Whatever happened to shame? And Guilt? Without shame, there is no blame. There is nothing over which to feel guilt. I have often wondered what would happen in our society if instead of sending guilty gang members to prison we reinstitute shame by putting the guilty into stocks and pillories in the public square. Put up a sign explaining their misdeeds. Provide a large basket of ripe tomatoes for the residents. It is important that the tomatoes be ripe because we don’t want to add injury to insult.
I doubt that will happen, though because the progressives would worry about the attack on the poor man’s self-esteem. Being in the stocks might embarrass him and cause him…shame! Do you think that other gang members would want to end up in the stocks, too? Would they want to emulate someone who has been shamed in public, ridiculed, too? As far as hurting their feelings, many shootings take place amongst and within gangs because of slights, a sense of being “dissed.” Hurt feelings. And if a few others get hit in the crossfire, well…
It might be advantageous for the younger children to see what happens when you fall into a gang. Gang life might not look so romantic. They might not look up to these people anymore and would be open to other role models.
It seems as a society, we have come to the conclusion that the root cause of so many of our ills is a lack of self-esteem so we are all caught up with giving our young people a sense of self-esteem. We start our sentences with, “I feel…” Perhaps the time has come to start our sentences with, “I think…” and then do some critical thinking before finishing the sentence. If we taught more critical thinking in our classrooms, we would graduate thinking students who will develop their own self-confidence through thought and reason rather than leave school with a false sense of self-esteem. As Bill Gates wrote a long time ago, you aren’t given self-esteem, you earn it-through behaviour and deeds and accomplishments.
Whatever happened to shame? It got put out away in a basket, somewhere in a very deep drawer, covered with other obsolete items, like religion. Shame is a Biblical word, like guilt, forgiveness, repentance, atonement. These are words that describe actions that are based on responsibility-to oneself and others that do not fit in with our entitled culture which is about rights-and feelings.
