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TweetDafydd at Big Lizards has a great post up about what we can do to prevent future mass killings like those that happened at VA Tech. No, it doesn’t involve gun control, or figuring out the various shortcomings of the campus police and the university administrators. It has to do with reversing what our culture has turned into, namely the “fighting back was not an option” mentality (a la the British soldiers held hostage recently), back into the culture of heroes, a culture that fights back.
Dafydd says:
Each one of us is a foot soldier for civilization; when evil threatens, we must do our utmost to thwart it.
Your utmost may be as simple as snitching on your best friend when you discover he has systematically looted the company you both work for… or as profound as Virginia Tech Engineering Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor, who gave his last full measure blocking the doorway to his classroom, allowing his students time to escape out the window.
And what of the others?
Did they gather those around them and hurry with them to safety? Did they save themselves? Each of these is a minor virtue, and I don’t want to knock it. Sometimes, such minor virtues are all that a person can achieve, given the time, place, and opportunity.
But surely there must have come a time when a man or woman, hiding not far away, saw that the gunman had turned his back. What that person did in that moment is the true assay of character.
Maybe someone charged at the gunman — but foul fate intervened, and the butcher heard, turned, and added another victim to his hellish toll. Anyone so killed is as heroic as Professor Librescu.
Dafydd is not disparaging those that took no action. Their actions are perfectly understandable. But is it possible those actions are a side effect of a larger pacifistic mentality that is so prevalent today? Especially on our college campuses?
But — and I hate the thought, even as it screams insistently — it is virtually inevitable that there were others who were there, who saw an opportunity, but who were frozen to the spot with dread. Or else they talked themselves into believing that there was nothing they could do. Or worst of all… some must have done nothing because they had been carefully taught that “nothing” was what they were supposed to do. I cannot help thinking that for many students at Virginia Tech yesterday, just as for the fifteen British sailors and marines, “fighting back was not an option,” because to them, it is never an option.
[...] We know this; it’s even an aphorism: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Dafydd describes it as the “doctrine of moral inertia”, which I find fascinating, and whole heartily agree with. He describes the story of someone who was scheduled to receive anti-terrorism training on the morning of 9/11. The teacher, a CIA agent, decided that the lesson was no longer appropriate, since the lesson was going to be to keep your head down, don’t be a hero, its an easily survivable situation. They all agreed that everything had changed, seeing those planes plow into the buildings, and hearing about the heroes aboard Flight 93. Those people didn’t just keep their head down, they didn’t rely on someone else to save them.
Sometimes, ordinary citizens are summoned to do extraordinary things — as the passengers on Flight 93 must have realized.
We now know that there are evil-doers out there to whom “death is a promotion,” as Cal Thomas said; they will happily die just in order to harm a few of us.
They are like Terminators, and no law or persuasion will stop them. They must be stopped by force: our force.
When some or all of civilization is at stake, failing to fight back is not an option… not even for us civilians.
Again, this is not to criticize, but to put the “what if” question out there. To remind all of us that EVIL is out to get us, be it in the form of an Islamist, or a crazy college student.
How many innocent lives would have been saved, had just one or two people done his utmost, not merely to allow some students to escape, but to thwart the evil itself?
We don’t know, but that’s a lesser issue: The greater issue is that, by fighting back against evil, the students, faculty, and staff at Virginia Tech would have fired the shot heard round the world, the meme that “fighting back is always an option.” Whenever such a massacre is aborted by extraordinary courage on the part of ordinary people, we send the message that good men (and women) must do something to prevent the triumph of evil.
But whenever we allow the moment to pass, and we remain hunkered down, hoping the butcher wanders away — translation: oh Lord, please let him shoot that girl over there instead of me! — we send exactly the opposite message: We reinforce the unAmerican idea that “we must sit quietly and wait for instructions.”
Wizbang! tandems this post, with some thoughts on how we adults are all part of the “American militia” when faced with evil. Like Liviu Librescu, like the heroes of Flight 93, we may be called up some day. What will you do?
Hat tip: Wonder Woman
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