I was mildly heartened to find someone else objecting to the "these children are our children" line so frequently trotted out since the Newtown mass child-killings. From Jonah Goldberg's The Rush to Impose Reason on Horror:
Contrary to a lot of sloppy prepackaged rhetoric, these weren’t “our” children. They were their parents’ children. To claim otherwise is to try to purchase the sympathy rightly reserved for the grieving on the cheap.Right. Read the rest.
Then read Mark Steyn's eloquent The Massacre of the Innocents. A bit:
For those untouched by death this Christmas, someone else’s bewildering, shattering turn of fate ought to occasion a little modesty and circumspection. Instead, even by its usual execrable standards, the public discourse post-Newtown has been stupid and contemptible.President Obama is among those who have tried to tie the slaughter to a political agenda:
“Goodness,” Obama said. “If there’s one thing we should have after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important.”It was a clumsy attempt, but it's the thought that counts, and his thought was "Never let a crisis go to waste." Stupid and contemptible, exactly.
“Right now what the country needs is for us to compromise, get a deficit-reduction deal in place, make sure middle-class taxes don’t go up,” . . . “Focus on issues like energy, and immigration reform and all the things that will really make a determination as to whether our country grows.”
The need to compromise on the fiscal cliff “has not yet taken up on Capitol Hill,” he said. “And when you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple of months — a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory — the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good and not tangle themselves up in a whole bunch of ideological positions that don’t make much sense.”
More from Steyn:
It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints, and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else’s, until after Christmas — except to note that the media’s stampede for meaning in massacre this last week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide.Go read the whole thing and pass it on.
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From my website:
ReplyDeletehttp://truthandcommonsense.com/2012/12/23/kirstin-powers-and-my-attempt-to-get-through-to-one-liberal/
I watched Kirsten Powers and decided to email her in an attempt to get through to a fairly common sensed liberal. Here is part of that email.
----The point I’m making here is that crime and the potential of violent crime- the act that has not occurred yet but will because of the interacting factors- is inescapable. I think one of the greatest difference between your type of person and my type of person is not intelligence or common sense or even ethical standards, it is one of experience and exposure. You live in a bubble. I and people like me created that bubble you live in. It was my calling, my job, my love to protect people. Hundreds of thousands of LEO’s are working every day to keep you safe inside that bubble where you and Judith can formulate ideas, secure in their validity, as long as the ideas remain inside the bubble. Many on the Left, who also occupy the bubble with you, use their secure location to demonize my people. Why? I have no earthly idea, except many of them are angry little individuals who also appear, frankly, a little stupid. Y’know, not unintelligent, but that kind of stupid that makes you wonder how they manage to get from one end of a day to the other in one piece. Paul Krugman comes to mind as do Geraldo (who by the way boasted about owning a 9mm semi-auto in the past), Michael Moore and most of Hollywood. Also, I fear you also live in an echo chamber. Be careful you aren’t simply hearing the same thing over and over. Remember, a bad idea doesn’t get better because it is repeated.
Getting to my point. You made a couple of statements which were incorrect, as did Judith.
First, there are a TON of reports and studies which do in fact link violent video games, movies and shows to violent acts, especially by younger bad guys. In fact, if memory serves me there were a few that linked the act to the movie/game directly. (The recent mall shooting in Oregon may very well be another. His dress matched that of a popular military video game.)
So, please, as a police officer, who has watched two generations become desensitized because of societal pressures and changes in a child’s environment, don’t repeat that particular statement again. I’d hate to stick you in the Rosie O’Donnell/Quentin Tarantino camp!---
Liberals have played around with our society trying to "remake it" and have turned it into something violent and filled with people with no sense of reason or accountability.
Rev Wright had it correct, the chickens have indeed come home to roost.
Lost in the knee-jerk denouncement of "politicizing" this tragedy - is the fact that those same denouncements are inherently political.
ReplyDelete“Don’t do X because of this tragedy” is just as exploitive as “Do X because of this tragedy.”
Steyn is attaching Newtown to his political agenda - and is appropriating the victims as a rhetorical tool just as surely as those he hypocritically denounces as “stupid and contemptible.”
How about this: Steyn is telling the truth. The political opportunists lack all honesty.
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