The five police officers who were killed in Dallas
are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens.
There is more than enough tragedy to go around.
"What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning.
I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it.
There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent.
We are a racist society, like most human societies.
We are a society in the midst of enormous changes--
social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it.
We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich,
and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor.
We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people,
cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets,
idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools
and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies.
Our political process is almost useless.
There are good people in Congress, but there are, also,
so many blatheringly mindless blowhards
and laughably shallow posturers that one could as well
ask third graders to write tax bills and trade pacts.
They think that doing nothing is worth being paid for.
One might as well allow sticks of dynamite and free beer
at Fourth of July celebrations as the mix we have created.
Politicians and citizens do not ask,
"What is going on here?".
They construct absurd conspiracy theories instead,
and propose that more guns will settle the problem of too many guns.
They fall in line behind get-tough cowboys who howl for war,
pretend that their own special brand of stone-age religion
is superior to other people's stone-age religion,
flex their cranial muscles and announce that anyone
who does not look like them ought to be sent back to England or Sweden
or China or Belgium or France or Nigeria or Guatemala,
without recognizing that everyone is from there.
If school teachers could pack heat, they say,
then when a crazy comes into the school with an AK-45,
the kindergarten teacher and the HomeEc instructor and the janitor
could open fire in return, and everyone would be safe.
The kids could duck under the desks
where they used to be told to hide from atomic bombs.
We need to do the things that will cause most people to say,
"We have a good thing going here!", you know, like jobs,
affordable and effective education, health care for everyone,
better bridges and trains and water systems, and a whole system of things
that will cause people to know that the system is fair
and that when it is time to retire they can turn it over to the kids
who might make things even better still.
Fair. Fair to everyone, as well as we can do it.
are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens.
There is more than enough tragedy to go around.
"What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning.
I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it.
There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent.
We are a racist society, like most human societies.
We are a society in the midst of enormous changes--
social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it.
We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich,
and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor.
We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people,
cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets,
idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools
and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies.
Our political process is almost useless.
There are good people in Congress, but there are, also,
so many blatheringly mindless blowhards
and laughably shallow posturers that one could as well
ask third graders to write tax bills and trade pacts.
They think that doing nothing is worth being paid for.
One might as well allow sticks of dynamite and free beer
at Fourth of July celebrations as the mix we have created.
Politicians and citizens do not ask,
"What is going on here?".
They construct absurd conspiracy theories instead,
and propose that more guns will settle the problem of too many guns.
They fall in line behind get-tough cowboys who howl for war,
pretend that their own special brand of stone-age religion
is superior to other people's stone-age religion,
flex their cranial muscles and announce that anyone
who does not look like them ought to be sent back to England or Sweden
or China or Belgium or France or Nigeria or Guatemala,
without recognizing that everyone is from there.
If school teachers could pack heat, they say,
then when a crazy comes into the school with an AK-45,
the kindergarten teacher and the HomeEc instructor and the janitor
could open fire in return, and everyone would be safe.
The kids could duck under the desks
where they used to be told to hide from atomic bombs.
We need to do the things that will cause most people to say,
"We have a good thing going here!", you know, like jobs,
affordable and effective education, health care for everyone,
better bridges and trains and water systems, and a whole system of things
that will cause people to know that the system is fair
and that when it is time to retire they can turn it over to the kids
who might make things even better still.
Fair. Fair to everyone, as well as we can do it.
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