A Moment of Grief.
Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, May 28th, 2014
Salaroche


I’m an Alumnus from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). I spent a few years of my life walking down the seaside walkways of that campus in general and up and down the hallways of its Political Science Department in particular.

Looking back upon those years in an objective manner, I have to admit those were not some of the happiest days of my life, as I had to read as many books and write as many corresponding papers during each single semester as I had never done in any single previous year. In exchange, however, I was perfectly aware that I was getting plenty of general information, methodology, and know-how of a quality found only in a few other American educational institutions, so I just took it all in stride.

Learning just a couple of days ago about the murderous rampage that took place in Isla Vista, UCSB’s dorm town, only made me look back over those years and wonder how would I have felt if such lunacy had taken place while I was studying there, and made me wonder how would I have felt if any of my Isla-Vista-resident classmates had been a witness or a victim in it.

“Madness”, I thought, “sheer madness”. For a moment there I felt genuinely grieved. “Madness”, I thought again, “there’s no other way to call it but sheer madness”. And I could sincerely empathize with those who were friends of, or family-related to, the victims. And for a moment I spontaneously grieved with and for them. Most of all, however, I grieved for our common human condition that allows some guys to feel so lost and desolated that the only way they see out of their strangeness is the way of mass murder. Oh sorrowful human nature.

But that is not the only sorrowful characteristic that defines all of us humans; there are other human traits that keep facilitating this kind of avoidable tragedies. One of those traits is our refusal to see that madness exists and has always existed in most human endeavors and that as long as we carelessly place murderous tools in the hands of the general population such madness is going to keep generating this kind of tragedies forever.

The Nefarious Recalcitrant Assholes, however, have their crosshairs centered on the profits the gun business generates for them, and to hell with whoever dies in the process. Stupidity is also one of the salient human characteristics, and the NRA banks on that human deficiency to thrive in their murderous endeavors.

No one in this world has the power to bring back to life the innocent victims of Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Connecticut, or the most recent ones in Isla Vista, California, but we do have the power to see that such tragedies are minimized down to virtually irrelevant levels, if only American politicians weren’t as corrupt as they presently are and were willing to use that power.

Left and right, American politicians keep falling under the influence of big capital thereby failing to heed the voice of the American people, particularly the call to reason that screams increasingly loud in our ears telling everyone that such widespread availability of guns is nothing but a curse in the daily affairs of the American society.

But the NRA has managed to equate gun-toting with American patriotism and continues, along with the Supreme Court, to interpret the second amendment in such twisted ways as to allow the massacre of innocent Americans to continue unabated.

Every country has the government and the laws it deserves, goes the saying, so as long as a majority of Americans are coopted into accepting the NRA’s and the Supreme Court’s gun-toting senseless dictates, the massacre will continue.

God save America.

Salaroche