Life's Pleasures Quote by Don Young

Don Young reaches for the bluntest kind of moral common sense: the idea that nobody can be saved against their will. The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost folksy, built on repetition ("I can't convince you... You have to...") that mimics a scolding conversation rather than a policy speech. That cadence isn’t accidental. It’s designed to close the door on arguments about outside help and open the door on a single, heavily loaded word: responsibility.

The analogies do rhetorical work by turning complex public-health and social problems into private habits. Alcoholism and diabetes aren’t chosen in a vacuum; they’re conditions with biology, environment, and unequal access to care baked in. Young uses them anyway because they carry a culturally familiar script: the addict who must hit bottom, the patient who must control cravings. That script nudges the listener toward a political conclusion without stating it outright: programs can’t fix people, and government shouldn’t be expected to.

Context matters because Young’s career was defined by a frontier-brand conservatism, skeptical of paternalism and impatient with what he’d frame as excuses. His intent is less about empathy for addicts or diabetics than about drawing a bright line around what society owes and what individuals owe themselves. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to therapeutic language and structural explanations; it’s a reminder that, in his worldview, the most important intervention is internal willpower.

It works because it’s rhetorically clean: two vivid, everyday scenarios, one takeaway. It also provokes because it compresses the messy middle - treatment, support systems, relapse, poverty - into a single moral demand.