CSotD: Children with their teeth on edge
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There was a time not so long ago — but before the Parkland kids were born — when the idea of a hall monitor with a machine gun was funny, in part because we hadn't begun to slaughter each other in random murders but mostly because nobody was stupid enough to think that a gun in a school hallway was a good idea.
Well, that's history. We've become more violent, a whole lot more stupid and even more ridiculous in our growing paranoia and embrace of a police state.
Speaking of history, next Tuesday will be the 85th anniversary of the fire at the Reichstag. And if you don't think that's relevant, either you don't know history or you haven't been paying attention to current events, because the sort of people who spread lies about how that happened, and how to address it, are still around, only now, as Rob Rogers notes, they're accusing the Parkland kids of being actors and puppets.
Then, as now, these liars are pursuing their own corrupt agenda, and the question is, will they succeed today as they did then?
We are at a flashpoint, and it's time to support the Parkland kids and their cohorts around the country, not to sit back and wish them well.
Maybe they see more clearly because they were not, like those apocryphal frogs, slowly lulled into a police state, with fingerprinting programs and TV documentaries that endlessly presented stories of child abduction and of sexual predators, or retold the Manson and OJ Simpson murders and various gruesome domestic killings, or fictional cop shows and movies that made heroes of impossibly capable crimefighters.
They could have accepted the world we gave them, but thank God they are kicking back, because we haven't been.
No, Jimmy Margulies depicts the way in which we handle our collective grief: Great floods of crocodile tears, made whole again by infusions of campaign cash and empty promises.
The kids aren't having it, and Scott Stantis offers the NRA a crying towel, while offering us a ray of hope.
Here's another bit of history the kids need to know: The Tobacco industry spent millions and millions to set up a phony research group and flood the nation with lies and pseudoscience, but finally the nation pushed back.
Watch any TV show, any movie in a setting prior to about 1980 and see how many people smoke. That's how much we smoked, how much tobacco was fully integrated into our society.
It's still around today, but confined and looked down upon and recognized for the harm it causes.
There is hope that guns will, one day, be worthwhile instruments of hunting and target shooting, but no longer accepted as an antidote to fear and personal insecurity.
Step One is to vote the puppets of the special interests out of office, including Marco Rubio, here parodied by Ann Telnaes in the wake of his shameful admission to the Parkland kids that, despite the murders of their schoolmates, he will not turn down the financial support of the NRA.
Let's be clear: It's alright for these legislators to represent the gun industry, but that means they can't also represent people who don't want to be shot in schools, at concerts, in churches.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else. he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. – Matthew 6:24
Perhaps, however, if we cleanse the Augean stables, we can then move to get money out of politics entirely, though it may take a Constitutional amendment.
But if that's what it takes, well, then that's the next Herculean labor.
But it has to begin in the 2018 elections this fall, because, as Mike Luckovich depicts, we're in danger of legislators listening to this kind of irresponsible, demented nonsense:
It boggles the mind that such an ignorant blowhard could be head of a lawn crew, much less a nation.
And it boggles the mind that a president could say something so completely dissociated from reality that it wouldn't at least provoke laughter, if not the 25th Amendment.
It helps that this president has never seen a gun fired in anger, having obtained a letter from the family doctor making sure he wouldn't.
However, I didn't serve, and I've heard enough from those who did that I wouldn't say anything as completely asinine.
Not that he's alone: Last night, the barstool experts in The Situation Room were excoriating the in-school cop at Parkland who froze up, as if there were time for him to have prevented the killings, assuming his pistol would have won out over an AR-15.
But mostly, as if it weren't common for an individual, no matter how experienced and well-trained, to freeze up under fire.
Take it from someone who has been there.
Take it from anyone who has been there, once you've determined that they were. The loudest, surest voices often weren't.
Meanwhile, Steve Sack notes that the NRA relies on metal detectors, not on their legendary "good guy with a gun."
Granted, it's not just their own gatherings. While they continue to recommend more guns everywhere, they also recommend metal detectors and armed guards everywhere.
Which is less "hypocrisy" than simple nonsense with a tinge of bigotry: Do they mean "everyone should be armed but nobody with a gun should be allowed in," or do they mean " … but only people who look like us should be allowed in with guns"?
Because most of the shooters have looked exactly like them.
Whatever. Answer not a fool according to his folly.
But do answer, and Poynter has an interview in which Rob Rogers, Ann Telnaes and Sage Stossel discuss the challenge.
Meanwhile, I'm unwilling to live in a society in which we live in constant danger, and under constant supervision.
Keep up the struggle, kids.
Your grandparents are just looking for the evening,
and the morning, in your eyes.
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