By Edwin Cooney
At least two of those who responded to last week’s column (in which I challenged the wisdom of Florida’s concealed weapons law) wondered when I became sympathetic to the plight of criminals rather than to the plight of the victims of crime.
I’m not aware of being in the slightest sympathetic to the plight of criminals any more than I’m sympathetic to the goals and mores of Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden. However, my insistence that there may be a flaw in our response to criminality caused at least two readers to suspect that perhaps Jesse James or Al Capone must be among my ancestors!!!
What I am increasingly aware of, however, is how a lifetime of experiences and observations can change one’s outlook on issues that one had made conclusions about many years ago.
At one time I saw murder as immoral, but I didn’t see state or nationally authorized killing (aka “war”) as immoral because I didn’t believe that democratically elected authority could be immoral. I once saw capital punishment and war as sad but necessary realities for our personal protection. I’ve come to believe that we seldom have to kill to protect ourselves. However, when that becomes necessary, it’s usually because we didn’t take a preventive measure before things became dangerous. Remember Winston Churchill’s observation that even as late as 1935, World War II could have been prevented without the firing of a single shot (Churchill’s Sinews of Peace speech on March 6th, 1946 in Fulton, Missouri).
Even more, I once saw reality as absolute truth rather than as situational or circumstantial truth. Unsettling as it is, I’ve come to realize that every situation possesses its own reality and that reality is often, although not always, amoral.
At one time I was sure that every sane person understood the relationship between cause and effect. However, after years of parenting, riding in cars as a passenger with both good and bad drivers, and studying history, I’m not sure any of us really grasps cause and effect when our need for gratification or justification gets in the way.
Call me a relativist if you must, but it has been my experience that those things that are most true are circumstantial. Try these “truisms” on for size and see how they fit:
1) People don’t realize the crushing dehumanization of being a victim until they’re victimized!
2) Most people don’t understand the forces of criminality until they commit a crime or are accused of one.
3) Most people avoid those who live with disability unless they bear a disabled child or become disabled themselves.
4) Even with its numerous virtues, democracy has no monopoly on morality.
5) Taxpayers have no monopoly on righteousness.
6) Truth doesn’t belong exclusively to good people.
7) Human principles are the keys to both morality and immorality.
8) True righteousness has more to do with love than it does with judgment.
9) As our “Creator,” God blesses others as much as God blesses America.
10) Finally, anyone who thinks he’s just composed ten absolute truths is absolutely full of himself!
Even more unsettling is what happens when truth is obscured by myth. This is what President John F. Kennedy had to say on that subject during a June 1962 Commencement Address to the graduating class of Yale University.
“As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of the truth is—very often—not the lie: deliberate; contrived; and dishonest; but the myth: persistent; persuasive; and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion rather than the discomfort of thought. Mythology distracts us everywhere.”
Unlike those of us who call ourselves “columnists,” presidents come face to face every day with reality. Ah, but it’s a very special kind of reality, isn’t it?
It’s called “political reality!”
I may miss my guess, but I’m betting that most of you see little that’s true or real about politics!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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