The following is a Facebook exchange about my latest post – “CNN’s Little Red Guards” – on both my blog and Facebook page. Check it out.
Respondent: Mao’s Red Guards? Good Lord. Take a chill pill, Roger, and stop stuffing so much wood into the stove. Go cross country ski for ten miles.
RogerG: Chill pill? Good Lord, Seth. A 17-year-old witness to a shooting spree does not a pundit make. That CNN lynching didn’t do anything but add a few more nominees for Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame museum. Now it turns out that the public employees and their bureaucracies in the vicinity, for whom our dependency would grow if gun-control zealots have their way, failed massively — from the FBI on down. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the model for the Broward County Sheriff’s Department is the California DMV – or maybe Caltrans. All the talk about robust nix lists, gun bans, licensing, expanded gun restrictions, etc., will be executed by the same people who can’t manage a downtown office, can’t restrain an out-of-control 18-year-old, can’t maintain the roads, won’t neutralize an active shooter, and is more concerned about public employee perks than job performance. Good Lord, Seth, get a grip. Layered security is the key: armed outside the buildings and armed inside the buildings.
Respondent: the Red Guard analogy was overwrought. Come on.
RogerG: No, not overwrought but dramatic — because kids are attracted to the dramatic. It’s in their DNA, so to speak. Their mental immaturity shows as unleavened opinions of stark over-simplicity. The Action Jackson of the Hitler Youth, Fascist Youth, and Mao’s Red Guards resonates much less among almost anyone old enough to have kids, a spouse, a mortgage, and freighted with the responsibilities of life. Kids occupy that space of free-wheeling innocence. Their opinions have a scent of irresponsibility about them while anxious to get on with the frenzy of the “movement”. You’re wrong in dismissing this cross-cultural predilection for blunt opinions and fevered activity. They are prime recruits for utopia-mongering, whether it be one of blissful equality or a nanny state managed gun-free existence. In a nutshell, they’re as crazy as moonbats.
And so it goes.
RogerG