Candidly Speaking - 29/08/22
On Our Responsibility to Our Children (Part 2)
“Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.”
(Matthew 18:4 - 5, KJV)
Upon publishing the last installment of this essay, I received some words of indignation from a frequent reader, and a friend of mine. She was not pleased with my treatment of the abortion issue, and she thought that my religious convictions have made me self-righteous. Of course, I disagree. If believing that abortion is equivalent to murder and that we should not butcher children in the name of “gender-affirming therapy” makes me self-righteous, then that makes just about any ordinary human being who has given a moment’s thought on these issues.
Nevertheless, the purpose of this essay, as well as any other blogpost of mine, is never to cause outrage. I merely hope to articulate my thoughts and views on a variety of subjects, some political, others personal, to the best of my abilities.
You may remember in the last installment, I quoted from the novelist Lionel Shriver, whose best known work “We Need To Talk About Kevin” features a gruesome scene of a school shooting, perpetrated by the titular character:
The story of a high-school mass murder (after Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Uvalde, the one aspect of the book that has dated is Kevin’s pitiful body-count of nine) is told from the perspective of the killer’s mother, who’s anguished about whether her dislike of her own son from day one made the atrocity her fault.
Recently, the parents who lost their children in the bloody massacre of Sandy Hook received some semblance of restitution when that horrible conspiracy nut Alex Jones had to pay damages for his malicious lies about the atrocity. Any interested party can look up Megyn Kelly’s excellent podcast episode to hear just how odious this man is. It was amusing when Jones was raving about gay frogs, but when he alleged that the parents who has lost their children via gunfire are mere “government crisis actors”, he have exited the realm of Common Decency, and should not be allowed re-entry.
But the recent legal victory of the Sandy Hook parents cannot obscure the fact that mass shootings of schools have become simply a risk of living in America. Columbine should have been the last of them. Instead, similar atrocities occurred in Stoneman Douglas, Virginia Tech, Uvalde (which has been said to be the deadliest in American history). There locations, like those of Auschwitz, Srebrenica and Bucha, will forever be remembered for the shedding of innocent blood. It is too late now to ponder the question: “What motivated these killers?” Instead, we should be asking: “How do we stop them?”
Every time a mass shooting happens, whether it occurred on school grounds or in other public places, American media becomes sharply divided over the positions of gun control vs. gun rights, mental health and mental illness (surprising, since they never talk about that at any other conceivable time), and the “motive” of the perpetrator. Nothing about the grieving parents, the young victims who will never see adulthood, or increased security measures to deter and neutralize homicidal maniacs.
That’s right, I call them “homicidal maniacs”. Not “troubled youths” or “mentally challenged fellow student”. No amount of turbulence in life of mental illness can justify murdering fellow innocent human beings en masse. These are acts of terrorism, and we have failed to see them as such. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, and in the case of gun-related massacres, the 18th century Whig is ominously correct.
Now, it is true that American culture is plagued with violence, more than any developed nations on Earth. American movies are filled with guns blazing and bodies being blown up to bits, violent crime in American cities is matched by the violent police response to it, private firearms outnumber the people who own them, etc. But there is a difference between the violence of a bad guy pushing a stroller into oncoming traffic, and the violence of a good guy trying to neutralize him. There is a difference between the violence Will Smith inflicted upon Chris Rock, and the violence in which the Oscars’ security detail inflicted upon Smith by restraining him (which, pitifully, they did not do). Non-violence, the kind courageously practiced by Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, can only work if the target of your cause possess the same moral framework as you do. It cannot work against an assault-rifle-wielding teenager with a death wish, or a armed gunman who believes in the Great Replacement Theory.
It was Christ himself who said: “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) Violence shall He inflict upon the wicked and the self-righteous. Because of our increasingly secular culture, we have not been teaching our children about good and evil. Hannah Arendt’s psychoanalysis of Adolf Eichmann, culminated in that phrase “The Banality of Evil”, is a moral outrage. Eichmann’s genocidal hatred of the Jewish people separates him from the population of decent human beings. And a mentally-troubled youth who shoots up a school is not morally equivalent to those sharing his mental afflictions.
Going back to the topic of children, I saw a horrifying video staged by a kindergarten in Gaza, where 5-to-6-year-olds participate in a mock military attack and hostage taking operation. Anyone who is morally confused about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should check out the clip. No one dies in the video, and not a drop of blood is spilled, but watching the video remains a spine-chilling experience: these children have been mal-educated from a tender age that violence against innocents are fine if they are not of your ethnic tribe. Are these the people you’d wish to peacefully coexist with?
Final point on Alex Jones. He has been characterized by numerous media outlets as a “right-winger”, which he is not and has never been. Wikipedia also lists him as “far-right” and “alt-right”. He is a conspiracy theorist whose ideas are rejected by both the Right and the Left. Just because he and Trump used to be friends does not mean he is welcomed in the Right. It petrifies me to know that he also has children, whose lives will be infinitely more difficult once they are chastised because of their parental heritage.