Happy Hilloween

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:15 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Via yesterday's Washington Times:

A cross-shaped steel beam that survived the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attack to become a symbol of hope amid the ruins was moved Thursday from ground zero to a nearby church, accompanied by a procession of victims' families, clergy and construction workers.

The 2-ton, 20-foot-high cross was placed on a flatbed truck for the three-block trip to its new home, St. Peter's Church, which had served as a sanctuary for rescue workers searching for human remains from the Sept. 11 attack.

"This piece of steel meant more to many people than any piece of steel ever," said Richard Sheirer, head of the city Office of Emergency Management five years ago. "It goes beyond any religion."

Ironworkers sang "God Bless America" as hundreds of people walked behind the cross to its temporary home facing ground zero outside the 18th-century church, the city's oldest Roman Catholic parish.

"This cross is a sign of consolation and inspiration to workers who served at ground zero for the 10 months of recovery," said the Rev. Brian Jordan, a Franciscan priest who had blessed the T-beam days after it was pulled from the wreckage. "Some interpret it as a cross. Others see it as an artifact that has historical and architectural importance, a reminder that is also a sign of closure."

The Ground Zero Cross will one day likely be part of the Formal Ground Zero Memorial or the September 11 Museum.

Johann Christoph Arnold wrote a touching article about the hope inspired by the Ground Zero Cross on Catholic Planet.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This verges on the surreal:

Six people were killed by a gunman at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County Monday, according to the county coroner.

Earlier, state police Cpl. Ralph Striebig said "there are a number of people dead. ... The exact number I do not know yet."

The police told FOX News that it was in fact a hostage situation and that the shooter is now killed. There were at least 12 people injured, along with the deaths, police said. Not motive is yet known.

The anti-individualist philosophy and emphasis on humility in the Amish faith makes one of their schools an odd venue for a school shooting, a crime that seems most often linked to those completely immersed in their own selfishness to a homicidal degree.

I'm not sure that anyone can precisely state what the motivations for this shooter or the others in the recent rash of school shootings may be, but I'll go ahead and argue that a society that teaches non-competitiveness on one hand and mindless recreational violence on the other is to blame as the root cause.

Not sure of what I'm talking about?

Check out the youth sports programs in your area schools and parks & recreation departments, and see if they keep score during games, or if they emphasis noncompetitive games. I know some communities where this is the case, because parents don't want children to want to deal with the "trauma" of loosing a tee ball or soccer game. Instead of learning to confront and push through losing to learn from it (which we used to call developing "character"), today's kids are often taught to avoid taking part in situations where they might lose and hurt their all-important self esteem, even if their highly regarded self esteem is unwarranted.

While these examples apply to sports, you can also look to school systems that socially promote children even though they cannot do grade-level work, or even worse, school systems that dumb-down passing grades to such a low level that passing is inevitable. Some tests for some school systems now consider "passing" to be only getting 30%-40% of questions on standardized tests correct.

Our education systems are overrun by teachers who can't teach rote facts, and more importantly, they can't teach our children to think. We are matriculating millions of American children who are completely unprepared to overcome challenges and failures in their lives.

At the same time that these same children are taught that the stupid and arrogant (Bam Margera, Natalie Maines, Paris Hilton, etc) can triumph but they can't, they ae also exposed to a media machine that cranks out slasher movies and extremely violent music lyrics and video games one after another.

We end up with children ill-equipped for success, unable to deal with failure, and programmed to see immediate violence as an acceptable answer to their short-term problems.

We shouldn't question why we've had so many school shootings lately. We should question why we've have had so few.

Update: The shooter has been identified as 32-year old delivery driver who carried out the attack in retaliation for something that happened "decades ago."

As you sow...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:59 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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