High School Juniors
There’s a sad day in a parent’s life when he comes to understand that his teenage child has the world figured out, and that mom and dad–once heroes–are hopelessly compromised. The child, now an adolescent, is seeking a much better world for himself, but he’s got at least seven or eight years of living under mom & dad’s roof, with their rules, and their boring submission to convention. This is the “sullen teenager” you see in almost every feature film and television series these days. Mom says something and the soft-focus high school junior in the background will be brought into high relief with an epic sneer.
“High school junior” status once came to an end at about age 24 in our culture, at about the time a college graduate began considering itemizing deductions, but with a stagnant economy and years spent trying to please academics, (who go to the grave as high school juniors), “high school junior” status is lasting well into the late twenties and early thirties. This delayed maturity even affects the conservative young bloggers who speak to this audience.
Matt Walsh, for example.
Matt Walsh admirably reminds us, recently, that our problems can be solved in Christ. “Yes,” mother tells a brooding, teenage Matt, looking out the window, “that’s what we’ve been teaching you. Now, just how do we apply Christ to this particular situation?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” a peevish Matt might as well respond, before storming off to his room, “but you’re doing it all wrong!”
Matt is tired of the bickering that ensues whenever there is a mass shooting. People run to their “battle stations” and throw out our “dull talking points.” I suspect Matt doesn’t have much use for more laws and more mental health solutions, and that Matt is arguing for the greater love Christ could bring our culture, but consigning both sides of the gun control debate or the Islamic immigration debate to “dull talking point” status is the clear sign of a distraught child miffed at the way big people do things.
Would anyone object to a nationwide spiritual revival, Matt? No. Would anyone disagree that Christ is the key to softening men’s hearts? No.
But Christians, Matt, have to propose solutions that make sense, and that can be sold, to a growing number of people who have no spiritual compass. Enter “dull talking points” and “battle stations” and all that other nasty adult stuff.
Pretending as though there were any moral equivalence between both sides of the gun control debate or both sides of the Islamic violence debate isn’t helpful. Thinking Christians understand that fathers, pastors, police, soldiers, and statesmen have an obligation to protect their flocks, with guns if necessary. Thinking Christians, (unlike the Russell Moore variety), know that Islamic values and American values come into rather severe conflict. And yes, Matt, these debates to involve taking up “battle stations.”
Last year, casino-owning, blunt-talking Donald Trump was too crude and earthy a man for Matt to support for president. Matt went to his room, in a snit, about the compromises some of the adults were making. Had Matt Walsh persuaded more high school juniors to go to their rooms, we wouldn’t have Justice Gorsuch on the court. We wouldn’t be debating abortion restrictions or tax reductions or dealing decisively with North Korea. We could be making more progress, indeed, if high school juniors like Mitch McConnell and John McCain weren’t having a fight on student council, but we make progress where we can.
So, Matt, please rake the leaves like your father asked you, and we will talk about this more at dinner.
Let me share a couple of observations. First, a minor suggestion to improve the utility of your blog: I think it ought to be your practice to provide a link to any columns or articles that you are commenting on. I had a bit of a hard time tracking this one down, and even then I had to make the assumption (which was easy enough to do in this case, but not always) that I had found the right one.
Second, I think it is important to place criticisms about specific passages within the context of the entire column. Having read your post before Walsh’s column , I had expected to find that he was appealing to some form of Christian fatalism if not outright pacifism. But it appears to me that he is making exactly the opposite argument.
Unfortunately, his column is something of a mash-up of two points, and it takes some effort to pull them apart. The first thing he is saying is that the perpetrators of recent mass atrocities are qualitatively different from “ordinary” killers in that they seem to be machine-like in their ruthlessness. I don’t think that this is a debatable point, even though there may be some disagreement as to its significance. Walsh contends that conventional policy proposals centered on mental health or restricted access to guns will do little to deter these amoral monsters. I don’t think it is fair to say that Walsh wants to deny people the means or the inclination to defend themselves, but maybe you read it differently than I did.
In any event, I don’t see how you can take issue with his far more crucial second point – which is that the public has become inured to these frequent acts of terror, so much so that they hardly seem real to us. I think there is an obvious (and disturbingly manipulative) explanation for that. Last week, in the immediate aftermath of a terror incident in which eight people were killed by a truck in New York, city officials didn’t even cancel a Halloween parade which was held only a couple of hours later just a few blocks away, much less the New York Marathon on Sunday, A day after three people (including a congressman) were shot in DC, the congressional baseball game went ahead as scheduled.The shutdown of the Mandalay Bay was measured in hours, not weeks or months. The pattern is the same for all of these atrocities, and the message we are being sent by our civic leaders is unmistakable – that while the mass murder of dozens, and sometimes hundreds of innocent people is tragic in some nominal sense, they have no enduring significance to society.
Walsh thinks that we are going to pay a high price for this insensitivity to tragedy. I happen to agree with him. The real danger here is not that we don’t take proper precautions to arm ourselves, although it is (as you eloquently pointed out) our obligation to do so. After all, the odds of any particular church or bike path being targeted are infinitesimal, and the totality of the carnage is small relative to deaths from cancer or car crashes. The real danger is that we are learning to dehumanize the victims of mass homicide. That is the spiritual crisis that he is referring to – our lapsed capacity to grasp the infinite tragedy of intentional murder.
In other words (and this is my theory, not Walsh’s), after decades of patient training, our immoral ruling elite has managed to sell otherwise decent people on the idea that there is nothing wrong with killing a million babies a year; and now they have moved on to the next rung on the ladder, which is to make us comfortable with the routine slaughter of grown-ups. No more “decent intervals” before resuming business as usual, no more collective rituals of mourning or of anger, no more “sacred ground”, no more revulsion at the thought that innocent lives have been snuffed out. Stalin famously said, “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.” I think that is the real end game here, to find out how low of a number of deaths can be consigned to the “statistic” category.
James — in my blogs, the links appear as a kind of rusty red color, so the words “reminds us recently” should have pointed to his original blog.
The terrorists, in their zeal to create the Caliphate, accurately see our culture as vulnerable to commercial interruption. They would adore the prospect of a city that had to close down in response to one of their barbaric acts, so I think, properly, when we go on with our festivals, our hotel check-ins, our routines, we’re telling the terrorists they will not beat us. Having said that, I don’t think we do a bad job of grieving the dead. 911 has become a kind of annual ritual for us. We name freeway overpasses after fallen officers; we give scholarships in the name of the slain. Our business hosted some of San Bernardino County’s EHS department, grieving the loss of their colleagues.
As a businessman, I’m personally glad we go right on with commerce, because (no offense intended) some of us don’t get paid unless the wheels of commerce turn. It’s one thing, as in the case of a fallen law enforcement officer to be paid to attend a funeral and it’s quite another to make an economic sacrifice to do so. I think the latter would be far more meaningful.
The thing that REALLY bothered me about Matt’s article was the notion that those of us who are arguing publicly against gun control or un-vetted Islamic immigration are merely jumping to our “battle stations” with our “dull talking points.” I realize he was also applying that to the opposing side, but I refuse to be put in the same bed with those barbarians — and Matt should know better.
Thanks for pointing out the link; I am colorblind, but I can usually see red against black and I missed it this time.