Eventually, you have to clean under the furniture as well…
The aftermath of the murders in Charleston South Carolina last week has revealed a dangerously reflexive compulsion among America society – one that seeks to remedy real problems with symbolic solutions.
Not unlike the slovenly bachelor who, rather than clean up a spill on the carpet, simply moves a piece of furniture over it, many Americans are scrambling for some way to rearrange the national furniture to cover the mess made by decades of a parenting flaw we used to call “permissiveness.”
The “permissive” parent came into their own in the early 1970’s, seeking to understand their child rather than to guide them. A premium was placed on kids finding their own way through difficult moral and ethical dilemmas rather than feeling the strong hand of a parent (who presumably had already mastered these essential social skills) keeping them on the straight and narrow path to successful adulthood.
“Do your own thing,” became more than a t-shirt slogan; it became a club used by a chaotic minority to batter century-old societal norms until they retreated, bloodied and broken, into the mists of irrelevance.
The rules lost meaning as parents increasingly abandoned hard-won societal wisdom in favor of the latest educational fad, or psychiatric-based child rearing method. An industry of charlatans – whose only bona fides were a pathological need to discredit anything that came before the date of their own birth – was born, spawning a decadal hegemony over our educational, psychiatric and penal systems.
Simply put, every idea was equally valid, as long as said idea was sufficiently counter-cultural.
Now, out of this self-wrought maelstrom, comes a fourth generation of children raised with minimal attachment to indelible truths. Unmoored from the concept of an extant morality, these rudderless youths drift through a roiling sea aboard a raft made from the plasticized detritus of a society where even the unborn are disposable.
It is just such a mind, pickled in the bitter spices of relativism that sees the horrific murder of 9 innocent people, and immediately searches for the objectionable flag that surely inspired it. You see, to them, the carpet isn’t dirty… unless you move the couch.
It cannot be that we have raised successive generations of unprepared children. It cannot be that we have tossed our offspring into a real world equipped with only the tools of fantasy; political correctness, hyper-sensitivity to any offense, and a firm belief that each of us are Gods unto ourselves with impenetrable self-esteem.
This is the sadness we see behind the eyes of the twenty and thirty-somethings when their insanely expensive college degrees prove to be as meaningless in real-world application as the counter-cultural curriculum behind them.
This is the sound we hear when the brittle shell that surrounds our little darlings finally cracks under the strain of a car breakdown, a missed bus or (God forbid!) an objective assessment of their marketable skills.
No… it is easier to blame flags and events now centuries old, than it is to face up to the reality that the norms we so blithely discarded decades ago were actually the very things that held this whole damn experiment together.
Dylan Roof is a harbinger. People like him are more common than any of us want to believe, because we made them. Not because of the prejudice of racism or the oppression of economic displacement or even the latest boogeyman of social evil, “white privilege.”
No, Dylan Roof is the product of a society who refuses to hold anyone accountable, for fear of being held accountable ourselves.
There is a nasty, disgusting something lying on the carpet underneath that couch. Our counter-cultural elites spilled it; no one cleaned it up, and now it is spreading spores that infect us with a disease of unknowable strength.
Demanding the removal of the Confederate battle flag from public view will not stop the next Dylan Roof. It will however distract us while the moonbats keep the couch in place, covering the spill, denying the truth.