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Recall that the victorious Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar forcibly relocated Jewish captives from Palestine to Babylon in 586 BC. Following is an excerpt from a rather old book by a Cambridge scholar, Terrot Glover, called The Ancient World: A Beginning, written in 1935. Speaking about the end of Jewish captivity in Babylon after the city was defeated by the Persian king Cyrus in 538 BC, he writes: "It appears, and it is a curious revelation, that a large number of Jews, in spite of the freedom given by Cyrus, refused then to return to Palestine as they refuse today; and Jewish scholars tell us that those who remained in Babylonia looked on themselves as the pick of Jewry."
Is it not curious that a people forcibly relocated to Babylon from their Palestinian homeland refused to return once given the freedom to do so? Maybe not so curious. "The pick of Jewry" was literal. When king Nebuchadnezzar defeated the kingdom of Judah in 586 BC, he didn't carry away all Jews, just the professional class, the leaders. The Jews taken to Babylon were the elites, superior in their self-perspective compared to the "common" Jews left in that rural backwater called Palestine. When given the choice whether to remain in one of the greatest cities on Earth at the time, or return to a subsistence existence of husbandry in Palestine… well, you can see why some Jews elected to remain in Babylon, hanging onto their urbanized self-perspective of superiority.
That all occurred some 2,560 years ago. I relate this in order to show how things have not changed much. Urbanites today still look down on rural people with a sense of superiority. Having been privileged to live in urban, rural, and suburban settings, I can tell you that the average urbanite thinks rural people are backward, uneducated, narrow-minded, Luddites, ignorant. These perspectives spill over into political policies whereby values embraced by rural residents get regularly trashed by the urbanite elites who control both Salem and Olympia.
And of all the policies that represent the rural-urban divide, the self-perception of urban superiority and rural inferiority, certainly gun regulation is right there at or near the top.
Urbanites think rural people are ignorant gun-toting fanatics, and consequently they never question their superior "understanding" of what constitutes right and wrong. What the arrogant urbanites never ask themselves is why they must impose their gun control measures on rural areas that have no impact on their urban areas. They never question why their perspectives on gun control should be imposed across the entire state, instead of just on their own urban counties. Of course, for any thinking person with an understanding of the constitution and civil liberties it is equally wrong to impose gun control on urban areas, but at least the urbanites have a majority in those counties. Not so in rural counties, yet they still want to control rural areas just the same as urban areas. Blinded by their self-perceived superiority, they are equally blinded to how wrong that is.
Our founding fathers were sensitive to the tyranny of the majority. But there is a deeper, darker shade of malevolence infecting urban areas in Washington and Oregon: the tyranny of Self-Perceived Superiority.
Is it not curious that a people forcibly relocated to Babylon from their Palestinian homeland refused to return once given the freedom to do so? Maybe not so curious. "The pick of Jewry" was literal. When king Nebuchadnezzar defeated the kingdom of Judah in 586 BC, he didn't carry away all Jews, just the professional class, the leaders. The Jews taken to Babylon were the elites, superior in their self-perspective compared to the "common" Jews left in that rural backwater called Palestine. When given the choice whether to remain in one of the greatest cities on Earth at the time, or return to a subsistence existence of husbandry in Palestine… well, you can see why some Jews elected to remain in Babylon, hanging onto their urbanized self-perspective of superiority.
That all occurred some 2,560 years ago. I relate this in order to show how things have not changed much. Urbanites today still look down on rural people with a sense of superiority. Having been privileged to live in urban, rural, and suburban settings, I can tell you that the average urbanite thinks rural people are backward, uneducated, narrow-minded, Luddites, ignorant. These perspectives spill over into political policies whereby values embraced by rural residents get regularly trashed by the urbanite elites who control both Salem and Olympia.
And of all the policies that represent the rural-urban divide, the self-perception of urban superiority and rural inferiority, certainly gun regulation is right there at or near the top.
Urbanites think rural people are ignorant gun-toting fanatics, and consequently they never question their superior "understanding" of what constitutes right and wrong. What the arrogant urbanites never ask themselves is why they must impose their gun control measures on rural areas that have no impact on their urban areas. They never question why their perspectives on gun control should be imposed across the entire state, instead of just on their own urban counties. Of course, for any thinking person with an understanding of the constitution and civil liberties it is equally wrong to impose gun control on urban areas, but at least the urbanites have a majority in those counties. Not so in rural counties, yet they still want to control rural areas just the same as urban areas. Blinded by their self-perceived superiority, they are equally blinded to how wrong that is.
Our founding fathers were sensitive to the tyranny of the majority. But there is a deeper, darker shade of malevolence infecting urban areas in Washington and Oregon: the tyranny of Self-Perceived Superiority.
The culture has changed so much in so many ways that the accumulation of events are hard for today's half educated to understand what they even lost.
