Guns, statues, anthems, toilets and war

After still another mass murder tragedy, even worse than past experience, and immediately followed by wafer-depth debates as to whether the usual presidential platitudes after the horror were suitable or whether the false flags of illuminati allegiance were waving behind it all, a still shaken public will find renewed arguments over what is called gun control in a national marketplace that shows signs of sinking more deeply into chaos. While this can be said at any moment, given rising real estate “values” as homelessness increases and renters are under assault, to mention only one economic contradiction, present circumstances give anyone a very difficult time to come up with sane explanations for what passes for democracy in a nation ruled by allegedly free market forces under total control of minority private sources.

When a relative handful of billionaires have more money than the majority of working Americans put together, that defines a political democracy the way economic analysis defines no-dinner-no-movie rape as a profitable form of dating.

So we will have renewed discussion about exercising some controls over particularly shameful behavior at the mall we call our home and putting some limits on who and how many weapons can, should, or will be owned by one or another citizen. Left out of the debate is the national weapons production and war making profits that are the backbone of our political economy. In the land of fast food and slow thinking, guns, bombs, missiles, death rays, drones and other aspects of murder play even greater a role than fossil fuels as both serve in mutual attacks on life’s social and natural environment. But we’ll more likely hear about the menace of silencers on guns, thereby muting any focus on the substance of the problem; our enormous creation of weaponry and a warfare budget and long-term debt to support it that dwarfs anything else in our market democracy which is about as free as food, clothing and shelter.

While liberals will support stronger background checks on gun purchasers, conservatives will wave the Second Amendment false flag with neither argument touching on the background checks we need on the wealthy owner-operators of our government. That state entity serves the interest of a tiny minority and does so at the expense of the great majority who have nothing but a symbol they are trained to salute while ignoring the fact that it has no substance. No landlord will accept a flag as rent or mortgage payment nor will any food mart take statuettes in lieu of plastic or cash. So while in righteous anger we trash, burn or tear down symbols, the reality of violence and poverty increases and thus leads to a more passionate public furor over symbols.

We are disorganized to obsess over the production of water pistols while creating billion dollar upgrades to our nuclear weapons stockpiles. Actually, we haven’t confronted that terrible threat of wetness, but under peace prizewinner Obama we took steps to assure our nukes could destroy humanity faster and better than anyone else’s. This is America, the essential nation of master race self-chosen people, where we are manipulated into actually believing there is more than one race and that we belong to whichever one is able to exercise its privilege to have housing, go to college and survive encounters with police without getting shot, while others live in the street, ghetto or projects and suffer a much lower survival rate when encountering public servants under trying circumstances. Money and class background, of course, have nothing to do with any of this.

The gun lobby will argue, as usual, that the overwhelming majority of gun owners do not commit murders, and they will be correct. But this makes as much sense as pointing out that the overwhelming majority of Americans have never killed any Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Palestinians, or any of the other peoples the USA has slaughtered by the millions. And that’s only covering the period from mid 20th century to the present. If we add the death tolls most of us had no direct role in inflicting in the Second World War, we could all have as many rifles as the Vegas murderer had accumulated but simply never use them to kill anyone and voila; we’d be a pacifist nation?

The problem is the enormous number of weapons and the cult of fear and violence that causes us to live in some kind of psycho-babble induced terror lest the evil government-terrorists-Russians-Koreans-Syrians-whoevers come bursting into our living rooms and attack us while we peacefully drink wine, smoke pot, eat burgers, watch surreality TV or pray to Jesus-Moses-Allah-the Big Bang. We must be prepared, according to a constitution most of us have never read and few even care to, which guarantees our right to keep and bear arms even if it offers us no right to have food, clothing, shelter or health care when we need it.

We are a people who can become righteously supportive of favored identity groups—when those groups represent no threat to the rule of our oligarch royalty class and will add to its profits—but forget the ideals of real democracy which involve coming together as a majority in order to make life better in what used to be known as the common good. But who wants to be common? That’s why we can rally to the banner of social justice for some of us as we support the political economics of social injustice for most of us.

We are good to consider the toilet problems of a minority who are defined as transgender but rather lamebrained if not bad to completely neglect a larger minority who have a toilet problem because they have a greater problem of no home. Which is where most of us use toilets unless we are of the tiny minority that finds them social meeting places like coffee shops, wine bars and food courts. Toilets are hardly as symbolic as flags or statues but our manipulated treatment and awareness of them are sadly signs of our mental and moral condition under the dictatorship of the rich and their media and political servants.

When relatively privileged members of society come forward to support the rights of those less privileged, it speaks to our potential strength as a people. But when that coming forward only looks at those less privileged as the source of our social problems and totally neglects the minority forces that profit from injustice, that strength becomes a terrible weakness. As when college educated folks, many destined for professional class unemployment, look at those even less educated and nowhere near professional status employed or not, and identify them as the source of inequality or racism or sexism or whatever branch of the poisoned forest whose tree they have been socialized to focus on, causing all of us continued suffering.

The blame game that puts responsibility for a crumbling political economic system on the backs of evil leaders and politically incorrect identity groups will only bring individualists any comfort, and not for much longer. These are the types who note what an egoist we currently have in the nation’s CEO position while using the first person singular as often as he does. That’s how we are socialized, shaped and branded. To see ourselves as isolated except when it is safe to identify as a group which can be organized to play a greater role in the consumption of the waste system, what the pope calls the “throw away economy,” which is throwing more human beings away every day.

We have a problem and it’s much bigger than you and me and whether each of us is armed or not, and we can only solve it by coming together and truly acting as a democratic people. It isn’t just some violent gun owners but of a homicidal, bordering on insane, system of warfare that will destroy all of us if we don’t radically change it before a greater than ever imagined tragedy will take it away from all of us.

Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.

Comments are closed.