[I started to write this back in 2015, three years ago. And never finished it. I’m hoping others will share their ideas under the original theme of this blog which is “We are all implicated in the issues we face in the country.” I would heartily accept your comments as long as they are in this vein. Thanks!]
I still believe that Americans are in general a peace-loving people. This even though we now live in a country that has gone gun-crazy. As I write this (October 9, 2015) there is more news of yet another shooting on a college campus even as the president heads to Oregon to console the families of victims in one of the most horrific mass shootings (also on a college campus) in recent memory.
It makes me wonder if The Onion Magazine’s usually biting satire is even that satirical anymore. Its article titled “‘No Way To Prevents This’, says Only Nation Where this Regularly Happens,” yet again raises the question about how it is that peace-loving people cannot do anything about living in a country where our children and youth are more likely than those in other developed countries to be shot dead or wounded by a gun.
It also speaks to the purpose of this blog: how are we all implicated in the problem of gun violence in America. I believe that pro-gun folks, especially those who adhere to the extremist National Rifle Association lobby, are implicated in this. Yet they seem to dig their heels in ever-deeper every time an incident raises the question of gun violence in America.
It’s a curious thing how we are all, including myself, running from fault, blame and accountability for the problems we all bemoan, on Facebook, at the dinner table, on TV talk shows . . . and yes, on blogs like this one.
I for one am hesitant to admit, for example, that keeping abortion legal and accessible, doesn’t facilitate abuse by some women and doctors who use it as birth control to terminate a late-term pregnancy. Or for pro-choice folks to pound away blindly at women’s bodies and women’s choice is the only vector in the argument. It’s not.
I don’t like to admit, and haven’t until right now, that the age of entitlement is just as dangerous and self-defeating for the poor and disadvantaged, some of whom do in fact learn that there is a way to survive, and sometimes even thrive, by “working the system,” a system that left-leaning Americans like myself, call a “safety net.” (And how much, I wonder, do self-described “progressives” advocate for greater spending for that net just so that they can side-step not only the homeless family on their street, but pretend that the problem is now “solved.” It’s not.)
I don’t like to admit these things any more than my right-leaning family and friends will admit that the distribution of wealth to the 1% has been going on for over two decades at least so that middle class and working class and yes, the poverty-stricken, no longer have the opportunities to survive . . . let alone thrive, and that banking regulations have been stripped away and corporate welfare now reigns at a level far higher than those falling through an inadequate “social safety net.”
So . . . getting back to my original question: how is it that a peaceable people, “the people,” can solve a problem that virtually no other developed nation suffers from; a nation that must still see its young children’s brains blown out at school in Newtown, CT and our college age youth in Oregon gunned down in the classroom?
Any thoughts?
