A tale of mass embitterment in America

Last night around 2:00 am I awoke thinking about yesterday’s blog and a passage in which I referred to the feeling of loss one can accumulate with age. This is what I wrote about the feelings I had while lining up to race an 8K in the Gasparilla race in Tampa and realized that my time for winning the overall was long ago, and past:

But I’d have won that 8K race by a minute or so any number of times during my running career, in quite similar weather conditions. It would be so sweet to win these things again. I won’t lie. I feel like something’s been stolen from me in life.

That last sentence leans toward being embittered. But that’s not how I feel or think. In fact, the words that followed describe the fact that it is our specific job in life to not let bitterness begin to rule our consciousness.

But that’s how life goes. Life is a long series of giving things away. The truly successful learn how to go through that process gracefully, or take pleasure in helping others to achieve.

Bitter times

Spending a few days down in Florida put me in close proximity to the most recent mass shooting at a school. The governor is considering changes to Florida gun laws in response to the slaughter that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was an embittered young man who stocked up on weapons and ammunition, carried them to the school he once attended, struck the fire alarm so kids would rush out of class, and murdered 17 of his former peers with a military-grade weapon that tears the organs of the body apart because that is what it was designed to do.

Answering questions

A few days ago I watched a video in which former President Barack Obama answered a question from an audience member about the Constitution and gun control. The guy asking the question was likely more than sixty years old from his appearance. He sported the classic white chin beard and somewhat portly physique of the retired––and obviously not doing much but hobby stuff. Through his question to Obama, he was expressing concern about the President coming to take away his guns.

Obama made clear the purpose of gun control. He said…and I paraphrase because he said this multiple times and in many different ways during his eight years in office, “We’re not trying to take anyone’s guns away.”

Yet every time there was a mass shooting a feverish segment of the American population would rush out and buy even more weapons. That brand of anxious logic told them that each new mass shooting would be the one that turned the tide against the Wild West mentality that has taken over America.

Well, perhaps that day has finally come. But I doubt it.

Quiet conversations

I’ve had many direct and earnest conversations about guns with guys like the one that stood up in the audience. He tried so hard to act rationally while talking about his fear of someone taking his guns away. I’ll leave that component of the argument right there, because that sense of loss thing, the fear of someone “stealing your rights” is the crux of everything going wrong with America today.

The version of “gun rights” that exists now in America is technically only a few years old. Conservative court decisions set the table for our current state of gun proliferation. This is called judicial activism. Of course each of these supposed “victories” for gun rights was ardently backed by the NRA. Collectively they have turned gun legislation inside out and upside down.

Now we have to try to live with the selfish desires of those who can’t see the forest for the trees, and are more concerned with the supposed sport of plugging holes in those trees than to prevent innocent fourteen-year-old kids from being mowed down like targets in school hallways, or concertgoers from being murdered from the temple tower of a hotel, or churchgoers blasted as they commune in the House of God. This is the true legacy of the NRA. This is the blood on their collective hands.

As for those evangelicals lining up to protect the conservative meme that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” here’s a lesson in religion. We all know that guns were designed for killing. Killing people in cold blood is not some form of “God-given gun right.” None other than Jesus Christ pointed out that intent is essentially equal to commitment of the actual sin. And when the design of a thing specifically defies a commandment such as “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” we all know that the temptation to do so will overwhelm the embittered conscience of those who feel wronged by society.

Even simple confusion or disenchantment can trigger the human instinct to maim and kill. It’s right there in the Book of Genesis, don’ t you see? It’s called Original Sin. And an AR-15 is nothing other than the license to do so. To sin. And to kill. It doesn’t matter if “law-abiding” gun owners only aim these weapons at targets and trees. The history of the human race is so profoundly violent it is inevitable that desperate, embittered souls like the biblical character of Cain will slay the targets of their ire. And it was only because his offering was looked upon with disfavor. It only amplifies from there.

If the biblical figure Cain had owned an AR-15, the Book of Genesis would literally been played outdifferently. He likely would have gone off and killed his future wife as well (wherever she came from) along with the rest of the human race. End of story.

And while we’re talking about ‘end of story’ tales. The gun lobby has even succeeded in preventing the Centers for Disease Control from doing research about the effects of guns on human health in American society. Think about that for a moment: the gun lobby won’t even let the nation’s leading medical research arm study what guns are doing to this country. That says a bunch about what conservatives truly fear about what their interpretation of the Second Amendment has become. They must stop the truth from coming out.

Criminal acts

That’s not just insanity. That’s a criminal level of obfuscation. Thousands of people are dying every year from gun violence, mass shootings and suicides. Now our own government has banned all reasonable research on the subject because the gun lobby and its kept politicians know that the truth about gun violence would force the nation to come to terms with an addiction to guns that now threatens to undermine the very construct of the American enterprise. It is an ungodly and perverted torque of gun rights that America has adopted as law.

Abomination and desolation

The neo-liberal influence of guns on society is an absolute abomination of what our Constitution was crafted to do: protect human liberty and govern those rights for all, not just a few. For centuries the words “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state…” were rightly interpreted to mean that the United States never wanted guns to get out of control. Well, that’s happened. Even the signs posted at school and church doors cannot keep the embittered from wandering around as if the entire world were a threat to their daily existence.

That’s fucked up thinking right there. And we can thank the likes of Wayne LaPierre for fomenting those fears because it profits his organization and the commercial enterprises that frankly benefit from every shooting that takes place in this country. If we’ve learned anything from the perpetual squander of human life that takes place in America every year, it is that murder is the one commodity that never goes out of season. Because the more it takes place the more the supposed ‘law-abiding gun owners’ flock to the arms merchants to add to their arsenal.

This is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. A tautology. But most of all it is the product of the embittered disarmament of common sense. Concealed Carry laws are the farce of civilized existence. Open Carry laws are a direct defiance of personal liberty. All this is a perversion of what the Founding Fathers ever intended, and is wrought by the constitutional originalism that so mimics the distortion of scripture by biblical literalists and legalists. We are stuck in the spin cycle of anachronism and innocent people are nothing more than target practice for the terminally embittered.

The gun lobby successfully sold its version of the Second Amendment on the false narrative that the proliferation of guns in the hands of private citizens is equal to liberty. That’s a lie, of course.

Guns now likely outnumber human beings in America. But worse, when the legislation banning automatic weapons expired, it unleashed a terrifying beast that now ensures police are outgunned on any street they patrol. Private citizens have to fear for their lives in formerly safe places such as churches, schools, concert venues and anywhere else an embittered individual unleashes hell on those that he (for it is mostly men who murder) either knows or doesn’t know.

There is no sane person in America who can claim that anything about this pattern of embitterment and violence is constitutional. The United States Constitution was written by people who did not by nature trust the mob rule of the general populace. Nor did they embrace the vigilante instincts of the unregulated militia. That’s why the Second Amendment was written with a brake system in place, a governor on an engine that might otherwise overheat.

That’s also why the Founding Fathers formed a republic, not a pure democracy as a form of government. But our political system has been overrun by mob rule, and our current version of gun laws is a reflection of that.

Embittered populace

So here we sit, with an embittered populace ruling the narrative and gun violence ruling the weekly headlines. All because a fashionably embittered authoritarian voting bloc fell for the promises made by a reality star President who has likely never read the Constitution, much less understood its history in any ideological sense.

Instead he depends on a brand of false heroics to depict himself as a hero for American values. These are lauded by a mob of terminally sentimental and fearfully irrelevant members of the population who believe that whatever Trump says is more important than the office he occupies or the responsibilities it entails. This is salacious stuff, and a high risk when we consider that his position makes him Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military.

He apparently holds a high opinion of himself when it comes to his personal level of heroism and fitness. As reported across multiple sites on the Internet, this is what our supposed President said in response to the shootings in Florida:

“I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” Mr Trump told a group of state governors gathered at the White House.

Mr Trump also said it was “disgusting” that officers reportedly did not confront the suspect on 14 February.

The massacre was the second-deadliest shooting at a US school.

“I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too,” said Mr Trump on Monday of his assertion that he would have rushed into the school.

He added: “You never know until you’re tested.”

This from a man not exactly known for his military service record, and a guy who received multiple deferments due to bone spurs.

Bitter man

Trump genuinely seems embittered and defensive whenever people question his qualifications, level of intelligence or bravery.

Yet those who support the man seem to do so in a fashion almost universally separated from any factual basis for his claims. The instinct seems to stem from rooting for what Trump supposedly stands for rather than anything he has said and done to effect any honest of positive change in America.

So he’s free to claim credit for an improving economy even as he lies about his wealth and success. Disregard the facts of his multiple bankruptcies and fealty to Russian bankers, and how he’s been bailed out multiple times from his massive failures as a businessman or as a human being. His lawyer even personally paid off porn stars to cover up the prurient affairs of his client. Even Trump’s elaborate combover hairstyle covers up a bald spot that had to be surgically addressed less his vanity and virility come into question. The man is the walking, talking embodiment of embitterment. But as Mark Twain once said, “All it takes is ignorance and confidence, and success is sure.”

And that’s how we got the phrase “Make America Great Again.”

Outgunned

So the thing we know about Donald Trump is that he embraces the embittered as a political party unto its own. That explains the isolationism. The xenophobia. The racist slander and libel against immigrants. And the confused idea that the only way to protect students is to arm teachers. Let’s just throw them all into a school together and let them shoot it out. That will fix things.

That’s the pattern here. If people are pissed and need a voice about something, Trump is their man. So the guy who wants guns and feels like someone is going to take them away has Donald Trump as an ally. But the guy outside that school who had a gun yet knew he was massively outgunned just by reading the terrifying signals of rapid-fire gunshots inside the school? Trump doesn’t like that guy. That guy was perhaps not a hero, but for many of us, he is a sympathetic figure because that’s how we feel in an American where guns constitute a license to kill. He rightly and likely sensed that the situation truly was hopeless.

That is the reality the gun nuts will never admit. They admit as much when defending assault rifles and other military-grade weapons. “But if we don’t have them only the bad guys will have them.” And that’s what constitutes the maelstrom of bad logic now shooting our nation full of holes.

Captured and tortured

Let’s not forget that Trump didn’t like the story of Senator John McCain either. Our supposed President criticized McCain for getting captured and tortured. Never mind that the circumstances of war (or school shootings) are often far out of the control of an individual. Perhaps everyday people are sick of being told they have to arm themselves in order to live in peace.

There many kinds of war going on in culture today. Donald Trump embodies so many of them. He fights wars against women who recall his sexually abusive behavior. He wants to build a wall to keep immigrants out of the country. And his environmental chief Scott Pruitt is doing everything he can to conduct a war against the earth and its natural resources.

Just as importantly, Donald Trump ignores the real signs of war going on in front of his nose. He doesn’t like accepting the idea that the Russians committed an act of war by interfering in the United States election through which our President was pushed into power. Trump is bitter about the very notion that such influence might have affected the outcome. And we might better keep an AR-15 out of his hands or he’ll go right after Hillary Clinton, the woman he stalked and threatened during the presidential debates. Although that’s an oxymoron.

Embittered and in power

Thus Donald Trump is the perfect symbol for all those embittered souls who find solace in the idea that they’ve “lost” something in the America that they think they once knew. Most of the Make America Great Again philosophy center arounds claims to “rights” that never really existed in the first place.

The nation has turned itself inside out looking for answers to the question of why mass shootings keep taking place, and the answer is simple: bitter, selfish people are never satisfied until someone pays a price for the pain they claim to own.