“Racism” – It's Time to Repudiate the Guilt

Does any sane person who pays the slightest attention to the talking heads from the television (MSNBC) and cable networks (CNN), or the news and opinion writers for the New York Times or the Washington Post believe that racism is ever going to lessen anywhere in the western world? Only a fool would bet on that particular outcome. Why? In a word: “Racism” is the gift that keeps on giving.

How did this come about?  “Racism” in the 1950s was a term then with a much more precise, recognizable meaning than it has today. It was largely limited in its circulation to liberal intellectuals and academics who studied the history of slavery and contemplated racial segregation in post-WWII America. Jim Crow was in place then with segregated schools, public facilities and businesses, double standards of expectations and accountability for blacks and whites, all premised on a widespread white perception that blacks were … well, generally, less capable, less reliable, less intelligent than whites. The segregation was well entrenched (de jure in the south; de facto in the north) and blacks in America were significantly poorer, less healthy, less educated than whites as well as feeling the daily sting of the indignities, along with suffering the hostilities, mistreatment and condescension of whites.

By coincidence, the American conquerors about this time were just finishing their occupation of defeated Germany, the occupation prolonged for years because the Americans felt they needed to remain as long as it took to make sure that the German people were completely free of this nasty “superior race” nonsense they had imbibed from the Charlie Chaplain mustachioed Austrian corporal and his henchmen who had brought most of Europe to ruins. Which proved finally to be a bit embarrassing for Americans, at least for those who recalled that their soldier boys, who were sent far across the ocean to dispose of the racist Hitler and stay and teach the Die Herren und Frauen to love democracy and recite Thomas Jefferson’s “self-evident” truth, “that all men are created equal,” came over in racially segregated units. President Truman’s desegregation order for the Armed Services didn’t come until 1948. Black American soldiers fighting oversees for equality came home to segregated public facilities, lunch counters and schools.

It was judged past time for a correction in these matters, and so it would be. Beginning in the 1950s, the dismantling of segregation and the criminalization of racial discrimination was launched. With the landmark “Brown versus the Board of Education” the Federal government forcibly desegregated the public schools. By the 1960s the conscience of white America was convicted of its racial iniquities. The correction was soon at top speed with the civil rights movement leading the way, and the rest, as they say, is history. In the five decades that followed the equalizing of black and white America became “mission central” with the legislatures creating and the courts enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the areas of housing, employment, government contracting and education, including the forced bussing of school children. Massive federal aid flowed to the heavily black-populated cities like Detroit, burned down by black rioters in the middle-late 1960s. Affirmative Action and EEOC, came into being with strict compliance requirements for universities and employers to make room for members of “underrepresented” groups. Across the country schools and universities focused their pedagogy on the evils of racism, the history of slavery and segregation and the moral imperative of “equality.” Blacks moved into prominent positions in every region of American culture and life, including the American presidency, Secretary of State, Attorney General and the U.S. Supreme Court. Utterance of the “n-word” for whites became a career-killer and a ticket to social ostracism.  An entire new industry, the “diversity” industry, came into being, its employees moving into business, education and government, tasked to promote the interests and guard the feelings of officially designated victims of discrimination, and to subject the would be discriminators to programs of reeducation where they learned about “white privilege,” microaggressions and how to “celebrate diversity.”

By 2009 with Jim Crow long dead and the jubilant inauguration of America’s first black President, elected in a still majority-white country, one might be tempted to think that the “racism” that marked racially segregated America in the 1950s had been vanquished or at least diminished enough to make everyone optimistic about the future of race-relations.  Wrong!  In the last year of his Presidency (2015) Barack Obama in an interview made the following observation:

Obama: “What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow. And that's still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it.”

Interviewer: “Racism”

Obama: “Racism. We’re not cured of it.”

What then were we to make of this “DNA” metaphor? Unfortunately, few, if any of the cognoscenti who constantly lecture Americans 24x7 on the ubiquity of “racism” and daily pounce on yet another politician or celebrity who breaks the strict rules of “Diversity-Speak,” bothered to decode the President’s remarks so that the average American might get a sense of what he was in for. They can be boiled down to: “Racism has always been the defining feature of American life and will be far into the future.” What then, we might wonder, is the “cure,” and who gets to say that it has been successful and the patient is whole and released from treatment?     

These questions expose the disingenuousness typical of Obama on the subject of race. The “our DNA” is white DNA, and the “racism” that “we’re not cured of” is “white racism” – there is no other kind in today’s America that will be countenanced. Obama chose the wrong metaphor.  His view of race is better expressed in theological terms. “Racism” is America’s “original sin.” It was, and still is, committed exclusively by white people, and no matter what metaphor you care to use, consider it a permanent fixture of American society. “We shall overcome someday.” But, sorry Pal, not today. With sin comes guilt, and white America now finds itself confronted with guilt, virtually unlimited guilt.

Guilt that comes in unlimited quantities can be a very valuable commodity for the right sort of “entrepreneurs” who know how to make it pay out in long term dividends, particularly when those dividends are of, shall we say, a material kind. Guilt makes most people feel really bad, remain highly vulnerable and willing to do things of an extreme nature to be free of it, things that may have little to do with the source of the guilt and may be highly detrimental to their self-interest and well being.

Guilt, in effect, can open the door to a form of extortion, moral extortion, if you will. When you feel guilty because you believe that you have done something harmful to someone, the person you have harmed has a moral advantage over you, so to speak. That person is the innocent party; you are the guilty party. You are in his debt. You owe him … something.  It may be an apology, change of behavior or attitude, or maybe compensation.  Relieving the guilt becomes a moral transaction and both parties (the injurer and the injured) have a responsibility to act in good faith and bring the transaction to a conclusion.    

Ah, yes, “the conclusion” and here is the rub. Atonement is the performance side of guilt – giving what you owe to the innocent party, doing what you need to do to atone for the wrong. The corollary of unlimited guilt is unlimited atonement (no conclusion), and when what you “owe” becomes unlimited the person you “owe” is no longer innocent, and you are no longer a free, accountable person making moral-spiritual restitution. You are a pawn being manipulated, being used to someone else’s advantage. Good faith has given way to exploitation. From being the sinner, you are now the sinned-against.

Unlimited guilt is what makes Obama’s “racism” a tool of moral extortion. An extortionist never says, “OK, your debt is paid; your obligation is fulfilled.” No, the blackmailer always comes back for more and ups the ante. “Not enough; I need more – until you are cured. I’ll let you know when that happens. Trust me.” “Racism,” however, never, ever, diminishes. Rather it becomes ever more insidious, protean, if you will, with forms and manifestations, heretofore unheard of – “systemic racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” “institutional racism,” the inventory expands almost daily. Moreover, “racism has provided the “ism” template (“sexism,” “ableism,” “homophobia,” “Islamophobia,” “transphobia”) for the rapid expansion of the diversity industry, with other large groups of the suitably injured and aggrieved, recruited to leverage new categories of guilt and make them pay dividends. 

How does the “racism” create the moral leverage that makes the extortion work so effectively?  First, it opens up a vast moral distance between the accuser and the accused. When someone denounces someone else as a “racist,” this act publicly affirms both, the accuser’s moral superiority, and the moral degeneracy of the accused. Since racism is the very worst of human pathologies, deeply embedded in the personality, the accuser by virtue of both recognizing and confronting this evil individual, gives confirmation of a moral superiority and rectitude of the highest order.  And, since the targets of racist are members of oppressed and exploited groups, the accuser’s virtue shines even brighter since he is speaking truth-to-power, he becomes a beacon of moral courage, taking a stand against bigotry and hatred. 

There is another kind of leverage that makes the extortionist demand virtually invincible. With “racism” being in one’s “DNA,” as Obama put it, the guilt is indisputable and inextinguishable. Remember, “we’re not cured of it.” No white person has ever convinced his accuser that he is not a “racist” and never will. Apologizing (Please, I am not a racist) or indignantly denying it simply ups the extortionist leverage of the term while the accused squirms like a worm on a hook. It’s a Catch 22. Once “racism’ is entrenched (“in our DNA,” “not cured”), game, set, match. This, of course, gives a lie to the rhetoric of “healing,” “reconciliation” and ultimately to “forgiveness,” cover-language used to soften and disguise the coercion and give the extortion a patina of moral legitimacy. But the accuser has no interest in reconciliation or incentive to forgive. With reconciliation, the “gift” would have to stop giving. Diversity professionals would have to find another source of employment.  Al Sharpton would not longer be called, “Reverend, ” and would likely be in prison.

A turning point in American history was the 2016 Presidential election when the obsession with “racism” was raised to a level of collective hysteria with Donald Trump routinely characterized by the entire main stream media and the opposition party as another Adolf Hitler, a 21^st-century, pogrom-planning fascist, broadly supported by voters (62 million people) motivated entirely by racial prejudice and hatred. The most memorable and appalling moment of the contest was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” denunciation of Trump supporters as “racists, sexists … you name it.”

With the improbable outcome of the election the hysteria has only increased, the most recent manifestation of its ferocity the unhinged outpouring of hatred from social media sources and the hostile and dishonest coverage of the national media of an incident involving a group of white, Catholic high school boys from Covington, Kentucky (Boyd Cathey) who encountered a native American protestor in Washington D.C. “The smile of one of the students, Nick Sandman, captured in a now famous photograph, was twisted by the virtue signalers into a disrespectful ‘smirk,’ a kind of  ‘racist dog-whistle,’ a symbol of ‘white privilege,’” all the standard tropes of today’s emboldened character assassins. Reigned down upon Sandman and his fellow students was a torrent of condemnations of in the thousands via social media that included death threats, demands to publish names and addresses, appeals to have them expelled from their school, rejected from universities, and encouragement to kill them and their families. All of this from Social Justice Warriors who decry the “hatred” of Trump supporters.

So, in contemplating this grim state of affairs, we need to ask now: to where has this 60-year battle against “racism” taken us? Sadly, it has taken us to a point where it should be clear that “racism,” now saturating the commentary on every facet of American experience, is not a word that describes the behavior or personality of any particular individual.  “Racism” does not depict any state of reality. It is merely a word of condemnation to complete a ritualized chant. “You are a racist” is a performative act in an excommunication ceremony (an expulsion ritual) whereby decent, normal individuals are pronounced to be moral lepers, unfit for civilized society and cast into the darkness. Recall the conclusion of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” slur, “they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.” This expulsion ritual is now frequently and routinely conducted by a vast network of moral police who occupy positions in government, the media, education and entertainment. They target white Americans who look back and wonder why the massive, decades-long efforts of atonement for racism have only intensified black resentment and hostility, why Black Lives Matter thugs are allowed to rampage and tear down historical monuments, why blacks are still burning down the cities, why millionaire, celebrity black athletes scorn the national anthem. These targets recognize that the “racism in our DNA” is the veiled language of the extortionists who use guilt as an instrument of intimidation, domination and revenge.  The guilt must be repudiated. Whites who succumb to the accusation of “racism” are embracing a future of their own destruction.   

 

   

Stephen Paul Foster's  newly published novel

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                        

 

Diversity-Speak: Animal Farm at Wright State University

When talking about race-relations in America these days one cannot overstate how corrupt the use of language has become. “Racism” is now a term of art reserved for demagogues, ideologues, character assassins and “professionals” who make a career of their race.  An honest, dispassionate discussion of race in America is verboten, and nowhere does the production of verbal smog with its semantic deformation and fake moralism on this subject rise more rapidly to match the level of Soviet-era, Pravda-style Newspeak than on the campuses of American universities.  

In most American universities there are now firmly entrenched “diversity” commissars -- here a Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, there an Associate Provost of Multiculturalism, everywhere a PC zealot with a hefty title, a heftier salary, and a job description written in the indecipherable argot of "Diversity-speak."  These are people with no real jobs. Installed by craven university presidents they serve as scolds and busybodies, self-proclaimed authorities on whatever might hurt the feelings of those in the currently certified victim classes. Within their purview are micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces and correct usage of pronouns in the service of transgenderism. Since these czars, are charged with conjuring into reality such elusive and nebulous abstractions like diversity, inclusion, equity, etc., who can ever remotely guess what it is that they are actually doing?

The language of academic Diversity-Speak is a subgenre of Newspeak. Its constricted vocabulary and closely regulated grammar make it into a straight jacket of ideological orthodoxy the constraints of which no one is supposed to break out of. The key words, in typical Orwellian fashion, are twisted beyond normal recognition. Everyone knows this: everyone pretends otherwise. 

The diversity VP at any typical university now serves as the institutional superego. He/she plays the role of the priest, a stern moralist who intones the politically correct incantations, but, most importantly, functions as the living symbol of the university’s vigilance against what must never be tolerated in even the slightest degree, racism and its spin offs – sexism, ableism, homophobia, the forced march on to infinity.  This is no small task since racism and its feral cousins are now so pervasive and manifest themselves in so much abundance, some of their forms so recondite, only to be discernible by the priest and his acolytes.  Thus: institutional racism, systemic racism, casual racism, overt racism, covert racism, legacy racism, environmental racism, economic racism -- on it metastasizes with an ever more complex taxonomy yet to be constructed and guaranteed job security for the well-paid necromancers.  

These high level diversity positions are steeped in perversity so glaringly obvious that the fact that no one can mention it (resistance is futile) suggests that higher education is now firmly in the grip of political extortionists and con-artists posing as moralists. The ludicrous perversity is that of the inevitable motive of self-interest built into the heart of the “diversity profession.” The more racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic an institution is (the more victims there are to attend to), of course, the greater the role, the higher the charge, the larger the entourage, the more power there will be for the officially anointed voices of the voiceless.  Attending to lots of victims requires lots of resources – increased personnel, more offices, bigger budgets for travel to conferences on diversity, the Diversity & Inclusion Conference & Exposition in San Francisco, October 2017, for example. https://conferences.shrm.org/diversity-conference  What chief diversity officer anywhere, even if he wanted to, would admit to a serious reduction in all the “isms” and “phobias” in the institution where he is employed?  Fewer “isms” and “phobias” mean fewer staff, diminished influence, less visibility, ultimately another line of work with more accountability.

But to return to the notion of the corruption of language, specifically Diversity-Speak, focus for a moment on the recent official announcement (below) of the appointment of a Diversity Chief at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. The announcement is worth parsing since it is so generic and tediously formulary that it could come out of almost any American university or college.  The language in the announcement, as should become obvious momentarily, is stereotypical, banal Diversity-Speak. Its design, ironically, is to say nothing that any remotely thoughtful and reasonable person would say depicts any aspect of reality. This is not language that is meant to reveal or describe anything but rather to soothe and misdirect.  

   

Matthew Boaz, Wright State University’s director of equity and inclusion, has been named to the new position of chief diversity officer….. Boaz is a nationally recognized leader in diversity, inclusion, equity and access. He has extensive experience in helping underrepresented students, strengthening recruiting efforts and coordinating Title IX policies. As chief diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership in promoting a campus culture that supports diversity and inclusion, forging strong partnerships with students, faculty and staff. “One of my goals as chief diversity officer is to create and maintain an environment in which every member of the Wright State community will feel valued because of their unique identity and authentic self so they are proud of their experience with the university,”…..   http://webapp2.wright.edu/web1/newsroom/2017/02/21/matthew-boaz-named-chief-diversity-officer-at-wright-state/

To begin: “Boaz is a nationally recognized leader in diversity, inclusion, equity and access.” “Nationally recognized leader”?  Beyond a ten mile radius from Dayton, Ohio no one could be found who ever heard of this guy. This lead-off talking point is a throw-away line, sufficiently vague and ill-defined as to be meaningless. One might ponder the dubious premise behind this fake encomium and speculate that anyone with a ‘diversity’ title can rise to this stature since there are no recognized standards or measurement of achievement that could be offered in support.  

  

To continue: “He has extensive experience in helping underrepresented students….”  Who were these students? Where were they?  What did he do to help them? What did he help them do?  Why did they need help?  No clue (wink-wink, it is obvious, isn’t it?). All we are supposed to know is that he is a guy who helps people, well, the right sort of people. What else does one need to be to be a diversity VP?  Just string together a few more of those vague generalities and bolster the fiction that there is a large contingent of needy people who will flounder without him.   

On to “partnerships”: As chief diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership… in forging strong partnerships with students, faculty and staff.  Ah, yes, the obligatory “forging partnerships”, another key filler phrase to signal how busy he will be but with no clue about what he will be doing.  What kind of partnerships? Why are they necessary? What have these partnerships achieved in the past that make them valuable?  

It gets worse: “One of my goals as chief diversity officer is to create and maintain an environment in which every member of the Wright State community will feel valued because of their unique identity and authentic self so they are proud of their experience with the university,” Boaz said.

Clearly, Mr. Boaz won’t be wasting his time on trying to appear modest.  The sum total of “every member of the Wright State community” if you count students, faculty and staff, would be in excess of 20,000 people, each with a “unique identity and authentic self”.  Unclear is how he will have time for any other goals, much less time for basics like eating, sleeping and finding the men's room  -- Oops, the gender neutral restroom. Still, given that Wright State University draws many of its students from the surrounding conservative rural counties, it seems reasonable to conjecture that some them might possess an “authentic self” (perhaps a traditional Christian self) that will not sit well with the pronoun-neutral apparatchiks in Student Affairs who warm the seats in (are you ready?) The Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer & Ally Affairs. One needs to twist furiously away on the Diversity hermeneutical-decoder magic ring just to decipher the meaning of the office title and to guess at how the people inside fill their days. Those members of the “WSU community” who can’t quite get the hang of transgenderism and its Talmudic pronoun assignment challenges might have to undergo a compulsory “attitude adjustment”, a correction to their not-quite authentic selves so as to emerge proud of their experience.  

This announcement is PR gobbledygook.  No one should take it seriously and it is likely that few people do.  It was written and issued no doubt with the hope that no one would pay it too much attention, and thus suggests how crude and cynical is the rationalizing of what diversity people are all about and how spineless the university administrators are who sic them on everyone else.  

Leonard Shapiro, a prolific historian of Soviet history and politics in attempting to distill the essence of Stalinist era propaganda wrote that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as jarring dissonance.” (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Random House, 1971, p. 477) The above example of Diversity-Speak resembles the propaganda described by Shapiro -- no attempt to convince or persuade -- just a predictable uniform public utterance to discourage dissonant thinking and remind everyone that the right people are still in charge.   

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Why the Left Hates Guns

                                                            

“President Obama says the biggest frustration of his tenure is the lack of new gun control laws.”

                              USA Today, July 24^th, 2015

Unlike most of the President Obama’s declarations – “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”, for example – this one, above, was true.  You could believe him for once. Obama always hated guns and if it had been in his power he would have confiscated every firearm in the country down to the last BB gun, except for those carried by the Secret Service detail that continues to protect him and his family.

Obama is a man of the left and the left hates guns more than almost anything else they remotely associate with the despised right, more than gas guzzlers, home school families, coal companies, confederate flags or pro-life protestors. Just the mention of the NRA will trigger spasms of fury and outpourings of disgust from a leftist. The NRA for them is evil incarnate. No other organization is likely more detested.

What is it about guns that make people on the left hate them so much and harbor so much contempt for those people – not so much the criminals who use them, but the ordinary, law-abiding people who insist on owning them?

Begin with the basics:  a gun is an amazing instrument of power. A ninety pound woman physically confronted by a two hundred pound man with a BMI of 25 has little power to resist his assault or aggression.  A gun in her hand completely changes the power equation.  Sans gun by virtue of his superior size and relative strength, the man can seriously injure or even kill the woman.  It happens. With the gun she can easily kill him if he attempts to harm her. This does not happen often enough. The right person in this scenario takes the ride to the morgue. His advantage-conveying, extra 110 pounds and bigger bones and muscles are nullified by the discharge from her 25 ounce Ruger.

Guns enforce power-relations which is why police and soldiers carry them. Guns also can change power-relations which is why so many people want them both for reasons legitimate and some not so much. The left wants to take away guns (primarily those of the “bitter clingers”) so as to render them powerless.

The left would love to confiscate all the guns in this country claiming that it would end gun violence. This is idiotic on the face of it. Criminalize the possession of something in high demand and relatively easy to produce and you will see a dramatic spike in its price because of the seller’s criminal risk. High prices attract high-risk entrepreneurs (aggressive young men usually) into the marketplace who form powerful, sophisticated crime syndicates that are (a) very competitive and hence extremely violent and (b) cater successfully to vast markets for their illegal product. The massive infusion of drugs into the U.S. with the accompanying violence dramatically illustrates how the unintended consequences of firearm confiscation, if attempted, would unfold.  Government confiscation of guns would drastically increase (criminalized) gun ownership and vastly increase gun violence, not to mention the exhaustion of law enforcement resources and the complete political alienation of large numbers of American citizens. 

The loathing of the left for guns in part comes from their jealousy of power. Guns are highly-charged symbols as well as practical instruments of power, and power, they believe, belongs exclusively to them. This is not just about what guns can do.  It is about what they symbolize – individualism, independence and self-sufficiency – for the collectivist, regulation-loving, control-obsessed left, anathemas.  

The thinking on the left goes something like this: because we are compassionate, smart, right-thinking and destined by the progressive march of history to eradicate – pick your evil – racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, global warming, we and we alone deserve power.  If not us, who?  And, whatever we must do to get it and keep it is fine because above all else we are well-intentioned and virtuous and if we are not in charge, then it’s, well, “the other”, the corrupt and morally benighted people who oppose us  – racist, bigoted, greedy, stupid, indifferent to the plight of the poor and unfortunate.  Leftists neither practice nor believe in loyal opposition: for the opposition they have only contempt.

Gun ownership confers power and thus just the suggestion that people might legitimately arm themselves constitutes an encroachment on the left’s perceived prerogative and arouses their jealousy and outrage.  People, they groan, do not neeeeeed guns! They know what people need and don’t need and are clearly annoyed that the unenlightened rubes who live outside of the civilized regions of Manhattan, San Francisco, Washington, DC and Madison, Wisconsin cannot grasp this obvious truth.  

Self-defense, they sneeringly dismiss as a legitimate reason to own a gun – that is what the State is for.  Try not to choke on the hypocrisy.  They are protected 24x7 by armed secret service personnel (Obama and his family) or live in safe, posh suburbs with expensive, sophisticated security systems and reliable, predicable police protection. But for those “folks” for whom they have so much compassion and about whom they know so little, those folks who have to worry about the muggers, rapists, wife-batterers, drug peddlers and strung out junkies who populate their neighborhoods? Well, they are supposed to cherish how virtuous they will feel without those awful guns they don’t need and hope a cop might show up before someone in the family gets raped or murdered. We all know that there are large sections of some of the cities in the U.S. (governed by anti-gun Democrat politicians) where the police reluctantly go. The State is quite selective in the protection it provides for its citizens. The “State” for the “ruled-over” is a useless abstraction and the pervasive cynicism and skepticism now aimed at those who operate it are completely justified.  These “public servants” enjoy all of the perks of their offices that the rest of us only envy. (“Last Friday, [Hillary] Clinton flew to Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where the stylist at the salon gives $600 haircuts. The department store was locked down for her.” http://thehill.com/opinion/ab-stoddard/249734-ab-stoddard-clinton-must-be-joking) Our political class betters make onerous rules for their inferiors to live under, but not for themselves. At election time these vultures descend from their comfortable, lofty perches to perform tedious rituals of pretending to care when what they really want is just more power and the advantages and privileges that come with it.

The animosity of the left for guns is also about the special kind of snobbery they indulge that relates to the work they do and the way they live. They tend to work in the realm of ideas and at activities intended to influence the thinking and actions of others.  They teach in schools and universities, run media outlets and newspapers, manage and administer organizations, market and sell products, process paper in government offices. Some of them are “grievance specialists” at universities and other organizations, professional busybodies and scolds who operate under the rubric of “diversity”, a code word that permits them to hector and bully whomever they please. These types don’t change the oil in their own cars, fix things they own when they break down, make or grow anything they use or consume.  They pay “other people” to do things like this, and they mostly look down on them.  These “other people” tend to like guns. They live and think conservatively and work at jobs such as policemen, firemen, mechanics, truck drivers, construction workers and run small businesses. They hunt, fish, bowl, fix their own cars, go to church, take care of their grandparents, join the military and do many other things that offend the sensibilities of the left.  For the Prius-driving, inequality-obsessed Sociology professor who campaigned for Obama, the gun-toting policeman he loathes and execrates in his 101 classes could not respond quickly enough to his summons when he thinks a burglar might be near.    

The left will never relinquish their hostility toward gun owners and never abandon their efforts at gun control.  “Gun control” is a euphemism, an essential piece of the larger picture that defines the essence of the left and what they aspire to, complete control of others. Because they believe themselves to be uniquely entitled to order and manage the lives of everybody, they observe no restraints of honesty or fair play. Be assured, they will relentlessly intrude themselves into every corner of our lives so as to make the rest of us into what they think we should be, pale, inferior imitations of themselves.  Guns are a huge obstacle to this goal. Viva the cold dead fingers!