Mind Your Tusks
I was in high school at the time of the Columbine massacre. It wasn’t the beginning of school violence or mass shootings, but it certainly got a lot of people’s attention.
I vividly remember the reactions of my peers and our parents, teachers, etc. Most people blamed the parents first. They weren’t raising these children right. If the parents had cared enough to pay attention to their children, they would have been able to see this coming, and stop it long before anyone got hurt. They should have kept their firearms from falling into the hands of irresponsible children. I have to agree with this 100%. I was raised around guns, taught how to use them safely. I went hunting with my father and his friends. I never would have gotten away with taking a gun to school. It honestly never even crossed my mind. It was not an option. My parents taught me that.
The next reaction was to blame bullying. The shooters were bullied and harassed at school to their breaking point and no one did anything. This shows a failure of the teachers and school staff as well as the parents again all around. The parents of the bullies should have taught their children to treat people better. This is not to justify the shooters actions. Being bullied doesn’t give them the right to take the lives of innocents in their lashing out. The parents of those bullied should have taught their children not to put so much stock in others opinions. They could have given them a stronger sense of self. This is the job of parents. To raise responsible children requires responsible parents. We see less and less of that as time goes on.
At the time of the Columbine shooting, it wasn’t just my echo chamber, the mainstream media was also talking about the bullying in schools and the irresponsible parenting. It was common sense that to prevent such violence from occurring in the future, parents needed to take more responsibility for their children. Some even advocated for literally holding the parents responsible for their children’s actions whether through fines or imprisonment. Maybe not a bad idea. Holding someone responsible for the mass shootings certainly makes more practical and logical sense than holding something responsible. Inanimate objects, such as firearms, do not fear repercussions. It’s not as if the gun itself can refuse to fire when a lunatic pulls its trigger out of self preservation. Guns are completely at the mercy of their bearers. Parents on the other hand, are human (mostly). They do respond to societally imposed repercussions for their failures and in turn, will try harder not to fail. That is, IF society is willing to hold them responsible.
Parents seem all too ready to abdicate responsibility for raising their children to the state. The results are not surprising in the least. The State is an inherently violent and oppressive institution. Any problem that the state aims to solve, it does through violence. There is no exception to this rule. Is it any wonder then, that as children are increasingly being raised by the state that they tend to use or advocate for violence to solve their problems? Not at all.
Most of the children today do not even understand that they are advocating for violence when they “demand” solutions from the government. They do not understand self-ownership. They do not understand non-aggression. They do not understand the value or importance of individual rights. They do not understand these things because their parents (my generation) for the most part, do not understand these things either. The stark trend over the last 30 years of allowing the state to raise our children has yielded disastrous consequences of which we’ve only just begun to reap. Collectivism and materialism are ideologically on the rise by design.
The primary purpose of government, of course, is to justify its own existence, to create a “need” for more and more government. They do this by manifesting dependence. Dependence comes in various forms. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on the dependence for protection, which manifests as the “police state”. It was well known at the founding of this country, and up until a few generations ago, that the primary responsibility for security was on the individual. Yes, we’ve always had a military and police force to help, but people were more willing to defend themselves from aggression and didn’t expect as much protection from the state. As we have given up our responsibility for raising our children to the state, shockingly, our children have become strong advocates for the police state. They are now marching in the streets, demanding that the state violently revoke our ability to defend ourselves, which obviously creates more of a necessity for the state to protect us. These are dangerous times we live in.
A boar raised in the wild knows no protection from predators by the farmer. The wild boar will viciously defend itself from potential threats to the best of its ability. Farmers have bred boars into domesticated pigs. Pigs raised on a farm are fat, and slow, and not so bright. They are missing their pointed tusks, their natural weapons of self defense. Domesticated pigs are obliviously led to their own slaughter. They are not forced, they go willingly into the slaughterhouse because they have been conditioned over generations to trust the farmer. They cannot imagine any other way of living. The same thing is happening to the human species. We are being conditioned into domestication by our farmers. We can tell that this process is in its advanced stages when the young boars are demanding the farmers remove their tusks. Human beings were not meant to be bred and raised as livestock. We have a greater potential than this. Mind Your Tusks!