I remember this story from the Old Testament: When Mesopotamia destroyed Jerusalem and took the tribe of Judah into bondage, it caused much consternation, because they felt that they had a compact with God, and God being infallible, couldn’t break his word, so, they must have, in some way, been responsible for their own destruction. Everyone knows that every relationship has two or more parties, and when any relationship goes bad, there’s probably enough blame to go around. On every stage, every actor has a part. Jesus may have summed it up with: “How can you criticize the speck in your brother’s eye, and ignore the beam in your own?”
So I guess I’m thinking all this because of the latest shooting sprees in Texas and Ohio. Ugly stuff. The Texas one, seemingly perpetrated by a young man who expressed racist views. The other shooter is dead.
My sadness is derived from my long love of this country (I’m 76) and what I’m seeing as the first news reports from the media. Once again, with sickening predictability, our media is crowing the same shabby leftist refrain that President Trump is at fault, and, of course, so is the Second Amendment.
I’m in no way saying that this sounds unreasonable — I’m saying it’s untrue.
The modern left is consumed with a hate for the president that’s led to two and a half years of a steady drumbeat of accusations, malicious and spiteful, false and unproven. He’s divisive, a criminal, a traitor, a racist, homophobe, xenophobe, crazy, stupid, white supremacist, ad-nauseum. Yet the left quietly absolves itself of any participation in the hyper-partisan antagonism growing to dangerous levels, even though much of the rancor is driven by their early and off-stated position of “Resistance,” and their continuing addiction to manufactured outrage.
Could the young man in Texas have been driven by the left’s continued support for illegal immigration? Their stated goal of tearing down America’s borders and allowing a free flow of the world’s poor to enter and live off American taxpayer largess? Or, Democrats continuing to obstruct any attempt to modulate border crossings, and denying funds to support border control efforts, while they castigate border authorities for not doing enough?
There are other things too, of course. The progressive destruction of American education. The attack on white men as: Racist, extra-privileged, toxic males, responsible for all the nation’s ills, past and present, worse if you’re a Christian. If an Anglo-American salutes the flag, or voices a defense of the Constitution, he’s a “white nationalist” and, according to today’s leftist paradigm, white nationalist terrorism is a thing to be feared — even though it’s a paranoia driven by assaults from the left. Has anyone ever heard of “Antifa” described as a progressive terrorist organization”?
As for the Second Amendment: I’ve heard many on the left call for “bipartisan, common sense legislation,” for sitting down together and finding a way forward to protect our national freedom and help insure the safety of our citizens. Why don’t they talk the same way about fixing the border?
As in all relationships, national ones sometimes reach breaking points. Our Civil War was one, so was our Revolution. A book written by a former German soldier who had seen four years of the most horrible destruction imaginable ended with the sentiment, “Anyone who lives in a country at peace is a criminal to instigate political violence.”
Maybe the left will come to question the narcissistic supposition of its moral superiority. Maybe the American left will be a little circumspect about its own fueling of political violence, and, perhaps, adopt a little humility and gratefulness about having been blessed to have been born here. Maybe they will tone down their own hate-filled rhetoric and realize that they, too, have a beam in their own eye.
Maybe.
Richard La Motte
Santa Clarita
