Complacent ignorance will do us in — as surely as an executioner's bullet

© 2018 Peter Free

 

27 March 2018

 

 

A sentence from William Astore reminded me of law school

 

In his professorial capacity, the former Air Force officer recently wrote that:

 

 

[W]hen I was a college professor teaching in rural Pennsylvania, my students’ knowledge of the Bill of Rights often began and ended with the 2nd Amendment.

 

[S]ome of these same students believed in unchecked government surveillance, using the rationale “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to hide.”

 

Thus they freely relinquished their 4th Amendment right to privacy even as they fought vigorously to defend gun rights.

 

© 2018 William J. Astore, People Who Cherish the Second Amendment, Bracing Views (26 March 2018)

 

 

It is not just Hillary's supposedly "deplorable" between-the-seas, either

 

When I was a student at a reputedly decent urban-draw law school in California — there by virtue of my wife's military career — one of its most thoughtful professors asked the class to invent the United States from scratch, Constitution and all.

 

He was greeted with an essentially period-long silence, then middle-aged me excepted.

 

Months later, he said privately that he was accustomed to such complacently uninquisitve thoughtlessness on law students' part. Only a handful of elite Eastern seaboard institutions standing for the contrary proposition.

 

 

The moral? — Freedom is too demanding for most people to keep

 

In the United States, it is perversely easier to assume that putting a bullet into someone else's head synopsizes the totality of the Federalist Papers.

 

One wonders, from this, when mental laziness is better characterized as simple stupidity. And when that combination will turn Lady Liberty into pee-puddled waste.