The Acceptance of Thuggery for Fun, Power & Profit
By Frank Salvato (08/31/07)
While the controversy surrounding Michael Vick continues to attract those who want to place blame on anyone and/or anything other than Michael Vick, a few stark realities present themselves all of which have an element of moral relativism. The sad fact of the matter is this; "thuggery" has seeped into every avenue of the American culture and our society is accepting it.
That “thuggery” has been accepted in professional sports is a given. From the NBA to the NFL, the counter-culture, urban bad-boy image has been accepted as “cool.” One need only look at the offenses that professional athletes are being arrested for and charged with to understand the spectrum of the problem. From Michael Vick’s guilty plea in the despicable dog fighting scandal to former Chicago Bear Tank Johnson’s repeated weapons offenses, from Charles Barkley’s assault charge for throwing a heckler through a window at a local bar to the Baltimore Raven’s Ray Lewis skirting murder charges through a plea deal, the idea that professional sports figures should act as a role models for our nation’s youth has been discarded and their behavior deemed acceptable as long as it generates the almighty dollar.
The urban counter-culture bad-boy image – or “gangsta” image – prevalent in most of today’s professional sports and modern music cultures, preys on those susceptible to its superficial allure, its façade of “machismo,” using the most base of human instincts – superiority through violence. Those who fall prey to the ghoulish magnetism of thuggery are not only proliferating this intellectually stunted societal ill but they are being used by the greed element in our society as well. Whether it’s the selling of the next gang symbol infused product to wannabe-punk suburban adolescents or the acceptance of “collateral damage” in the form of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent lives lost to the on-going and expanding epidemic of inner-city gang turf wars, thuggery is encroaching into the American mainstream at an alarming rate.
Our society, through the ideological cancer that is moral relativism, has taken to rationalizing the cause of many a heinous act to any number of mitigating factors while excusing those who commit these acts – like Michael Vick – as victims instead of the self-centered, pampered elitists that they are. This rationalizing of purposely bad behavior facilitates a growing citizenry of conceited, entitlement-seeking malcontents who demand that they be seen, understood and accepted as correct on every issue and in every circumstance regardless of how the facts of the matter may present or what the rules and laws mandate. The result is a society that increasingly refuses to take responsibility for its actions.
We not only see this epidemic on an individual level, we see it on an organizational level as well.
When we look at political action groups like MoveOn.org and ACORN that mount politically aggressive and many times factually slanted and inaccurate campaigns, using nationally and sometimes internationally acquired funds, to target individually elected officials – regardless of their political affiliation – we are witnessing thuggery in the political arena.
When we see the morning news shows of the mainstream “alphabet media” covering Democrat presidential candidates "nearly twice as much" as their Republican counterparts and framing the questions used during their interviews from a liberal perspective a majority of the time we are witnessing a form of thuggery in the informational and – dare I say it – intellectual realms.
And when we see organizations like the ACLU and CAIR using the power of unlimited funds to perpetrate what amounts to a “litigation jihad” against those they oppose and disagree with we are seeing not only a bastardization of our judicial system but an example of legal thuggery.
At the birth of our nation our uniquely American society had a very clear grasp of the concept of good and evil, of bad and good, of what was right and what was wrong. Individuals and organizations who transgressed the boundaries of the evil, the bad or the wrong were expected to pay a price for their misdeeds. Today, through the employment of the perverted and contorted logic of moral relativism anything can be rationalized and anyone – even if they are the purveyors of evil – can be a victim.
All that our “enlightened” society expects from those who commit even the most monstrous of societal transgressions is “an apology.” The sad part about this reality is that because our society has become morally relativistic there is no threshold for how sincere that apology has to be.
If you don’t believe this to be true, just ask the dogs that Michael Vick and his thug friends killed...for fun and profit.
Frank Salvato
Related Reading:
Michael Vick Apologizes
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20070828/ts_time_blog/michaelvickapologizes
MoveOn targets pro-surge Democrat
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/moveon-targets-pro-surge-democrat-2007-08-29.html
Morning News Shows 'Promoting' Democrats, Study Finds
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200708/CUL20070829b.html
CAIR's Growing Litigiousness
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/332
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