07/14/2013
Overall, I must say, I’m at one with my TakiMag colleague Kathy Shaidle on the Zimmerman trial and its extramural manifestations:
I feel about the Zimmerman/Trayvon case the way I’ve felt about life since about 5 minutes into my first day at nursery school:Holy shit: Everyone here is an idiot.
I did work up some indignation about the “wannabe cop” meme, though. As I said in this weekend’s Radio Derb:
Second sidebar point: The steady stream of sneering about Zimmerman as a, quote, “wannnabe cop.” What’s the point there? My neighborhood has a volunteer ambulance service, who have saved many lives. If I join them and go through the first aid training, does that make me a “wannabe doctor”? If it does, what’s wrong with that?
Plenty of public-spirited citizens would like to be cops (or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers) but can’t meet the standards for fitness or smarts, or perhaps just already have full-time careers they’d rather not abandon. Why shouldn’t they have some lesser role to play in their communities? Is every social function to be left to fully-credentialed experts with years of training?
The paradox here is that the Cultural Marxists who incited this prosecution, when the credentialed experts were telling them there was no probable cause (oh, by the way: does Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee get his job back now, having been proven right all along?), are also the people who fondle the word “community” with such loving care, and stick it in the names of all their organizations.
As I also observed in this weekend’s RD broadcast, regarding the Justice Department’s helping organize early rallies to demand a prosecution:
The actual Justice Department unit stirring the pot is one called the Community Relations Service. Nobody, including me, had ever heard of this outfit before Wednesday; but I was confirmed in my longstanding opinion that any organization with the word “Community” in its name is a willing tool of the street-fighting fascist Left.
One consequence of this trial that can reasonably be anticipated is that citizens will now be much more reluctant to engage in voluntary activities on behalf of their communities.
The timing is bad here. As state and municipal budgets come under ever greater strain, we’ll be wanting more wannabe cops, not fewer.
Fewer is surely what we’ll get, though. Help out my community by doing Neighborhood Watch work? No way! Safer to stay home and do TV Watch.
In certain countries of Europe the natives consider themselves as a kind of settlers, indifferent to the fate of the spot upon which they live. The … citizen is unconcerned as to the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or of the parsonage; for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself, and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the Government. He has only a life-interest in these possessions, and he entertains no notions of ownership or of improvement. This want of interest in his own affairs goes so far that, if his own safety or that of his children is endangered, instead of trying to avert the peril, he will fold his arms, and wait till the nation comes to his assistance … When a nation has arrived at this state it must either change its customs and its laws or perish: the source of public virtue is dry, and, though it may contain subjects, the race of citizens is extinct.— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter V.
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