Delusional And Dangerous
link Restaurant with No Weapons, No Concealed Firearms Sign Robbed at Gunpoint.
It sure is crummy when a good plan goes awry. Sure, it makes sense to some; simply post a prohibition against something and voila, problem solved. As long as two things are present: firstly, that people can actually read and secondly that people give a flying flick about what’s on the sign. It may have just occured to the owners of this restaurant that posting a no guns sign at their premise is as useful as a no poop sign for dogs at a fire hydrant. To the crooks who robbed the place at gunpoint, the proprietors may just as well have placed a neon arrow at the register saying “take me, I’m yours”.
But this logic is lost on much of that segment of society who believe that waving their “I’m a Vegetarian” t-shirt will prevent them from being eaten by a lion in the wild. A similar gesture of stupidity is occurring now in another context, that involving the fate of 300 odd girls in Nigeria being held captive by a terrorist Muslim group whose name sounds amusingly similar to the band that sung “Whiter Shade Of Pale” from the 60’s. The brilliant campaign that has been thought up is to use Twitter and mount a social media campaign: specifically, hashtag, bringbackourgirls:
Undoubtedly, the pressure brought to bear by celebrities and social media will convince the armed militants to give up their control of the poor girls. The consequences of not complying are too fearsome to consider. What if they get unfriended? If only someone had the foresight to place a no kidnapping sign at the girls’ school at the time. They wouldn’t be in the pickle they’re in now. Also, this same social media campaign aims to shame the men who would be potential buyers of these girls as slaves: “Real men don’t buy girls”. Boy, I bet the market for buyers of the girls has dried up completely. Given that the terrorists have threatened to sell the girls off at $12 apiece, why doesn’t someone just offer to take the entire bunch for $3000 on a bulk discount?
Increasingly, the delusional are living in a bizarro world of theoretical benigness and faux moral piety wherein the intrusion of harsh reality is an affront to be dismissed contemptuously. Those that choose to live in reality are shamed at best or at worst, demonized, even criminialized for actions that offend the delusional. And of course, woe be to any who would willfully or unwittingly say something that is deemed to be offensive by the PC gestapo. Even the normally brash Mark Cuban had to backpeddle a bit when he candidly stated that if he saw a black kid with hoodie walking his way, he’d cross the street. Apparently, “black kid in a hoodie” was dog whistle speak for Trayvon Martin. Cuban used to have more cojones, but now is bowing to the PC police too. Mark, Mark, Mark.
Putting up signs and imagining that bad things won’t happen to good people is an admirable life philosophy…if you’re an 8 year old girl. Usually, people grow out of that stage of naivete and become adults. It’s not clear to me why the views of the delusional have become mainstream, but I suspect it has something to do with the state of protracted adolescence that’s epidemic in the West. The bemusement turns to despair when you realize that it’s the delusional people who are in positions of influence and that adolescence for them is a permanent state.