This past week the Washington Post noted that 9 out of 10 Native Americans either thought the name of the DC football team, the Redskins, was not offensive or simply had no opinion either way…that is to say that they just didn’t care.

Yet the left, including sports commentatwit, Bob Costas, continue to tell them that they should be offended:

Bob Costas, the NBC Sports broadcaster, said he decided several years ago that the name was inappropriate and chose not to use it. He most famously weighed in against it during halftime of a Redskins-Cowboys game in 2013, telling viewers that the name is “an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present-day intent.”

That’s the thing about progressivism. If they care about it and you don’t, you will be made to care. For me, this is the same for same-sex unions, transgenderism, prostitution, smoking weed, etc. – I simply don’t care what you choose to do as long as it doesn’t impact my freedom, security or safety – but progressives have decided for me that I must care because they enact legislation, promulgate rules and lay taxes that guarantee that I can be punished for speaking against these things, acting against them and opposing the use of my taxes to support them.

Progressivism has always carried with it the stench of tyrannical totalitarianism…as sure as sunrise, when power is involved, many seem unable to resist falling for the temptation to lord that power over others. Whether I truly care or not, your not caring offers me an opportunity to exert power over you by forcing you to care. Making you care is just an opportunity to use my power and to open up other opportunities to expand my power through “addressing” other presumed slights and grievances.

This is really nothing new.  Throughout time, the concept of good leading to evil is actually pretty common. We are all familiar with the old saying “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” but this statement is a distillation of sentiments from far earlier ages. T.S. Eliot wrote, “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”Around 1150 AD, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote, “L’enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs” (hell is full of good wishes or desires). An even earlier saying, “”facilis descensus Averno” appears  in Virgil’s Aeneid (written between 29 and 19 BC) and essentially translates as “the descent to hell is easy”.

While the concept has been around a while, progressivism has elevated it to an art form. Progs like Costas are the water carriers for the Grievance Collectors, those perpetually offended souls who harvest angst and anger as if it were wheat – but Robert Quinlan Costas is only a foot soldier in the war on individual rights. It would seem we no longer have the right to be concerned only about things that matter to us as individuals without being forced to care about matters of others by a government that is very willing to choose what we should care about. It is no coincidence that those things represent opportunities for government to legislate or regulate the behaviors of the majority in “defense” of a hand-picked minority. In the case of transgenderism, a minority the medical community sees as people with gender dysphoria, a form of mental illness.

Unfortunately for progressives, one of the rights we have as free people is the right not to care.