Personally, I don't care
whether people own guns or high heels or silly putty. You stay out of my way;
I'll stay out of yours. What really irks me is all the unexamined talking
points and escalated ire. It ought to be simple enough to understand that
people are not likely to respond well to the prospect of stupid assholes with
deadly weapons.
I feel like I am watching a
debate between the "get a gun" and the "get a law" crowds of revealed lore. As
humans I guess weapons and laws as weapons (words as weapons) come to us
easily. What if we stopped attempting to beat each other with our weapons of
choice and moved through into a discussion about how to better get along? Maybe
we can each have our weapons to work on practice, to feel safer, while looking
beyond those defenses to some shared vision of useful interaction, civil
dialog?
it dishonors real suffering
to subsume this victimizing of innocent bystanders, this destruction of
nonconsenting, noncombatants casually as collateral to silly arguments of power,
to subsume these insane tragedies to some political preference for causes of
outrage. If you are concerned about outrageous outcomes of violence, what are
you doing to calm, uplift, soothe, lighten, make peace?
I have been thinking about the
link between peevish self-entitlement attitudes and capitalism. Certainly such
attitudes could surface in a variety of cultural environments; but the capital
investment economy social structure seems to be based more on this kind of
attitude than most. The idea of taking risk for profit, the idea of encouraging
greater production for lower wages from the great majority of the people --
individuals subsumed to their economic role in creating wealth for the
risk-takers -- the underlying incentives people are raised on to believe if they
fail it was because they did not work hard enough, do not seem to improve our
general attitudes toward ourselves or each other.
A MYTHOLOGY
OF BULLETS by GLEN SLATER
all is interconnected
each is territorial
life, death, re-emergence in changed
form, a nightmare tarantella
a wiggly microbe dance re-imaged
into macro by degrees of the eternal
This culture obfuscates the basics
of sex and death -- binds them up in moral outrage
and damnation for the masses to feed
upon in maenad frenzy
We expect subterfuge to fuel
salvation when all we need saving from is the resultant
confusion.
