America’s Fractured Culture

Posted on February 27, 2018 by Robert Ringer

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Life is a dangerous experience.  It’s dangerous at birth and dangerous every step along the way of our journey to another dimension.  The Parkland, Florida school shooting is yet another reminder of the painful reality that there are some dangers we simply cannot eliminate.

Coming to grips with this fact is an insurmountable obstacle for many people.  In fact, it’s at the very heart of the mental disorder commonly referred to as “liberalism.”

Among other things, liberalism is a manifestation of immaturity.  The true liberal is someone who can never seem to accept the fact that he cannot control every situation … cannot end poverty … cannot prevent wars … cannot save the world … and certainly cannot get everyone to agree with and accept his views on morality.

Which brings me back to the recent school tragedy in Florida.  It’s almost as if the Dirty Dems look forward to the next school shooting as an excuse to pull out their gun-control talking points and pass moral judgment on those who dare challenge them.  It’s not so much a diversionary tactic as a delusion stemming from a childlike naiveté.

It goes without saying that any serious, halfway intelligent adult understands that school shootings have nothing to do with law-abiding citizens owning “too many guns.”  This is not only clearly supported by statistics, but, just as important, common sense.

The truth is that gun violence in schools — like gun violence anywhere — is just one of the many harsh consequences of America’s fractured culture.  More specifically, the societies of all Western countries have been decaying in a cesspool of relativism for decades.

With certitudes in short supply, every facet of life is now subjective, and an unstable mind overwhelmed by hatred has little difficulty extending this subjectivity to the taking of human life.  After all, relativists argue, in our age of “enlightenment” there is no rational reason to be bound by traditional norms.  In a relativist, subjective world, you can do anything you want to do and be anything you want to be.  There are no constraints or limitations.

In contrast to today’s toxic culture, I would submit that the apex of Western civilization was the 1950s, particularly the first half of that long-ago decade.  The world was much younger than today, and much more innocent.

Unfortunately, we’ve been in a downward spiral for the past 60 years.  It’s a spiral that has brought about all kinds of decadent consequences, among them the proliferation of murder rampages in our schools.  Now the question is, what can we do to stop these mass slayings — or at least reduce them in number?

For starters, there’s nothing to be gained by listening to those on the Radical Left, because, let’s be honest, they don’t even want to think about serious solutions to school shootings.  It’s much easier, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, to lash out at guns in the hands of everyday citizens as the cause of mass slayings.

A naïve person might be perplexed as to why Radical Leftists and their low-information, toady cheerleaders keep pounding away at gun proliferation as the cause of America’s violence, notwithstanding the fact that this conclusion has been conclusively proven to be false.  The answer, however, is quite simple:  It’s because their power agenda is far more important to them than reducing the number of homicides in schools — or elsewhere.

As a result, they submit to “willful blindness,” i.e., they purposely ignore the facts, wave aside common sense, and, as quickly as possible, fall back on their agenda-driven talking points.

To a rational observer, however, it’s self-evident that the underlying cause of violence in America is its toxic culture.  By toxic culture, I’m talking about such things as:

  • Violent video games and movies.
  • Entertainers openly advocating violence against the president of the United States.
  • NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.
  • Statues being torn down in cities across the country an effort to erase history.
  • More than a half million homeless people in the United States alone.
  • An obsession with giving the highest priority to the well-being of illegal immigrants rather than American citizens.
  • Abortion factories that taxpayers are forced to fund.
  • Violent protests in major cities that city officials allow to go virtually unchecked.
  • … to name but a handful of examples.

Everyone recognizes that the United States has serious problems, but the NRA is not one of them.  Neither are “bump stock” guns … or global warming … or allegations of sexual harassment that occurred 30 years ago … or special prosecutor investigations where there is no evidence of a crime … or the status of “Dreamers.”

Homelessness — and the human feces, drugs, and trash that come with it — is a serious problem.  Children born out of wedlock are a serious problem.  The opioid crisis is a serious problem.  Bullying is a serious problem (because it causes boys with mental issues to snap).  Sanctuary cities are a serious problem.  And, above all, gun-free zones are a serious problem.

The United States is, in fact, drowning in a sea of serious problems, and solving those problems is the most rational and effective way to go about repairing America’s fractured culture.

When it comes to mass murder, mental health is arguably the biggest problem of all, but to date no one has been able to figure out what to do about it.  Rigorous background checks for gun purchases is a good step in the right direction, but the sobering reality is that you can’t stop a mentally ill person from killing if that’s what he’s determined to do.

If you try to prevent a mentally disturbed person from purchasing a firearm, he will find another way to get his hands on one — through the black market, through theft, through borrowing … whatever it takes.  And if he can’t get a gun, he might just plow his pickup truck into a crowd of unsuspecting pedestrians.  Or — the most preferred murder method of all (statistically speaking) — he can resort to the O.J. weapon of choice.

Given that we have endless work to do on the problems that underlie America’s penchant for violence, we have no time for nonsense like making murder easier for mentally ill or malevolent people by turning the whole country into one big, gun-free zone.

That said, people (including President Trump) should stop using phrases like “… to make certain this never happens again.”  It will happen again, because it’s one of those things we can never totally control.  The wisest course of action is to implement serious countermeasures — not emotion-based non-solutions — in an effort to keep the tragedies to a minimum.

Let me make it clear that I am in favor of doing just about anything that will prevent as many mass shootings as possible.  By the same token, I am unequivocally opposed to doing anything that not only does not save lives but also strips people of their Constitutional and, more important, God-given rights in the process.

Robert Ringer

Robert Ringer is an American icon whose unique insights into life have helped millions of readers worldwide. He is also the author of two New York Times #1 bestselling books, both of which have been listed by The New York Times among the 15 best-selling motivational books of all time.