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Lessons From the
Jonesboro Massacre
Dear Editor,
Re: Jonesboro Massacre (April 6, 1998)
The two boys, ages eleven and thirteen, who planned and executed an armed assault
on their Jonesboro school, killing five and wounding eleven, are old enough to know
the evil nature and grave consequences of plastering innocent people with bullets.
Yet they chose to ignore the consequences and the lives of their victims in order
to express their rage.
Blaming these evil choices and actions on gun availability, as many in the media
have done, doesn't explain why they did it. What if the boys chose to use poison,
or enlist more killers and use arrows or spears? Also, blaming it on TV violence
is shallow because it doesn't explain why some volitional beings become mindless
automatons who selectively copy violent actions on TV, while others do not.
There are three glaring and ominous aspects about modern culture that best explain
why these boys acted on their feelings of rage in total disregard for human life
and future consequences.
First and foremost, Progressive pedagogy has sacrificed knowledge and thinking skills
to feelings and to conformity to the group. Also, thanks to Dr. Spock et al, parents
have become more permissive and submissive to their child's whims, thus encouraging
their child to be impulsive and irresponsible rather than thoughtful and responsible.
This breeds insecure and mindless misfits who seek gangs for security, and scapegoats
for projecting their self-hatred at, which breeds violence.
Second, regarding justice, children get the message from every direction that if
they do harm to others they will either be loved and forgiven a la Christianity,
or be told by moral relativists that good and evil are subjective/arbitrary notions,
or receive lots of attention and excuses from modern liberals who are eager to blame
their actions on materialism, capitalism, society, genetics or whatever.
Third, children are continuously told that selfishness is evil whereas selflessness
is good -- that people's rights and interests must be forcibly sacrificed to the
needy, society, God's will or the environment. In other words, the needs, desires
and feelings of others supersede one's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
This pervasive morality of altruism is an open invitation for an impulsive emotionalist
to forcibly sacrifice the lives of others to his feelings and desires.
As long as people continue to evade the root causes of violence in our culture they
will be impotent in diagnosing and preventing incidents such as the Jonesboro massacre.
Worse, our intellectual leaders will go on advocating the same poison -- emotionalism,
the perversion of justice, altruism -- as the cure.
Sincerely,
Glenn Woiceshyn
© 1998 Glenn Woiceshyn.
All rights reserved. This article can be found on-line at at http://www.capitalism.org/glennw. |
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