Scriptorium Daily
That part of society that cannot trust in a God big enough to watch over the sparrows will soon try to regulate the fall of every sparrow. Another madman has misused his free will to do evil and politicians pretend evil can be avoided by laws and regulations.
If the politicians could ban free will in the citizens, then they might end evil, but they should not try to do what God Himself will not do. So long as men are men, there will be tragedy in this life. Prudence may limit the harm, but never totally avoid it, and wrapping us all in kevlar will only make the madmen try harder to kill.
A healthy society would grieve proportionately, but media driven soppiness moves beyond the genuine shock of decent men to inauthentic wailing. Tonight I saw the madman’s face a dozen times in a short viewing of a news channel and so we give the lunatic the attention he craves. President Obama gave an excellent speech that grasped the essence of the situation. He was prudent, but most other pols and the pep rally around him were not.
We can be thankful our President was presidential, but sorrowful that many of us were not.
Instead of national courage and resolve, we have decided to engage in an orgy of national mourning. Apparently no tragedy must be allowed to go to waste in our media. Much must be said and said again about this sad event, because there is time to fill in the post-Christmas and pre-election schedules at the news channels.
Bad news sold papers in 1911 and sells commercial spots in 2011, but decent people passed up the “extras” in 1911 and turn off the saturation coverage now.
A nation of therapists will opine about root causes and blame will be quickly fastened, as it always is, on the devils of the ruling class. Pundits will pronounce it must be the fault of populists, puritans, or Palin, because for a generation evil has always been blamed on religion, Republicans, and the Reagan-of-the-day. If once the elite admit that nothing could have been done, they will have noticed the limits of their own sovereignty, and that is unacceptable to them.
The ruling class long ago learned the trick of demonzing by protesting the “ugly rhetoric” of the other side. After all, the rulers have the power to tax, police, and regulate so free speech is one of the few powers left to the masses. It is uncomfortable for big government to deliver graft to big business to the sound of prophetic denunciation. It is simple for these powerful to associate any evil with their discomfort . . . however remote the connection.
Life-long pols like Louise Slaughter of New York can conflate any tragedy with their own discomfort, because they so earnestly desire a much quieter opposition.
Pepsi keeps telling us that Coke was our parent’s drink and politicians keep telling us that politics used to be nicer. Coke keeps outselling Pepsi while 1912 politic rhetoric was Halo-2 compared to 2012 Wii-safe talk.
Theodore Roosevelt said he stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord and ended up speaking with an assassins bullet in his chest. The incumbent President, the avuncular Mr. Taft, would accuse Roosevelt of insanity while their Democrat opponent Mr. Wilson cultivated his racist supporters to win. Meanwhile a million Americans would vote for a real lunatic socialist fringe.
A nation that watched “Birth of a Nation” and voted for Eugene Debs was in bad shape.
The Mama Grizzly has never used rhetoric as strong as the Bull Moose and President Obama’s heaviest language is thin indeed compared to that bellowed by Taft. Nobody now in power would openly approve of romantic views of the Klan like Woodrow Wilson, and the Socialist Party is extinct.
Things are, on the whole, better not worse. The nation is at least as happy, healthy, and wholesome as it ever has been . . .which means that bad things still happen to good men. The lawless use our liberty to harm us, but we are too fond of our liberty to avoid this danger.
Any decent person is sorry for untimely deaths and the suffering of the injured after this event. If we can learn from the events, then we should do so, but it is hard to think critically when surrounded by waves of sentimental gush. Calm and sincere mourning must not be drowned out by emotionalism whipped up to sell product during commercial breaks.
Justice is the product of reason driven by prudence. “In God we trust” is our national motto and this is a good time to heed it. Trusting in men to right every wrong and avoid every danger will only guarantee greater wrongs and more present dangers. The God who sees and accounts for the sparrow knows the pain of this past week. God sees all, has the power to right all, time to do it in, and the goodness to be trusted. No man can see enough, has sufficient power, time, or the virtue for such power. If men gained the power to see all things, even the sparrow, then tyrants would soon be watching us. The power to make safe comes with the risk of being patronized. The absolutely safe would be patronized absolutely.
God bless the men and women hurting tonight and God save those who would use their pain for power or profit.
