CALLING FOR A NATIONAL REFERENDUM
It came a couple of weeks ago in the mail; don’t even know who sent it. Someone who knows my stance on guns. It’s a fancy leather wrist band inscripted with NOT ONE MORE. Very cool. I put it on. Then as I was shutting down my computer for the night a couple of days ago…nine more.
I waited a day. I don’t have words for my kind of outrage. My mind doesn’t drift toward forgiveness. I don’t even know what that is, other than “the fragrance the violet leaves on the heel that crushes it” as Twain said. And it isn’t up to me to forgive; I didn’t get crushed. Only my heart, from two thousand miles away. But I want to know why Mitch McConnell’s heart isn’t crushed. Or Baynor. Or McCain. Or any of the dozens of Dems who are afraid to take on the gun lobby. See, when your heart is crushed, you’re willing to do whatever you have to do to stop what’s crushing it. You’re willing to give up your job. You’re willing to do that thing you can be proud of when you stand before your god on your version of Judgment Day.
President Obama says he is not resigned, that there will come a day when we’ll do the right thing. I love the guy and I hope he really believes it, but we just watched the slaughter of nine people so graceful and embracing that their hateful killer almost didn’t open fire, on the heels of a deranged young man who brought an assault rifle he got from his mother to gun down twenty kindergarteners and first graders. No change in gun laws.
I waited another day. To get past NRA snake and board member Charles Cotton blaming the slaughter on Reverend Pinckney for not allowing guns inside; you know, so that blessed souls gathering for prayer can gun down whoever wanders in with a killing heart. I waited to get past the dim-witted Fox News mouthpieces telling us it wasn’t about racism, it was an attack on religion. Can you imagine the conversations those people have before going on the air? Can you wrap your mind around their gracelessness? I waited to get past the right wing mental health bullshit (their summer version of the war on Christmas). You know, it’s not about guns, it’s about mental illness; proclaimed by people who vote again and again to cut mental health services. It’s about everything but guns. Guns are our freedom.
Random thoughts; because this level of malice coupled with this level of indifference does not allow order of thought:
It’s about guns, it’s about hate and it’s about indifference. Any discussion which doesn’t include that is ignorant and futile.
When it comes to being unforgiving, Dylann Roof doesn’t even enter my mind, nor does whoever forked over the capital to buy the gun, or the people who “should have seen the signs.” It’s us I can’t forgive. It’s elected South Carolina Governor Nikki Hayley standing before her microphone declaring “This is not who we are.” Yes it is, Nikki. You fly a flag celebrating an entire culture of Americans who kept the ancestors of this days slaughtered innocents in slavery. You call it tradition. It’s fucked up tradition, Nikki.
The leadership of the National Rifle Association is a terrorist group. Think about it. The NRA not only stands for and trumpets policies that have slaughtered far more innocent people than the 9-11 jets ever did, it buys the votes that keep those policies in place. And fuck you legislators who sell those votes.
The membership of the National Rifle Association – not to be confused with its leaders; that’s a closed club – sends their dues to said terrorist group, even though a significant number among that membership support regulation. Folks, start another group; a CNRA (Compassionate) or an SNRA (Sane) or an NRAWFS (With a Fucking Soul).
And what’s going on with the rest of us, holding national conversations based on stunningly ludicrous basic premises?
-The right wing tells us racism is a thing of the past and we enter into that debate as if it’s real. There is no debate. Fuck you right wing. There is racism, it’s rampant and you feed it and you feed off of it.
-The right wing tells us the Second Amendment guarantees each of us the right to as many guns and as many different kinds of guns as we want. Fuck you right wing. The Second Amendment guarantees no such thing. It provides for a well-armed militia, and that is not some north Idaho, south Georgia, middle Montana gaggle of gun nuts. It’s the National Guard. If in fact the Second Amendment were meant to arm us against a “traitorous national government” it would allow individuals to possess bunker buster bombs and nuclear weapons and fully armed drones because, guess what? the national government has all those things and more. The kind of weaponry available to us now was unimaginable to the founding fathers and if we are to hold to the questionable position that they were wiser and more insightful than most of the rest of humankind, we have to know that were they alive to witness what the Second Amendment has wrought, they’d shoot themselves so they could roll over in their graves. At least they’d have access to the arms with which they could expedite that.
--The right wing uses the word “freedom” as a talking point, when it has no idea what the word even means, and because they use it in the manner they do, it loses whatever salient meaning it may have had. Talking points have one function and one function only: to make intellectually lazy people feel smart. So basically it allows a dumb guy to connect “freedom” to the NRA version of the Second Amendment and portray himself as a patriot. It’s bullshit. When you hear it, the only sane response is to laugh and walk away.
--The right wing tells us, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Yeah, well they do it with guns. Guns do kill people. Adam Lanza doesn’t slaughter 26 human beings without deadly weaponry that has no function other than to end lives. James Holmes doesn’t end the lives of 12 and injure 70 more without deadly weaponry that has no function other than to end lives. And so on. The debate over whether an AR-15 or an AK-47 is an automatic weapon is mute. Who gives a shit? It fires fast and slaughters. Same with all the fancy handguns. And here’s the response to anyone who tells you the answer is to arm church members and teachers and college kids and cowboys and drunks. Fuck you. I’d be embarrassed to be in any way involved in that conversation.
It’s us, folks. When Mitch McConnell calls the Boston bombing an act of terrorism while the Charleston church shooting is a tragedy, then follows it with “the church should be a place of refuge… a place of compassion,” vote his ass out of office! The Senate should be a place of compassion. The Senate should be a place that helps make policy so the church is a refuge. MSNBC put out an innocuous poll asking us whether we think this killing will have an effect on tightening gun laws. Hey, MSNBC you don’t need a poll. I’ll tell you with absolute certainty. Hell no. Adam Lanza slaughtered 20 kindergartners and first graders. White kids, for the most part from a relatively well-off community. The Newtown parents met with representatives and senators face to face after that unimaginable mass murder and were told in effect, “We’re sorry for your loss, but I’ve got a campaign to run.” Joe the not-even-a-real Plumber added with his own brand of reptilian empathy: “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” Obviously not, Joe, but if the decent people of this country can pull it together, as our president has indicated, we’ll change your Constitutional rights.
Several prominent community leaders in Charleston were recorded the other day saying we need a frank discussion on hate crimes and gun control, once the grieving has eased. But see, the right wing knows if they can keep the discussion going, nothing has to get done. The “discussion” has brought us to a place where it’s worse to call someone a racist than it is to be a racist.
We are a nation threatened by hate who won’t confront it’s own racism or its own illusion – delusion – that respect comes out of the barrel of a smoking six-shooter; are a nation that doesn’t take care of it’s disenfranchised and its mentally ill - those who have nothing to lose - and that refuses to keep guns out of anyone’s hands in the name of a freedom we can’t define.
We need a national referendum on shame.
I waited a day. I don’t have words for my kind of outrage. My mind doesn’t drift toward forgiveness. I don’t even know what that is, other than “the fragrance the violet leaves on the heel that crushes it” as Twain said. And it isn’t up to me to forgive; I didn’t get crushed. Only my heart, from two thousand miles away. But I want to know why Mitch McConnell’s heart isn’t crushed. Or Baynor. Or McCain. Or any of the dozens of Dems who are afraid to take on the gun lobby. See, when your heart is crushed, you’re willing to do whatever you have to do to stop what’s crushing it. You’re willing to give up your job. You’re willing to do that thing you can be proud of when you stand before your god on your version of Judgment Day.
President Obama says he is not resigned, that there will come a day when we’ll do the right thing. I love the guy and I hope he really believes it, but we just watched the slaughter of nine people so graceful and embracing that their hateful killer almost didn’t open fire, on the heels of a deranged young man who brought an assault rifle he got from his mother to gun down twenty kindergarteners and first graders. No change in gun laws.
I waited another day. To get past NRA snake and board member Charles Cotton blaming the slaughter on Reverend Pinckney for not allowing guns inside; you know, so that blessed souls gathering for prayer can gun down whoever wanders in with a killing heart. I waited to get past the dim-witted Fox News mouthpieces telling us it wasn’t about racism, it was an attack on religion. Can you imagine the conversations those people have before going on the air? Can you wrap your mind around their gracelessness? I waited to get past the right wing mental health bullshit (their summer version of the war on Christmas). You know, it’s not about guns, it’s about mental illness; proclaimed by people who vote again and again to cut mental health services. It’s about everything but guns. Guns are our freedom.
Random thoughts; because this level of malice coupled with this level of indifference does not allow order of thought:
It’s about guns, it’s about hate and it’s about indifference. Any discussion which doesn’t include that is ignorant and futile.
When it comes to being unforgiving, Dylann Roof doesn’t even enter my mind, nor does whoever forked over the capital to buy the gun, or the people who “should have seen the signs.” It’s us I can’t forgive. It’s elected South Carolina Governor Nikki Hayley standing before her microphone declaring “This is not who we are.” Yes it is, Nikki. You fly a flag celebrating an entire culture of Americans who kept the ancestors of this days slaughtered innocents in slavery. You call it tradition. It’s fucked up tradition, Nikki.
The leadership of the National Rifle Association is a terrorist group. Think about it. The NRA not only stands for and trumpets policies that have slaughtered far more innocent people than the 9-11 jets ever did, it buys the votes that keep those policies in place. And fuck you legislators who sell those votes.
The membership of the National Rifle Association – not to be confused with its leaders; that’s a closed club – sends their dues to said terrorist group, even though a significant number among that membership support regulation. Folks, start another group; a CNRA (Compassionate) or an SNRA (Sane) or an NRAWFS (With a Fucking Soul).
And what’s going on with the rest of us, holding national conversations based on stunningly ludicrous basic premises?
-The right wing tells us racism is a thing of the past and we enter into that debate as if it’s real. There is no debate. Fuck you right wing. There is racism, it’s rampant and you feed it and you feed off of it.
-The right wing tells us the Second Amendment guarantees each of us the right to as many guns and as many different kinds of guns as we want. Fuck you right wing. The Second Amendment guarantees no such thing. It provides for a well-armed militia, and that is not some north Idaho, south Georgia, middle Montana gaggle of gun nuts. It’s the National Guard. If in fact the Second Amendment were meant to arm us against a “traitorous national government” it would allow individuals to possess bunker buster bombs and nuclear weapons and fully armed drones because, guess what? the national government has all those things and more. The kind of weaponry available to us now was unimaginable to the founding fathers and if we are to hold to the questionable position that they were wiser and more insightful than most of the rest of humankind, we have to know that were they alive to witness what the Second Amendment has wrought, they’d shoot themselves so they could roll over in their graves. At least they’d have access to the arms with which they could expedite that.
--The right wing uses the word “freedom” as a talking point, when it has no idea what the word even means, and because they use it in the manner they do, it loses whatever salient meaning it may have had. Talking points have one function and one function only: to make intellectually lazy people feel smart. So basically it allows a dumb guy to connect “freedom” to the NRA version of the Second Amendment and portray himself as a patriot. It’s bullshit. When you hear it, the only sane response is to laugh and walk away.
--The right wing tells us, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Yeah, well they do it with guns. Guns do kill people. Adam Lanza doesn’t slaughter 26 human beings without deadly weaponry that has no function other than to end lives. James Holmes doesn’t end the lives of 12 and injure 70 more without deadly weaponry that has no function other than to end lives. And so on. The debate over whether an AR-15 or an AK-47 is an automatic weapon is mute. Who gives a shit? It fires fast and slaughters. Same with all the fancy handguns. And here’s the response to anyone who tells you the answer is to arm church members and teachers and college kids and cowboys and drunks. Fuck you. I’d be embarrassed to be in any way involved in that conversation.
It’s us, folks. When Mitch McConnell calls the Boston bombing an act of terrorism while the Charleston church shooting is a tragedy, then follows it with “the church should be a place of refuge… a place of compassion,” vote his ass out of office! The Senate should be a place of compassion. The Senate should be a place that helps make policy so the church is a refuge. MSNBC put out an innocuous poll asking us whether we think this killing will have an effect on tightening gun laws. Hey, MSNBC you don’t need a poll. I’ll tell you with absolute certainty. Hell no. Adam Lanza slaughtered 20 kindergartners and first graders. White kids, for the most part from a relatively well-off community. The Newtown parents met with representatives and senators face to face after that unimaginable mass murder and were told in effect, “We’re sorry for your loss, but I’ve got a campaign to run.” Joe the not-even-a-real Plumber added with his own brand of reptilian empathy: “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” Obviously not, Joe, but if the decent people of this country can pull it together, as our president has indicated, we’ll change your Constitutional rights.
Several prominent community leaders in Charleston were recorded the other day saying we need a frank discussion on hate crimes and gun control, once the grieving has eased. But see, the right wing knows if they can keep the discussion going, nothing has to get done. The “discussion” has brought us to a place where it’s worse to call someone a racist than it is to be a racist.
We are a nation threatened by hate who won’t confront it’s own racism or its own illusion – delusion – that respect comes out of the barrel of a smoking six-shooter; are a nation that doesn’t take care of it’s disenfranchised and its mentally ill - those who have nothing to lose - and that refuses to keep guns out of anyone’s hands in the name of a freedom we can’t define.
We need a national referendum on shame.
