WHAT ABOUT DALLAS?

In 1924, two rich, educated American teenagers had plotted the perfect crime for 7 months. Nathan Leopold (18) and Richard Loeb (17), decided to kill a kid just for the thrill of it. They picked out Bobby Franks (13), kidnapped him, and immediately killed him with a chisel in the get-way car. They poured acid on his face and hid his body then sending a ransom note to Mr. and Mrs. Franks. They didn't need the money; their fathers were millionaires, one a retired vice-president of Sears and Roebuck. They wanted the crime to be perfect so as to prove their intellectual superiority over everybody else.

THOSE GLASSES!

Their perfect crime wasn't so perfect; Leopold dropped his glasses near where they hid the body, a pair of glasses with a special frame hinge that had only been sold to three people in the Chicago area where they lived. The other two were easily eliminated as suspects by the police and this led to them to Nathan Leopold. The newspaper stories of Leopold and Loeb was all over the world, billed as "The Crime of the Century."

ENTER CLARENCE D.

The brilliant boys confessed under pressure and their parents hired the most famous defense attorney of the day, Clarence Darrow to save their boys from the hangman. It was an open and shut case: guilty as sin. Leopold himself had said, "It is just as easy to justify such a death [as Bobby's] as it is to justify an entomologist killing a beetle on a pin.”
 
 Darrow entered a plea which shocked the D. A. and the world: "Not guilty." When the witnesses for the defense took the stand, they were "alienists" (the word back then for psychiatrists) and doctors who'd examined the defendants. Darrow believed the new idea, as did they, that was just coming into vogue that the human being is what he is and does what he does because of influences and forces beyond his control. Therefore, the youths were the products of their parents, their nannies, the society around them, and the Jazz Age. This defense had never been tried before and it stunned everyone when the theories of Sigmund Freud were brought into court. According to Darrow, there was no free will for the human being, so the individual is never at fault. There were other arguments he presented as well, they're youth being one of them.

Darrow was the champion of the anti-capital punishment crowd, so he had taken the case. In all of the dozens and dozens of criminals he'd defended in his long career, only one had wound up executed--the very first one of his 60 defendants.

Darrow had waived a trial by jury; his surveys of the citizens of Chicago indicated that an overwhelming majority were in favor of executing the boys. Therefore, the trial would be argued before a jury of one--the judge. A brilliant move on Darrow's part; now he would have to convince only one person, not twelve.

Darrow carried the day. His concluding speech took 12 hours over three days and he called it the finest speech of his career. One writer called it, "Shakespearean." Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life in prison. Darrow had shifted the blame from the boys to the society,  to the age in which they lived, to their parents, and to their nannies. Mission accomplished. The fallacy in all of this is that, going by Freud's theories, nobody is ever responsible for anything because if Leopold's and Loeb's parents were at fault, then they really weren't at fault because their parents were and so on and so on and so on.

Loeb was murdered in prison by a fellow inmate in 1936. Leopold was released in 1958. He died in 1971.

DALLAS 1963

In 1963, shortly after November 22, the drums were beating. The unthinkable had happened--Lee Harvey Oswald had gunned down the President of the United States. When lots and lots of people heard the news from friends or passersby on the streets, they thought it was a joke, but when they heard it over the radio or TV, they knew it was true.

We heard the drumbeat from the commentators on TV and radio, then we read it in newspapers and later, books. The sound of the drums was all over the place; there was no surcease. There was no way to escape it. It was so ubiquitous that it became embedded, ingrained, embedded, and cemented in our brains: Dallas, the newly-named City of Hate, did it.


Wait. What? A city did it? That's what the experts, the social scientists, the authors, the commentators told us, and we believed it, hook line and sinker. People vandalized cars with Texas license plates. The city of Cleveland placed armed policemen on the upper portions of their stadium because on the Sunday after Friday November 22, Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys played the Browns. It Cleveland and in every other city where Dallas played on the road, they booed and booed and booed at the very name, "Dallas."

Nobody asked, "What did the Cowboys have to do with the assassination of the President?"

A Texan, traveling out of state on November 22, had stopped at a gas station when the news came over the car radio of the assassination. After he paid for the gas, the attendant threw the change in his face.

Nobody asked, "What did the traveling Texan have to do with the assassination of the President?"

The mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell, received a letter in which the anonymous writer said, "Dallas, the city that virtually invited the poor insignificant soul who blotted out the life of President Kennedy, to do it in Dallas."

Nobody asked, "How could a city invite someone they never heard of to kill the president?"

THE PAST IS PROLOGUE

In Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Antonio says to Sebastian, "What is past is prologue." We might paraphrase the Sweet Swan of Avon to say, "Ideas are prologue," meaning, "Ideas have consequences later on."

To blame a city for the actions of one man takes the responsibility off the individual and puts it on a group. David A. French has written: "Remember always that the primary blame for any criminal or wrongful act lies with the perpetrator and his or her confederates. . . and [we should not] take an individual crime and turn it into a group indictment."

But that's what we've done for years now--we shift the blame from the individual to a group or an entire segment of society. We've seen this in operation recently: a Muslim terrorist kills and kills at a night club, but the experts blame Christians. Such a shift blames a segment of society numbering in the millions as the killers. The New York Daily News blamed the National Rifle Association in spite to the fact that the killer wasn't a member of that organization. When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in OKC, then President Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh.

When a certified nut who was obsessed with the idea that NASA had been faking space flights shot Gabby Giffords, they blamed Sarah Palin and the much maligned NRA. Sarah Palin has her faults, but shooting G. Giffords wasn't one of them.

This blame shifting happens so often, it's gotten ingrained in our national psyche.

When Dylan Roof gunned down the pastor and nine other members of the congregation at the A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, sociologists shifted the blame from him to the Confederate Flag, and so removals of the flag began all over the place. Those who flew the flag were somehow at one with Roof in the murders.

This brings us back to Dallas: This month, Micah X. Johnson killed five police officers in a planned attack. Dallas police chief David Brown said that the perpetrator clearly “planned to injure and kill as many law-enforcement officers as he could.” Johnson, who appears to have been the lone gunman, had written on Facebook, “ATTACK EVERYTHING IN BLUE EXCEPT THE MAIL MAN." The murders came about as a result of Johnson's reactions to the recent officer-involved shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn.

The blame-shift began. In Phoenix, agitators hurled rocks at police and chanted, "We will kill you."

In like manner, CNN commentator Sally Kohn thinks police are to blame for the sniper-style ambush that killed five Dallas police officers.

But the commentators aren't asking the questions, "What did the five dead officers have to do with the deaths in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights? What did the police force in Phoenix have to do with the incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota?" They're not asking the questions because the answer is obvious: Nothing whatsoever. If the officers involved in the shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota are guilty of murder, they should be held accountable, but to blame "everything in blue except the mailman" doesn't make sense, so it's nonsense.

WHAT'S THE CAUSE AND WHAT ARE THE RESULTS

The cause of all of this is the rejection of the Bible and of a principle therein from cover to cover. Romans 14:12: An individual is responsible for his actions--"So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God." We call it individual accountability, a long lost concept today.

But the opposite idea is that individuals aren't responsible for their crimes, groups are. Result?-- division of one group against another; large segments of the population arraying themselves for battle against another segment; one segment doesn't trust another segment and all are divided.

The consequence of rejecting the Bible: the nation is torn apart. Ideas have consequences in Dallas and everywhere else. The price is high. We're paying it.