Mau mauing common sense and responsibility = shooting in the streets

Can we start teaching discipline and responsibility in the schools?

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The latest shootings in Madison, WI:

• 10 p.m. Wednesday (03-28-18) in the 3500 block of East Washington Avenue. Victim hit by stray bullet(s), injured.
• Earlier that day at 3:55 p.m. in the 500 block of Northport Drive at the Ridgecrest Apts. Targeted victim injured.
• 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, two groups of three to four men shooting at each other on the 4300 block of Lumley Drive, on the SW side.

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Where are the kids and their protests! Rescind the Second Amendment! Get Cops out of Our Schools, Our of Our Neighborhoods, and Out of Our Banks!

What you want to bet none of these losers made their beds that morning? Or any morning?

Make your bed? That’s the first of Admiral William H. McRaven’s 10 Life Lessons from Basic Seal Training: “Start your day with a task completed; start off by making your bed.”

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

It’s the culture, kids!

That kind of time-tested advice is, today, the smart set decrees, nothing more than a radical-right dog whistle. Blaming the “victim.”

“You should wait until you are older to date,” begins Wendy Wang, who will have none of the values shaming. She writes, in the Wall Street Journal, “Like many Asian parents, my mother stressed the importance of working hard and getting a good education before beginning a family.”

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman have been preaching this message, to ridicule from the Left, for whom the only answer is More Gummint.

Brookings scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill call it “the success sequence”: Get a high school diploma, work, then marry before having children. In that order!

“Why do we fail to convey this message to poor young people?” Ms. Wang asks. Answering her own question, because “Liberals often dismiss [this prescription] as a right-wing notion.”

Dog whistles only liberals can hear

Just look at the trouble Penn Law School professor Amy Wax got into! Prof. Wax co-authored an op ed entitled  “Paying the price for the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.” She discussed the resulting contretemps for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. (Get on their mailing list!)

Thirty-three (or one-half) of her colleagues in the Penn Law school condemned her piece and demanded that students monitor Professor Wax and report evidence of any “stereotyping and biases” to university administrators.

What got their ire? First, her piece took inventory of today’s societal ills.

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. … Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

Quit screwing up your lives (and ours)!

Wax calls it “the cultural script” — a list of behavioral norms “that was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s”:

• Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake
• Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness
• Go the extra mile for your employer or client
• Be a patriot, ready to serve the country
• Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable
• Avoid coarse language in public
• Respect authority
• Eschew substance abuse and crime.

(Blaska would add, Hike up your pants.)

These norms defined a concept of adult responsibility that was, we wrote, “a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.”

The blowback from the perpetually offended Left was immediate and vociferous.

A raft of letters, statements, and petitions from students and professors at my university and elsewhere condemned the piece as racist, white supremacist, hate speech, hetero-patriarchial, xenophobic, etc. There were demands that I be removed from the classroom and from academic committees. None of these demands even purported to address our arguments in any serious or systematic way.  … the charge that a statement is “code” for something else, or a “dog whistle” of some kind … is to silence speech deemed unacceptable. 

Can make steam

A family treasure is a postcard my grandfather J.M. Blaska made in 1906 showing the proud proprietor aboard a hulking black steam engine that he had acquired to run the threshing rigs that harvested oats for horses and barley for brewing. Addressed to the woman he loved, the young man announced that they could now get married, he having procured a means of livelihood.

How quaint. Today, the smart set demands that whatever job you have — if even you have a job — be a family supporting job rather than, maybe (ya think) working yourself up to a family supporting job. If you don’t have a job, that’s society’s fault, right?

Blaska’s Bottom Line: A black delegate to the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans told this scribbler, “poor people have poor ways.” If our schools were allowed to teach Discipline and Responsibility, first, all the rest would follow.