Cora, my three-year-old granddaughter, is sequence number six in the clan of eight mini-Kimmels.  She shares a basement bedroom with her sister and a few nights back she crawled out of bed stumbled upstairs and awakened her mother by announcing she was afraid of heights.  “Well it is a good thing you sleep in a toddler bed, so get to bed,” her mother fired back.  Cora’s mom runs a pretty tight ship, so she meandered back to bed.

Although Cora’s fear of heights appears to have been a self-induced convenience, most everyone fears falling to some degree.  Through reasoning and conditioning, many are able to suppress this instinctive, self-preservation phobia, but not me, even though I am a pilot.  I am comfortable flying because I have more confidence in Bernoulli’s principle of lift than the structural integrity of bridges, skyscrapers and cliffs; all of which could collapse at any moment.  Here is why acrophobia is timely.

 China recently constructed the world’s highest, glass-floored, suspension bridge spanning 900 feet across a 594 foot deep gorge.  Pedestrians slip on blue, paper booties so as to protect the one-inch thick, clear floor and off they stride for the rush of a lifetime.  Many of the first adventurers were so overwhelmed by the visual stimuli of the nothingness beneath them they crawled back to the visitor’s center.  Last week, with dozens of thrill seekers creeping across the gorge, the glass cracked and the fun of suspension bridging plunged to the rocks below.  Now, to New Zealand. 

Sweeping social media is a recent Go-Pro video of four, French, backpack-laden hikers crossing the Hopurahine Suspension Bridge in New Zealand’s Te Urewera National Park.  At the half-way point, the suspending cable snaps and the four plunge 26 feet into a deep river.  Other than scrapes and a dunking, the adventurer’s injuries were minor and this brings me to my point. 

After learning about the mishap in New Zealand and knowing the clear China walkway has already cracked, would you cross the glass-floored suspension bridge, or would your fear of heights confine you to the visitor center parking lot?  I would refuse even if suspension bridges had a perfect safety record, but would you cross if the failure rate was 100 percent?  Think about it and consider this analogy:  The unwashed continues to let the ruling class direct them across the wealth redistribution, suspension bridge of Marxism.  Progressivism, socialism and Marxism are synonymous terms for government controlled economies and historically all have failed at being the bridge to nirvana.  This election cycle, American voters, including illegal immigrants, must resist being mesmerized by the free stuff the ruling class candidates beam from the left side of the canyon.  There is no free and our national debt is rocketing skywards.  Retiring this liability will be impossible in any economic system other than free-market capitalism.  Vote freedom over free stuff, or just like the French hikers in New Zealand, America plunges into the abyss.