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. 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. 437

George Carlin, from the film Life is Worth Losing

Cartoon by Gavin Aung Than, of Zen Pencils, a wonderful site that matches Gavin's drawings with wonderful quotes, and which beats hell out of my puny efforts here.

no. 399

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."

Clarence Darrow

no. 315

"We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

Charles Bukowski

via

no. 211

"Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it? And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends."

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Beauty Will Save the World

via

no.176

There's more to this comic.

no. 88

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and I had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it"

Mark Twain