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Topics: Commentary, Fait Accompli, Politics
Thursday night I was at work, numb from the news of yet another shooting. I remember an essay I wrote titled "I'll be famous," a sentiment from the perpetrator of a mall shooting in Utah (apparently, a breakup with his girlfriend sparked it). I repent of blaming mental illness in this and related cases, the go-to knee jerk shtick of every pundit and schlock spouting psycho-babble on flat screens for ratings. I recall the graph I pulled from NASDAQ data on Smith and Wesson (the only publicly traded stock of a weapons manufacturer I could find), and correlated it to an apparent increase in value after every significant, newsworthy shooting. The president's remarks were emotional, genuine and probably a few outlets took him up on his challenge of comparing ten years worth of public shootings to terrorist attacks. My guess is a few affiliates, likely after their statisticians compiled the data, opted not to broadcast it as it went against their stated dogma.
I live in upstate New York, and visited Newtown, Connecticut Christmas Day in 2012 with my family - my wife, my daughter-in-law; my sons to pay our respects. The emotions we encountered were still raw and dour; variations of twenty-six angels erected as we slowly drove or walked through; the flowers and teddy bears fresh. Alex Jones suspected a "false flag operation," which supports he knows little to nothing of the term's origin by his overuse of it to everything of evidence he won't accept. Despite our current naval-gazing and "soul searching," I sadly have come to a dark conclusion:
When twenty children and six educators could be gunned down in their own school and our lawmakers did absolutely NOTHING, it was pretty much a wrap after that!
We...are...nothing...to them.
We are of no importance to elected officials that are behind metal detectors; bomb shelters and have their own armed congressional security - and equally impressive at their progeny's private schools; we are nothing to 47% of legislatures who are themselves millionaires or multimillionaires: how does a body like THAT raise taxes on THEMSELVES? We are especially gnats compared to pachyderms when we cannot write checks in the thousands of dollars to fund their next election to keep their jobs (with taxpayer subsidized health benefits and a really GOOD retirement) for 20, 30, 40, 50 years! In the case of the presidency, both major candidates must raise close to a BILLION dollars for a job that pays $400,000.00. Let that irony sink in.
So, as much as I agree with the president's statements, I am both a rationalist and realist. Like the mythical Chris Kringle, I no longer believe in jolly old elves sliding down chimneys; nor unicorns; Bigfoot; UFOs or Loch Ness Monsters. There are however, monsters, and I'm not talking the "lone wolf"/individual psychopath trooped out to steer the conversation toward a faux angst about "mental health"...it is US.
Like Texas textbooks, we can classify Africans as "workers" as if they willingly boarded the "Good Ship Jesus" to the New World seeking opportunity: the word "slave" or slavery appears at least 21 times in the official articles of secession, just not in these textbooks. We can say "all men are created equal," ignoring 3/5th a person; lynchings, castrations, burning crosses; burning people at stakes (usually after lynchings and castrations); voter suppression, poll taxes and personhood conferred to corporations not by Citizen's United, but the 14th Amendment during Robber Baron days. We can say "remember the Alamo," and forget the entire state that legally CAN'T secede used to be the territory of Mexico. We can dismiss the thousands of Asians that built the railroads for those barons, losing their lives and the Japanese Americans like George Takei's family (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek) interned on suspicion based on their appearance. We can call it "western expansion" and "Manifest Destiny" and completely ignore the indigenous people whose land was taken; populations wiped out, "Trail of Tears" in Oklahoma, and their only compensation thus far has been "reservations." We can bury recent history under a dark carpet - Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; was not affiliated with Al Qaeda, but we invaded it anyway and stayed for longer than WWII, after two tax cuts for the wealthy; an unfunded Medicare Part D, and loosened financial regulations that caused our economy to go into free fall before the 2008 elections. Hell, if we can ignore all that, climate change denial is a snap!
If "corporations are people," then America is a psychopath. It at least explains a lot regarding our current political morass and ineptitude, and maybe that it's always been.
The last paragraph of Tim Kreider's superb essay in The Week, May 29, 2014 brings it home with a punch. I invite you to read it in its entirety:
If we're not going to do anything again, I'd just like to make one request: given that we've all agreed, if only by our passive acquiescence, not to keep this from happening, can we please quit pretending to care? Let's just skip the histrionics this time: no pro forma shock, condolence photo ops, somber speeches, flags at half-mast, meaningless noises from liberals about legislation, meaningless counter-noises from the NRA about armed guards in elementary schools. Why bother going through the motions of soul-searching when we know very well there's nothing to search? If we can't be brave we might at least be honest: when we see the familiar helicopter shots of ambulances outside a school, the clusters of classmates hugging, the sobbing parents being led away, the makeshift shrines of candles and plush toys, instead of looking stricken or covering our mouths or saying "Oh my God" or "How horrible," let's just all look each other in the eye and say: "Shit happens." Jeb cleaned it up.
If that is to be all our fates, let that be our epitaphs without further pretense, or delay!
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