RUSTLINGS

People who say that life is not worth while are really saying that they themselves have no personal goals which are worthwhile... Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project... Always have something ahead of you to "look forward to" -- to work for and hope for.

Maxwell Waltz

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I've had so many people say "AMEN" to the following column by Charles Krauthammer, that I'm reprinting it. The general subject is:

If Communism and Socialism are Dead ... what's Left for the Left?

"The Committee for the Free World, the most spirited anti-communist voice in post-Vietnam America, has closed shop. 'We've won, goodbye,' explained founder Midge Decter. The most skeptical coroner has spoken. Communism is dead. Another story, however, has been largely missed: Socialism is dead, too.

Historian Christopher Lasch recently said, "We have to ask ourselves whether (Mikhail Gorbachev) isn't presiding not just over the collapse of the Soviet empire but over the collapse of socialism as well. It is all very well to argue ... that the socialist ideal was never to be confused with (Soviet-style) `actually existing socialism.' But the whole point of Marxian socialism as distinguished from utopian socialism, if anybody remembers, was precisely that it was not merely a speculative ideal."

Socialism, despite what Gorbachev pretends, was never the doctrine of loving thy neighbor as thyself. It is a political doctrine of class conflict rooted in rejection of private property and faith in social control. If socialism is dead, what's left of the left? Judging from its activities, it is improvising well:

* Environmentalism. A natural successor to Marxism. There is a certain shamelessness in the left adopting the environment as its cause, considering the environmental wreckage left by "actually existing socialism" in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Environmentalism is nonetheless the perfect escape hatch for the left, because it enables the left to do precisely what it tried to do under the banner of socialism: allow educated elites to tell everyone else how to live.

* Peace. With the gulf crisis, the left (with some help from the isolationist right) has been busy trying to revive the long dormant anti-war movement. But here one gets the feeling of people going through the motions, of a reflexive, almost nostalgic anti-interventionism.

* Deconstruction, a.k.a. the Balkanization of America. This is the major project of the left in the universities, the monastic refuge to which the most radical left has retreated. How to undermine a culture it cannot abide? By attacking its most central values: the idea of a common Western culture and the idea of a common American citizenship.

How? By proclaiming and championing a new oppressed group, no longer the bloated and ungrateful working classes, but a new class of carefully selected ethnic and gender groups. Blacks, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, Native Americans are now wards of the left.

In their name is launched an all-out assault on America's cultural past. As Professor John Searle points out in the New York Review of Books, the demand is not just for an expansion of the West's cultural canon to include works by women or people of color, but the destruction of this canon as representative of a white male-dominated system of cultural oppression.

Of the three projects, Balkanization is the most serious. America will survive both Saddam Hussein and the snail darter. But the setting of one ethnic group against another, the fracturing of the American idea, poses a threat that no outside agent in this post-Soviet world can make.

Charles Krauthammer

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In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm; in the real world, all rests on perseverance.

--Goethe

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Contrary to those who promote "get rich schemes" by encouraging you to think, act, dress and speak like a millionaire if one wants to become one, EDWARD CLARK says:

"The best way to realize the pleasure of feeling rich is to live in a smaller house than your means would entitle you to have."

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My condolences to the family of BILL BACK who died Sunday. His funeral will be at 11:00 a.m. today (Wednesday) at Centenary Church.

Bill was one of the solid, quiet leaders of our community. He undertook many tasks (outside of the limelight) that benefitted many of us in this area. From my first experience with Bill in our Jaycee days, to most recent events, ... he was one who always volunteered; always was there; always did more than his share; and always with a positive attitude and a twinkle in his eye.

His family and friends will miss him, but he's left us all with a memory and example of a good life.

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There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.

--John F. Kennedy