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A Darwinian Reversal, or; “How He Gonna Get His Money?”
Aristotle believed that there were two basic types of virtue: intellectual virtue, which is taught, and moral virtue, which is the result of habit. “By being compelled to acquire good habits,” Bertrand Russell synopsized, “we shall in time, Aristotle thinks, come to find pleasure in performing good actions.” These are surely worthy positions to consider and debate, but the intrinsic connection of virtue with goodness was accepted as foundational.
Some 2,338 years after Aristotle’s death, however, virtue has been redefined by one Nautika Harris who explained the nobility of her cousin, Trevon Johnson, and his recent robbery of another person’s home as follows: “You have to understand, how he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school?”
Never mind the process by which virtuous thoughts and actions are inculcated in the mind and heart. Never mind Aristotle’s further proposition that virtue is found in the “golden mean,” between two extremes, i.e., the virtue of courage residing somewhere between recklessness and cowardice, or the virtue of a ready wit being located somewhere between buffoonery and boorishness. No: Virtue is now reduced to breaking into another person’s home and taking their property because, otherwise, how you gonna get your money?
Under the circumstances, it’s tempting to reverse the Darwinian model and observe that instead of ascending from the lower animals, people are rapidly descending toward them. Meanwhile, Johnson’s exercise of this new virtue ended in his own death, as the lady whose home he was robbing shot and killed him in the act. He was 17 years old. “I don’t care if she have her gun license or any of that,” said Harris of the homeowner, “that is way beyond the law, way beyond.”
It’s embarrassing to have to explain this to Ms. Harris, and it ought to embarrass you to have to be instructed in such elementary distinctions, but while we mourn the loss of your cousin, it isn’t “way beyond the law,” for free people to defend their lives and property. The idea that anyone, anywhere, should surrender their home, their belongings, and their safety so that aggressors and thieves can invade and plunder is so breathtakingly ignorant that one can only marvel at the stunted mind and spirit capable of framing the words, “How he gonna get his money?” If it was “his money,” he wouldn’t have needed to break into another person’s home to get it, would he?
The larger question confronting those with a moral sense beyond that of the average two-year old who grabs another child’s pacifier, is how to address the rapid disintegration of civil society and its accompanying barbarism. In November 2014, the state of California formalized a novel approach, with Proposition 47, which reduced the number of felonies (and felons in prison) by — are you ready? — reclassifying some felony offenses as misdemeanors and springing former felons from the pokey.
Who knew it could be that easy? Why not outlaw Cs, Ds, and Fs in school while we’re at it, so that everyone is an A or B student? Why, we could reduce the prison population further still if we eliminated murder charges on the grounds that the deceased isn’t really dead — he’s just in a state of decompositional relaxation. Sentence? Forty-five days without video games, to include time served waiting for trial, followed by hot chocolate and sugary doughnuts with the parole officer once every six months if your social schedule will allow and thanks for shopping!
Meanwhile, California Dreamin’ has turned into a nightmare, as Marc Debbaudt explains in the San Francisco Chronicle, where that city has achieved the dubious honor of having the highest increase in property crimes in the United States. Car looting has increased some 31 percent since 2014, and has nearly tripled since 2010. Violent crimes are on the rise, with 48 cities in the California experiencing increases in their violent crime rates (34 of those cities seeing double-digit increases).
A 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times reported that the framers of Proposition 47 anticipated that “A drop in the state prison population because of Proposition 47 is expected to save about $100 million annually, according to a state estimate… [that] will go toward treatment and education programs beginning in late 2016.”
The results thus far? In San Francisco alone, the crime wave that Prop 47 sparked resulted in a $120 million loss in the first six months of 2015. In Los Angeles, the cost of increased crime over the same time frame was over $250 million. To recap, California’s paradigm-busting Coddle-and-Release Program, which was suppose to save taxpayers $100 million annually, has actually cost them over $370 million in just six months, and that’s just in two cities! What about the resident of the other 46 cities whose crime rate is on the rise, whose property is being looted and whose lives are at risk? Where do they go for answers?
Well, if they listened to a recent debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, they heard a question on the “mass incarceration” of African Americans that was prefaced with the following statement from a member or the panel: “As a black man in America, if I were born today I’d have a one in three chance of ending up in prison in my life.” A sane candidate would have immediately responded by asking how the gentleman how he hadn’t ended up in prison and gone on to suggest that the best way to avoid prison is to refrain from criminal acts. Instead, both candidates responded by promising to end “mass incarceration,” as if the authorities were going about rounding up entire black communities for an all-expense paid trip to Treblinka.
When we turn Martin Luther King’s dream around and disfigure it to the point that we focus not on the content of a person’s character, but the skin color of the perp, we’ve done more than just lose our footing on the slippery slope to cultural delinquency. We’ve discarded our dignity and performed great swan dive into the abyss.
A healthy society would measure justice not by the number of people incarcerated, nor even by their race, but by whether law abiding citizens could go out to dinner without being assaulted and mugged. Or, perhaps, by whether their home is being looted by a pack of imbeciles, all because some starry-eyed liberal decided to assuage his sense of self-loathing by letting criminals loose to prey on those who work hard and play by the rules.
A healthy society would equip young Trevon Johnson with the mental, cultural, and spiritual ability to draw upon the accumulated wisdom of human experience so he could get his money by earning it in exchange for contributing his unique talents and gifts to a community that fosters growth rather than victimhood and depraved entitlement.
A healthy society would — above all else — be honest with itself and dispense with pretentious, therapeutic pablum that absolves the miscreant of responsibility for his actions. After all, as Dostoyevsky reminded us a century and a half ago:
Published in Culture, Domestic PolicyA man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself.
I feel sad. (That seems to be happening to me a lot lately, in spite of my general sunny disposition.) I am neither a paranoid person nor a generally fearful person, but as I watch the outrageous sense of entitlement growing, I wonder if there is any safe place. When I’m in a strange place, do I need to be overly vigilant? So far I’ve refused to give in to that attitude (ordinary vigilance should be sufficient), but I wonder if I’m being naïve and foolish?
It’s hard to say. Here in Memphis, which is the second most violent city in the country, it’s a given that each evening’s newscast will begin with a report on a murder or a violent attack of some kind. And it isn’t confined to just one or two neighborhoods. There is simply no safe place anymore, and the news is filled with victims who never thought it would happen to them. We have a new state of the art home security system and sufficient firepower to keep our little family safe, …but it shouldn’t have to be this way.
This was an excellent analysis and much appreciated. I had heard about this “breathtakingly ignorant” statement by this fine, upstanding citizen of the Great State of Florida, but reading this prompted me to go to the video clip which is quite informative, and I would urge all who really want to get the full picture to watch it very carefully. By that I mean it is not only downright frightening to watch this woman actually say those words and preach to us about not understanding how “boys in the hood” had no other way to get “their money”, but to catch the tone of the TV report almost overtly urging homeowners not to defend their homes but to wait on a response from a 911 call. So, one might say that watching that video clip was, in a way, a “double whammy” in describing the descent of our culture toward complete and utter collapse. Again, this was a fine piece and I very much appreciated it, chillingly frightening as it is to witness our slow decline “back to the bush”.
When you point out that a person has destroyed his life through his own action or inaction, you are condemned for “blaming the victim.” You’ll get the same response if you recommend that people not do things that will destroy their own lives.
The left doesn’t want to end ignorance or poverty – they need them to justify their own existence. But they’re not totally without compassion. After all, they do want people to be comfortable in and with their ignorance and poverty.
Dave- “We have a new state of the art home security system and sufficient firepower to keep our little family safe, …but it shouldn’t have to be this way.”
Quite a fitting statement… let the criminals out so the public creates little fortresses instead… or personal prisons?
So this is what liberal ‘justice’ looks like, the animals run openly, the citizens must cower?
And third we are now in a position where describing the perpetrator of a crime is considered a hate crime.
Nautica expressed her feelings on the matter. What did the media report the father said?
Dave,
This is very interesting and I think important. The mentality of “How he gonna get his money?” is so alien to most of us we don’t realize that it exists. When Travon Martin hid behind some bushes and then surprised George Zimmerman who did not have his weapon in his hand, most people don’t understand what happened or why. Once you realize that the clan of home breaker thieves believed that they were entitled to do it, only then can you imagine why Travon was so angry with the little cracker. Zimmerman was interrupting their thefts and that was wrong so Travon decided to “teach him a lesson”.
When we imagine that the most simple moral precepts don’t matter we short circuit the only thing that holds society together. After that all is chaos.
Regards,
Jim
I was thinking the same thing, S of S. I lived in New York in the very early eighties, and it was…exciting (I was young) but pretty grim. People got sick of it, they instituted Broken Windows and community policing, and lo-and-behold, things improved… to the point where people can’t remember how awful it was.
My mother says it’s like the immunization debate. She spend nearly two months in bed with whooping cough—that was common. One of her childhood friends was lucky to survive polio with serious handicaps. For anyone born since 1960 or so, it seems natural for children grow up without ever being seriously ill—natural in the sense that no one had to actually do anything to make this new normal come about, and thus no one has to do anything to maintain it.
I’m sorry but I think you are miss characterizing the Trayvon/Zimmerman altercation. It is unclear who actually started the physical confrontation between the two. All we have to go on is the testimony of Zimmerman who has every reason to lie in order to preserve a possibility of self-defense against a murder charge. We do know that Trayvon was well with in his rights to be in the neighborhood and was engaged in no illegal activity that night, and that Zimmerman’s justification for confronting him was at best flimsy. If you wish to make a point like this I would suggest using Michael Brown for whom the circumstances of his demise are far more clear.
Val,
Zimmerman wasn’t confronting him. He was following and calling in exactly as he was trained by the police for his community watch duty. They advised him “you don’t need to do that” because they were afraid that what happened would happen. He was jumped. Luckily it was only by one person who didn’t have a knife. If it had been two or they had used a knife Zimmerman would have been dead. Still the assailant was much larger than he was and attacked first hitting him and knocked him down. There was a series of burglaries in broad daylight in that neighborhood. Zimmerman’s next-door neighbor was burglarized at noon while she (a single woman alone) was in the house. She ran terrified and Zimmerman’s wife let her in. It was after that Zimmerman joined the community watch. Zimmerman and his friend who had also joined responded to eight burglary attempts. Each time they got there too late to “confront” anybody. They were satisfied to harass the burglars in hopes they would move on. If it was your wife and baby you’d understand his attitude very well.
cont.
cont. from #41
We fail to recognize the truth. When human beings decide to become predators upon their fellow humans they cross a line that cannot be finessed by “smart behavior”. Sooner or later a tragic end must occur as the wolves will either kill the sheep or the sheepdog will kill the wolf.
Val, I’m 63 and I’m incapable of generating the naivete necessary to imagine Trevon a victim. It’s Zimmerman who was the victim of the system. His marriage destroyed and life ruined by a President who used him as a scapegoat rather than face the massive black on black gang violence that was responsible for 95% of black lives lost.
Regards,
Jim
Trayvon was not an angel, but he had the right to be in that neighborhood, and Zimmerman had no clear or obvious right to be following Trayvon. He wasn’t a police officer in uniform, he was a stranger who fit the universal profile, and —as Trayvon made clear enough in a phone conversation before their final encounter—Trayvon considered him a threat. And why not? If a heavy-set, thirty-something, grumpy-looking [Hispanic, in an area where that counts] man was following you through your own neighborhood, a neighborhood that had recently seen a spate of crimes moreover, wouldn’t you feel threatened? I know I would.
That’s not enough of a threat to legally justify a violent response–from ambush. Also, the testimony from his Precious-looking female friend, I apologize I can’t remember her name, was illuminating. I won’t go through the individual pieces of her testimony that stuck with me, because it would probably make some feel I’d violated the CoC, but in general she made it clear that Trayvon decided to beat the snot out of Zimmeran, and intimated quite strongly that Trayvon decided to attack because he assessed the reason Zimmerman was following him was because Zimmerman was gay. And a cracker. A gay cracker.
Oh, definitely—and once Trayvon had commenced attempting to beat the snot out of Zimmerman, Zimmerman had to defend himself. Still, by making it a race/gun thing, the left (as usual) missed what to me is a more important element; had Zimmerman been a uniformed police officer, the reason for his interest in Trayvon would have been obvious to Trayvon as well as everyone else, the police officer would have engaged Trayvon and ascertained that, on that night if not at all times, Trayvon wasn’t up to mischief, and in all likelihood everyone would have gone home that night alive.
By indignantly defending against the race/gun thing, Zimmerman’s supporters also missed the obvious lesson: wanna-be cops are dangerous to themselves and others.
Kate,
Is the community watch now part of the vast right-wing conspiracy? Zimmerman was following their procedures to a tee. Was multiple break-ins and burglaries in a small community over a short period of time just something one must accept like the weather? On eight separate occasions, Zimmerman and friend broke up a burglary in progress! Do ordinary citizens just trying to get to work and making their mortgage payment have no rights whatsoever?
If Zimmerman’s wife had not let the next door neighbor in and the “[REDACTED]s” as Zimmerman had called them had beaten and raped her and stolen what few valuables she had, would that have been alright? Do people have any right of self-defense when someone of underprivileged status and race decides to prey upon them as a wild animal would? Zimmerman shot a rabid dog attacking him. We can ask how the dog became rabid but we can not fault Zimmerman for his behavior.
Regards,
Jim
So the lesson of Trayvon Martin in this view is:
Mind your own business
Don’t watch out for your neighbors or neighborhood. That’s the job of the government, not the citizens.
if you see something suspicious, for gods sake don’t say anything – turn the other way and keep going.
I remember during one of the Clinton administrations, a young American was found keying cars while walking down the street, I believe in far east somewhere.
That jurisdiction practices caning. Minimal jail time but the culprit gets caned over his back. Clinton tried to intercede for the young American and got him a reduced sentence, that is he got a lesser number of stripes on his back than a local would have gotten.
Of note, recidivism in that locale is much lower than the recidivism in the US.
Perhaps corporal punishment would be beneficial for first-time offenders? Better than being locked up with hardened criminals and being subjected to the brutality of such people?
Unfortunately, like leaky pipes, the correction will come from the outside as the real plumbers of this kind of problem are forced to deal with it.
I think that the voting populace who are forced to act and deal with the effects of this problem will turn increasingly to the elected and pressure them to handle it, and handle it in such a way that more Californias are avoided.
In my neighborhood there was a house with bars on the inside of the windows and an elderly couple who lived there. It was a prison for those people, a prison designed to keep people out. It seemed to me to be a horrible way to live, always assuming the worst.
Correction: “White Hispanic”
At the same time, I can also see why Zimmerman behaved the way he did; he was angry at the crimes committed in his neighborhood, he was a man attempting to do what men do (defend the women and children) and he thought of himself as a neighborhood protector. For some reason, we don’t always realize that other people can’t read our minds.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to know that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman—the best defense is a good offense, my first husband (who had a rough upbringing) used to say, and Trayvon wouldn’t be the first to consider himself justified in launching a pre-emptive strike. Nor do I disbelieve that Trayvon would have beaten the snot out of Zimmerman. Once combat was engaged, the chance to explain and converse was gone.
Neither of the take home lessons we’ve been offered (“Poor Trayvon, profiled and then shot by a privileged white man” or “Poor Zimmerman, pilloried for defending himself against a homicidal black thug”) seem particularly apt. It’s more like “aggressive young men make messes that often end in avoidable tragedy.” Which, by the way, is a very familiar theme in my world.
Kate,
I am afraid you are naive and have drunk the kool-aid on this one. Travon knew very well who that “little cracker” was. Zimmerman was far from angry. He was acting as an adult with responsibilities. He and the others were forced to resort to a neighborhood watch as the police simply were not going to commit the manpower to patrol this lower middle-class neighborhood. Zimmerman knew they were on their own so he did the neighborhood watch thing probably to calm his wife more than anything else. It was Travon that was angry about Zimmerman. Travon jumped him for no reason. Travon had committed no crime. He didn’t come out of the bushes and ask Zimmerman “Hey man why are you following me?” He attacked him because he knew exactly why Zimmerman was following him. Zimmerman suspected him and Zimmerman may very well have been right. I guess Zimmerman should have just let these “[REDACTED]s” break into any house in the neighborhood they wanted? Incredibly macho of Travon to try to beat to death a smaller man. How cowardly of Zimmerman to shoot the lunatic bastard on top of him beating him for no reason. The ugly little white Hispanic. Why Travon was a beautiful black man who looked just like the President.
Sorry if the narrative most likely supported by the facts doesn’t agree with the narrative that wishful thinking liberalism wants to believe. I guess I’m getting too old to generate that much credulity anymore.
Regards,
Jim
Did he? How do you know this? It seems to me that if Trayvon said he thought Zimmerman was “a gay cracker” that doesn’t imply “the guy is part of a neighborhood watch group” to me.
Again, I’m not claiming Trayvon was an angel, only that the situation was messy.
This we agree about.
I haven’t said that Trayvon was oppressed. I haven’t said that he was a good human being. He may well have been a rotten human being. One of the irritating things about the left (from the Prez on down) is how unwilling they are to yield a good-bad, black-white storyline when it comes to a situation that is more shades-of-gray.
I’m waiting for you to tell me that George Zimmerman was wearing a big, neon-pink t-shirt that said NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH in big font across it? Or even that he declared himself at any point to be NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH. Indeed, according to the police at the time, he failed to identify himself as such. He also got out of his SUV after the dispatcher told him not to.
If the neighborhood watch training did not include identifying oneself as a member of the same or following the instructions of the dispatcher, it was crappy training; a thirty-ish male stranger apparently stalking you through a crime-ridden neighborhood is bound to be perceived as a threat. How that threat is interpreted (let alone responded to) will depend upon the sensibilities of the person being followed and even thugs can feel menaced by an unknown young male.
Again, this is not to say that Trayvon was an innocent flower, but in police world it does; even the lives of known felons are preserved wherever possible, so forgive me if I don’t consider it a good thing that Trayvon died, even if he wasn’t the fine, upstanding youth the left would paint him as.
So let’s flip the question around; assuming Trayvon thought he was being followed by a scary freaky guy what should Trayvon have done? What would you—at seventeen—have done? What would you want my sons to do in that situation?
Kate,
You are writing a novel for the oppressed Travon that is nonsense. If Zimmerman hated Travon he would have called him something more demeaning than just “an [REDACTED]”. Travon calling a guy who looks 100% Hispanic a “cracker”, now we are getting into real hate. The gay thing is just a thug put down. Anybody who isn’t cool, meaning smoking dope and committing robbery, is gay.
Again, Zimmerman didn’t confront Travon. Zimmerman wasn’t even trying to confront Travon. Travon was acting in a suspicious manner in a neighborhood that had multiple break-ins. Zimmerman had been trained by the police to do community watch. Zimmerman was following procedures he had been taught tightly.
No Kate, you’ve fallen for the BHO big lie. Travon was the hater and Travon was the aggressor. Asking Zimmerman not to be part of a community watch in such a neighborhood is taking away his right of self-defense just as much as if the 2nd amendment were destroyed. The real question here is why the President of the United States decided to make such a minor incident that obviously didn’t fit the narrative that he was selling into a major deal. ISIS and Boko Haram commit atrocities & genocide but it’s No Drama Obama. Suddenly, George Zimmerman the white Hispanic (the most cringe-worthy appellation I can imagine since the President is also of mixed race. Perhaps Obama is a white Black man.) is a whole regiment of Ku Klux Klan riding across the country burning crosses.
Don’t fall for it.
Regards,
Jim
I am willing to believe that Zimmerman understood himself to be acting as part of neighborhood watch in good faith. It’s not just because of your advocacy; I vividly remember the night my beloved late husband was coming home after a late shift as a police officer. He was traveling on a metro bus with a young woman, and because he was concerned for her safety, he kept an eye on her, made sure he sat near her, and even transferred at an earlier point to another bus than he otherwise would have, because she was a small female, alone in a sketchy neighborhood. What hadn’t occurred to him—until she screamed at him—was that out of uniform he strongly resembled exactly the scary male character he was seeking to protect her from.
Sorry, Jim—something weird is happening when I try to edit.
BTW—back to the original post; the problem of the culture (writ large, as well as in its concentrated form within certain communities—inner city black, rural white):
Yes.
And yes, I do think the story of Trayvon—not the actual story, but the instant-myth and accompanying moral preening—is relevant to the discussion, not because of who Trayvon and Zimmerman actually were, but of what they were made into; symbols for the readily-outraged instead of actual human beings who deserve to have justice, with “justice” being defined as the chance to make your case in court.
The cognitive dissonance on the left is downright deafening: #BLM have taken up the cause of Jamal Clark who was shot by Minneapolis Police who had responded to a domestic violence call. Clark’s girlfriend was being loaded into an ambulance and Clark tried to interfere with paramedics, so the police went to arrest him, he tried to grab an officer’s gun though of course, the #BLM story—now disproven, not that it will matter— is that Clark was in handcuffs at the time.
The kicker, for me, is in italics above; whatever the domestic disturbance was, it resulted in a young woman going to the hospital in an ambulance. And yet Jamal Clark is a pearl among men.
“There’s No Excuse For Domestic Violence…”
Five people have been shot and injured in the demonstrations so far.