The War Comes Home: Another School Shooting, Another Normal Day in America

A rant concerning this latest incident: Twenty schoolchildren, eight others dead in Connecticut massacre One sign that your country is dying is that massacres of innocents by heavily armed psychopaths become normal. Now, America's fighting several blithely genocidal wars abroad, and trying to start several more, for the profits of the military-industrial complex that rules its empire. Sure, Barack Obama, blithe mass murderer of Muslims by drone and super soldier, cries for twenty innocent children in Connecticut. But none of us cries for the millions of innocent children in the countries America's conquering in order to steal their oil. This is utterly nihilistic — but Social Darwinism is our national faith, so this kind of thing is what our nation stands for! We call it the Wild West, or American values (e.g., God-given gun rights, "stand your ground", etc.). The civilized world, to which America has always refused to belong, calls it barbarism. Back in the 1920s, the general opinion of civilized Americans was that there is no such thing as "American civilization"; that phrase is, by definition, a contradiction in terms. America went directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. Sure, there's pockets of civilization scattered around here and there, primarily in the more liberal big cities and college towns. But this massacre of innocent children in a small New England town is a reminder of America's true nature — i.e. no different from those other jihadis — and that barbarism will hunt civilized people down and slaughter them anywhere. Even worse: the killer was a local who went to that school and whose mother — his first victim — was a teacher! I don't ever expect anything to be done to help the mentally ill in America; after all, Social Darwinism is the national faith, and the victims are eugenically inferior because they died and the killer proved himself inferior by killing himself. I don't expect anybody in power to call for restoring the ban on civilian ownership of assault weapons, either; after all, the right to bear combat weaponry was given to Real Americans by GOD!!! and is too much a part of the national faith. This is the empire of capitalistic Christian Egoism, after all. Instead, I expect America to share the fate of its symbiotic enemy, the Soviet Union. The Cold War never ended; only one of its evil empires went away. It won't end until the other empire — ours — falls too. Need more proof that American conservatism and Corporatism have gone completely insane? Just wait till the terrorist insurrections begin — and they will, believe me. The Götterdämmerung of Conservative America is at hand. A disclaimer: I'm not even pretending to be an objective analyst in this post. The blood of twenty innocent children murdered by a psychopath won't let me. I need to vent my outrage before I punch out any of my conservative relatives, who aren't enemies. Now that it's out of my system, I can finally be objective: After several decades of devotion to drug prohibition, some American voters in Western states (including my own) have started to rebel against it. Will massacre after massacre of innocent civilians wake Americans up to the danger of guns in the hands of psychos, or to the dire need for the kind of mental-health system genuinely civilized countries consider an absolute necessity? How many American civilians have to die like their "enemy" Muslim counterparts before Americans start to wake up? My hope is that it won't take many more. But there's a class-war element to this, too. Note that the most conservative states dominated by the richest conservatives are the ones with the laxest gun (and even murder) laws and the highest murder rates. The 19th-century robber baron Jay Gould bragged that he could hire half the working class to kill the other half. He meant right-wing terrorism, championed in his day by the Ku Klux Klan. This kind of thing is exactly what he was talking about. Just wait till the real terrorism begins...