Posted on 07/24/2012 7:07:33 AM PDT by SJackson
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
Heroes in Aurora
Posted By Bruce Bawer On July 24, 2012 @ 12:20 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 7 Comments
Three episodes from recent European history:
Several years ago I wrote this about the Lindh killing: People just stood there, waiting for somebody else to do something. Somebody whose job it was. Hayek was right: the capacity for resistance the capacity of even conceiving of resistance is bred out of people in social democracies. Of course, that’s a generalization. Not everybody in Western Europe is a coward. Besides, who can say how any of us would act in such situations, when everything is happening fast and when it may seem unclear exactly what is the best thing to do?
Still, I couldn’t help thinking of those, and other, historic instances of human passivity when the details of the movie-theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, began to come out. I am referring to the remarkable fact that not one, not two, but three of the people who died from gunfire that night were young men who lost their lives protecting their girlfriends from the spray of bullets.
Think of it. In one part of the theater, Jon Blunk, 25, a security guard who’d served on the U.S.S. Nimitz and wanted to become a Navy SEAL, pushed his girlfriend, Jansen Young, to the floor and under her seat, then covered her with his own body and held her tight. Elsewhere in the same theater, during the same terrifying moments, Alex Teves, 24, who’d just finished earning a master’s degree in clinical psychology, was pushing his girlfriend, Amanda Lindgren, to the floor and shielding her with his body. Still elsewhere in the theater Matt McQuinn, 27, a clerk at Target, was doing the same thing for his girlfriend Samantha Yowler.
All three of these young men died; all three of these young women lived.
Of all the aspects of the horror at Aurora, this is the one I keep coming back to. Not only was I deeply moved by the fact of these three amazing acts of self-sacrifice; they raised a host of questions that are probably impossible to answer definitively but that I can’t stop asking.
Let’s begin with this one: what is the statistical probability that, in a sold-out movie theater faced with such a crisis, three such instances of apparently reflexive heroism would occur? To put it a bit differently: was this a fluke? Or not? How about this question: is such a thing more likely to happen in the U.S. than elsewhere in the developed world? Is it more likely to happen in a mountain state than in certain other regions of the country?
Further questions came to mind. Some of them clearly arose because I’ve spent much of the last couple of years working on a book about the role of ideology including radical feminism in the American academy and its effect on the broader culture. In the course of my research I’ve read books and attended lectures that were simply drenched in man-hatred. I’ve been exposed repeatedly to the mantra that every male is a potential rapist and every woman a potential victim the argument that without men there would be no aggression, no murder, and no war (to say nothing of those ubiquitous evils, competition and capitalism). And in the last few days, as a result, I’ve wondered: since the horror at Aurora, how many professors of Women’s Studies and other such disciplines (not to mention high-school social-studies teachers and the like) have devoted classroom time to discussions of the lesson or lessons of Aurora?
I suspect that a good many of them have, and it’s pretty clear to me what lesson your typical Women’s Studies prof would draw from the events of that night. Namely, this: the human male, born savage, has been more or less domesticated in most of the countries of the developed world, thanks in large part to their stricter limits on gun ownership and their more feminist-influenced cultures. In America, however, owing to its deplorable Second Amendment and its Wild West mentality, the male of the species remains more untamed in love with guns, in love with violence. I suspect that in recent days, James Holmes has been cited in a thousand classrooms as a cautionary example of the male as monster: look, even the harmless-looking science nerd can be a mass murderer!
Americans and Europeans alike talk as if America alone had its Columbines and Virginia Techs. Why is it that none of the most recent atrocities of this kind in Western Europe among them the 2007 incident in which a Finnish student gunned down eight people at his school, the 2009 murder of fourteen people in and around a German school, the 2011 killing of six people at a Dutch mall, not even the mass slaughter in Norway has acquired a catchy shorthand name like Columbine? Why (except for the Norwegian massacre) do they disappear so quickly off the international radar screen? Why are atrocities like Columbine and Virginia Tech always served up as evidence of some deeper malady that afflicts only America, while similar events in other countries are never analyzed in such terms? Can it be that what truly sets America apart is not the frequency of such incidents within its borders but the astonishing degree of reflexive heroism of which its people are capable when faced with such an event?
I wonder: how many Women’s Studies professors have taken time in recent days to consider what lessons the actions of Jon Blunk, Alex Teves, and Matt McQuinn might teach us about the human male and, in particular, perhaps, about the American male? Might their threefold heroism actually be a symptom of something special and wonderful about America something that has to do with its history of individualism and self-reliance, of frontier-conquering pioneers and GIs who liberated foreign peoples from totalitarian tyranny? How indeed, one almost wants to ask, is it possible that in a culture suffused with radical-feminist male-hatred and scorn for traditional gender roles that all three of these young men acted instantly to risk their lives for the women they loved?
Blunk, to be sure, was a veteran who wanted to be a Navy SEAL, and whose military training might be credited in part for his spontaneous act of valor. But the others? McQuinn was a clerk at Target. And Teves was a psych student, who in the last couple of years may well have been exposed to even more mindless, male-bashing PC claptrap than I have while working on my book. But all three of them acted like Navy SEALs. They all died proving that they had what Tom Wolfe called the Right Stuff. To what extent was this the result of sheer primitive instinct, and to what extent the product of civilized ethical upbringings? To what extent can it be fairly characterized as distinctly American?
Many Western Europeans, of course, consider themselves more civilized than Americans, and as an example of their superiority they routinely point to their revulsion for gun rights. But at what point in the climb toward true civilization do you start to slide downhill into the slough of decadence? Who is more civilized, the man who stands by passively and impotently while murderous mischief is afoot or the man whose first instinct is to take responsibility and to take immediate action?
Until not terribly long ago, major works in all the major forms of narrative in Western culture novels, stories, plays, films routinely and uncynically held up as heroes men who put their lives on the line for others. Self-sacrifice: this was, ultimately, what it meant to be a man. What, if anything, does it mean that of all the storytelling genres and subgenres high, low, and in between that are thriving in today’s postmodern, irony-besotted West, pretty much the only one in which the leading male characters can usually be relied upon to be not just protagonists but real heroes, valiant and chivalrous in the corniest old-fashioned sense, is the action-comic movie presumably (though I haven’t seen it yet myself) like Batman: The Dark Knight Rises? Which brings us to one last question (for now, anyway): is it fair to wonder what would have happened if a crazed gunman had decided to shoot up a theater in Manhattan or Amsterdam, or Stockholm in which people were watching, say, the latest Woody Allen movie?
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A shame none of the three, or anyone in the theatre, was armed.
In one part of the theater, Jon Blunk, 25, a security guard whod served on the U.S.S. Nimitz and wanted to become a Navy SEAL, pushed his girlfriend, Jansen Young, to the floor and under her seat, then covered her with his own body and held her tight. Elsewhere in the same theater, during the same terrifying moments, Alex Teves, 24, whod just finished earning a masters degree in clinical psychology, was pushing his girlfriend, Amanda Lindgren, to the floor and shielding her with his body. Still elsewhere in the theater Matt McQuinn, 27, a clerk at Target, was doing the same thing for his girlfriend Samantha Yowler.
All three of these young men died; all three of these young women lived.
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BTTT
...”But all three of them acted like Navy SEALs”....
Bravo Sierra!
I disagree with this 100%. If they HAD acted like Navy SEALs, they would have acted, not remained passive. Now, I wasn’t there, but it seems the people in the theater were far more like Europeans than were the guys on board United 93 on 9/11/2001. The latter MEN did act like Navy SEALS, taking direct action against the musloids.
This Frontpage piece is ridiculous on its face.
There where several other heroic acts in the theatre that night. I counted at least eight. The most heroic in my opinion was a thirteen year old who stayed, when she could have run, with bullets flying and the confusion and tried to get an adult body of the six year old girl to try to save her life. The three men prominent in this article and adults gave their lives protecting their girl friends, someone they knew. This girl thirteen years old stayed to help a stranger risking her life in doing so.
While trying to count the acts of heroism I was wondering if this is a part of what we as Americans are and if that degree of heroism is found in other nations. That question was answered by this article. There was a disquieting thought with this. Twenty, thirty even fifty years ago there would have been an active offence not just passive defence. A half dozen or more men in a full out charge at the shooter would have taken him out with fewer deaths. What has changed from fifty years ago?
Thanks for the thought provoking post. It’s nice to know that there are still men and women of honor, even in the younger generations, and that American heroism hasn’t yet been bred out of the American culture.
Re: All three of these young men died; all three of these young women lived.
This is why women do not belong in combat, because the male instinct is to protect an endangered female
Should they have put on their kryptonite suit and rushed him?
A most emphatic YES!
Forty years back that is exactly what would have happened.
“What has changed from fifty years ago?”
FACING REALITY has changed. Socialist PC is rampant and radical, viciously prevailing - removing God and decency from as much as they can. - My great grandfather maintained the lights along the river; his job was to travel the river and do his job. He carried a Smith & Wesson weapon because there were many rough characters who also traveled the river looking for the weak to kill and rob. He faced that reality, carried, and as far as I know never had to use that weapon.
So the liberal agenda is clear - kill all the heroes.
Think how this applies to our ROEs and gun control. Those who can will and liberalism despises the strong.
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