Overreach And The Invasion Of The Moral Conscience.

In my previous post I asked at what point is the public going to demand that government take action against Islamic violence. Perhaps now we need to speculate as to what may have changed within the Public's conscience that will trigger these demands.

No one is questioning the moral revulsion that we all feel when events like just happened in Nice occur. Sad as such a state of affairs is, it's sadder still that we have developed almost a sense of numbness to these events. Just so long as they occurred every 6 or 8 months we could express our horror at the event but then within a few days or weeks the numbness sets in and we go back to our daily routines and the memories of these events fade from the forefont  our everyday lives.

Yes we do think that there but for the grace of God go I, but then the funerals are over the perpetrators are caught or killed, we breath a sigh of relief and push the thought that another such event can and will occur out of our minds.
 
We become almost thankful that we get that needed breathing space. The scenes of the horror in France, in Florida, in Germany and elsewhere are so awful, so stressful, so emotionally draining that we come to crave the opportunity to reset ourselves and resume some sort of normality it our daily lives.

But now that appears to have changed. We don't get that opportunity to reset. The 6 month interval is all but gone. We don't even get 6 weeks. The horrors now seem to come every two weeks or less. The narratives of horror, the visions of blood soaked bodies of innocents laying in the street are quickly replace one upon another. There is no rest, no reset. The stress, the emotional exhaustion becomes relentless. This condition if it remains persistent can and will become the equivalent what was once called combat fatigue, what we now call PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This creates problems for government. Firstly we are private citizens not members of the military. Combat stress is part of being in combat arms.  Military recruits receive training to deal with the stress of combat, civilians don't and shouldn't have to. The toll of extended stop loss deployments on US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq has long been seen in the continuing horrific suicide and institutionalization rates among veterans. When this stress begins to manifest among the civililian population, and if the current trends and frequency continues it will, the results will likely be even more extreme.

The longer the politicians procrastinate and talk about "living with terrorism" as French President Hollande did today, the sooner one of two things will happen. The public's demands that government stop sitting on its hands in the face of innocent bodies being stacked like cord wood will grow louder and louder and eventually if necessary, move into the realm of demonstrations and civil disobedience.

If individuals don't start conducting random acts of retribution against Muslims, innocent or not, and their property it will be a miracle. When and if it does happen the responsibility will be as much on the feckless poloticians failure to act as it will be Islam's failure to evolve beyond the 7th century barbarism of Sharia law.