Vice President Kamala Harris has a catch phrase most should be familiar with. ‘What can be, unburdened by what has been.’
There are plenty of YouTube clips on it and it has its own Wikipedia page. The Guardian has a piece that implies it is some sort of self-help mantra.
There will be a lot of puff pieces about VP Harris in the coming weeks and plenty of endorsements from the celebrities. We will be told that she is both a radical and a safe pair of hands. That she was tough on crime but also a liberal. There are some very serious objections to VP Harris and a good place to start is this piece by Ann Coulter explaining how VP Harris is responsible for the shocking crime wave in California.
But I want to examine this phrase ‘What can be, unburdened by what has been’ a little more. It perfectly highlights the dividing line between the left and the right, the liberals in the American sense of the word and the conservatives. I, as a conservative find it terrifying. It is far worse than what President Ronald Reagan identified as terrifying, namely I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
If that is what President Reagan heard, I say good luck to him. These days if you are speaking to someone from the government, the reply is, how can I not help you. Or the computer says no. Or, No, you are not entitled to child benefit. Or if you are in Accident and Emergency, please take a seat and we will be with you in 15 hours. But President Reagan lived in simpler times.
‘What can be, unburdened by what has been’ is a longer version of Welcome to Year Zero. It is an attack on the past saying that what has been offers no guidance to where we should go. It is said by a person who when they come to a fence in their path, they immediately start planning to rip it up. This fence must go. The conservative who comes upon the same fence will stop, pause and ask questions. Why is this fence here? Who put it up and why? Is it protecting anyone?
The Year Zero attack on our past has been ongoing for years. Once the left destroys a people’s attachment to their past, their traditions, and in particular their land (the British Countryside is racist) and tear down their heroes (Churchill is racist and Theodore Roosevelt was racist and his statute must be removed from the entrance of the New York Museum) then this creates a void that can be filled with whatever the left wants.
And what the left want is transgenderism, open borders, a collapsing fertility rate, and a very large State. Instead of statues of Churchill we will get An Expert, that can predict the need for lockdown based on dodgy computer models or perhaps it will be a Lycra clad cyclist who in between mowing down pedestrians and causing massive tailbacks on country roads is doing his bit for the planet. Or usually, it will be a massive rainbow flag.
‘What can be, unburdened by what has been’ is not just a call for slow and steady change or reform. It is a call to revolution. VP Harris is saying we should be unburdened by what has been, in other words we should do what we like, unburdened by the past.
There is the fault line – conservatives should believe that they are burdened or limited by the past. Those on the left do not. They believe that our elders are not wise or worthy of respect – they and their old ways should be dismissed out of hand.
It is also telling that for the likes of VP Harris the past, our cultural heritage is not seen as a tradition to be treasured and passed on to the next generation, but instead a burden to be tossed aside. The arrogance of this is also terrifying – the belief that you and your ideas are superior to everything that went before and that only the people who came on the scene 2 minutes ago have all the answers. This is hubris and we see it everywhere.
This leftist mindset also believes that our young people should have few if any limits placed on them. Instead let them ‘run free’ and they will just blossom. This has been the prevailing orthodoxy for at least two or three generations and we can see the results. The youth running around with knives all over London stabbing people or the lawlessness that is happening in California to name just two obvious examples.
Traditions or burdens of the past are things such as family, religion and cultural heritage unique to each country as well as knowledge. All of these have been attacked by the left – the family is limiting for women especially, religion has long been attacked, no country should have its own heritage as it is always somehow racist or far-right. Instead we should have a globalist nightmare instead. Even knowledge itself was only discovered and produced by ‘dead white men’ like Einstein, so is of no use. All of it, from maths to classical music, must be “decolonised.”
The past, our history, our culture and traditions that bind people together also put limits on our behaviour. We absolutely should be bound by the traditions and rituals of the past.
I believe we should be burdened by what has been. This does not mean living in the past but instead learning from it. This avoids stagnation. What we are seeing now in the West is stagnation because so much of our time is spent arguing over total nonsense, stuff that our ancestors had already settled and therefore we could move on to achieve other things like putting a man on the moon.
Today the so-called progressives are arguing over who should go to what bathroom. This doesn’t seem like progress to me. It is stagnation, the backwardness of believing we should be ‘unburdened by what has been.’
So, the next time VP Harris tells you we should think about what can be, unburdened by what has been, recognise it for the revolutionary talk that it is.