In the land of the free
It is very much in the fabric of America. The rising of America it is based on violence and its idolatry. Let start disabusing the notion that this is not what we are. It might be more realistic to say this is not what we dream to be. Maybe that’s why Dr. King saying I have a dream was so threatening to his own life to end up taking it along with the dream of change for black Americans. The best of America is still part of a dream. For a country so bent of its principles of individuality and exceptionalism, how do you convince them that the root they worship is the same root reflected in the violence in school shootings? Would they come to see how violence to others can only turn into violence onto yourself? This is the America that is. Stubbornly clinging to the values that made them come into an incredible rising ~200 years ago. Stubbornly refusing to unpack the unfolding of those values, not even through bullets in their children. What can be left of a society that is so identified with being exceptional and forward thinking that it contributes to the death of the same children that are the only ones that can possible carry forward said exceptionalism? Raging through the west and shooting natives is now mirrored in the shooting of the children of our cities. How much for being exceptional.
It is time to die. It sounds like a video game chat between teenagers as they shoot on their screens to the monster in an elaborate castle that guards some tokens valuable to show your worth in the game. That’s what the shooter said in the classroom full of kids. What happens when you can enact the game in real life after you have played it for so long? This is not an indictment on video games. It is the enacting part that shouldn’t be so easy. With Uvalde's latest shooting incident, America came to its full display: a teenage boy perpetrated one of the most horrendous acts humans come to witness. The police were doing what they are known to do, contain civilians, arrest them, tease them, doing a perimeter and put a stoic face as they do so. Stay back they kept telling walling parents hearing gunshots in the school where they sent their child to learn. Is there something worse than grieving your child many times? Hearing shots while your kid is trapped in a barrel, like a duck being sentenced to carry the desire of the fellow Americans of their right to possess a tool designed to kill faster than brain synapsis connect thoughts for the shooter? And then we move to the next stage: public outrage, funds being raised (can money solve all of America’s problems?), and demands for the corresponding state senator for a change.
Social and traditional media keeps looking for a reason, a guilty party and the debate over the second amendment intensifies. But what I see is a tremendous lack of leadership. If it is indeed the home of the brave, it is certainly lacking a brave leader. People keep resorting to funds, digital outrage, and tears. Senators keep talking. Why are we expecting anything else from them? A job of a senator is to talk and to make himself known enough to get funds for their next political aspiration. They display outrage too in the interviews. They are outraged that people correlate guns with a psychopath killing more than 20 people in less than an hour in a school in a small town in one of the biggest states of the Union. Like Ted Cruz. Or they are outraged that America is so fine with idolatries to violence. Tired of how it doesn’t do anything. Like Obama. It all seems so detached to me. How can people be so removed from the tragedy that destroys families? America sees death as a rite of passage, a price to pay for all the good the country has created and it is so exceptionally good, that people from all over want to come here. How can you say there is a problem here if people want to come? As if there can not be problems in both places. As if they are not an extension of the same problem. As if that should be enough of an argument to not look at the problem. If this is about an agenda, cursed be those whose diagrams of death are condemning children.
A gun is a tool, an instrument to kill. It is weird that a tool that outpaced the utility for which it was created, being used in an environment for which it was not created, ravaging your own homes gets such a strong cult. If any other tool in your shed would have killed several of your kids, while the others watch in your own garage, I am not sure you will keep that tool with such high regard and blame only the disturbed man who used the tool. Its sole presence will trigger deep pain. You must likely would have move houses just to deal with the pain easier. Maybe the only way to get to change is to put some AR15 in people’s garages while their children play in them. Sickening to write, as sickening as it should be to stand behind such weapons of destruction.