Saturday, January 16, 2021

A Few Thoughts

I'm glad to see that our Democrat friends have finally recognized that riots are bad, the police and the national guard are good, and fences work. What they couldn't see, or wouldn't admit, during last summer's riots is evidently as plain as day to them now. All it took was for them to get "mugged by reality" last week and suddenly the scales fell from their eyes.

Now they're demanding that illegal entry into the nation's Capitol be prosecuted, they've stopped demanding that the police be defunded, they're wondering why the national guard wasn't called in and they're approving the erection of barriers around every capitol building in the nation.

Perhaps they'll even see the dissonance between their newfound views on illegal entry, the importance of law enforcement and the need for barriers to keep people out and their views on illegal immigration, but I shouldn't hope for too much.

Here's a pet peeve of mine: Why do politicians insist on calling people who commit horrific crimes "cowards" when the word is completely inapt? A coward is one who lacks the courage to do or to endure something. In the wake of 9/11 the terrorists who perpetrated that atrocity were often called cowards, but whatever they were, they were not cowardly. Anyone willing to sacrifice one's life for a cause one believes in is hardly a coward.

Likewise, the rioters who stormed the Capitol on the 6th have been called cowards by some of our political leaders, including Mike Pence, but I fail to see how the word applies to what they did. Their behavior certainly doesn't deserve to be called brave, but how was it cowardly? It seems the more appropriate word would be "evil," or "malignant," or, if we really wish to be anachronistic, "wicked."

Unfortunately, a society which can't bring itself to use language any stronger than "not okay," "unacceptable" or "inappropriate" to describe acts that are morally heinous like burning down shops and destroying peoples' livelihoods will shrink from incurring the opprobrium of progressive social media mobs for being judgmental and using more robust descriptors like "evil" or "wicked."

Now that's cowardice.