We have failed to remember the lesson of Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler. In 1938, Hitler was a bully, and like most bullies, he was all bluff. Germany was not ready militarily to take on the world. He lied, and the world believed him.
This posting, however, is not about 1930's era England. It is about the United States of America, immediately following WWII until now.
It's ironic, bordering on hypocritic to demonize Neville Chamberlain for acquiescing to a tyrant, but hail as heroes, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, for allowing other tyrants like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung to oppress, enslave, brutalize, and, yes, murder millions more than Hitler ever did.
There is no question that World War II came at great cost to America. It cost us in terms of economics. Can you say "national debt" or "eternal federal income tax"? It cost us in terms of human life, losing approximately 416,000 (primarily) men in military deaths. Compare that with 5.5 million military deaths in Nazi Germany alone, and America's loss doesn't seem as significant, but it still exacted a heavy price.
This is when a history lesson should not be painted with broad, generalized brush strokes. It requires analyzing many different strains of historical thought, finding the common themes and ideas that are threaded in most, if not all accounts. The American GI that was not killed and buried in Tunisia, Normandy, or Bastogne quite often returned home to bury himself in a career. Essentially, the Baby Boom generation was raised by women, since that men absented themselves from their wives and children to pursue financial gain. They believed that they were entitled to this pursuit. A quick read of Tom Brokaw's homage, The Greatest Generation, will describe this scenario repeatedly, but without impugnity.
My point is that America became feminized to the degree that masculinity is maligned at every turn to the degree that it is considered to be a form of bigotry. Fatherhood is ridiculed, and relegated to irrelevance, at best, an object of scorn, at worst. Hollywood has reinforced this view ad nauseum. I submit to God's original design that a family--and by extension a culture--survives and thrives in accordance with its ability to balance male and female perspective. We need both, but the United States of America is overwhelmingly dominated by feminine thought. So, what is my point?
In the most basic of terms, nurturing is a female quality. Protecting and enforcing is a male quality. These traits are not gender exclusive, but since human beings were not created to be asexual, we need males AND females. Within feminized America's borders, we are lousy at enforcing. (i.e., illegal immigration) We birth, raise and train bullies. It begins with parents who are mindless about dealing with children who won't mind. Our judicial system has criminalized spanking the bottom of a disobedient child. From infancy, our children are learning that failure to abide by rules established by those who have lawful authority over them carries with that no consequences. Many frustrated parents attempt to absolve themselves of any responsibility by attributing bad behavior to "phases" like the "terrible twos".
With their consciences cleansed by their self-absolution, these same parents place their trained bullies in our government schools where the parents' appeasement is codified. Teachers and administrators are not allowed to even touch a child, unless danger is imminent. In urban areas, education is not the primary focus of government schools. It is not even secondary. The first order of business is to have bodies that can be counted, because federal money is doled out based on attendance. The second order of business is to control those bodies that don't want to be there. To do that without the cost of dealing with parental litigation, the schools try to reason with the ignorant bully brutes. Their only means of control is to appease and look the other way when bad behavior, if not immediately endangering anyone, erupts. In one of five large high schools in Corpus Christi, Texas, there is a hallway that teachers will not enter, because to do so would result in being confronted with open sexual activity, requiring disciplinary action. So, teachers and administrators pull a Neville Chamberlain, and look the other way. It would be the height of naivete to think that such practices are limited to one high school in South Texas. (For what it's worth Corpus Christi high schools have a 50% drop-out rate.)
Our prisons are nothing more than locked boxes of appeasement. Anything shy of execution or restitution to victims is appeasement. I'm not advocating executing every lawbreaker, but putting miscreants behind bars in an effort to contain (or control) bad behavior is nothing but institutionalized "looking the other way". This subject alone is worthy of a separate discussion, so for the sake of avoiding a tangent, I will save that argument for another day.
Appeasement is now a virtue in America. A few days before our recent national election, I had a successful businessman tell me that despite his conservative convictions he was voting for Barack Obama out of fear that if John McCain won, African-Americans would riot. Within weeks after 9/11, many Americans believed that any military response to those responsible for that horrific day, would only serve to make them mad at us.
If you think that this is just hot air from a bigoted sexist pig, I submit to you for your consideration a highly rated and successful television show that thrives in part because of appeasement. It's most watched episodes are broadcast at the beginning of each new season with example after humiliating example. I write of American Idol. Talent-less contestants clamor for a chance at glory, because their mother didn't want to hurt their feelings or crush their deluded dreams by telling them that they shouldn't do what they do in public, and certainly not in front of a camera. This is one of those rarities where America doesn't look the other way.
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