No Limits
Timothy Birdnow
Trayvon Martin died for the liberal dream of no limits.
The circumstances and blame for Martin's death are still much in doubt, but the media has clearly staked it's position, with the usual narrative"brutal white thug terrorizes and murders innocent black child for fun". http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=50463
This is indeed reminiscent of the way the media presented the Duke Lacrosse team incident - where a poor black "dancer" was brutally assaulted and gang-raped by a bunch of drunken white children of privilege - which turned out to be a case of a drugged-up prostitute accusing some men of rape because she got mad at them. The media tried and convicted these boys in the court of public opinion because they wanted a racial issue that would demand growing government involvement and force white men to stand ashamed and reviled. But this goes back farther, to the hysteria we see in almost every politically correct circumstance; the McMartin Preschool case where the family who ran a modest day-care were arrested, imprisoned, and had their names dragged through the mud because crusading psychotherapists (unlicensed, at that) coaxed every child in the school to claim they were molested when they weren't. This fit the narrative at the time, and served a useful political purpose, forcing tighter regulations on day care and getting the government involved in something that really is none of their business. Everyone knew that educating children is none of their business, so a reason to intervene had to be found. Rape is a powerful motivation to intervene.
This goes back to the Clarence Thomas hearings where Judge Thomas was accused by a woman of sexually harassing her, a woman who followed Thomas from job to job despite the "harassment". This goes back to Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley, who falsely accused a bunch of white men - including a District Attorney - of raping her. This goes back to the accusation of marital infidelity by George Herbert Walker Bush during the presidential campaign, when the media knew Bill Clinton found nary a damsel uninviting and further knew Bush was a decent and honorable man who would not do such a thing. The media has use of tragic events that they can fit into a narrative of their choosing. This case was no different.
Here we have a poor black child murdered by a white cop-wannabe in a gated community, murdered for "walking while black". (I remember the line from the Al Pacino movie "And Justice for All" where one of his clients says "it's just like a cigarette, they gotta have an N***** every twenty minutes".) Pictures of Trayvon Martin when he was younger appeared ubiquitously in all of the news stories about the case. No mention was made about his three suspensions from school for drugs, jewelry that appeared to be stolen, and defacing lockers. No mention about his tweets http://www.scribd.com/doc/86809463/Trayvon-s-Tweets-the-Daily-Caller (where he called himself the No Limits N****) in which he advocated "f*** a bitch, any bitch you want" or "ho you got USED fo you loose-ass p****" or "Your the type of bitch that give up your p**** for free and think it's cool". Or the ever popular "I want some head". A real class act.
Does this justify his killing? No. But it should have sent up red flags for the media that maybe, just maybe, there was more to this story than meets the eye.
As it turns out, George Zimmerman is an Hispanic, not a white guy. And his "gated community" is a $120,000 per home operation, not some rich compound. And Martin was trespassing. And the injuries sustained by Zimmerman suggest he was attacked. And eyewitness accounts suggest he was defending himself. And the police didn't charge Zimmerman. And Martin was 6 foot 2, a powerful man, not a small child.
The usual suspects immediately went ballistic; Al "Tawana Brawley" Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, etc. Spike Lee, the boring movie producer, published George Zimmerman's home address. The New Black Panthers, fresh off their voter intimidation tour, offered a $10,000 bounty "dead or alive" for Zimmerman. He was expelled from college. He lost his job. And yet the man has not even been charged with a crime, much less had his day in court.
These accusations are a political tool. They help advance hate crimes laws, gun control laws, get more money for social programs, advance the welfare state, the police state, the systematic disenfranchisement of white males in America. Sharpton, Jackson, and the other race hustlers understand the value of conflating issues like this.
Remember the beer summit following the arrest of Friend of Obama Professor Henry Gates? Any man, white or black, yellow or red, is going to be arrested if he is breaking into a private residence and does not produce identification. Had police failed to arrest Gates there would have been equal acrimony, claiming they didn't care because the house was owned by a black man. Obama made political hay with this, saying the police acted "stupidly".
It fit the narrative; the Man harassing poor, innocent blacks. It is a romantic tale, a morality play.
But the media will be the media, just as sharks will be sharks and a seal caught in their midst will be torn apart. Conservatives understand this. But there is another aspect to this case.
It stems from the Liberal view of how society should work. Freedom to the Left is to be the "no limits N****", to be free to do as you please and the hell with societal constraints. Nobody has a right to say "no", to say there is a line that you may not cross. Young people search for that line all of the time; it's part of growing up, learning where the parameters lie. Liberals want no parameters. They do not want wins and losses in little league, they do not want hard grades in schools, they do not want enforceable standards of conduct, nor enforceable laws. They think that "If it just feels good, do it" is a way to organize society. They want nothing to interfere with their godhead, with their absolute right to determine who and what they are and how they will behave.
Think about the many different group identities they have created over the years; one largely joins these groups as part of personal identity as a matter of choice. Barack Obama certain chose to join the angry black community of Jeremiah Wright and his fellows. Obama's mother was white, and he was raised by his mother and grandparents as a white child, but he CHOSE to be black, and joined the community not of working blacks but the black community of grievance. There are innumerable other such communities; the LGBT community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered for those who do not know), the aggrieved Hispanic, the aggrieved Native American, for all I know there is an aggrieved Laplander or other such. Then there are the political groups; the angry environmentalists, the anarchists, the social democrats, Neo-Nazis, Marxists. The list goes on and on. And followers of musical or artistic traditions. Hip hop culture. Heavy metal culture. Folk music culture, Reggae. And let us not forget Islam and other aggrieved religious types, like angry atheists.
But rebellion is at the core of all of these identities, a rebellion against Orthodoxy, against Natural Law, against the Judeo-Christian principles. It is the Original Sin, the dream of the first fallen angel who decided he would rebel against the way things are no matter if it destroyed him. (And remember that radical activist philosopher Saul Alinsky dedicated his grand Opus "Rules for Radicals" to Lucifer, the first rebel.) Liberalism is a philosophy of heterodoxy, of smashing all that is good, moral, and just in the name of authenticity. You cannot be authentic unless you rebel, and by rebelling we mean adopting a type of conformity to a particular radical group or end. As a result you have "bug chasers", homosexuals who actively pursue infection with the HIV virus so as to be "authentic". You have the Hip-Hop culture, with all the misogyny, the brutality, the emphasis on rage and hatred and rebellion.
Many have died for this creed. No limits!
But freedom is not without limits and never has been, because there are unpalatable consequences. If you should step off a cliff you will fall to your death; that is an example of the boundaries of freedom. You are free to do it, but the end result isn't pleasant. If you inhale exhaust from your car's tailpipe you will die, or if you try to remove your head with a chainsaw. There is a law inherent in the structure of Universe that says you cannot take such actions without paying a terrible penalty. And just as there are physical laws governing the Universe so too are there moral and spiritual laws governing human behavior. America was founded on this exact principle, that there are right and wrong actions that circumscribe our behavior. Freedom is being free to live within the parameters set for us by our Creator (or by Nature of one prefers). This is not so to the liberal/left; freedom is what THEY decide it is, and God or Nature will be the one to yield.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead claimed that "science" had established the malleability of human nature, that Man is not bound by moral or natural laws but can be twisted and molded. Many other liberal academics agreed with her, and began a worldwide program to remove the "archaic" moral constraints. The Free Love Movement, for example, sought to dismantle the protections that had been painstakingly put in place over centuries, protections designed to guard the emotional well-being of the young, both the lovers and any offspring that may result. But sexual morality was a hindrance to the godhead of the Progressive mind, and the desire to perform any sexual feats that may enter into their whim drove them to dismantle these safeguards. Out-of-wedlock-births? What need of fathers anyway! STD's? We can always make penicillin and use condoms. Emotional scarring? Just ignore it, or go deeper into the behavior that caused it in the first place.
The endgame was a world ruled by that most terrible of tyrants, the animal nature. Liberals, in the name of freedom, have stripped away the civilizing controls, the self-restraints, the basic core that makes Man different from the animals. What is left is purely animalistic in ambition.
So many of our young people have become "No Limit N***" types. They know deep down that there has to be a boundary, and they long to find an anchor in a stormy ocean of passion and pointlessness, but they cannot, because nobody will teach them where it is, and their whole culture tells them you should live however you please. No limits! The result is drive-by shootings, "knock out games" (assaults on innocent bystanders to see if you can knock them unconscious with one punch), drug abuse, rapes, criminality of every kind. Always the quest for limits, and finding none a more desperate effort. The eventual limits they find are death or imprisonment, which only hardens the rebellion. Death often seems the only constraint.
This is not to say Trayvon Martin was necessarily a bad young man; I do not know, and this story has much to reveal. But we have seen this all too often, and this particular case is starting to show a familiar pattern. This pattern, though not in the least limited to the black community, is particularly prominent there, where drug use is high, single parent homes common, illiteracy and violence rampant. There is a tendency in the black community to excuse much based on past racial discrimination, and there is a mistrust of the law as an enemy rather than partner. The unique historical perspective of blacks coupled with the decades of "help" from the welfare state have destroyed many of the better values in the poorer black community, creating an angry dependent class, angry at having to be dependent but not knowing how not to be, and with Progressive laws designed to excuse and dismiss rather than hold to account, they have removed the limits needed for this community to really be free. Schools have no control over the children when they attend (if they bother) because that would be wrong to impose our values, and so those children with weak or absent parents learn early that they are untouchable. They develop a provocative character, seeking to shock and offend as much as possible. Wearing pants at knee level is about shocking the "uncool" conformists as much as anything.
Now, teenagers tend to do this no matter what community they are from, but it is more pronounced in the black community where so many of the restraints, the civilizing influences, have been broken down by decades of social experimentation. The poorer communities are hardest hit by this plague. But it is a universal malady in America and the West.
But Trayvon Martin was trespassing, wearing a hoodie (a gang symbol), and that alone used to be called "asking for trouble". Does it justify killing him? Absolutely not, but should a white kid be attacked in a black neighborhood at night people will shrug and say "he should have known better" and that will be the end of it. Consider the assault on a white student on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois a few years back http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/09/15/white-student-beaten-on-school-bus/; the black kids cheered, and the attackers admitted to police that the assault was purely because the student was white. Too often this type of behavior is excused because the perpetrators are black, and assumed victims by default. Consider the female jogger in Central Park who was gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead a back in 1989; the attackers admitted it was because she was white and affluent, but hate crimes charges were not issued.
What is the point? The point is that there is a tendency to excuse misbehavior, even criminality, by the liberals who have caused this in the first place. As a result, a man like George Zimmerman (the man who shot Trayvon Martin) understood that he could well get beaten half to death with little consequences to his attacker, who so many would excuse as just an innocent young boy. Perhaps he shot him unnecessarily, but he may well have done so not so much out of malice as fear, a fear born of "no limits". One does not reason with a pack of wolves or an attacking bear. Our wonderfully compassionate liberals have turned our children into exactly that.
And of course the immediate response is to demand Zimmerman's head. The Black Panthers put out a contract on him (an illegal act, but they have committed illegal acts before with no consequences from Eric Holder's Justice Department so why not?), Spike Lee tweets his home address with the intent of getting him killed (and it turned out he tweeted the wrong address), and the civil rights hustlers are out in force. (If vigilantism is wrong on Zimmerman's part, why is it not equally wrong on Lee or the Panther's part?)
I would argue that, in the end, Liberalism killed Trayvon Martin as much as anything.
He deserved better. So do all the rest of us.
Trayvon Martin died for the liberal dream of no limits.
The circumstances and blame for Martin's death are still much in doubt, but the media has clearly staked it's position, with the usual narrative"brutal white thug terrorizes and murders innocent black child for fun". http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=50463
This is indeed reminiscent of the way the media presented the Duke Lacrosse team incident - where a poor black "dancer" was brutally assaulted and gang-raped by a bunch of drunken white children of privilege - which turned out to be a case of a drugged-up prostitute accusing some men of rape because she got mad at them. The media tried and convicted these boys in the court of public opinion because they wanted a racial issue that would demand growing government involvement and force white men to stand ashamed and reviled. But this goes back farther, to the hysteria we see in almost every politically correct circumstance; the McMartin Preschool case where the family who ran a modest day-care were arrested, imprisoned, and had their names dragged through the mud because crusading psychotherapists (unlicensed, at that) coaxed every child in the school to claim they were molested when they weren't. This fit the narrative at the time, and served a useful political purpose, forcing tighter regulations on day care and getting the government involved in something that really is none of their business. Everyone knew that educating children is none of their business, so a reason to intervene had to be found. Rape is a powerful motivation to intervene.
This goes back to the Clarence Thomas hearings where Judge Thomas was accused by a woman of sexually harassing her, a woman who followed Thomas from job to job despite the "harassment". This goes back to Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley, who falsely accused a bunch of white men - including a District Attorney - of raping her. This goes back to the accusation of marital infidelity by George Herbert Walker Bush during the presidential campaign, when the media knew Bill Clinton found nary a damsel uninviting and further knew Bush was a decent and honorable man who would not do such a thing. The media has use of tragic events that they can fit into a narrative of their choosing. This case was no different.
Here we have a poor black child murdered by a white cop-wannabe in a gated community, murdered for "walking while black". (I remember the line from the Al Pacino movie "And Justice for All" where one of his clients says "it's just like a cigarette, they gotta have an N***** every twenty minutes".) Pictures of Trayvon Martin when he was younger appeared ubiquitously in all of the news stories about the case. No mention was made about his three suspensions from school for drugs, jewelry that appeared to be stolen, and defacing lockers. No mention about his tweets http://www.scribd.com/doc/86809463/Trayvon-s-Tweets-the-Daily-Caller (where he called himself the No Limits N****) in which he advocated "f*** a bitch, any bitch you want" or "ho you got USED fo you loose-ass p****" or "Your the type of bitch that give up your p**** for free and think it's cool". Or the ever popular "I want some head". A real class act.
Does this justify his killing? No. But it should have sent up red flags for the media that maybe, just maybe, there was more to this story than meets the eye.
As it turns out, George Zimmerman is an Hispanic, not a white guy. And his "gated community" is a $120,000 per home operation, not some rich compound. And Martin was trespassing. And the injuries sustained by Zimmerman suggest he was attacked. And eyewitness accounts suggest he was defending himself. And the police didn't charge Zimmerman. And Martin was 6 foot 2, a powerful man, not a small child.
The usual suspects immediately went ballistic; Al "Tawana Brawley" Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, etc. Spike Lee, the boring movie producer, published George Zimmerman's home address. The New Black Panthers, fresh off their voter intimidation tour, offered a $10,000 bounty "dead or alive" for Zimmerman. He was expelled from college. He lost his job. And yet the man has not even been charged with a crime, much less had his day in court.
These accusations are a political tool. They help advance hate crimes laws, gun control laws, get more money for social programs, advance the welfare state, the police state, the systematic disenfranchisement of white males in America. Sharpton, Jackson, and the other race hustlers understand the value of conflating issues like this.
Remember the beer summit following the arrest of Friend of Obama Professor Henry Gates? Any man, white or black, yellow or red, is going to be arrested if he is breaking into a private residence and does not produce identification. Had police failed to arrest Gates there would have been equal acrimony, claiming they didn't care because the house was owned by a black man. Obama made political hay with this, saying the police acted "stupidly".
It fit the narrative; the Man harassing poor, innocent blacks. It is a romantic tale, a morality play.
But the media will be the media, just as sharks will be sharks and a seal caught in their midst will be torn apart. Conservatives understand this. But there is another aspect to this case.
It stems from the Liberal view of how society should work. Freedom to the Left is to be the "no limits N****", to be free to do as you please and the hell with societal constraints. Nobody has a right to say "no", to say there is a line that you may not cross. Young people search for that line all of the time; it's part of growing up, learning where the parameters lie. Liberals want no parameters. They do not want wins and losses in little league, they do not want hard grades in schools, they do not want enforceable standards of conduct, nor enforceable laws. They think that "If it just feels good, do it" is a way to organize society. They want nothing to interfere with their godhead, with their absolute right to determine who and what they are and how they will behave.
Think about the many different group identities they have created over the years; one largely joins these groups as part of personal identity as a matter of choice. Barack Obama certain chose to join the angry black community of Jeremiah Wright and his fellows. Obama's mother was white, and he was raised by his mother and grandparents as a white child, but he CHOSE to be black, and joined the community not of working blacks but the black community of grievance. There are innumerable other such communities; the LGBT community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered for those who do not know), the aggrieved Hispanic, the aggrieved Native American, for all I know there is an aggrieved Laplander or other such. Then there are the political groups; the angry environmentalists, the anarchists, the social democrats, Neo-Nazis, Marxists. The list goes on and on. And followers of musical or artistic traditions. Hip hop culture. Heavy metal culture. Folk music culture, Reggae. And let us not forget Islam and other aggrieved religious types, like angry atheists.
But rebellion is at the core of all of these identities, a rebellion against Orthodoxy, against Natural Law, against the Judeo-Christian principles. It is the Original Sin, the dream of the first fallen angel who decided he would rebel against the way things are no matter if it destroyed him. (And remember that radical activist philosopher Saul Alinsky dedicated his grand Opus "Rules for Radicals" to Lucifer, the first rebel.) Liberalism is a philosophy of heterodoxy, of smashing all that is good, moral, and just in the name of authenticity. You cannot be authentic unless you rebel, and by rebelling we mean adopting a type of conformity to a particular radical group or end. As a result you have "bug chasers", homosexuals who actively pursue infection with the HIV virus so as to be "authentic". You have the Hip-Hop culture, with all the misogyny, the brutality, the emphasis on rage and hatred and rebellion.
Many have died for this creed. No limits!
But freedom is not without limits and never has been, because there are unpalatable consequences. If you should step off a cliff you will fall to your death; that is an example of the boundaries of freedom. You are free to do it, but the end result isn't pleasant. If you inhale exhaust from your car's tailpipe you will die, or if you try to remove your head with a chainsaw. There is a law inherent in the structure of Universe that says you cannot take such actions without paying a terrible penalty. And just as there are physical laws governing the Universe so too are there moral and spiritual laws governing human behavior. America was founded on this exact principle, that there are right and wrong actions that circumscribe our behavior. Freedom is being free to live within the parameters set for us by our Creator (or by Nature of one prefers). This is not so to the liberal/left; freedom is what THEY decide it is, and God or Nature will be the one to yield.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead claimed that "science" had established the malleability of human nature, that Man is not bound by moral or natural laws but can be twisted and molded. Many other liberal academics agreed with her, and began a worldwide program to remove the "archaic" moral constraints. The Free Love Movement, for example, sought to dismantle the protections that had been painstakingly put in place over centuries, protections designed to guard the emotional well-being of the young, both the lovers and any offspring that may result. But sexual morality was a hindrance to the godhead of the Progressive mind, and the desire to perform any sexual feats that may enter into their whim drove them to dismantle these safeguards. Out-of-wedlock-births? What need of fathers anyway! STD's? We can always make penicillin and use condoms. Emotional scarring? Just ignore it, or go deeper into the behavior that caused it in the first place.
The endgame was a world ruled by that most terrible of tyrants, the animal nature. Liberals, in the name of freedom, have stripped away the civilizing controls, the self-restraints, the basic core that makes Man different from the animals. What is left is purely animalistic in ambition.
So many of our young people have become "No Limit N***" types. They know deep down that there has to be a boundary, and they long to find an anchor in a stormy ocean of passion and pointlessness, but they cannot, because nobody will teach them where it is, and their whole culture tells them you should live however you please. No limits! The result is drive-by shootings, "knock out games" (assaults on innocent bystanders to see if you can knock them unconscious with one punch), drug abuse, rapes, criminality of every kind. Always the quest for limits, and finding none a more desperate effort. The eventual limits they find are death or imprisonment, which only hardens the rebellion. Death often seems the only constraint.
This is not to say Trayvon Martin was necessarily a bad young man; I do not know, and this story has much to reveal. But we have seen this all too often, and this particular case is starting to show a familiar pattern. This pattern, though not in the least limited to the black community, is particularly prominent there, where drug use is high, single parent homes common, illiteracy and violence rampant. There is a tendency in the black community to excuse much based on past racial discrimination, and there is a mistrust of the law as an enemy rather than partner. The unique historical perspective of blacks coupled with the decades of "help" from the welfare state have destroyed many of the better values in the poorer black community, creating an angry dependent class, angry at having to be dependent but not knowing how not to be, and with Progressive laws designed to excuse and dismiss rather than hold to account, they have removed the limits needed for this community to really be free. Schools have no control over the children when they attend (if they bother) because that would be wrong to impose our values, and so those children with weak or absent parents learn early that they are untouchable. They develop a provocative character, seeking to shock and offend as much as possible. Wearing pants at knee level is about shocking the "uncool" conformists as much as anything.
Now, teenagers tend to do this no matter what community they are from, but it is more pronounced in the black community where so many of the restraints, the civilizing influences, have been broken down by decades of social experimentation. The poorer communities are hardest hit by this plague. But it is a universal malady in America and the West.
But Trayvon Martin was trespassing, wearing a hoodie (a gang symbol), and that alone used to be called "asking for trouble". Does it justify killing him? Absolutely not, but should a white kid be attacked in a black neighborhood at night people will shrug and say "he should have known better" and that will be the end of it. Consider the assault on a white student on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois a few years back http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/09/15/white-student-beaten-on-school-bus/; the black kids cheered, and the attackers admitted to police that the assault was purely because the student was white. Too often this type of behavior is excused because the perpetrators are black, and assumed victims by default. Consider the female jogger in Central Park who was gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead a back in 1989; the attackers admitted it was because she was white and affluent, but hate crimes charges were not issued.
What is the point? The point is that there is a tendency to excuse misbehavior, even criminality, by the liberals who have caused this in the first place. As a result, a man like George Zimmerman (the man who shot Trayvon Martin) understood that he could well get beaten half to death with little consequences to his attacker, who so many would excuse as just an innocent young boy. Perhaps he shot him unnecessarily, but he may well have done so not so much out of malice as fear, a fear born of "no limits". One does not reason with a pack of wolves or an attacking bear. Our wonderfully compassionate liberals have turned our children into exactly that.
And of course the immediate response is to demand Zimmerman's head. The Black Panthers put out a contract on him (an illegal act, but they have committed illegal acts before with no consequences from Eric Holder's Justice Department so why not?), Spike Lee tweets his home address with the intent of getting him killed (and it turned out he tweeted the wrong address), and the civil rights hustlers are out in force. (If vigilantism is wrong on Zimmerman's part, why is it not equally wrong on Lee or the Panther's part?)
I would argue that, in the end, Liberalism killed Trayvon Martin as much as anything.
He deserved better. So do all the rest of us.
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 5:48 AM
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