After Buffalo and Uvalde, America feels broken: Where do we go from here?

[marmar]

After Buffalo and Uvalde, America feels broken: Where do we go from here?
Feeling grief, confusion and despair right now is normal. How do we turn that into something constructive?

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
PUBLISHED MAY 27, 2022 6:30AM


(Salon) America is in big trouble. I think we all feel that way.

The country will not somehow "be fine" or find healing any time soon. Do not listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. They are lying to you. Although the clinical language may not apply perfectly, it feels as though we are experiencing a national nervous breakdown, a collective mental health crisis on a grand scale. It feels both societal and personal.

Less than two weeks ago in Buffalo, an apparent white supremacist terrorist killed 10 Black people at a supermarket. Ten days later in Uvalde, Texas, a deranged gunman attacked an elementary School, killing 19 children and two teachers. In both cases, the shooters used the AR-15 assault-style rifle, for all intents and purposes the same weapon used by the U.S. military. It fires standard 5.56mm bullets, which would typically strike the human body at a speed of 3,251 feet per second with 1,300 foot-pounds of kinetic energy. Some of the parents in Uvalde had to provide DNA samples so their children could be identified.

Both alleged killers were 18 years old. What personal, social or psychological emptiness leads such a young person to commit such a horrific act? We look for answers and do not find them.

We know that too many Americans love guns more than they love children, or life itself. They are possessed by the totemic power of the gun and what it represents in American history and society. Guns provide a temporary cure for death anxiety by conferring the ability to deliver death to others. These pathological attachments are camouflaged by all sorts of nonsensical rhetoric about "freedom." It is almost too perverse to be credible: The "freedom" to own as many guns as one wants trumps the freedom to live without reasonable fear of dying by gunfire.

....(snip)....

Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of history at Grand View University where he specializes in apocalyptic religion and political violence. His essays and other writing have been featured in the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, the Bulwark and Foreign Policy.

We live in a country where half of the 500 or so people who make all the laws that govern this nation are begging the other half to help them save lives, and yet, no matter how many children die in a classroom, no matter how many people are murdered in a grocery store, no matter how many bodies pile up, the other half will say "thoughts and prayers," wash their hands of the whole affair and collect their 30 pieces of silver from the NRA. And we accept that this is a society. That this is a nation worth saving. That the Golden Calf that the Second Amendment has become to the right is worthy of the sacrifice of innocents, day after day, week after week, my entire life. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/05/27/after-buffalo-and-uvalde-america-feels-broken-where-do-we-go-from-here/

[Irish_Dem]

1. Fascist dictatorships deliberately break the spirit of their people.

This is how the make the people give up and surrender.

[Sucha NastyWoman]

2. We go left.

This country has only gone farther and farther right for so long, we’ve lost our balance and are crashing to the ground.

[slightlv]

3. From one Nasty Woman to another,

you're absolutely correct! And you know what else, the Right knows it, too... that's why they're really pushing it this time around. They know we're at the tipping point and not backing down. They also know the way the pendulum swings... they know they've pushed it so far right, that it has to swing that far left before it can come to rest in the middle once again, and they're determined they're going to prevent it. Of course, they're fighting against physics, itself, to do it. But then they're not known for they're sense of Science, anyway, are they?

To be honest, I not only look forward, but I also kind of fear what we in the left can do if we swing as far to the left as they have swung to the right. This country has never seen it before; it only thinks it has. The '60's was as close as we came with the violence of the SDS, etc. Overall, that was the exception and not the rule, even then. The right has made violence the rule, rather than the exception. If we were to turn that on it's head back at them, they'd not know what hit them. There really are enough of us left alive from that time to pass on the knowledge of those days. Not that I want that violence revisited... but like I said... Yertle the Turtle knows how the pendulum swings. Why else do you think he gave Cornyn that order - like it's going to go anywhere or accomplish anything! It's meant to try to pacify the raging horde who are becoming more and more enraged with each drip of information that comes out of Uvalde.

Between Alito's 16th Century Memo against Women, the Boston Massacre of Grandparents, the Uvalde Massacre of Children, and De Santis' ongoing war against anything not male, white, CIS, and Christian, I do believe the majority of the U.S. is beginning to say "Enough!"

At least, I damn sure hope so.

[wnylib]

4. What or when was the Boston Massacre of Grandparents?

[slightlv]

5. the Supermarket is what I'm talking about there

attention was paid to the number of older women who were shopping... being one myself now, I consider that a euphemism for grandparent (deservedly or not)... and, omg, I am SO thankful for spellcheck these days!

[mnhtnbb]

6. It was in Buffalo, NY, not Boston.

[slightlv]

7. I stand corrected.

Too many to keep tract of, and I'm too upset. I apologize.