Sunday afternoon, the end of another long boring week in America. Keep on walking. Nothing to see here.
At least nine people dead in a mass shooting in Texas. Nothing new. Last year alone, Texas had 55 of ’em —better than 1 a week. Besides, there’s already that little episode a couple of weeks ago where the guy took an AR to his neighbors. They’d asked him to please stop firing it since it was making their baby cry. Only five dead bodies in that one, including a nine-year-old. Nothing new here. Just keep on walking.
Oh, yeah, I guess there was also that family up in Oklahoma, the highway shootings in Maine, the ongoing road-rage, the. . . Well, yeah, you get the idea. Just 17 mass shootings this past week. No big deal. This is America. Get used to it.
All of this is probably assuring my Swiss relatives that their country is moving in the right direction. Once (inaccurately) described by the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a nation with guns everywhere, Switzerland has now dropped to nineteenth in the world in gun ownership.
But maybe the NRA can have a new poster child for gun ownership—Serbia. It ranks third in gun ownership among countries with at least a million citizens. And in only 2 days, they’ve had 2 mass shooting. Who says American values can’t be spread abroad?
Ironically, just today, a letter in the Omaha World Heralddrew attention to the fact that 20% of Nebraskans will experience a mental health condition in any given year. That’s no different from the rest of the nation—at any given moment, 1 in 5 adults is experiencing significant depression. But should they be carrying guns around? Of course! Besides, that just gives us all an excuse whenever someone gets shot.
The NRA is right—people kill people. And the more drunk, high, depressed, angry, sad, bitter, disappointed, confused, belittled and hopeless people who have guns in their hands? The more Americans are going to wind up dead. But that’s OK. Because we can always T.A.P.-out.
Just abbreviate it like that. Thoughts and Prayers. We say it so often these days, we might as well just shorten it. Thoughts and Prayers. Thoughts and Prayers. Thoughts and Prayers. TAP, TAP, TAP. TAP, TAP, TAP. TAP, TAP, TAP.
Nothing new here. Just TAP-out and walk on by.
But this just gets us started for the week that was. In other news, the U.S. Congress is engaged in an ever-escalating pissing match over the debt ceiling that has the potential to devastate the economy of the world’s strongest, richest, and most important nation. Republicans, who care deeply about the deficit (but only when Democrats are in office), seem content to let the country default on it’s debt, turning us into a dead-beat nation. Never mind that every economic analysis has indicated that unemployment will skyrocket, our economic output will fall, and the country will profoundly suffer.
Do we need to cut our spending and increase our revenues? Of course. But any decent business manager can tell you, an organization that manages by crisis isn’t going to last long.
Ditto governments. Congress needs to dispense with all of the Jr. High drama (OK, it’s Middle School now), raise the debt ceiling so we can function as a nation, then do the hard work of fixing the budget. It’s way overdue. In the past, neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any interest in it.
But the news keeps getting better and better. Traditionally, the American people have believed that regardless of who controlled Congress and/or the White House, at least the Supreme Court could be an impartial arbitrator of justice.
And despite numerous biased and purely partisan political decisions by the Court this past year, many Americans still believed they could count on the institution for justice. But any remaining hope for The Court went out the window this week with the mounting evidence that Court decisions were essentially bought and paid for by wealthy conservative donors. From what we know, Clarence Thomas (https://www.newsweek.com/clarence-thomas-tangled-web-gets-worse-worse-senator-durbin-1798894) and quite possibly John Roberts have been on the receiving end of big dollar influence.
I’ve already commented on Thomas, but Roberts really saddens me.
Most of us have seen a picture of the statue of Lady Justice. Blindfolded, she holds a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other. She is supposed to represent absolute fairness in the Judicial System. But after this week, Thomas has turned her into an image of a stripper with a wad of dollar bills in her G-string.
Around the country, state legislatures are wrapping up their sessions. Most of them haven’t bothered to spend time on such mundane issues as health care, mental health services, public education, women’s health, poor nutrition, and inadequate infrastructure. Instead, it’s been a frenzy of anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-public education, anti-public health, and anti-public safety legislation. And in far too many states, there’s also been a far-right Governor salivating to sign them into law.
Of course, all of this just scratches the surface. At the border, thousands of desperate asylum seekers are waiting for COVID-era Title 42 restrictions to expire. They’ll be begging for a chance at a better life.
Can we take them all? Of course not. That’s why troops have been deployed. But we can legally take a lot more than we’ve been taking. Businesses are desperate for employees. Unemployment is at record lows. It only makes sense.
But one thing is certain. Whatever the number of legal immigrants, it will be too many for those who want to use immigration as a political club to bludgeon their opponents, regardless of the human suffering that occurs. Immigrants are usually poor and powerless. They make perfect scapegoats for demagogues.
But on the positive side, unemployment continues to fall, inflation is coming down, and the grass is starting to green-up.
So let’s ignore all of the other stuff. Just keep on walking and pretend it’s not happening. Nothing to see here. Nothing to get upset about.
Ho-hum. Just another week in America.