CSotD: The Beast of All Possible Worlds
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Let's start with John Deering's commentary, because the drek-to-brilliance balance on this topic has been way off, perhaps because all the good ideas were used on previous mass murders.
Well, not all of them, because Deering hits a poignant note with an understated piece that works on a couple of levels.
The first, most obvious and probably most intentional, is that we've been summoning the grief counselors to our schools far too often to deal with the aftermath of school shootings.
But this commentary goes beyond that and plumbs additional depths, some of which may fall under the category of "perhaps you have to have been there."
It's been awhile since I've been into schools except to pick up grandchildren, but I spent about a quarter of a century visiting hundreds of schools, and the chatter about how to change them to prevent shootings has me both scratching my head and furious.
The idea of arming teachers is the most idiotic, because (A) it assumes that the NRA's vision of living in an armed camp is sane, (B) it assumes that the qualities that make a good teacher would also make a good bodyguard and (C) it ignores all experience of people who have actually been in live fire situations.
"Idiotic" is one of those terms like "Nazi" that we've thrown around so much that it's lost meaning, but in this case, I mean it's idiotic in a literal sense: You would have to be an actual idiot to think it over and still believe it.
And let me amplify that by saying I heard someone on a news show yesterday call for more guns because having two armed officers on the scene in Texas and two others respond nearly immediately had not put enough guns in the situation.
I need not add that this opinion was not coming from anyone who claimed experience in live fire situations.
And Texas Lt. Gov Patrick's idea of having only one door was met with immediate derision by critics who pointed out the fire-safety aspects, so its advocates changed it to having only one entry door.
Which has been the case at every school I have ever walked into since Columbine.
Some, admittedly, let students, staff and faculty access the door with a key card, but that could easily be modified. Most already require that the office staff buzz you in.
And there are proposals to put kids through metal detectors as they do at airports, which would only extend the school day by an hour and a half or more.
Deering's sardonic joke about full-time grief counselors could be, by dropping one word, a proposal that would actually make a difference.
As it happens, the first tiny school I visited after Columbine — and found myself locked out because I went to the side door by the parking lot — has apparently tripled its guidance counselors since then.
I know this because I spoke to the entire guidance department then and he told me he had far too much on his plate to be able to help kids who really needed help.
And now I see they now have one counselor for every 267 students, which is better than New York State's average of one counselor for every 385 students.
To which ridiculous statistic you should also recognize that guidance counselors are under pressure to get as many kids into colleges as possible, which forces them to focus on "guiding" and "counseling" kids through the application process and leaves them very little time to ask "How's it going?"
And so the response is to blame the victims of the shooting and assign kids the task of making other students feel wanted and loved.
Maybe we should arm the kids, too. Who would think about shooting up a school knowing all his classmates were armed to the teeth?
Cheaper than hiring counselors, easier to pass than sensible gun laws.
But, hey, as Mike Thompson notes, all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Or, at least, it would be if the libruls and Nancy Pelosi would shut up.
True, Voltaire mocked the idea, but good religious people know that Leibniz was right, as explained here.
And we'd vote on the DACA legislation, but it's not necessary because we know how America should be, and we don't need atheists and furriners messing up a perfectly ordered universe.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(The only thing more depressing than the discussion over how to avoid meaningful action on school shootings and immigration is the trivial nonsense everywhere else.
Now, on one level, it's all just a harmless distraction and we should lighten up.
And I would be a curmudgeon to point out (again) that, back when the Punch-and-Judy shows were showering vulgar mayhem on the delighted mob in the medieval marketplace, we didn't allow the mob to vote.
But there is a connection between Kanye and this past weekend's gushing over that land to which a rather small percentage of Americans can trace their history. (Governmental origins aside, few west of the Appalachians ever bent knee to King George.)
Our fascination with royalty and gossip and royal gossip, however, is a symptom of how desperately the mob yearns to worship someone who will solemnly and graciously create an ordered universe for them.
Meanwhile, I was going around the dial trying to find something other than people yelling at each other about school shootings or simpering over the royal wedding and discovered that Storage Wars is still on the air, or at least on the cable.
Which only depressed me further because, while I'm resigned to the fact that people who watch staged, edited "reality" shows are permitted to vote, this particular program has been shown to be an outright, deliberate fraud.
And defended only as "free speech," not as honest.
And yet it still has an audience.
As discriminating in their voting as they are in their viewing.
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