Standing up for their culture
A shocking story from the BBC - despite all the guns, and a number of murders committed by guns, America is peaceful. In fact, it sounds like Britain forty years ago - except that in mid-20th century Britain hundreds of thousands of people legally owned guns and there were virtually no murders. The BBC reports -
I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place. A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, 'a gentler environment for bringing the kids up.'This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.
Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.
'It seems so nice here,' they quaver.
Well, it is!
Ten or 20 years ago, it was a different story, but things have changed.
And this is Manhattan.
Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.
Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.
They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.
It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquillity and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.
What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.
Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken. . .
The writer suggests there are reasons for this, and rather helplessly offers the lack of public drunkenness in polite America as an overriding reason.
It seems to me that the reason is that Britain has been overwhelmed by change, which its culture has not been able to resist or transcend. Those changes include less Christian faith and the moral compass provided by that faith, multicultural relativity and political correctness, vast numbers of people arriving with no interest in the British way of life, and many British people not standing up for their civilization. We would also add that it is now virtually illegal for law-abiding citizens to own guns, so only the criminal elements have them. With the connivance of its political and media elites, Britain has been as overwhelmed by cultural change as Tibet.
This could change. It will change overnight when Brits stand up for their culture.
One of the reasons that people who come to America try to fit in is that Americans give them the feeling they are joining a proud and independent country. They are asked to meet the standards of America. Not the other way round.
BBC story via Instapundit
