this to the events in places like Berkely, where on
separate occasions conservative speakers were shouted down and
all but run off of the University of California Berkely campus,
and in one of these incidents left-wing students and other "activists"
rioted in the streets. They bragged afterward that they didn't allow
"fascists" to speak on their campus; and affirmed their visceral
hatred of President Donald Trump. In Portland, Oregon, Black
Lives Matter thugs teamed up with other radical groups and rag-tag
individual hooligans to force local Republican Party members and
elected officials from marching in an annual parade in which they
have always marched, with no problems of any kind, until
this year. The GOP folk were told that they would be physically
attacked by the left-wingers if they appeared in the parade, and
since they could not (or perhaps would not?) be guaranteed
safety by the city and its police, they cancelled their scheduled
appearances in the parade.

And your faithful Peasant can come up with more, many more,
such instances of leftist thugs silencing the people whose views
differ from their own, going so far as to threaten them with mayhem
if they appeared in their cities and on their college campuses.
This behavior from the people (I use this term VERY loosely!) who
boast of their supposed tolerance, inclusion, pluralism, and, yes,
love, while accusing conservatives and other non-lefties of
intolerance, exclusion, elitism, and hatred. I have asked this
question here on this blog before, and now ask it again; don't you
love it when the Left accuses we conservatives of behaving as they
do?

I think that these stories are perfectly illustrative and revealing as
to the true behavior of each side, and no more remains to be said.
This was certainly a most interesting, and instructive Memorial
Day for your observant Peasant; a tale of two ideologies and their
adherents.


MEM