By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — A major threat to the United States — and other nations, too — is the ever-growing preference to blame external factors for one’s troubles instead of acknowledging that they can be dealt with by the individual.
Help from others may be useful or needed — what’s a friend for? — but even the members of a team have to take individual action. Just waiting for the other guy won’t score all the points.
An article from Fox News, posted April 29 at the New York Post, illustrated another dangerous expansion of the trend to surrender responsibility. In fact, the article said some people now seek to become disabled, even though surgical intervention.
“Transableism is a newer term for BIID, or ‘Body Integrity Identity Disorder,’ in which a person actually ‘identifies’ as handicapped,” the article said. “BIID has been relabeled to transableism to align with today’s trans community, according to some.
“The point of ‘changing the identifier’ from a psychiatric condition (BIID) to an advocacy term (transableism) is to ‘harness the stunning cultural power of gender ideology’ to the cause of allowing doctors to ‘treat’ BIID patients by ‘amputating healthy limbs, snipping spinal cords or destroying eyesight,’ according to Evolution News and Science Today (EN), which reports on and analyzes evolution, neuroscience, bioethics, intelligent design, and other science-related issues,” the Fox News article said.
National conservative radio talk host Dennis Prager takes just the opposite view. Although Prager didn’t examine the advent of seeking to make oneself physically disabled during a recent talk here, he emphasized the efficacy of taking personal responsibility.
Prager spoke to an outdoor gathering at a spacious home on the south slope of local landmark Camelback Mountain on April 27, with people seated on portable chairs around the lawn.
His syndicated radio program is carried here by KKNT (960 AM), whose afternoon daily talk host Seth Leibsohn joined him on the home’s patio and presented topics for Prager to discuss.
Referring to transgenderism and linked issues promoted from beer commercials to famous theme parks’ leadership, Prager said, “I want to withdraw from Bud Light. I want to withdraw from Disneyland.”
If parents say it won’t matter to take their children to Disneyland, “That bothers me more than anything the left does,” he said.
Make sure that the new kid in a family understands it’s more important to have self-control than self-esteem, Prager said.
On the other hand, he said, black youngsters, women, and Hispanics are taught that they’re terrific but America stinks.
Prager, who was born in the latter 1940s, said he didn’t get the message when he was in the fifth grade that the world was better just because he was in it — although he might make it better later.
Most therapy counselors take the wrong direction, he said.
“My message is, you are your biggest problem. . . . Most therapists are awful” because they enforce the belief in patients that everything else is the problem, not themselves, Prager said.
Ask an addict, Prager said, “What turned you around? ‘The day I recognized I’m my problem’.”
Prager said he has a son who has been sober for seven years, but used to have a therapist who told Prager that he should make himself available to the son and thereby show interest in his welfare by, in essence, living on his son’s doorstep.
This was foolish advice, said Prager, who believed that when his son wanted his help, the son would come to him — which is what happened.
As for realizing the importance of taking personal responsibility, “I learned it in AA. . . . There’s more wisdom at an AA meeting than at Harvard,” he said.
Prager added later, “You have to hit bottom in order to get up.” The problem occurs with not getting up.
“I will not allow my life to go down the tubes because of my children. . . . It’s a terrible error. . . . And, by the way, your children don’t want to be your life. . . . My parents’ joy was each other,” although “they got a lot of joy from my brother and me,” Prager said.
Nearing the end of his talk before offering to take questions, Prager said it’s nothing to celebrate if a seven-year-old boy says he’s a girl, or a seven-year-old girl says she’s a boy.
Local talk host Leibsohn said his KKNT listeners wondered what was the Bible or Torah verse most meaningful to Prager, a Scripture scholar.
Citing particular passages, Prager said that as of late, he thinks of the Commandment to honor your father and mother, because every cult that comes along wants to take away parental authority.
Prager said leftists want schools to give students both breakfast and lunch to make the point, “We feed you, not your parents.” He said there’s no way to get around lunchtime at school, but he’d never let them provide the breakfasts.
Germany bans homeschooling, Prager said, which he views as another example of “Germany is always wrong” — a reference to what it did in World War II. Earlier in his talk he asked how many people regret homeschooling their children. Maybe one percent, he offered.
Perhaps California and New York would ban homeschooling, said Prager, who grew up and studied in New York and lives in and broadcasts from California.
Prager, who speaks Russian, said that out of thousands of graduate students at Columbia University, he was one of only seven who were studying Communism at the school’s Russian Institute. So few, he recalled, that all of them could sit around one table.
He used to think that countries including Russia, China, and Vietnam fell to Communism because they didn’t “have a history of liberty,” Prager said, adding that he has developed “a much more sympathetic view of Russians now” because he sees the United States, with a very different history, headed in the same direction of political repression.
Former Cong. John Shadegg, who had represented Arizona in Washington, D.C., as a Republican legislator, attended Prager’s talk here and put Prager in mind about leftists caring about “humanity” in the abstract while conservatives care about individual people.
Prager said he thinks of people in three groups: those who fight, those who help the fighters, and — the largest group — those who do nothing.
Helping the fighters is just as important as fighting, he said, because, “If the troops don’t get supplies, they can’t fight.”
One important way to help, he said, is to send articles to others in order to “get the word out” on what’s helpful to know.
A lying left-wing claim is, “Black slaves built America,” Prager said.
In fact, he said, 306,000 black slaves were sent to America while seven million were sent to Brazil. If slaves equaled prosperity, Brazil would be the wealthiest, which it’s not.
If slavery meant wealth, he added, the U.S. South would have been far wealthier than the North, which it wasn’t.
There were more slaves in the Arab and Muslim world by a factor of 100, Prager said, and most of the slaves of Arabs were castrated so they couldn’t have families while many of them died because castration was so painful.
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