Civilization Was Nice While It Lasted

Kristinn Taylor at The Gateway Pundit has a disturbing story of violence. "Animalistic Behavior": Cleveland Police Chief on Armed Group of Teens Seen on Video Savagely Attacking Man at Gas Station, Engaging in Shootout

What were you doing between the ages of 12 and 16? I'm guessing that you were not stealing cars, engaging in firefights, engaging in what I can only describe as a gang assault, or shooting people. Maybe I'm wrong.

Surveillance video taken at a Cleveland gas station shows an armed group of teens who arrived in three stolen cars attacking and savagely beating a man in the parking lot and then engaging in a shootout with an unseen target. The attack took place after midnight on Tuesday. A dozen juveniles aged 12 to 16, nine boys and three girls, were arrested within two hours of the attack. The victim, a 34-year-old man, was not shot and was eventually able to take refuge inside the gas station. The stolen cars, two Hyundai and one Kia, had been taken Monday night.

The statement by the Chief of Police didn't cause a media outcry for a reason you can probably think of, if you give it a minute. The prosecutor also had some things to say, but I really don't know if the Cleveland DA is a soft-on-crime, or not. I guess we may find out, since these juveniles were arrested.

And while this story is about one group of kids from Cleveland, other cities are seeing similar things. What makes this different is the video.

Stories like this often remind me of the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. The line of the poem I am reminded of is, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." The entire text of the poem, it isn't long, can be found below (after the break).

I could also quote Hobbes from his book Leviathan, about what happens to society as a whole when law and order are not enforced by some governmental power, or Rudyard Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." Both are appropriate, because both also discuss the disintegration of society. Hobbes is focused on Law and Order, Kipling has a broader view.

Civilization was nice while it lasted.

 

The Second Coming
  — W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It was written in 1919, after the First World War.