By Cranky Housewife -
Culture encompasses the whole of learned behavior patterns which are shared by a common people within a particular society. Often, people confuse the term culture or even popular culture with the random nature of pop culture events. But culture is not something that just happens as spontaneous combustion or sporo-genesis might. Culture is developed, nurtured, fostered toward a community’s own betterment or demise. It takes time and effort to embrace true social change. Those changes might not always be what is best for a community but they are, in fact, deliberate and can be traced back to measured shifts in that community’s standards of ethics and morality.
If people within a society find that they are experiencing the consequences associated with unusually negative behaviors such as promiscuity, vulgarity or violence, they might rightly assume that the events are due to a statistical anomaly that can be written off as a fluke which will soon pass…pop culture events if you will. If those behaviors take on generational values – out of wedlock births that beget out of wedlock births or foul-mouthed parents producing loutish and vulgar children for instance – it would be equally fair to say that the community is experiencing social entropy... that the culture is coarsening.
Have I provided you any information that you didn’t already know?
I heartily doubt it. Conservatives have been having discussions like this for as long as I can remember. No… you have merely been invited to listen in as I talk myself through how I am going to deal with a terrible dilemma. You see, in a couple of days, Christmas break will be over and I will be sending my children back to school. All of my children – both individually and collectively – have expressed concerns about going back to school.
Thirty years ago, it would have been reasonable to assume that my kids were concerned because of some actual academic component, i.e. because they forgot to complete a science project over the break or they don’t care for their math teacher. Ah, the good old days when a child’s biggest worry was having to get her parent’s signature on her failed history test. Unfortunately, my children are concerned about returning to school because they are afraid they will get shot and killed by someone else’s kid who has quite decided to take up psychosis instead of going out for the football team this year.
Twenty years ago, I could have told them that the evil committed against the infants at Sandy Hook Elementary School was an aberration, that those kinds of things almost never happen, that they have absolutely nothing to worry about. Ten years ago, I could have told them that sometimes evil does happen but it certainly doesn’t happen in our community and they have very little to worry about.
Five years ago, I could have told them that there’s enough security in place where the teachers and other faculty members could keep them out of harm’s way if someone tried to copycat such a heinous crime and as long as they follow instructions then they will be okay.
As for 2013, I’ve got no advice of value other than – keep your phone fully charged and on you at all times. If something out of the ordinary happens, you call me and then hide until I can get to you…and I hesitate to tell them that because a) I don't want to turn them into alarmists and b) then I must face the possible truth that public schools are simply no longer safe and once that conclusion has been reached, I will no longer be able to send my kids there.
I received a letter via email from the school’s administration informing me that they promised the students that the school employees will keep them out of harm’s way and it would be helpful if I would please reinforce that message at home. My children trust me. If I tell them that that school is safe then they will believe me. You see the predicament that I find myself in? These school administrators are asking me to promise my children something that I, in fact, have begun to doubt. They are essentially asking me to lie to my kids so that we can all continue on as before without any messy interruptions.
For the record, the pop culture answer to this dilemma that I am facing over the safety of my children…who are federally mandated to attend the absolutely secure schools that I am federally mandated to fund…as you may well know, is the confiscation of privately held firearms from the general population and the repeal of my second amendment rights by the State of Illinois which has done such a bang-up job in managing everything else under its jurisdiction that it only makes sense to hand them over complete control of my personally safety as well.
Democrats, as per usual, refuse to let a national crisis go to waste and have begun their propaganda campaign to discharge me of my constitutional liberties by rousing their Hollywood cohorts to extol the virtues of disarmament:
These are the same propagandists who have forbidden conservative Americans from making personal judgments about how other people live, from criticizing films for their corrupting properties, from complaining about the bilge which passes for music, from decrying the moral decay reflected in primetime television-daytime television-Saturday morning cartoons-and all commercials in between, complaining about the perversion and violence in video games-children’s books-and-oh-my-gosh-am-I-leaving-anything-out?
The Left has decreed that conservatives must not pass judgment on how other people choose live. They themselves have judged that no one lifestyle is better than any other and they happily clarify to all that will listen that morality and bigotry are synonymous. The Left perpetually reinforces through its cultural hegemony that conservatives are simple-minded prudes who can’t seem to mind our own antiquated, pre-Victorian business long enough to get it through our thick skulls that none of the cultural rot that surrounds us could possibly have a negative effect on anyone. The Left loves to reinforce the stereotype that conservatives are simply too gauche to adapt to our nation’s excitingly avant-garde cultural norms.
So when their children playfully dabble with psychotic, irrational behaviors, we must accept that this too is a lifestyle choice that holds equal legitimacy to running for student body president or participating in a religious youth group or some such nonsense. Piercing one’s tongue is as valid a fashion choice as painting one’s finger nails. Playing M rated, first person, shoot-em-up video games is fun and not at all damaging to a developing conscience. Songs about rape, murder and mutilation are as socially valid as Ode to Joy.
And now that the Left has gotten its way on all cultural fronts and we begin to see the social fallout of these shifts in attitude, it is demanding that conservatives disarm ourselves and hand ourselves over to the security that the Left wishes to provide us – not because conservatives are unable to respect the lives of five year old children but because the Left can’t seem to manage it. And they suggest that I should promise my children that they will be safe from harm in the very institutions that contrived to promote this chaos to begin with?
Great.
