JEREMIAH POFF
CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST
Imagine yourself in six years sitting in your home. Perhaps you are married and have a kid. Maybe you’re not quite there yet and you’ve got an apartment in a big city with a couple of roommates.
All of the sudden you get a notice in the mail that you have to leave your home so the government can remodel your home for “green energy.” Oh, and to add insult to injury, it’s being paid for with your taxpayer dollars, which you are currently paying at 30 percent of your income.
This is the reality of the so-called “Green New Deal,” a package of legislative proposals brought forth by House Democrats earlier this month supposedly meant to combat man-made climate change.
Perhaps the most outrageous and far-reaching legislative proposal to ever make its way onto the floor of the House of Representatives, the Green New Deal is nothing more than an elaborate Trojan Horse for extreme socialism.
We might call it “green,” but the truth of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s environmental protectionism is that it aims to force the United States government into every single aspect of your life.
Ocasio-Cortez faced so much backlash from the proposal that her website took down the “Frequently Asked Questions” about the Green New Deal the same day they went up.
What did those FAQs include? Well, a proposal to eliminate air travel within ten years, remodeling every single building in the entire country for environmentally friendly power and economic stability for those who are “unable or unwilling to work.”
UNWILLING.
You, the taxpayer, are expected to pay for someone else to eat government funded bonbons on a couch paid for by the government, in government housing. All because the communist dimwit from New York wants people who DO NOT WANT TO WORK to be able to live comfortable lives.
Welcome to the Democratic Party of 2019.
In 1962, Democrat president John F. Kennedy saved America from the real and immediate threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He stood up to a socialist dictatorship as it stood on our doorstep and threatened to end life on Earth as we know it. And only a year earlier, he uttered one of the most famous sentences by an American president.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
We are now living in an age where a sizable number of people in this country and around the world feel that America owes them something. That they have a right to our hard-earned prosperity. And those unwilling to work for their success have a right to other people’s success.
This is not what made America the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. And it is most certainly not the moral teaching that Christ brought to us through the Gospel and his Church.
When God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, our first parents lost the right to an easy life. They had to work to survive. St. Josemaria Escriva, a modern saint and founder of Opus Dei, noted the dignity in work and invited people of all careers and ways of life to dedicate their work to God as a prayer.
When we live off of the fruits of someone else’s labor, we are encouraging the capital sin of sloth. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez thinks that she can support people who won’t work by taking from those of us who recognize the dignity of hard work. But what she is proposing is evil on all accounts. Each of us has a responsibility to work and glorify God through our use of the physical and mental talents he has given us.