It wasn’t from Sarah Palin; it wasn’t from anyone on the right. It wasn’t from anyone on the left, either. No one person’s statement or acts made Loughner what he is. So, where did he come from? Marybeth Hicks over at Catholic Exchange explains:
…So far, only the Rev. Franklin Graham’s statement about the Arizona shootings suggests the cultural connection to the dark and disturbing persona that has emerged in Mr. Loughner‘s profile: “What frightens me is that our country has accepted murder, violence and rape as entertainment, which we see portrayed every day on TV, movies and video games … . If we as a nation are not careful, we could see the destruction of the foundation this nation was built upon.”
I can’t help but wonder if Jared Loughner may have grown into a deranged killer thanks, in part, to a popular culture that feeds not on vitriolic political speech, but on a fascination with death, violence and evil. High school friends say Mr. Loughner seemed relatively normal until his teen years, when one friend says he started to obsessively play video games, listen to music on his headphones and generally isolate himself. Others also recount that his headphones were fixtures in his ears…
Does this mean that everyone who plays video games and isolates himself with head phones will become a crazed killer? No; but a lot of people who do just that will become ever more evil as time goes on.
Sin works like that – it works to isolate the individual and throw him back upon himself. Cut off from God, a person who falls further in to sin eventually is also cut off from people, too. Just out there, spinning in a void, growing more desperate, despairing and self-centered by the minute until the whole world seems a conspiracy against the individual. Step by step, Loughner took that path – just as, step by step, so many others have…and in today’s age, it is easier than it has ever been. Our modern communications, paradoxically, allow us to isolate ourselves better than ever…and feed ourselves on images and sounds which drown out any sense of decency.
Curiously enough, Loughner is probably more sane and reasonable at this moment than he’s been in months, and perhaps years. While being interrogated, probed and prodded by police and psychologists, he’s having more human contact and thus having to adjust himself to the reality that other people live in the world. It is to be hoped that it will all wake him from his delusion so that before he faces the executioner he’ll see and understand his own evil, and beg forgiveness for it. But, that is not something we, on the outside of his life, can do much about. We can, however, take the real lesson from this tragedy.
We can’t live in a sewer and expect to be clean. We can’t, that is, have healthy minds and bodies if all we do, day by day, encourages diseased minds and weak bodies. While this will anger our liberals, the fact of the matter is that liberalism does bear a great deal of responsibility. Not for Loughner’s particular actions – all of us must bear responsibility for the things we do – but for convincing us, as a society, to throw over traditional morality and become tolerant of ever more brazen outrages.
Anger! I can feel it rising in liberal breasts as they read that. So be it. It was liberals who said that easy access to pornography is harmless. It is liberals who said that we can’t in any way, shape or form censor the glorification of crude sexuality and violence in popular culture. It was liberals who told us that the more garbage we allowed to be flouted in public the better we’d be – that if we did this, we’d lose all our hang-ups and become more relaxed, tolerant people. Well, we did just as liberalism instructed and look where it got us.
We must beat back the pollution in our society. We must become, once again, a nation which is truly horrified at rapes, murders and robberies. I defy anyone out there to tell me they were really shocked at what happened in Arizona. After scores of such incidents in the past 20 years, we’re all desensitized…it is routine; it is what we expect to happen. But now it is time to stand up and say, “no”. We must say no to those who insist that not only should we allow the current level of filth, but we must allow even more to be poured in. This is not a demand to draw a line in the sand, but a demand that we push the line back.
Or, we can just make noises about being outraged at this incident, do nothing and just wait for the next pile of corpses as we watch our civilization die. I asked my wife last night just what was it that I, a Christian man, had ever done to protect even one child from turning in to a Loughner? Not a thing – but, not any longer. Now I stand and fight.
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