An interesting take on violence in America

Courtesy of my boys.

Shameless excuse to post picture of the boys

We were talking about the issue of violence, gun violence, gun control and everything else that predictably has come up since the carnage in Las Vegas.

Their first observation is that the victims are not being presented as a 'demographic.'  It was not an attack on Country Music Fans, or a group that might have swung more conservative.  The focus has been on individuals - which is as it should be.  Their observation was that, in other shootings, such as Orlando or Charleston, the individual victims were swallowed up by the demographic.

But that got them to thinking, and one of them mentioned something I hadn't thought about.  Regarding the shooting at the church in Charleston, they noticed what happened.  They said the shooter (whose name will remain unmentioned), was seen to have posted several pictures of himself with various totems and trinkets, displaying this flag or brandishing another symbol of hate.  One of the many pictures famously had him holding a Confederate flag.

And barely two years later, despite overwhelming opposition by public opinion, there has been an unstoppable tidal wave of destruction and eradication of almost anything to do with the entire Confederacy, and any cultural attachments to anyone at all who lived during that time.

A shooter has many pictures, including one with a Confederate Flag.  And in a couple years, faster than the Cabbage Patch Kids fad rose and fell, an entire swath of United States history is all but eliminated from the public forum. And it hasn't even stopped there, with new calls against Francis Scott Key, Stephen Foster - why the list goes on and on!

My boys suggested that you can't expect a society that handles issues like that to be one that encourages polite debate or respectful disagreements.  A society that hangs national trends on a single image, distorts context, demonizes opponents (in this case, anyone disagreeing with the removal of monuments being a racist), and then moves with the power of the state to immediately impose this new understanding of our heritage, is not one that is fostering goodwill and unity among its citizens.

It's not just issues of race either.  Consider the speed with which Transgenderism went from a mental health issue, to one that is perfectly acceptable and anyone bucking the trend will face the power of the government, so said Barrack Obama.  About a decade or so?  And so it is.  Remember yesterday when 'X' was good?  Well now we say 'X' is bad.  And furthermore, anyone who doesn't immediately snap to it is lower than dirt, a real scum.  And if that wasn't enough, we're going to get the government involved to exact the appropriate punishment against all who have failed to see the latest version of the light.  

Therefore, the boys argued, why would we be surprised when its citizens act the same: Formulate whatever reality they want (reality, we're told, being mighty relative), generalize and demonize, and then act upon it in the most destructive way possible?  

I have to admit, I hadn't thought of it like that, or connected the two.  But then I'm old, fifty years old.  I remember a time when it wasn't like this.  My boys, even my oldest, know very little else.  As one asked me after a day at school: Was America ever a good country?  They know very well the sting of being told that they are racists because of their skin color.  They have learned little good about the civilization that bore them.  And it's all happened like that (imagine me snapping my fingers).

This is not our grandfather's WASP America.  This is the America that has become used to mass killings and indiscriminate shootings, unimaginable crime, drug and suicide rates, corruption and bias on every level of our social ladder.  It is a nation where our leaders, our celebrities and our representatives frequently portray in the most demeaning and derogatory ways possible everyone who fails to conform to the latest manifestation of truth.  And in it all, we ponder why things are the way they are. 

I won't say my boys are spot on, or that they've unlocked the mystery.  I just thought it was interesting that my boys believed there could be a connection where I hadn't seen one.