One of the seldom remarked-upon things in modern life is how many things are controversial or extremely difficult, not because they’re innately hard to handle, but because a certain percentage of Americans have no morals or common sense.
That was something that came to mind when I saw this video:
In the video, a Hispanic man is in the car with his family, and he gets pulled over by ICE. They have no idea why they were pulled over. When ICE comes up, he asks why he was stopped; ICE tells him that he looks like a target they’re after and asks for his ID. He gives them his ID, they look at it, realize it’s not who they’re after, tell them to have a nice day, and they go back to their cars. It was a very normal encounter. Humdrum and boring even.
Why?
Because the guy in the car didn’t act like a moron.
Compare that to the people in Minnesota chasing ICE agents around with their cars, attacking them, smashing things up, resisting arrest, screaming abuse, etc., etc.
The problem in Minnesota was never ICE. It was the idiotic behavior of leftists in Minnesota.
Similarly, how much of the Black Lives Matter riots were driven by people who acted like retards around the police and got hurt or killed as a result of it? Not all of them, but it played a big role in most of them? Absolutely.
Michael Brown attacked a police officer. Keith Lamont Scott got out of a vehicle holding a gun when officers were there after someone else and refused commands to drop it. Jacob Blake had a knife and was being arrested for having a felony; he shook off a taser, then he got into his wife’s rented SUV (They police had been called there by the wife) with their kids in it to drive off. That’s when he got shot. Even George Floyd refused to get into a police car.
Meanwhile, if people simply cooperate with police officers, the chances of violence occurring are statistically zero. We’re talking maybe an incident per tens of millions of stops – yet we’re not supposed to notice that. We’re supposed to have big debates over what police officers do or don’t do, which is absolutely appropriate, but we completely wave off the idiotic behavior that’s 95% of the real problem like it doesn’t matter.
Similarly, how bizarre is it that there are cities that simply allow homeless people to set up tent cities on public sidewalks? Next thing you know, there are needles and human excrement on the street while the people that actually pay taxes don’t feel safe walking down the sidewalk. Chronically homeless people are some of the worst people in our entire society, and the whole idea that they should be allowed to degrade the quality of life for everyone around them is ridiculous.
The whole trans debate revolves around these kinds of issues, too. At the end of the day, as long as you’re an adult and don’t want taxpayer dollars to pay for it, if you want to dress as a woman and surgically mutilate yourself, that’s a terrible decision and shows you’re deeply mentally ill, but that’s your decision.
The problem is trans people insist on trying to make everyone else adapt to their bad behavior. “As a man dressed like a woman, it would be weird for me to use the men’s bathroom, and besides, I kind of like seeing naked women, so I want to change clothes with the women. Oh, I also want to play in their sports events. If I go to jail, I should also get to be in cells with them (heh, heh). Also, we should all agree that if you have a problem with this, you’re a bigot and everyone has to agree I’m a woman even though we all know I’m really not.”
There are other groups of mentally ill people in our society, but there’s no group of mentally ill people whose terrible behavior, perversion, and ridiculous demands create as many problems for everyone else as trans people.
We can go on and on with this. Because some people think it’s fine to steal things and the people in charge in a lot of liberal cities mostly agree with them, we get everything locked up in stores in certain locations:
Similarly, because some people have been habitually abusing unsupervised refills at soda machines, restaurants have started adding QR codes to prevent it:
One of the things I’ve also noticed, first while traveling around in big cities, and now in my home town of Myrtle Beach, SC — a tourist town — is MANDATORY tips added to bills of a certain size. Since there are some cheap people, especially as part of big groups, that don’t tip, they started adding them in automatically:
My local mall where I go to the movies has started banning kids under 18 unless they’re with a parent on the weekends. If you look at this incident, maybe you can see the type of behavior that inspired that:
If you want to live in a high-trust society and don’t want to have to deal with things like this, the sort of people who cause these problems need to pay a SOCIAL COST for that. When bad behavior is treated as no big deal or laughed off, all you get is more bad behavior that ends up inconveniencing everyone else. When people conclude that doing this kind of behavior will make other people view them as losers, they will go in the right direction.
Meanwhile, when everyone just behaves responsibly, sticks to the rules, and shows the most basic consideration for other human beings, everything in our society immediately starts to smooth out and gets easier.
In my view, the shitification of social behavior started with the leader of the free world at that time, Bill Clinton, stood at the podium on TV broadcast to the world to tell his baldfaced lie that he did not have sexual relations with that woman Ms. Lewinski... a much younger female employee that worked for him.
In that moment we did a downward turn in our collective moral compass to do the right thing, and instead we moralized getting what we wanted and lying to get away with it.
Just last night I was reflecting on my childhood. When I was 7, my friends and I would ride our bikes with our .22 rifles across the handlebars to the local hardware store to buy a few boxes of .22. Then we would ride to the nearby field just outside the city limits that was used for plinking. It backed up to a levee that worked as a backstop. We would target practice. None of us dared to do anything that was unsafe. If we had, our parents would get a phone call before we got home and we had a blistered butt and no more rifle for a very long time. Once in a while a patrol car would show up and the two officers would get out and talk to us, reminding us of the safety rules. Of course, we got to turn on the siren and look over the patrol car. We knew these two officers well, they patrolled our neighborhood.
That is not happening today.
In 1971, my family moved 120 miles. Once every few months, I would walk to the Greyhound bus station in the morning, buy a ticket, and ride the bus back to where we moved from. I had to transfer buses along the way. The driver made sure I knew exactly where to go to get on the right bus. Many times, someone transferring to the same bus would walk with me to ensure I got on the right bus.
When I got back to our hometown, my grandmother would pick me up and I would spend a week with my grandparents and then return home.
That is not happening today.
When I was a teenager, my friends and I had a great deal of freedom. There were times we would take off to the mountains to go camping to escape the summer heat. We loved that freedom and would not do anything to endanger it. We were on our best behavior and we also had a blast.
As a high school teacher, I overhear teens today complain that their parents do not trust them and then in the same sentence will be scheming to have a friend cover for them by saying the teen is at their house to play video games when the teen is actually doing something they should not be doing.
When my son was driving himself to school (he used my vehicle because I was recovering from a stroke then) his friends would try to convince him to drive them places after school. He did not give in to peer pressure and always said no.
One day, he had some friends over after school. We always had extra food in the house because if you feed them, they will come and we provided a safe place to hang out. Occasionally my wife and I would help them with homework (we were both teachers). I overheard their conversation. A friend was trying to convince him to drive the friend somewhere after school the next day. My son responded, you do not understand, both of my parents are teachers. If they found out, they would go to DMV and cancel my license. I would not be allowed to drive their vehicles for the rest of my life. They trust me as long as I give them reason to trust me. I might get away with it a few times, but one time, something will happen and they will catch me. They might see me driving where I am not supposed to be, or I get into an accident and they will learn I had friends in the car. My life as I know it will be over.