Shame! Is Jeb running for president or the High Sparrow of Westeros?
Last week, we highlighted
Jeb Bush's 1995 campaign to shame unwed mothers and now we have the video of his "bring back shame" speech. Please take a few moments to see Jeb Bush making his pitch to "restore shame" as a cornerstone of our society (transcribed in full below):
I happen to think as a society there are some things we need to do as well.
First, we need to restore shame. There's not shameful behavior anymore in America. You can do just about anything you want to do and no one minds. In fact, we're so numbed by what's happened around us that we've turned it off. As I described my disgust and my sadness for a teacher getting killed by a 10-year-old, how troubling that is...I was in an elevator and the person next to me just kind of shrugged it off and said—well, this happens all the time. And I can understand how people respond to this because if you don't, you could go crazy. If you saw the things that are going on, it would be very difficult to do it. So, the natural response is just to say "that's the way it is." Well, I don't think so. I believe we need to restore a sense of shame so that certain behavior becomes, makes you blush. That certain behavior becomes such that you don't accept it. And that little by little that type of attitude becomes pervasive not just in your family, but maybe in your neighborhood and perhaps in your community and over time we begin to restore a sense of shame for behavior that is outrageous.
Let's take a breather here to break this down. I think we can all agree that a 10-year-old shooting a teacher is outrageous. Not sure what planet he lives on or who he spoke to, but it is hard to imagine a tragic incident like the one he describes didn't cause outrage. Not to mention a quick search of school shootings in 1995 only turns up one case—where a
16-year-old boy shot and killed a teacher before committing suicide. Not sure what shooting he's referring to, but that dubious story aside, let's see who else Jeb Bush wants to shame:
It's the type of shame that existed, for example, in the 1960s when half the people who were qualified to accept public assistance didn't take it because they thought it was shameful.
Wait, what? Those 1960s poor people really had their priorities on straight. They had too much shame to see their kids were properly fed. We need to get back to poor people feeling more shame. Thank you, son of a president, brother of a president and grandson of Wall Street banker and Senator for letting us know poor people don't have the same kind of shame they once thrived on.
It's the type of activity that made adoption a much better option than bringing a child to term without the ability to take care of that child or abortion. It was the sense of shame that created the shotgun wedding! Does anybody hear about the shotgun wedding anymore?
Forget better sex education and family planning like affordable and accessible birth control. Poor people need to feel more shame so they make the right choice and give their children up for adoption. And/or being forced into marriage by their father at gunpoint.
It's the sense of shame that used to exist about people who are very talented and intelligent cheating in school. It's the sense of shame that we don't have that makes our culture so debased and depreciated over time.
Secondly, we need to return to a time of accountability in our lives. There needs to be a recognition that just as, and Michael Novack said this, as freedom, as oxygen is to lungs, so is virtue to freedom. There's no way that you can live in a free society unless there is accountability and responsibility to our actions. Government can play a part in this and certainly people can. We live in a world that is based on no-fault insurance, no-fault capitalism, no-fault marriage. We have the politics of victimization. We have all sorts of things that lead us away from accountability in our own actions. It starts at an early age.
Well, about that whole accountability thing. Has his brother taken accountability for leading us into a war with known faulty or made-up evidence? At last count there are nearly
4,500 American soldiers who died in Iraq and countless Iraqis who didn't have a single thing to do with 9/11. Maybe the Bush family should start by being accountable for their own misdeeds.