After the terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, some pious souls in the media called for 24 hours of dignified silence before the politicizers launched into their usual politicizing. I don’t think it lasted even 24 seconds. In the length of time it takes for the shot-clock to run out in an NBA basketball game, the players were at it again.
From the right came cries for tightened restrictions on Muslim immigration. “The Religion of Peace strikes again!” conservative pundits crowed. And from the left, somber words of comfort for “the LGBT community.” They’d ban all those horrible guns this time. Oh, and this heinous crime was most certainly not the fault of radicalized Muslims, but of anti-gay Christians who don’t want to bake cakes.
The concept of the individual is as dead as the human beings liquidated in the Pulse attack.
A meme almost immediately made the rounds on Facebook. Where “gays” — meaning all of us, evidently — needed to be schooled on how stupid we “all” are because we side with the gun-banning appeasers of terrorists who want to kill us. Or something.
I left a comment reminding these “libertarian conservatives” that collectivist thinking and mindless identity politics are supposedly the sole province of the Left they so despise. That by no means all gay people think the way they assumed every one of us did. I was readily assaulted by a battalion of overaged third-graders, screeching that I had to be an hysterical, gun-grabbing, Muslim-appeasing leftist (what else could I be?). One patriotic gentleman told me that I had the IQ of squashed fruit. Pun almost certainly intended.
If this is the state of “libertarian conservatism,” then heaven help us. These people have been sucked headfirst into the same black hole that has already swallowed millions of leftists. The concept of the individual — defended by Ayn Rand as “the smallest minority” — is as dead as the human beings liquidated in the Pulse attack.
Members of any so-called community of minorities who permit themselves to be lumped together into a faceless glob are committing a sort of suicide.
The full Rand passage is this: “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” I guess the battalion on that Facebook post missed that in their quick scan of the CliffsNotes.
Members of any so-called community of minorities who permit themselves to be lumped together into a faceless glob are committing a sort of suicide. They are sacrificing their very selves. No politician or activist who demands this of them has any genuine regard for them as human beings. When people are rounded up together like cattle, it is not very often by those who care about them, or mean them well.
The Orlando shooter was able to kill so many because they’d corralled themselves into a confined space. Not because of cowardice or any coercion, but because that was where they could have a good time. The reasoning of those who would exert power over us “for our own good” also presses us together into a crowd, where we are indistinguishable from everybody else, can’t assert our individuality and can be more easily manipulated. We also find it more difficult to defend ourselves from harm, and nearly impossible to escape it.
In the aftermath of the Pulse massacre, of course many of the usual people are repeating their boilerplate blather. They’re obsessed with “gun violence,” about which we supposedly must “do something.” But the master programmers of this blather seem less confident than they have in the past. An increasing number of gay people are now deciding that the “something” we must do is something else.
As first responders moved among the shattered bodies of the dead in that nightclub, they heard the ringing of victims’ cellphones. Calls that would never be answered. Calls from friends and relatives who were not trying to call “the gay community,” or “stupid liberal gays who hate guns,” but merely loved ones for whose lives they feared, and whom they’d called too late.
I will need to be more careful, from now on, about where I go and whom I’m with. I’ll need to watch the exits when I’m in a predominantly-gay crowd. Of course I’m not always allowed to bring a gun wherever I go, and in the types of gatherings where large numbers of gay people will be, firearms will almost certainly be forbidden. Yes, I take it personally that 50 people were murdered because they were gay. But I take it as no less of an affront that a few elites, who think they’re better qualified to see to my safety than I am, are doing their utmost to keep me from defending myself.
I will need to be more careful, from now on, about where I go and whom I’m with. I’ll need to watch the exits when I’m in a predominantly-gay crowd.
They’ll tell me I’m stupid when I protest that I have the right to self-defense. Others will call me stupid simply because “all” gays must be presumed not to care about defending themselves. There are already many, many more Muslims in this country than there are gays. The Left — which really cares about nothing but power — can certainly do the math. If they couldn’t use it as a pretext for disarming the citizenry, or for slandering all Christians yet again, many of them wouldn’t bother shedding a single tear for those of us who are murdered.
In one way or another, every one of us gets thrown into some demographic group, which then becomes a voting bloc, of interest to the political class only because it wants something from us, or can get something out of us. The individual is indeed the tiniest minority. Yet if enough of us remember that individuality is the one feature we all share, perhaps we can rise up and reassert a commitment to our common humanity. And if that does happen, maybe those cellphones won’t have rung in vain.
