Bored to Death

It's gotten damned boring.

Another mass shooting. Multiple deaths. The same questions, the same speculations. Who is the shooter? Why? Is he a muslim? A terrorist? Can we pretend to not be xenophobic, while at the same time demanding profiling? Was he insane? Where and how did he get the guns? Just get out the checklist, okay?

Today's rampage has so far not yielded any answers. The shooter is dead. Sometimes they survive to tantalize and infuriate us. When they are killed, there is the horrified calm that descends over the coverage by the media. It will now fall to the shooter's family to disavow his actions, and then become a proxy for the public to vent their anger upon.

If it sounds like I'm bored, I'm afraid I am. Twelve years of  multiple wars, occupations, invasions and surges, thousands of deaths and dismemberments, staggering numbers of military suicides, and finally the sheer numbers of massacres that are happening with ever greater frequency have just made me numb to all this horror.

The NRA will start off by claiming it's "too soon" to discuss sane restrictions on gun ownership. Liberal groups will deride the obsolescence of the Second Amendment, and push for insufficient regulations. Much talk and debate will bring forth no changes whatsoever.

If the wholesale death of little children at the hands of deranged snipers brings no reforms, there is no chance that the deaths of military personnel, already treated as little more than canon fodder as is, will bring about any changes at all. No chance, brother.

This "freedom loving" society of ours, is sick, sicker than we ever thought. It's not just manifested in the murder visited upon the population with no meaningful response at all. It's the sickness that arises from a philosophy with an absence of a moral center. Not the faux morality espoused by any shameless television preachers, but a recognition of the essential humanity and rights of all.

We've lost the understanding that a society can never thrive by treating any segments of it, or any individuals in it, as disposable. The results of this are on view on the front pages of news websites all over the internet.

It would be sickening, if it hadn't become so damned boring.

www.psychicinfection.blogspot.com