Five Things That Scare me

Normally, I embrace opinions. I traffic in opinions. After all, I’m a blogger. Opinions have been good to yours truly.

But if there’s anything scaring me these days, it’s the blatant use of celebrity opinions with regard to [the correct version, FYI] health care reform. I am appalled at the obviously widespread school of thought among the glitterati that those of us who don’t appear in cheesy horror flicks and bad 1980s TV series care one whit about what actors actually think.

Like Robert Englund, who slams those of us opposed to socialized health care as fearmongerers and liars:

If we’re going to achieve effective health care in this country, we need an honest public discussion based on facts: how do we pay for reform, how will it work, who will be covered?

These are important issues than cannot be solved while lobbyists, pundits and “tea-baggers” are muddying the waters by marketing fear. The only people who should be scared by health care reform are those who make a profit off of other people’s suffering and illness.

And, of course, he has to slam the Tea Party movement, the only truly grassroots political movement in America today, with the sexual insult made popular by a man who has probably done a whole lot of teabagging on his own. But to get back to the parody:

Other things that frighten me:

I’m scared by the enormous amount of chutzpah put out by the Hollywood community—like, the ones who popularized bottled water now freaking out at the number of plastic bottles of water consumed by their fellow Americans.

I’m scared by the celebrity slamming of Soccer Moms and SUVs, even as these people use their private jets, are brought to the studio by limousine (no doubt consuming their top of the line bottled water during the ride there and back), who slam the American working and middle class and then pretend that their own children ever walked to school from their L.A. mansions. (As for the mocking of the Blackberry and GPS—from a Hollywood actor/director/producer? Is he kidding us?)

I’m scared by the ease with which the Hollywood elites embrace the nanny state, and then wonder why children have lost their sense of adventure. It’s because the nanny statists have put so many regulations on what people can do, the outdoors is practically forbidden to the rough-and-tumble kids of yesteryear. You think kids are growing up on the internet? No. They’re growing up with the internet, which is an entirely different concept. But how would Freddy Krueger know anything about kids outside of his own sphere, which is the rarefied air of the Hollywood elite? Real world kids? They’re a whole ‘nother species.

Finally, one thing that’s not scaring me is the way children are managing to be raised quite well without ever knowing there was a scary guy in a mask named Freddy Kreuger, and an actor who conflates his popularity as an Freddy with the conceit that people care what he thinks about things that are not movies.

Cross-posted on Hot Air.