Do you ever wonder if the bottom-line might be a form of mass psychosis?
Melissa Alexander, 44, is a Republican gun owner, in Nashville, Tennessee. For all of her life, perhaps, has she cruised along without questioning the cultural and economic hegemony* dominating life in her community?Reality hit her square in the face on March 27, this year. Her fourth grade son survived a mass shooting but watched in horror as three of his friends and some teachers died.
On March 27, 2023, a mass shooting occurred at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian Church in America parochial elementary school in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee when Aiden Hale (born Audrey Elizabeth Hale), a transgender man and former student of the school, killed three nine‑year‑old children and three adults before being shot and killed by two Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) officers.Ms. Alexander is among thousands of brand-new Tennessee activists, largely led by mothers, who are pleading with the state legislature to pass stricter gun laws during a special session called by the governor and scheduled to begin on Monday.
Her son survived an attack that killed three schoolmates and three adults. She is among thousands of new activists pressing the Tennessee legislature to pass stricter gun laws.
The problem is not, in my opinion, that the shooter was a transgender man, but that for whatever reason, Hale felt alienated from the community.
****
How many times have you read something eerily similar to this story? Thousands? How long have you been reading news reports in the United States? Years?
Mass shootings in America are pandemic. Have everyday journalists ever looked behind the curtain to figure out WHY this might be the case?
Those entrenched in the cultural and economic hegemony of America bicker over whether the problem is too many or too few firearms in our allegedly "free market" capitalist economy. Markets, allegedly an invisible hand that can solve all of our problems with a god-like sweep of a magic wand, seem to only offer get more guns in the hands of Americans as a solution.
How safe is our society since overwhelming proliferation of firearms (including assault weapons) overtook our communities? The question answers itself.
Lawmaking chambers in state capitols and Washington, DC continue to proliferate dysregulation of firearms.
I'm not a psychoanalyst, even though I may play one from time to time on my blog, but it occurs to me that one possible antidote to this problem might be figuring out how to counter the breakdown of community in our communities and in our country.
Was there a time when people didn't simply go to work then come home and veg in front of the idiot box until it was time to go back to work?
So goes the premise of Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.
Ms. Alexander's son survived? So, why does she care now about the gun problem in America?
In Frans de Waal's book Mama's Last Hug, the primatologist shares myriad insights on animal and human emotions. One that caught my eye and made me think for more than a minute,
Rational arguments are woefully insufficient to arrive at moral principles, which get their force from the emotions. The enormous investment we make in rectifying unfairness and injustice—the screaming protests, the marches, the violence, the endurance of police beatings and water cannons, the trolling and bullying on Facebook—remind us that we aren’t dealing with some bloodless mental construct. Absence of fairness and justice shakes us to the core, something that no amount of elegant abstract reasoning will ever accomplish.
De Waal, Frans . Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (p. 219). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
No comments:
Post a Comment