The Not-So-Great Generations

We had similar thoughts following last night's post about Professor Liviu Librescu and his bravery in the midst of the Virginia Tech rampage. We weren't sure how to sum up our concern that our generation -- those of us over 25 but under 40 -- and the one after us fail to live up to the example set by our parents and grandparents.

Canadian author and columnist Mark Steyn, however, nails our feelings exactly in this column titled, "Cult of Passivity."

On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our "children" need to be "protected."

Point one: They're not "children." The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and -- if you'll forgive the expression -- men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are "children" if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office.

Nonetheless, it's deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself -- and, in a "horrible" world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

We can't get the image of a nearly 80-year-old professor pressing against a door while a gunman shot through it ... trying desperately to keep a madman out while his students escaped. Tears come to our eyes. Of all the young men in those rooms, it is this old white-haired man who we praise today.

No, none of us can absolutely predict how we'd react in that situation. But we can take a pretty good guess by looking at how we live our lives. Are we the type of people who run up burning skyscrapers or hold doors amidst gunfire? Or are we the type who hide in a corner or turn the other way rather than "get involved"?

God help this country if Professor Librescu is more of the exception than the rule. At least we are heartened to hear some other stories of people helping others. And we may never know what this young man did or tried to do. But judging from the stories we've already heard of his kindness and spirit, we can assume he was rushing to help one of the students who he was charged with looking after. God only knows what great accomplishments he might have produced.

We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom's security blanket. Geraldo-like "protection" is a delusion: when something goes awry -- whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus -- the state won't be there to protect you. You'll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

*When we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position.*

I'd prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

"Better to die on your feet than to live for ever on your knees." -- Dolores Ibarruri.

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Speaking of classics, the "great dame" and New Orleans native Kitty Carlisle Hart has died. She was 96.

In a piece on CBS' "60 Minutes" in 2000, Marie Brenner, author of "Great Dames: What I Learned From Older Women," said: "A great dame is a soldier in high heels. ... They lived through the Depression. They lived through the war.

"They were tough, intelligent and brassy women," said Brenner, who described Hart as a great dame who "walks into a room, and the room lights up."

Discipline ruled Hart's success. She began every day with an exercise routine, even after she turned 90.

"I can do things a woman a fifth my age can't do. ... I do 40 leg lifts without stopping, And then I take my legs, I put them over my head, and I touch the floor behind me with my toes, and then very slowly I let myself down, touching every vertebrae as I go," Hart told "60 Minutes."

RIP.

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Harry Lee, the take-charge sheriff of Jefferson Parish, La., has leukemia. He still plans to seek re-election, even at 74 years old.

But, brandishing his legendary obstinacy, he vowed to stay on the job and even to seek an eighth term in office this fall.

"I fully intend to qualify and run for sheriff on Sept. 4," Lee, 74, said at a news conference.

Love him or hate him, you can be sure the ol' cuss will be there on Election Day if -- and only if -- the Lord Almighty Himself doesn't intervene.