By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly
get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in
preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.
Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As
the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having
fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling
the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or
not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by
showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view
that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.
Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post
published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should
“somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and
simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should
do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know
where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood,
Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros,
have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And
now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness
gone mad.
It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a
second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in
school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in
the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No,
we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks
such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would
be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.
In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter
policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good
stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in
the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the
basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how
to make new friends.
Today, the free-range generation to which I belong is
dying out — and, this time, it is not from the wounds inflicted by everyday
teenage knife fights but because our politicians and activists simply cannot
leave us be. From the time of the Colosseum, our civilization has had a
tradition of lightly regulated, highly entertaining combat. Who are we,
exactly, to think we know better?
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