There have been so many school shootings in the United States since the Sandy Hook massacre that no two responsible data-gathering agencies can agree on the precise number, which might be as high as 142.
“Stuff happens,” said Jeb Bush, prince-in-waiting of the presidential dynasty from Texas.
United States aircraft bombed to smithereens a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 patients and medical staff.
“Collateral damage,” said an official statement by the U.S. military there.
Can this craven, war-obsessed, bloody-handed nation sink any lower?
Spare us the “few rotten apples” argument.
This is a sick, evil nation. The relative handful (among millions) of perpetrators of the school massacres, the My Lais, the helicopter assaults on innocents in Baghdad — these relative few are not the problem. WE are the problem.
We elect the blathering fools who fund the senseless, endless wars; we look the other way while profit-gorged war mongering oligarchs take control of our country and its laws; we tacitly affirm the “right” to arm this nation to the teeth, so that anyone, anywhere, can legally assemble the wherewithal to kill six, eight, 20 people at a time. We allow the NRA to perpetuate the lie that the Founding Fathers wanted it this way when they wrote the Second Amendment. We “Support Our Troops.” We wave the flag
We allow armed criminality. Some of us fervently endorse this, somehow conflating “freedom” with weaponry. Abetted by the media, we seek out comforting euphemisms for our criminality. We do not call these crimes what they are. Murder. Massacre. Genocide.
We wallow in our delusions of national greatness, traditional morality, American exceptionalism. Even as the carnage mounts and the innocent continue to die.
We lack the courage to acknowledge what we have become, clinging to a belief in an America that never existed.
We walk with The Enemy and don’t even know that he is Us.
