Publisher’s note: Workload, sickness, and other factors caused an unexpected and unwanted gap in publishing. Hopefully, TPOL will be back on schedule now for the rest of May. We will seek to have more, shorter commentaries and look forward to your visits, your comments, and your feedback! Thanks for reading!

Political correctness in 2022 means several things: people – especially innocent people – die needlessly. Matters like diversity, tolerance (and affirmation) supersede essential character traits like courage and competence. Political leaders seek excuses to tolerate and excuse idiots who do horrible things and let even more horrible things happen. Worse, cowardice trumps courage.

The recent insane massacre in Uvalde, Texas is just the latest incident demonstrating this. I was again reminded of the day my wife’s mother died, 22 years ago, the same day two murderers attacked Columbine High School in Colorado. (No, she was not one of the Columbine victims – she died while watching the news of the massacre.)

Sadly, cowards in uniform are enabled by cowards NOT in uniform.

But there have been dozens of other incidents both in the States and around the world which have demonstrated the complete perversity that is contaminating virtually every society, every polity, every community on this planet.

It isn’t just schools, either: not just Sandy Hook and Parkland and Columbine and Uvalde. Not just church meetinghouses: Sutherland Springs and White Settlement and Emmanuel AME in South Carolina and St. James COE in South Africa.

And it isn’t just police forces – no, police men and women – who demonstrate these politically-correct “virtues” that let them all too often ignore their sworn promises to serve and protect. PEOPLE – NOT government leaders, not budgets, not ideologies. It includes military forces. It includes especially political leaders and bureaucrats and corporate bosses and worker-bees. And educrats and teachers. Yes, and parents as well.

And it is not just PHYSICAL COURAGE that is missing – and deemed politically incorrect. It is MORAL COURAGE that is also missing: the willingness to risk anything to challenge lying and other forms of immorality.

As I watch and listen to the sequence of events in (and the previous lies about) Uvalde, Texas, I again wonder at how many different dimensions I’m hearing and watching these events. Certainly two or three: the stories are too different for them all to be true.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe NONE of them are true. Mama Liberty was fond of reminding us that we never know the whole story: that we never can find out everything that happened. Much less WHY it happened.

But what we CAN see is that whatever the immediate reasons for these horrible incidents, the ROOT causes are pretty clear. Some reasons can be traced back decades, others just a few months and weeks. And every one of the reasons, history shows, can be seen to come from a severe human failure. A failure of people to KNOW and DO the right thing, and a failure of people to hold people responsible.

Whether it is a failure to teach people to respect human life: not just the lives of others but THEIR OWN life, or a failure to rationally analyze and respond to unsafe conditions and unsafe actions, it is HUMAN FAILURE that leads to unneeded deaths most of the time.

Think about these failures and why we have them, and stay tuned. But again, ask yourself what a problem we have with cowards in uniform.