I'm sure you heard about the 16-year-old kid who killed 4 pedestrians while driving drunk and was given probation because he suffered from "affluenza". What's that? It's a jamming-together of "affluence" and "influenza" to describe the condition of being rich and sick. The boy was a victim of his parents' wealth and dysfunction who never taught him responsibility or consequences. According to one psychologist, his father "does not have relationships, he takes hostages" and the mother was indulgent. "Her mantra was that if it feels good, do it." So the boy didn't need punishment; he needed help.
It isn't new, of course. Remember Dan White? Maybe not. He was a supervisor in San Francisco, the guy who murdered Mayor Harvey Milk. His defense was dubbed "the twinkie defense." The jury convicted him of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder because he had an addiction to sugary junk foods which caused "diminished capacity". Or perhaps you never heard of the Crocodile Dundee Defense. Paul Dunn murdered his pregnant wife and chalked it up to insanity produced by the movie Crocodile Dundee where he tried to use the knife like Dundee did. In 2002 an Ohio woman shot her landlady in the head, and her attorney argued that "our world is just an illusion generated by our machine overlords" -- the Matrix defense. The jury bought it. Well, they bought that she believed it and that was enough. In 1987 a man drove to his in-laws' house, attacked them, and killed his mother-in-law. His defense was that he was sleepwalking. He was acquitted. Then there was the famous Lorena Bobbitt case. She was raped by her husband, got drunk, and ... well, you know. I think they call it a "penectomy". The defense? She was drunk and couldn't help herself. Oh, well, why didn't you say so? They let her go.
It just keeps going and going. "I couldn't help myself." You'll hear it in the kitchen. "Yes, I ate the whole thing. I couldn't help myself." You'll hear it in court. "Your Honor, it's not my fault. It was my parents' fault. They didn't raise me right. I just couldn't help myself." You'll hear it from the Human Rights Campaign. "Gay is not a choice. They can't help themselves." Any excuse in a storm. There is one place, however, that you will not hear it. That would be at the Final Judgment. No excuses there. Good luck with that.
2 comments:
I saw a show on TV some years back. It was a documentary that was covering our justice system. They profiled a young man... 20-something?... who was angry at the justice system. He was on death row you see. And if America had had a decent justice system, and had taken his juvenile delinquency seriously, and had punished him sufficiently when his crimes were not quite as serious as a heinous murder, why he would not have wound up on death row. While I think he did have a point; that when a society doesn't take crime seriously and coddles young criminals, it does plant the seed that crime is OK as long as one has a legitimate "excuse". And though the feel-good compassion extended to young criminals might make the "mama spirit" in feminism feel good about itself, there are these sort of consequences that are completely disconnected and downstream from the warm fuzzies that the mother gets by giving the little boy a pass because after all, he is only a little boy. But for the young man in question here, he is still acting out his worldview by blaming his mortal predicament on society. In short, he was still making excuses, and probably went into eternity living out the belief system that had been programmed into his head since youth... that system being that no one is ever responsible for governing themselves, because if we were, we would not need big Mama to govern us instead.
It is, as it turns out, biblical.
"Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil (Eccl 8:11).
Post a Comment