Is it a foghorn or the wind's
Drone-monotone through a barely open
Sliding door? What is this kindly view for?
The waves slide out from nowhere in the dew:
No horizon. No slow ships from Hamburg Süd.
This powerful narcotic compounded for you --
Flat, pastel, gently pulsing day and night
The tidal foam a self-abasing white
And nothing there to break a terrace nap
And nothing there to take your thoughts, and tap
Their shoulders toward the useless and the old.
Dead passions; thoughts of the dead; all gone cold
While you lie temperate and unconcerned
About the super-earth light years away:
"A world that constantly burns."
We all need to adjust to the idea that unfathomable levels of gun violence, including school shootings, are going to get worse, not better, in the decades to come. In the past month alone, my two sons had a baseball game canceled because of a shooting at the park where they were meant to play and, two weeks later, soccer practice cut short because a nearby gunman had opened fire on a school down the road. In that latter incident, no innocent lives were lost thanks only to the gunman’s inability to effectively use any of the three assault rifles—I’m sorry, “modern sporting rifles”—he had stockpiled in his apartment overlooking the school...
My wife, who grew up in the suburbs of New York without any firearms in her home, tells me that I am fighting a losing battle. She tells me it’s impossible to recapture a more responsible approach to firearms.
But we have to try. Because the firearms are just not going away. The shootings are not going to stop. Our children are going to be exposed to a level of everyday gun violence that children in literally no other developed nation experience.
“Republicans are not going to expand mental health funding. Mental health care is for sissies and liberals. The only thing they’re going to expand is access to guns… The norm in this country has been that mass shootings have been used by state legislatures and governors as an excuse to loosen gun laws, not tighten them. This is our country.
… [T]here are two Clinton-era federal laws declaring schools gun-free zones. If the Republicans take over the House, they’re not going to have much of a legislative “agenda” beyond impeaching Joe Biden and getting to the bottom of the national crisis swirling around the question of why Hunter Biden’s canvases fetch such handsome prices, but I would expect that maybe they’ll repeal those federal laws and pass something getting us closer to their “Bushmaster in every classroom” fever dreams.
… McConnell has blocked vote after vote on gun safety. If he’s back in charge of the Senate next year, he’ll keep that grim, blood-soaked record intact. And he and his party will do nothing on mental health. How many children will have to die before a handful of Republicans will join Democrats to pass a sensible law or two? Whatever the answer is, it’s a ghastly and indefensible number. But I fear the real answer is that we’ll never know, because they never will.”
PS: You know all about Wyoming, which Tomasky points out ranks almost, er, dead last for mental health care, because UD‘s always marveling at its AMAZING suicide statistics.
… and now, at one in the morning, it was just beach, stars, and dark sky. The waves pounded rather scarily. On the blue tarp path to the sand, a solitary person startled us. “I was lying down on the path for the meteor shower, but I got up when I heard you.” A slender young man, maybe seventeen, wearing a hockey uniform, appeared in our flashlight. “My mom told me there might be a meteor shower.”
“Might even be a meteor storm,” said UD. “But might be nothing.”
“I’ve seen twelve meteors already,” he said, excited. Also genial, polite.
“That’s promising! Any of them have tails with fireballs?”
“No, but most of them were very bright.”
UD liked his excitement, recognized it as the same species as hers — the anticipation of an insane cosmic shakeup. As in – why should that not be? Why should the infinitely firm (yeah I know it’s not really; but that’s how it looks to us) firmament not do a big ol’ break dance and splatter itself with sweat? Why shouldn’t that occasionally be? Not Stars Fall From Heaven stuff, but the universe for, say, twenty minutes, losing its glacial poise – its gassy poise. Letting its freak flag fly…
And here were Les UDs, ideally situated – prone under a huge clear sky on an empty stretch of soft sand. Light breeze, seventy degrees.
******************
And certes, as soon as we lay down, bright meteors (and jets, and satellites; and, over there, bejeweled container ships) blasted out of the black, their silver stilettos thrilling the three of us… But there weren’t many of them — not a shower, not a storm, not even a swarm; merely jabs here and there concerning the death of comets.
And fine. Our humble humanoid charge was to thank the divine withholder for at least this much glint, even this weakly dropped hint of the amazement up there.
Mr UD babbled throughout about big bang controversies and changes in the laws of physics and UD tried to follow as her eyes swept the sky.
After, UD told the hockey kid about Cherry Springs State Park. He whipped out his phone and read, entranced. We left him there (Mr UD made sure also to mention Big Meadows) in the bowl of the universe, in his little circle of cellphone light.
Hours spent reading reflections on America and the latest elementary school massacre have led me back to Christopher Hitchens writing about George Orwell. I very much want to believe – I plan to act in various ways in accordance with the belief – that there are enough clear-eyed and ethical Americans to start nudging us away from the nightmare the country begins to resemble.
From the simple, psycho, devotees of violence gathered in Idaho militias, to the less organized, more complex population of assault weapon adherents, we have a problem from hell, and must think calmly about how to solve it.
We must start at ground zero: NMAA.
No Motive At All. The older man who killed 58 and injured 1,000 in Vegas had absolutely no discernible reason for doing it, which serves to remind us that some people from vicious parentage/upbringing do what they do (Bernie Madoff, son of two financial criminals, had no discernible motive – he was already legitimately vastly wealthy) for deep-lying atavistic reasons.
The Vegas killer was the son of a big-time crook. Say he had it in his DNA; say he was one of those rare human animals living in a state of bestiality which he kept more or less under control for fifty years or so, but decided to let rip as he reached the end of his life. Although rare, such people really hit the jackpot when they’re born into a culture that begs them to collect massive assault arsenals.
We think Paddock killed a lot of people, but be assured that eventually two friends will do the same thing, shooting out of adjacent windows, and they will have learned a lot from Paddock’s errors.
I suspect for people like this, as with the two notorious Los Angeles bank robbers in the 1997 North Hollywood Shootout, the real satisfaction lies in the long, elaborate preparation — these people took painstaking years to prepare their climaxes.
In terms of sheer body count, NMAAs are our biggest challenge. I think serious intelligence organizations rather than local police forces/the FBI, should be involved in the identification/tracking/detention of these supremely dangerous people. At least until we figure out a way to stop arming them like high-functioning terrorists.
“… Fewer people own guns, but the people who own them own more of them—a lot more—and the reason they most often cite for owning them is no longer hunting (56 percent) or even target shooting (70 percent), both activities one can imagine normal people engaging in, but “protection against crime” (88 percent). For all but a small subset of people, owning guns for protection against crime is not normal. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. It’s paranoid and unhealthy and very, very dangerous.
People used to own guns to kill animals. Now they own guns to kill people. And enough of them are emotionally unbalanced enough to cause serious trouble…
Everything unkind that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ever said about this group (“basket of deplorables,” “cling to guns or religion”) is true, easily confirmed by even the most cursory review of polling data. Because of the unrepresentative nature of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, this minority’s opposition to gun control is sufficient to block any and all legislation intended to address the problem…
A majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws, but 80 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners do not, and that’s enough to prevent anything from happening…
How many more children will die before things change? It’s my duty to inform you, future victims, that 185 isn’t going to be enough. Your blood will have to be spilled as well. You probably won’t have to wait very long. The next school massacre is likely only a month or two away.”
[This] is happening, over and over, because certain people who very obviously have the power to try to stop it are refusing to do so and letting it happen. That isn’t random…
[This] is tolerated by Republicans and the right wing. This tolerance of such high levels of violence makes it, in essence, sanctioned by the state, or perhaps in this case, the states…
[Republicans] find this level and type of violence acceptable, and choose, over and over, not to do anything about it. And that is the fact that unites these otherwise unrelated acts of violence: The Republican Party makes excuses every time for why this or that act couldn’t have been prevented, and we must therefore do nothing. That makes the Republican Party responsible for this carnage…
… Am I saying that individual Republicans want individual schoolchildren to die? Of course not. I am saying that these same Republicans in general venerate a level of violence in our society that the majority of us find intolerable and appalling, and they understand intuitively how that violence advances their agenda, by giving their rabid base something to rally around. Mass-shooting violence used to be random in this country. But at this point, with it happening so frequently, and with the fanatical veneration of guns and the violence they reap so deeply knitted into the American right’s worldview, this violence ceased to be random some years ago.
********************
From The New Republic newsletter, ‘Fighting Words,’ by Michael Tomasky. (No link available.)
Dude catches a fish just as Mr UD stops to chat with him. Mr UD says he brings him luck. Dude agrees. Dude’s waving the fish at UD, who asked him to wave the fish at her.Diapered, bootied, and pompadoured ducks on the boardwalk.
