In a gazillion years, I would never disparage Andrew Luck for his decision to walk away from football in the prime of his career.
It was shameful to hear the boos that rained down on him as he left the field Saturday night as news of his retirement broke to the fan base. I, for one, admire that an athlete of his stature could not only walk away from the income, but that he told the world, essentially, that his identity is not wrapped up in football. I'm in no position whatsoever to tell anybody how they should live their life.
I honor his decision to want to live a long, happy, and healthy life without the pain and suffering that comes with being a pro football player. I agree with the idea that his own health, both in the present and in the future, should be valued above performing like a circus monkey every Sunday. And I respect that he values his family over the trappings of being a professional athlete.
There is simply no question that Andrew Luck is a good guy, with a good heart, and gave everything he had to the position he played on the field. He is a class act all the way.
However, there is another side to this story, and the truth is that the fans, from a strictly football fan perspective, have every right to be upset, even if we respect the decision he had to make.
Let's face it: The average 29 year old guy doesn't have the luxury of being able to retire and simply walk away from his career, especially with the knowledge that he is ridiculously financially set for life. The average 29 year old, especially one who spent four years in college, is really only just getting settled in a career, and likely has hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.
Some are entrenched in a career at 29, but many are still finding their way, having floated between various jobs still trying to find the right place to land. Some never find it.
Only Andrew Luck can know if his decision to retire is ultimately the right one or not. But one thing is for sure: It is because of the fanbase of Indianapolis that he is able to do so at age 29.
Luck is a millionaire already, not to mention the millions of dollars he's walking away from in retirement. He's 29 years old. It's not as if he worked 30-40 years in a job, saved and invested well, and is now moving on to his golden years with just enough money to live in a decent retirement community until he dies and go out to eat at 4:30 in the afternoon when he wants to. No, Andrew Luck made nearly $15 million just for agreeing to play for the Indianapolis Colts before he ever took a snap, and, so far, has earned $97 million + in seven seasons with the team, and that's without playing a single down the entire 2017 season.
Who's to say Luck doesn't have other income potential? I have no idea. I don't know what his degree is in. I do know that he's a very smart guy, so the reality is likely that he'd have no trouble finding another good career and earn a good living. Be he'll be hard pressed to find anything else that will pay him nearly $100 million in seven years.
No, Luck is able to retire for one reason: Because he's a good football player and the fans invested money to watch him play. They not only invested their money to watch him play now, but they invested their money in believing that he would one day lead their team to a Super Bowl championship. We're not talking Trent Dilfer here. We're talking about a man who has the skill and the tools that make him perhaps one of the best five quarterbacks in the game. A bonafide star with a history of winning and a legitimate shot at winning it all.
The fans believed in that, and paid their own hard earned money with the hopes of those aspirations coming true. Now, he's gone.
Yes, the fans have a right to feel a little shafted.
Look, no one's life is going to significantly change if one guy plays football or not. No way am I trying to equate that playing football -- or any entertainment endeavor, for that matter -- is as life altering as, say, brain surgery. The sun will still rise tomorrow whether Andrew Luck plays football or not.
But there's something to be said for the entertainment industry in general. Despite most of the boneheads in Hollywood, entertainment pursuits are what keeps the populace from losing their marbles on a regular basis. People gladly fork over their hard-earned income because going to a ballgame or a movie gives them a chance to "get-away," even if only for a few hours. A chance to put the everyday stresses and problems of our lives aside for a bit and just enjoy being.
We get behind a team, and pay our money to support them, so that they, in turn, can give us little respites from our everyday lives. We hope they win it all, and get upset when they don't, but even then, we stay true, because it gives us something to hold onto when life gets a little crazy. We often complain about how much money athletes make, but at the end of the day, if they weren't there, and we didn't have entertainment options, we'd all probably go nuts. When it's all said and done, athletes make the money they make because we -- the fans -- pay them.
So yeah, the fans have a right to be upset with Andrew Luck. Questions about the timing of his decision, how much the front office knew of his feelings for how long, and all the rest, will all have to be settled another day. But the fans invested their time and money in watching Luck throw a football, and they are the only reason he has the financial means to walk away from it all before he turns 30.
I'm not offering a solution. I'm not saying there is one. I'm not suggesting the fans are due some sort of refund from the team. I'm not saying Luck or the Colts owe the fanbase some quid pro quo for the sunken hopes. I'm simply saying that there's justification in the fanbase being upset, even as most of us truly respect his choice. Most of us, faced with the same set of circumstances, would likely choose the same.
It's a dilemma for sure. You don't think the Colts front office is scrambling right now? You don't think the players themselves haven't all been thrown for a loop? You don't think Luck hasn't anguished over this? I don't care how much money a guy makes, it can't be easy to walk away from virtually the only thing he's known in his life since he was a fetus.
But the fans have taken one on the shin as well, and while we all applaud Andrew Luck for his courage and for what he gave us on the field, we have a right to be upset for how it all played out.
We all moved on after Peyton Manning (ironically, in large part due to the play and promise of Luck himself) and we'll all move on after Andrew Luck, and Jacoby Brissett and whoever else helms the team down the road. Tomorrow is a new day, as they say, and who knows? Maybe Brissett will shine given the full time chance to do so. If he does, the sting of Luck's departure won't last long. No pressure though.
We all wish Luck well -- Get well soon, brother.
But for now, the fans deserve the chance to cry a little bit.
Monday, August 26, 2019
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
It's Not a Gun Problem: It's a Morals Problem.
Like most, I was horrified at the senseless murders this past weekend with the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. I was also horrified when it happened in Columbine and Sandy Hook, and I was horrified when it happened in Orlando and Vegas. The stories dominate the airwaves for days after each.
Unlike many, I'm also horrified at the shocking number of murders every weekend in many of our cities. Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore suffer dozens of murders every week. Mostly, they're ignored by the media.
Yesterday, a friend of mine posted on her social media account this question: Why do we hear so much in the media about each mass shooting, but the daily murders in our inner cities are virtually ignored? She then said she didn't want the comments to turn into a political debate.
I commented that if she didn't want a political debate, then her question couldn't be answered. Because the answer to her specific question -- why so much media coverage for mass shootings and not for daily murders -- is a political answer.
The answer to the problem of why people are shooting each other is, sadly, is much deeper.
First, from a strictly journalistic standpoint, Mass Shootings aren't normal. They're OUT of the normal. That's one reason why the media covers them. Events that are abnormal are inherently newsworthy. That's why you'll see the house on fire in your neighborhood on the news, but you won't see your neighbor mowing his grass on the news.
Mass Shootings, though seemingly on the rise in the last few decades, are still extremely rare. And thus newsworthy. Murders every night in Chicago, on the other hand, are very common. Baltimore alone is on pace to have a homicide virtually every night of the year. Chicago, twice that. The local news might give it mention, but nothing more.
The real answer, however, is political. Or maybe, more to the point, agenda-driven. Today's mainstream media outlets, be it broadcast, print, or internet, are liberally run. They lean left, and in most cases, have given up all pretense of being unbiased. If you believe otherwise, you're simply ignoring reality. They are driven by advertising revenue, and little else. They don't care as much about disseminating information as they do selling papers.
Now, the same thing can be said about Conservative run news outlets as well. But there's a distinct difference, and a reason why, say, Fox News, stands pretty much alone on the Conservative right, but the Liberal Left has CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, et al, most major newspapers, and run Google and Facebook. And the reason is fairly simple: Liberalism ideology doesn't allow for free thinking. Liberalism at its core promotes the idea that most people cannot think for themselves, and therefore are not smart enough to make the best decisions for themselves. They have to be told what to believe, and how to behave, and how to spend their money, and what insurance they should have, etc. Liberalism teaches that nobody is better than anybody else, and therefore, no one deserves to be more successful than anyone else, regardless of how hard anyone works.
In short, Liberalism believes that the government should be in charge of virtually everything, and make all decisions for everybody, because it can do it more wisely and fairly than the individual. And many who get involved in media -- reasons for which we do not have the time to discuss here -- tend to adhere to that belief. As such, most media outlets are Liberal, and their belief is that it is their job to tell people what to believe. Most consumers of mainstream media are fine with that assessment and sadly are quite content to be told what to believe. So liberalism sells to the masses much more than conservatism. While there are far more Conservatives in this country than Liberals, there are far more Liberals who are willing to allow themselves to be told what to think, and so they consume the mass media much more than do Conservatives. CNN is liberal only because that is the audience they can most easily sway. It's simply economics.
Mass shootings are rare, and thus very compartmentalized, and as such are very easy to attach to an agenda talking point. These days, they're very easy to attach to the political rhetoric of their choice, even though mass shootings have been taking place for decades now. And in the case of the mainstream media, they're going to attach it to Donald Trump, even though he is not in any way, shape, or form, the problem. But that's their agenda. Trump is a racist and a bigot, everything he says is racist and inflammatory, even if its true, and so the mass shooters are just following Trump's creed. It's stupid, of course, but easy.
The murders happening in our cities every night are far more difficult to deal with, because, in general, they fly in the face of every Liberal talking point:
That does not fit the Liberal agenda, so the media doesn't cover it.
So the Left focuses on the Mass Shootings. And does everything they can do to monopolize each event so they can push an agenda.
And that's the problem. Everybody gets so bogged down in placing blame -- when the blame lies squarely and solely with the shooters themselves -- that nothing gets done to fix the problem.
The overall agenda, of course, at this point, is to blame Donald Trump for everything. Which is blatantly absurd. Mass Shootings over the past, say, 40 years, have happened at about the same rate under all different administrations. Even a small cursory search of mass shootings will show that while the US leads the world in TOTAL # of mass shooting events, the top 5 criminal mass shootings in history didn't even happen in the United States, and only 2 of the Top 10 occurred in the US.
This past weekends shootings are an excellent example: The El Paso shooting was committed by an apparent white supremacist, and the Dayton shooting by a Democrat Liberal fond of Elizabeth Warren. In both cases, the shooters are appear to be certifiably nuts.
ALL shootings are acts of terrorism. Whether by a white supremacist or a radical muslim. But even then, those are just words. Obama's refusal to call terrorist acts by Muslims "terrorism" didn't make it any less terrorism. And even though Trump has repeatedly denounced racism and white nationalism, there are still racists of all colors in this country who want to do bad things to good people.
Gun control isn't the answer. Never has been, and it isn't the problem anyway. Our country has more gun-control legislation on the books right now than it ever has in its history, and yet these events continue to happen. Cities like Chicago prove that more gun laws don't cut down on crime all that much, if any. And most mass shootings happen in gun-free zones anyway. It doesn't get any more gun-controlled than that. Wal-Mart is a gun-free business, and yet a man took a gun into one in El Paso and killed 22 people. Nobody in the store had any chance to defend themselves.
Meanwhile, armed police reacted to the shooting in Dayton in less than a minute and stopped the killing spree at 9. By their own admission, the gunman was trying to get into a night club (a gun-free club) and had he done so before officers shot him dead, the death toll would have been "catastrophic" -- their words, not mine.
Some would say we don't have "enough" gun control. I would counter that we're not enforcing the laws already in place very well, so the need for more is moot. And it is true that the US leads the world in number of mass shootings. But we are the only country that allows our citizens to freely carry guns. And there is a very specific reason for that. It is a reason on which the country was founded: To resist oppression by the government. As such, we enjoy more freedoms in this country than any country in the world because our Constitution allows for it's people to resist. Every other country in the world envies this about us. And the freedoms we enjoy because of it are one of the reasons hundreds of thousands of people from other countries try to enter our country every year.
We have more guns on the street than any other country, and we feature more gun crime than any other country. But the trade off is that we offer more freedom than any other country, and the primary reason for that is because was can resist our government's oppression that would otherwise take it away.
Layer 2 of the gun-control debate is that we should ban assault weapons. Which is also stupid because the human race has proven time and again that it will kill no matter what the weapon. Besides, there are literally thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of assault-style weapons in the hands of private citizens at this moment that have never harmed a soul. The actions of a few lunatics cannot be reason to take those lawfully-obtained weapons away from law-abiding citizens.
Liberals argue that automatic weaponry allows killers to kill more people in one swing than does a simple handgun, and that our forefathers only knew of muskets and could not fathom assault-style weapons when they penned the Constitution. Each of those assertions may be true, but the Constitution wasn't written for a specific gun, rather, a specific concept. Gun ownership was a means of resisting government oppression (and providing for and protecting one's family.) It doesn't change the fact that a Boeing airliner in the right hands can have a vastly advantageous impact on society, but in the wrong hands can kill 3000 innocent people in one dastardly act. Nobody -- except for that dingbat AOC -- is calling to ban jet airliners.
Besides, I would be more than willing to discuss restrictions on certain types of weapons when the Left can promise me they won't go after all guns in general. If I've learned anything about Liberals in my lifetime, it's that enough is never enough. They scream about AR-15's today, and I guarantee you, if they succeed in getting them banned, they'll be screaming about hunting rifles tomorrow and handguns the day after that. I absolutely refuse to discuss ANY banning of guns until the Left can assure me there is a limit to what they want banned. That, of course, will never happen.
I created a Facebook post yesterday that read, "Blaming Donald Trump for everything racially and politically wrong with this country is like trying to blame the "Stranger Things" [child actors] for all the corruption in Hollywood." It's absurd to think any of this is Donald Trump's fault. He literally has only been on the scene for three years. There are those who want to believe he's not doing much to make things better, or even making it worse. Fine. I won't argue that here. But clearly this is a problem that has been festering in this country for decades, only getting worse with time. Trump may or may not prove to be the answer, but he certainly is not the problem.
The problem is simple if we'd just take the time to look at it logically. And, if the Left had the courage to admit that their ideology is not only flawed, but damaging to the psychology of the country. Ever since the country began edging away from it's Christian foundations -- which, if we're being truthful, really ramped up beginning in the 1960's -- we have seen an overall moral decline in the country that has coincided with a rise in tragic events like mass shootings.
We have demonized everything from prayer in schools to traditional marriage. We've championed the murder of babies, legalized it even, and told our children it is OK to question God when it comes to how he created them. Christians themselves rave about how we should all be more "loving" and yet buy their children video games for Christmas that promote mass killing as entertainment. We've elevated the importance of sporting contests over Sunday church services. Leftists have been telling us for decades now how awful we are to our planet, and that it's all going to come to an end soon. I mean, what's a few dead people in a Wal-Mart if the Earth is going to be uninhabitable in a few years anyway?
Leftists have spent the last 30 years telling us how bad white people are, especially white men. And then they wonder why a white man goes nuts and shoots up a church full of black people.
Democrat liberal policy creates and promotes a permanent underclass. Look at every Liberal-run city in this country and then try to convince me that Liberal policy is actually beneficial. It creates and maintains a class of people permanently subsistent on the government, who are then told that all their problems are the fault of big, bad, white Republicans. And being convinced that the American dream cannot possibly include them, they resort to crime to deal with their poverty.
We've told our young girls they can accomplish anything men can accomplish and then allow mentally-deranged men enter their ranks and destroy their ideas of womanhood. We tell our Sons its wrong to be and act like men. That masculinity is "toxic" (whatever that means). And we've devalued the role of the father in the family. Single motherhood is championed over toxic fatherhood and boys grow up without fathers at an alarming rate. This article shows that a vast majority of mass shooters since Columbine have grown up in broken homes, many without fathers.
Men can't be men, and women can't be women, and then we wonder why they're so confused about life and can't get it all together before they go shoot up their schools.
We don't have a gun problem. If we did, then all these Mass Shootings would look the same. But they don't. We have a morals problem. And it's getting worse. And it lies squarely on the declining moral climate in this country over the past few decades -- a declination that is advanced by Liberal ideology.
God is wrong, mean, or doesn't exist at all. Traditional family values are worthless. All white people are bad, and have an unfair advantage in life. Anything you earn and work hard for should be absconded and given to others. Personal responsibility is pointless. The Earth is going to cease to exist in a matter of a few years, and it's all our fault. Being a woman or a man is meaningless. Lawlessness is a preferred method of dealing with society, and police officers are horrible people who would rather see you dead than protect you. Following the laws of the United States is racist. Killing babies is OK. And you're too dumb to think for yourselves.
And we wonder why people go nuts and shoot a bunch of people.
Unlike many, I'm also horrified at the shocking number of murders every weekend in many of our cities. Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore suffer dozens of murders every week. Mostly, they're ignored by the media.
Yesterday, a friend of mine posted on her social media account this question: Why do we hear so much in the media about each mass shooting, but the daily murders in our inner cities are virtually ignored? She then said she didn't want the comments to turn into a political debate.
I commented that if she didn't want a political debate, then her question couldn't be answered. Because the answer to her specific question -- why so much media coverage for mass shootings and not for daily murders -- is a political answer.
The answer to the problem of why people are shooting each other is, sadly, is much deeper.
First, from a strictly journalistic standpoint, Mass Shootings aren't normal. They're OUT of the normal. That's one reason why the media covers them. Events that are abnormal are inherently newsworthy. That's why you'll see the house on fire in your neighborhood on the news, but you won't see your neighbor mowing his grass on the news.
Mass Shootings, though seemingly on the rise in the last few decades, are still extremely rare. And thus newsworthy. Murders every night in Chicago, on the other hand, are very common. Baltimore alone is on pace to have a homicide virtually every night of the year. Chicago, twice that. The local news might give it mention, but nothing more.
The real answer, however, is political. Or maybe, more to the point, agenda-driven. Today's mainstream media outlets, be it broadcast, print, or internet, are liberally run. They lean left, and in most cases, have given up all pretense of being unbiased. If you believe otherwise, you're simply ignoring reality. They are driven by advertising revenue, and little else. They don't care as much about disseminating information as they do selling papers.
Now, the same thing can be said about Conservative run news outlets as well. But there's a distinct difference, and a reason why, say, Fox News, stands pretty much alone on the Conservative right, but the Liberal Left has CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, et al, most major newspapers, and run Google and Facebook. And the reason is fairly simple: Liberalism ideology doesn't allow for free thinking. Liberalism at its core promotes the idea that most people cannot think for themselves, and therefore are not smart enough to make the best decisions for themselves. They have to be told what to believe, and how to behave, and how to spend their money, and what insurance they should have, etc. Liberalism teaches that nobody is better than anybody else, and therefore, no one deserves to be more successful than anyone else, regardless of how hard anyone works.
In short, Liberalism believes that the government should be in charge of virtually everything, and make all decisions for everybody, because it can do it more wisely and fairly than the individual. And many who get involved in media -- reasons for which we do not have the time to discuss here -- tend to adhere to that belief. As such, most media outlets are Liberal, and their belief is that it is their job to tell people what to believe. Most consumers of mainstream media are fine with that assessment and sadly are quite content to be told what to believe. So liberalism sells to the masses much more than conservatism. While there are far more Conservatives in this country than Liberals, there are far more Liberals who are willing to allow themselves to be told what to think, and so they consume the mass media much more than do Conservatives. CNN is liberal only because that is the audience they can most easily sway. It's simply economics.
Mass shootings are rare, and thus very compartmentalized, and as such are very easy to attach to an agenda talking point. These days, they're very easy to attach to the political rhetoric of their choice, even though mass shootings have been taking place for decades now. And in the case of the mainstream media, they're going to attach it to Donald Trump, even though he is not in any way, shape, or form, the problem. But that's their agenda. Trump is a racist and a bigot, everything he says is racist and inflammatory, even if its true, and so the mass shooters are just following Trump's creed. It's stupid, of course, but easy.
The murders happening in our cities every night are far more difficult to deal with, because, in general, they fly in the face of every Liberal talking point:
- They're not committed with assault style weapons, but rather primarily with handguns, so gun-control is off the table.
- The city of Chicago, for one, has some of the toughest gun-law restrictions anywhere, and yet have massively-high gun crime, so the argument for tougher gun laws is off the table.
- Most of the crime happens in the inner city, and the "less affluent" parts of town, so the idea that citizens who are helped by government welfare are somehow better off is off the table.
- The vast majority of the crime involves inter-racial combatants, i.e., black-on-black crime, so the white supremacy assertions are off the table.
- Turns out, cities like Baltimore really are cesspools of crime and poverty, just like Trump said, so calling Trump a bigot is off the table (even though they still do.)
That does not fit the Liberal agenda, so the media doesn't cover it.
So the Left focuses on the Mass Shootings. And does everything they can do to monopolize each event so they can push an agenda.
And that's the problem. Everybody gets so bogged down in placing blame -- when the blame lies squarely and solely with the shooters themselves -- that nothing gets done to fix the problem.
The overall agenda, of course, at this point, is to blame Donald Trump for everything. Which is blatantly absurd. Mass Shootings over the past, say, 40 years, have happened at about the same rate under all different administrations. Even a small cursory search of mass shootings will show that while the US leads the world in TOTAL # of mass shooting events, the top 5 criminal mass shootings in history didn't even happen in the United States, and only 2 of the Top 10 occurred in the US.
- Kent State happened under Nixon's administration.
- San Ysidro McDonalds happened under Reagan.
- Columbine happened under Clinton.
- Virginia Tech happened under Bush, Jr.
- Sandy Hook the Washington Navy Yard happened under Obama.
This past weekends shootings are an excellent example: The El Paso shooting was committed by an apparent white supremacist, and the Dayton shooting by a Democrat Liberal fond of Elizabeth Warren. In both cases, the shooters are appear to be certifiably nuts.
ALL shootings are acts of terrorism. Whether by a white supremacist or a radical muslim. But even then, those are just words. Obama's refusal to call terrorist acts by Muslims "terrorism" didn't make it any less terrorism. And even though Trump has repeatedly denounced racism and white nationalism, there are still racists of all colors in this country who want to do bad things to good people.
Gun control isn't the answer. Never has been, and it isn't the problem anyway. Our country has more gun-control legislation on the books right now than it ever has in its history, and yet these events continue to happen. Cities like Chicago prove that more gun laws don't cut down on crime all that much, if any. And most mass shootings happen in gun-free zones anyway. It doesn't get any more gun-controlled than that. Wal-Mart is a gun-free business, and yet a man took a gun into one in El Paso and killed 22 people. Nobody in the store had any chance to defend themselves.
Meanwhile, armed police reacted to the shooting in Dayton in less than a minute and stopped the killing spree at 9. By their own admission, the gunman was trying to get into a night club (a gun-free club) and had he done so before officers shot him dead, the death toll would have been "catastrophic" -- their words, not mine.
Some would say we don't have "enough" gun control. I would counter that we're not enforcing the laws already in place very well, so the need for more is moot. And it is true that the US leads the world in number of mass shootings. But we are the only country that allows our citizens to freely carry guns. And there is a very specific reason for that. It is a reason on which the country was founded: To resist oppression by the government. As such, we enjoy more freedoms in this country than any country in the world because our Constitution allows for it's people to resist. Every other country in the world envies this about us. And the freedoms we enjoy because of it are one of the reasons hundreds of thousands of people from other countries try to enter our country every year.
We have more guns on the street than any other country, and we feature more gun crime than any other country. But the trade off is that we offer more freedom than any other country, and the primary reason for that is because was can resist our government's oppression that would otherwise take it away.
Layer 2 of the gun-control debate is that we should ban assault weapons. Which is also stupid because the human race has proven time and again that it will kill no matter what the weapon. Besides, there are literally thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of assault-style weapons in the hands of private citizens at this moment that have never harmed a soul. The actions of a few lunatics cannot be reason to take those lawfully-obtained weapons away from law-abiding citizens.
Liberals argue that automatic weaponry allows killers to kill more people in one swing than does a simple handgun, and that our forefathers only knew of muskets and could not fathom assault-style weapons when they penned the Constitution. Each of those assertions may be true, but the Constitution wasn't written for a specific gun, rather, a specific concept. Gun ownership was a means of resisting government oppression (and providing for and protecting one's family.) It doesn't change the fact that a Boeing airliner in the right hands can have a vastly advantageous impact on society, but in the wrong hands can kill 3000 innocent people in one dastardly act. Nobody -- except for that dingbat AOC -- is calling to ban jet airliners.
Besides, I would be more than willing to discuss restrictions on certain types of weapons when the Left can promise me they won't go after all guns in general. If I've learned anything about Liberals in my lifetime, it's that enough is never enough. They scream about AR-15's today, and I guarantee you, if they succeed in getting them banned, they'll be screaming about hunting rifles tomorrow and handguns the day after that. I absolutely refuse to discuss ANY banning of guns until the Left can assure me there is a limit to what they want banned. That, of course, will never happen.
I created a Facebook post yesterday that read, "Blaming Donald Trump for everything racially and politically wrong with this country is like trying to blame the "Stranger Things" [child actors] for all the corruption in Hollywood." It's absurd to think any of this is Donald Trump's fault. He literally has only been on the scene for three years. There are those who want to believe he's not doing much to make things better, or even making it worse. Fine. I won't argue that here. But clearly this is a problem that has been festering in this country for decades, only getting worse with time. Trump may or may not prove to be the answer, but he certainly is not the problem.
The problem is simple if we'd just take the time to look at it logically. And, if the Left had the courage to admit that their ideology is not only flawed, but damaging to the psychology of the country. Ever since the country began edging away from it's Christian foundations -- which, if we're being truthful, really ramped up beginning in the 1960's -- we have seen an overall moral decline in the country that has coincided with a rise in tragic events like mass shootings.
We have demonized everything from prayer in schools to traditional marriage. We've championed the murder of babies, legalized it even, and told our children it is OK to question God when it comes to how he created them. Christians themselves rave about how we should all be more "loving" and yet buy their children video games for Christmas that promote mass killing as entertainment. We've elevated the importance of sporting contests over Sunday church services. Leftists have been telling us for decades now how awful we are to our planet, and that it's all going to come to an end soon. I mean, what's a few dead people in a Wal-Mart if the Earth is going to be uninhabitable in a few years anyway?
Leftists have spent the last 30 years telling us how bad white people are, especially white men. And then they wonder why a white man goes nuts and shoots up a church full of black people.
Democrat liberal policy creates and promotes a permanent underclass. Look at every Liberal-run city in this country and then try to convince me that Liberal policy is actually beneficial. It creates and maintains a class of people permanently subsistent on the government, who are then told that all their problems are the fault of big, bad, white Republicans. And being convinced that the American dream cannot possibly include them, they resort to crime to deal with their poverty.
We've told our young girls they can accomplish anything men can accomplish and then allow mentally-deranged men enter their ranks and destroy their ideas of womanhood. We tell our Sons its wrong to be and act like men. That masculinity is "toxic" (whatever that means). And we've devalued the role of the father in the family. Single motherhood is championed over toxic fatherhood and boys grow up without fathers at an alarming rate. This article shows that a vast majority of mass shooters since Columbine have grown up in broken homes, many without fathers.
Men can't be men, and women can't be women, and then we wonder why they're so confused about life and can't get it all together before they go shoot up their schools.
We don't have a gun problem. If we did, then all these Mass Shootings would look the same. But they don't. We have a morals problem. And it's getting worse. And it lies squarely on the declining moral climate in this country over the past few decades -- a declination that is advanced by Liberal ideology.
God is wrong, mean, or doesn't exist at all. Traditional family values are worthless. All white people are bad, and have an unfair advantage in life. Anything you earn and work hard for should be absconded and given to others. Personal responsibility is pointless. The Earth is going to cease to exist in a matter of a few years, and it's all our fault. Being a woman or a man is meaningless. Lawlessness is a preferred method of dealing with society, and police officers are horrible people who would rather see you dead than protect you. Following the laws of the United States is racist. Killing babies is OK. And you're too dumb to think for yourselves.
And we wonder why people go nuts and shoot a bunch of people.
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