The premise of this Cleaning House series is the idea societal mores and culture have been deteriorating the past 50yrs. This has been due to uncontrolled immigration, rise of multiculturalism, diversity mandates & a rigorous progressive politicization of education, journalism/news media, entertainment, government, even justice.
Its also due to growing secularization, single-moms, fatherless homes, rising prevalence of unmarried family units, increasing drug use, flagging attitudes about individual responsibility, group-think mentalities stratifying us into factions like male v female; white v nonwhite; religious v secular; capitalist v socialist and most recent, Muslim v non-Muslim.
These cause promiscuity, more divorce, falling church attendance, more violent crime/incarcerations, influx of illegals, coarsening of culture in language/behavior, malfeasant/felonious public servants/politicians, skyrocketing public debt, governmental corruption, dilution of traditionalism/constitutionalism and weakening of character/integrity of our institutions, public and private.
Immersed in these chaotic elements we look for easy answers. At least, liberals do. They won’t admit their policies/demands are the problem, crying for more and more of the same. They think investing unending amounts of time, energy and money studying the negative side-effects of their otherwise brilliant ideas will help to better manage them.
Gun violence in general and mass shootings/massacres in particular triggered this series to begin with. In prior installments I argued our changing culture was a primary contributing factor to this phenomena. But another approach to finding a reason for the mayhem might be to impute it from what we know.
Going back before the 60’s there were relatively few incidents of assassinations, mass shootings, suicides by people under 30, abortions or mercy killings of the sick/elderly. Since then these all exploded to much higher levels. Why? What’s driving it? The common denominators are male, under 35 {approx}, mental instability and religious fanaticism.
One can’t dispute progressive efforts have liberalized attitudes about sex, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, multiculturalism racism, single-moms and so on. Men under forty have been exposed to this since childhood, with good chance they grew up in a fatherless home with drugs and domestic violence, lackluster emphasis on education/religion and a continuous stream of entertainment mediums filled with drugs, violence and sex.
One can also agree killing randomly en masse is deviant behavior smacking of a drug induced false reality, aberrant mental state {sociopathy/psychopathy} or theocratic/ideologic fanaticism. All these have always existed to greater/lesser extent, but the general relaxation in societal prohibitions and the encouragement or self-aggrandizement of “if it feels good, do it!” have tragically exaggerated these tendencies to out-of-control levels. Devaluing of life as depicted in media and validated by abortion-rates, escalating euthanasias and gang violence all promote this calamity.
Another school of thought has it that most of the problems are traceable to poverty and racism, so if we fix these we’ll be good to go. We’ve spent over $3 Trillion dollars on various programs intended to help the poor and ease racial tensions since LBJ’s Great Society. Yet, the proportion of poor in our national demographic has stagnated & groups like Antifa & Black Lives Matter show racial tensions remain a serious problem.
Of course, liberals say it isn’t that their programs don’t work, nor will they allow that basic human nature has anything to do with it. Instead they blame the evils of capitalism monotonously deriding what they see as the have/have-not effect of trickle-down economics; blame White Supremacy, with its exploitative coveting of ill-gotten gains; blame nationalism/jingoistic hubris, for what they see as prioritization of military expenditures over domestic welfare considerations.
They want to redistribute wealth, enforce compulsory diversity, eliminate nationhood/sovereignty and build a leviathan government with soft tyranny soon becoming a harsh totalitarianism. They claim we must do more, effect more equal outcomes and social justice, level and make more fair our society, demand it embrace all cultures, attitudes and ideologies.
History doesn’t matter; prior failures, irrelevant; freedom of the individual, secondary; human nature’s egocentric aspect, fixable. In short, the liberal mindset assures itself it can fix all of society’s ills: egocentrism becomes altruism; idleness, ambition; disinterest, thirst for knowledge. They’ll turn Samoans, Norwegians, Nigerians, Martians into Americans; they’ll surrender sovereignty and exchange democracy for Big Brother.
The American experiment produced the most vibrant, successful nation ever to exist. It created more opportunity for more people, giving rise to the largest middle class the world has ever seen. It imbued its populace with such attitude & good fortune it prompted them to spread beneficence around the globe. It welcomed all comers, met all perils, sacrificed blood, sweat and tears defending the freedom of its people, and all peoples.
In the face of this success, this unequalled brilliance, the liberal is still unimpressed, still feels a sense of disappointment/failure in our present state of affairs. He/she cannot reconcile growing examples of extreme wealth against a stagnant lower class; fantastic health service against limited accessibility; 1stclass universities serving middle/upper class & ignoring poor; men patronizing women, whites dominating blacks, the US lording it over the community of nations, 3rd World, etc. These are all unfair and must not stand!
Every comparison invites criticism. To what do they compare? Actual conditions nation by nation, or some ideal never-to-be-achieved? They’ve spent over five billion/yr for sixty years. They’ve spoon-fed affirmative action into education and the workplace, but human nature won’t change to suit a makeshift artifice. Intelligence is innate, not created; knowledge is sought, not forced; respect is earned, not given.
We don’t cherish/respect what is easily gained. A free education in many cases produces little merit. The liberal refuses to accept this, trying over and over to make work that which will never work. Einstein called this the definition of insanity; Lefty Louise “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Me? “Careful what you wish for” . . .
You’ve Been Reading Shaneview
I’m Al Shane
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