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Sign of our Times: A Culture of Fear
Robby Soave: “On Monday, the boys were forced to meet with an assistant principal and an anti-bullying specialist, who quickly decided to punish them for clearly constitutionally-protected speech.”
Truly a sign of our times. Two boys go to a shooting range, train with legal firearms. Post some pictures and innocuous comments about their training and are immediately punished by their school because of the complaints of one panicked parent.
This is the true battlefield of the Culture Wars, not our politics. No political victory will fix this and no legal regime of protection will last when under assault from people like this parent and the school officials at these boys’ school.
Let’s look at the chain of events that took place here. A parent discovers that boys at a school that his child attends went to a firing range and trained with guns. They joked that they would now be ready to kill zombies and they thought the firearms they used looked cool. This caused panic my friends, panic! How could this cause panic? Well, we know that the parent could not have possibly known anyone that owned or used firearms. Not only that but the parent did not know anything about using or owning firearms themselves. This total ignorance can be the only excuse for the knowledge that some students at a school your child goes to touched firearms causing panic.
Now in a nation of 330 million people, you can find people weirdly ignorant of all kinds of things so the parent’s panic, while deserving ridicule and scorn, can be at least understood. What makes this even worse is that he called the school and no one in authority at the school knew anything about firearms, knew no one who owned firearms, and seemed almost completely ignorant of the Constitution of the United States. One person was an anti-bullying specialist who knew nothing of how to handle this, nothing.
So in New Jersey we find that a huge number of people, their family, colleagues and their friends, a group of people most likely numbering in the hundreds, know so little about firearms that the mere sight of them cause a severe panic and cause two boys to be strongly punished in their school for doing nothing wrong.
What election fixes that? What kind of legal regime protects against such massive ignorance and fear? Elect Trump to a thousand-year reign and this kind of ignorance could continue. This problem is more systemic and deeply rooted then I would like to believe. We need to wonder how so much fear of normal activities has crept into American culture? How can our nation expect men and women so panicked by the idea of someone they know touching a gun to act in real adversity? Would they step up to meet a crisis with courage and compassion to help their fellow citizens or retreat to protect only their own interests?
Political victories can hold such fear at bay for a while perhaps but a longer-term solution has to be pursued. Political victories are not permanent, and we have to start the process of removing some of our most important rights out of the political sphere again so our rights can remain secure.
I am thinking that we need to react to stories like this not with insults, outrage, and anger but to meet it primarily with compassion. These people are scared and ignorant and that makes their life smaller and less joyful. Perhaps people at PTA meetings need to bring up gun ownership, talking about gun safety courses and suggesting NRA courses on gun safety and the like for the ignorant. When we respond to fear with compassion, instead of hatred we cause embarrassment and self-assessment, instead of resentment and a desire for revenge.
I am not saying that we don’t have to fight for our rights or for respect, certainly when we are dealing with people with real power we need to constrain them, however we can, but when our fellow citizens and public school employees act this way I think we need more compassion and less outrage. It is important to remember that often times we are not dealing with malice on this level but fear produced by ignorance. I think that calls for a different kind of response.
What do you all think?
Published in Education
@brianwolf, I understand what you are saying. I am not disagreeing with you, I think. I am offering a caveat; maybe it’s a proffered operating template.
Tell me if you think this is relevant: The greatest Hanshi I ever studied under (for at/about 10 years all told) gave me a gem to meditate on.
Pacifism is a virtue only when it is a choice.
If I have no choice but to take a whuppin’, whether I opt to pacifically endure it, or fight back and still get whupped, then it’s not a +20 moral plus points win for me because I had no choice. One way or another, I was going to take a whupping. So I get no moral superiority by claiming “I chose pacifism” after the fact.
Now, if I could have absolutely obliterated my antagonist, but instead chose to accept his blows, suffer his slings and arrows, then I have some moral cachet.
I don’t think, in our cultural or political conflicts we are there yet. So, achieve the unassailable position, and then instead of crushing our antagonist, deal with him with compassion, with respect, and by acknowledging his own agency, with a view toward making him better.
It happened to my husband. He’s been teaching 18 years. So, I’m pretty knowledgeable on this particular subject.
Here is a case where some compassion is needed:
Man In Critical Condition After Hearing Slightly Differing Viewpoint
What I don’t get is why the school authorities acted as they did (in this and other similar cases). Defusing complaining parents is a big part of their jobs.
Large or small, they need to do it, successful or not.
We’ve organized our public schools to maximize the impact of political correct cranks. Kiwis in New Zealand, when they were kicked out of their special subsidized relationship with the Brits, had to become independent quickly. One of the key fixes took their schools in just a few years form the bottom of the industrial world to very close to the top. They got rid of the entire educational bureaucracy, let any kid go to any public school in the country and the money followed the kids to the schools. Teachers and parents ran the schools and if they did a lousy job they lost students quickly and hence money. What does our educational bureaucracy achieve? What does forcing kids to go to neighborhood schools achieve? What does letting teacher’s unions decide what to teach across the entire state achieve? What does holding on to lousy teachers and promoting them based on time rather than teaching skills achieve? New Zealand was government run but they made it market based. We may be too big and diverse to do it the same way but states have to move rapidly toward market solutions. Markets work. Socialism doesn’t. Education is one of the few parts of our economy that has been socialized for decades. Why are we surprised? Socialism never works and in a country of over 300 million of the most diverse people on earth why on earth can’t we change it?
@bossmongo If we are talking about coming under assault like the boys then your strategy here is perfect. We are not in a world where exposing the insanity of the parents and teachers at the school in New Jersey is enough. It clearly is not enough a counter attack is needed and the lawsuit launched by the boys is necessary.
Again the rest of us I think need to think about how we can create the “unassailable position” you speak about in the post. We seem to spend a lot of time thinking about how to better ridicule, shame and demoralize the bad actors here, even when they have not done us any direct harm, but that seems to generate the same attitude from the other side.
I think that if we go after the enemy from two directions, in this case, with the lawsuit the boys launched and then looking to contrast our reasonableness and the righteousness of our position with their extremism, driven by ignorant fear we would better move the general public to make our position unassailable.
Americans tend to hate the aggressors in the Culture Wars, one of the reason our foes developed victim culture. When we appear to the middle as just as hyper partisan and unreasonable in our beliefs as our foes the normal ill-informed and uncommitted American can just sniff his nose at both sides and declare, “A pox on both their houses.” Leaving us vulnerable to future irrational attacks and the latest Bernie Sanders appointed Judge.
I think we should spend more of time not on how we can make our opponents squirm but on how we can make their attack appear as irrational, fearful and pointless as we can. So that when the wheel turns and we are more vulnerable to attack they still can’t succeed.
I think there are many people out there that are persuadable and that making the effort we will isolate the minority of committed extremists that truly hate and fear us and limit their power.