Natural Law, Religion, Teachings

Minding Other People’s Business, Brief Genesis of a Social Cancer

I frequently chastise Minders of Other People’s Business, who I will refer to here as MOPB’s. I just want to remind people who react to these mites are not themselves MOPB’s simply by calling them out.

MOPB’s illustrates a deep personal and social law.

When someone kicks down your door and invades your privacy, announcing to the world that your choices of living room decor, wallpaper colors, pets, meats in the fridge versus strictly veggie are so de classe, or annoying to them….when you call them out, you ARE NOT likewise minding their business.

You see, MOPB’s are defined as those who believe that anything, ANYTHING of which they disapprove IS their business, and that they have not only the right, but the duty, to make the maximum amount of noise to tell the world about it.

And of course, demand that it be fixed.

They have always been with us. Even the smallest town had them, and still has them, long before social media and the internet. Or even telephones.

My mother was one of these and she belonged to a coven of five or six church ladies who whispered out secrets about who was seen sneaking out of a house after 11 PM when the husband was away; stuff like that. One of them told my mother that they’d seen me light up a cigarette out behind her outhouse. That news beat me home by an hour and I was grounded. (I kept a pack behind a loose brick at the post office, where I waited for the school bus each morning, so all was not lost.)

Growing up I always thought MOPB’s were a part of nature, and likely they were. The natural scientist would say “they are not survival endangering” to the community, so harmless. But neither were they survival-enhancing. Just something everyone, adults and school kids alike just simply had to recognize. And endure.

And since I spent a lot of free time watching old black & white movies on television I got a broader grasp of MOPB’s, for virtually every town, whether out West, the Indiana midwest, or New England, they all had their gaggle of MOPB’s walking down the street together, giving “that look” to a woman whose skirt was a bit too high, or her jacket just a bit too seedy. It didn’t matter whether the woman was a saloon girl, or from a hut across the tracks, or a farm woman in town for the monthly shopping, they all got that same rolled-eyes look.

And, on occasion, they’d pop into the mayor’s office to complain…especially if it were about a bosomy saloon girl walking down the boardwalk having forgotten to cover up in a full length coat, which common decency dictated that all ladies wear on the public streets. In all those films, whether about the 19th Century or 1930s-50s, proper ladies in public were covered in long coats, much like those hedge-gabbers, shown above.

And to my mind, no one signified the type better than Margaret Hamilton, best known as the Wicked Witch from the “Wizard of Oz”. No one had a more memorable disapproving, prune-faced scowl than she did. True, there were New England types, Midwestern types and Old West types, but their faces and manners were the same…which tells me Hollywood was trying to tell us something. (Ms Hamilton was from an upper class Cleveland home, but at least did marry…for awhile.)

Now, even in the 30s and 40s, Hollywood was fairly left-of-center, but I don’t think they ever foresaw this MOPB “type” would become a model for what would become modern feminism, even though it was in abundance in the early feminist movement that had a direct role in gaining women the Vote in 1920 (which was a Good Thing) and Prohibition in 1919, which was a terrible, terrible thing, for it turned small time crime into big business which has since created evil empires that now include drugs and human trafficking…all because the MOPB’s, who largely came from affluent families and modeled on the New England families and their exclusivist Puritan strain. All they had to do was dump that one redeeming quality…their belief in God. Get rid of God, which they did by ’60s, and you have the check-off list for all the darker personality traits and psychology for the Modern Left.

(You may not know this but the original spread of the settling of the Appalachian regions, by Protestant Scotch-Irish, beginning late 1600’s, early 1700s, was shuttled through Philadelphia ports because the Puritans of Massachusetts made the Boston ports inhospitable to those beer-swilling primates from Ireland. It would be their Virginia and Carolina militias that would turn the tide for the Patriots in the Revolution at Yorktown, FYI.)

So it only stood to reason that the more privileged in America, post Civil War, largely the industrial northeast blue states would develop a distaste for those teeming millions who would arrive to fill the factories, coal mines, and steel smelters, mostly from Ireland and Italy, but also other east European Catholic countries. They lived in urban tenements, and swilled cheap beer.

Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage (the WCTU and Feminism) were joined at the hip… only not the same hip. The right hip did the right thing and achieved the vote for women but the left hip; starting out anti-Catholic, is today, anti-religion and pro-privilege.

You see, MOPB is not a political stance, it is first and foremost a display of temperament and class identification. The down-the-nose sneer.

(Margaret Hamilton in one of her many roles; the famous WCTU photo of prune-faced “lips that no sane man would ever kiss”; New York spinster, Frances Willard, founder of WCTU; and one of their southern KKK delegations around 1900.)

As bad as that might have been, they have become much worse:

And yes, if you have not noticed, what once was a club exclusively for women has now seeped over to a large number of males who do not identify as gay, yet possess this one element of MOPB. Many, I’ve observed, are lawyers. It’s annoying as hell, and quite frankly, very embarrassing for men, but that too comes from sketchy upbringing among the rich.

This is yet another reason why the MOPB Left hates Donald Trump, a son of wealth and privilege, he went another way.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *