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Minnesota whites’ reaction to second “Asian” baseball bat assault in three days
Just last evening I discussed the savage attack by “Asian”—overwhemlingly likely Hmong— youths on a woman jogging in a Twin Cities park. And now it’s happened again, as reported the Pioneer Press:
2nd Lake Phalen baseball-bat beating occurs near scene of vigil for Friday assault
As an account of the second baseball bat attack, the story doesn’t rise to the level of journalistic incompetence, since it doesn’t describe the attack. It is nevertheless an amazing story, a must-read portrait of contemporary America. What stands out is the comments by the people who were attending the vigil/march that was in progress when the second attack occurred. Here are these upper Midwest liberals, they’re besieged by violence in their neighborhoods and parks, they can’t go outside in safety, this poor woman had her hands horribly injured, and far from having righteous rage at the criminals who did this and the determination to punish them and remove them from society, the marchers keep reacting like helpless overfed dolls. The pastor who organized the march, instead of saying that the criminals must be arrested and imprisoned, talks about “pushing them back, with love.”
As I was reading the article, I thought of how an American community in the 19th century would have responded to these attacks. They would have formed a posse, searched out the bat-wielding savages, and arrested or killed them. Compare that to these pathetic Eloi:
One of Tammie’s sisters, Linda, gritted her teeth.
“We have to remain”—she clenched a fist—“positive.”
See? It’s impossible to do anything to protect society from criminals. Furthermore, the world is not only outside our control, it’s also unknowable. The criminals are not described. No one quoted in the article refers to them. It’s as though the crimes were not committed by specific human agents. That the attackers are Hmong, an ethnic group well known as the source of a great deal of gratuitous criminal violence in that part of the country, is never mentioned. The only reality is a shapeless misfortune outside human control, and so all that one can do is bravely clench one’s fists and remain staunchly “positive.”
Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, the supreme explicator of modern nihilism, would have loved that phrase, “We have to remain positive,” seeing it as a perfect expression of nihilism. What it really means is: There is no moral truth. Therefore there is no such thing as criminals who need to be seen as criminals and punished. And therefore there is nothing for us to do about the criminals. And so, in the absence of the ability to recognize evil and combat it, the only remaining recourse is the mandate to “be positive.” Which, by the way, is the liberal weenie version of Nietzsche’s command to say “YES” to a universe of total meaninglessness.
Here is the article.
2nd Lake Phalen baseball-bat beating occurs near scene of vigil for Friday assault
By Bob Shaw and Mara H. Gottfried Pioneer Press, August 5
It was like an attack on peace itself. [No, you liberal idiots. It wasn’t an attack on “peace.” It was a attack on people. Namely an attack on white American people by Hmong people.]
A candlelight vigil following last week’s baseball-bat beating was under way Monday evening at St. Paul’s Lake Phalen when another baseball-bat assault happened only blocks away.
“This only shows we can’t go out anymore in the neighborhood we grew up in,” snapped one woman, furious at the similar attacks on the trail around Lake Phalen. “We can’t even be safe during the day!”
St. Paul police arrested three suspects in the Monday assault who roughly match the description of the assailants in Friday’s assault—three young Asian men.
The two 18-year-old victims in the latest attack, a man and a woman, had minor injuries and declined medical attention.
St. Paul police spokesman Peter Panos said Monday night it remains unclear whether the two attacks are related. But vigil marchers made a connection.
“It certainly seems ironic to me,” said Sue Frelich, a 30-year friend of the victim of the Friday assault.
The evening began quietly in the parking lot of Arlington Hills Presbyterian Church, near the scene of the Friday attack.
The 100 people at the 7 p.m. vigil were marching in support of the victim identified only as “Tammie,” who is in her 40s and suffering from breast cancer.
The church’s interim pastor, the Rev. Howard Dotson, helped organized the community march. He had only been on the job three weeks but said his years in the rough neighborhoods of Los Angeles had prepared him well.
“We need to reclaim this space that has been polluted by violence,” he said. “We need to push back, in a loving way.”
Frelich said Tammie’s breast cancer had metastasized into about 40 separate tumors. Chemotherapy made her sensitive to sunlight—which is why she walked by the neighborhood lake at night.
About 12:30 a.m. Friday, she saw the three attackers by a willow tree.
“She told me she said, “Stop! I have cancer!” ” Frelich said, sipping a Diet Coke in the heat.
Tammie’s middle finger was severed as a result of the attack, and she suffered multiple fractures in both hands and a broken wrist. She had surgery at Regions Hospital to put pins in her left hand.
Frelich was outraged.
“How long will it take her to recover from this—so she can move on to the rest of her suffering?” she said.
Just as the march was ready to begin, several police cars shot past the church.
Suddenly, a sister of Tammie’s pulled into the parking lot and told onlookers she and her children had just witnessed another baseball-bat assault.
The news rattled the crowd, but the vigil proceeded as planned.
During the march, Kurt Adamson of KJ Catering said he had just delivered a week’s supply of food. It was donated not only for Tammie, he said, but for the others she cares for—two aging Alzheimer’s disease sufferers in a foster care program, her two children and one grandchild.
When the group got to the site of the attack, Dotson recalled how Tammie was assaulted.
“This is tragedy upon tragedy,” said Dotson. Amid the occasional bark of a dog and honking of horns, Dotson led the group in prayer.
The vigil ended when the flames from a few cigarette lighters were passed from candle to candle until the whole crowd glowed. Thin and off-key strains of “We Shall Overcome” rose through the downcast branches of the willow tree.
One of Tammie’s sisters, Linda, gritted her teeth.
“We have to remain”—she clenched a fist—“positive.”
Bob Shaw can be reached at bshaw@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5433. Mara H. Gottfried can be reached at mgottfried@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5262.
- end of initial entry—
Before I posted the above entry, James P. sent the same article with a comment.
James P. wrote:
The response from local liberals is truly nauseating:
The church’s interim pastor, the Rev. Howard Dotson, [said] “We need to reclaim this space that has been polluted by violence,” he said. “We need to push back, in a loving way.”
The vigil ended when the flames from a few cigarette lighters were passed from candle to candle until the whole crowd glowed. Thin and off-key strains of “We Shall Overcome” rose through the downcast branches of the willow tree.
One of Tammie’s sisters, Linda, gritted her teeth.
“We have to remain”—she clenched a fist—“positive.”
Talk about suicidal liberalism! Two beatings with bats, and they are still bleating hymns and yammering about being “loving” and “positive.” The proper response to such an assault is not an insipid candlelight vigil, but a beating for the perpetrators followed by their prompt incarceration.
Britain may be the Isle of Wimps, but Minneapolis / St. Paul seems to be the Twin Cities of Wimps.
Mark J. writes:
This story is interesting to me because it happened here in my “hometown,” the Twin Cities, where I grew up and have lived all my life.
The east side of St. Paul, where these attack occurred, was a long-time blue collar white neighborhood where workers for the Hamm’s brewery lived and raised families. Then, beginning a couple decades ago, the Hmong began to be settled there. With an increasing influx of illegal Mexicans and blacks from the Chicago area, the transformation into an alien, multicultural “haven” has passed the tipping point. A liberal woman friend of mine who, like the woman in the story, is middle-aged and has walked for years in that area (where she lives) was assaulted last year by a group of black men and now is afraid to take walks at any time except in broad daylight in busy areas. (She used to use the scenic walking trails in the area.) Also fairly recently a 13 year old white girl walking to school was brutally raped and assaulted by a black man in an alley near her home as she left for school one morning. Across the street from my friend lives a family that fly a Mexican flag from the flagpole in their front yard. University Avenue, the historic main thoroughfare of St. Paul that runs over to the border with Minneapolis, has in my lifetime been significantly transformed into a hodgepodge of shoddy little shops with Hmong and Spanish signs. The whole situation is an unfolding lesson in the reality of a multiracial society for the very liberal, very sheltered white people of Scandinavian/German heritage that made up Minnesota’s population since its founding in the 1850s.
I was recently at Harding High School on the east side of St. Paul, and the experience of walking through the hallways between classes was surreal and alienating. I graduated from another St. Paul high school in the 1970s and remember Harding well—full of blue collar white kids who frequently dominated the city’s athletic competitions. Now it is a sea of black, Hispanic, and Asian faces with only a smattering of beleaguered whites. The posters in the hallways are of MLK Jr., Sojourner Truth, and so on, without a historic white face to be seen. It is discouraging to see white people’s taxes being used to educate and make comfortable invaders who wish us ill and are busily immigrating and reproducing to take away from us that which we created and what they never could create on their own, and which they will degrade as they did the places where they lived before.
With the similar influx of Somalis and Mexicans in Minneapolis, there may be no metro area in America that has undergone such a rapid, destructive transition. We are directly on track to becoming another Detroit. But we are also the home of some of the most hard-core, suicidal (in the UK manner) liberals around, who elected the first black Muslim to Congress and may elect Al Franken to the Senate this fall. We are one of the principal multiracial “petri dishes” in the country and it’s very depressing for someone like me who is old enough to remember how good it was before.
Sage McLaughlin writes:
Given how I’ve been inundated with Baby Boomer self-congratulation and racial guilt, it remains hard for me to face what I know to be true:
Sixty years ago, a black man who tortured a white girl nearly to death, raped her, and set her on fire would have been signing his own death sentence, and any black man would have known it. A pack of Hmong savages who set upon a random white woman with baseball bats would have known the same, and their sense of self-preservation would pick up exactly where their civilized sense of decency left off.
And it was a far, far better world for that.
LA replies:
In a sense you’re not saying anything that radical or un-PC here. You’re just advocating the restoration of the death penalty—of the death penalty meaningfully imposed and timely executed.
Karl D. writes:
I think your description of these people as “Eloi” is perfect. If one didn’t know better one would think they were genetically altered. I have been having an ongoing argument with one of these types at my blog concerning the recent UN human rights commission telling the UK that they need to be “nice to Muslims”. Here is a quote from her.
Finally, don’t worry about me classifying you purely because you don’t follow the PC way [as if I care how she classifies me—Karl D.]. PC ideas and concepts are just social governing at its best. I applaud the fact that you are at least a free thinker in this aspect, I just hope you can use some of that to develop a love for all mankind, regardless of the wrongs they do or you may associate with them.
She is a pacifist of the worst order. When I pressed her with the question, “At what point would you defend yourself or your country? What would it take for you to actually fight back?”, she evaded the question and gave some wishy-washy answer that she doesn’t know how she would react. To these people the “high road” is more important than death. I wonder if there is some sort of psychological defect that underlies this attitude. I would like to think they would fight back if someone were obviously and systematically trying to wipe them out, but I doubt it. Once again, that chore is left to people who live by objective reality. The liberals merely reap the rewards.
LA replies:
“To these people the ‘high road’ is more important than death.”
Well said. A quotable quote.
Gintas writes:
The church’s interim pastor, the Rev. Howard Dotson, [said:] “We need to reclaim this space that has been polluted by violence,” he said. “We need to push back, in a loving way.”
“In a loving way” likely means like Elwood P. Dowd and his big, invisible rabbit. Where’s the love for all the folk who are now running scared? Eradicating this evil would be a fine, tangible way of showing love for the community.
After church not long ago I was standing talking with a couple of men and one of the young lads came by and started to fight with me—mostly play, but there’s always this undercurrent of the young lads testing themselves against the menfolk, measuring themselves physically, so I make sure they hurt some when they’re done. I told him, “If you mess me up, I’ll beat you into a senseless bloody pulp. All in Christian love, of course.”
Sage McLaughlin write:
OK, what I said isn’t all that un-PC. But the implication I intended to convey was that the courts and law enforcement, once upon a time, protected the people in part because there was a very real threat of vigilantism—when I say that a black man who perpetrated those kinds of crimes against a white woman would have signed his own death warrant, I don’t necessarily mean that an efficient legal system would have seen to it. I mean that the outrage from whites as whites would have been enough to seal his fate. Whatever the imperfections of such a situation, and whatever injustices it might threaten, it remains preferable to the current situation, which is completely unacceptable.
LA replies:
Yes. I actually felt from the tone of your earlier comment that this was what you meant. But the words didn’t quite match the music.
Robert B. writes:
On the woman in Phalen Park, the attackers were Hmong. The Hmong are known for violent and nonsensical behavior here, its just normally no one is willing to talk about it. Back in the early ’90s, no more than a few miles from my home in the upper Midwest, a gang of them held up two gas stations that were across the street from each other. In the second station they made the two store clerks and two customers lie face down on the floor and summarily executed them. Then, after they were caught, their fellow gang bangers attempted to break them out of jail. These were kids—teenagers in high school!
The Hmong are a violent, aboriginal people who were tossed out of China and parts further north and eventually driven into Laos where they were being driven out when the CIA discovered them and co-opted them and their violent behavior. It seems no one wants them around as they cannot get along with anyone.
Philip M. writes from England
The newspaper article you link to describes this as a “vigil for the assault,” a curious concept if ever there was one. But the “vigil” does seem to have become a feature of the modern West following such incidents. It seems to me a very un-northern European/Protestant response.
When people hold vigils for the dying it is because they are aware that the time for hope and action is over, and all that is left is dignified prayer and contemplation, a constant wakefulness in the last hours of the dying to show they are not alone in their final hours.
When I think of the displays of grief in places like Mexico or Africa following similar violent incidents, it seems to me as I think about it that it accompanied by a sense of hopelessness, the family of the victim/s wail and cry as much against the injustices of the universe as against any failing in their society or people within it. I have never sensed in such gatherings the feeling that those who attended will seek justice or try to make a better society. It is the reaction of people who know that this is the way things are and they will never change, so let’s get all the grief out and just move on. It is a fatalistic Third-World response.
These are just first impressions, I don’t know if I am expressing this very well, but I think you will be able to see what I mean. In short, Lawrence, if I should ever get battered with a baseball bat in your neck of the woods, please could you forgo the scented candles and acoustic guitars and get some big guys is a pick up truck to go and find the people who did it?
P.S. You are right that there are no decent right wing British blogs. Why do you think VFR-land is full of Limey immigrants like myself?
LA replies:
Very good insights about the utter inappropriateness, or rather the perfect political correctness, of holding a “vigil” during a crime epidemic that has people cowering in their homes afraid to go out.
There’s the Sufi saying, “Trust in God, but first make sure your camel’s tied.”
Before people attend to their collective spiritual well-being, they first need to secure their physical safety. I mean, that’s what organized human society is about, first and foremost, to secure people’s basic physical safety so that they can then attend to higher matters. But liberals can’t fully “relate” to that first task of human society, upon which their own rotten ungrateful existence depends, because it implies that there are such things as human evil, criminality, and unappeasable enemies, and that society must use force to suppress them. The liberals’ very existence depends on non-liberal truths that they deny, and on non-liberal actions that they despise.
Philip M. continues:
Minnesotans have invented a whole new concept: the vigil-ante! I’m trying to picture Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood now—an ordinary guy, pushed to the brink by the chaos and lawlessness of the inner cities, deciding to take control of the situation by singing a medley of John Lennon songs and joining forces with the local lesbian community to weave a commemorative rug made of lentils and tree bark from sustainable woodland!
LA replies:
Very good. In the old America, when the rule of law failed and ordinary citizens became the helpless victims of savage outlaws, society responded with Vigilantism. In today’s America, when the rule of law fails and ordinary citizens become the helpless victims of savage outlaws, society responds with the Vigil. We’re in the Age of Vigil-antism.
(“Vigil” and “vigilante” both come from the Latin “vigilare,” to watch. See Wikipedia.)
Stephen Hopewell writes:
The thread on the baseball bat assault and “vigil” was an excellent one. I especially appreciate Sage McLaughlin’s comments on how the situation a century or so ago, when assaults on whites would result in mob vengeance, was preferable to the situation today. Back then, civilized whites had to act to restrain the mob element, by promising and delivering swift legal punishment. Certainly, sometimes horrible injustices occurred in these circumstances.
But a people that has completely lost the capacity for self-defensive violence is also finished. Our liberal society and the liberal state have destroyed the white mob, but they have also destroyed our manhood. Part of it is cowardice, fear for our own physical safety; more deeply we are so indoctrinated in nonviolence and the understanding that WE would be punished for violent acts that we have lost the capacity even to think of physically defending ourselves.
A thought experiment: suppose some area of 19th century America were being colonized by Muslims. The Muslims build a mosque and the locals react by burning it down. The Muslims get the message and go back where they came from. Now, our own governments and town planners import the Muslims and sponsor the building of the same mosque and prosecute anyone who harasses the builders in the mildest way. What moral form of self-defense is available for modern people?
Adela G. writes:
Karl D. writes: “To these people the “high road” is more important than death.”
Very well said.
In fact, for these people, the “high road” can lead to death and even that does not persuade them to take another path. I verily believe that the fact that it can lead to death is part of its appeal to them. To live cheek-by-jowl with the Other in a “vibrant community” in one’s own country is to risk being beaten, raped or murdered for one’s belief in the value of such communities and in “pushing back” at attackers “with love.” This assertion of left-wing radical egalitarianism over every other ideology to which whites subscribe and even over life itself is secular martyrdom, no less fanatical for being rooted in political ideology rather than Christian theology.
Unfortunately, the left is not content to take this high road by itself. If only it were—! Then the problem of how to counter this insanity would take care of itself in a generation or two. But no, even middle aged women with cancer must be sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism and egalitarianism.
Patrick H. writes:
You quote a correspondent: “To these people the “high road” is more important than death.”
What is so sickening about liberals is their utter narcissism. It’s as if the only thing that matters is what they feel about what happened, what sensations they allow to flush through their torsos in response to the objective, out-there horrific reality of the crime perpetrated by those barbarians on that hapless woman. The only thing they care about is that they themselves not be “corrupted” by any emotion outside the permitted holy trinity of liberal feeling: compassion, guilt, and sorrow. I must confess I have a particular loathing for this species of liberal narcissist, especially the religious kind. “We [aka ME ME ME] have to remain positive.” MY emotions, MY thoughts must only be of the permitted kind. “We [ME ME ME] need to push back in a loving way.” MY emotions are what legitimizes any pushing back, whatever that means. The important thing, the only thing really, is to FEEL the right way. So, liberals! When you are met with a real, objective, actually existing horror, remember the liberal syllogism:
We construct our own reality.
Reality is what I feel it is.
Therefore: I must construct my reality by feeling the right way about it.
The problem is twofold: reality is what doesn’t go away, even if you don’t like it. And, more importantly, what if you just feel burning rage and anger and hatred and the desire to punish anyway? If you’re a liberal, you’re damned. So in order to be saved in the modern liberal church of Calvinistic Solipsism, you cannot even admit what you are feeling. You must “construct” a story about your feelings that will allow you to believe that you ARE saved, you ARE a liberal, you ARE NOT a human being.
And so you will end, as liberals will, saying, “We must remain positive.” Said through gritted teeth, with clenched fists, as you descend “steadily, everlastingly inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.” (Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell.)
As I said before, Lawrence, the problem with liberals is much worse than their being Eloi. There is something inside them that actually terrifies me, it is so absolutely inhuman. It’s like they’re Pod people. God help me, when I think of these solipsists, these Men Without Chests, I feel such loathing that I am actually physically nauseated. God help me to pray for their salvation as for my own.
LA replies:
This is a great comment. I’ll have to read it again. It connects with the idea that liberals are not just allowing themselves to slide into some preliminary stage of nihilism (as described by Eugene Rose), but, positively, in a systematic, programmed, ruthless way, are heading into the ultimate abyss of the Nihilism of Destruction.
Robert B. writes:
I know both Bob Shaw and Mara H. Gottfried personally—Shaw wrote the articles about my family and the farm, and Mara has attended some of our meetings concerning the overrunning of a Jewish neighborhood in St. Paul by Somali Moslems and their crime—which includes, now, stabbing a woman in broad daylight.
The soft aspect of this is an old tradition with the Pioneer Press—it was begun by 3M so as to make the area look idyllic to attract high end executives to live here. Though back then there really wasn’t much crime to speak of anyway.
Philip M. writes:
I agree with Stephen Hopewell, this thread has been really interesting, an example of what your blog does better than any other I have come across, teasing out the meaning and signs of decay in what would probably appear nowadays to most people as a relatively mundane occurrence. Like Stephen, it had also occurred to me that far from being less civilised, the society which is prepared to use violence in a controlled and directed manner to defend itself is far more civilised than the one in which the law abiding are imprisoned in their own homes. I suppose the logic of many liberals is that “violence begets violence,” that by fighting fire with fire you will only set the whole town ablaze, so we must restrain our vengeful impulses. The same logic is applied to the debate on smacking. It is as if they viewed violence as a living beast which must be starved or ignored to death rather than fed. There is no discrimination in their minds between just and unjust violence.
His reference to “the mob element” made me think of the Simpsons. I know it is only a cartoon, but it is a very good guide to the thought processes and prejudices of the modern liberal and is worthy of closer attention by someone with a mind for such things. The braying, bloodthirsty mob is a feature of many episodes, and always with the ironic commentary that it is the backward, atavistic impulse of those who want to be part of the crowd, which inevitably ends up punishing the wrong person in its frenzied, irrational blood-lust. Just the other day I saw an episode in which a meteorite had been expected to hit the town, and Mo, the local barman, shouts to the mob “Let’s burn down the observatory to make sure this never happens again!” The actual solutions in the Simpsons always comes through the dialogue and understanding of an enlightened character. When we are wondering why the impact of liberal thinking has become so pervasive, we should not underestimate the power of such clever and relentless propaganda on young minds.
Ironically, “demo-cracy” is the rule by the very “mob” whose instincts the democracy-loving elites despise.
Tim W writes:
I watched Charles Bronson in Death Wish this past weekend. I hadn’t seen this movie in probably thirty years (it was released in 1974). I was amazed at how un-PC it is, at least relative to other films. The protagonist is a New York architect (Bronson) who holds liberal views on crime (it’s caused by poverty & injustice) and guns. He changes very quickly when his wife is murdered and his daughter raped in a home invasion. A right-wing Arizona land developer then teaches him the value of guns and self-defense. Bronson proceeds to knock off a variety of vermin in the subways, parks, and alleys of NYC over the next hour or so.
The most vivid crime in the film, the initial attack on Bronson’s loved ones, is committed by whites, and about half of the hoodlums in the film are white. But about half are black, which is approximately 100% more than in most films. One scene in the film probably couldn’t survive today. Sophisticates at a cocktail party are discussing the vigilante killings that have been dominating the news. One man declares the vigilante to be racist since most of his victims have been black. A woman responds by saying that’s because most muggers are black. That may be the only time that stat has ever appeared in a Hollywood film!
Paul Nachman writes:
You write:
Before people attend to their collective spiritual well-being, they first need to secure their physical safety. I mean, that’s what organized human society is about, first and foremost, to secure people’s basic physical safety so that they can then attend to higher matters. But liberals can’t fully “relate” to that first task of human society, upon which their own rotten ungrateful existence depends, because it implies that there are such things as human evil, criminality, and unappeasable enemies, and that society must use force to suppress them. The liberals’ very existence depends on non-liberal truths that they deny, and on non-liberal actions that they despise.
Not only is this paragraph a nugget worth preserving, but “rotten ungrateful existence” (shouldn’t there be a comma between rotten and ungrateful?) is a gem within a gem. Tough love, without the love.
LA replies:
“Tough love, without the love.” That’s a classic.
And you’re right about the need for comma.
But now that I think about it I’m not sure. If “rotten” and “ungrateful” were each independently modifying “existence,” then I agree that there should be a comma. But here I’m saying that their existence is rotten because they’re ungrateful. What is rotten is not their existence, but their ungrateful existence. If I put the comma in, that would be saying that they’re rotten people apart from their ingratitude, which was not my intention to say, at least not here. So I think the comma should remain out.
Van Wijk writes:
If a man is found guilty of rape or murder, he should hang. Is it our place, as men, to forgive someone for committing such a profound violation? Is it our place to say that a rapist or a murderer is rehabilitated? And who among us should guarantee that such a criminal has, in fact, been rehabilitated, and that he won’t re-offend?
Forgiveness of such a crime can be given only by the victim and God, and neither should influence the sentence.
All throughout history men have learned and kept fundamental truths. Modern liberalism is the willful renunciation of these truths. I sometimes wonder whether the ancients would see our current predicament and howl with laughter or fly into a rage at seeing us give away our birthright as a gift.
Laura G. writes:
I have been thinking about the craven responses of the citizens in St. Paul, and the many pertinent comments from your readers. I grew up mainly in Minneapolis, where both my parents and their families were native for several generations, but have been living in North Carolina for many decades as an adult. These attacks and the responses to them are among the many events which have let me know that the world I lived in as an Upper Midwesterner during the 1940s and ’50s is long gone. A question (one of many) is “why.”
In one respect our nation could be divided into two unequal parts based on a monumental difference in experience. The South is the one part of the U.S. which has actually experienced military defeat on its own soil and everything that that defeat brought with it. The North and West never had that educational experience, and our nation as a whole projects itself as if it believes it has never known defeat. Nevertheless, that self-image is false, and the South has indeed known grinding wartime defeat plus a subsequent occupation. Probably as a result, it is the South that values and demands individual defense and the right of citizens to be armed. It is the South that has the highest numbers of men serving in the armed forces and maintains to this day a warrior culture. It is the South that continues to provide examples of shoe-leather justice for some crimes, a reality that is frequently visible when a person who is being arraigned for an assault on a child shows up at court with cuts and bruises shaped like boots and bats. Meantime, other sections of the country seem to have slipped into a belief that they have no need or right to attend to their own safety or to rectify crimes in their own community.
I do not think that the reasons for the limp response of the Saintpaulians is a simple matter of a greater distance from the enforced reality of experiencing a great battle, but it does seem to me that their slothful attitude may be being greatly enhanced by the sense that someone else will do the grimy, nasty work of keeping them and their homes safe. In the South, they know the flaws in that plan, having personally heard about it from their mothers who heard all about it from their mothers, and so forth on back. Those learning experiences were not so terribly long ago, but for sections of the country that never wanted to know about the role of armed force in defense, forgetfulness conveniently allows them to take the lackadaisical attitude that is front and center regarding these attacks and which is the default position of liberals in any event.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 05, 2008 02:21 PM | Send
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