Distinguishing between right and wrong

My first car was an Isuzu I-mark. It ran on diesel, got about 40 miles to the gallon, and had a "racing stripe" along the side that is a hilarious story in and of itself. As the years went on I upgraded from time to time...including a Toyota Celica, a Mitsubishi Eclipse, and then a 40th Anniversary Mustang. That car was so much nicer than anything else I had ever been in that it was unreal. Now, of course, I have the Blue Mustang...newer, nicer, better in about every way. The comfort level of that car as compared to the comfort even of the previous Mustang is so much higher it is like moving to the Isuzu from a bicycle with no seat....you just don't realize how much more comfort you could have until you get it.



But even when I had the Isuzu I knew the difference between the comfort level between that bumpy ride and the comfort of someone rolling the luxury sled with the leather interior, the working shocks, etc. For that matter, way back when my ride was a hand me down bicycle with handlebars that could not be tightened so they were always flipping over the front, I knew the difference between that transportation and say...a Ferrari.



I was also easily able to distinguish between the over the top "violence" of the Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons and the guy who started sniping from the hotel overlooking I-5. I could tell the difference when I was 7.



Sadly, not everyone can. Take, for example, a man who is much smarter than I, I assume, since he has a PHD and I do not. However, he cannot distinguish between different types of violence.

Take, for example, this quote. The second of many ironies was that an elitist foreign-born governor who made his fortune by promoting violence in his films denied Williams clemency.

Let's deconstruct this argument. Nobody questions that Schwarzenegger is foreign born. Elitist? More in the eyes of the beholder. He has a very checkered past (allegations of gropings set against his fairly successful run as part of the physical fitness drive, impolitic and unacceptable racial comments against progressive policies)...but elitist? I think that is a fairly questionable charge.

But let's take a look at the violence Schwarzenegger has promoted:

A) Fictional.
Quick, name the top 5 "based on a true story" Schwarzenegger flicks...

B) Almost universally in the cause of "justice"
I can think, off the top of my head, of 2 movies where Schwarzenegger played the bad guy...the hysterically bad Batman and Robin (1997) which, admittedly, was seen by over a dozen people, and The Terminator (1984). Otherwise, he has consistently played the good guy standing up for truth, justice, and the human way.

In other words, in his violent movies...admittedly the preponderance of his work....the good guys win and the bad guys are punished, usually violently and frequently gruesomely. So the lesson learned from his violent movies is that good will prevail over evil and evil will, in the end, be punished.

Yet our friend Reese equates the legal, state-sanctioned execution of a murderer who admits he was responsible for a lot of death, mayhem and destruction with the defense of the helpless (a common theme in Schwarzenegger movies), search for vindication of the wrongfully accused, actions of law enforcement and/or military officials performing their job, and so forth.

He even goes so far as to say that Tookie Williams was a far, far better man than he was:
King and Williams were both worthy of being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Tookie was nominated for the prestigious award on multiple occasions.

Again, at times you need to actually exercise your mind a little bit. King was nominated by a completely different class of people than Williams was. Do some research into who nominated Williams...which has a lot to do with why the Nobel crew never took that nomination seriously nor did they pursue it as a legitimate nomination...which it wasn't. The nomination process is not particularly difficult... and it was a member of the Swiss Parliament who nominated him.

Frankly, what I personally saw of Williams work qualified him for the Nobel Peace Prize about as much as the redemptive work of Tammy Faye Bakker does for her...

But for Reese these things mean nothing. For him, violence is violence, there is no difference between selfish, evil violence as performed by criminals and violence that is fictional and/or legal and retributive in the pursuit of, if not a just society, then at least one that is structured for the safety of people who are not into carrying guns and clubs and bats to defend themselves against the outrages of people like Tookie and his Crips. Perhaps it is a legit argument that killing a man for killing four men is not just 19 years after the fact...though every year I come to believe in it more every year.

Of course, a lot of this trails back to where a great deal of society has moved. We, as a society, have thrown out the concept not only of a God but of absolute right and wrong. No longer is there right and wrong, now there are "choices". Whatever "rights and wrongs" exist are governed by who is deciding it...that is why we have more and more ridiculous statements like, "He made some comments that might be racist." People don't even know if it is right or wrong until enough people have said so...and even then it is debatable! Society is in deep, deep trouble.

The court of public opinion is a terrible way to decide what is right and what is wrong. It is times when right and wrong are determined by public opinion that you get screwed up paradigms where King Jr. is a bad guy and Tookie Williams is a good guy.

I see Reese working...I just could not disagree with him...or, for that matter, the society producing people like him...any more strongly than I do.