I keep having to go back to posts below to update them as more die from wounds. This from the most recent series of mass shooting.
Two big ones, and several smaller.
A mass killing is called so when the body count is higher than four. The last two went way past the limit. All together the last two have 33 shot dead, and 28 badly wounded.
#45 is being forced to condemn white nationalism from which most of the killings are spawned. He really doesn't want to go there. They're the most loyal part of his base.
As one commentator said this could put him in a unique position. He's the only political figure in the whole system that these sort of folks will listen to. I suggest like Nixon going to China he should have a direct dialogue with the white race nationalists.
If he did it'd be historic.
Because he actually has the power to arrange at least a partial ceasefire. I hope he does. I hope one of his enablers puts it too him how he'd be praised across the country even the world if he did such a meaningful act.
He ego would spontaneously ejaculate.
We'll see.
(...yes I'm reduced to hoping for a spark of rationality from #45. Such are the desperations of our times.)
Yeah, I hope Trump does something like that.
ReplyDeleteBut I fear that even if he does, it may not help all that much. These massacres are about more than just white nationalism, though that clearly is the motivator in some cases. There's also the yawning gap between what life in the USA is supposed to be about - the American Dream - and what it actually delivers, and the cognitive dissonance which that causes. Plus we're doing a very poor job of raising and socializing young boys and young men. Plus most Americans are not very bright and so do not have constructive or creative solutions to their problems.
The historian Morris Berman, who has made a long-term study of American decline, says that we are no more than a few years away from a war of all against all. He accurately predicted an increase in these kinds of shootings a year or two ago. So yeah, any mitigating factor, even timely actions by people we detest, could be a good thing.
You are absolutely right Kevin. Add to all this the environmental crisis that is rapidly closing in on us and Morris Berman seems quite mild in his outlook.
DeleteEmerson saw this long ago when he said "The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."
I recently read that some children in school can't read traditional clocks. The kids complain it's just a,..."bunch of numbers that don't change".
ReplyDeleteSo instead of teaching these kiddies how to read a clock or a book or perhaps basic geography science or math.
In some schools they just removed the clocks, and replaced them with digital versions.
How they will tell time in a power failure they didn't address.
It's not so much that Americans are less intelligent...although I quietly now suspect this. The real problem is that Americans are profoundly uniformed uneducated, and uninterested in learning,....anything. That is anything not having to do with their immediate gratifications or perhaps celeb news.
In such an environment it's no surprise some of these youngsters are so easily swayed by a few pages on a hate site. That, and with handy access to automatic weapons then go out, and slaughter.
It's notable that the El Paso shooter posted his Nazi manifesto online minutes before he went out to enforce it.
Access to the internet history's most powerful store of knowledge. Where it's algorithms sort people by reading choices intelligence, and intent.
Then guides them accordingly.
Such in the hands of the angry fearful, and semi-literate as we're seeing is a Demon's brew.