John Hawkins has an excellent piece today at Townhall.com entitled
Your Screwed Up Life is Your Own Responsibility, He begins by quoting P.J. O'Rourke and Thomas Sowell:
“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.” — P.J. O’Rourke
“We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did,but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.” – Thomas Sowell
The quote from Thomas Sowell perhaps sums it up best for a lot of people who feel that their hard work, living by the rules is punished by a society that seems to elevate sloth and irresponsible behavior to some form of secular sainthood. I have said before elsewhere, that Michael Brown's death was the result of Michael Brown's actions. If he had been driving too fast, and run his car into a tree and died, his family would still be grieving, but they would have had no one else to blame. But because a police officer killed him instead, they blame the police officer, the town of Ferguson, and ultimately every white person living in the United States. Note that the police do not shoot to kill, but to stop the attack. Had Michael Brown stopped the attack at any time before the sixth bullet struck him in the head, he would very likely be alive today.
So now Eric Holder says we shouldn't be racially profiling, of profiling on the basis of creed, gender or sexual orientation, or national origin, because profiling is ineffective. Like so much said by this guy, I both disagree and agree with his statement. No, we shouldn't be racially profiling, but certain behaviors that happen to be associated with certain races are sometimes a cause for alarm. If a white person has a shaved head, and tattoos on his neck and other body parts indicating an affinity for NAZI philosophy, would you think that person might be a skin head and dangerous? Of course you would, and rightly so. Similarly, people affiliated with gangs have a certain style of dress, and certain mannerisms that shout "gang" to anyone who sees them. Profiling is not ineffective, and race sometimes plays a part.
Jesus summarized his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, and if you understand these teachings, they are not so much theology as they are practical rules for living responsibly. You have free will, of course, and you can "do as you damn well please," but living that way, constantly applying your own will, makes for a miserable existence, and hurts the people around you as well. If you don't quite understand what Jesus was getting at in the Sermon on the Mount (and I didn't either for a long time,) I suggest you read, and re-read Emmet Fox's little book
The Sermon on the Mount: Keys to Success in Life.
