Calhoun's Cannons for Sept 19, 2013
The US seems a country hell-bent on its own
failure
Clive
Crook
Did you know that in Iowa,
the very heartland of America,
a legally blind man can go into a gun store and buy any kind of weapon he
wants? It's true. And it's delicious to think about. The white cane. The guide dog. The AR-15.
It's the perfect symbol for what America
has become.
It's perfect because it's absurd, its potential for
pointless, bloody death is extremely high, and nobody with a lick of sense seems
to think that this was not a good idea. That's
because, in America,
guns trump public safety, trump common sense, trump everything. And the public's appetite for pointless,
bloody death is still not slaked. Far from it.
Our blood lust seems limitless.
Twenty-two little slaughtered kids didn't do the trick. Now, 12 more killings at the Washington Navy
Yard hardly caused a ripple, except for the usual media hand-wringing: A few
days of, Oh, Dear, sigh, well, nothing to be done, our hearts go out to the
families, time for closure, let's move on. And we got a few days of the usual
questions -- How did a deranged man get his hands on weapons without even a
background check? The answers remain buried
in the back pages, but I'll give you a hint: With the NRA's help, all sensible
gun laws have carefully crafted loopholes built in to them to make the laws
basically moot -- mere window dressing to shut up the noisy grieving parents
and heart-broken, outraged communities.
That's because, in a country that finds nothing absurd in
selling guns to blind people, gun ownership trumps everything. After all, it's
a "right," and "rights" can always be demagogued even into
absurdity -- one town's mandatory own/carry law that forces even blind fools
into being gun-toting vigilantes. What can possibly go wrong with that?
And so we plod on, the body count growing, day by day. And that's clearly O.K. with us. That's how much we love our guns. More than our children, more than our fellow
citizens. So we pretend to write gun
laws that are more sieve than shield, then shift the blame for the mayhem to
video games and mental health and poverty and poor schools, all of which can be
ignored utterly since doing something about those interlocked and complicated things
will require higher taxes and a heavy-lift commitment to create (and pay for) a
decent society. So, that's off the
table. Who wants a decent society when we can have a society that sells guns to
blind people?
So America
turns itself into one big "Jackass" movie. Absurd, idiotic, with a high potential for
pointless, bloody, sophomoric mayhem.
Which is why I now find myself turning the page and changing channels
when news of another slaughter appears. It's
not "compassion fatigue," really.
More like "rerun fatigue."
It's all become annoying background noise, like a loud lawnmower motor
on a quiet Sunday morning; You know you
can't do anything about it since your neighbor has a "right" to mow
his lawn anytime he wants to, and his "right" to mow his lawn trumps
your "right" to peace and quiet.
So you block the sound from your mind since nothing will be done to
change the situation.
It's a hell of a way to live, especially since We the People
have the tools and the capacity to create a different country, but choose not
to. And so we end up with a country that
sees no problem in selling guns even to blind people. And then keeps wondering
why things keep going so terribly wrong.
Posts
