Three news stories neatly show why America is having problems. Each shows a different version of the same problem: faulty thinking.
The first: Bryce Dejean-Jones was fatally shot while breaking into a Dallas-area apartment. So, what was a famous NBA basketball player just at the brink of success doing breaking into someone's apartment? Well, he'd had a fight with a former girlfriend, and apparently thought he was breaking into her apartment. Wrong apartment! Just an honest mistake.
The news is full of his former team mates gushing about the tragic loss. I don't buy it. He got exactly what he deserved. If he'd busted into the right apartment and got shot, would that have been okay? Well, no. But what he actually did was even worse. A locked door means, "Keep out!" Only firemen and military commandos on active duty have the right to break into a locked apartment. Even the police need a search warrant. Anything else is Breaking and Entering, which is a felony. This is not rocket science. Even a famous athlete should be able to figure it out. Being shot by the victim while while in the act of committing a felony against them is not tragic. It's justice.
What's tragic is that there are people who think it's okay for a big, strong man to bust into someone's apartment if they have a disagreement with them, just because they can. That's called, "savagery."
The second news article involves a real savage-- an adult, male gorilla who was dragging around a four year old boy who had crawled into the gorilla exhibit at a zoo. The zoo's Emergency Team had to shoot the gorilla to save the life of the child. Predictably, animal rights nuts are calling this "murder" and demanding the arrest of those responsible. Let's get a few things straight.
1. Murder is the unwarranted killing of one human being by another. No human was killed; it was an animal. An intelligent, human-shaped one, but still an animal. In fact, a wild animal. The gorilla was not shot in anger, hatred, or for a trophy, but because he was endangering a human child in a zoo. If it had been a 400 pound man dragging the child around and endangering it's life, and the SWAT team had shot him, it still wouldn't be murder. The only relevant factor was the danger to the child.
2. The child was not supposed to be in the gorilla exhibit, but had squeezed into the enclosure, attracted by the gorilla, no doubt. In doing so, he had acted exactly like a four year old child. Can't blame him for that! Must be the parents' fault, right? Ever taken a small child to the zoo? Most of the enclosures are there to protect the animals from the people! Zoo designers go to fantastic lengths to make it impossible for people (including four-year-olds) to get into the cages. In the hundred year history of the zoo, no one had ever managed it before! Nope.
Nobody felt good about killing the gorilla. Nobody is blaming the zoo, or the child. It was an accident. But the safety of the child, even a wayward one, trumps all other considerations.
Speaking of Trump, this brings up my third news story. Donald Trump's Presidential campaign is bankrupt. Financially, not just logically. He wants the Republican Party to bankroll him from now until the Convention, even though he recently publicly assured the party, "We have money."
If they buy it, this will be the FIFTH time Donald Trump has used bankruptcy to force someone else to pick up the tab for his mismanagement of his ventures. The other four were business ventures, and some of them are still going through the courts as we write this.
The purpose of our bankruptcy laws is to allow those who inadvertently get in over their heads a chance to pay off their debts as best they can, and have that accepted as "good enough." They were never intended to give billionaires a free ride by saving them from the consequences of their own poor decisions.
Misusing laws like this is properly called "cheating." That's what we call it if a person who is on Welfare "works the system" to make more money than they could expect to get from employment. That's what we call it when a person uses tax "loopholes" they are not entitled to, in order to reduce their tax burden. And that's what it should be called when a candidate outflanks the competition by spending all his campaign money months too early, and then expects the RNC to pick up the tab for months of pre-Convention politicking, because he is "the presumptive Republican nominee."
That is properly called CHEATING. Mr. Trump seems to believe that it's okay if you can get away with it. Here's the logical flaw. Getting away with cheating is not the same as "not cheating." Getting away with lying is not the same as "honesty." Getting away with racism is not the same as "fairness." And not being proven wrong is not the same as being right.
All three of these logical flaws all boil down to the same idea: there IS such a thing as objective reality. Misdirected savagery is not tragic. It's EVIL. Killing an animal that is in the act of injuring a child is not "murder". It's NECESSARY. Getting away with wrong-doing is not innocence. It's CHEATING. Remember the old joke about, "If you call a cow's tail a leg, how many legs does a cow have?" The answer is, "FOUR, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg."
No comments:
Post a Comment