Both of these gems were waiting for me in my email box this morning:
IDEAS THAT KILL
I was born in 1943 and grew up in the 40's and 50's. Anyone much younger
than 45 will find it difficult to comprehend what a difference there is
between today and then. The differences speak volumes about where
is
today and where it is headed-and the end of the road is not very pretty.
>From the time I was old enough to go to the movies and until I was
approximately 10 years old, I spent nearly every Saturday afternoon at
our
local movie theater watching Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and other heroes
defeat
the bad guys. There was killing all over the place: the good guys killed
the
bad ones.
The message in these black-and-white movies was black and white: the
good
guys were good and the bad guys were very bad. An explosion of cheers
would
erupt from youngsters, including myself, when the heroes came to the
rescue
of the innocent victims of the bad guys. Murder, robbery and mayhem were
very bad. Being good was very good and becoming a person who lived by
what
is right was very right. All of us wanted to be like those heroes. We
wanted
to do what was right. And I wanted to make something of myself and
achieve
something important: it was a glorious, almost inexpressible vision of
the
future. I, and most of my generation, believed it was important to be
good,
to do what is right. This was the message I received from almost every
source: movies, my teachers and virtually every adult I knew-until I got
to
college.
We didn't have video games back then, but we all played equivalent
games:
cowboys and army. We shot, with cap guns, the imaginary bad guys and
defended the good guys. In this make-believe world we acted out a moral
absolute for the real world: instruments of force were only to be used
in
self-defense. The near-universal acceptance of this belief in America,
in
my
childhood, kept crime very low-and juvenile crime was rare.
I grew up in a town that probably had more guns in town than people.
Guns
were all over the place and no one feared them. Virtually every adult
owned
one or more guns, including automatic weapons. Lots of people carried
them
around openly, in their cars and on their persons, especially during
hunting
season. Guns were a lot more accessible to children than they are today.
Not
only did every kid in school know where his parents kept their guns,
virtually every pre-teen boy owned, by the time he was 10 years or so
old,
a
shotgun or rifle given to him by his parents. Yet not a single person
felt
threatened or was ever threatened. And there was not a single murder
using
a
gun or any other weapon while I lived there.
There were no school counselors to undermine the authority of parents.
When,
on rare occasions, I got a whipping from my father for doing something
wrong, there were no voices around yelling "child abuse." If I
misbehaved
at
school, there was a price to pay, including the possibility of getting
paddled by the teacher or principal. Most of us were grateful for such
discipline.
When I went to college, in 1961, I made my first contact with one of the
ideas that would become the destroyer of America, as I had known it: the
idea that there are no absolutes. This notion was awash on our college
campuses in the 60's. It was an idea that would undo, for many,
everything
they had learned as a youngster from their parents and teachers. It
would
create a generation of baby boomers that thought virtually nothing was
absolute, that almost anything goes. It was an idea that gradually
filtered
down to high schools and grade schools. It was to later take many lives,
as
it has most recently done in Littleton, Colorado.
If a child accepts the idea that there are no absolutes, it will
gradually
destroy everything within his mind that sets a rational man apart from a
savage. If there are no absolutes, then there is no such thing as:
truth,
knowledge, standards of right and wrong-or reason. Such a child is not
guided by his intellect, but by emotions generated from the terror of
trying
to live a life devoid of the only means of living: reason, the ability
to
think. Such a child grows to resent and hate those who can think and
live
successful lives. Unable to reason, he resorts to the only other tool
available for dealing with others: force. And the example set by
statists those purveyors of force-provide him all
the rationalization he needs to become a criminal.
The idea that there are no absolutes is a contradiction and, therefore,
absolutely false. But as long as this idea remains the common currency
of
modern education, we will continue to see students, transformed into
absolute monsters by the teachers of the non-absolute, kill others.
Fulton Huxtable
April 26, 1999
© Copyright 1999 Fulton Huxtable
http://www.fatalblindness.com
PERSPECTIVE ON LITTLETON
By Tom Clancy
Almost exactly eight years ago I was at Walt Disney World in
Florida,
pushing a wheelchair occupied by a little boy of seven years who had
already
lost a leg to cancer and would, on Aug. 1 of that year, lose his life. I
say
this to let the reader know that I am aware of the fact that if there is
something worse than the death of a child, I have yet to encounter it.
Fourteen kids and one adult are dead, and for no good reason. The
horrid events in Littleton, Colo., last week cause us all first to
then to feel the loss of other parents and, last of all, to ask why it
had
to happen.
This last question cannot ever be answered with certainty. To
look
into another human heart is something none of us can really do. We can
only
guess and hope that something like this stays a long way away from our
own
families. This does not, however, stop people from taking this incident
and
using it as fodder for their own political views.
The first and most predictable reactors to this event were the
guncontrol advocates. It had to be the guns' fault, they said even
before
the last sad echoes faded. (The two alleged criminals also used
explosive
devices; why not do away with chemistry class in addition to toughening
up
guncontrol laws?) The media dutifully reported this view, because they,
as
a
rule, follow the cant of the political left, because for the news media
the
Constitution starts and ends with the 1st Amendment and not even all of
that.
"Congress," this part of the Constitution says, "shall pass no
law
the
respecting an establishment of religion," and then it goes on to protect
press, freedom of speech and assembly. This first entry in the Bill of
Rights is taught to kids in school as freedom of religion. Yet current
political culture twists it into freedom from religion. The political
left
bridles at the mere recitation of a single prayer in public schools.
Why?
Well, it offends some of those among us who choose not to believe in
God,
and since those people may be offended (especially the noisy ones), this
small minority is able to impose its views on the majority, and to do so
with the blessingnay the advocacyof the "progressive" elements of our political culture.
I suppose my first reaction is, what's the big deal? If atheists
don't believe, what possible interest could they have in the words of
those
exposed to a contrary outlook, lest they be polluted by it. We can't
who do? Oh, yeah, the kids of parents who choose not to believe can't be
the public schools inculcating belief in something like thatand we
don't.
later on. Better, isn't it, to let kids mush along with their own
subculture
and figure things out for themselves, albeit with the help of rap music
and
Web sites about Adolf Hitler?
I never attended public schools. My parents sent me to Catholic
ones,
where education in religion was part of the curriculum, and along with
that
came a few simple rules: killing and stealing were out. Why? Because
they
were wrong. A simple bit of advice for a child to absorb, and evidently
effective. Nobody shot up St. Matthew Elementary School while I was
thereand
back then guncontrol laws were far more lax than they are now. Crime was
also a far more rare event.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but the simple
fact
result of this is that there were no people to take the two adolescent
shooters in Littleton aside and say, "Hey, guys, this Hitler chap you
talk
is
that the political left has assumed ownership of the rules of
contemporary
society. They have replaced right and wrong with something else, and one
about, he was not much of a role model, and, by the way, whatever
you may have with your schoolmates, we can work on that, and maybe if
you
change a little, they will, too, and whatever feelings of rejection you
have
will fade away in a relatively short period of time."
So maybe, just maybe, we can allow public schools to tell kids
that
some things are just plain wrong? The problem with that is that our
ideas
of
right and wrong ultimately come from a source higher than government.
And
to
say such a thing would offend atheists. But if you remove something and
fail
to replace it with something else, there will be a downstream effect.
some cases there is nothing we can do about the wishes of that human
heart.
But in some cases we can, if we think a little about what ideas we
trouble
ourselves to teach our children. It is neither difficult nor
particularly
offensive to instruct children in the better reasons rather than casting
them adrift to find the worse ones on their own untutored accord.
Tom Clancy's Latest Novel Is "Rainbow Six" (Putnam, 1998) Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved