What I want to say, however, is how un-American this thinking is.
America has a mythology, as all civilizations worth the name do. The American mythology has considered the question of "What should an American do if his loved ones are murdered by violent people?" many, many times. We have a vast literature on the subject, both in the form of novels and television shows, and especially in the form of the Western movie.
What never happens in any of these stories is that the American is chastened by being subjected to violence, becomes a pacifist, and yields up all means of self-defense while crawling to Authority to beg for protection.
You know what happens? Of course you do.
Who are these people? Not any one of us.
8 comments:
"Who are these people? Not any one of us."
Nevertheless, they live amongst us. The weak thinkers of that cohort conceive of peace among us, the strong think of power over us.
They, too, ought to consider what our mythology has to say about that sort of thing.
"I'm going to attack you until you relinquish the means of defending yourself" is an irrational argument.
Indeed; it is an argument that depends for its success on the irrational part of the soul, the part that is subject to fear. It might work on a person whose reason is too weak to master their fear and decide upon rational resistance in defense of autonomy. It sometimes does work, I suppose, for that reason.
Yet if that is a discussion of how the virtue of courage works, this talk of mythology is part of the 'proper upbringing' portion of the Ethics. Americans were raised on these stories; if you don't like the Westerns for being too old, try John Wick. The American upbringing has a clear and bright answer to exactly this kind of problem.
I'm reasonably happy with the Westerns and not so fond of Mr Wick, really.
That was Tom -- I'm logged out for some reason.
I liked the first one, which did a great job with the set-up.
I like Westerns better too, but you and I are not the young. Maybe they'll rediscover the genre, though, which is very rich and well-developed.
That was Tom -- I'm logged out for some reason.
Prolly 'cos you don't like John Wick. On the other hand, I don't entirely disagree. I found the movies moderately entertaining, although I think the steady drumbeat of violence was overdone.
On the other other hand, a number of firearms experts have said his pistol uses were pretty realistic. And Reeves did train hard at both pistol use and martial art techniques. On the other other hand, though, in his latest Wick movie, Reeves' age was starting to show: he only had the one martial move, and he was age-related stiff at delivering that.
Back to OP: I think, slow to boil as Americans--at least of our generation--are, folks like the Jay Joneses and their supporters will not like the outcome when we boil over.
I do worry, though, about the younger generations. On a subject more relevant here than might seem, there's this NYP article on women selecting voluntary celibacy: https://nypost.com/2025/10/10/lifestyle/gen-z-and-millennial-women-are-going-celibate/ The TL;DR of it is that they see no sense in taking to bed the current generation's crop of...men...who they see as beta and gamma males (my terms; although their descriptions fit) uninterested in commitment, or anything unrelated to their personal gratuitous gains.
Eric Hines
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