Here here. The bleeding heart liberals have inveigled there way into all aspects of our society, spilling their bile over everyone and labelling anyone who disagrees with them a racist or bigot. England is becoming the sewer of the world where any scum can come, and stay and be financially supported by us, even the ones planning to kill us. It made my heart leap to see the way the police in Boston dealt with the bombers but of course the insidious infiltrations are harder to deal with. Plus over here we have the EU making and enforcing our laws. If they believe that terrorists have human rights, let them live in Brussels. I would send them all to America. They know what maximum security means there.
teddy
There's a fair bit of anger in your comments here. I suspect that Shriver has tapped into those kinds of sentiments and frustrations with her original article - people feel disenfranchised when they perceive minority groups running the place and when they perceive that 'liberalism' has let them down and actually made them feel more unsafe. We should be very fearful of fundamentalist ideologues, no matter what the persuasion, who want us all to do things THEY deem 'good' for us all. It is fundamentalism which brings us the social disruption of 'everybody has human rights' and the bleeding hearts themselves seem satisfied to let other people die in the interests of their own progressivist social agenda of absolute freedom and incontestable 'rights'. (Seems to me I've heard that message somewhere before - somebody dying for others.) We never hear from them that there might, indeed, be the need for a "review", a 'tweaking' at the margins, of the way things work when dreadful things happen!!
Most of the time all we get is the usual leftist cant about people being the 'victims' of the system and, therefore, less responsible. Most of their arguments are framed within a 'them' and 'us' axis, from a victim mindset, which is actually more divisive than the 'system' they perceive as owing them so much. Egro the bleeding heart. I saw it in an assistant principal at my last school. The teachers tried to effectively discipline particular students (i.e. making them society and job-ready!) and he took up their cause because he had 'suffered' economic deprivation just as they had and, therefore, he tried to administer the 'system' from his own conflicted position as a 'victim' of it. One day at lunch he tried to tell me all about how he admired Chavez because he stood up to George Bush. I didn't say much except, "well, who'd have thought?" I didn't wanted to lose my long-term casual position at the school by disagreeing with him. (I did anyway, when he came to our beautiful, big home in a fancy street for Xmas drinks. Big mistake! As Shakespeare said, "a man may smile and smile and be a villain". Consequently, he's the Principal of that school now!!)
As usual, it's the silent majority of hard-working people who want to live their lives the best way they can. To raise their children with values - but, unfortunately, many or most of these values are constantly undermined by the very social behaviours they are meant to civilize. Today the default position is "I" - my rights, my needs, my entitlements. That toxic first person pronoun which probably does more to destroy community values than any other single factor.
Recommended reading: "The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations", Christopher Lasch.
Lesson over.