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The
Acceptance of Thuggery for Fun, Power & Profit
By
Frank Salvato
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.
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 | 
