The Road To Nowhere At The Barrel of a Gun

 I honestly don't know how this blog is going to turn out. Normally I plot these things in my head, and then I write them. Being able to do that as always been an ability of mine. Yet as I sit here, typing this post, I'm at a loss, a complete loss. When I heard of the shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, it brought me back to Columbine.

I was 23 when Columbine happened, so I was only a few years removed from being a high school student myself.  And let us being completely blunt, high school is torture. The cliques, the pressure to conform or be cast out, as the band Rush so precisely put it in their song Subdivisions. High School like a precursor to social media. Where everyone checks their value based on comments and likes. One gages themselves in high school pretty much the same way. I have a few regrets from my high school days, but I try not to dwell on them too much. I cannot think of any bullying that I went through in high school that would have led me to take up arms and slay my classmates. 

When Columbine occurred, all I could think about is those who lost their lives and the various milestones they'd never get a chance to enjoy. Walking across the stage at graduation. Finding love, getting married, getting a job and having a career. Perhaps even having a family of their own. All of that taken away in the blink of an eye, at the hands of a kid with a gun. And I sit here wondering what the survivors of Columbine are thinking right now. Are their deceased classmates on their mind?

I want to be clear about one thing up front. I don't care what motivated the shooter, I don't even want to give him the curtesy of seeing name in the paper, mentioning it here in the blogs, or even on twitter.  My only concern is for the families that just one week removed from a holiday in which we give thanks now have to plan funerals for their children. Oh. and by the way, the Christmas shopping season has begun. There's that as well. 

Tate Myre, age 16. Hanna St. Julian, age 14. Madisyn Baldwin, age 17. All of them children who died in a horrific fashion. Madisyn should be focusing on college, or whatever her post-graduation plans happen to be. Hanna was just a Freshman, still trying to navigate what high school was all about. Tate might have been focused on finally learning how to drive a car. Who knows what contribution to society they might have made. Alas, we'll never know, as they were cut down before they could even get started. 

It's one thing when there is a workplace shooting. No life lost should easily be discarded, but the rational is at least those were adults. When it comes to school, and its children that die, it stings a little more. And it's always just confused me that a political party that will fight to make abortion illegal, citing the fetus is life, are the same ones that opt to do nothing in the wake of a school place shooting. The tired old rally cry that dust off and bring out is that any talk of gun control is politicizing the event and that the focus should be on helping the families. heal. If I had a child that died in a school shooting, I would want change, not the same goddamn rhetoric that gets spewed each time this happens. How come so much time and effect are put into protecting a fetus, but so little once they are born? They never want to blame the gun, but they want to find blame anywhere else. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's empty talk like that which becomes offensive during times like these. 

That brings me to another classic rock song. Saturday Night Special by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Lynyrd Skynyrd essentially created Southern Rock, and one of the bands regrets it has is allowing the label to associate them the Confederate Flag, which is partly the reason they did the song "Workin' for MCA" where they took their own label to task. The band, despite appearances, was good with gun control. In fact, the song, Saturday Night Special, which does get played at NRA rallies, asks "Why don't we dump all the guns to the bottom of the sea, before some fool shoots you or me."

Now, I'm not advocating that we get rid of all guns. The U.S. Constitution makes gun ownership a right and that cannot be taken away by the stroke of the president's pen. However, we do need to take a look at the situation and address ourselves to solving the problem. In the 1920's the N.R.A, citing the increase of Tommy Guns by the Mafia, which began to rise in America as an unintended consequence of the Volstead Act, was one of the first to call for a gun registry in America. A far cry from today's N.R.A., which to me in my opinion,  has become nothing more than a glorified sales person for the gun manufactures, now stands steadfast against any such regulation. 

It is well beyond the time that we awaken ourselves to the issue at hand. Something needs to be done to address this issue. As it stands, three people have lost their lives over a weapon that was given as a present without a second thought to its use. Three lives that were just beginning to find their footing in this world. Three kids are dead. 

I guess it's time to wrap this blog up. As I said at the start, I had no idea of how this was going to turn out as there are still a wide range of emotions going through me right now. One of which is accepting the grim fact for all of the talk and bluster that shall emerge from this, we'll be back in this spot sooner or later, lamenting the lives lost, wishing for change. Rinse and repeat. If only we could get off this wheel and make some actual change. Change that has come decades too late for the Columbine victims. Years too late for Jamie Guttenberg and the victims of Parkland. And too late still for Tate Myre, Hanna St. Julian, and Madisyn Baldwin. I just hope it doesn't end up too late for anyone else, especially a teen or young child. 

America: A Land of contradictions

 Sometimes it's the simplest things that will trigger a thought. Yesterday I was watching TV and an ad came on for bottled water. It really struck me as odd. Our founders put to paper that Americans should have access to life, liberty, and happiness. And here we are charging people for something it is essential to life, water. We have crippled our system so much that we now sell bottled water. Now, I could point out that this is capitalism run amuck, but that would be too great and clear of an observation.  When in fact, that seems to be more or less, what America is founded on.

There is a call to help the homeless, but when there is no profit to be made from it, they are left to their own devices, to survive on their own. However, in the few special occasions that they find shelter, if a developer comes in with a fistful of greenbacks, those homeless people are tossed back out onto the streets, while what they once called home is remodeled into an upscale suite of apartments. 

Everyone wants to protect the children. You have scores of people protesting outside of abortion clinics. Yet when it comes time and those children need services such as WIC or food stamps, the very crowd that once vowed to protect them when they were a fetus turns against them with great fury, and calls them moochers, sponges off of society. And if they live in a poor neighborhood awash in crime, little is done to invest in that neighborhood. That is unless, you call private prisons an investment. And that's nothing more to profit by keeping people, mostly African-American and Latino-American, in prison be decreeing harsh sentences and coming up with ways to ensure they end up incarcerated. And you thought slavery was something only in history books.

Health care. If you want to be healthy and live a long life, you must pay for the privilege. 

We have for profit prison systems. Water, a natural resource, is now bottled because our country is held back by a political party that doesn't see investing in clean, safe water as a priority.  It is if an unforeseen side effect of unchecked capitalism is the profiting off of suffering. Anytime you try to point out these flaws, you're branded a socialist or worse. That serves to only keep us stuck going in circles.

Let's be blunt, there is no perfect system, no matter how much someone tries to frame it. We must awaken ourselves to the reality that unchecked capitalism as grown into a raging beast that is out of control. We need laws to keep businesses in check, offering real punishment when they price gouge. Laws that make them think twice about layoffs and uprooting operations so they could avoid such pesky things as paying people a livable wage. Laws that for once and all say that keeping people in prison should not be a for profit business.  There is a lot that we must open our eyes to in this country, because these are times of peril. And under we can correct the course we're on, we're just doomed to repeat the same mistakes.