George Rebane

Last week’s Union had a couple of items that piqued my ire.  One included the display of a grim array of new militarized riot control gear that our Grass Valley police will now have at the ready to put down any protests they deem will violate public order and safety. (more here) The other item was the newspaper’s editorial board, in their 8apr22 Our View column (here), clutching their communal pearls about the recent Sacramento shootings and lamenting that “we’re nowhere near knowing the steps we need to take to reduce the number of shootings in this country.”

Regarding the militarizing of our local law enforcement agencies, we’ve discovered during the last few years that local authorities have great latitude in what violates their sensibilities for order and safety.  In the more progressive communities we have seen that tolerating (promoting?) weeks of murder, mayhem, and property destruction is quite acceptable.  In days of yore (when we were much younger) such mass thuggery in the name of civic protests would not have been tolerated.  The local constabulary would have turned out en masse to put it down quickly, calling neighboring LE agencies to help if needed, and the governor was always prepared to send in the National Guard if things really got out of hand.  But rioting, looting, burning for days/weeks on end would not have been tolerated by anyone.

And of course, in those days all prospective protesters cum thugs knew that this response awaited them.  Hence such riots, as are common today, were then few and far in between.  The obvious answer was that our culture was markedly different in those days.  Those who have been paying attention know that American civil culture has undergone massive change since the Great Society days.  The long-term plans of the eternal Marxists populating our Left required a couple of generations of ideological education (Lenin required only one) in our union dominated public schools and academe.  These plans have more or less been fulfilled as every attitudinal poll and longitudinal study in the land has shown over the last forty years.  The schools have graduated dumber students – abysmally ignorant in perennially Democrat controlled jurisdictions – giving the country young people (millennials, et seq) who are quite sanguine in accepting collectivist autocratic governance.  The necessary Orwellian protocols are now in place and functioning well.  As we know, the more recently educated have their own history that looks favorably at what to the rest of us were the large-scale human tragedies of the 20^th century.

Mass shootings form the second issue here, the causes of which are an unknown to most progressives who cover that deficit with the hopeful mantra that it’s a force of nature called ‘gun violence’ which is to blame.  And for these misguided simpletons what will end gun violence is when guns will be forbidden to all law-abiding private citizens.  This ideological cohort knows nothing of what concerned our Founders when they gave us a republic if we could keep it – today we are not keeping it.

Our Founders were ‘people of information’, as knowledgeable and/or educated people were labeled in those days.  They knew the fragility of democracies and the vagaries of volatile public sentiment and sensibilities.  And they knew that no form of liberal governance, no matter how perfectly formed, would come with a perpetual guarantee.  They had just gone through an agonizing revolution to cleave a new nation from the then greatest world power whose governance against their overseas brethren had turned rotten and untenable.  They were humble enough to admit that what they were forging in Philadelphia could easily suffer the same fate.  And their solution for this was that in the democratic republic they constructed, citizens would always be allowed to possess arms to revolt when no other course remained to preserve liberty and its blessings.  The fundamental recourse of a free people is to always retain the means to overthrow their government when it has gone rogue.  They put that in writing.

Collectivist education has pretty much removed the transmission of this wisdom.  Today our culture is digesting the politically correct notion that not only is armed resistance to government futile, but also that it should never be attempted.  And what better way to guarantee that latter than by removing the means from all compliant law-abiding citizens and criminalizing the remainder.  And all this can be accomplished by promoting a sub-culture that unendingly produces outrageous tragedies that are all gathered under the rubric of gun violence, which has only one solution for abatement.

That violent sub-culture in its unique practices among the poor, unskilled, and uneducated is an existential political blessing to our collectivist autocrats.  Doing away with that sub-culture is for them anathema – they have made even talking about such initiatives as being prima facie evidence of racism and white supremacy.  But as history tells us about past American cultures, where such mass killings were less than rare, it is the transition to a new culture of selective rights, privileges, and entitlements that now sprouts a weekly crop of mass murders in cities where individual responsibility has been replaced by collective claims for government handouts.

Memo to Union’s editorial board: The sought for solution is straightforward if only the Dems would let their African-American constituents off the plantation.  There are no solutions that require more entitlements or more monies thrown at the mass shootings problem; only a change in the culture of expectations that begins with revamping the educational opportunities available to the affected minorities.  Without the return to a culture based on an empowered family unit supported by traditional spiritual institutions, all change is hopeless.