BURY MY HEART AT SANDY HOOK

It’s amazing to see the panic-buying of semi-automatic assault rifles in the aftermath of the mass shooting of 20 kids and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut USA, whether it is out of fear of gun control laws or an idea to equalise the firepower of another  imagined future mass murder is anyone’s guess, but one thing if for certain, those buying the weapons are almost certainly, unknowingly, providing the means for the next massacre (notably after every massacre the sales of the exact weapon used rockets, in a perverse form of advertising)…

Now in principle I think a people armed is a good thing, presupposing that that people are rational actors of-course, and that the right to form militias to throw of tyranny is a given in my book- but this is America we’re talking about, the Land of Lost Opportunity, the land that came in to being through the concept of ‘Manifest Destiny’ , ‘rugged individualism’ , slavery and a God-given right to commit genocide, despite the fundamental democratic principle that religion should be separate from the state along with the judiciary and the legislature… Sadly, the very good reasons for ‘the people’ to be armed have long since won the day, the tyranny of the market prevails and so does a peculiarly American  concept of Christian Social-Darwinism, that supports the very tyranny that is supposedly the threat. The John Wayne-machismo-loving middle classes don’t so much fear the government for taxing it or for wanting its guns, no, they fear those beneath them on the slippery slope of a class system that is supposed not to exist in the US.

(‘Rugged individualism’ in action?)

This Christian Social-Darwinism is marked by a total absence of  compassion for the poor or needy (despite what the Idiot of Nazarene said) and thinks that ‘free’ healthcare provided by the state is tantamount to full-on godless bolshevism ,  confusingly painting the hapless corporate puppet Pres.Obama  as either Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Bin Laden or Stalin as the nemesis of the white middle classes ,bringing the revenge of the ghettos with him into the White House and down Main Street. Some of the right-wing adherents of the 2nd Amendment believe that if it was interpreted correctly, ordinary citizens should be able to carry the modern equivelant to 18th Century infantry weapons (sword, pike, flintlock pistol and muskets) which would mean shoulder-fired missiles, heavy machine guns, mortars and hand-grenades (though I suppose this might also include tactical battlefield nukes)…

What America was, or could have been, is long since lost, the America of social justice, a refuge from persecution, religious or otherwise, a New World built on new values was buried under the filth, greed  and corruption of the Railroad bosses, the Chicago industrialists, the Tamany Hall bigwigs and the showman politicians from Teddy Roosvelt onwards.  They succeeded, by and large, in irradicating any social sense of human community in their nation in the pursuit of profits and enrichment, through coercion and corruption, often through the gun- As the millionaire industrialist Jay Gould said in the late 1800s, ‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half’ ultimately ensuring that the America of Anne Hutchinson and the antinomianists, Tom Paine, Herman Husband,Nat Turner,Henry Thoreau,  Frederick Douglass ,Josiah Warren, the Molly Maguires , Albert and Lucy Parsons, the IWW,  Emma Goldman and countless experimental colonies established to institute social justice was buried under an illusory dream of personal enrichment.

The legendary ‘frontier’ so dear to so many Americans still exists in their minds- although it has become everybody and everything outside of themselves and represents mortal  danger to them- just as the paranoid, imperial US foreign policy paints anything not within its control as being a threat to ‘national security’.

Obama ‘wept’ when speaking of those murdered children, knowing full-well that drone strikes across the world kill and mutilate on his orders…and that the weapons ‘lost’ by the FBI in Mexico supplying organised crime there in a supposed ‘sting’ operation, will kill many more innocent children and adults, never mind the countless deaths from poverty fuelled crime in cities across the US…

Meanwhile, obesity and deaths from car accidents in America kill far more people than guns do (and the largest proportion of those shot commited suicide), yet nobody suggests banning cars or fast food (yet), as the capitalist juggernaut rolls on, praised by its own victims who arm themselves against themselves, without realising they are their own worst enemy through ignoring the fact that it is only the wealthy elite that really reaps the benefits of the American Dream.

THE RICH ARE OUR MISFORTUNE.

For more on gun massacres:-

https://incubusblog.wordpress.com/rule-no-17-smile-at-all-times/