Changes after the Riots?

 

One can read a lot of guesses about what things which were common last year will be gone or far less frequent when things return to normal  after the epidemic, because of the epidemic. It is an interesting topic, and so is a similar one about what might change because of the Black Lives Matter craze, the Black Lives Matter and antifa riots, and the responses by governments and organizations to them.

I have made a few minor changes on that account. My wife and I had shopped at Eddie Bauer for years. After the CEO of Eddie Bauer sent an email to customers asserting that we non-BIPOCs were a bunch of racists, and that he was going to have the company discriminate against us in hiring, we decided we did not care to give money to someone who was spitting on us. We haven’t bought anything since and won’t until he and his policies are gone.

I have not followed the NBA since the days of the first dream team, but I occasionally would look in on a game or two in the finals, particularly if San Antonio was playing.  Now I am done. I do not care  to be lectured by Chairman Xi’s special friends about how evil a person I am and how horrible this country is. I feel about the same way about the NFL. Listening to a bunch of rich spoiled brats who have been pampered since high school whining about how oppressed they are, slandering their country, and siding with an anti-American communist agitprop gang against the fans who made their wealth possible is a little hard to take. Besides there are lots of nice things one can do on a pleasant Sunday afternoon in the fall.

Those things are minor and insignificant except perhaps to Eddie Bauer, the NBA, and the NFL if enough other people make the same decisions I have. There are others that are more important.   According to statistics gathered  from dealers, among the several million Americans purchasing guns this year, there were  around five million new gun owners, people who had not owned a firearm before. While  some may have decided it was time to try their hands at hunting or target shooting, it seems likely that most of them were arming themselves for self defense. That would be a good thing both for them as individuals and for the country politically. People should  accept the responsibility and be prepared to defend themselves, and the more armed citizens there are, the harder it will be for the leftists to disarm the population.  The decision to take responsibility for one’s safety and  no longer completely trust or rely on governments to provide protection is one that can influence changes in attitude on other things.

There have been stories in the news about people moving away from big cities to suburbs or rural areas in response to the riots. I have not seen statistics on how much this is happening or from where, but there is evidence some people are leaving. There does seem to be some change in people’s mood. For years in media, entertainment, and even advertising big city life has been depicted as hip, exciting, and even glamorous while suburbs and rural areas often have been ignored or disparaged as dull and boring Cleaver-ville or backward domiciles of hicks and rednecks. We may never see people in the media and advertising singing Green Acres is the place to be, but general attitudes toward urban living may change some as people consider costs, benefits, and incentives.  If so, it likely will be mainly the more productive, self supporting people who leave the cities, making the political and other situations worse for those who stay behind.  If leftist city governments respond to losing taxpayers by  raising taxes on the ones remaining, incentives for leaving would only increase. 

Make Fearless Fosdick Fiction Again

 

Probably few people remember or know of Fearless Fosdick.  He appeared from time to time as a parody of Dick Tracy in a strip within a strip in  Al Capp’s L’il Abner as Abner’s comic strip  hero.  Among other quirks and shortcomings, he had the unfortunate habit of randomly blowing away innocent bystanders in his pursuit of the villains. It was good, silly, often black humor, and Capp ran the gag for years.

In real life careless, trigger happy cops are not funny at all, but rather a menace to the lives and property of people around them.  On the evidence there are plenty of them out there and plenty of cases where they behaved badly. We hear more about it in the news when the victim black, but that is because such shootings are exploitable politically. It is an equal opportunity problem.  Whites, blacks,  Hispanics Asians, American Indians, men, women, and kids have been gunned down unnecessarily.

The case of Breonna Taylor has been in the news recently. She was an innocent bystander killed by cops who broke into her apartment in the middle of the night and got in a gunfight with her boyfriend who is said to have assumed he was facing a home invasion from criminals.  She was shot five times, while her boyfriend was only wounded. (He was charged with assault  and  attempted murder of a police officer, but all charges have been dropped.)  Several shots from the cops went into an adjacent occupied apartment. It was a drug raid, but no drugs were found in the apartment.

It is hard to see how Taylor’s killing was not at least negligent homicide. It is a rudimentary rule of basic training in safety with guns that one does not fire until one has identified one’s target.  Parents teach it  to kids learning to shoot with their first .22s or BB guns.  Yet a group of professionals with years of training and opportunity to practice forgot or ignored it, and seemingly blasted away like Fearless Fosdick.

At a time when leftists are encouraging looters and rioters and spreading false claims that all or most policemen are trigger happy bigots, it is appropriate to  “back the blue” and oppose  the crimes and nonsense.  However reforms are needed.  The United States should ban Gestapo and KGB style middle of the night raids, whether no knock or not, as unnecessary and too dangerous, both for the raiders and the victims. (There might  be a case for well defined exceptions for a Ma Barker or a Baby Face Nelson, but the exceptions should be rare, and even then care should be taken not to harm bystanders.)  Cops should be held to at least the same standards and requirements as the rest of us for using guns safely and for demonstrating that a use of force was appropriate. As a small practical step, it might be a good idea to switch officers back from large magazine semiautomatics to five or six shot revolvers as sidearms.  It is surely a good idea to train officers to understand that policemen and soldiers in combat  are different things, operating in different environments and  under different rules and to behave accordingly.

Fearless Fosdick should be only in archives of the funny papers, not on the streets.

The End of World War II

Today is the 75^th anniversary of the last act of World War II, the ceremony of Japan’s surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  (The actual surrender had happened earlier on August 15^th .)  I don’t know how many people will notice or care.  Most of the men who fought the war are gone. The youngest people legally serving in 1945 would be ninety one or two now.  

My contemporaries and I grew up in the shadow of the war.  Over fifteen  million men had served in it in the armed forces. My father and both his brothers were three of them. As a kid I heard their stories and the stories of the fathers of relatives, friends and schoolmates.  Every president of the United States from 1953 to 1993 served at least briefly in the armed forces during the war.

Now the war is as remote in time as the Civil War was when the Nazis invaded Poland. I hope Americans will remember it – honoring the valor of the men who won it,  understanding that civilization is not a given and  the  need for powerful and prepared armed forces to preserve it, and learning what is necessary to keep something like World War II from happening again. I hope, but  I have no idea whether I should expect. 

This is a good day to offer thanks to all the men of World War II – the young men and the old, the ones who came home and the ones who did not. They saved civilization and made our world possible.