August 7, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The REAL CULPRITS of Those Mass Shootings

Friends,

Back in my junior year in high school there was not one—not one—school shooting in the entire United States, and not one act of what is now called “domestic terrorism.” In fact, in our schools other than some minor and normally harmless fist-fights (mostly to settle private disputes between rambunctious teenage boys), the extreme violence as we see and experience in our day was basically non-existent.

In fact, all through my grammar school and then high school years (in Garner, North Carolina) the schools were open. Just like all our stores and places of commerce, almost anyone could just walk in freely, although normally for schools to the administration office if something was desired. I can remember when my mother came to pick me up when Hurricane Hazel was on the way, or when news came that one of my grandfathers had passed away near Charlotte, and we needed to prepare to make the sad trip there for the funeral. She didn’t have to go through a metal detector and be searched for a concealed weapon. That was unthinkable. People weren’t like that then.

There was no need to have all the doors locked, or to hire security and police staff…or for that matter, to have employed babbling psychologists, sociologists, and “grief counselors” ready to assist students who suffered “mental problems.” Indeed, it was considered the height of intellectual folly and ridiculousness to even think about having “staff psychologists” or “grief counselors” lurking about to handle personal issues—mental illness—when the real solution to any potential problem was strong two-parent families  (which then accounted for around 90% of domestic situations) at home, and solid discipline at school, plus the fact that the vast majority families (and their children) were churchgoing and, at least publicly, professed some sort of faith in God, and thus in His Commandments.

The administrators of our schools and proprietors of our places of business—they weren’t afraid of some deranged gunman coming in and shooting up the place. That just did not happen.

Since then and with the triumph of modern progressivism, we have been informed that those older modes of behavior and belief, that way of life and conducting ourselves, was bad, that it restrained our freedom, that it limited us, that it was certainly “sexist” and probably also “racist.” We have been instructed that the older credo about marriage and the family is passe’ and in our contemporary culture just no longer applies. Marriage as a sacred institution, and for many of us a sacrament, has been in so many words downgraded to “if it feels good, you can do it,” or, “shack up for a while and see if it works, and if not, then just split.”  Too bad about any children born in this situation; they’ll just have to live with the less bad parent, usually the mother.

No need here to cite statistics: you already know or have an idea what they reveal. Even in two-parent families, modern theories of child-raising dominate in far too many cases. Older, traditional ideas are relics of a bygone and, we are told, “not very enlightened age.”

And the schools? From the earliest primary grades to high school and then our colleges, “progressive” modern educational theories now undergird and inform instruction, certainly in public institutions of so-called “learning.” There has been a long-march, a continuous and largely effective campaign to implant an ideology, inculcate it in the unformed minds of our youth. How else to explain, in large part, the indoctrinated, zombie-like graduates of our schools and colleges, who simply mouth the ideological slogans and post-Marxist pablum instilled into them through twelve years of schooling and then another four of college?

And our entertainment industry and sports?

I was struck this morning as I forced myself to watch a few brief minutes of “Fox & Friends,” and beheld the woefully dumb blond Ainsley Earhardt rhapsodize about the 1990 film, “Home Alone,” one of the most inane and insipid movies of the past thirty years, as one of her favorite motion pictures. Just an example, but an example that says quite a bit about not just the twice-divorced Earhardt, but about what has happened to American society and the standards of taste now regnant and dominant in our decaying culture.

When was the last time you viewed a film without a plethora of four-letter words—and lots of them—or bedroom scenes which bare almost everything, punctuated by grunts, groans, and grimaces? Take a look at HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, and regular weeknight television, almost any program.

I recall Groucho Marx on his early 1950s TV quiz program, “You Bet Your Life,” when he intimated in a very humorous way, sexual relations between a couple. Everyone laughed (after gasping), but everyone also knew back then that such relationships were very special and should be within matrimony. There were limits to what should be said, not because of prudery, but because such intimate acts were very unique expressions of the sanctified marital bond. Of course, such relations also existed outside that bond—and that was also talked about and illustrated within our culture—but everyone, or almost everyone, knew that that was NOT normative, NOT the way things should be, NOT if families and their offspring were to succeed, and NOT if our society was to survive.

So, over the past week we have the specter of a dozen or so Democratic candidates blaming the shootings in El Paso and Dayton on Donald Trump—he is, according to that sorry excuse for a human being, Beto O’Rourke, the reincarnation of—drum roll—Adolf Hitler…seriously! He’s a racist and the white-nationalist-in-chief who is directly responsible for ALL the violence we’ve seen, whether in a Walmart in El Paso or a high school in Parkland, Florida.

Yet the real culprits, those really responsible for the condition of our country and for the situation we find ourselves in are those like Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Juan Castro, and their intellectual associates and immediate forebears, who have inflicted—and continue to inflict—on us the insane policies and nostrums, the ideology that is at the very root of our situation in and the breakup of this country.

No, Beto: it is people like you and those who taught and instructed you who produced the crisis we see around us, the dislocation, the despair, the heartache, the fatherless boys, the broken families, the rage and misdirected anger…and the violence. Look in the mirror and SEE the culprit, and then go take a thirty day Ignatian Retreat in silence and pray God that He will forgive your Evil.

*****

As usual, Pat Buchanan succinctly and concisely slices through both the political and some of deeper implications of what happened this past weekend:

Exploiting Massacres to Raise Poll Ratings

https://buchanan.org/blog/exploiting-massacres-to-raise-poll-ratings-137381

By Patrick J. Buchanan    Tuesday - August 6, 2019

It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019.

In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera — police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials — were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead and wounded.

But for the Democratic presidential candidates, the El Paso atrocity was like a loose football in the Super Bowl. A mad scramble broke out over who would be first and most savage in indicting President Donald Trump for moral complicity in mass murder.

Never let a crisis go to waste is an old political adage. And this crowd of candidates was not going to let that happen. Yet the naked political exploitation of these horrific acts, before the bodies of many had been removed from the crime scene, was appalling to behold.

Learning in Las Vegas of the slaughter at the Walmart in El Paso, his hometown, Beto O'Rourke flew back that same day and sped to the scene. Railed Beto, Trump "is a racist and he stokes racism in this country ... and it leads to violence. ... We have a president with white nationalist views in the United States today." He called Trump's language about Mexican immigrants "reminiscent of something you might hear in the Third Reich." Asked on Sunday by CNN's Jake Tapper if he believes the president is a "white nationalist," Beto eagerly assented: "Yes, I do."

Bernie Sanders, asked by Tapper if he agreed with Beto, replied: "I do. It gives me no pleasure to say this ... all of the evidence out there suggests that we have a president who is a racist, who is a xenophobe, who appeals, and is trying to appeal, to white nationalism."

On the same CNN show, Sen. Cory Booker almost outdid Beto, "I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this ... (mass murder in El Paso) because he is stoking fear and hatred and bigotry." Booker went on: "We have a president of the United States who is savagely fraying the bonds of our nation by speaking consistently words of hatred, words of division, words of demonization and demagoguery. ... He is fueling an environment where white supremacists ... are finding more and more license to strike out against the vulnerable, to strike out against the immigrant, to strike out against 'the other.'"

Booker is saying Trump is rendering moral license to race conflict.
 

Elizabeth Warren issued a statement: "We need to call out white nationalism for what it is — domestic terrorism. It is a threat to the United States, and we've seen its devastating toll this weekend. And we need to call out the president himself for advancing racism and white supremacy."

Ironically, The Washington Times reports that the Dayton shooter, who killed his sister and eight others, "described himself on social media as a pro-Satan 'leftist,' who wanted Joe Biden's generation to die off, hated Trump, and hoped to vote for Sen. Elizabeth Warren for president."  "I want socialism, and i'll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding," Connor Betts, the killer, reportedly tweeted.

Not to be left behind, Sen. Kamala Harris said of the president after the slaughter, he's "a racist, there's no question in my mind."

These attacks, unprecedented in their savagery, testify to a hatred of Trump that is broad, deep and implacable, and unlikely to be constrained before November 2020.
Folks still speak wistfully of a return of the unity America once knew and of a coming together to stand again on common ground. But where is the evidence for that hope?

If Trump's fabled base is to going to stand loyally by him, and the Democratic candidates are going to unleash this kind of bile against him, whoever wins in 2020 will be not be able to unite us, absent a Pearl Harbor-style attack on this country.

Clearly the issue in the 2020 campaign is going to be Trump. Is impeachment now back on the table? How can it not be? Though Robert Mueller found no collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, support for impeachment hearings passed the midway mark inside the Democratic caucus in the House last week, even before the horrible weekend.

And if Democrats believe about Trump what their candidates say about him — that he is a white nationalist racist and xenophobe deliberately stoking fear, hatred and violence, whose words and actions call to mind the fascist Italy of Benito Mussolini and Third Reich of Nazi Germany — how can the Democratic leadership credibly not try to impeach him?

Yet, blaming the massacre in El Paso on the rhetoric of Donald Trump is a charge that can come back to bite his attackers. Neither the right nor left has a monopoly on political extremism or violence. And the hate-filled rhetoric of the left this last weekend exceeds anything used by Trump.