Read a blog post here that, short of the call to inflict punishment at the end of a stick, jibes with my beliefs about a lot of the bad things that happen out there:
Today, a bus driver stabbed. Yesterday, a gang-related shooting at a middle school. Wednesday, a shooting at an office complex. Tuesday, a 5-year old kidnapped and forced into a bunker. A family murdered by a teenage son. 20 first grade students executed. 12 people killed watching Batman at a movie theater.
I don’t care why these things happened. I am not interested in what you think about gun control, mental illness, poverty, white male entitlement, post-traumatic stress syndrome, gangs. I have no interest in debating with you the reasons that our country has landed in the shadow of the valley of death. The truth is, I fear evil. But apparently, no one else does.
What was supposed to be the greatest country in the world has become nothing more than an oversized playpen for spoiled, petulant brats who don’t understand and certainly don’t consider consequences.
Bad people have always existed, and bad things have always happened, but we used to care. Now, we shake our heads and furrow our brows. We have conversations instead of repercussions. We encourage our children to express themselves, instead of impressing upon them the very real necessity of limitations on that expression. We challenge authority because we don’t want to be controlled, instead of standing up for what we believe in and taking control of our streets, our schools, our homes.
I am so sick of it.
I don’t care if the kid who shot another kid yesterday comes from a single parent house and lives in poverty. I don’t care if the man in the bunker has post-traumatic stress syndrome from fighting in a war. I don’t care if Adam Lanza had Asperger’s Syndrome and a crazy mother who ignored the warning signs.
I don’t care, because it’s no excuse. Millions of people live in poverty; they cope with pain, they deal with loss; they battle mental illness. And they still manage to possess enough human decency to value someone else’s life.
Sure. There will always be people that are mentally ill in a very defined way. There are people that are evil. Pure evil. They know better and they STILL do what is horrifyingly wrong.
The issue I have comes down to definitions of people like this asshole Jimmy Lee Dykes and Adam Lanza as "victims." These people are not victims.
I DON'T CARE that Adam Lanza couldn't make a single friend in school or didn't know how to socialize. I've met several people with aspergers and, even though some may seem a little off sometimes, they would never naturally do what this prick did.
I had tourettes growing up. I had to weather being made fun of. I had low self-esteem because of it (and a mother who couldn't stop accidentally putting me down) but did I go out and TAKE REVENGE on everyone who did this to me? I got in a few fights to stop the name calling, but I would never have considered doing it at the end of a semi-automatic rifle.
I'm of the mind that most people know the difference between right and wrong. They may fool themselves into believing they are doing something right when a little voice they ignore tells them its not so, but nobody ever said doing the right thing was easy.
Too many are ready to excuse people's mental illness as reason enough that their actions aren't judged as harshly as others. Sorry. For a good portion of those evil people out there I'm just not buying it. Nobody's giving Hitler or Stalin a pass. They shouldn't do the same for Adam Lanza, Jimmy Lee Dykes or others like them.