Sense and Sensibility

I want to thank all the readers who answered my opinion poll dealing with the Virginia Tech massacre and the Supreme Court abortion ruling. I’m happy to report that PalosVerdesBlog readers are smarter than your average bears.

On the question about the likely source of the killer’s rage, Cho’s personal evil was the 100% response. The purpose of his acts was to get on television (93%) and he should rot in hell (85%). There was one respondent who could not make up his mind on any question, who saw “complexity and a variety of possible answers.” Of course this is precisely the moral relativism which is plaguing our society. When dealing with questions of right and wrong, good and evil, moral relativists are incapable of making value judgments.

We’ve learned a lot since the tragedy about the killer, Cho Seung-Hui, and about those who tried to deal with him. Cho’s English class examined contemporary horror films and literature, and the students were required to keep what were known as fear journals. “We had a whole discussion on serial killers,” said one student. (This is the crap they are teaching in the humanities at major universities.) Professors saw the images of persecution, revenge and anger in his writings and found themselves struggling to define the line between a legitimate work of self-expression and one of violent or sick imagery that needed to be restrained. Political correctness is going to get us killed.

Eight of his professors, while trying to “balance the freedom needed to be creative against the warning signs of psychosis,” formed a task force to discuss how to handle him. They reached out to university officials but no action was taken by school administrators in response to their concerns.

To me the overlooked story is the heroic act of Professor Liviu Librescu, a 77 year old holocaust survivor who sacrificed his life to save his students in the shooting rampage. When the gunfire got closer to his classroom, Librescu fearlessly braced himself against the door, holding it shut against the gunman in the hall, while students darted to the windows of the second-floor classroom to escape the slaughter. All the students survived. Librescu stayed behind to hold off the crazed gunman. He died to save his students.

“He realized he had to save the students,” said his daughter-in-law Ayala Schmulevich. “That was the kind of man he was.”

I have to wonder what was wrong with the male students in Librescu’s mechanical engineering classroom. In comparison to the twin disasters of feminism, rampant abortion and the decline of the nuclear family, one tends to overlook another tragic outcome, the feminization of America. Manliness, as Prof Harvey Mansfield explained in his book of that title, is on the decline in America. It is telling that the hero of the Virginia Tech tragedy was a member of the Greatest Generation.

The other significant story last week was the Supreme Court upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban passed by congress and signed into law by the president. I think my question about what the Court ruling exhibited confused some folks, since only 50% answered that it showed judicial restraint. The point is that the Court saw no reason to interfere with a duly passed law. The implications for Roe v. Wade are being debated. The ruling expresses respect for the dignity of human life (93%) outlawing a procedure (“intact dilation and extraction”) that is nothing less than a gruesome murder (100%) of a child.

For the feminist’s side of the issue, I turn to Anne Hendershott, professor of sociology at the University of San Diego. “The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about the small, gripping details of how abortion works,” said the professor. “Focusing on such details,” she said, “is how so-called incrementalists are trying to chip away at the availability of abortion.”

I guess the devil is, literally, in the details.