God bless the delusional.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Target CEO Brian Cornell denied that the retailer’s plummeting sales numbers have anything to do with their new transgender bathroom policy. While acknowledging that these protests have hurt a couple of stores, Cornell said the boycott was immaterial to Target’s bottom line.
“It’s been a very wet and cold start to the year and it’s reflected in our sales,” Cornell told WSJ. “We haven’t seen anything from a structural standpoint that gives us pause.”
Target announced their new policy – allowing transgender customers and employees to use the bathroom of their choice – on April 19. Almost immediately, more than 1.2 million people signed on to a boycott of the retailer – a boycott that has received limited attention from the mainstream media for obvious reasons. What can’t be ignored, however, is the stock price.
Since the day of the announcement, Target’s stock has fallen from $84 a share to $64 a share – a massive 20% drop that can only be partially explained by the overall retail slump in the economy. These losses have cost the retailer’s stockholders somewhere between $6 – $10 billion in 2016.
And if the CEO’s best guess on what’s ailing his store is rain, that stock price may plummet again.
Of course, it’s not incompetence. It’s activism. They aren’t stupid; they can look at cause-and-effect and reach the same conclusions as anyone else. They’re merely hoping that this transgender bathroom issue will blow over and things will quickly get back to normal. Or, as “normal” as things can be when you have men using the women’s room and so forth.
They have cause to be optimistic. This transgender bathroom debate is a hot-button issue right now. Conservatives will never have more passion about this issue than they do right now. If it takes a similar trajectory as gay marriage, you’ll barely hear a peep about it in another couple of years. Things do get “normalized,” no matter how abnormal they are. It’s this fact of human psychology that has allowed the left to keep foisting one insane initiative after another on the American people.
It’s also why the usual approach conservatives take to fighting back is so ineffective. In fact, “fighting back” is not even an accurate description of what we usually do. All to often, we merely provide resistance. Our only goal is to stop change. Unfortunately, that’s a very anemic goal, emotionally speaking. Human beings have a hard time getting excited about merely maintaining the status quo. Eventually, we wind up saying, “Eh, what’s the difference. Just let ’em in.”
If we really want to start making this country great again, we can’t be satisfied with merely maintaining what we have. Liberals have pushed us much too far to the left. The status quo isn’t good enough. Not anymore. We have to start pushing back, and pushing back hard. That’s where the energy is, that’s where the excitement is, that’s where the lasting motivation is.
That’s where America is.
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