Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the raft of school massacres, drive by shootings, gang rapes and other heinous crimes perpetrated by our children should make us question… what in our society has gone so terribly wrong? The callousness of the crimes our teenagers are committing is astounding. This is a recent trend however. Prior to the 1980’s there were no school shootings despite the ready access to guns. I grew up with a gun in my bedroom closet. The thought never occurred to me to shoot anyone… especially my fellow teens! I was picked on, I was bullied, but the last thing that I would contemplate would have been to kill someone. In this article I hope to explore some of the reasons our society has started breeding killers instead of producers.
In order to even think about acting in such a violent way a person must lack empathy. If we dehumanize others it then becomes possible to kill without remorse. We see this in the dehumanizing propaganda of the Nazis… calling Slavs, Jews and Gypsies untermensch, the communists with bourgeoisie and modern progressives with “Tea Baggers.” This is a necessary prerequisite to carrying out a Columbine type massacre. Those who identify with others as fellow human beings, have empathy for their fellow man, and cannot murder without remorse. This is common sense. Therefore, those children who act violently lack empathy, for whatever reason.
Hsun Ching said, the congenital nature of Man is evil, the good in us is learned. If we take this to be true then it is clear that empathy is a learned trait. Children are not born with it. It is parenting that teaches us the good from the bad, aided by religion and to a lesser extent society. From this it becomes obvious that the civilizing of children is being undermined by something new, since this is a new phenomenon.
The incidence of violent crime committed by teens before 1990 was very low and concentrated in the inner cities. This is a point at which to start our inquiry. Children raised in the hinterlands had almost universal access to guns, but the incidence of violent crime was almost non existent. Clearly something that was effecting children in the inner cities prior to 1990, that was absent in the country, had the effect of lowering the empathy of children. If we examine the factors that were common in the inner cities back then, but were absent in the rural areas, we might get a handle on why we are facing such violence from our youth.
The culture of the inner city is society’s culture today. Rap music is all the rage with it’s violent lyrics and sexist themes, video games become more violent daily, and hard drug use is rampant. To blame all the violence we see on a single genre of music or violent games would be lazy. Other human factors we see in the inner city are a lack of fathers in the home. The welfare state provides powerful financial incentives for women to have children out of wedlock. Other things we see in the inner city are a lack of religion among parents. Children are raised without the moral teachings of any religion at all. They are universally inculcated to atheism, which is taught in the state run school system. These are potent factors in the moral teaching of children that were lacking in the inner cities prior to 1990 that have migrated to the suburbs and now the rural areas of our country.
Those who are taught atheism by the public schools have no spiritual underpinnings. There is no fear of hell, or love of God, only the empty ideology of hedonism. The hedonist who has no fear of certain immortal punishment, only the possibility of temporal punishment and then only if they are caught, have limited incentives to be good. I recall setting in Church on Sundays and attending Catechism after school. This had a long lasting influence on me. Without the moral imperative that a belief in God bestows to children, who are human beings and have an innate desire to believe in something, become easy victims of pernicious teachings. From this we can conclude that the atheistic state monopoly schools have some culpability in the violence.
Fathers are integral in the raising of children. This cannot be denied, but often is, by the secular atheists who run our government. The State has usurped the role of father in the modern family. Gay marriage is only a symptom of this. The role of mothers has traditionally been to provide a safe loving home setting for children, while the role of father is to provide the discipline that civilizes us. I remember, the mere threat of my father coming home and hearing of something I did wrong, was enough to snap me back in line. How sad that so many children have no such figure in their lives. The State is a very poor replacement. From this we can see that the incentives the welfare system gives to people, to be unwed mothers and absent fathers, has culpability as well.
The lack of fathers providing a civilizing and stabilizing effect on children, along with the lack of religious teaching providing moral grounding, have the negative effect of disconnecting children from civilization. A person who is disconnected from their civilization believes he or she has no stake in society. Those with no stake in society see others as mere tools, there to meet their hedonistic wants and needs, and so have no empathy. Empathy is built up over time in children, by families, religion, discipline and social interaction. Human beings who lack some, or all these things, are far more susceptible to the negative influences of violent video games, pernicious music, gang culture and the dehumanizing effects of hard drugs.
These evils have migrated from our inner cities to the suburbs and farms to dehumanize our children. Clearly, not all children are committing such acts of violence, but if you look into it you will find that all the children who do act in such anti social ways, have one or more of these negative influences in their lives. The answer to this violence is not to limit guns, outlaw video games or censor rap music, it is to restore the good influences and empathy our institutions used to instill in children, institutions that are under siege today. It is the lack of these good influences that are the real culprits… promoted by the atheistic welfare State.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
