As the days all blur together in this drunken mass hysteria called 2020, I’ve already forgotten the official transition date from unnecessary coronavirus shutdown season to riot season. No doubt Hallmark is barely keeping up with the demands going from one to the other.
According to the painfully WASP-y leftist Illuminati in the United States, I am now supposed to don sackcloth, smear ashes (presumably from a peaceful protest riot-torched business) all over my face, and wander around issuing a public mea maxima culpa to the world for my unpardonable sins that have supposedly contributed to all of the societal ills in this country since the 1600s.
Yeah…no.
I don’t doubt for a moment that there is much that needs fixing in modern American society. It would seem that’s one of the few things upon which we (almost) all agree:
Poll: 80 percent of voters say things are "out of control" in US https://t.co/5kxOOLhWEW pic.twitter.com/RyuPSzh0IZ
— The Hill (@thehill) June 7, 2020
Do I think that racism is still a problem in America?
Yes.
Do I think it’s still 1959?
No.
That’s not because I’m in some insulated white privilege ivory tower, it’s because I’m a grown-up who’s read history books.
I am also very well aware that bad cops are a problem. As I explained in a post earlier this week, I have experience dealing with the police from both sides of the law, it’s not as if I’ve always defaulted to a “rah-rah law enforcement!” position.
My reasons for not participating in the collective guilt trip are sound and I will explain them momentarily but they will be characterized as racist by anyone from the other side who gets hold of them. As someone who spent almost all of the Obama years as a full-time conservative activist, I long ago got used to being called a racist by a bunch of nutters who don’t even know me. It’s not true, it’s never going to be true, and the repetition of the charge by a leftist mob that is always going to hate me anyway is meaningless.
My real reason for opting out of the verbal flagellation is that — consistent with my lifelong political ideology — I entirely reject the collectivist mindset that fuels it.
You know the conservative drill: I’m not responsible for your actions, you’re not responsible for my actions, and I am sure as hell not responsible for Derek Chauvin’s actions. In any way. Ever.
To borrow a word from the other side, I am not at all interested in “normalizing” the notion that we are participants in a collective whole that can be arbitrarily parsed and defined by the political class for the purposes of control. If you think about it, that’s how this whole problem started way back in colonial times.
What is most perverse about this is that I am being told to shoulder blame by a godless, secular rage mob that has utterly abandoned the concept of personal responsibility.
I am an extraordinarily flawed human being who will remain a work in progress until the day I die. But I do work. I’ve always been a man of faith and the Lord and I have a continual back-and-forth about what I need to work on. I’ve often told people that I try not to get up in the business of other people’s faith because I have so much work to do on my own spiritual life.
I will, however, say this without hesitation: the posturing American liberals who want me to be part of this guilt trip are my moral inferiors.
I will continue to struggle with being a better person but working unceasingly to do so. I will also continue to call out the wrongs in the world. The fact that a man lost his life because one cop was a rage-filled a-hole is most certainly evil.
But it is also just as certainly not an evil I participated in in any way.
Collectivism is also an evil, by the way, and this tragedy can’t be used as a stepping stone to permanently imposing it on this still-free society.
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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear twice a week.
