Where’s the Red Line around children at school?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 10, 2024 – When does a school district contain more military-grade weapons than is safe for the community’s physical and mental health? At what point will parents be guilty of criminal negligence for delivering their children to school? How many school shootings is too many?
The recent one-boy war in a Georgia classroom was the 45th school shooting in the presidential election year of 2024. Which candidate takes the issue seriously enough to offer more than thoughts and prayers; who proposes an honest, thorough solution?
Please don’t rinse these bloodstains out of your consciousness of American citizenship, much less erase them from your divine conscience. The blood of this incident was spilled because one boy-soldier’s commanding officer, his father, thought it a fitting way to celebrate Christmas by arming his son with an assault rifle.
How does American society produce people who celebrate the birthday of a prince of peace in a manner appropriate for the birthday of a warlord?
Who are we, who keep sending our neighbors to city hall, to the state house, and to congress, where they only add fuel to the fire, as they keep issuing gun permits to people who cannot tell the difference between peace and war?
No gun problem here
We don’t have a gun problem, we have a national mental health problem. Far too many people only believe what makes them feel good. And from sun up to sun down, every American has an overwhelming range of options that allow perfect, cost-free escape from reality – and still take home a generous paycheck.
It is dead easy to ignore plain facts, such as that liars lie, cheaters cheat, rapists rape, and haters hate. Instead of the facts on the blood-soaked ground, too many of us embrace ancient promises that peace on earth only arrives after the devil has served two terms in the White House.
Nor is the left right, as demonstrated by the recent run of political theatre on campus. The collegiate cohort is pro-Palestine, not anti-war. How and why they champion the people of Palestine, but not the enslaved Uighurs of China, or the victims of a hundred petty warlords in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Syria, Africa, Haiti, Mexico, Central and South America, amounts to proof of how widespread is our national mental health problem.
Indifference to honesty, to the whole truth, to a consistent and comprehensive world view, is what has brought empire after empire to ruin throughout history. It led to the American revolution against the British empire. But the dishonesty virus was only contained, never killed.
Today, the conservatives who propped up the Disneyland of the British empire have been reborn as the conservative American party that is intent to restore toppled Humpty Dumpty to the throne. Madness reigns, and it wears a red baseball cap. Switching to a blue beret is a good first step, but until we name the problem, we can’t begin to design a solution.
There is no honest way to read the second amendment without seeing that whatever right a citizen has to bear arms is subject to regulation and related to the security of the state.
Where was the militia on January 6, 2021? We know where Colonel Bonespur’s brigade was, and now hundreds of them are behind bars. Whether their imprisonment improves the security of their various home states remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the feckless colonel bounces between courthouse and rally as he awaits our decision on which federal address his mail will be forwarded to?