no. 487

"A good friend posted this to his site today. naylandblake.net
This has to be the one of the most reasoned explanations I've read on this massacre.

What to say after Pulse

June 14, 2016
This is what I have to say post the Pulse massacre.

The problem is not that this man was a demon, an outsider, some sort of outlier on the continuum of human American experience. This man was a citizen of this country. He was what is held up as the norm: young, religious, husband, father.

The problems are the systems that surrounded this man, that taught him that the normal reaction to seeing people different from himself was disgust.
The systems that taught him that his disgust was normal.
The systems that taught him to rationalize his disgust as an expression of faith. The systems that cloaked that rationalization in a rhetoric of nobility.
The economic systems that allowed him to weaponize that disgust, to turn that disgust into bullets and mutilation. At every step he made decisions that he is responsible for, but at every step those decisions were made easier by hundreds of other people whose words and actions told him : Yes, you are right to be disgusted, and the righteous way to deal with your disgust is to deal death to people you don’t know and to crow about it. Here is a gun that lets you do that, here is a system that will laud you for doing that.

When politicians pray after these things, pray after killing bill after bill that would break these systems, pray after taking money from people whose incomes come from making it easy for these men to spray death, I can only think that they are praying that people don’t connect the dots, that people don’t try to say to them, you continue to teach people that their disgust is normal, that their violence is normal and right and good, that their deadly actions are normal.
They are praying that people don’t wake up to the fact that you have said to all of those families and lovers of the people who died at Pulse that you would rather have your gun today than to have any of those victims still alive.

The killer was merely the agent of your contempt. When you put your righteousness above those lives, when you put your gun above those lives, you make a sham of the Constitution and the country and the god you claim to serve and revere.

The problem is not that the killer is beyond the pale: The problem is that the killer was an apt pupil for all the teaching that you left for him and which you are still maintaining today." 




Bric 1101 commenting at The Rant

no. 483

"He who wants a rose must respect the thorn."

Persian Proverb

no. 482

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

G. B. Shaw 

no. 479

"Every conviction of error is a violence done to the mind, inasmuch as the forcible eradication of a prejudice must be attended with a painful sensation. The blind man is happy in his blindness, and the ignorant content with his ignorance. The wisest of men has somewhere told us that the increase of wisdom is the increase of sorrow."

- Francis Hopkinson

no. 471

"The mouth is the basis for calamity" 

Japanese saying

no. 469

"Oh, he had been rascally drunk occasionally, but while it had looked a good idea at the time, it never looked quite the same later on when you woke up"

Terry Pratchett in "Dodger"

no. 468

"This is good for a man because responsibilities are the anvil on which a man is forged."

Terry Pratchett in "Dodger"

no. 467

“What’s the difference when you are seven years old?... the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.”

Terry Pratchett in "Dodger"

no. 464

"Screw soccer, ignorance is the official sport of humanity"

from Jeph Jacques' comic "Questionable Content".

no. 463

"Determination, of course, being nothing more than anger with brakes and a steering wheel."

from The Last American Vampire (pg 31) by Seth Grahame-Smith

no. 462

"In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over."

Dan Hodges @DPJHodges

no. 461

"Viewed through the lens of history, the main job of U.S. presidents is to be mature and wise enough to stand up to the permanent war machine."

Jeffrey Sachs, Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University

no. 458

"If teenagers were called 'incompetent adults', we'd avoid a lot of these misunderstandings."

John Allison

no. 454

"It doesn't take much cruelty, to make people afraid of your kindness"

a softer world, no. 1171

no. 450

"For a country that used to pride itself on a certain stoicism, the United States has become a land of whiny little boys and girls."

Ted Rall, "Wimpy Cops and Scared Soldiers: Why Are Americans Such Cowards?"

no. 449

unknown

no. 446

"You boffed him so hard, he went Walden."

Amy to Shelley, in John Allison's Bobbins.

no. 445

"We’re haunted by terrible fears and paranoias. We’re frightened beings. When people are afraid, fear takes over and brings out all kind of irrationality. So, yes, we’re constantly striving to be rational, but we’re not wholly rational beings."

Karen Armstrong

no. 444

"We’ve separated religion and politics, and this was a great innovation. But so deeply embedded in our consciousness is the desire to give our lives some meaning and significance that no sooner did we do this than we infused the new nation-state with a sort of quasi-religious fervor. If you regard the sacred as something for which we are willing to give our lives, in some senses the nation has replaced God, because it’s now not acceptable to die for religion, but it is admirable to die for your country."

Karen Armstrong

no. 443