By SHAUN KENNEY
School shootings are very nearly always a tragedy in real time, one that grips the attentions of readers and viewers. The suffering of children is always a magnet for the do-gooders of the world who scream “Do something!” when at times, there is nothing to be done.
Facts are, you are more likely to hit the lottery or be hit by a bolt of lightning than be involved in a mass shooting, schools or otherwise. Violent crime has gone down since the 1990s, firearm ownership has gone up. Of the 50,000 deaths by firearms each year, over 60 percent of them are due to suicide — a mental health issue if there ever was one.
Of course, no one talks about the violence in Chicago — a city whose near total ban on firearm ownership has neither abated nor stopped street gangs from terrorizing entire neighborhoods, where the number of American dead in just one of our inner cities has outstripped total American deaths during the entire Iraq conflict, thus earning the city the moniker of “Chiraq” for its blithe disregard for innocent life.
So why does the death of a child in a school in suburban America seem to grip our headlines, while that very same child walking home from school and caught in the crossfire of Chicago’s inner cities is treated with radio silence from the media?
For five decades, we have poured money into America’s education system without seeing corresponding results. During the Bush administration, federal education dollars doubled while test scores remained stagnant. SAT and ACT scores remain in an unarrested 15-year slide, while home-schooling parents in Maryland are now threatened with biennial state inspectors to check in on their children’s mental and physical health — an Orwellian solution concocted by one instance of abuse on the other side of the country that had nothing to do with home-schooling in the first place.
College and university professors are flummoxed at the lack of quality of their students. Students themselves are told they need a four-year education to make it in today’s world, and sign themselves into indentured servitude in order to pay their passage into the ranks of the employable. When they emerge with their degree in English or something that ends in —ology, they are utterly shocked to learn that there are no women’s studies factories being built nearby that pay $50,000 a year to help pay off that student debt.
So they cocoon themselves in victimhood and create an environment where identity and achievement are acquired on the basis of oppression points. Those who conform to non-conformity perform all sorts of acrobatics to outdo one another. When this mediocrity finds common cause — statues, guns, free speech, the Catholic Church — they rally together against a common oppressor. In a clickbait driven world, the media smell blood and follow the scent. Since attention validates suffering, the cycle continues.
Meanwhile, we find our institutions bending the knee to the new postmodern ethic. Public schools have washed out into a setting that strives for mediocrity and feelings. Colleges and universities rob students of excellence by issuing credentials. Instead of vocations, we create jobs. Even private and parochial schools find themselves submitting to the dictatorship of relativism, finding it impossible to fight.
Yet as that Irish patriot Michael Collins once advised, the only weapon we have at our disposal is our refusal. Vaclav Havel picked up on a similar theme in his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, where the ridiculousness of the apparatchiks could be undone by our mere refusal. Solzhenitsyn — another man familiar with social tyranny — counseled that the lie of the world may very well conquer, but never through him.
As Catholics faithful to the Magisterium, the only way to stand like a rock is to hold fast to the rock on which the Church was built and refuse to acknowledge the noise and passions of the world. Our refusal to be swept into the madness of these crowds is our best weapon against what are arguably stupid times.
Conservatism has always been an anti-ideology at heart; a set of values founded and grown in maturity — not the prolonged adolescence the political left seems to foist on the rest of us. Perhaps in that wisdom, there remains a path forward.
Letters On Giving To Those Who Ask
Several readers offered their thoughts on my interactions with the gentleman whose story sounded strangely familiar to some.
Mr. M — from Massachusetts, had a simple solution — ask the man for his stuff and see if he produces it. If so, then at least the story of offering you a watch and an old computer has the possibility of being genuine. Excellent point . . . and perhaps he’s right.
Mr. B — had an ingenious solution, that being to call AAA and get them to tow their vehicle on your dime. Inevitably, in his experience, the request is refused and angrily so, though he is insistent that he carries a $20 bill just in case the spirit moves him to give to the homeless or needy. A good balance, to be sure.
Finally, Mr. S — counsels that much like ourselves, too often the materially poor want God’s help on their terms, but not on God’s terms. A profound statement to be sure, as we are all from time to time very guilty of this error. The recommendation to read Chesterton’s Heretics was a good one — very glad to have taken this up!
More important than all of this, you can perhaps tell that I can be a generous person (at times) to the point of making it a fault. Of course, there is a strain of thought that says that it is immoral to allow a fool to keep his money, and there are experts and marketers who spend days and nights thinking of new ways to wheedle a dime from honest folks.
Critics may say that I am one of these people, as I am indeed a fundraiser and writer by profession…at least for the moment. For myself, I would rather think that I am in the game of fostering relationships between good people and good causes. The poor whom Christ counseled would always be with us are not just the materially poor, but the spiritually poor as well.
So yes, our Catholic charity will naturally be taken advantage of by the Jean Valjeans of the world (for those who have read Victor Hugo’s masterpiece Les Miserables). This doesn’t mean we have to be either silly or cynical, but inquisitive? Perhaps that’s better.
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Of course, I am succeeding (but not replacing) the inestimable Mr. James K. Fitzpatrick for the First Teachers column. Please feel free to send any correspondence for First Teachers to Shaun Kenney, c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 — or if it is easier, simply send me an e-mail with First Teachers in the subject line to: svk2cr@virginia.edu.
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