Another day, another shooting by someone who had so few problems in his life that he made some up and then took it out on others. The shootings in Colorado Springs and Arvada and the earlier shootings in Omaha were both done by whiny little brats whose lives were so devoid of problems that they took the tiniest slight and mushroomed it into catastrophe. The people of the church Matthew Murray shot up are to be commended for forgiving him, but I think it's time too that we started calling these things what they are, and recognizing what is causing them. Our everyone-is-a-victim culture is what is responsible for these shootings. If you have any kind of problem, it's not your fault, you poor dear. It's other people's fault. Well, if it's other people's fault, then it makes sense to lash out at those other people, now doesn't it? It implies too that it is the responsibility of others to make and keep you happy. And then schools (though Murray was home-schooled, so we can't quite blame the schools for him -- but it is hard to believe that his parents weren't nonetheless influenced by the culture around them that said that self-esteem is what is most important to a child's upbringing) are so concerned with teaching self-esteem, though they do nothing to develop in students a self to esteem, and the actual outcome is whiny little crybabies who are all torn up if you criticize anything they do or say. You don't teach self esteem by telling kids how wonderful they are. You teach them self esteem by challenging them, disciplining them, making them proud of having accomplished something. You don't tell them they are wonderful unless they provide some sort of actual evidence that they are in fact wonderful. Our children need to be toughened up. Nietzsche was complaining about what wimps the Germans were 130 or so years ago -- he would be utterly appalled at the state of things in the United States now. We have raised a bunch of pansies that can't take the least criticism, then can't figure out why they come in, guns blazing, when they meet the least little resistance or have the least little disappointment.
So what do we need to do? A few suggestions:
1. Stop with the self-esteem education! This is destroying the nation more than any other single thing.
2. Let kids fight it out. We have gone too far in stopping any kind of aggression in our schools. The fact is, we are a social species, and we need to work out our place in the hierarchy of wherever we are. In schools, this gets worked out best in the younger grades, in schoolyard fights. Our anti-bullying campaigns have resulted in the weakening of many kids. Further, as with any social mammal, if you put off and put off and put off aggression, when it does finally break out, it will become even more violent, and even deadly. This is why stabbings and shootings are way up in our schools. In an ideal world there would be some sort of ritual where the students in a school could establish their places in the hierarchy, and that ritual would be set up by the school itself. Of course, so long as schools are run by Leftists, this will never happen, as the Left is anti-hierarchy to a fault.
3. Every child should be enrolled in martial arts. This would actually help with self-esteem, not to mention teach them self-control and responsibility. It also provides a ritualistic space to work out the hierarchy.
4. Children have to be given responsibilities. When children are old enough, they should be made to work around the house to earn an allowance. And it should be with that money, and that money alone, that they buy things they want, rather than having mommy and daddy buy them whatever they want whenever they want it. When children get everything given to them when they want it, the do not learn to delay gratification (thus our high credit card debt in this country), and they go out into the world thinking that that is how the world works. It doesn't, and then they are disappointed.
in short, we have to teach our children to be responsible for their own actions and to have self-control. Above are a few ways we can do that. In short, we evolved to live in a difficult world, and when our world becomes too easy, we create difficulties for ourselves. We drive ourselves crazy without problems. We can resolve this problem by not making the world easier, but by making it more challenging. Further, if we are going to expect our children to grow up to value life, they must first learn what it means to value anything at all.
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Followup on Dec. 12. This incident suggests I'm right about the consequences of putting off aggression in our schools.
7 comments:
It doesn't help that the low pay, low standards, pervasive mediocrity and grinding bureaucracy of the teaching profession tends to attract sad or angry untalented shit-sacks and bleeding heart nannies that fancy themselves social workers. Or that many students have such a lousy home life that school personnel take it upon themselves to try (and fail utterly) to provide the kind of mammalian nurturing and unconditional acceptance that deadbeat parents don't (or can't).
Still, I think one has to blame the parents as much as the schools. Nothing shoots up a school, church or mall like a kid who is ignored 90% of the time and coddled and pandered to the other 10% by every single adult in his life.
I like the martial arts idea, but I'm having a hard time envisioning a school-sanctioned hierarchy-establishing ritual. What would that look like in real life?
Martial arts would play a role in such a ritual. The smart-dumb hierarchy works itself out pretty clearly in schools. But physical hierarchies are being squashed by Leftist ideologues, and those are in fact no less important. In chimpanzee troops, the smart ones get eh strong ones on their side before they stage a coup -- so there is an evolutionary relationship between the smart and the strong. Martial arts competitions could clear that sort of thing up. The good thing about that too is that it would reward good technique and practice rather than being merely born a big brute. With martial arts, the smart could become the strong.
I think too that if you had a place where students could go to fight it out -- or, in this case, spar it out -- that would keep tensions low. In social mammals, if you put it off and put it off, the inevitable fight becomes more and more deadly. You have to properly defuse these things early.
"This is why stabbings and shootings are way up in our schools. "
I don't know how true this is, but, regardless, even if it is, that doesn't take away from the fact that violence outside of schools, i.e. the real world, is way, way down. In fact, lower than it's been in 40 years!
Out in the "real world" there are consequences for your actions, there has been an increase in numbers of police, and it is clearer what your role in society is. Guiliani's tactics in NYC was a significant contributor to the overall drop in crime rates.
Well, i'm not sure how that explains violence being way way down. New York may have been more violent in the past, but not so much so that Giuliani's policies are responsible for improving the statistics for the whole country. There are only 8 million of us here in NYC.
Plus, you can be held accountable for your actions at school, arrested even, even if you are a juvenile. And the guy Matthew Murray was 24 years old! 6 years out of school.
My point with him is that he was a product of our culture, the prime source of with being our schools. When our schools put people out in to the world unprepared for the world, the reactions range from Murray's to psychotherapy and drugs. Certainly the nation has a much higher level of consumption of psychotherapy and drugs. And while overall crimes may be down, these kinds of crimes are all too prevalent.
And, yes, the crime rate really was so bad in NYC that it had a profound effect on the national crime rate. Also, nothing succeeds like success, and Guiliani's crime fighting techniques spread to other cities.
Further, my wife, who used to work for the Dallas city school district, said that the police were at her school every single day -- to take in a child who was 8 or 9 or 10. This was typically for hitting a teacher or throwing a desk.
Now, are you really telling me that the current way we run our schools, with the police showing up to arrest 8 year olds, is better? Our schools are getting worse, and soon we're going to be reaping the results of the kinds of schools, with the kind of self-esteem training we have going on in them, in our society. It will included not just the occasional whiny middle classed white boy shooting people up, but will also include a society of people who know nothing but are confident in their ignorance, running the country.
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