After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
—Author William S. Burroughs
The Parkland school massacre should be the justification for banning ROTC from public schools.
Remember our public intellectuals from times past, who fearlessly challenged the social mores and public zeitgeist of their times?
Henry David Thoreau comes to mind, who famously opposed the Mexican-American War with a night in jail, as does Voltaire’s sharp critique of Enlightenment optimism. Well, now these public minds are far and few between.
It had been in the works. Instead of engaging in the traditional revulsion associated with a mass shooting, or even digesting the grief of outraged students and grieving parents, US President Donald Trump’s solution to guns violence was elementary. To target the perpetrator, it was necessary to arm instructors, mount the barricades, and raise the stakes.
Gucci uses severed heads as an accessory in a fashion show in Milan, Obama's portrait painter creates large paintings of black women holding severed heads of white women, a Hollywood comedian photographs herself holding what appears to be the severed head of the President, celebrities attend parties displaying heads on dinner plates, and Disney creates cartoons with headless creatures and heads without bodies. [It's time for the rest of us to push back, don't you think?
I grew up as the child of a small Houma Indian community in south Louisiana. My father was a hunter, trapper and commercial fisherman so my early years were spent at his side observing and learning those life-ways. In our household a gun was just another tool with which we put food on the table.
The compulsive hatred of Putin by many who have almost zero idea about Putin or Russian history is disproportionate to any rational analysis, but not surprising. Trump and Putin are like weird doppelgangers in the liberal imagination.
— John Steppling, “Trump, Putin, and Nikolas Cruz Walk into a Bar”, Dissident Voice, February 21, 2018.
While the outrage and horror being expressed about the most recent mass school shooting that took place on Valentine’s Day in Florida is certainly warranted, the anger is incredibly displaced. Anger, disappointment, fear and sadness are all acceptable and understandable emotions to experience after an event such as this takes place in the United States or elsewhere. But it is the elsewhere that I want to focus on right now.
