2nd Lake Phalen baseball-bat beating occurs near scene of vigil for Friday assault
Just last evening I discussed the savage attack by Hmong youths on a woman jogging in a Twin Cities park. And now it’s happened again, as reported the Pioneer Press.
As an account of the second baseball bat attack, the story doesn’t rise to the level of journalistic incompetence, since it doesn’t describe the attack. It is nevertheless an amazing story, a must-read portrait of contemporary America. What stands out is the comments by the people who were attending the vigil/march that was in progress when the second attack occurred. Here are these upper Midwest liberals, they’re besieged by violence in their neighborhoods and parks, they can’t go outside in safety, this poor woman had her hands horribly injured, and far from having righteous rage at the criminals who did this and the determination to punish them and remove them from society, the marchers keep reacting like helpless overfed dolls. The pastor who organized the march, instead of saying that the criminals must be arrested and imprisoned, talks about “pushing them back, with love.”
As I was reading the article, I thought of how an American community in the 19th century would have responded to these attacks. They would have formed a posse, searched out the bat-wielding savages, and arrested or killed them. Compare that to these pathetic Eloi:
One of Tammie’s sisters, Linda, gritted her teeth.
“We have to remain”–she clenched a fist–“positive.”
See? It’s impossible to do anything to protect society from criminals. Furthermore, the world is not only outside our control, it’s also unknowable. The criminals are not described. No one quoted in the article refers to them. It’s as though the crimes were not committed by specific human agents. That the attackers are Hmong, an ethnic group well known as the source of a great deal of gratuitous criminal violence in that part of the country, is never mentioned. The only reality is a shapeless misfortune outside human control, and so all that one can do is bravely clench one’s fists and remain staunchly “positive.”
Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, the supreme explicator of modern nihilism, would have loved that phrase, “We have to remain positive,” seeing it as a perfect expression of nihilism. What it really means is: There is no moral truth. Therefore there is no such thing as criminals who need to be seen as criminals and punished. And therefore there is nothing for us to do about the criminals. And so, In the absence of the ability to recognize evil and combat it, the only remaining recourse is the mandate to “be positive.” Which, by the way, is a weenie-liberal version of Nietzsche’s command to say “YES” to a universe of total meaninglessness.
Here is the article.
Comment from blog: “This story is interesting to me because it happened here in my “hometown,” the Twin Cities, where I grew up and have lived all my life. The east side of St. Paul, where these attack occurred, was a long-time blue collar white neighborhood where workers for the Hamm’s brewery lived and raised families. Then, beginning a couple decades ago, the Hmong began to be settled there. With an increasing influx of illegal Mexicans and blacks from the Chicago area, the transformation into an alien, multicultural “haven” has passed the tipping point. A liberal woman friend of mine who, like the woman in the story, is middle-aged and has walked for years in that area (where she lives) was assaulted last year by a group of black men and now is afraid to take walks at any time except in broad daylight in busy areas. (She used to use the scenic walking trails in the area.) Also fairly recently a 13 year old white girl walking to school was brutally raped and assaulted by a black man in an alley near her home as she left for school one morning. Across the street from my friend lives a family that fly a Mexican flag from the flagpole in their front yard. University Avenue, the historic main thoroughfare of St. Paul that runs over to the border with Minneapolis, has in my lifetime been significantly transformed into a hodgepodge of shoddy little shops with Hmong and Spanish signs. The whole situation is an unfolding lesson in the reality of a multiracial society for the very liberal, very sheltered white people of Scandinavian/German heritage that made up Minnesota’s population since its founding in the 1850s.
I was recently at Harding High School on the east side of St. Paul, and the experience of walking through the hallways between classes was surreal and alienating. I graduated from another St. Paul high school in the 1970s and remember Harding well–full of blue collar white kids who frequently dominated the city’s athletic competitions. Now it is a sea of black, Hispanic, and Asian faces with only a smattering of beleaguered whites. The posters in the hallways are of MLK Jr., Sojourner Truth, and so on, without a historic white face to be seen. It is discouraging to see white people’s taxes being used to educate and make comfortable invaders who wish us ill and are busily immigrating and reproducing to take away from us that which we created and what they never could create on their own, and which they will degrade as they did the places where they lived before.
With the similar influx of Somalis and Mexicans in Minneapolis, there may be no metro area in America that has undergone such a rapid, destructive transition. We are directly on track to becoming another Detroit. But we are also the home of some of the most hard-core, suicidal (in the UK manner) liberals around, who elected the first black Muslim to Congress and may elect Al Franken to the Senate this fall. We are one of the principal multiracial “petri dishes” in the country and it’s very depressing for someone like me who is old enough to remember how good it was before.” — Mark J.