None Dare Call It Reason

Ok, so I see this big hoopla (deeply flavored with just a hint of rare hoo-ha) about this woman who saw her kid standing on the toilet and the kid tells her she learned it at school. No, it wasn’t some nifty new personal hygiene technique, it was a lesson in hiding from a mass shooting event. Because if you stand on the toilet, the shooter can’t look under the stall door and see your legs, right? Well, except now anyway, since the concerned mom has revealed this escape-and-evasion tactic for tots to the entire world. The mom is outraged because the politicians aren’t “doing” anything about it.

The government has been “doing” things for quite some time now and, gosh, we haven’t gotten any safer. Gee, imagine that! But what they have succeeded in doing is convincing people that in government lies the solution. When every problem is a nail, the government is always the right tool for the job, am I correct so far? However, what people forget to realize is that when problems are nails, the government is actually a tape measure. They’ll measure the length of the nail, its diameter, the thickness of the plank the nail is going into and, at last, discuss this with other tape measure carrying officials. At some point in the future, the nails cease to be as much of an everyday problem as are the fifteen new government agencies created to regulate the nails.

I tend to think the government itself is creating a society in which mass fear is promoted as a method to build dependency upon the government. I’m not trying to minimize the very real fears people have about the safety of their children. But I know that more laws and police agencies are not going to make us safer. We have more police agencies running around right now than at any point in American history and, yet, mass shooting events only increase rather than decrease. Gee, now why is that? Because extreme violence is a social dynamic created by the breakdown of ethical and moral values within a given culture. Now, notice I did not say “economic” reasons. There are very poor nations on this planet that don’t see these mass shootings. Therefore, we can see that this violence is not the result of money, too many guns, not enough laws, or too few cops. No, the real reason is the gigantic elephant in the room no one wishes to talk about: The reason is our culture. If one can call it that.

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When a society and the culture break down and decay, then things such as mass shooting events become possible. How so? Because there is no moral compass that exists to police that person from within. Laws are made for the law-abiding, after all. Now, if I have a society in which the government resorts to violence at every opportunity when it does not get its way worldwide, what then is this government teaching to its citizens? If I have a society with movies, music, computer games, and other such mass media that glorifies horrific violence and I encourage the children to watch it and participate in it, what then will these children learn? Add to that the government, in schools, glorifying its own horrific use of violence worldwide when the government teaches history to those children. The history that the government has written from its own perspective in which it is the justified winner even in wars it lost or opted for a cease-fire in. How, then, can this society be taught that violence is not moral when the very children are taught that it is from an early age?

Then you wonder why your kids are taught to stand up on toilets and hide from mass shooters? Excuse me, but do you realize your own government has done mass shooting events all over this planet? They call them “wars”, and “police actions”, and so forth. But mass shooting events are what they are, be not fooled by semantics cooked up by Pentagon creative content writers. And the people killed did nothing wrong, either. Why then is this justified? Do you know that other countries have to teach their kids to hide from aerial attacks? Gee, and who has aircraft and aircraft carriers capable of carrying out these attacks? That would be our government. Why, then, are we not concerned about what those children are taught to hide from? Perhaps when we value all lives, and not just those closest to us, we might see fewer mass shooting events.

Let’s not forget that your kids can turn 18 and enlist into the United States military and become legal mass shooters. They’ll even be glorified as heroes for doing so. And if they die in the process, that’s when regret finally manifests, am I correct so far? Otherwise, we are proud of our own government-sponsored mass shooting events, are we not? Defending ourselves, you say? From whom were we defending ourselves when we armed terrorists to rid Syria of Assad? Had Assad done anything to us? No. But we gave guns to terrorists who perpetrated a mass shooting events in Syria and we sat there smug and waved the flag, am I correct? Even the usually anti-war liberals and Prius-weenies sat there and applauded this slaughter because it was their guy Obama doing the straw purchase of guns that ended up in the hands of ISIS. How are you now outraged about violence? What, is this something new?

Our society is more violent in many ways than many of the countries our government points fingers at as being “violent”. Our government certainly is. We’re the only ones with aircraft carrier battle groups capable of extending bombing runs to people anywhere on this planet. And use them we do. Those carriers probably clicked over the billion mile mark on their odometers years ago. If those carrier aircraft had frequent flier miles, we’d have enough to go to a galaxy light years away round-trip. Violence, yes, do tell.

Therefore, America, when your kids are taught to hide, they will also be taught that the solution lies in the government staffing the schools with troops that are allegedly cops. They’ll be taught the solution is to cower in fear until the government gives the all-clear. The same all-clear that air raid sirens sound in the foreign countries we bomb. The all-clear telling those parents they can come out and try to find what shreds are left of their kids who didn’t get into the school bomb shelter in time. Violence, yes, tell me more. I’m intrigued to hear more government solutions.

See, folks, this has happened before. We were taught to “Duck-and-Cover” in schools to cover from a nuclear war with the Soviets. One that our government would surely have started if they thought they could have hit the Soviets in a first strike and gotten away with it with “just” ten million American dead. No, this isn’t new. This is the same old government teaching fear and violence in this never-ending cycle. As I have said here before, things like mass shooting events don’t just manifest all by themselves without causes and conditions that lead up to them. Are you aware we’ve been in a permanent “bunker mentality” since World War Two went into extra innings with the Cold War? Are you aware that we have teens right now who have never lived in an America that wasn’t in a war? Do you remember we’ve been at war for 15 years now and it looks like that game is going into overtime? That the government teaches the “enemy” is all over and everywhere? And you thought there would be no consequences for this? What, you thought this wouldn’t affect children born into this maelstrom of violence and paranoia?

Yes, violence, tell me more. I really am interested in hearing how a government that has armed terrorists who’ve, so far, killed a hundred thousand people in a giant-scale “hit” on Bashar al-Assad can solve it. Not only that but trained those terrorists, too. And you think this government is going to keep your kids safe? Do you now realize that they cannot even keep your kids safe from noticing the government itself says violence is the solution to any problem? Yes, and they teach your kids that in history. Every press conference where Obama stood up there and demanded Bashar al-Assad step down and, when he didn’t, about 40,000 more people died within a month. And then Obama is presented to your kids as a role model by the schools, remember? They might as well have been up there glorifying Caligula as a role model.

Do you really think violence can be taught, glorified, and engaged in by the entire culture and government and this not echo throughout the whole of that society? Yes, it must be the guns, sure. Because it can’t be teaching kids this: When you tell Timmy he can’t be president of the East Side Boy’s Club anymore and he refuses to listen to you because you’re president of the West Side Boy’s Club and it’s none of your business, the correct thing to do is retaliate. Which means either shooting Timmy yourself, or hiring the local gang to do it. No, it can’t be that, can it? I mean, just because the government does that doesn’t mean kids won’t learn that even if politicians are held up as role models to emulate, right?

Kids that learn this grow up one day. Some go into the military where violence is encouraged and it earns you a paycheck. Others perpetrate the violence upon the society itself and then society is shocked. Right, THEN they are shocked. With kids, you can’t say violence is okay against these innocent people overseas but not against other innocent people here. It doesn’t work that way. Kids don’t understand politics, though anyone who justifies government violence is not really any different morally from Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, or Josef Stalin. Those men had reasons they considered justified for what they did. But we didn’t accept or understand those reasons, right? Well, kids don’t fully understand the concept of, “President Obama has to stop those bad men over there…” when they see kids screaming and crying in the rubble of a city and you explain it that way when the newscaster says it was caused by an American bomb.

So, in the end, if you don’t want your kids taught to hide in fear, we’ve got to start by insisting our government stop making peoples’ kids in other countries hide in fear. Guess what? It’s not an instant, feel-good solution that’ll bear fruit in a year. It’s going to take one, maybe two or three generations to unlearn this cycle of violence. That’s why gun control doesn’t work, people. You have not addressed the REASONS for the violence. So if you would have your children live without fear, you’ve got to teach the fearlessness that the vast majority of this planet does not want to kill us to the extent that we need to go kill them first. You’ve got to teach that violence is wrong no matter who’s doing it or what cool uniform they wear. You’ve got to teach that being the president of the United States does not magically confer righteousness and a moral center upon that person. That evil men have been and are elected to be president of the United States and they’re not all automatically heroes with federal holidays named after them. And how does one know a president is evil? Because he engages in violence or provides weapons when the people being targeted have not even threatened us.

If violence is wrong in the hands of one shooter, how much more so is it wrong in the hands of one man and a vast military in his control? But our society has refused to recognize that moral absolute and, instead, hides behind patriotism and pre-emptive wars. Until we stop glorifying that violence, we will continue to see it visited upon us. You see, it isn’t just that the shooters use so-called “military weapons” to carry out these attacks. They’re often dressed in military clothing and using military gear. Maybe it’s time to start looking a little deeper into where they learned that. And who taught them.

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