What makes conservatives happy

Letter to the editor in the NY Times:

I get it. We need only to embrace the call “to focus first on the welfare of others” just as conservatives do.

I can hardly wait to separate refugee children from their parents and put them in cages, cut back on food stamps and public education, discourage vaccinations and masking, abolish women’s reproductive choice, privatize Social Security and all forms of health care, continue destroying the natural environment while concentrating pollution on the most socially and financially disadvantaged, invest in guns not people, oppose efforts to decrease the wealth gap and to remedy societywide racial, ethnic and gender discrimination, increase taxes on the poor while showering benefits on the rich, suppress the votes of minorities and the less affluent, refuse to mitigate (or even acknowledge) the ongoing climate change crisis, embrace individualism and the “free market” over social benefit. And this is just a short list.

I can feel myself getting happier just thinking about it!

David P. Barash

Redmond, Washington