Blame the Tool

Over the course of my adult life I have had the pleasure and the pain of working with contractors of different types having work done on my home.  Some have been very good.  Their work was exemplary.  The fit and finish was top-notch and the outcome was better than I ever expected.  However, there have also been some real stinkers.  These are the folks that just don’t seem to get it.  They have the same tools and the same amount of time.  I think I’ve finally figured out what’s different between the good ones and the bad ones.  When I tell you what it is, I’m sure you’ll have one of those ‘head-slapping’ moments, wondering why you didn’t think of it earlier.  The difference between the good ones and the bad ones MUST be the tools.

Right?  Did I nail it?  What?  You don’t agree?  Wait – you mean you think the difference is that the bad contractors have bad skills????  But wait.  That can’t be right.  You see, I keep seeing people blame the tools instead of the people using the tools in other areas, so it MUST be the tools, not the worker.  Example?  Every time somebody uses a gun illegally the left runs out and screams that we have to get rid of guns – that the guns are the problem.  So if the gun is the problem when it’s used in a manner inconsistent with its intent, then the tools must be at fault when they are used in a sloppy or incompetent way. 

When you come right down to it, guns are ultimately just tools.  They meet a need (ask a policeman if he’d feel ‘right’ being unarmed or try to hunt geese without a shotgun.  Try to protect your family from an armed assailant without a firearm) and are basically no more than an extension of the person wielding them.

Each time this kind of awful tragedy occurs, we see a segment of the population run out and try to take the blame OFF of the person who actually committed the heinous act, and put it on the firearm they used.  I’m not the first person to say this, but isn’t it possible that if some of the teachers had been armed with SOMETHING other than dry-erase markers and binders that maybe a psychopath would not have as good a chance to kill so many?

People always ask the same question when this happens:  Why.  It’s the simplest and most basic question and it’s also the most important.  I would like to posit some reasons why we’re seeing this kind of thing a bit more:

-        For years we’ve taught our children that they can do no wrong.  Parents are afraid to tell their kids that they are wrong – they don’t want to hurt their feelings.  Have you ever been to a kids soccer game where they don’t take score?  What happens if you punish your child with a spanking or a stern talking to in public these days?  It’s easier to let our kids ‘self-determine’.  Society won’t take your kids away if you let your kid be a brat.  They will if you try to stop the bad behavior.

-          Kids see themselves as their own moral authority.  They are taught that they should follow their hearts and that they know what’s right.  There is no ultimate standard taught.  Our society is, at every level, trying to destroy religion by making it the butt of jokes, by attacking those who might believe that there is a God or even that the universe was created.  If you are a ‘creationist’, these days that will be used against you to keep you from holding just about any public office.  Turn on the TV and you’ll find that those who believe in and follow God and religion (particularly Christianity and Judaism) are treated as though they are stupid beyond belief.  If each individual is his/her own standard, then we are doomed – remember:  Hitler, Mussolini, Amin, Stalin… they all believed they were right.  I venture to say that this idiot who killed all of those children also thought he was right.

-          For years we’ve taught our children that they are without hope.  This is the real destructive power of the religion of ‘global warming’.  It takes away all hope of a future.  Kids today are taught in school that everyone they know and love is contributing to destroying the earth they are going to have to live in, and that they have no future because of all of the horrible people that came before.  No wonder they have so much anger and resentment.  When you teach people that they are doomed from the day they are born, we shouldn’t be surprised that they are a bit unstable.

-        We teach our children fear.  Helicopter moms are legion these days.  Kids aren’t allowed to go outside the view of their parents.  They aren’t allowed to explore the rain culverts, or climb the trees or ride their bikes to the woods or build tree-houses or play with B-B guns or any of a million other things that most of the 50+ generation did when we were kids.  It’s much safer to put them in front of a computer or PSP or TV.

One quick aside here:  which do you think is more likely to teach a kid gun safety and proper use:  having a B-B gun or playing Modern Warfare, hmmm?

So our children have no faith, no hope and no sense that they can be wrong when they have an idea or want to do something and they are afraid.  Since all of this isn’t bad enough, we do one more thing that is, in my opinion, unforgivable:  We screw around with their brain chemistry by giving them psychotropic drugs to help control their behavior.  I’m pretty sure that in just about every single case where this kind of thing has happened, it comes out that the kids were on some kind of ‘mental’ medication.  That can’t be a coincidence.  In fact, the labeling on many of these drugs (like Adderall, for example) warns of things like extreme nervousness and paranoid delusions – mood swings that might include hostility and severe aggression. 

The bottom line is that it’s a tragedy that this happened.  It’s a tragedy that so many died.  But it’s also a tragedy that we aren’t identifying the REAL cause and working to correct it.  The tool is not the problem.  The defective human being is the problem.  We need to give our kids hope, teach them that neither they nor any other human being is the ultimate authority, and let them learn to trust themselves and not fear.  Finally, we MUST get stop medicating our kids into oblivion.  It’s taken 50 years to screw this up, so we probably won’t see it fixed for many years, but we have to start.  Otherwise, we’re just blaming the bad workmanship on the tool and not on the workman.