Tag Archives: Society and parental responsibility

From the Horses Mouth … so to speak

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Each and every day there is someone in the news proclaiming to be an expert on gender affirming care. What I have yet to see is anyone who is a long term post-surgical transsexual, with the exception of Caitlyn Jenner, discuss the issues involved in that fateful decision. Now, admittedly I do not watch every news channel, and for a very good reason. Most of them have an agenda and the predominant agenda is based in a push to force a trans-gender ideology on much of the adolescent population in our public schools. I find that tragic.

In the early years of the 21st Century, I stumbled across a mid-nineties article in a medical publication that discussed the suicide rate among transsexuals. The numbers in that article were based on “actual” suicides not “attempted” suicides. There were a lot of statistics listed to shore up the basic findings of the study which the publication quoted. The one statistic that stuck out for me was that the suicide rate among the cisgender community was in the neighborhood 0.25 percent of the study population. In comparison, the rate among the trans community was roughly 10.5 to 11 time higher. Personally, by the time I was in my mid-fifties I had personally only known 2 people who had committed suicide. Within one year of involvment in the transgender community I had four people I knew commit suicide.

Consideration of suicide is something that has never been an issue with me other than to wonder what it would take for me to even mildly entertain the idea. So, when I read about the current rate of youth who have “considered” suicide as a reason for “gender affirming care” in the youth today I have to admit to a certain degree of skepticism stemming from the knowledge that teenagers have a tendency to be a bit dramatic. So, just how accurate is that statistic? Is it based on hospital records or the teenager’s word?

My biggest concern regarding the frequency of “attempted” suicide is the influence that the school personnel are having in the student’s lives. It’s my belief that school personnel have only 2 jobs. The first being to educate children in their care … not indoctrinate them. The second job they have is to keep the parents informed as to the progress their children are making and highlight failings as well as accomplishments. That is not what’s happening today.

Anyone who has followed what I write in this blog knows that I have been beating a drum about the dangers of the NEA for quite some time. It’s a danger that I recognized over sixty years ago when doing debate prep on the high school debate team. Even then I was aware of the fact that our schools and the teachers they employ had in reality more hours a day in which to influence the understanding that children develop than the time their parents have. Recent events regarding gender identity have proven that what I understood then was fairly accurate, without knowing the extent to which the teacher’s unions would go to usurp the rights and influence of the parents. In my mind it’s akin to kidnapping when a teacher who is entrusted with the care of a child goes behind the parents back to push what, in most cases, is surely a temporary fantasy.

What is going to happen ten or even as little as five years from now when that child realized what a horrible mistake has been made? I can’t imagine what the actual suicide rate is going to climb to. Unless I miss my guess, an entirely new form of legal remedies will develop in the form of suits brought against teacher’s union and individual teachers themselves and deservedly so.

There are those who will say to me that I’m just spewing sour grapes since I didn’t make that irreversible decision until late in my life because I was a coward. Maybe! But, when I made that decision, it was with a background of having lived a life as a boy, a man, a husband and a father, which gave me knowledge that could only come from that experience. I admit there are times that I wonder “what might have been” had I not made that irreversible decision. I also wonder at times what life would have been like had I made that decision then. And I seriously doubt that I am no different from every other post-surgical transsexual.

I have had the privilege of living 2 lives which is something that these children who are being groomed by teachers and sometimes by misguided parents who think they are being loving, will never know. In most cases those parents are not being loving at all. How many of these children who are being secretly transitioned are going to return to that classroom with an AK47 ten, fifteen or twenty years from now and indiscriminately open fire in anger. (and yes I’m aware that the recent case involving a former student at a Christian school appeared to be revenge for having not been recognized as who she thought she was).

The bottom line to me is that we are witnessing a tragic confluence of out of control so called educators and woke ideology. As far as I’m concerned, the first of many lawsuits against school administrators and teachers is long overdue. Gender identity should be left to the individual and the family together with a trained counselor.

So now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth… So to speak.

Unintended Consequences

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There’s a phrase in our language that I find particularly apropos today. The phrase is “unintended consequences”. I really hope that the current climate which has enveloped the gender identity issue is not intentional, but that hope is most likely futile. What has happened is that the efforts of the vast majority of persons like me to be productive, contributing parts of society are rapidly being eroded by liberal activists whose only goal is to force the rest of society to accept their world view.

How in God’s name have we suddenly become the linchpin of this destructive Godless move to force, by means of intimidation, acceptance of the choices a relatively small segment of society has made? Those choices that have been quietly gaining acceptance for the last twenty plus years have now been set back by a small number of self-important individuals seeking attention.

I have been working and living my life free of the fear of intimidation for the better part of the last fifteen years. Today, thanks to the liberal left I no longer feel the sense of safety and freedom to live the life I have worked to create for myself and for others like me who simply want to be accepted as who we are. Different? Absolutely, but not a danger to the lives of society in general.

So, I’m angry.

I’m angry on any number of levels. The first level is anger at the relatively small number activists who have chosen this time to advance their own personal agendas on everyone they consider narrow minded, conservative Christians and anyone else that tends to agree with that point of view. It is a typical liberal philosophy that they know what is best for everyone else and if you don’t agree with them, you are a threat their existence … literally a threat to their existence as much so as Nazism was a threat to the Jewish people. Those liberals have been educated to think that way without question.

The end result is that the people in our country, indeed the entire world who do question liberal thought and the process by which they arrive at their conclusions, those people are labeled narrow minded bigoted anti-democratic (the government definition not the political party) Nazis. The fact that liberals resort to name calling is itself proof that they are incapable of constructive conversation, and they are incapable of that because they are incapable of constructive thought. Our education system has seen to that successfully enough to have reduced the numbers of thoughtful people to affect the outcome of a national election.

On another level of anger, I find the willing accomplices in our press are ensuring that the advancement of the acceptability of those of us whose bodies do not match our emotional makeup has been set back by decades. And it’s not rooted in the gender variant community as much as it is in persons like Anheuser-Busch’s Alissa Heinerscheid who fancy themselves as being more enlightened than anyone else.

I have no problem with anyone wanting to share their journey in life with anyone who cares to pay attention to them. After all, I did publish a book on my own journey. What little I have seen of Dylan Mulvaney, she does appear to be one of those people whose body and emotional mindset simply do not match. But the mere fact that she allowed herself to be shown in such an unfavorable light casts a shadow on her moral compass. She has contributed to the unexpected backlash besetting Anheuser-Busch … Unintended consequences.

It has been my experience that when we go about our lives like any “normal” person does, that our gender identity becomes pretty much a non-issue. Even people who don’t particularly approve of the choices we’ve made refrain from overt displeasure in our presence.

But the in-your-face approach that Bud Lite has employed with Dylan Mulvaney has created a backlash not only against Anheuser-Busch but against the trans community as a whole. This is what happens when people like Ms. Heinerscheid stick their noses in where they aren’t wanted and try to cram their ideas down other people’s throats. And it’s not just her.

Take the legislator from Montana, Zooey Zepher, who has managed to create a minor firestorm by trying to cram her gender identity issues down the throats of her constituent legislators and the people who voted for them. The mere fact that she was elected to the legislature should be proof enough that had she behaved like an adult and not a rabble rouser she would have probably accomplished far more. What she ranted about was a proposed bill that would ban “gender affirming care” aka gender reassignment surgery for children, which I assume means anyone under the age of eighteen.

Liberals like to cherry pick one or two individuals or circumstances, attach a label to them and then lump entire groups under that label. They simply cannot cope with genuine individuality. The term most often referred to in that case is group think. And group think bans any ideas, thoughts, conversations or efforts at open and fair debate. Liberals simply cannot fathom any idea that runs contrary to, or even slight askew to, the main body of thought which most cannot even track back to the actual origin of the idea.

And that brings us to the subject of group thought about gender identity. Any time I publish something related to my gender identity and/or my political preferences the criticism I receive comes from people in the LGBT(Q) community. It almost always runs along the line of thought that if a person is lesbian, gay bisexual, transsexual or (questioning) they have to be a liberal democrat, because after all they are the only ones who are accepting of the way we live our lives. That is just plain misguided thinking stemming from ignorance. Why is it that conservatives are always the boogie man? And we are now full circle back to group think.

The group has concluded that since they all think alike that conservatives must all think alike. Nothing could be further from the truth other than the desire live our lives independent of the constraints the liberal left would like to place on us, and a general distrust of government. The experience that I’ve had is that while some conservatives may disagree with my choices, they generally accept me as I am as long as I don’t demand acceptance. In some cases, they may choose to consider me misguided and seeking attention. Whatever their feelings on the subject they are almost always willing to have a conversation on the subject. Liberals will inevitably resort to name calling and insults rather than a discussion on merits.

Conservatives, in the LGBT(Q) community are more numerous than one might expect because they don’t wear their politics on their shirt sleeves. And they are most likely to be Christians which is another taboo for liberal progressives in the gay community. But that conversation is for another time. What I want to get across is the idea that conservatives of any life choice have been too eager to compromise in order to express a willingness to avoid confrontation. That has been construed as a number of traits, such as cowardice, lack of compassion, lack of intellect. That willingness to discuss issues has led directly to the liberal left branding us as weak and ineffectual. And they have been very successful in that endeavor.

It’s time for conservative to fight fire with fire … adopt a no prisoners attitude. Compromise has been a total failure and if that isn’t corrected immediately the demise of a wonderful form of government will be on our shoulders. It will be on the shoulders of all conservatives, normal and LGBT(Q). We are the ones who will have to shoulder the blame just like a parent who lets their child run wild without any discipline are ultimately to blame for the outcome of their children’s lives. Liberals do not respect compromise or reason. They only respect power.

Conservative willingness to compromise with the evil of liberalism has had all these “unintended consequences” that have brought us to the brink of collapse.

As for the “T” part of the alphabet soup label. Those of us who are not subscribing to the current disruption of our society by the noisy attention seekers; we need to let the world know that those people do not speak for us. We have paid our dues to be a part of society. The spoiled children who are rioting and their willing accomplices in education and the press have not paid more than a dime in dues to be considered as reasonable people. The backlash which is occurring should have been expected and would have been totally unnecessary. Just ask Anheuser-Busch if they are happy with their

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The tragedy of Wokeism

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What has happened? How could the country I grew up in, a country that stood for freedom of thought, freedom of expression; how could it get so totally screwed up? There is a myriad of opinions on that issue but none that really get to the root of the problem. How do I dare to think that I might have the answer? After all I don’t have a basket full of degrees in things like philosophy, political science, or even an associate degree from a community college. It’s because I have seventy-eight years of common horse sense, a record of observation and a knowledge of history.

With that said, what do my common horse sense and observations tell me?

Item #1. Wokeness. What a crock this notion is. As explained to me the term comes from the notion that if a person or idea is woke, that they are better informed and more enlightened as to the supposed wrongs committed by people whose skin is what society calls white. Or to put it more succinctly, if you’re woke it means you woke up to the fact that you woke up how privileged your whiteness has made you.

For those of you who are products of modern public education you probably are not aware of how many union soldiers died in the civil war. That number has been pegged at 110,100 who died in battle. Another 224,580 died of diseases contracted while in the service of their country. I guess you could say that Abraham Lincoln was the original woke person and furthermore those 334,680 dead would have to be considered woke as well. Not all of those were white. An estimated 40,000 black soldiers died in service to their woke white government.

So, my question is … how many of our present day wokers have died in service to the cause of correcting this supposed injustice?

Answer: Zero. (at least to my knowledge)

If there is a bottom line to wokeism I believe it is this: Wokeism is a terribly misguided notion that suffering of the average white American is going to be a justifiable penance and punishment for the acts of ancestors, they never knew. Ancestors who, by the way, felt they were as justified in the way they viewed their fellow beings of a different color as the wokers of today.

To that end, wokeism is insinuating itself into every single facet of the lives of average everyday people regardless of their skin color, their income, their pleasures (especially their pleasures because that’s where wokeism thinks that’s the most painful wound they can inflict) the education of their children, the cars they drive, the way they prepare their meals. The list goes on infinitum.

It’s all about one of the most basic drivers of human desire … Control! That is the driving force behind liberalism, progressivism and wokeism. And the adherents to those philosophies simply cannot imagine that their aims and goals are destructive to the human spirit. The mere thought of logical progression to their ends, being the destruction of the very society that nurtures those very freedoms which allow them to pursue their goals, never enters their minds. If it does the idea is quickly discarded.

Wokeism is a declaration that only certain people are enlightened enough to see the perceived injustices in the world. They feel that it’s incumbent on them to force their views on how to correct the wrongs as they see them. They are incapable of seeing that as an injustice itself.

Wokeism is an insidious ideology that has infected nearly every facet of our daily lives. Corporations like Coca Cola and Nike are front and center in the effort to force every person in our society to adjust their moral values to fit the new woke norm. And that’s just the tip of giant iceberg that has the potential to sink our mighty ship of state. An iceberg called trans inclusion.

On this I am infinitely qualified to write and speak about. Up until two years ago the community of which I am a part was quietly making headway in our effort to gain understanding and inclusion. I have long believed that what I have referred to as the alphabet soup of the LGBTQ (and whatever other letter you want to tack on) began to gain acceptance not because of the incessant demonstrations that were apart of the movement in years past.  It was because of the many who went about their daily lives without wearing their sexuality on their sleeves, just waiting for someone to knock that chip off their shoulders so they could have an excuse to claim victimhood. No! Acceptance came about because the thousands of our community just wanted to live their lives in peace went about being a part of society without making their sexuality the focus of their lives.

It’s not about what you are. It’s about who you are as a person. And that is what is being totally missed and tragically misconstrued by the woke movement in the form of the current trend of woke teachers and educators usurping parental rights. Wokeism is using this issue in an attempt to create an Orwellian society. Long ago I realized that our education system held the key to the future of our society and thus our nation.

Uneducated individuals in our schools, (and yes “uneducated” regardless of what degree a college or university may have conferred up on them) from the teachers to the school boards have determined that it’s their duty to take actions regarding the future of a child which cannot be reversed. The suicide rate among the gender community is probably the highest of any one group in our country today. And it is going to get even worse ten to fifteen years from now when those children who have been encouraged to make life altering decisions which they are ill equipped to make reach adulthood and realize that they can never, ever reverse that action.

What then is society going to do to hold those teachers and educators accountable for what they are creating? Unless I miss my guess, that answer is “not a damned thing”. Parents must, without a doubt, take action now to take back control of their children’s futures by getting involved and getting rid of anyone who sits on a school board and advocates for society to take control of children’s lives.

I can tell you from personal experience that there will always be that seed of doubt in the mind of a person who has made that irreversible decision, when life has its inevitable ups and downs. When that happens, only a person who has made an informed decision about what lies ahead for them will survive. Making a decision to “transition” to a life in a different sexuality is not the same as deciding that a person is gay. Deciding to life ones life as a gay person is reversible. Case in point, I have more that a few personal acquaintances that lived a gay life that are now happily married to someone of the opposite sex. That is simply not possible for anyone who has made that sexual/gender transition.

Wake up people.

So How Did We Get Here?

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So, how did we get here? How did we get from the nation that I grew up in, a nation full of promise, a nation capable of landing a man on the moon, a nation that looked at its faults with an eye toward actually correcting the faults and not perpetuating the faults? How did we get from a nation of hopeful high school and college graduates whose worst crime might have been hanging a disagreeable professor in effigy instead of reality, from a tree in the center of the campus? How did we get from there to a nation where students march in masse protesting something, they have no actual knowledge of, while cheering the burning of our flag and destruction of the dreams of small business owners in the name of racial justice?

On the flip side, how did we go from nation of law-abiding citizens who identify themselves as conservatives; from a nation of people who accepted the outcome of an election regardless of who won because we trusted the system that counted the votes to do it honestly and let the chips fall where they may. How did we get from no need for conservative voters to gather in-masse, to support a president who, in spite of all the good he did, was not re-elected under a cloud of suspected corruption of officials in 5 states?

We didn’t get here overnight. We didn’t get here in a year. We didn’t even get here in a decade. We got here after years of careful and deliberate efforts of groups who had a fear of individual accomplishment. People who achieve through individual effort are feared by others who only find comfort in group think and group function.

When I was on the high school debate team one of the questions was “Should the federal government aid in funding public education?” (I paraphrase that question). One of the primary arguments on the negative side of that question was that local education systems would become too dependent on that source of funding and the result would then be encroaching federal control of the school curriculum. In other words, if you’re going to accept our money then you must accept our directions on what to teach and what not to teach. What was never expected was how non-government entities would eventually have far more influence than state and national government edicts.

It wasn’t the fault of politicians in spite of what we have come to think of them. It was the realization by non-governmental entities that what they had in their possession was something far, far more powerful than any government. Think about it … Who were the majority of those marching in support of Black Lives Matter and the call to defund the police? They were students. Black, white, brown; the color didn’t really matter. They had been conditioned by 12 to 20 years of sitting in front of “educators”; a group that had under their influence, as Rush Limbaugh would say, “young skulls full of mush” for a minimum of four to six hours a day. How many hours a day does the average parent spend on the mental development of their children? One? Two, maybe?

So, what kind of ideas are being stressed during those four to six hours a day? Well, as I noted in my last blog, 96.1% of the political donations made by the NEA in the last fifteen years have gone to democrat candidates. What kind of world to democrats want for our children? The last ten days should be your answer. They want to squelch any form of dissent to their ideas and their ideas are based on their belief that the average person is not capable of making rational decisions about their own lives. In addition, to that arrogant opinion of the average person’s intelligence is the belief that anything, and I do mean anything, they have to do to gain and hold that control is justifiable as evidenced by the obvious irregularities in the election results in five states during the last election. They have no moral compass whatsoever.

If you want to know then, how we ended up with such corrupt victors in our last election, look not to the politicians, look to how the people who elected them and the people who got them elected arrived at their justifications for their behavior. Those were arrived at through years of being under the influence of educators who themselves spent years under the influence of those who went before them.

I ask myself how did two educated conservatives such as my parents raise two broad minded conservatives, my brother and me, and then a decade and a half later a relatively narrow minded extreme liberal like our sister? It was a matter of how we were educated, when and where. Our parents didn’t change, the education systems changed.

I said in my last blog that if we are to effect lasting change in our country it has to start in our schools by getting involved with the local school board and administration. Weed out anyone who believes that their job is to shape minds. It isn’t; it’s to teach the basics not the morals of the teachers. It’s the parents’ job to shape the minds of their children.

Frustration is turning to Anger

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My frustration is turning to anger. Maybe the final straw was seeing a mob; that’s the only word for it; pulling down a statue of Francis Scott Key in San Francisco. So what if he was a slave owner. If what I recall of my education is correct; and I’m pretty damn sure it’s because the NEA hadn’t corrupted the system yet; most of the signers of the declaration of independence were slave owners. My guess is that there wasn’t a single one of those fools involved in the destruction of that statue that’s had any seriously accurate education in our history.

It’s highly unlikely that any of the people who did own slaves were the ones to go to Africa and kidnap the people they “owned”. The slave traffickers in many cases weren’t even the ones to kidnap the people they trafficked in. In most cases the unfortunate people to be sold into slavery were captured and sold by other black tribesmen or Arab Muslim slavers.

But all that knowledge is secondary to the root cause of all the turmoil in our country. That root cause is total and complete lack of basic education and sense of responsibility for one’s own actions. Parents are turning the education and upbringing of their children over to the state. And the cities and states that are the most affected with the problem are those run by liberal politicians like Bill DeBlasio of New York City.

I know that conservative news and commentary outlets see this, but why don’t people on the left at least give lip service to the issue? Can it be possible that they really don’t want to see it because it’s such a glaring example of what liberal progressivism does to the soul of the communities it has taken root in? I tend to think that is the case.

Everything Marxism and Maoism teach is on full display with each and every march and riot that’s occurring on a daily basis. Has our education system become so badly directed that the average person is totally convinced that they owe nothing to the society they live in and that the government is there to provide them with not only the necessities of life but all the goodies that come from a free enterprise form of economy?

So yes, I am angry that people I know, people I care about and people I love are so totally ingrained with an attitude of hatred toward everything that has made this country the one place on the face of the earth where everyone wants to live.

I’m angry that everything about this country that I love and hold dear has become a target of hatred and a form of reverse prejudice.

I’m angry that the press in general, the liberal politicians, the entrenched bureaucracy in Washington, the public education system have all been co-opted by the notion that only a relatively few elites have the vision and correct idea of what is right and what is wrong.

I’m angry that those same people who have made common sense a thing to be laughed at and belittled, are the ones making decisions that affect my life and the pursuit of happiness embodied in our declaration of independence.

And I’m angry that those people who are supposed to be the defenders of free speech; the educators, the liberal politicians and most of all the press, think that I am ignorant because I am a Christian, a politically conservative Christian, a politically conservative Christian trans-sexual; that since I’m all these things, I can’t have an opinion worth voicing.

I could go on indefinitely about what started out as frustration and has now become anger and how that anger makes me want to lash out, but I don’t believe that’s productive, so I won’t.

If you’ve read this far, I think you get my point. I’m angry.

The Ignorance of Innocence

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I am just not sure where to start, but I have to start somewhere so I will start with the laziness of parents; parents who have decided that their job is over as soon as the potty training is over. Entirely too many parents have totally turned the process of raising children who have a clear understanding of their rightful place in society along with basics required to achieve that end; such as accurate knowledge of our history. That fact has never been more on display than it was this past week in Washington DC and more than two hundred other cities across the country. The very idea that “children” should be the ones to tell responsible adults how to handle a subject as important as the right to bear arms is, on its face absurd beyond bounds, and dangerous at its core.

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but I can tell you that there is no legitimate comparison to saying that at the age of 17, young men and women are old enough to lay their lives on the line and don a military uniform are therefore old enough to tell adults what to do. In the first place, in the military at that age and experience level they are not telling anyone what to do. In the military they are being told what to do, how to do it and when to do it by people with far more age and experience. In the process they’re gaining a level of maturity and respect for authority that our school systems are doing a poor job of..

What we saw last weekend was a display of young people who were guided by pure emotion, which in some cases, I’m reasonably sure, were whipped to a frenzy by adults with less than honorable intentions.  Raw emotion has a great deal in common with the object of the frenzy … military weapons. Used for the right reasons and in the hands of someone with the right motives either can be a force for good. But, in the wrong hands and used with the wrong motives either can yield tragic results.

The fact that these “children,” and that is exactly what they are, have been so poorly educated about the history and reasoning embodied in our constitution, and in particular, behind the Second Amendment to our constitution is a worse than tragic reflection on the state of our education system.

When I was on the debate team as a junior in high school the national debate topic that year was about the advisability and necessity of our federal government providing funds for the education systems in the various states. I was young and not the most brilliant mind on our debate team, but in the course of studying the pros and cons of federal involvement in local education I did realize the dangers of a single central influence on the direction of the thought processes of “young skulls full of mush?

To my way of thinking it was a simple matter of math; the math of time. The math worked out like this. The average student spent at the most a half hour in the morning with his/her parents and in many cases barely an hour in the evening. In that brief time, what was being taught and/or learned? Probably not much in the way of how our government influenced our lives and the importance of guarding against ideas contrary to the personal desires of the parents.

On the other hand, children are under the influence and care of whatever school system they attend a minimum of 30 to as much as 40 hours a week. Socialists, liberals and progressives alike recognized this fact years ago and its why organizations like the NEA and teachers unions are so overwhelmingly influenced by ideologies in opposition to the basic Judeo-Christian principles of our founding documents. Is it any wonder then, that it was so easy to gin up the emotions of high school aged students across the country last week and convince them that it was the inanimate tool to blame and not the perpetrator or the people who raised him?

I have no statistics to back up my theory that the success of the Charter School initiative in most cases is the result of schools based on sound educational principles void of liberal dogma and experimental curriculums. Sadly, Charter Schools are not guaranteed continual existence. There are enough of them failing, to create a ground swell of concern for the lack of parental oversite of these schools. And that brings me back to my original premise that in the last 50 or so years parents have come to rely on schools to do the primary job of caring for their children.

So, I will beat the same drum I beat in a recent piece … Parents should be held responsible for the nature of the persons they turn loose on society. Until that happens organizations like the NEA and others with less than honorable intentions about the direction of our society, will control the direction of our society.

Where does the responsibility really lie?

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It’s all a blame game. In the wake of the tragedy that unfolded in the halls and classrooms of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks ago we have witnessed the same rhetoric that has become the mantra again and again. It’s nothing but a blame game because no one has yet to actually get to the root cause of such horrific incidents … at least in my humble opinion.

The very first thing to be blamed, of course, is the instrument of destruction, the weapon; with the liberal left leading the way accompanied by some of the RINOs. The mere fact that so called intelligent, thoughtful people would immediately jump to the conclusion that an inanimate tool was to blame is absurd on it’s very face.

That is followed, naturally by the equally absurd idea that there is no reason for a common citizen to need such a destructive weapon. The notion that only the military should need such a weapon is fostered by the naïve idea that when our forefathers passed the second amendment to our constitution they were only thinking of securing the ability of the citizens to put meat on the table. While that was a consideration it was only a small consideration. A reading of the accompanying documents shows that the basis for that amendment was to forever create a fear in those who govern of the governed. That idea was totally new to mankind. Historically it had always been the governed who feared those who governed.

If weapons of the type used in Florida were banned, any individual determined to kill others would simply find another way to do it. The lesson of the Alfred P Murrah Building in Oklahoma City nearly 23 years ago should be required study for every politician, especially liberal democrats, and government bureaucrats. Timothy McVeigh didn’t need an AR-15. All he needed was a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of Ammonium Nitrate, a rented U-Haul and a cheap timer to kill 168 people, wound another 650 and damage all or parts of 300 buildings.

In light of that you would think that America’s farmers would have to find other sources of nitrogen to fertilize their crops but to my knowledge that is still readily available at any garden center or farm supply center in this country.

Even with all the fire power found in Stephen Paddocks room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino the number of people he killed or wounded pales in comparison to the destruction in Oklahoma City.

Have trucks or cars been banned after their use in the killing of innocent people in Europe? No, they haven’t. And while we’re at it let’s ban the use of all presser cookers. You remember don’t you, that pressure cookers were used in the Boston Marathon bombing a few years ago.

As history progressed so did the development of weapons and up until the invention of weapons like the AR-15 there was little concern with private ownership of certain weapons. I don’t know what was behind the reasoning for letting the ban on private ownership of the AR-15 expire, but it was the right thing to do in my opinion.

The citizens of our country should always have access to weaponry equivalent to the military. It is the only way to see to it that our government, people who serve in our government elected and unelected in particular, never have access to any means of overcoming the freedom of the governed. But that wouldn’t be an issue if the root cause of such tragedies was accurately identified.

The news is rife with politicians, celebrities, psychologists and pseudo-intellects blaming the inanimate weapon, people who own inanimate weapons, those who make inanimate weapons and society in general for the tragedy. But, not one of them has addressed the real root of the problem. True, background checks do help identify people who shouldn’t have access to guns, but that is like trying to stop a leak in a dam from the outside where the water has already breached the dam instead of on the inside where the leak begins.

So where is the inside of this dam? Not one person in any of these tragedies, with one exception that I know of, has placed the root blame where it really belongs.

I have always been a firm believer in the responsibility of parents to see to it that the children they bring in to the world are raised with a respect for the rights of other people and their own responsibility to conduct their affairs in a manner that does not interfere with the rights of other people. There is an old saying that goes like this: “Your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins.”

When any parent fails in this responsibility to teach that concept to their children they bear equal responsibility for the acts of the children they turn loose on society. If an adult does such a lousy job of raising a child that the child becomes a blight on society and as we have seen in the recent events, a deadly blight, they are equally responsible for the acts of that child. It’s my firm belief that if the lives of the perpetrators of these tragedies were traced back far enough you will find an event, involving the parent directly or indirectly, which eventually led to the acts which ended in tragedy for the lives of other people.

That is the very seed of virtually every one of these tragic events and ignorant attention seeking persons of mediocre notoriety are racing to the microphones to blame the inanimate object or the NRA. Stupid corporate leaders are racing to the microphones to withdraw their support of the NRA. How shortsighted and ignorant can those executives be? Apparently extremely ignorant and shortsighted.

Once and for all … let’s get to the root of the problem. People who are ill equipped to raise responsible members of society and the society which chooses to turn a blind eye to them are the real root of the problem. Do I expect that to ever be addressed? No, I don’t.

We have created, at a minimum, two and possibly three generations of adults who have chosen to turn the responsibility for raising the children they bring into the world over to the school systems. Those systems are heavily staffed by teachers and administrators who are teaching our children that they bear no responsibility for their own actions. And that, I believe, is because those liberal educators don’t want to assume responsibility for the outcome of their own lives. They want society to take that responsibility off their shoulders.

Imagine a society that exacted the same penalty on the parents of children who harm others as the penalty imposed on the child. No doubt events such as we have just witnessed would be rare indeed.