Sgt. Mom

Air Force veteran, historical novelist, and cat-person

Bubbles, Harbingers, and the Perils of Talking Past Each Other

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If ever there was a nation-sized demonstration of the Pauline Kael intellectual bubble on the part of a national elite being caught with their metaphorical trousers down and their pale pasty behinds glowing radioactively for all to see … then the vote this last week for Britain to depart the EU at speed would be it. Here all the movers and shakers, the intellectual, social and political set were so certain in their own rectitude and equally convinced of the stupidity, backwardness and flat-out racism of their fellow citizens … well, of course, I can almost hear the wailing from the Remainders all the way in Texas. Because all the right-thinking people agreed with them; membership in the EU was a Positive Good, and the Way Forward, and the Wave of the Future, and such membership showered nothing but good things upon them ….

Well, it showered good things on the right-thinking people, but everyone else living outside the privilege bubble saw disadvantages up the whazoo, including the fact that basically, there was no appeal. Everything from the sugar content in jam to the proper curvature of bananas and that was just the petty, annoying stuff was all in rules written by some faraway bureaucrat who could never be sacked for cause, or voted out of office.

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The Bottom Line …

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On the Orlando Ramadan massacre –

I know everybody’s trying to spin this thing to support their favorite political hobbyhorse, be it gun control or anti-immigration, but it you take a deep breath and step back and look and the evidence in the cold light of day without political spin, this guy seems to fall into the profile of the typical mass shooter:

He was a person with psychological problems. Clearly he was socially awkward, not well-acculturated, had gay desires that he couldn’t reconcile with his religious upbringing and lashed out in an attempt to resolve his personal demons and maybe give his sorry life some meaning.

He had an ideology, but I think that ideology should be seen as a seed. If it didn’t fall on the fertile ground of a guy with profound psychological issues, it probably wouldn’t have sprouted.

At the end of the day, though, that’s all psychobabble. What matters is how do we protect ourselves from guys like this without destroying our freedoms. Don’t expect to find an easy answer to that one, but here are a few suggestions:

1. Stop all the nonsense about “assault weapons” and gun control. We’ve had that debate for 50 years and the American people have consistently rejected draconian gun control. Ain’t gonna happen. People aren’t going to disarm themselves when the government is incapable of protecting them.

2. My question for Hillary Clinton (which I am sure she won’t want to answer) is “Is it ok to fire an armed security guard who publicly espouses support for jihad even if he hasn’t broken any laws?” If we don’t have the same answer to that question as we would if we substituted Ku Klux Klan for jihad, we aren’t in the right place. And if the answer to both questions isn’t yes, what exactly is the point of licensing security guards?

3. We need to do a better job of acculturating foreigners and getting them to become Americans. We used to be really good at that back when we believed in America as an idea, but we’ve gotten so mired in multiculturalism that we’re afraid to insist that people embrace American values, even people to whom we grant birthright citizenship. That’s a problem. Of course, that will require us to come to some agreement on what “American values” are. And if you think the answer to that question is just going to be White Evangelical Protestant Values, you need to take a look around you and count heads. If we can’t come up with a definition of “American values” that has a place for gay people and people whose parents don’t speak English and atheists and Muslims who don’t support violent jihad, then we’re screwed. We will just balkanize ourselves into armed camps and become Lebanon.

4. We need to stop the war on men. It’s creating a lot of disaffected, alienated young men with no real purpose to their lives who become fertile ground for radical ideologies. Omar Mateen and Dylan Root are both fruit of the same tree.

I’m not sure any of this would have prevented this particular incident. But I am sure that we’re going to have more of this stuff if we don’t get the above items right.

From commentor JLPandin, on this thread at Instapundit.

Steps

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I suppose that the most horrifying aspect of the Trump rally in San Jose last week was not that there were obnoxious and semi-coherent protesters outside the event, or even that they became violently abusive to those attending the Trump rally. It was that the San Jose PD, and the civil administration appear to have at best sat back and watched ordinary citizens be chased down and physically abused and at the very worst, facilitated, enabled and afterwards blandly excused such attacks. The civil government of the city of San Jose apparently decided that it was okeydokey for the agents of law and order in San Jose to sit back and allow law-abiding citizens exercising their rights in attending a political rally to have the c**p beaten out of them … because they didn’t approve of the particular candidate.

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Community

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We walked with the dogs on Saturday morning as we do almost every morning; our two, Nemo and Connor, and the exuberant labradoodle belonging to an elderly neighbor. Penny, the labradoodle is a young dog, energetic, impulsive and quite strong; late last year, while walking down to the community mailbox, Penny pulled on her leash abruptly that our neighbor was pulled over and absolutely wrecked her shoulder/rotator cuff when she fell to the pavement. This meant several days in the hospital and weeks of therapy for our neighbor, who likely will never regain full mobility and so, we walk her dog in the morning, and the children of another neighbor walk the dog later in the day; all this aimed toward exhausting the dog, who as noted, is young, exuberant and requires an extensive program of exercise which our neighbor is simply unable to provide, as much as she adores her companion-dog. So we do it it’s what neighbors do.

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Memorial Day in Luna City

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(A brief account of Memorial Day in Luna city, from the Second Chronicle of Luna City, which we brought out at the beginning of May, in response to a chorus of pleading from readers who want to know how the cliffhanger at the end of the first Chronicle was resolved.)

Luna City is well-equipped with military veterans, as are many small towns in fly-over country especially the old South. The draft is only somewhat responsible for this. After all, it was ended formally more than four decades past. But the habit and tradition of volunteering for military service continues down to this very day, with the result that veterans of various services and eras are thick on the ground in Luna City while a good few continue as reservists. There are not very many pensioned retirees, though; Clovis Walcott is one of those few, having made a solid Army career in the Corps of Engineers, and then in the same capacity as a Reservist. He is the exception; Lunaites mostly have served a single hitch or two, or for the duration of a wartime mobilization. They come home, pick up those threads of the life they put aside, or weave together the tapestry of a new one. What they did when they were in the military most usually lies lightly on them, sometimes only as skin-deep as a tattoo … and sometimes as deep as a scar.

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