Posted on 08/08/2019 3:56:02 AM PDT by DoodleBob
The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don't understand the rules, who don't think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control. We are the country that has a TV commercial on all the time that says: "Just do it." Michael Frederick Griffin just did it....
As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn't seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, did so many become undone?
We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won't like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals--university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators--who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
However, the editorial is still relevant, if for no other reason, because it shows that after 26 years, as a culture we are STILL debating the cause of this sort of madness.
all according to plan ...
1968 was a defining year in modern history world wide, the year radicalism became mainstream . In Europe, the popular term for the 1960s generation that wishes to tear down society to rebuild a utopia in their own image is “ the Class of 1968”
The 1968 Democrat Convention riots in Chicago were the defining event of 1968
I lay it all at the feet of our entire political/legal system and the cultural environment in which we live. This idiocy can be summed up in one sentence from an infamous U.S. Supreme Court ruling:
"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." -- Planned Parentdood v. Casey (1992), from Part II of the USSC ruling, joined by Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Souter
For one thing, it is astonishing that such banal, infantile slop could be written by anyone who has been educated past kindergarten. Secondly, this statement goes right to the heart of the question about why we can't deal with these horrific crimes. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, we can't even define objective standards for "good" and "evil" anymore. We are all allowed to define our own concepts of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.
What's alarming the dimwits who run our institutions now is that a lot of people have taken them up on this untenable definition of "liberty" in ways they never expected. Some mutant in Texas decided that his "concept of existence" was one in which he didn't have to live with immigrants, with Hispanics in general, or maybe just with any WalMart shoppers. So he was perfectly justified -- with the full support of the U.S. Supreme Court, by the way -- in going out and promoting that "concept of existence" by shooting a bunch of WalMart shoppers in El Paso.
So the person who makes a living by killing babies is behaving in a "civilized" manner, while a person who takes it upon themselves to avenge those dead babies, and prevent more dead babies, because the (current) people in charge condone it is acting in an "uncivilized" manner?
Personally, in this case, I'm rooting for the shooter.
Before I click on the link, is the WSJ still behind a paywall?
Story not accessible. Subscription necessary.
No guardrails = no borders, no morals, no God...no consequences for one’s actions.
I would amend your statement just a little. We have criminalized a lot of thinks in recent years. You can’t smoke most places, obviously draconian gun laws fit, how much water our bathroom fixtures use is mandated by law, what kind of light bulbs we’re allowed to buy. You get the picture. But here’s the kicker, we have legalized so many immoral, some might say mentally ill behaviors. We glorify and celebrate homosexuality, transgenderism and drug use. We even allow grown men, many probably harboring pedophiliac thoughts, to dress up, read to and cavort with young children in public library no less. My point is that the Left has no problem regulating how we live our lives down to the Nth degree unless it involves perverse, abnormal or deviant behavior, then anything goes.
I think this combination is at least a contributor to much of the senseless behavior we see today. I can’t buy an incandescent light bulb, but if I’m a grown man I can legally follow a 10 year old girl into a public bathroom or takes showers with women at the gym. I can only use 1.5 gallons of water to flush my s**t, but I can grow, sell and smoke all the weed I want. The only things we’ve deregulated is deviant personable behavior and I would put gun down score of innocent people in that category.
While in principle I don’t disagree with you concerning abortionist, murdering someone in cold blood because you disagree with them is the epitome of uncivilized behavior. I’m sure many on the Left would tell you attacking conservatives is acceptable behavior because we are intolerant, bigoted, racist assholes. In a civil society we settle our differences without violence. Sadly that has become more unlikely with the rise of progressivism and the rhetoric from the Left. We shouldn’t excuse bad behavior by those on our side based on the behavior from the other, but we are rapidly being pushed into it because the institution we set up to protect the civilized from the uncivilized have failed us. This won’t end well.
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We have really been tipping for a very, very long time, and especially since they took God out of the schools.
(Do they pledge to the flag in schools anymore?)
GREAT, GREAT POST!
So if I had been in Walmart a few days ago, standing behind the shooter as he started killing kids, it would have been uncivilized of me to put one in his head?
You may respond that if after he had finished his spree and walked outside, if I then put one in his head, it would be an uncivilized act.
Technically, since he wasn't threatening me directly in the store (were I behind him), then my actions there would have been uncivilized?
Had I put on in his head in the store, I would have been preventing more deaths. If I let him walk out and the cops arrest him, society would deal with him as a killer.
There is no such dealing in this society with an abortion doctor. We'll have to agree to disagree. I'm rooting for the shooter in this case.
Leftists are to blame.
Leftists took fathers out of the families.
Leftists took God out of society and the schools.
Children grow up with no respect for boundaries and restraint and no value for human life -including their own.
All so the Leftists can harvest justifications for taking freedoms away from the innocent.
Just goes to show: Same as it ever was but now it’s much hotter and at a National Level that may come off the rails once President MAGA/KAG is re-elected in 2020.
Technically if you are in close proximity of a active shooter then he is a direct threat to you and you would be totally within your rights to defend yourself and the others around you, and I would expect you would. That is different than gunning someone down as they walk to their car or to their mailbox or wherever the doctor was when shot because you disagree with what he does for a living. Is it alright in your mind for someone to shoot a policeman getting into his car in his driveway because in the shooters culture police are seen as racist who murder this person’s people for no reason? Not an uncommon belief in many minority communities.
My point is that in a civilized society we do not settle our difference by committing murder. Should the abortion doctor be shut down and put in jail for feticide, yes, but that is the preview of the legal system and courts not vigilantes. If we are going to accept what the individual who shot the doctor did because we disagree with what he did and stood for, we are opening up a huge Pandora’s Box.
We may just have to agree to disagree which is the civilized thing to do and used to be common practice in this country.
“And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news.”
There was a time like that and it was the 1950’s and into the early 60’s. These were the truly golden years in my life experience. It can be argued that the assassination of JFKo marked the beginning of the end of our collective national innocence. However, I will forever mark the turning point as the election of LBJ over Barry Goldwater in 1964 followed by the Berkeley Free Speech movement that year. All the current woes flow from these events IMHO.
What in the past had been simply illegal became "civil disobedience." If you could claim, and it was never too hard to claim, that your group was engaged in an act of civil disobedience--taking over a building, preventing a government official from speaking, bursting onto the grounds of a nuclear cooling station, destroying animal research, desecrating Communion hosts--the shapers of opinion would blow right past the broken rules to seek an understanding of the "dissidents" (in the '60s and '70s) and "activists" (in the '80s and now).
Concurrently, the personal virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. In the process, certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.
You can argue, as many did and still do, that all this was necessary because the established order wouldn't respond or change. But then you still need to account for the nation's simultaneous dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction. You need to account for what is happening to those people within U.S. society who seem least able to navigate the political and personal torrents that they become part of, like Michael Griffin. Those torrents began with the antiwar movement in the 1960s.
Those endless demonstrations, though, were merely one part of a much deeper shift in American culture--away from community and family rules of conduct and toward more autonomy, more personal independence. As to limits, you set your own.
The people who provided the theoretical underpinnings for this shift--the intellectuals and political leaders who led the movement--did very well, or at least survived. They are born with large reservoirs of intelligence and psychological strength. The fame and celebrity help, too.
But for a lot of other people it hasn't been such an easy life to sustain. Not exceedingly sophisticated, neither thinkers nor leaders, never interviewed for their views, they're held together by faith, friends, fun and, at the margins, by fanaticism. The big political crackups make the news--a Michael Griffin or the woman on trial in Connecticut for the attempted bombing of the CEO of a surgical-device company or the '70s radicals who accidentally blew themselves up in a New York brownstone. But the personal crackups just float like flotsam through the country's hospitals and streets. You can also see some of them on daytime TV, America's medical museum of personal autonomy.
It may be true that most of the people in Hollywood who did cocaine survived it, but many of the weaker members of the community hit the wall. And most of the teenage girls in the Midwest who learn about the nuances of sex from magazines published by thirtysomething women in New York will more or less survive, but some continue to end up as prostitutes on Eighth Avenue. Everyone today seems to know someone who couldn't handle the turns and went over the side of the mountain.
These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life's margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They're guardrails. It's also true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules. But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in. All of them did so to transform the country's institutions and its codes of personal behavior (abortion, for instance).
In a sense, it has been a remarkable political and social achievement for them. But let's get something straight about the consequences. If as a society we want to live under conditions of constant challenge to institutions and limits on personal life, if we are going to march and fight and litigate over every conceivable grievance, then we should stop crying over all the individual casualties, because there are going to be a lot of them.
Michael Griffin and Dr. David Gunn are merely two names on a long list of confrontations and personal catastrophe going back 25 years. That today is the status quo. The alternative is to start rethinking it.
That's how you end up with state governments basically marginalizing cigarettes even while they push to legalize marijuana ... etc., etc.
Thank you!! :-)
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