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April 18, 2007

Our Culture of Passivity: 'Protecting' our 'children' at Virginia Tech

Topics: Human Interest

On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our "children" need to be "protected."

Mark Steyn on a topic we previously addressed here:

[...] Point one: They're not "children." The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and -- if you'll forgive the expression -- men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are "children" if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office. Nonetheless, it's deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself -- and, in a "horrible" world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

... We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom's security blanket. Geraldo-like "protection" is a delusion: when something goes awry -- whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus -- the state won't be there to protect you. You'll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision.

As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

When we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position.

[...] I'd prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

Point 2 and more - here ...

Posted by Richard at April 18, 2007 4:59 PM

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