A Rebuttal

     I exhort you to patience, Gentle Reader. This rant will be rantier than most.

     Francis Turner has a good piece up on the virtue-signaling “Sons of Mary” versus the get-it-done “Sons of Martha.” Rather than excerpt it, I’ll simply direct you to it, as it’s more than worth your time. (There’s a bit of Kipling in it, too.) It got me to thinking about the least discussed of all disjunctions among men: the impassable cleft between those who take responsibility and those who disdain to do so.

     “Responsibility for what?” you may well ask. And that is, indeed, the question. Allow me to provide a little more stimulus to thought. Regard this piece from Ammoland:

     Sadly, no Thomas Jefferson has appeared among us (yet) to articulate and encourage the Constitutional faithful and our message wide and far enough to shut these fools down.

     With subversive scum like George Soros, the morons in the entertainment industry and the willing idiots in the media pushing this insanity, our resistance to this plague of lies, distortion, and hostage-taking of ignorant youth has to be strengthened and elevated nation-wide....

     I want many more of you, whether having served, fought, or simply are a loyal American, to begin to stand up, be articulate, put forward logical and sensible arguments, and give these ignoramuses some lessons in truth and honesty.

     The author of the above seems to think that our right to keep and bear arms is endangered because we haven’t argued for it strenuously enough. I’d ask him what planet he’s from, but I probably wouldn’t like his answer.

     What’s the missing element here? The Constitution of the United States, specifically the Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments thereof, explicitly guarantee the right of the people to keep and bear arms against infringement. That’s inarguable, though the Left will continue to throw mud at it on various specious grounds. Still, the relevant text remains as it was from the ratification of the original Bill of Rights. So what’s missing? Anyone? Bueller?

     Compare the two pieces cited above. What would Francis Turner say to Timothy V. of Springfield, Oregon?

     Here’s another tidbit: Ever since Andrew Breitbart opined that “politics is downstream from culture,” conservative commentators have bemoaned the paucity of conservative cultural contributors. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of these wordsmiths that they could take a hand in the thing – that they could employ their oft-demonstrated eloquence in a fictional setting. Oh, there have been exceptions. William F. Buckley wrote a number of novels. Kurt Schlichter has written two books that have been fairly well received. And of course there’s this hack, though why anyone should pay attention to his crap, no one can say.

     The rest of them simply sit on their fat asses, collect fees for their columns and articles, and bitch.

     Finally, one from the domestic front: My wife Beth (a.k.a. “the C.S.O.”) complained for several months about a habit Zoe, one of our cats, had formed. Zoe likes to “bomb” Beth: i.e., she mounts the hutch above Beth’s desk and throws things down at Beth with a flick of her paw. Beth griped about that for quite some time without doing anything about it. I said nothing. I knew she’d bitch at me if I were to tell her what to do about it. As is the way of women, she wanted sympathy, not solutions.

     However, just two days ago, Zoe flung a small statuette that landed dead-center in Beth’s coffee. One of the consequences was a ruined keyboard. That finally moved Beth to implement the solution to her complaint: she cleared the top surface of her hutch of anything small enough for Zoe to use as ammunition. The bombardments have ceased, and only Zoe appears unhappy about it.

     “Sons of Mary,” indeed.

---

     There is exactly one person your decisions and actions can command. It wouldn’t matter if you were the Emperor of Earth; anyone could defy you if he were willing to pay the price. The implication “should” be “obvious:”

If you want it done that badly,
Get off your ass and do it yourself.

     Of course, if you’d rather whine about it, that’s your option. It’s our option to ignore you – or to mock you.

     It’s mind-boggling how little there is to know about ourselves that we don’t know already. I keep coming back to these hoary old maxims, these “sturdy wisdoms,” this folklore. It’s all there, Gentle Reader. If there’s anything new under the sun, it doesn’t include any brilliantly original ways to get other people to do what you want them to do so you won’t have to do it.

     What’s new – to Americans, at least – is the proliferation of bitchers and whiners. “We want this!” they scream, and expect that the rest of us will deliver it to them gift-wrapped. Maybe it’s tied up with the (relatively) new notion that you can make something into a “right” by demanding it loudly enough. Whatever the genesis, it’s made our relations – especially our relations with our progeny – near to unendurable.

     Allow me a citation from one of my novels. Christine D’Alessandro is preparing to go to war: a war her late mentor Louis Redmond could have made unnecessary, but didn’t:

     “How do you think he’d feel about this, Chris?”
     She sighted along the blade of the K-Bar, saw no burrs or chips, and sheathed it carefully in her boot.
     “I don’t know, Malcolm. Probably, he’d hate it. For all that he could whip a whole regiment with nothing but a handful of pine needles, he didn’t like himself better for it. He said he let Tiny live to send a message to the rest of them. I always figured it was just as much because he didn’t have the heart to kill him, once the bastard was down and helpless.”
     The old warrior nodded. “He was a good man.”
     “Oh, the best. There’ll never be a better one, take it from me. But he let Tiny live, and now I have to do this. I figured something out today, Malcolm. Want to hear it?”
     Loughlin’s head came up, and she looked him in the eyes.
     “Once you know a man deserves to die, you have to kill him. If you don’t, you’re committing a crime against everyone who doesn’t deserve to die. If you get him down but can’t bring yourself to do it, and he gets up off the mat and kills you instead, you’re only getting what you deserve yourself.”

     Tattoo this on your eyelids – on the inside of your eyelids:

If you know that it needs to be done,
Do it yourself.

     Tattoo it on the insides of your kids’ eyelids, as well.