Your "new normal" is my "not acceptable".

Michael Hurd expertly sums up the causes of the events of yesterday.

A majority of us keep expecting our leaders and officials to initiate force against our fellow citizens on a daily basis, robbing from another to give to ourselves. And then we marvel at the fact that some choose to take the violence to the streets.

What happened to America? How did it go from being a predominantly peaceful place to one where acts of unspeakable terror and violence are becoming more normal

Read the history of the last 75 years or so. As the entitlement/transfer-of-wealth state has grown, and gradually devours its best citizens and the best within us all, the incentive for crime and terror grows. Violence fills the void where our freedom, productivity and self-respect might and should have been. [bold added]

This sums up perfectly what I was grasping at when,  weary from losing several days of my life and a significant part of our savings to taxes, I heard about yesterday's atrocities in Boston. Thieves, including urbane con artists, and murderers, including the most brutal ones, are cut from the same cloth, and differ only in degree. And if this country isn't full of them yet, the world already is: Scott Holleran is right to point out that, contrary to the headline at The Boston Globe, "the world" isn't mourning with us. "The world" doesn't care and, as a very good parent once put it, "The cavalry ain't coming."

The immediate cause of the attacks on our freedom yesterday is poor government (which improperly pickpockets Americans while worse than failing to take decisive action to protect us); but the ultimate cause is bad culture, which causes voters to have irrational priorities, and thus select poor leaders. The timing of the bombings, on tax day, may have been a coincidence, but the brutal murders and orderly pickpocketing that went on have some causes in common.

I see much more to be alarmed about from yesterday than the more dramatic events of 2001: Too many people already regard taxes as tantamount to a law of nature. That is bad enough, but now lunatics, religiously-motivated or otherwise, bombing people out of the blue is starting to look like a "new normal".

This is what a cultural war is like: exhausting and coming from all sides. That bombing occurred on a street I used to walk most mornings, with my baby daughter in a stroller, and those taxes made me less able to take good care of her. That said, I do not regard it as normal or acceptable for murderers and thieves to have free reign and moral cover in the way we could observe yesterday.

-- CAV