Let’s move this to a practical exercise.
The shepherd instinct is fundamentally embracing the calling God has placed on manhood itself. Learning about it requires deconstructing everything that perverts it. As my regular readers know, this sort of deep discernment leads to disgust with almost everything about Western Civilization. In God’s Justice, to be a man is to be a shepherd, and it means the kind of caring that doesn’t wait for the sheep to appreciate any part of all that. Realistically, virtually no one is going to listen to us, but we hold forth the truth because we care about the truth first, and our caring about people is derived from our first commitment to truth/justice/reality as God defines it.
This is a disaster, but not for the reasons cited. It’s a disaster because the solution is not available in technology, nor in any part of Western society. This sort of tragedy will become more common because it reflects a social neurosis. All the actions likely taken by anyone with any kind of authority will only make it worse, shifting the core of neurotic action to another place on the same very messed up social fabric. We have yet to see the extent of creativity by which this morally sick world can hurt itself.
The first mistake is forcing children to create their own society. Segregating them into a public education system totally remote from their parents’ world guarantees they have none of the moral anchorage that got us even this far. In other words, it’s not enough that we are under a deeply disturbing Western social mythology. There was at least some functional usability there, but that has also been disemboweled — altogether with forethought and malicious intent — by modern secular education under the control of the state. Year by year the social definitions of what is moral and good drifts farther and farther into insanity because the school system is openly hostile to parental values. The kids also won’t swallow the whole idiocy of the educators’ perverted views of reality, so they keep coming up with their own flavorings arising from the sheer creativity without even the pretense of anchorage in sanity.
It doesn’t even wait a full generation for catastrophic collisions between the establishment and the fresh criminality of youth. Thus, the entire social fabric has gaping holes and raveling throughout.
So the Internet is no longer your fathers’ DARPA nerd project. In ancient times, people who had the power to make far-reaching decisions generally didn’t gain that power before they first gained an awareness of how their choices could affect future generations. Their decisions were seldom as arbitrary as they seem to us, because consideration for subtle moral effects was always a factor. It is only modern empiricism that ignores morality, and the Internet arose from a bunch of compartmentalized tech wizards with near-zero consideration for how it would affect society. Unrestrained creativity always runs to bloodlust out of sheer boredom, and that’s what we see with all the ancient wisdom thrown in the trash. It never occurred to the DARPA nerds that their moral considerations, such as they were, could not be assumed present in future generations. Abuses they never dreamed of are now the norm.
Yes, we live in a world that celebrates creativity in moral depravity. It is ludicrous that we still refer to those two murderous girls as “young ladies” but they are entirely typical of their generation. Everyone will be running around acting horrified at the suicide and callous response of the two bullies, but by the time they are adults, their own children will be yet more shocking. Meanwhile, established authorities will seek every answer possible except the ones that will work.
Jesus said, “Feed My sheep.” What are you going to feed them, O shepherds of the Lord?
Is it appropriate to use the image of shepherd for the things under my control as a woman? Or is there something else more fitting?
Mother. As you might expect, the ethics and actions of motherhood aren’t so different from that of shepherd, just the role and image. You will surely shepherd you children, but in biblical parabolic language, the gender identity looms very large. I have no doubt you are more than able to translate through faith the things I say about manhood into womanhood. The mother is the shepherd’s chief ally in this world; the calling is not solitary for either in the imagery I use here.