The US Army recently did a study about how to prevent the many suicides by military personnel, especially combat veterans. This is a topic that speaks to me as a Veteran and the father of veterans. I cannot tell you how many of my son’s friends, who had been with him in Diwaniya, have committed suicide. He has lost more comrades since their return to the US than he did in Iraq. I went to the funeral of his best friend. He was a fine young man and I liked him.
Abe was sitting with my son as my son was working on his pistol. The action was not working properly and he had disassembled it and reassembled it as they talked. He tried the action and it still didn’t feel right. He had Abe take a look at it. They worked on it some more, with a little oil and it seemed to be better. He looked at my son, he had been having troubles with his wife and she was talking about divorce and taking his daughter from him but he always seemed positive about the future. It didn’t seem to be anything insurmountable to him. Abe then slid in a magazine and chambered the round and said, “I can think of no better way to die than in the company of my best friend.” And shot himself. My son held him as he bled out, awaiting 911’s arrival. This was especially hard for my son to deal with because he was raised with our family motto: Dum Spiro Spero – Where there’s life there’s hope. [See: https://sabersedge.online/where-theres-life-theres-hope ]
The Army’s report, like so much of our superficial, materialistic, consumerist society said nothing that would have assisted in this situation. Absolutely none of their “solutions” would have saved my son’s friends. In 120 pages they never seemed to seriously ask why these suicides were occurring. Oh, they had solutions. As if you can ever create a solution for a problem that you don’t understand the “why” of. They want to ban guns on the post. They want to prevent anyone under 25 from buying a handgun on base. They want to register all gun purchases. None of these things would have had any effect on the suicides of my son’s comrades. Their response, as is so common in this disgustingly superficial society we have now is to ban and restrict THINGS. Not once in the report is there a serious discussion about WHY this is happening, they do not address the psychological needs of combat veterans who have returned from war. Nor do they discuss the family needs of helping soldiers to reintegrate with their families or a society that has not had the horrific experiences that the soldiers have had during their service to our country. Nor did they mention the VA’s pamphlet of a few years ago suggesting that suicide was an honorable way out of difficulties veterans may face…that was hushed up once it came to the awareness of the public. It was a cost-cutting measure to avoid paying for all of those government-funded services. I find it interesting that the only people who ever tell me how lucky I am to have VA Health care have never experienced government-run healthcare. [See more on a superficial society: https://sabersedge.online/natural-laws-and-natural-rights ]
As always in our superficial materialistic society, we look at things and pretend it is addressing the problem. It does not. Our society has become very adept at ignoring “why.” We ignore the whys of history condemning current generations to relearn the painful lessons that past generations already learned once, the hard way, with many deaths and much suffering. Such ignorance and failure of our educational system demand we learn those lessons once again…the hard way. We recently experienced the cost of not passing on the lessons of World War One where they learned that Chemical weapons are somewhat unpredictable but biological weapons are completely uncontrollable. Once an engineered biological creation escapes the lab it will go where IT wants and not where we want it to go…oh, yeah, and it mutates. These are not new lessons. We learned them before. There is a reason biological research and gain of function research were banned but we, apparently, forgot the lessons learned in the past. Or at least Fauci did. But, he is also the one who, in the 80s, insisted we would all get AIDS from toilet seats. Such spectacular failure garnered the usual result in the halls of the rich and powerful. He got promoted because they never take responsibility for their failures. They always blame things. [Our society has ceased to look for root causes see why: https://sabersedge.online/hello-world ]
Today in our society our common answer is to deal with crime, suicide, violence, and shootings by looking at guns. We never ask why they are occurring. I have to believe that we are not, as a society, so stupid. Instead, I suspect that we know why and we don’t want to deal with it so we talk passionately about guns because we don’t want to deal with the difficult truths and emotions that surround these things.
School violence and mass shootings are a case in point. The data is available that well over 90% of these perpetrators are from broken homes, raised by single mothers (without a father present,) and that they are using or were using psycho-pharmaceuticals whose long-term side effects, too often, are untested. All of these factors are new to the society we built in the late 20th century through today. Yet, they feel the need to attack guns which have been a staple in our society for over 300 years, and never produced this result. Yet, instead of looking for the real reasons, which must lie in the mistakes we have made, they look at a constant that has existed in our society throughout our history…guns. [ For a more in depth discussion of this see: https://sabersedge.online/sacrificing-liberty-for-safety-and-slavery ]
I am not a scientist. However, I know that if you have an experiment or an equation and get different results it is stupid to blame the constant. You need to look at the variables. When we look at the variables we have in our society to see what we have changed it is not gun ownership it is how we have undermined our society. I will touch on a few things here but there are more. I would welcome your comments below as to other things you see that we have changed in our society that could be causing the violence, crime, suicides, and hopelessness that plague our society. [For how our society has changed see: https://sabersedge.online/awaken-the-lions-have-we-been-domesticated ]
Societies gain their values through institutions. The institutions that have served Western Civilization for a couple of thousand years include our communities of faith, our education system, the communication of time-honored lessons and values that were hard won and learned through many mistakes and suffering by previous generations, and, of course, our families. The last 50 years have seen the systematic dismantling of all of these things [see why in: https://sabersedge.online/active-measures-the-subversion-of-the-good ].
No fault divorce considered a good idea at the time, has destroyed our families and made the stability of the family anything but. Children can no longer rely on growing up with both a father and a mother. As such, the stability of the family and the carefulness and seriousness of mate selection, and the need to keep the family together as a stable environment to raise children have been seriously compromised. But our response is not to build stronger families. Our response is to look to money, child support, and more government interference. For it is government interference in the family that weakened its bonds in the first place.
The educational institutions of Western culture have drastically changed in the last 150 years, after supporting the development of the greatest and most advanced civilization to yet be seen on this earth we decided to change the entire structure, content, and output of our educational system. We decided that rather than using education to bring out the best in each of our students we would use it to support the factory and corporate structure. As I have mentioned before it was after we made this change that we came up with the dubious idea of “learning disabilities.” This seems to mean that people don’t fit into our assembly line educational project and won’t make good factory or cubicle workers for our corporate overlords. As a defective “product”, these people are cast aside or drugged to make them fit in. Is it any wonder that the frustration builds until people explode as everywhere we turn the needs of children are ignored and the needs of society take precedence? After all, does anyone truly believe ten-year-olds need porn in their school libraries or sexy drag shows for their entertainment? We don’t do these things for our children but because society says that IT’s needs are more important than our children’s. Aren’t we tired of the government and schools telling us what THEY want to do to our children? [See the series: https://sabersedge.online/who-stole-your-education ; for an explanation of what happened to our society in the last 150 year: https://sabersedge.online/the-world-built-in-the-last-150-years-is-broken.]
I hesitate to recommend our communities of faith because they too have been infected by modern technobabble. For hundreds of years communities of faith taught us the values and order of society and gave us a ground for belief; a foundation through which we could order our belief in all things. This has been replaced by a belief in relativity and science that does not give us a secure foundation to stand up because it is ever-shifting and, ironically, science could not have developed without our belief in God (or Gods) who created a world that made sense. Without a world that makes sense (and a randomly generated world does NOT necessarily make sense,) there was never any reason to assume that we could rationally explain the world. But, in Western Society, where we believed the world was created by God and that the world reflected this divine order science developed and spread through the rest of the world. Even if it forgot that it was monks and religious men who were the first scientists. Today, science and pop psychology have replaced the ancient scriptures.
I was disgusted when I walked into one of the largest United Methodist Churches in Kansas City and, looking at the shelves and desks of the pastors and leaders of the church I found not a single Bible but numerous books on leadership, psychology, and entertainment. The heretical imaginings of many modern churches have culminated in my wife being taught “White Guilt” in the Bible study of her church. So, even some of the churches are teaching Cultural Marxism. While I was aware of the communist-grounded ideas of “liberation theology” as an agent before I attended seminary I remember sitting in a class at seminary and once more being told that we must read the Bible through a “preferential hermeneutic of the poor.” Meaning that we must give the poor preference in our interpretation of the Bible, “check your privilege” as a rich, white, land-owner, I suppose. They said we need to reach out with the gospel preferentially to the poor because they need the comfort of Christ more than the rich. In their view, Christ came to minister to the poor, and primarily the poor, with contempt for the rich. Such Marxist sycophants ignore his ministry to tax collectors as well as paupers. I raised my hand and said, “If that is so please explain to us why according to (and I cited the study,) the upper middle class and wealthy have higher rates of suicide than the poor. It seems to me that everyone needs the gospel and we can’t look at superficial indicators to determine who.” This particular instructor flunked me because I “didn’t understand” the Marxist drivel she was trying to teach. Oh, I understood it alright. I got my Master’s Degree despite her animosity and unfair grading practices but her class was so subjective in its grading that her opinion reined in the grade book and because her tests were subjective rather than objective, she argued that my disagreement meant I didn’t understand the material; (or I would certainly have the same opinion she did). This Marxist arrogance is rife within the modern educational and religious hierarchies of today. But Marxism MUST be arrogant because it cannot survive scrutiny, debate, or the lessons of experience. [see why in: https://sabersedge.online/active-measures-the-subversion-of-the-good ].
I also think she was irked when, at every break and after class, a small cloud of a half dozen evangelical students regularly approached me and asked, “What does the Bible say about what she just taught.” At both the agent’s course and seminary I had a reputation among other students of being “widely read” and of strong opinion. The thing is, I never saw any use in “weak” opinions. If you are right, cling to the right, and if you are proven wrong, discard the wrong opinion and take the right one. This is why I read so much and watch the news and read articles from multiple countries to take in knowledge and get as close to the truth as I am humanly able.
This Marxist subversion of an institution that was depended upon to pass on the knowledge that has persisted for thousands of years is telling on our country. As Jordan Peterson says, in this book the Bible has proven strong than stone and more enduring than empires. As my father taught me I read it every day. Especially the Wisdom literature, Jesus was one of the most excellent Wisdom teachers that ever lived.
Our society has systematically undermined religious institutions, and subverted classical educational values, the family, and the traditions of nation and culture.
Yet, it thinks guns are the problem – when we have had guns for hundreds of years in nearly every household in America and never had this problem. Not only that but they were often loaded and hanging over the mantle placed in the main room of the house for ready access. If guns were the problem we never would have survived our first 200 years.
Society needs to look in the mirror and consider that, after systematically destroying every foundation upon which our society was built that perhaps the reason for the current mental and emotional instability of our society and our children is that they were not raised in a stable environment with sure foundations. But, that is my opinion. What do you think? [See: https://sabersedge.online/the-more-things-change ]
I started this by talking about how our military reflects our society in its inability to ask “why” a problem exists and jumps to regulate things. Like our pharmaceutical companies, they concentrate on relieving symptoms rather than dealing with the underlying problems. Our society has never had such random anger and violence and instability. But our society has never been as lost as it is today or as regulated. [see: https://sabersedge.online/we-now-live-in-a-totalitarian-state ]
Maybe we should ask why and answer, and then hold our leaders and institutions accountable for bringing us here. In the meantime, it is foolish to trust our children to the institutions and government which has wrought this havoc. We need to protect future generations. Someday, I may have the money to start a private academy but, until then, we must all do our part to save the future in the hearts and minds of our children. We can fix this problem. All is not lost, I have talked about the solutions many times in the past. But we do need to act. Things won’t fix themselves. [see: https://sabersedge.online/awaken-the-lions-fixing-a-toxic-system ]