Civilization for all

Sitting at home early last Saturday morning, I heard gunfire in the distance. Spread out across the sprawling flat farmland that surrounds my rural residence are several duck blinds and pits, and as the season wound down, the hunters were energetic. The booming reverberations in the quiet twilight brought no alarm to me, however. The only targets were waterfowl.

But how different — indeed, how horrifyingly apprehensive—the situation is for city-dwellers who routinely hear gunfire in their neighborhoods. The very idea of listening to the same kinds of loud booms ringing out, repetitively, and knowing that the targets are not ducks but other humans is a truly atrocious thought.

And one that’s tragically all too familiar for far too many Americans and Arkansans.

——————— We purportedly live in a state of advanced civilization. Quality of life in these United States has risen to standards unimaginable just a few short generations ago. In industry, medicine, technology, science, entertainment, convenience and all manner of creature comforts, progress has been incredible.

One nagging area of exception is violent crime, which signifies a monumental breach of bedrock principles for any civilized society.

What is violence, but forceful actions driven by lack of respect for the life and rights of others? And what is crime, but offensive conduct detached from respect for the rule of law?

That such deficiencies exist to the requisite degree that several million people willfully attack and harm millions of innocent citizens each year is a barbarous cancer on our civilization. It should not be the stuff of political footballs, hot potatoes or musical chairs.

Liberal ideology has become lost in the wilderness on many issues, but turning a blind eye to the crime problem isn’t just a case of disorientation. It’s a decidedly mean-spirited dereliction of civilized duty that sacrifices some of society’s most vulnerable members on the altar of specialinterest dogma.

Sole-agenda advocacy groups have one hymn and one verse. Anyone who doesn’t sing along is deemed an oppressor. Their narrow narratives are pre-written and pre-applied to every possible publicity situation.

Consider the fatal shooting of a North Little Rock black teenager by police that stemmed from a traffic stop in the wee hours of Jan. 7. Before any facts were confirmed, before any video evidence was released, before any official investigation had time to unfold, a predictable, pre-scripted refrain was proclaimed.

The Black Lives Matter Little Rock organization posted on its Facebook page the day after the shooting that the NLRPD had “murdered” the teenager.

That same day, the family of the 17-year-old demanded “justice” in a GoFundMe post informing viewers that the teenager had been “gunned down” and “shot 5 times in the back” after he had “surrendered and was laying face down on the ground.” That post was promptly shared on the Black Lives Matter Little Rock Facebook page as well.

One state representative was quick on the trigger to cast suspicion and doubt on the initial police report, declaring that the case was a clear example of why “independent” investigations were needed for police homicides.

Comments on the first news stories included skeptical posts mocking the official report, such as “a 17-yearold in the grasp of police draws down on them?”

Faced with a surging flood of false assertions, police released the dashcam video of the incident. The “victim” not only had a gun, but resisted police trying to disarm him, and cocked, aimed and fired it at the officers during the struggle.

The point here isn’t that the malicious, erroneous posts mentioned above weren’t eventually retracted (they were). It’s that they should never have been made in the first place. Because a bell can’t be unrung, responsibility dictates discipline in deciding whether to ring it.

Here’s an even greater point: that illegally armed teenager (who was violating a court-imposed curfew associated with his bond release on pending robbery charges) didn’t hesitate to open fire on three gun-wearing law enforcement officers.

Had he not been pulled over, how much less hesitation might there have been to use his gun to settle a score, win an argument, or prove a point to an unarmed audience? That’s how fusillades of gunfire in too many poor neighborhoods wind up leaving random bullet holes in homes, cars and innocent people.

“Culture” is never an excuse for uncivilized behavior. What message did it send to other teenagers when adults and organizations so confidently, carelessly and wrongly condemned police simply because they wanted to get out front in promoting their own cause? What message does it send when agenda-driven adults and organizations refuse to assign accountability for actions to, say, unruly students in school or unwed parents?

The study of civilization is conclusive when it comes to the enduring importance of things like education and stable family structure. We can argue divisively about the state of our union according to our politics. But we need a resurgence in unified reverence for the state of our civilization, and in collective revulsion of the violent crime in many places that threatens it.

Too bad we can’t find a specialinterest group to advocate for that.