San Diego — On Friday news of a horrific nearly inconceivable school massacre flooded the airwaves. I was still in Denver and actually very near Columbine when that incident unfolded. When such things happen we are left stunned, saddened, and then searching for answers.
Even the great campaigner-in-chief, the tireless ideologue, King Barrack I, knew it was time to give it a rest when addressing the nation following the tragic and senseless murder of children in New England this past week. You know I intently dislike his policies but this time, he was spot on in his eloquent intitial statements to the public. The human tragedy won’t distract him for long before he uses it for his agenda, but at least at that moment, for once in his reign, he took the right tack. But not so for his sycophantic followers on Facebook. Oh no, they will never be said to miss a chance to spew their pabalum to the hordes of willing co-whiners hanging on every word. They will never be seen to miss a chance, especially based on a crisis or tragedy, to advance their own agendas.
The cowardly shooter himself was not, of course, seen as to blame in any way. Poor guy; he may have had this syndrome or that neurosis, this “challenge” or been the helpless victim of bad potty training, but was at best a pawn to his poor socialization, made helpless to sort out good choices by evil corporations, chemically or genetically tainted food, and, of course we cannot overlook global warming. Worst of all, he was apparently inescapably mesmerized by the soothing spiel of the guns he had apparently stolen from his mother (whom, out of gratitude he killed) even though he was not legally able to buy them due to his age.
Based on the shrill and unthinking (but deep feeling) screed being howled forth on Facebook, I can just hear it now as it will become the stuff of bardic legend and will find its way into the sacred texts of the agenda. It will read something like this…
“And Lo, the evil Gun confused the man’s mind and spake thusly unto him and commanded, ‘Go ye forth thou craven soldier of evil, take hold of me in thy right hand and take hold of me in thy left hand and do ye smite those of the most innocent ye can find! I, the Gun, have commanded thee and thou must obey.’ But the man was sore afraid and so the evil gun spake again saying, ‘Verily I say unto you, fear not, be ye calm, for thou needst only hold me and I will aim and fire myself being the creature of pure evil that I am, and thou shalt remain free of guilt and be considered blameless since it was of mine own not thine own doing.’”
This day and age will, I believe, be described by future historians as the time when those demanding entitlement and victim status finally outnumbered those who, like the brave souls of the mid and late 18th Century chafed under a previous King determined to rule not just their lives but their destinies, were themselves determined to take hold of their unalienable rights, their freedoms, and with them, accept their responsibilities.
We, the sheeple, have, it seems to me, just proven (albeit in a squeaker of an election) that the tide has shifted. No longer in America do we have a majority of people seeking guidance from their own hearts and faith along with a demand for personal freedom and, as payment, accepting the responsibilities attendant on them. We now have a slight but growing majority of those who seek guidance and goodies from a generous elite tyrant, who knows so much better than they what they should do and how they should think.
No longer the true “home of the brave” we are now home mostly to frightened souls willing to trade freedom for those endless goodies and the security from having to accept any responsibilities for our own actions or consequences for our own choices no matter how moronic or self-destructive. Neither Pericles nor Solon, nor even Alexander could be more surprised and disappointed at what has happened to once mighty Greece than would be Washington and Jefferson and Franklin at what has become of the country they left us.
And with that change, perhaps appropriately toward the end of 2012 (think Maya calendar) we have reached another critical point of change; the point where we as a nation no longer deserve the freedoms paid for in blood by those who have gone before. Perhaps our cultural 2012 apocalypse is that we have become so degraded in our ethics and depraved in our desperation to avoid approbation for behavior or restraint in our choices we cannot logically or literally be seen as the same people spoken about in our Declaration of Independence; and we are certainly no longer secure from governmental abuse by the Constitution based, as it is, on those obviously outmoded concepts of individual freedom and the restraint of government. When we sit by without comment as our ruler sets new records in Executive Orders and the creation of bureaucratic fiefdoms, aka “Czars” all to allow the creation of laws and regulations bypassing congress, we are obviously, as a people, in collusion with the damage being done to our founding rules.
We are instead, fueled by indolence and driven by a self-anointed sense of victimized injustice, crying for a new declaration, but this time it will be a Declaration of Dependence along with a new Constitution guaranteeing us all a place at the public trough.
And such a people as we seem to be descending into obviously cannot be trusted with the means to keep the government in check or, for that matter, any tools or even thoughts, which would suggest that evil exists, that some people do evil and are evil. Much less should such a people as we have become have granted to them rights of self reliance and the rights to the results of exercising that self reliance. And much less the right to own a weapon.
I personally believe it is time to call “bullshit” on this idiocy of blaming a tool. I went to my guns and hauled their little butts out to have a chat and told them not to be trying to entice me to go off and hurt innocent people and definitely not to be doing it on their own. As carefully as I tried to listen, not one of them had a word to say to me. Perhaps I am blessed (or cursed) with stupid guns that are just hunks of machined metal and not infused with a wicked spirit.
But according to my so-called friends on Facebook, those hunks of metal are endowed with a rudimentary though malicious intelligence and a powerful volition to either do harm on their own or to somehow, by means as yet not fully understood, trick otherwise intelligent, kind, gentle, stable individuals into taking them out and allowing them to do violence on others. By their reckoning, it is the gun that needs banishment not the people who would never even think of violence and hurt were it not for the influence of the evil firearm.
We do not allow children these days to do anything even remotely possible to hurt themselves. They no longer are even aware of danger since they are wrapped up in our protective gear and paranoia to be “safe.” Children no longer trained to protect themselves against a bully of their own age have no point of reference from which to even attempt to protect themselves against an adult bent on their destruction. Nor are they prepared to deal with the array of bullies they will find as adults in the business world. Their overwrought protection has, in fact, made them incredibly vulnerable to all forms of physical, mental, and emotional destruction.
And yet in this Orwellian world of double speak and double think, the destroyers cannot themselves be truly responsible because if we allow for the mere possibility that a bad guy can be blamed for HIS behavior, then we open the flood gates to having our own behaviors examined and perhaps, to the detriment of our fragile egos, condemned. To protect us from blame and scrutiny and ever feeling bad, we make it impossibly hard to get mentally unstable individuals off the streets and into some form of care or confinement while instead using that instability as an excuse for behavior. It may be a partial explanation but it is not an excuse and it should not be tolerated.
We have reached a point where we no longer believe in the power of God but we do seem to believe in the power of an inanimate object to command its owners to commit murder and mayhem. We hear Son of Sam say the devil spoke to him through dogs and say, “well, y’know, like maybe… he was not, like, y’know, a bad guy; he was just, like, sick and needs, y’know, to be better understood.” Really?
I’m not even the slightest sorry that I feel we should not be called upon to spend one more penny to keep Berkowitz, Manson, Kuzinski, Hassan, et al breathing our air one more second. To demonstrate the avoidance of bad consequences for bad behavior simply facilitates and perpetuates more bad behavior. If it makes YOU feel good, great, but do not ask me to spend a penny paying for it.
Do not ask other innocents to die for it when the next loon that was on lots of radar screens as unstable and dangerous, whose writings indicate a desire to wreak vengeance for real or imagined slights on real or imagined tormentors, but were never confined because that would be “intolerant” or, worse, insensitive. I call “Bullshit” on such idiocy.
Maybe Elvis isn’t dead after all… And maybe those really ARE aliens kept on ice in Area 51.
Such a population of stupid, lazy, insufferable, self-proclaimed victims and the terminably needy have no rightful place at the same table as those who have gone before; those who have accepted sacrifice, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice, to purchase and repurchase our freedoms and rights of self determination. If this new entitled American citizen (or even non-citizen; who cares they are here and need a voice, right?) is an exemplar of what we, as a society and culture have become, then those poor devils of old made their sacrifices in vain and for nothing; the generation they fought and died to protect has slapped their efforts in the face and rejected their beliefs out of hand.
We need to end the hypocrisy of observing Veteran’s Day as if we truly respected what those veterans had done and would dedicate ourselves to protecting it. Nonsense. This new citizenry has, in my opinion, cast off those blood-bought rights and flung them on the dung heap of their own tolerance turned to cowardice and fear turned to ignorance gone to seed. They have dedicated themselves to turning this country into a place those brave souls would never have fought for and certainly would never have offered their lives for.
So maybe it is time to admit that, defacto, while some of us were not paying attention, growing numbers of our citizenry have knowingly and purposefully abrogated and abdicated their claims on the rights granted in our Constitution and it needs to be re-written to accommodate this new entitled people.
We have already limited our Free Speech Rights, we have already worked hard to turn Freedom OF Religion into Freedom FROM Religion (except, of course, for the religion of others who seek to destroy us). We have already turned the Right “peaceably to assemble” (which means to assemble lawfully) into the Right to form a mob and do damage or any unlawful act to anything in the area so long as you espouse the correct and accepted agenda. So why not, while we are at it, simply toss out our right to maintain the weapons with which to keep government at bay since we now apparently feel the need for that government to think for us, provide for us, keep us safe from each other (though not from it), and to determine for us, with far greater wisdom than we could ever possess, how to best allocate and distribute the fruits of our labor?
Who are we, after all, to think we should have such a right to choose for ourselves? That’s not fair. What is fair is having those who will be productive carry the load for those that will not. And those that will not be productive deserve everything those who will be productive earn just, apparently, because they were born. And maybe, if we really think about it and try, as caring individuals to empathize with them, they actually deserve even more since their poor innocent egos are damaged and they are made to feel bad by having to sit by and look on as others work and they are, by their lack of effort and enterprise, left empty handed.
Let’s try something heretical, some perspective on this tragedy. Not in any way to diminish the scope of it or the horror of it and certainly not to diminish the evil and depravity of the perpetrator; rather to understand the situation on a broader scale.
In the last few years, 2010 to 2012, there have been school murders across the globe: in Russia, in Germany, in Canada. Even in China during those years there were multiple school attacks around the country leaving over 20 dead children and many more wounded. But in China no one was shot: the weapons instead were knives, cleavers, and in one especially horrible case, gasoline.
The worst school massacre in this country occurred in Bath Township, Michigan… in 1927. Thirty-eight children and a few adults were murdered by a disgruntled looser of a local election. His weapon of choice… dynamite.
What this all should start to illustrate is that any attempt to deal with this behavior that concentrates solely on the tool to the exclusion of the individuals doing the murdering, is doomed to failure. Concerning my views on the 2nd Amendment and what we might do about it see the post on “The Aurora Shootings, Pt 2.” But clearly despite the typical liberal’s desire for simplistic feel good solutions, we have got to address far more than simply whether we should any more be allowed to own a firearm.
Do you hear about those other shootings around the world even though an internet search on school attacks makes them easy to find? No. Don’t expect Chris Matthews, Allen Colms, or Rachel Maddow to talk about them. Why? Because they do not fit the agenda.
Bah. So again I call “Bullshit!” I think this new majority deserves the world and the government they seem to want though, if history has any predictive value, it will turn out far different than they think it will. But I can tell you this… I sure as Hell do not want it for myself.
I believe history has shown the accuracy of the adage that when a government fears the people there is justice, but when a people fear the government there is tyranny. But when they realize that is true… it will be too late.
N. DAVID KING's BLOG 