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Monday, January 28, 2019

An Occasion of Sin

There are a lot about, especially in the media. And boy do people rise to the occasions they find. So, to continue where I left off, with the Covington Catholic High School lad, we need to look carefully to see just where people can go wrong. And by 'wrong' I mean Sin. And by 'people' I count m'self in with you and the rabble, far left, alt-right and centre.
But first .. Put the stones down and step away from the fake news purveyors.


The left especially have a pronounced hypocricy, but don't think  that the ordinary folk do not. The lefties were as quick to condemn one high school lad as they were to rush to condemn anyone who tried to question another high school lad. 

Conservatives have a similar, albeit less noticeable propensity to hypocricy too.

And what did the lad do? He 'smirked', apparantly, although to me he seemed to be smiling a tad nervously. For that, the stones started flying. 

THIS is a SMIRK

The tweets, and other social media 'messages' wanted blood and guts, often literally.  They did not stop to think, nor gather facts. 


That is what we expect of journalists, but guess what?  They didn't wait, think nor collect facts either.

But, let us back up a bit for those who have not caught up let alone risen to the occasions. The hopefully sinless .... in this instance.  Christopher DeGroot gave some background before Anthony Esolen brought the message home about OUR sins.

Christopher focused on those that should know better.
Conservative Moral Prostitutes
People need enemies and scapegoats. People need someone or something to hate. For there is meaning and vitality in hating. There is, above all, unity, especially in politics, defined as it is by conflicts and group interests.
OK. Some people. Perhaps most. 
We learned this dark lesson this week.
We saw the usual conservative moral prostitutes rush to condemn a group of innocent young Christian men. Students at Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky, they attended a pro-life rally at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. last Saturday. Also present was a group of Native Americans, for like everyone these days, they too have grievances to express and rights to affirm. 
At one point a man named Nathan Phillips decided to walk up to Nick Sandmann, a member of the pro-life group, and bang a drum and sing in his face. 
Phillips is 64. Sandmann is 16. But Phillips’ behavior would have been extremely stupid even if he weren’t much older than the teenager. 
What was the meaning of the drumming and singing? What was it supposed to accomplish? 
Did Sandmann, as a young white man wearing a MAGA hat at a pro-life rally, embody such evils as Phillips sees fit to protest?
The answer, of course, is no. 
Yet as Jonathan Swift said, man is not a rational animal, but an animal that is capable of rationality. 
So it happened that many people, upon seeing brief footage of a white teenager smiling at an old Native American man while a group of boys, also wearing MAGA hats, looked on from behind the two men, assumed Sandmann and his schoolmates were looking for trouble. 
In their white privilege, they chose to pick on and ridicule Phillips, who, having dark skin, was oppressed by definition.
More detailed footage soon revealed all this to be nonsense. 
The boys, indeed, had done nothing wrong, and it was Phillips who was the agitator, though the plainly idiotic and dishonest man has put a benevolent-sounding spin on his conduct. (We also know now that Phillips is not, as he had claimed to be, a Vietnam veteran.) 
Sandmann and the other boys have been objects of hatred in both the media and on social media. 
Some have received death threats. And with that reflexive gutlessness that marks Christianity in our time, their school issued an apology. So did the Diocese of Covington.
It has been quite revealing to see how much hatred there is for white people in America, and what little it takes for it to come forth. 
Events, however, are essentially occasions for the assertion and expression of human character. 
Thus, if you know what people value and believe, you can have a pretty good sense of how they will perceive and judge phenomena in general. It is remarkable how predictable people are in this respect.
Christopher drew parallels with the Kavanagh hearings where similar wild lies were told to discredit the man (I abridged for brevity - follow the link) and mentions an example of what a journal wickedly threw at this lad: 
Hence the 'National Review' article “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross,” written by Nicholas Frankovich and published at 2:55 a.m. on Sunday at the magazine’s website. 
The Covington boys, according to Frankovich, “mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. ‘Bullying’ is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here.”
Remember, he is talking about a smiling boy, otherwise silent, with a drum banging in his face by a man who is shown subsequently to be a damnable liar. 
His hysterical enthusiasm increasing, Frankovich continues: 
For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.
Unhappily, Frankovich failed to work in a Hitler reference for his fellow good team members.
National Review silently removed Frankovich’s article on the same day it was published. Then, with shameless hypocrisy, the magazine began publishing articles taking the media to task for its coverage of the Covington boys. 
To his credit, Frankovich has apologized for his atrocious article. But his destructive moralizing is just one instance of a general practice on the right. 
A quick look around on google, twitter, facebook and other social media will show the most disgusting, violent and obscene messages about and directed to this lad.  Mainly, I have to say, from the Left. 

We can point a finger, at Frankovich amongst many others but before we pick up the stones (which to my mind he richly desereves at least a few), let us hear from Anthony.  

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest books are Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. He directs the Center for the Restoration of Catholic Culture at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts.
The Greater Sins in the Covington Incident
I dislike speaking about failure and sin, and dearly wish that the leaders of my Church would give me less occasion to do so.
Everyone by now has heard about what happened to boys from Covington Catholic High School.  They were at the Lincoln Memorial, waiting for the bus home to Kentucky.  
They were in Washington, of course, to protest the murder of unborn children.  
In other words, unlike almost everybody else who goes to Washington to protest, they were there not to campaign, not to condemn a political party, and not to demand something for themselves, but to protect human lives that are now vulnerable to destruction.  Some of them were wearing a Make America Great Again cap.
Then they were harassed, in the vilest terms, by members of what appears to be a lunatic group, the “African Israelites.”  They did not respond in kind.  
They began to chant school chants, to drown out the insults.  At that point another protest group came into the picture.  They yelled at the boys too, telling them to go back to Europe.  This one was led by an American Indian (I too am native; I was born in the United States), beating a drum, within inches of the face of a boy he had apparently targeted.  The boy, nonplussed, held his ground and smiled a frozen smile.
Let us enumerate the sins that followed.  
The Diocese of Covington, along with many another organization and person, leapt to condemn the boy in harsh terms.  They did so without knowing what happened.  After all, they were not there.
This is called PREJUDICE, or RASH JUDGMENT.  You have the tree and the noose ready, and you say so publicly, before you know a thing.  
What prompts the sin of PREJUDICE?  A variety of things, in this case.  One was race hatred: many people leapt to judgment because the accused were white 
One was our endemic contempt for boys.  One was political faction: people who do not believe as I believe about X – fill in the blank – are not simply mistaken, short-sighted, ignorant, or simply possessed of a different judgment about what is possible or advisable for the common good.  They are wicked.
That was shortly followed by VINDICTIVENESS.  People called for the boy to be expelled, and they were glad to subject him, his family, and his school to national disgrace.  The glee of vengeance causes people to lose all sense of proportion, and to forget their sins.
Unless I am much mistaken, this is not a land of saints.  To be rude to an old man is bad, even when the old man is behaving in a disgraceful way.  Place the worst construction upon the boy’s action.  Each of us has done plenty of things that are a hundred times more wicked, vile, and destructive than is that sin in question.  If the boy deserved expulsion for that, we should all deserve, for our worst sins, protracted torments followed by slow hanging.  The very call for a wildly disproportionate and ruthless punishment was such a sin.
But, of course, the lad has simply stood silently, smiling. 
A lot of people began to have second thoughts.  Others roamed over the Internet to find something, anything, that would cast the school in a bad light.  Some said that the boy did not himself write his sometimes ungrammatical apologia, explaining what happened.  They had, of course, no evidence for their accusation.
This was the sin of CALUMNY.  By this time, people knew quite well that the boys had not sought out any confrontation, and that they had been already abused by grown men aplenty.
To abuse the weak – children, women, youths – is at least a sin of COWARDICE, and to call them “faggots” and “incest kids” compounded the abuse with the sin of OBSCENITY.  To withhold the truth about the context of the incident, truth that would mitigate any guilt, or exonerate entirely, is to commit the sin of DETRACTION.
The Indian with the drum and his group showed up at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception the next evening, attempting to disrupt the Mass.  This was a sin of SACRILEGE, against the holy place and the worship of innocent people; in the context of what they had already done, it was the sin of CONTUMACY, and of SOWING DISCORD.
The school had to remain closed the following Monday, and the boy and his family have received plenty of threats of violence and death.  I have seen some of these.  Incitement to a felony crime is nothing for police to take lightly.  These are, at the least, sins of MALICE, not of intemperance; sins committed not in the heat of a situation that has come upon you suddenly, but in the cold; deliberate, calculated, intentional.
At the worst, they are sins of VIOLENCE, and of vicarious participation in the evil that is wished, if someone should be so mad or so wicked as to burn or kill.
I am not calling for the prejudicial, the contumacious, the cowardly, the deceitful, the vindictive, the factious, the malicious, and the violent to be strung up.  
The point is that, surrounding these boys and taking their words and actions in the worst way they can reasonably be taken, are crowds of people committing the sins I have named, sins that are many orders of magnitude more miserable.
That people can commit them and not be aware of the trap they have set for their own feet is simply astonishing to me. 
 I do not understand it.  I’m not a saint.  I daresay they are not saints, either.  
But they think they are.
They must think they are, because nobody, knowing that he is steeped in moral sewage from head to toe, would rave and rage at the filth on his neighbor’s shoe.  It would be worse than nonsensical.  It would be like begging for the vengeance of God to come down upon you.
Amongst the vile people denouncing the boy and calling for his punishment was the local Archbishop. A man who should have been aware of the mud and filth. 

His 'deeds' were Sinful.

From those given great position, powers and gifts, much more is expected. From Headmasters too.  

The behaviours of many all around this event were appalling

Whilst we may have to wait for Judgement from my Supplier at some later date, the 'society' we live in has its own means. The Law.

The boy's father has hired 'counsel' to pursue those that lied, threatened, calumnised, etc.
Covington Student Nick Sandmann Hires Prominent Libel Attorney
The family of Nick Sandmann, the teenager in the middle of the now-notorious encounter between a Native American man and several high school students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, has hired a prominent libel attorney.
The family hired Atlanta-based lawyer L. Lin Wood on Thursday, family attorney Todd McMurtry confirmed.  
Wood has been called a “smooth-talking Southern attorney” that has “carved out a successful career representing the high-profile and falsely accused,” according to The Washington Post in 2011.
Wood represented former Republican presidential nominee Herman Cain after his campaign was derailed by sexual harassment claims, and also represented the family of JonBenet Ramsey, who were suspected in the murder of the child pageant queen.
Wood “is committed to bringing justice to 16-year-old Nick Sandmann and his family.” 
'Tis pity Denny Crane isn't real and available. He would frighten ten shades of greenback out of the hundreds whose arses he would haul into Court. 

It is going to be necessary to send a very hard message to anyone so willing to try to destroy with lies and threats.

Meanwhile, I thanked the gentlemen for their views and pulled pints all around.

Now, lest anyone think (uncharitably) that I take a 'holier than Thou' attitude here, none of the vile people involved traspassed against me, so I am in no position to offer forgiveness.  (Trolls have aimed at me in the past and I forgave them - keeping them outside the hedge lest there be more 'occasions of sin'.)

Those that apologise to young Nick may seek his forgiveness. But their souls -psyches are severely damaged. Perhaps out of ignorance or from 'possession' There are many out there - most of us? - who are subject to the attention of demons.

Pray for them.

I too may have some things to report in Confession. The Archbishop may need time with his Confessor as well.

Pray for me.

How about you?

Drink up.

Pax.














9 comments:

  1. More bait? Ok, I'll take it - and the risks here:) But I'm not going to say what you think. I'm going to say that of course your version starring the poor little innocent white boy who simply smiled at the 'mean ole injun' isn't what happened either, it leaves much out of the story too - and I think you know that - just as press does;) Conscious deception is sin too, right?

    There were no victims in that situation - everyone made poor choices they need to take responsibility for - but if we HAD to pick one, the closest was Nathan, if you saw the full timeline of videos chronologically.

    But do we always have to have a victim?

    Rhetorical.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We shall all answer for our failings one day. I shall not rise to this occasion of sin you present. But you better watch out for Denny.

      Delete
  2. I'm not sure what Denny the fantasy TV lawyer has to do with me, Denny isn't real and even if he were, I would have nothing to worry about as I have truth and evidence on my side. And sometimes high-priced lawyers like Denny like to win cases despite truth and fact, too. But the truth will not be suppressed forever. I'm not at all worried about Dennys, though,like you, I'm worried about my maker's opinion. But I'm taking your comment to mean I'm no longer welcome, then, after all?

    Strange goings on here as of late. And still I will wish you, and any false accusers about, God's blessings as Christ commanded. But I will not, however, not stand in the way of consequences of their actions or justice, either.

    Peace be with you

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nothing in my comment said you were not welcome. Just be nice.

      Delete
  3. My apologies if you receive this twice, I wasn't sure it took.

    I'm not sure what Denny the fantasy TV lawyer has to do with me, Denny isn't real, and even if he were, I'd have nothing to worry about, I have truth and evidence on my side. But sometimes high-priced lawyers like Denny like to win cases despite truth, too. But the truth will not be suppressed forever :)

    But I'm taking your comment to mean I'm no line welcome?

    Strange goings on here, as of late. And still, I wish you, and any false accusers that have been about, God's blessings as Christ commanded. But I will not, however, stand in the way of consequences for their own actions or justice, either

    Peace be with you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What I neglected to mention is that I know 2 parents from CCHS. Note not all are wearing Trump hats. Not because they didn't vote for Trump, too, but because they didn't care for the March for Life getting hijacked into a Trump advertisement, nor school staff allowing/encouraging it.

    Additionally, 25% of Native Americans are Catholic and even their native religions usually shun abortion and infanticide.

    These are things you know by actually living in the community rather than trusting press from either side or viewing videos through politically biased lenses and missing important details on them. And there's more background on all the players in this game that isn't pretty, which is why I say there are no victims and the best thing we can teach Nick is we all take responsibility for our own actions. I thought that was a mature and fair assessment, I'm sorry you don't find it 'nice'

    Otherwise, I won't be returning regardless of your meaning earlier, see my note to you on my earlier post today as to why. And yet the blessing wish stands

    ReplyDelete
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Ne meias in stragulo aut pueros circummittam.

Our Bouncer is a gentleman of muscle and guile. His patience has limits. He will check you at the door.

The Tavern gets rowdy visitors from time to time. Some are brain dead and some soul dead. They attack customers and the bar staff and piss on the carpets. Those people will not be allowed in anymore. So... Be Nice..