What is Wrong In Our Society?

 

What is Wrong In Our Society?

 What is wrong with our society? 

 We seem to have a mass shooting at a school or a church or a super market, or other such soft target, as often as every week.

 We have a population of nearly 335 million people, and we have just about as many firearms in the country.  So, its’s easy, and it happens after nearly every shooting, to blame the gun, and not the nut or the criminal behind the gun.  Restrictive gun laws don’t work.  Many mass shootings take place in cities and states with the most draconian gun control laws, California, Chicago, New York, etc. 

 What happened to our country?  Its not the guns.  We’ve always had guns.  Guns are endemic to the American ethos and culture.  We just used them as the tools that they were intended to be, and not against each other, or to enter a school and start killing innocent children.  There are over 300 million guns in the country, so confiscation and overly strict laws against lawful gun owners are not the answer.  We need to learn to live with the guns we have.  It would help to keep guns out of the hands of the crazies, but left-wingers talking and bloviating at the issue accomplishes nothing.

 I grew up in the 1940’s and 1950’s in Massachusetts, and I was raised with guns.  A Red Ryder BB gun at age eight.  A .22 rifle at age twelve.  Then shotguns, higher caliber rifles and pistols when I got older.  And we carried these firearms around in our cars and trucks, and didn’t even think twice about it.  They were tools, for hunting, or for target practice.  Never in a million years would the thought arise to turn a gun on another human being.

 But it was different world.  We went to church.  We respected our parents and teachers and the police.  We obeyed the laws.  We were taught to be good citizens by the paragons of our communities.

 Elements of our society lost being decent, God-fearing people, somewhere along the way, and lost their ethical and moral integrity.  Maybe it was related to the reaction to the second world war and the movement away from religion and toward secularization.   Maybe it started with the assassinations in the 1960’s of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and the world-wide movement toward anarchy.  Maybe it was related to the resurgence of socialism and communism being taught in our universities, with insufficient stress on the corrosive nature of those philosophies.

 And more recently, this ethical and moral degradation has been hastened by the ready availability of destructive anarchic material readily available to young minds on the internet, and the rise of “wokeness”, political correctness and “cancel culture” as active facets of popular thought.  Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa fan the flames of violence, and people like George Soros fund it.   

 Many Americans, at least in “fly over country” retain solid American values.  But unfortunately, some younger Americans have lost touch with what America is all about, and enough of these are disenchanted or lawless enough to riot violently in the streets and cause destruction, or to pick up a weapon and go on a shooting spree.

 Ray Gruszecki

May 24, 2022