The soft cowardice of low expectations
Excellent post by Andrea, who, besides not being a regular newpaper columnist for some reason, also still needs money, post-layoff:
"Running away is the New Bravery... Sure looks like a lot of cowering and curling up and waiting to be killed was done. And I persist in thinking that there is just something wrong with that. But I don't blame the students -- this is how we've trained them to react, after all. Violence only begets violence."
Please read the comments, as she explains to Treacher, very carefully, what she and I have been saying all week:
No one (well, not me, and not Steyn or Udolpho or Kathy Shaidle) is calling the students cowards. A coward makes a moral choice to run away despite cultural training and expectations that he stand and fight. What I am seeing here (and what I think the others I named are seeing) is a lack of that cultural training and expectation to stand and fight, or at least not to lay down and wait for death.
Especially when you read the Washington Post article I linked to -- I found that account even more dismaying than what I supposed happened. Everyone (except, tellingly, some of the older teachers) seemed to have been overcome by the horror of a single man with two guns. Who, I might add, wasn't a particularly impressive specimen of manhood. That might be a normal, instinctual response, but civilization wasn't built out of people giving in to their instincts. I suppose I should have made that clearer.