Who disputes that our modern society is technologically sophisticated and intellectually brilliant? We can point to any number of indicators proving we are Number One. Like vocal sports fans, we like to vaunt our superiority. They even sell sponge-rubber fists with index finger raised. You see lots of them at games.
We can look back in history to a less advanced society. We can see that we have progressed so far beyond backward ways we have put aside. We wonder how people back then could have so universally tolerated slavery. Did you see “Twelve Years a Slave?” The Academy Awards called it an excellent film, and so have thousands of viewers. Based on the true story of a freeborn American black man kidnapped and sold into slavery, the main character Solomon endures the hideous degradation suffered by millions of Africans seized and brought here to be auctioned like livestock. In 150 years, millions of Africans died aboard slaver ships before they could even arrive in the enlightened new world to live out their lives as economic chattel.
The savage cruelty was right there on the screen. Cringing viewers wonder how white men and women could have so little moral or human objection to a practice so brutal. Inflicting pain to enforce obedience under a whip was a legal right. Article One, Section Four of our Constitution required anyone in the 13 states to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Abraham Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment put an end to this, after some resistance. Today we shake our heads at such barbarians.
Or how about another recent film, “Philomena?” The story was set in 20th century Ireland, where another widely accepted tradition prevailed. If an unmarried young woman became pregnant, she was put by her family in one of the Magdalene convents. The sisters supervised the laundry labor of these women, allowing them to see their illegitimate children an hour or so a day. But the children were put up for adoption, being taken by wealthy couples seeking a child, who would never see its mother again.
This too was terrible in its cruelty even if well-meaning rationales were put forward to defend it: the girl sinned; the child got a better home; the family name was not disgraced; the labor was lucrative for the convent. It’s not as though they burned anyone at the stake.
But I emphasize that both slavery and forced removal of children from their mothers were widely practiced and accepted traditions of long standing, over great areas of land, with impressive rationalizations. Granted both were admittedly distasteful, but the alternatives were thought to be worse: the cotton economy of the south would crash, and chastity would be seen to cave in to sexual wantonness. While no one wants to impoverish a valid industry or to abandon morality, we have found better ways to safeguard these. We have learned a bit from our unspeakable experience.
But in a century or less, what will they look back and find, and then say about us? Will they find barbarisms of the same size? Impossible, you say. We’re Number One. True, we are a little embarrassed that our church until recently protected the institution and its priesthood at the expense of child victims of abuse. Then too we admit that 1,100 Americans die every day from nicotine-induced diseases while we outlaw marijuana and heroin and cocaine and other less addictive substances which together kill nowhere near cigarettes’ death toll. And then there is our nation’s awkward annual allotting of two thirds of our discretionary federal budget to arms when social needs like curing diseases or attending to infrastructure or providing affordable housing or endowing education and the arts are neglected. Futurists tell us now that the decline and fall of our nation will happen because of the neglect of these and similar things.
Similar things like our near universal access to guns. Each time the litany of American massacre sites gets another addition, we react as did genteel plantation owners or pious chastity police tearing babies from their mothers. How else do we explain the sorrow and hand-wringing after another gunman goes berserk in a movie or college or grade school or at a congresswoman’s speech venue? And then all calms down again. Ho hum.
Because these things are so, the Second Amendment must be repealed.
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