I don't know about you, but I'm ready for a New World
Order.
I know that phrase is controversial, and a negative to many of my
conservative friends. But the Present World Order is getting scary and
I'm up for a change.
There's one condition, though: I get to create it in my own favorite
world order image, which I discovered when I was in my early 20s while
watching the original Star Trek TV series.
Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise left Earth "to
explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations
..."; and the assumption was that the world and civilization they left
behind pretty much had its act together. Clearly people were free,
intelligence and integrity were valued, technology was amazing, and the
sexes and races got along with each other and with semi-aliens like
Spock.
I figured this is the way the world might be someday, even though I grew
up with the Cold War. When I was pregnant the Red Chinese got the bomb
and I was concerned about bringing a child into a world that I thought
they might rule.
Anyhow, my son is now 42; the closest he came to communism was taking
economics courses at UMass Amherst; the Russians are sort of our
friends; and I find myself thinking that maybe the Chinese, less Red now
than they were, might be a nice ally against the Muslim hordes. Do
Islamic terrorists hate the East as much as they hate the West? Let's
hope so.
But the phrase "new world order" has another connotation. I discovered
it in 1971, when I was in western Pennsylvania visiting my parents on my
way to my new home in Massachusetts.
We took my son to a nearby country fair, where there was a booth manned
by something called the John Birch Society. Its members were warning
about this thing called the "New World Order" and a man who, they said,
would be the next president of the United States.
I had never heard of this Jimmy Carter person, but they even had a list
of his future cabinet. Three names stayed with me, and I recognized
Cyrus Vance, Harold Brown and Zbigniew Brzezinski when, six years later,
they became President Carter's secretary of state, secretary of defense
and national security adviser, respectively. Whoah! How did those
backwoods Pennsylvania folks know all that in 1971?
After moving near the home turf of the John Birch Society, which was
founded in Belmont, Mass., I did some reading over the years about
certain highly placed people in Big Business and government who had an
agenda: They and their institutions would bring about "world peace" by
placing their superior selves in position to control the individualists
among us, one way or another. Eventually I learned that liberals in
general thought they would fit right in with that new, peaceful world
order; and I understood that it was the job of people like me to resist
their attempts at control, annoying them as much as possible.
I never really got caught up in the conspiracy thing; or thought, as Mel
Gibson apparently does when his brain isn't functioning, that it had
something to do with Jews. In Massachusetts, many of my fellow resisters
were and are Jewish, most notably key talk-show hosts during the 1970s
and '80s like Avi Nelson, David Brudnoy, and Jerry Williams and
political activists like Republican leader Gordon Nelson and my former
boss, Don Feder.
Government is too disorganized and inefficient for a conspiracy. Big
Business is too competitive, and often passes on its money to spoiled
kids like Paris Hilton. So it's hard to imagine a group of conspirators
that still hangs out together 80 years after the Birchers said the
conspiracy began.
Alleged New World Order liberals are attracted to others like
themselves, of course, and do have undue influence in our universities,
where they pass on their strange notions of "peace at any price" to new
generations. I think youthful idealists usually get over this
unrealistic world view, though. Most Americans don't like being told
what to do, even, or especially, by those who think themselves superior.
Every now and then, though, I find myself wondering: What other
explanation might exist for the political and business leaders who
support illegal immigration? Do they want open borders that will
eventually change nations into a peaceful "one world" governed by them?
Maybe such a fantasy did once exist in our society's higher circles. But
if it endured, it would now be running into another vision of a new
world order, one run by Islamic terrorists who - unlike our former
Soviet enemies who were sensibly concerned about mutually assured
destruction - are completely insane. Maybe the elitists and the
terrorists will cancel each other out. If not, we can always hope that
the more than a billion Chinese eventually decide they'd rather be
allies for freedom, with us.
But just in case, we might want to work on technology to help us someday
boldly escape to where no man has ever gone before - a new world order
of freedom for all.
Barbara Anderson is executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. Her syndicated columns appear weekly in the Salem
News, Newburyport Times, Gloucester Times, (Lawrence) Eagle-Tribune, and Lowell Sun; bi-weekly in the Tinytown Gazette; and occasionally in the Providence
Journal and other newspapers.