As a member of a generation which grew up in a Spartan America, in which most men had to serve in the military; as a member of a generation which was bled to death in the jungles of Vietnam by a Panglossian Globalist Administration which wanted to democratize an unwilling people who wanted to be left alone; as a member of a generation which rallied from a cruel and unnecessary sacrifice to defeat the Soviet Union of the Cheka, NKVD and KGB, this Blogger has grave and grievous concerns about turning over the future of the Republic to the New Thinking of Millennials, Nancy Pelosi’s “NEW AMERICANS.’
They just don’t think right; they have abandoned knowledge learned from painful lessons to indulge in sociological fantasy. They have forgotten that Mankind is riven by primordial and atavistic urges. Rather than attempt to have society control or govern such primeval forces, the New Americans wish them away. They use sociological jargon, as a magical ritual chant, to ward off the evil in men.
My generation knew that there were three types of men in the species, good men, bad men and evil men. My generation knew that the trick to governance, at the granular level, is to insure that the bad men fight to protect the good men rather than join forces with the evil men.
An article in the NEW YORK TIMES’ Magazine caught this Blogger’s attention as a prime example of the New American thinking; the following is excerpted from that article.
“There’s an anecdote that Ruth Wilson Gilmore likes to share about being at an environmental-justice conference in Fresno in 2003. People from all over California’s Central Valley had gathered to talk about the serious environmental hazards their communities faced, mostly as a result of decades of industrial farming, conditions that still have not changed….. There was a “youth track” at the conference, in which children were meant to talk about their worries and then decide as a group what was most important to be done in the name of environmental justice. Gilmore, a renowned geography professor (then at University of California, Berkeley, now at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan) and an influential figure in the prison-abolition movement, was a keynote speaker.
She was preparing her talk when someone told her that the kids wanted to speak with her. She went into the room where they were gathered. The children were primarily Latino, many of them the sons and daughters of farmworkers or other people in the agriculture industry. They ranged in age, but most were middle schoolers: old enough to have strong opinions and to distrust adults. They were frowning at her with their shoulders up and their arms crossed. She didn’t know these kids, but she understood that they were against her.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“We hear you’re a prison abolitionist,” one said. “You want to close prisons?”
Gilmore said that was right; she did want to close prisons.
But why, they asked. And before she could answer, one said, “But what about the people who do something seriously wrong?” Others chimed in. “What about people who hurt other people?”
“What about if someone kills someone?”
Whether from tiny farm towns or from public housing around Fresno and Bakersfield, these children, it was obvious to Gilmore, understood innately the harshness of the world and were not going to be easily persuaded.
“I get where you’re coming from,” she said. “But how about this: Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” She was asking them to consider why, as a society, we would choose to model cruelty and vengeance.
As she spoke, she felt the kids icing her out, as if she were a new teacher who had come to proffer some bogus argument and tell them it was for their own good. But Gilmore pressed on, determined. She told them that in Spain, where it’s really quite rare for one person to kill another, the average time you might serve for murdering someone is seven years.
“What? Seven years!” The kids were in such disbelief about a seven-year sentence for murder that they relaxed a little bit. They could be outraged about that, instead of about Gilmore’s ideas.
Gilmore told them that in the unusual event that someone in Spain thinks he is going to solve a problem by killing another person, the response is that the person loses seven years of his life to think about what he has done, and to figure out how to live when released. “What this policy tells me,” she said, “is that where life is precious, life is precious.” Which is to say, she went on, in Spain people have decided that life has enough value that they are not going to behave in a punitive and violent and life-annihilating way toward people who hurt people. “And what this demonstrates is that for people trying to solve their everyday problems, behaving in a violent and life-annihilating way is not a solution.”
The children showed Gilmore no emotion except guarded doubt, expressed in side eye. She kept talking. She believed her own arguments and had given them many years of thought as an activist and a scholar, but the kids were a tough sell. They told Gilmore that they would think about what she said and dismissed her. As she left the room, she felt totally defeated.
At the end of the day, the kids made a presentation to the broader conference, announcing, to Gilmore’s surprise, that in their workshop they had come to the conclusion that there were three environmental hazards that affected their lives most pressingly as children growing up in the Central Valley. Those hazards were pesticides, the police and prisons.
“Sitting there listening to the kids stopped my heart,” Gilmore told me. “Why? Abolition is deliberately everything-ist; it’s about the entirety of human-environmental relations. So, when I gave the kids an example from a different place, I worried they might conclude that some people elsewhere were just better or kinder than people in the South San Joaquin Valley — in other words, they’d decide what happened elsewhere was irrelevant to their lives. But judging from their presentation, the kids lifted up the larger point of what I’d tried to share: Where life is precious, life is precious. They asked themselves, ‘Why do we feel every day that life here is not precious?’ In trying to answer, they identified what makes them vulnerable.”….NEW YORK TIMES.’
Ms. Gilmore’s sociological philosophy would be very relevant if Mankind lived in a society without the human species.
.” Which is to say, she went on, in Spain people have decided that life has enough value that they are not going to behave in a punitive and violent and life-annihilating way toward people who hurt people.”
Societies do not create LIFE ANNIHILATING societies; it is THE PEOPLE within those societies who create LIFE ANNIHILATING societies.
Ms. Gilmore wants to abolish prisons( as seemingly does THE NEW YORK TIMES). That would be copacetic if we lived in a society of Quakers, but we don’t and never will. Regardless of how far society evolves in the development of sociological idioms, there will still be certain people within it who like to kill.
Hasn’t Ms. Gilmore, or the TIMES ever met ANYONE who likes to kill?
In the Old American West they had a name for it, kill crazy.
John Wesley Hardin killed by his own reckoning 42 men, the first one at 14. Hardin was in a hotel in a Texas town with paper thin walls. The cowpoke in the next room was snoring so loudly that Hardin could not get to sleep; Hardin got up, went next door and killed the sleeping man.
That Ms. Gilmore is LIFE ANNIHILATION.
Does any Latino kid in the Central Valley, or Ms. Gilmore or any sane person believe that putting John Wesley Hardin in prison for seven years will cure him of the syndrome of Life Annihilation? (Hardin was killed by another life annihilator, who walked up behind him and shot him the head…that life annihilator claimed self defense.)
Willie Sutton was an Irish Brooklyn bank robber; he was not a member of the Mafia. One day, while he was dodging the law, Sutton rode on the IRT, he was recognized by a 24 year old accountant Arnold Shuster, a clothing salesman. Shuster followed Sutton home and reported him to the police.
Sutton was captured.
Shuster went on television and told how he was a good citizen and like all good citizens had done his duty.
Albert Anastasia, head of the Gambino Mafia family, saw Shuster on television and ordered him murdered.
Anastasia did not appreciate good citizens doing their civic duty, not in Brooklyn. And even though Sutton was not a made man, nor even Mafia, Anastasia thought it was a bad example to the rest of Brooklyn that he had been turned in by an ordinary bloke.
Does any Latino kid in the Central Valley, or Ms. Gilmore or any sane person believe that putting Albert Anastasia in prison for seven years will cure him of Life Annihilation?
Civic order is binary; either the criminal is afraid of society or the society is afraid of the criminal.
Prisons, and in this Blogger’s opinion, the Death Penalty are necessary to keep the criminal afraid of the society, or somewhat afraid.
The New American thinkers have seemingly forgotten the lessons of Hardin and Shuster; the life annihilator has a natural instinct to life annihilate. He does not need lessons; he has instincts, urges, compulsions, or innate meanness.
If John Wesley Hardin is ever reincarnated into the world which Ms. Gilmore, Millennials and the New Americans intend to create,he will kill 142 men rather than 42.
"Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind..NY TIMES"
"Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind ...NEW YORK TIMES."
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