Charity For The Elite

New York Times columnist David Brooks is astoundingly out-of-touch with the real world. In his New York Times column, Startling Adult Friendships, Brooks fantasizes on the theme of "What if you had $500 million to give away?"

Sadly, the best thing Brooks can come up with is "friendship retreats."

So I envision a string of adult camps or retreat centers (my oldest friendships were formed at summer camp, so I think in those terms). Groups of 20 or 30 would be brought together from all social and demographic groups, and secluded for two weeks. They’d prepare and clean up all their meals together, and eating the meals would go on for a while. In the morning, they would read about and discuss big topics. In the afternoons, they’d play sports, take hikes and build something complicated together. At night, there’d be a bar and music.

I think you have to be an academic or elite New Yorker not to realize that the only type of people who are interested in, or who have time to attend two-week "friendship retreats" are people who already have a lot of free time and who are already inclined to be interested in that sort of touchy-feely endeavor. Who has time to spend two weeks away from their regular life, even all-expenses paid? In other words, this will attract elites, the wealthy, or the Occupy Wall Street types (over-educated, under-employed).

So, basically, Brooks thinks the best way to change the world with a big bag of money is touchy-feely vacations for people just like him. Yeah, sounds like something a New York Times writer would come up with.

Or, you could look at it from the darker side, "groups of 20 or 30 would be brought together from all social and demographic groups." I love the term "would be brought together." People use the passive voice in writing when they are trying to avoid naming the actor, or the method of the action. How would people of "all social and demographic groups" be brought together? Because, let me tell you, my social and demographic group would rather gnaw its own leg off than have to spend two weeks at a David Brooks-sponsored friendship camp.

Of course, there are precedents. Socialists and Communists around the world have been very consistent in finding means of shipping people off to camps "for their own good," whether they want to go or not. Now, I'm not suggesting that Brooks wants to ship us all away to re-education camps against our will, I'm just using hyperbole to suggest that Brooks, like those totalitarians, thinks he knows what's best for us, and hasn't really thought it through far enough to realize that the very people he probably thinks need the camps most want nothing to do with him.

This is the sort of fuzzy-headed thinking the left is famous for. Yes, I know Brooks is ostensibly a "conservative" or "moderate" columnist at the New York Times, but, seriously, that's like being the biggest Libertarian on the Politburo.

Inevitably, such an idea would be an utter failure. In a free country, it just dies away and becomes joke fodder, like Air America. In a communist country, it becomes official government policy and turns into the Gulag.