The day after
We never talk about prevention until the bad thing has already happened. Airport security went from fairly lax to militant and invasive -- the day after 9/11, not the day before. Flaws in the New Orleans hurricane surge protection system prompted a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers -- after the levees failed at the cost of some 1800 lives, not before. Today, gun control is suddenly a hot topic -- after a gunman shot up a school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children and 6 adults. Not before.
I doubt I'm the first person to put forth my musings on this topic, but it's been bothering me, so in the blog it goes. Tragedies shouldn't astonish us. We shouldn't act as if they come out of deep left field. We know in a general way that hijackers, and deadly storms, and homicidal maniacs like this Lanza person, all exist. There's a whiff of hypocrisy in our acting surprised when the general becomes specific and actual. Because the surprise is really a way of saying that we couldn't have known, and therefore that we don't share in the responsibility. And neither of those things is really true.
We are all participants in a culture which really doesn't mind violence. Glorifies it, even, in the abstract. We are also a culture that sees nothing wrong with the means of violence being readily available. And anyone with slight common sense can see that that's a bad combination. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all victims of pointless violence, most of the American public would have to be named as defendants. Thank your lucky stars that that's impracticable, folks, because when you condone violence in the abstract, and also condone the ownership and recreational use of weapons, your only way out of culpable negligence is claiming that you didn't know some people can't separate fantasy and reality, and you didn't know some people can't tell right from wrong. And you won't sound very convincing saying that on the witness stand.
A Facebook friend of mine shared the following Ronald Reagan quotation today: "We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." I see what our former president was getting at, but I don't like the quotation, because buying into this philosophy translates all too easily into opting out of responsibility. Each individual is indeed accountable for his actions, but society bears responsibility for who that individual turned out to be, and for what he was able to do before being stopped. That doesn't mean we stop punishing the guilty; it just means we need to stop feeling so damn superior. Bad things will happen, and we know they will happen, and we could be working harder to prevent them all the time, not just on the day after.
I doubt I'm the first person to put forth my musings on this topic, but it's been bothering me, so in the blog it goes. Tragedies shouldn't astonish us. We shouldn't act as if they come out of deep left field. We know in a general way that hijackers, and deadly storms, and homicidal maniacs like this Lanza person, all exist. There's a whiff of hypocrisy in our acting surprised when the general becomes specific and actual. Because the surprise is really a way of saying that we couldn't have known, and therefore that we don't share in the responsibility. And neither of those things is really true.
We are all participants in a culture which really doesn't mind violence. Glorifies it, even, in the abstract. We are also a culture that sees nothing wrong with the means of violence being readily available. And anyone with slight common sense can see that that's a bad combination. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all victims of pointless violence, most of the American public would have to be named as defendants. Thank your lucky stars that that's impracticable, folks, because when you condone violence in the abstract, and also condone the ownership and recreational use of weapons, your only way out of culpable negligence is claiming that you didn't know some people can't separate fantasy and reality, and you didn't know some people can't tell right from wrong. And you won't sound very convincing saying that on the witness stand.
A Facebook friend of mine shared the following Ronald Reagan quotation today: "We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." I see what our former president was getting at, but I don't like the quotation, because buying into this philosophy translates all too easily into opting out of responsibility. Each individual is indeed accountable for his actions, but society bears responsibility for who that individual turned out to be, and for what he was able to do before being stopped. That doesn't mean we stop punishing the guilty; it just means we need to stop feeling so damn superior. Bad things will happen, and we know they will happen, and we could be working harder to prevent them all the time, not just on the day after.
posted by Oliver Lemke at 1:13 PM
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