By Joe Bissonnette
Monday, March 26, 2018
Like “philosophy,” “sophomore” is one of those richly
nuanced Greek words that should be handled with care. Of course, it is the name
given to second-year students in a four-year program.
It is a humorous and not entirely flattering term. It is
a compound word, combining “Sophos,” meaning wise, and “Moros,” meaning stupid,
because second-year students know just enough to make themselves think they
know it all, thereby making themselves dumb. It is amazing how predictable and
consistent this phenomenon is. And it’s a very good reason why we should gently
but firmly tell David Hogg and his friends marching on Washington to sit down,
stop speaking, and listen.
Unlike the Kardashians, social media, gender studies, or
anything sold by Starbucks, the Second Amendment is not some fraudulent circus
scam designed to deceive, corrupt, and impoverish. Peace, order, and good
government have had an amazingly long run in America, but they are fragile
things, and the United States Constitution did not secure them by chance. As
student activists will quickly note as they begin to observe their rising
student leaders, power corrupts. It is a rare government that is not trying to
expand its scope at the expense of the freedoms of the governed. The Second
Amendment is unique in its clear recognition of the need for forceful vigilance
in the face of this fundamental truth. But this is a truth revealed by light,
not heat; that is, this is a truth seen through clear thinking rather than high
emotion, and so it is all but invisible to the students and celebrities who
marched on Washington in the wake of another tragic school shooting.
David Hogg is a 17-year-old student from Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Florida, the scene of the most recent tragic school
shooting. Hogg is basking in his 15 minutes of fame at an embarrassingly early
age, and so we might avert our eyes from his much-viewed display of
ingratitude, sanctimony, and profanity, except that we can’t, because
manipulative adults in the media are deploying him as a useful idiot. Older
useful idiots are also in attendance: George Clooney, Dennis Rodman, and of
course Kim Kardashian. But people who cherry-pick the tragic, the emotional, and
the strange to form a national narrative have cast their klieg light on David
Hogg, and so in predictably sophomoric fashion he believes himself to be an
oracle.
To witness or experience tragedy is a terrible thing, and
it is no easy thing for anyone to make sense of, and so from Job on through the
stoics to the victims and heroes of the day before yesterday, the mystery of
ineffable tragedy has been most often met by solemn silence. PTSD does not
instill wisdom. But that doesn’t really matter to the cynical media, who cut
back and forth between Stormy Daniels and the earnest pontifications of
adolescents.
A little perspective is in order. Time reports that since 2013, six adults and 35 children have been
killed in school shootings in the U.S. While this is a tragedy, there are an
average of 51 deaths by lightning strikes each year in the U.S. The likelihood
that you will be killed by a lightning strike is six times greater than the
likelihood that you will be killed in a school shooting. The shooting at Stoneman
Douglas High School in Florida was a tragedy, but it is not part of an
epidemic, and it is mendacious to present it as such. There are, however, a
number of reasons why it is being given this spin: 1) Any attack on children is
particularly horrific, and if it bleeds it leads; 2) any grave crime committed
by a minor is deeply disturbing; 3) any story involving guns makes blue-state
America see red; 4) the mainstream media is so desperate for under-30 viewers
that they will give triple coverage to any story from them and for them; and 5)
everybody knows that schools are sociopathic, outdated, Industrial
Revolution–era warehouses, but the media Left hasn’t figured out how to say
this out of fear of the powerful teachers’ unions, so this provides a back door
into a great untold story. This last point is worth a moment’s attention.
A psych study a few years ago had a large random sample
describe a facial expression in a picture. The vast majority of children and
adults identified the facial expression as neutral or positive, while more that
70 percent of teens identified the facial expression as negative, hostile, and
judgmental. Teenagers are constitutionally insecure. We all know that. Now
everyone intuitively knows the danger of cascading negative social
reinforcement; that is, when you put together a bunch of people with the same phobia,
the likelihood of the phobia emerging and eclipsing everything else is very
high. And unless you are in complete denial, you probably remember that this
was a huge part of the high-school experience. Most of high school is terrible.
Teens feel insecure, and their feelings of insecurity are further heightened by
the insecurity they detect in each other and on it goes. Teens probably did
much better before the Industrial Revolution, working alongside their elders
and mentoring their younger siblings. For a long time, schools had some
justification in laying a unifying foundation and a standard base of skills,
even if it did hold back the development of most students most of the time. But
now, online learning can be as varied and individualized as the millions of
students who might use it, with goals achieved years earlier at a fraction of
the cost.
A strong subtext of the recurrent school-shooting story
is the obsolescence of schools and our unwillingness to address it. Sophomores,
your righteous indignation is a false consciousness created by a cynical media
who have cast you in a role for their own purposes. The anti–Second Amendment
hysteria of the Left is portraying an exceptional tragedy as an epidemic. But
there is something within your purview which deserves your scrutiny. Take a
critical look at those mind-numbing factories you’re forced to attend.
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