Culture of passivity
Mark Steyn on Virginia Tech on National Review Online
We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry - whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus - the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.
I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.
Why are we raising a bunch of pacifists? When I was going to school, the creed wasn’t “don’t fight at all“, but “don’t start fights”. My parents thought it was ok to finish them (though I never had to, I had implicit permission to kick the crap out of someone who started a fight with me). I didn’t fight if I didn’t have to, but I didn’t let people bully me either. These days it seems that you get in as much trouble for fighting back as you do if you start the fight, which is just wrong. We are teaching our kids to allow people to take their things away, or to hurt them physically without fighting back. Do you think when they grow up they will be willing to fight for our ideals? Do you think they will be willing to fight when someone tells them “You can’t say that because it will hurt someone’s feelings” when we’ve taught them not to fight when someone else is hitting them?