For What It’s Worth

Once again, we are faced with battle lines being drawn; we can all see there’s something happening here.  We can’t avoid the man with the gun over there, telling me I got to beware.

For it is now a grotesquely common cultural oddity unique to the United States; more American than apple pie, baseball and even mom.

Those affected are revisited by grief with each subsequent mass shooting; reminded time and again, that they’re among the statistics that have become the line drawn in the sand.  With each mass shooting, new faces stream across the media, joining the previous; bonded with a common thread that should never have been spun.  Shouting, crying, asking; “why” and repeating over and over; I think it’s time we stop!  And oh how they wish, after every mass shooting, they could take them into their arms, warning them; children what’s that sound?

But they can’t.  They scream “I think it’s time we stop; everybody look - what’s going down?  Our children are gone; our lives are devastated.

But the killers of children, parents, lovers and siblings refuse to admit culpability in the paranoia that is theirs:

“the gun grabbers are after my precious.  They’re there I know they are; clandestinely and insidiously scheming to take from my cold, dead hands my precious. We must defend precious at all costs, even life, for that is but collateral damage, expendable; they can all die in martyrdom for my precious.  As long as that life is someone else’s; preferably the women and children we use as human shields.  After all, we wouldn’t want to die in vain without the drama of their blood flowing into the streets; what good is a bloodless show, a show of someone’s death protecting my precious?”

There’s battle lines being drawn alright, and those battle lines are; the streets of freedom, safety and liberty? 

The bearers of precious are here to guard our freedoms and will gladly gun down any who disagree with them.  Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong, so we’ll simply shoot in the name of freedom.  Oh what lovely freedom!  In the US of A; where we can roam the streets without fear of becoming another statistic!  Not a group of deranged, paranoid killers in sight thanks to those with their precious.

The parents and the lovers of those gone know all too well that paranoia strikes deep; into your life it will creep, without a moment’s notice.  But, we can let freedom ring, for we have given our young people speaking their minds; given the cause our hopes, our loved ones in the name of the second.  Wondrous freedom; such comfort to know we are safe to roam our safe streets.

What a field day for the heat.  A thousand people in the street, singing songs and carrying signs; mostly saying hurray for our side.  They lost their loved ones, but it’s worth it in the name of the second. As long as it’s someone else’s loved ones.

You’ve taken it all out of context you say?  “This is not about guns or the freedom to carry assault weapons to buy hamburgers; this is about outrage against the man.  And so are we.”

Well I MAY have taken the lyrics out of context, but you have MOST CERTAINLY taken out of context, the second amendment.

You have infringed upon my freedom to walk my streets without the fear of being gunned down by the lunatics with access to just about any firearm manufactured; the liberty to own your precious does not trump my freedom to live without fear.

Your precious is not worth one more life; not one more grieving parent whose life has been dubbed collateral damage for a “right” that you grossly misinterpret so you can find your balls while hiding behind dead women and children.”

And these are mass SHOOTINGS!  So your argument "why not control knives, or baseball bats, or steel-toed shoes, or as in one Mother Jones video; bathtubs" or any of your other lame arguments that are absurdly juvenile and utterly nonsensical.  The problem is a lack of control on firearms.  How many people have died in mass knifings?

Paranoia strikes deep

Whose Fault Is All This?

Although I avidly and vociferously support far more stringent laws regulating firearms, I worry that, like so many other issues carved out of our social environment and stuffed under some hyper-focused magnifying glass, perhaps we focus too hard on trimming one single blade of grass when the whole damned lawn needs to be mowed (or hell, maybe burned and replanted).

I’m a voracious consumer of news reported by various small, international media outlets disconnected to our completely biased main stream media.  From a perspective gained in doing so, the culture of our nation seems unlike any other among the developed nations on this planet in that it repeatedly breeds hate, violence, racism, misogyny and murder like rats receiving daily injections of testosterone.

Hell; we're even the only developed country still using the death penalty for christ sake.

I'm neither educated well enough, nor am I equipped with the natural intelligence it would take to find any single factor, or even a group of prevailing causes to pin the parade of horrific violence that streams endlessly across the idiot tube, over the radio waves and through the Net (almost sounds like a Christmas carol).

As much as I would love to blame all this on what is likely the most repulsive lobbyist group that has ever entered the lobby arena, the NRA (and make no mistake, I firmly believe that the NRA and their efforts towards massive firearms proliferation are major factors in all these mass shootings), there’s more to the problem; there must be.

And!  As much as I would love to add the following to my hypothetical causal analysis; evangelical extremists spewing ad-lib Christianity while they promulgate hate against other religions and diversity; myopic politicians owned by special interests; the apathetic white middle class living in the comfort of our indifference, I still cannot find a definitive connection to any one of them, or even collectively that explains the incredible volume of violence Americans summon from whatever "hell" there is to cast upon one another.

Is it the culture of exceptionalism we've been force-fed from the moment we could find our way to K-12? 

Or, is it the incessant barrage of all the mind-numbing drivel combined, scrambling our brains beyond the capability to organize our own thoughts well enough to fix any of them?

I’m not one to read what even looks like a conspiracy theory, much less subscribe to them, but one can't help but wonder; is there some grand manipulation taking place that would make Lysistrata herself proud?

It’s all very baffling and frustrating, especially when we continue to hear the same rhetorical horseshit coming from the same horse’s asses; all the while nothing is resolved.

The only fix, and just perhaps even a contributor to our conundrum, I can see is personal responsibility, and accountability.

Perhaps we spend too much time blaming others and seeking a fix from government, when we we should simply be changing us rather than attempting to change the world around us.