It Is the Gods Who Are Crazy

How many more innocent lives must be sacrificed before people realize that?

By guest contributor TJ Martinell.

Years ago I wrote a dystopian short story called “Ward 387” depicting a world that has become so unhinged that people pay to live in asylums that, rather than housing the crazy, allow normal people a break from the insanity.

I thought back to that story when I read about the recent mass shooting in Wisconsin. The details are still coming in, and obviously I don’t want to rush to judgment on the important facts; but what we do know is that the shooting was committed at a private school by a girl, who committed suicide after.

Those two pieces of information should leave anyone with children worried moving forward. School shootings have mostly occurred at state-run education centers, and shootings at private institutions, like Seattle Pacific University, were mostly carried out by nonstudents.

There are numerous implications for this. One is that parents can no longer view a private school as a safe place to have their children educated. Another is that we could see a rise in female shooters (again, depending on the facts surrounding the shooting).

While I am hesitant to form an opinion on what motivated the shooter, I can’t help but wonder what all of this must mean. Why did this happen?

One thing that gun control proponents always miss when it comes to mass shooters is that there are two things that must be present for it to occur: motive and opportunity. Access to firearms, legal or not, provides a piece of that opportunity, but without motive it doesn’t happen.

Yet, motives are a separate thing from causes. What is causing young people to show up at their schools with guns and kill their peers and teachers?

I don’t presume to have an answer for this latest shooting. But it serves as a good opportunity for exploring why we have such things occur, compared to eras when high schools had rifle clubs and kids openly had full gun racks on their pickup trucks in the parking lot.

My theory is that, like in “Ward 387,” society has become an open madhouse that drives the young mentally ill, particularly within the education system, where suicide rates for students go up during the school year and down during summer.

It’s worth examining more closely. Everything about our modern world is unnatural or based on postmodern shibboleths, and this applies more so with children and K-12 than anyone else. The natural order of things is for children to spend most of their childhood with their parents, siblings, and extended family.

Instead, many of them spend their earliest years surrounded by strangers their age and older strangers rearing them in a culturally void environment, with their parents acting as partial custodians. Their extended family performs a ceremonial role at major holiday dinners, if that.

Although a child is handled by many people, no one knows who exactly is responsible for failure if that child is not raised properly, nor can anyone define what being properly “raised” means.

Rather than given the freedom to roam and explore as they did in decades and centuries before, they are forced to sit at desks in a perpetual state of submission in practically every aspect of their lives, continually told what to do and not allowed to make independent decisions. It’s not just that their actions are controlled, but they are confined to buildings that more and more resemble prisons.

In the natural order of things, boys would spend most of their time around other boys under the supervision of older men, and the same for girls. Now, you have them spending time in sex-integrated spaces controlled by females, many of whom are childless and see the students as blank slates onto which they can project a personal or political ideology or agenda.

In the natural order of things, boys and girls would be raised by the parents and family with the ultimate purpose that when they become adults they marry, have children, and engage in an honest trade or profession. They would be given more and more responsibilities and autonomy as they age until they reach adulthood and are expected to function independently.

Now, they are kept in a perpetual state of adolescence not only by educators but by their own parents, who deny them responsibilities or the authority appropriate for their age and intelligence. Childbirth is seen either as a parasitic event to be avoided at all costs, or one in which the parents are acting as sperm and egg donors for the State which cannot bear offspring but holds claim to that of those whom its rules. For such parents, their duty is simply to procreate; the education system actually raises their progeny.

Our legal framework regarding the age of consent for everything from sex and smoking to drinking and killing foreigners in their native lands for Uncle Sam is an inconsistent mishmash due to competing agendas and ideologies.

In the natural order of things, boys would be taught by men how to be masculine, and girls by women how to be feminine. Now, you have an androgynous Cthulhu-like behemoth system birthed from the Longhouse that eradicates any meaningful difference between the sexes in all strata of society starting at the earliest of ages. There is no social or cultural consensus on how men and women should behave, and no institution offers any moral guidance on the matter, lest they run afoul of that Cthulhu’s ever-watchful gaze.

We have children raised for years without a higher meaning or purpose, without a genuine sense of belonging or connection to their heritage or lineage. They are readied for a life where their only value is measured by how much GDP they can produce or wealth they can accumulate amid a social hierarchy in which a hodgepodge of bickering tribes feud over who can claim the highest form of victimhood.

And we haven’t even talked about prescription drugs yet.

I could go into how social media and the Internet radicalize the young as well, but let’s be honest. If the things above did not occur and children were being properly raised, I highly doubt that they would be susceptible to indoctrination into violent behavior. I would speculate that the young go online to find explanations for the things they see wrong within the real world, not the other way around.

These are all changes that have taken place since the era when these shootings did not occur. If challenged, few would defend these practices on the basis that they’re best for the child.

Again, this is not to assign a cause or explanation to what just happened in Wisconsin, but until there is reflection on how children are raised today, it is reasonable to expect more incidents like it to occur.

If so, the only question is: How many innocent lives must be sacrificed on that altar before people realize that it is the gods they serve that are crazy?