Cry-Bullies & The Entitled Generation

I ran across news of a proclamation that a white woman pretending to be black was a “hero”? This is certainly a foolish and ignorant thing to say but one might ask is it an indicator that the West in general and the United States in particular may have become too soft and delusional to survive.

One obvious thing to point out is that in this era when the news is choked with “#FirstWorldProblems” true heroism is all but lost. True heroism was on display when the Greatest Generation fought the Nazis and won. True heroism was on display when blacks and others stood up to guns and dogs and water cannons to reclaim God given rights and freedoms.

A sex change is not heroic. If we ever regain our sanity a sex change may not even be news. Just how is your personal decision and your personal sexual proclivities any of my business let alone news?

The business of taking private behavior that cannot legally be performed in public and calling an announcement of it “heroic” has definitely watered down the world “hero” in the west. Kurdish women taking up arms and fighting one of the greatest evils the world has ever known—ISIS—that is heroic. Turning private behavior into public policy maybe many things but it is not heroic and it is not news.

There are many who say they have the answer for what should be done about gun violence. One thing that could be done but I believe is not voiced often enough is reduce the volume of certain aspects of our culture. We need to turn down the noise on the notion that nothing is real even in our personal lives unless we report it on Facebook, or Twitter or on the evening news. We need to return to the notion that our reality is formed in the eyes of our friends, family and community. Most of us will never be famous. Even for 15 minutes. And that’s a good thing. Most sane people agree that what spree shooters do to get 15 minutes of fame is unacceptable. I have heard some interesting advice by many that we should not publish the names of mass murderers. We should not know about their lives and certainly should not know about their “manifestos”. Let the justice system deal with them and rest of us should rarely think about them at all. They are highly disagreeable trash and filth that should be disposed of and never seen or heard of.

It is said that you get more of what you support or subsidize so let’s err on the side of praising the people who go toward the gun fire, and the bombs and the burning buildings to protect the rest of us. The cowardly killers who often kill women and children are beneath something that crawled out from under a rock.

Not everyone who carries a gun in a time of war is heroic. I am going to disagree with most of the religious right on this but I do not consider a man who shoots a stranger in the back from a safe distance because he was ordered to do so a hero. He may being doing a necessary job that saves lives but I reserve the word “hero” for that guy who jumped on the grenade or that other guy who kept defending his wounded comrades though he was wounded himself. For me heroism requires an element of real and present danger. A fireman who runs into a burning building is a hero. There is a counter example that I am not quite sure what to do with. The cop who refuses to shoot a man who is trying to get himself killed—as long as no one else gets hurt by the inaction—is certainly modeling a commendable behavior worthy of praise but I am not quite clear that I would call him a hero.

By the way, as long as I am offending the religious right let me further state that there is nothing heroic or even necessary about the slavery flag or about calling a football team by a derogatory name for Native Americans. Grow a pair and give up those dirty security blankets.

What happens when you tell young people that there is no difference between Honor Killing and Female Genital Mutilation on the one hand and cyber bullying and wolf whistles on the other hand? You wind up with a generation that has no sense of proportion. You wind up with a generation that has an inappropriate hierarchy of outrage. You wind up with, for instance, “emotionally fragile” college students who exhibit “declining resilience”. One author reported that some off campus college students panicked when they saw a mouse in their apartment and called the police.

When you combine political correctness with inappropriate moral outrage then you get millions of earnest young people equating first world problems with third world problems.

Nothing we experience in the west is as bad at what happens in the third world. We lose our moral center when we fail to recognize this. For instance, as horrific as school shootings are they are not as bad as being burned alive my ISIS thugs. There is nothing that people who suffer under ISIS can do to improve their situation if they don’t have the weapons to fight back and if they are under armed guard so they cannot run away. Depending on what your political beliefs concerning guns are, both pro and anti gun folks have plans that could conceivably change the gun violence equation in the US. Honest observers would point out that that there are no prefect solutions and it is likely that gun violence would still occur in the US as it does in countries with different gun laws and a different gun culture than our own. You may be able to effect the frequency but that is as much as you can do in a free society. Some say there are already 300 millions guns somewhere in America. Once the liberals get the guts to do what they want and go after those guns, most of them will be disappear from public view. Until the government puts chips in all our heads they are never going to know where all the guns are even if they confiscate every gun they know about.

Some who may disagree with me about how the Third World is inherently more dangerous than the West are atheists. Do you know what would happen to you in any Muslim country if you went up to people and told them that religion was stupid and only idiots believe in it? If you are having trouble with that question let remind you that in one such country a woman was beaten to death and burned alive because it was rumored that she disrespected the majority religion.

This incident also reveals how foolish and unintelligent some fragile minds in the west have become when they compare western religious fundamentalists with say the head choppers of ISIS. The most western religious fundamentalists are able to do are offend your sensibilities. They are not throwing gays off roofs, burning people alive or chopping heads off.

Have you ever seen those maudlin commercials that try to convince you that the United States is crammed with hordes of starving people and that you need to give up all your worldly goods and become a communist so that these folks can live? In reality we have the richest poor this world has ever seen. You can easily find people who the government defines as poor who have cell phones, designer sneakers and cable television.

When middle class parents provide a decent life for their kids they are not by their lifestyle abusing poor welfare recipients.

Some demagogues and disingenuous folks are try to play on your emotions to stampede you toward a wildly inappropriate solution to a made up problem. Unfortunately such behavior often masks real problems. For instance, if you ever do come across a child who is actually starving in America you have either also come across an adult who is criminally negligent or an abandoned child. We have a huge and expensive child welfare program already in place to take care of that problem. Nothing more needs to be done than to notify those folks and check to see that they did their jobs. No new bureaucracy is needed and no new program is needed.

When you come across adults who are homeless note that we have many programs and agencies for them as well. For the homeless who are sane what they need is to get off drugs and booze and to get jobs. For those that are not, at last we have found the correct place for government to intervene. Nothing that the rest of us can do can help people who are not really sure what planet they are on. This is a job for government. If I had my druthers, the sane homeless would all go to church. I would send all the criminals fresh out of jail to church as well. Whatever else you may think of churches, they can provide a structure and a reason for being that might otherwise be lacking. For the life of me I have no idea what a militant atheist could say or do that could convince a homeless wino to try sobriety and a job.

Some demagogues try to use Western guilt that we have chosen a political and economic system that provides very well for us to stampede us into suicidal decisions. For instance, we have in the middle east a very strange dislocation wherein hundreds of thousands of men, with no mothers, wives, children, or younger siblings claim to be refugees from ISIS. Only a suicidal idiot could miss that whatever these men may be, “war refugees” they are not. How many "MEN" do you know who would abandon their mothers, wives, children and younger siblings to face ISIS alone? Under no circumstances should we take even one of these single men into the US. In fact the only refugees the US should consider taking are Christian families. Anyone who objects to the American values of beer, bacon and bikinis should not be allowed in. Anyone who does not wish to assimilate should not be welcome. We should look at how many refugees the Vatican is taking in, add to it the number of Christian churches in the entire nation of Saudi Arabia and take fewer than that number. Neither Christianity nor western compassion are elements of a suicide pact. We are not obligated to take in those who would if they had their way force Sharia law and the oppression of women on us. Any western woman who is not clear on what could be coming our way need to take a look at the problems that Europe is having. Do you want this:

1) Female genital mutilation

2) Punishing rape victims

3) Honor killing

4) Strapping bombs to children

5) Sexually enslaving women

6) Murdering homosexuals

7) Child marriage

8) Domestic Violence

9) Disciplining or Punishing Wives

In conclusion I am not saying that because most of our First World Problems pale in significance to Third World Problems that we need to stop living our lives and just concentrate on third world. I am saying many of us need to stop whining about our problems and to get a grip. We also need to have the courage to tell those who would mislead us to take a hike. We need to reserve our moral outrage and calls for international action for life threatening emergencies. For instance, cyber bullying is not an international concern worthy of United Nations actions or proclamation. In fact cyber bullying should be #101,000,000 on the UN top ten list for problems to address. Here are some things they should get to long before that:

1) Female genital mutilation

2) Punishing rape victims

3) Honor killing

4) Strapping bombs to children

5) Sexually enslaving women

6) Murdering homosexuals

7) Child marriage

8) Domestic Violence

9) Disciplining or Punishing Wives

#VAW or violence against women is a much more immediate threat to the world than hurt feelings and bruised egos will ever be.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201509/declining-student-resilience-serious-problem-colleges

https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200411/nation-wimps

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2015/05/16/when-did-america-turn-into-such-a-nation-of-wimps-n1999791/page/full

http://www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/al-mohler/are-we-raising-a-nation-of-wimps-1311401.html

http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1817260,00.html

http://www.thesocialmemo.org/2015/09/college-students-call-police-seek.html