I was a bit baffled by the panic that the collective nation felt in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. I understand the sadness, but to hear news personalities and politicians so distraught—to see the nation turning on their televisions after work and mashing their faces against the screens wanting to learn more information goes several steps beyond simple grief. There was a fear invoked by the events of December 14th, 2012 where a 20-year-old shooter walked into a school and gunned down over twenty people, mostly kids, before taking his own life, that exceeds rationality and the reason is not what anyone is willing to discuss.
My thoughts about public education have evolved over the last couple of years from something that I previously tolerated as a local nuisance to a national menace of the American psyche. I have learned through my school levy fights that most parents don’t care one iota what their kids are learning in school, or what damage to their social futures that government schools might do to their children over 13 years of elementary school and high school education. Parents simply view public education as a babysitting service while they conduct their busy lives climbing a career ladder hoping that instead of love for their children they can purchase respect with the incomes they’ve earned from their occupations. Some parents do get involved in their children’s education, particularly in sports. However, many of these parents deep down inside hope their children’s participation in extracurricular activities will save money through scholarship earnings when it comes time to pay for college tuition leaving some of the savings that parents toiled over for years free for a nice vacation. The sports participation is not one of love for the child as much as it is hope that their child will land a cherished scholarship. It is rare to see parents in modern America taking an active role in their children’s education because they figure that is the job of the school—and in the back of their minds, the parents reserve the right to blame the school and the teachers for their failures as parents when things go wrong later. That is the essence of modern public education in government schools. The labor unions are happy to exploit this trend to their advantage, and they have. Politicians are happy to exploit the guilt parents feel over their lack of involvement to enrich themselves as social looters. But the real victims have always been the kids who just want parents to love them, teach them, and launch them into a life of their own with some measure of confidence—which they often find completely void.
So I did not feel stunned as others might have when hearing about the Sandy Hook shooting. In fact, due to the social conditions involved on all sides, I am surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. The failure is truly in social collectivism, where parents, kids, and politicians have embedded themselves into each other’s lives like mashed potatoes on a Thanksgiving Day dinner to be consumed by modern society and defecated out as waste products of a life dedicated to serving the collective whole. When it comes to gun violence and the most vulnerable places that they are occurring with the most emotional impact, it is in school settings that they are most rampant. This latest rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the Virginia Tech massacre that claimed 33 lives in 2007. Before that it was the Columbine shooting that was so glorified by the communist leaning Michael Moore film Bowling for Columbine.
The logical conclusion that one could make if they thought clearly on the matter is that if parents wanted their children to be truly safe, and to get a proper education that they would home-school their children instead of sending them to a public school full of unarmed progressive advocates where the children are vulnerable to the collective whims of society. It is in such whims that distorted minds like Adam Lanza can make victims of unarmed children and naive human beings who prefer the peace sign over the barrel of a gun with a continued belief that evil can be legislated out of Earth’s social fabric. People who think in such ways are the real danger to children because they are functioning from a false philosophy that is not driven by logic, but by their own internal selfishness. They do not wish to take the time to raise their own children properly so they send them to public school hoping the government can do it for them—but in so doing, their children are vulnerable to progressive politics, global power grabs, collective identity, and the barbarous malcontents of mental erosion.
My wife and I never left our kids to the fate of public education. My wife was always a stay-at-home mom who drove my kids to school every day and helped them with their homework every night. She also home-schooled them when the school wanted to teach my kids things we didn’t think they should be learning in the fourth grade—such as sex education. Most of what my kids learned they learned with the input of my wife and me spending time with them and taking an active role in their lives which still exists to this day. Many of my kid’s friends they went to school with who had parents who did not take an active role in their child’s lives, are rudderless despots drowning in the oceans of daily living, and that fate was sealed by their parents who used public education to do the job of parenting. We have watched the decline first hand over the last decade and the differences are incredibly obvious.
It is dangerous to place children in large groups unarmed in a school room that only has one door in or out and is guarded by pacifist progressive leaning teachers radicalized by national teachers unions. The policies of progressivism are failing in modern life, and there will be more incidents like the Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre. There will be more because all the sorrow in the world can’t remove evil from the planet. Evil cannot be controlled by more rules and regulation. It cannot be quelled by guidance councilors or even more tax money. Success in every American child requires a parent or mentor who will take direct responsibility for a child with real love and understanding that is rooted in individual responsibility. The collectivism that is taught in modern society will produce many more troubled youth like Adam Lanza and leave millions of children perpetually vulnerable in classrooms all over the country because parents use public education as an extension of day care leaving complacent employees to safe guard the lives of Americas children—which is a recipe for disaster.
If parents really wanted their kids to be safe, they would withdrawal them from public school, teach them at home on a computer with online education within the safety and sanctity of private property guarded by American sovereignty, and one of the spouses would quit their full-time job and become a full-time parent because that’s what it takes. The fear that society felt on the day of the dreadful Sandy Hook Massacre was not because of the victims—it was the realization that a system that most everyone has accepted as “good” is actually a very vulnerable environment that is well out of the control of the parents. That vulnerability has been glazed over while busy parents pursue their individual careers, but the knowledge that a crazed lunatic can walk into any public school known to be full of unarmed—naive human beings is a lucrative target for the mentally anguished like Adam Lanza. The fear that people felt upon hearing the news is that what they believed to be safe is quite the opposite, and if they want to keep their kids out of the grips of deaths embrace, or the many social pressures that lead to small losses of innocence, that the parents will have to take more active roles in their family’s lives. And if I were them, I would take my children out of public school and do the job myself—so that I could ensure safety and success. The grief that people are feeling is not for the unfortunate victims and their families, it is the realization that the responsibility for children cannot be pawned off on a group collective, but are the sole enterprises of a parent and their children, and is best protected with a personal firearm, a solid peace-loving religion, and a thirst for learning that is as free of social degradation as possible.
Rich Hoffman
The Overmanwarrior 