George Rebane
Last weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings are today’s national conversation, a conversation that does not yet communicate much beyond the emotional demand that something must be done. The conversation is yet a babble that has little reason, meaning, or direction in either working toward a shared understanding of the problem, and most certainly not toward any shared understanding of possible solutions, were they even to exist.
The little contribution here is only to record my own perceptions and feelings, and not offered as some definitive insight, the application/adoption of which would miraculously relieve our national pain. The overarching insight is that all these nativist massacres (as opposed to those motivated by foreign ideology/theology) are the inevitable result of a growing cultural deficit. The population distribution of cultures has become flatter as the former dominant cultures are practiced by ever fewer people – in a statistical sense, the tails of such distribution of multiple cultures are becoming fatter, and therefore more populous. This means that the number of people who invent, join, practice new and extreme cultures and belief systems is rapidly growing. The inevitable result of such an amalgam is that more and more individuals are out there on the borderline of doing something to act out their recently acquired and strongly held beliefs about what is wrong with the society in which they find themselves. And with more on the borderline, more are likely to cross it with the results we see.
The shooters are accused of being members of the country’s vast hordes of white nationalists and white supremacists (motivated by Trump, of course), the remainder of whom are just waiting their turn to grab a semi-automatic and go into crowds to kill innocents. Many of these ideological idiots and/or mentally ill actually believe that their killing spree will start some corrective movement to return society to a more desired form. Others are acting out fantasies learned online, simply because they have no other more social or socializable lives. Statistically these lonely and unsocialized online hermits can represent a considerably large cohort of estranged young, mostly white, gamers whose days are filled with realistically gory shoot-em-up encounters.
President Trump is blamed by the rabid Left for being the primal cause of all this carnage for the simple reason that he has identified the mass illegal border crossings by foreign nationals as an ‘invasion’. The correct use of this word makes him a racist and/or white supremacist in the eyes of our progressives. In the established understanding of ‘invasion’ we were taught that it is the process in which there is an overwhelming illegal ingress of foreigners into a nation-state whose arrival is NOT intended to assimilate, support, and uphold the indigenous culture which they encounter, but instead, by their newly established presence, to fundamentally transform that culture into one more of their own liking. That, in fact, is an invasion, whether perpetrated by the Wehrmacht marching through the Low Countries or the Red Army sweeping westward through eastern Europe. Or today the ingress by millions of illegals into countries which stagger under their onslaught as has happened in Europe and now in America.
And the confusion and cynical understandings of ‘invasion’ is just an infinitesimal example of how our language no longer is able to serve us in any meaningful and productive dialogue that can be used in the attempt to heal our breach. Vernacular English has already lost enough information carrying capacity that it has become dysfunctional for anything other than impenetrable vituperation and vilification of the other side. I offer as an example of this the many years of comment streams that populate these pages. As one side attempts to define the terms of discourse, the other either rejects or ignores them while offering nothing in return that would make their own responses intelligible. So with the help of public schools, we have destroyed our language. Words no longer carry a shared functional or operational definition, ergo we talk past each other while getting more angry and frustrated.
The most powerful attribute of the Left’s ripostes is that they contain terms which are not defined and will never be defined. In that manner the verbal attack can remain semantically fluid with no hope of pinning anything down so that progress toward understanding can be made. The objective is the maintenance of invective which to the lightly-read will sound like overarching reason and logic to buttress the argument.
So now America is in a semi-stable state in which millions of forlorn young men – white and black – have grown up without the legacy of any civil culture. They, along with the rest of us, want to construct a coherent ontology (worldview) one in which they can claim a place of relevance. The easiest ex-family paths to that are through tribal gangs and living in virtual worlds. We must always remember that all sentient critters demand relevance to their environment, no one is satisfied living the life of a potted plant. Most cultures teach that relevance is achieved through productive memberships in society that defend and build social structures offering high qualities of life to themselves and their dear ones.
But that path is intrinsically more demanding and requires the acquisition of skills and assiduously putting them to work. An easier path has always been to tear down established structures to a Mad Max level where everyone can claim relevance based on their ability to do harm. And the radical tails of our multi-cultural population distribution today have enough unstable ones to regularly express themselves in that vein. And these are overwhelmingly men with no previous public record of malfeasance, in short, they are undetectable – each one as he strikes is a Black Swan whose path to destruction only becomes visible in the rear-view mirror.
When we have destroyed families of the poor, and recognized those who can’t or won’t as victims with inalienable rights of retribution, then we have what we witness. I now consider myself privileged to have gone through such a period of poverty and destitution after arriving on these shores to live on the wrong side of the tracks. It was my family that had the culture and grit to recognize the promised land and persevere when it was still common for neighbor to help neighbor. That was then, this is a very different now.
[9aug19 update] Union publisher Don Rogers writes a thoughtful article – ‘Half the deaths, triple the horror’ – on gun violence in today’s newspaper. There he puts into numerical perspective the nature and source of our country’s firearm deaths – e.g. “Homicides committed by firearms in our country have dropped by nearly half since 1993.”, “the (mass killings) nightmare we’re really talking about here kills roughly at the pace of fatal lightning strikes each year”. However, our political lamestream media and the Left continue to have easy pickings with the millions of lightly read innumerates who compliantly substitute emoting for reason. I wish Mr Rogers had spent a bit more ink on the role of cultural breakdown in fomenting today’s lone wolf massacres, and the Constitution’s support of what I have termed ‘par force’ (here and here) that enables our citizens to preserve the nation from a tyrannical state.
[10aug19 update] Guns are used legally by civilians for defense and to avert crimes in tens of thousands of cases annually. Yet the lamestream publishes nary a word of such happenings in their daily practice of ‘journalistic ethics’. This omission is just one of the many which attest to the demonstrated proposition that the news media is overwhelmingly populated by ideologically biased, holier-than-thou scumbags parading under ‘fair and balanced’ banners. Here is some recent data on such gun usage across the country. Now imagine if enough people with CCWs carried to make it probable that a terrorist would run into one or more such citizens as they started to massacre what they thought was a defenseless gathering of the innocents. As by now we all know, 'when seconds count, police are minutes away'.
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