Liberal excess is weighing US down
by Hartley Steward
London Free Press
8 March 2000
In my mind, the shooting of a six-year-old girl by a six-year-old boy puts an end to the liberal argument. The liberal argument has been a fantasy, a wild hope, a fairy tale wish on a star. Dreaming in Technicolor, as my father used to say.
If I've got it right, the argument goes like this: If a child shoots a child, the child has been let down by his or her parents. If the parents turn out to be a crackhead mom and a rotten dad, already in jail, well, someone did poorly by them as well. If the next generation -- the grandparents, or, in this case, grandparent -- happen to be in jail, too, then society in general must be at fault. The child, the father, the mother, the grandfather are not at fault. There is no blame, no consequences, only more social engineering to be done. The solution is to work harder for the just society and utopia that will be ours.
It has always been appealing. It's the way we prefer to see ourselves.
We would like to believe love and understanding will triumph over hatred and bigotry. If everything was nice, why, everyone would be nice. We want the human condition to respond to a hug and a kiss and an open mind. We are a generous breed, more ready to forgive than judge; more ready to empathize than condemn. We have been easy to seduce.
But it has been a seduction that, unless we face the facts, will surely be our end. At worst, it has been a fraud. At best, it has been a flawed and misguided philosophy. And it has brought us to this. A little boy, a first-grader who lives in a crack house without a bed of his own to sleep in, shoots a little girl classmate in a Michigan school and nobody knows what to do about it. Do we:
* Take another look at
gun control?
* Get counselling
for the parents, if we can find them?
* Cluster hug the
kid and get him into a good anger management course?
* Charge somebody
-- anybody -- with leaving a gun in a place where a six-year-old can get his
hands on it?
The liberals have come out swinging, somehow misunderstanding this thing so sadly that they think it is an I-told-you-so moment for their side.
In their fervour, they believe they are the solution when the truth is they are the problem. They are asking the same questions they always ask, all of them wrong. The right questions go to the root of what has been wrong with the whole liberal world, wherein everyone is a victim, no one is accountable, so they will never be asked. You would guess that when children begin to shoot children pretty well as a matter of course, we would stop asking the old questions, leave off the knee-jerking and start wondering where it all went wrong.
You would hope we would see, at last, the ugly truth: That given the same liberal indulgences of the last decades for another generation or so, we will descend to depths from which we will never recover. Down and down, the dark version of the neverending story.
North American society needs desperately to be saved from the notion that all evil can be explained by the lack of a level playing field.
Yes, for sure, there are a lot of uneven playing fields and we had better keep trying to level them. But just because you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth has got to stop being justification for stealing someone else's.
It should be obvious by now that creating rationale after rationale for uncivilized, unacceptable behaviour is just not cutting it. Having been sexually abused as a child is not licence to sexually abuse your children.
Having been whacked about by your father is not an excuse for beating on your wife.
Having gone to school hungry as a child is not an acceptable explanation for violent home invasions as an adult.
Moral fibre and ethical considerations are not the exclusive domain of the advantaged. Surely, being born on the wrong side of the tracks does not preclude learning right from wrong. Poverty does not equal stupidity and lack of privilege does not make one a sociopath. The liberal experiment is over.
We can't continue to create excuses for yet another generation.
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