Some Broodings on Romney and Entitlement

Romney and Entitlement.

In his now notorious May 2012 screed against 47% of Americans Romney gave particular emphasis as he denounced almost half of the country for feeling ENTITLED to all sorts of benefits—entitled “to health care, to food, to housing, to--you name it.” That portion of the once-secret video bothered me when I first heard it and continues to gnaw at me.

Many people are coming to the conclusion that Romney has no firm goals as President but simply feels ENTITLED to be President because he was chosen at birth—healthy, tall (as years passed), handsome, enormously rich and growing richer as he took advantage of all the loopholes in all the tax laws he was entitled to take advantage of. 

Now after learning that some of my cousins, including little children, were massacred by Mormons at Mountain Meadows in 1857 I have looked a little into the assertion that the massacre might have had something to do with the then-recent murder in Van Buren, Arkansas, of Parley Parker Pratt, one of Romney’s great great grandfathers, by the legal husband of a woman he had taken as his 12^th wife. The allegation is that the man who took vengeance on the seducer of his wife and the kidnapper of his children somehow caused the massacre of scores of men, women, and children at Mountain Meadows a few months later.

This seducer, Parley Parker Pratt, was the father of some 30 children and grandfather of 266, Wikipedia says. And you see the pictures of Romney’s great grandfather with his 5 wives and many children. As I try to make sense of the current Mormon concept of celestial marriage I wonder just how many wives a Mormon male can be sealed to forever. There is not a clear answer--but clearly a lot of entitlement.

Running through this snippet of Romney family history is a sense of ENTITLEMENT, I think. Certain men are entitled to much more than health care, food, and housing. Mitt Romney has had the great good luck to think of himself, all his life, as entitled to anything, everything, “you name it”—even the Presidency. Dangerously delusive for him, devastating for the country, where 100% of the people have a right to feel entitled to health care, food, housing, you name it.



P.S. Passage from Zane Grey's THE DESERT CRUCIBLE, unpublishable in his lifetime except expurgated as THE RAINBOW TRAIL:
"Waggoner, the known husband of five wives and father of fifty-five children! . . . Shefford did not need to be told that here was a man who had believed he had conversed with God on earth--who believed he had a divine right to rule women . . . .

I have learned in the past decade that family traits persist generation after generation, sometimes even after traumatic disruptions. Bullheadedness, altruism, greediness, others. Why not a sense of ENTITLEMENT?