Virginia Tech II

[kravjeff]

A Culture of Passivity – \”Protecting\” our \”children\” at Virginia Tech.

By Mark Steyn

I havenít weighed in yet on Virginia Tech ó mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. Iím not sure Iím ready to go the full Derb but I think heís closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our ìchildrenî need to be ìprotected.î

Point one: Theyíre not ìchildren.î The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and ó if youíll forgive the expression ó men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are ìchildrenî if theyíre serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clintonís Oval Office. Nonetheless, itís deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself ó and, in a ìhorribleî world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Point two: The cost of a ìprotectedî society of eternal ìchildrenî is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the ìMontreal massacre,î the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though youíd never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate ó an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The ìmenî stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

I have always believed America is different. Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didnít meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals. And a few months later as Richard Reid bent down and tried to light his shoe in that critical split-second even the French guys leapt up and pounded the bejasus out of him.

We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdomís security blanket. Geraldo-like ìprotectionî is a delusion: when something goes awry ó whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus ó the state wonít be there to protect you. Youíll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

When we say ìwe donít know what weíd do under the same circumstancesî, we make cowardice the default position.

Iíd prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

[giant-killer]

Hmmm, I agree, it would make sense for people to fight back, yet at the same time it’s always easy to sit safely at home in front of your computer and judge others for their failures to act.

But that’s why learning self-defense is so important – it gives you the mindset to realize that you don’t have to be a victim, that it’s possible to fight back. If you have never even thought about self-defense, you’ll likely be too scared to do anything in such a situation. As soon as you see that gun pointed at you, you’ll psychologically become the victim and the person holding that gun becomes the guy in charge.

Don’t have time to google now, but I think there are some psychological studies on the relationship between victim and perpetrator. There were some cases, such as the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, in which the victim had numerous chances to escape, but wouldn’t, feeling a type of dependency on the kidnapper. There was another case, a boy having been kidnapped a few years ago, who lived all of that time in an apratment with the kidnapper, often being left alone. He even had a bike and internet access, but never called for help.

As for the passengers on September 11, I think one big reason they fought (as opposed to the passengers on the other planes) was that they had been able to contact family members via cell phone and realized that the planes would be crashed, rather than flown to the ground for possible negotiations between authorities and hostage takers. As soon as the passengers realized they were going to get killed anyway, they decided to fight. I actually think if there were another hijacking in the US, most passengers would likely fight right away, realizing what’s at stake (which happened in the Richard Reid case).

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Giantkiller

[giant-killer]

Some interesting facts about \”Stockholm Syndrome\”, the relationship between hostage and hostage taker. Not quite what you are alluding to (these cases involve people who have been taken hostage for a longer period of time), but still interesting from a psychological point of view:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

There is more on the net about it, too.

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Giantkiller

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