Sarah And James Brady — The Anger From Another Time

As published at MensNewsDaily.com

Violence. Conflict. As if these were useless and undesirable societal dynamics.

As a matter of fact, without them, we would be stomped by those who use coercion as an everyday tool to get their way. Perhaps that’s why there’s a worldwide movement to discourage resistance to issues in general. It’s made its way here, and we’re feeling it big time. One of the pressure tactics we’re experiencing is disinformation in both facts and attitude, and this one comes from The Brady Bunch in the news again lately.

Since the attempt on the life of President Reagan, where James Brady was shot also and suffered permanent brain injury, Sarah and James Brady have devoted their lives to the elimination of handguns, and in so doing, they seek to destroy Liberty for all. Though there is a big connection between guns and liberty, there is an even more significant connection between resistance and liberty. People want to be left alone. Some cannot leave them alone.

Why?

As one example: is the Brady response a rational response in grief or injury, or it is a normal, but irrational response to grief and injury?

An irrational response can be normal.

At first.

Often, we see news releases of individuals who are victims of violent crime, and who announce publicly their position against weapons instead of being against the volitional criminality that hurt them. The Bradys are no different. They, too, can be emotionally hurt and exhibit an irrational reaction at first: they are attacking the machine instead of its operator. To appreciate that an irrational response can be normal for coping with any given trauma is not the same as giving the imprimatur of normalcy to the irrational when it lasts.

We all feel anger and injustice, but where you take it from there is everything.

I understand the Bradys’ anger for the shooting — but underneath, most liberal thought comes from anger alone. Previous anger.

My objection to liberal thought — or the lack of thinking things through — has always been that the anger they exhibit is merely a compounding of a single event such as theirs onto much earlier wounds, and that it can be misdirected, blind and — most important — lasting.

I often refer to it as the anger from another time.

At most any time in a person’s life, there is a perception of justice and injustice, even as we come to learn the very concept. Such old wounds become old because they have been held for so long; others who can let go tend to grow up with less baggage, more self-confidence and tend to work without a net.

Our war is between the self-confident and the forever-wounded. This is why the difference between Liberal and Conservative is only a relative one.

Liberal anger is from old wounds, and anything can symbolize some older wound or a sensitive contusion, sensing objective danger about to hurt them all over again. Anxiety is the anticipation, the perceived imminence, of reliving that pain, and the Bradys are certainly a poster child for it.

The problem is that such irrational, emotional views can spill over into our governance, as such hurt persons try to change politically what they can change only internally.

To protect oneself from reliving their anxiety, people commonly erect a reality distortion device. We all do it. But where we all share this trait, many of us triumph over our anxieties of old and get past the injustice. If one can, another can, too.

Others cannot, and they hang onto the old injustices and hang on and hang on. They then see them everywhere, and why not? They’re sensitive to them, alert to them, over-reacting to them, certainly. The injustice collectors they are called.

And Americans are starting to get it. Observers are noticing Projection a great deal lately and commenting on it more and more. I base the thesis of my book on the total spectrum of defense mechanisms — reality distortion devices to ward off anxiety.

And, as in the case of most liberal anxiety, it reacts not to the actual trauma, but to symbols of it which they seem to spot everywhere.

The forever-wounded try to change their social environment of old hurt through modern coercion instead of changing, or working through, their inner pain.

In short, the Gun Control Movement isn’t even about Guns. It never really was.

In a May 19th press release, Sarah Brady issued over the U.S. Newswire:

It would be obscene for Congress to eliminate District of Columbia gun laws. The Mayor is against it. The Police Chief is against it. The Washington D.C. business community is against it. And the people who live there are against it.

Revoking D.C.’s gun regulations is like pouring gasoline on smoldering coals. Anyone who follows the gun violence problems that Washington D.C. has struggled with can’t possibly, honestly believe that the answer is a lot more guns.

This is, of course, heated and irresponsible rhetoric when an NBC poll actually shows something else: for the results of NBC4.com’s ongoing poll on the D.C. gun ban, visit this page.

At the time of this writing, on the question of “Do you think it’s time to change D.C.’s handgun law?”, 88% of those responding said Yes.

Maybe the answer isn’t more guns, Sarah, but it certainly is more Liberty, or the decriminalization of lawful response. Untie the hands of the constituent so that the sovereign individual, the nation’s greatest asset, is not in such great danger. Each is, after all, the community’s first line of defense.

In every announcement, Sarah Brady is saying something important: I hurt, so you have to get rid of my pain: I want to tie your hands so you cannot fight back; it’s a scorched earth policy until this pain stops. (Not a direct quote, but that’s the thinking of the gun control movement when they put honest people at the mercy of criminals.)

That’s about as smart as Alfred Nobel’s inventing Nitroglycerine, because he wanted to put an end to war, remember?

Or Marx’s confiscation of private property to breed out want, disappointment and envy.

The significance of it all is this: while our schools, workplaces and other venues try to discourage responses which they want to mischaracterize as in anger, it is the left who is in fact responding in anger societally and immensely. Against family, predominantly. (Unhappy children of three generations of broken homes explains a lot there.)

Projection from the Left..?

Beyond question.

The Left’s old anger from another time is reacting to symbols in a free society that is fabulously symbol-rich. It is they who are responding in anger.

For generations now, and mounting with every broken home.

Are we to have compassion for these people?

No. I would advise against it. Not all situations require compassion, and though we might feel compassion for the Left’s hurting and in such large numbers, the firm approach is needed. Reality check. Anything else is enabling.

Because they are not so impaired as to be entirely out of touch with reality, they are simply impaired because they are partially out of touch through erecting any combination of reality distortion devices with which they can cope. They are as much in volitional control as the man who shot James Brady and President Reagan.

As hurting Liberals operate to destroy symbols that make them anticipate more anxiety coming, they operate on the misinformation input of their reality distortion devices. One example is the intellectualization they exhibit; another isolation mechanism to ward off pain and which makes them believe they are smarter or that we are stupid. This doctrinaire attitude is irksome and destructive to dialogue. For them, the canard is more satisfying to enunciate than solving the problem would be. The snotty remarks in confirmation hearings is a perfect example of off-topic rhetoric that betrays an underlying, long-standing anger.

This is why liberal policy has always failed and will continue to fail: it is conceptualized on misinformation input through the filtration of their reality distortion device to protect them from even older hurts.

Hang-ups can be nothing more than simple excess baggage in everyday life, but when it’s forced on us, spilling over into our governance, then we stand to surrender the country for an injustice that was in fact never really there.


John Longenecker is author of The Battle We Fight — Battling Potomac Fever To Recapture Our Homes And Communities, available at online booksellers and as an e-book.