We drove past the turnoff to the town a few days after the shootings happened.
On getting back I watched a lot of things about them, and the aftermaths.
But this isn’t a political post really. The politicians are willfully useless when it comes to real change. It’s also no surprise to learn that these particular small-town cops and a lot of others are inept, self-serving, and very likely cowards too.
No, the real problem is with the assumptions we live by, built on lies and greed and fear. The system itself breaks minds, routinely and habitually. The shooters are “maniacs”. But no one asks why there are so many maniacs. There is more than one mass shooting a day in the Empire now; way, way more than in any other rich country.
WHY are so many people so broken? What broke them?
I’m all for reasonable gun control and background checks and all the rest of the prescriptions that never happen anyway. But honestly–even if they did happen, it would change very little.
Ban this, ban that–bullshit. It’s only a variation on Reefer Madness theme. You ban heroin, and every day people will still OD on something. You ban a video game or a comic book, or a novel, or a poster on Twitter–nothing changes. Prohibition does not work.
Why do people so badly need drugs, or illegal literature? Why do people feel so driven to take out their impotent rage and madness on killing other people?
Why is it that so many of these school shootings are carried out by people who grew up going to those same schools?
Why, in this System, do so many bright-eyed innocent children get the chance to get ‘educated’ and grow up, only to turn into murdering monsters … which of course begs the question of all the other quietly broken ones who live on without getting their day in the headlines, because they turn their madness inward and become suicidal rather than homicidal?
Why is death via bullet the number one cause of death among school-age children in America?
Fuck gun control, speech control, mind control, controlled substances–fuck the cops, fuck control period.
“But the world is full of bad people!” Not even including, of course, the ones who wear suits or get elected or just Succeed.
WHY is the world, and this world in particular, so full of people gone bad?
If you can craft a real and full answer to that, you’re spiritually miles ahead of Peter Arredondo and Ted Cruz and Chuckie Schumer and any policeman who ever drew a breath. And though it galls me to not be the smart one under any circumstances, you’ll be miles ahead of me too.