Culture?

We’ve become an irresponsible culture bereft of goals, profitable ambitions and responsibility for our own actions.

Culture?

Author
By Sarge

 1. the total of the inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge, which constitute the shared bases of social action 2. the total range of activities and ideas of a group of people with shared traditions, which are transmitted and reinforced by members of the group: the Mayan culture 3. a particular civilization at a particular period 4. the artistic and social pursuits, expression, and tastes valued by a society or class, as in the arts,manners, dress, etc 5. the enlightenment or refinement resulting from these pursuits 6. the attitudes, feelings, values, and behaviour that characterize and inform society as a whole or any social group within it: yob culture 7. the cultivation of plants, esp by scientific methods designed to improve stock or to produce new ones (World English Dictionary -2014)

A film critic took Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen to task for helping to create a culture responsible for the Isla Vista shooter’s action.  Aside from the absurdity of blaming individuals for the actions of a single mentally and emotionally challenged individual it causes societies lesser intelligentsia to demonize guns again and scream a question I learned long ago has no answer: why?



Immediately after the attacks and deaths of numerous young people on a college campus everybody cries out in their pain and suffering for their loss that this is the fault of the NRA and a gun culture gone incredibly insane. To this I say: NO it isn’t the NRA’s fault or mine for being a law abiding gun owner and shootist. It isn’t even the fault of a culture long established in this nation of people armed and ready to defend their rights; not just “gun-rights” but civil and constitutional rights established in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It wasn’t gun owners or Second Amendment advocates made that college campus a “no Gun Zone” and removed the right of self-protection from those young people.

It was knee-jerk reactionaries believing mentally and emotionally challenged individuals give a damn about your stupid signs restricting the rights of the law-abiding citizens and will cease carrying weapons to be used to maim and kill. This young man used a knife to kill his first victims; stabbing and rending their flesh with abandon. But everybody narrows their focus to look at the gun. Nobody looks at the mental challenges and the emotional strife of the individual and demands we commit them for observation to allow time and distance from the delusion and medication application to possibly control the demons running rampant in that ONE individual’s mind.

We have rights. We have Constitutional Rights. We have Freedom of Speech as a Right. We have the Right to Free Association and to be safe in our safe in our papers and personal communications. We have Patient Rights and a plethora of other “rights” we glibly proclaim have no basis in fact to exist. We proclaim we have the right to be as silly and self-centered and as alone as we delude ourselves into believing our society wants; as though seclusion is demanded and enforced by others. Many whine about being ostracized when their personalities restrain them from trying to enter the community.

Society is responsible for the ills found in our streets. We have people mating and reproducing when many of them shouldn’t be allowed to use sharp objects or play with matches. We have maturity defined by a certain age like 18 years old or 21 years old to be allowed to assume certain “adult” responsibilities. We try to make these entitlements administratively lawful and command all fall under the umbrella we say is protective of everybody’s rights. We allow undeveloped minds demanding compliance with their wishes based solely on the ability to demonstrate and tear down what others have built because it’s “fun”; or they had too much to drink or they simply don’t like the way things are going.

We’ve turned over the responsibility of societal growth and interaction to people we would let run a lemonade stand simply because they have letters behind their names and work in colleges and universities. We have developed a “laissez-faire” culture, a culture of child rearing placed on auto-pilot because we don’t have the maturity to raise and direct our children while they are in our care. We ship them off to day-care and play-care and after school care. Then we let them slip our oversight with after school activities and social groups and we strategize their upward mobility and forget their spiritual development because God is so banal a concept and out of touch with the “realities” propounded by scientific theorists.

It didn’t start with Apatow or Rogen, who, by the way, is Canadian; it started as a people, when the Industrial revolution allowed for greater wages, more opportunities for leisure and the chance to walk away from our responsibilities as individuals. That’s the shame of it all. We’ve become an irresponsible culture
bereft of goals, profitable ambitions and responsibility for our own actions.