Uncomfortably Numb*

Here's a sensible middle-class type who, for the past thirty-odd yrs. believed America was composed entirely of sugar, spice & everything nice, & is therefore surprised when crazed blood-thirsty American killers kill the so-called innocent. Even worse is the lack of outrage. "Horrors!! Have Americans become numb to this sort of thing? How could they?" We're then treated to a list of killing sprees, & the names of the killers.

Each entered the national consciousness when he picked up a gun and ended multiple lives. Uyesugi, 1999, Hawaii office building, seven dead. Hawkins, 2007, Nebraska shopping mall, nine dead. Barton, Ratzmann and Stewart — 24 dead among them in 1999 (Atlanta brokerage offices), 2005 (Wisconsin church service) and last week (North Carolina rehab center). Each has been largely forgotten as the parade of multiple killings in America melts into an indistinguishable blur. We bemoan, we mourn, we move on.

Guess so. Might even be the sensible course. It never stops (Has there been a Sunday-go-to-meeting shooting today?) but there's nothing that can be easily done about it, so we do our best to step over it, as if it were a homeless type napping in a doorway, & go on w/ our business of destroying the continent (if not the whole world) our ancestors stole for us by murdering & then marginalizing the original inhabitants.

Often, rather than stepping over it, we'll drive around it, possibly on our way to becoming one of the circa 40,000 claimed annually in automobile caused deaths (not to mention the more than two million  "permanently injured" annually† on the highways & byways). Numbness is the American way.

Even in a media-saturated nation that encourages short memories, these numbers are conversation-stopping: Forty-seven people dead in the past month in American mass shootings and their aftermaths. 

Not yet on the author's radar as he typed: The man in Washington state who plugged his five children & himself on Saturday, because his wife was dropping him like the hot potato he turned out to be. (No word yet on his employment status.)

Put aside for a moment the debate over guns. This isn't about policy. It's about asking the urgent question: What is happening in the American psyche that prevents people from defusing their own anguish and rage before they end the lives of others? Why are we killing each other?

It's who we are & it's what we do, to coin two perfectly awful phrases. We've no idea who or what Ted Anthony is, other than AP National Writer, but we don't see much analysis going on here. Shouldn't the AP's "National Writer" have noticed that we are, as Frank Zappa put it, a "scab of a nation/driven insane?" 

Probably not. A look at Mr. Anthony's page on Linkedin (Facebook for careerist scum) reveals a pile of corporate double-speak & no-speak in his resume (Dig this: "Leader and participant in AP strategic projects designed to leverage company's more market-focused approaches to newsgathering." Hokey Smokes, we're gong to have to stop "aggregating" so much of our "news" from those clowns.) & indicates he is located in the "Greater Pittsburgh" area. So yesterday morning's expression of confiscation paranoia just struck a bit close to home, & brought on a fit of hand-wringing, w/ a dose of "Where has the American Dream gone wrong?" for good measure. 

For so long, the national narrative has been so bullish about equality of opportunity, so persuasive in its romance of possibility for all.

Who could have been persuaded by such a bald-faced lie? State Lottery players & bitter gun-clingers are high on the list. Not that it makes a hell of a difference if you're force-fed the impossible dream, or confronted w/ the grim truth of the system from the first day of school, either way you're crushed. If anything, deluding the proles that "working hard," ad nauseum, will result in anything more than harder work for them seems to lead to trouble.

*The hep will forgive a later Pink Floyd reference. We hope.

†From an ambulance chasing website. More reputable sources indicate as of 2005, there were around 2.9 million auto-related injuries per yr., w/ around 10% of those resulting in long-term disability. And around one million short- & long-term auto accident disability claims filed annually. Even discounting loafers, slackers, & cheats, that's an amazing figure. You are destined (by the Dep't. of Statistics & Actuaries) to be in an accident (fender bender to paralysis/death) every six yrs., & will come close to an accident every two or three mos.! How you like them apples, America? Are you completely numb yet?