Guilt By Coercion
- by David Matthews 2
"The sense of inferiority and the sense of guilt are exceedingly difficult to distinguish." - Dr. Sigmund Freud
Let me ask you.. are you feeling guilty?
You aren’t? WHY? Don’t you know what this past week was?
This was the one-year memorial over two punk kids who stormed their high school and killed thirteen people before killing themselves! You’ve GOT to feel guilty about that!
And if that wasn’t enough, this week also marked the five-year anniversary of two extremists blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma! All of those lives lost!
What? You aren’t feeling guilty over that? What’s wrong with you people? There must be something seriously wrong with you.
Granted, we have the two men responsible for blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the two punk kids who shot up Columbine killed themselves… but that’s no excuse! You HAVE to feel guilty about those deaths!
Doesn’t that sound absurd? And yet that’s what we are being told we must do.
We’re being told this from members of government, who are eager to exploit each tragic occurrence for their own pet programs. We are told we MUST feel guilty over each tragedy.
The media, naturally, is eager to cooperate in this emotional form of mind-control. It doesn’t take much effort for them to put together a whole miniseries telling you how you should feel. They already have all of the news footage from the archives. All they have to do is cobble together a group of so-called "experts", get sound bites from the politicians, and run a few biased polls. Presto! A five-part miniseries to make people feel guilty about something they have nothing to feel guilty about!
Let’s get brutally honest here… there is NOTHING for most people to feel guilty about for the tragedies in Columbine or for Oklahoma City. NOTHING. They happened. They were tragic, and a lot of lives were needlessly lost, but there was realistically nothing any of us could have done to change or to stop them.
No new law or regulation would have ever stopped those tragedies. Indeed, when it came to Columbine, over one hundred federal and state laws were broken by those two punk kids. Even the friend who purchased the guns said that no background check would have prevented her from purchasing guns she had a legal right to purchase. No matter how many laws Bill Clinton wants to shove down our throats, none of them would have ever stopped that event from happening.
Ah, but there’s the rub! This is not really about remembering tragedies, but rather it is about getting laws passed and freedoms infringed.
Libertarian talk show host Neal Boortz once pointed out that the difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives think things through while liberals are concerned with what people feel. Well, I disagree. I think both liberals and conservatives try to play upon the emotions of the public, especially when they cannot use rational arguments in their favor. Certainly when it comes to the way things "used" to be, conservatives try to play upon a sense of insecurity and fear to sway the public to their side.
Politicians, then, want us to feel guilt over these tragedies. To make us feel guilty for having so many freedoms, and thus able to remove those freedoms through laws and regulations.
Consider, if you will, the recent anniversaries of tragedies the government wants us to remember. They want us to remember the tragedies of Columbine and Heritage high schools. They want us to remember the tragedy of Oklahoma City. According to Bill Clinton and his supporters, it’s our fault for having so much freedom in our lives that these tragedies can happen.
But what about another tragedy that happened on the same day as Oklahoma City just two years earlier? What about the tragedy in Waco, Texas, where dozens of men, women, and children were burned to death? Why were there no remembrance ceremonies? The answer, of course, is that the government has nothing to gain from this tragedy. In fact, the federal government is very much responsible for creating the events that led to that inferno. The only thing that can be remembered from this incident would be that of government failures and gross overkill. So rather than try to blame society in general for Waco, the federal government foists all of the blame on David Koresh and hopes that the people will forget that it ever happened.
Worse yet is that we are being told that we HAVE to feel guilty over things like Columbine and Oklahoma City just so President Clinton and the gun control lobbyists can shove new gun control legislation down our throats. Clinton even had the audacity to demand that Congress rubber stamp his gun control legislation just so he could proudly proclaim having passed it on the one-year anniversary of Columbine. What gall of any elected official to demand that Congress heed his will just to fulfill some manufactured ceremony.
You know, it is one thing to play upon feeling that already exist. People can get emotional over the most pathetic of situations. Just look at the number of people who cried when Morris the Cat died, or took the death of John F. Kennedy Junior personally. Even trying to tell people what to think has been a problem ever since the first governments discovered public relations. But to try to tell the public what they are supposed to FEEL just so they can get some kind of law passed is perhaps the height of arrogance for any body of government.
Emotions are temporary, dependant upon the situation of the moment. Laws are not. Those legislators who try to use emotions to push legislation are not the kind of legislators who should govern over a society that claims to cherish freedom.
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