Comment on Prager's "Middle Fingers at the White House"

Why did these activists for gay causes feel they could act this way in the White House, the most prestigious and revered building in America? Aside from contempt for social norms, the reason is that those who see themselves as victims have impaired consciences. Nothing dulls the conscience quite like regarding oneself and/or one's group as victims. The vast majority of violent criminals believe they are victims of society, poverty, racism, etc.; Islamic terrorists see themselves as victims of the West's alleged "war on Islam;" Germans in the 1930s saw themselves as victims of the Versailles Treaty; and in America today, no one sees themselves as victims as much as gay rights activists do. (http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2012/06/26/middle_fingers_at_the_white_house/page/2)

This insight dovetails disturbingly with the growing cult of victimization which reads controversy and dubious morality into the savage beating of an abusive priest, Farther Jerold Lindner, by a long-ago victim, now 45, named William Lynch.

"Victims have impaired consciences" -- indeed!

No matter what we may have suffered, we cannot run around damning others and baring tales about what we have suffered, and therefore transformed our past hurts into passing justification to make war on all whom we perceive as enemies of the aggrieved.

I take into account the current conditions of convicted child molestor Jerry Sandusky, now housed in the state penitentiary under suicide watch, while the rest of the inmates chant the Pink Floyd refrain "Leave them Kids Alone". No matter how vile the actions of the former coach, the staggered and stratified hierarchy of evil created by inmates is an offense in itself. Yet society has engaged in the same perversion, in many cases demonstrating an illicit and troubling attachment to lambasting grievous perversion in the front-page press. These salacious revelations serve not to inform or protec the public, but rather position a newspaper into highlighting heinous behavior, and thus heightening dwindling readership. The accounts of child-rape and aggravated and unmitigated assault against young people should enrage all of us, but to publish these harrowing accounts, in many cases, seems to open the wounded to further victimization, exposing to public purview very private and painful memories, while doing to inform the public on the proper steps to take to protect youth from predation.

The rampant exposure of child abuse in the media stems also from some misplaced catharsis, one in which the reading public can point at one class of individuals and cry out, "There's the bad guy!"

I speak from a Biblical point of view that such finger-pointing serves no one, and in fact stirs up empty ire while enabling another cohort of individuals, victims of child abuse, to keep being aggrieved victims. The tenets of the Judeo-Christian heritage, many religions, indicate that the fallen and frail nature of man has created the essential elements of commonality which united and indict the human condition. Death and the taxation of questions in our life afflicts everyone of us, regardless of or particular sufferings or parochial origins.

The wagging of middle fingers from a gay pride rally at the White House, the waging of class warfare in the Commons under the Occupy banner, the rise in sex abuse as a front page teaser, all of these troubling phenomena are the result of terrible exploitation, the agency  of grievance industries that stir up interest groups to pass racist, thought-crime legislation, to foster the growth of government power to hand out more to those who refuse any responsibility to make do in a fallen, imperfect world. The mentality of "forever aggrieved" has aggrandized "Leftists" like ones whom Prager indicted at the White House's 2012 LGBT pride reception. They have no right to denigrate the 40th president with middle fingers and vulgar language, regardless of the deceased president's stand on controversial issues.

This culture of "anger-as-right" is all wrong, one that even now dominates our public schools, informing students' ethnic identity based on a position of minority exploited by some rich, white, upper-class, Anglo-Saxon power structure. Yet man thinks. and his thoughts inform his emotional reactions, not his circumstances. Yet public education seems more pressed to press our youth to view themselves as victims of something, as opposed to active agents who can receive and release their lives into greater good. Our history books, our science classes, even the reading selections in English books, deny the universal condition of manking, instead reinstating the ethnocentrism which had motivated the Greeks to question the traditions of the surrounding nations, as well as their own. The notion of an educated mind, or an open spirit, was based on one who sought a standard beyond one's prejudices of predilections for the familiar. Allan Bloom lamented this terrible trend in higher education when he wrote "The Closing of the American Mind." Now, this country is witnessing the Closing of the American Fist, in which every person identifies with dependence and entitlement, demanding more from fewer and fewer, threatening the financial and social  stability of this country.