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| "Like a lot of jokes, it's not a joke." -Noam Chomsky |
So... just so we're clear. What exactly is the cutoff point? For what, you may ask? Dead kids. And no, this isn't some kind of elaborate dead baby joke, so hear me out.
In any given situation, there is a point at which a condition or behaviour becomes so egregiously unacceptable that something must be done to eliminate it. So. We can call the massacres of our children by radicalized lunatics, fascists and supremacists "School Shootings.". But that really deflects the reader or listener's attention from the victims. Someone went in and shot up a school, people say.
No they didn't. Someone went into a school and shot a bunch of children.
That sounds a lot more unacceptably horrible, doesn't it?
Cos it is.
They're not school shootings. They're children shootings.
But I digress. If only a little.
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| THIS IS AN AR-15. |
Ergo, we have not reached the amount of murdered children for our eminently bribe-able leaders to give a damn about the situation.
Therefore... there must be a finite amount of murdered children that is acceptable to our current elected officials. This is the amount of dead kids that they're just hunky-dory fine with. Doesn't matter if it's your dead kids. My dead kids. Anyone's dead kids but their own kids. As long as they're your dead kids, they are just fine with accepting the NRA's check, having a drink and going on with their day.
Furthermore, if there is a finite acceptable number of murdered children, there must be a number at which that acceptable number becomes unacceptable. So. The question now becomes, how many dead kids does it take?
It sounds like a slogan meant to arouse an emotion. Something a newscaster might show you footage of. Protesters in the streets of Washington DC with signs reading "HO-HO-HO, HEY-HEY, HEY, HOW MANY OF OUR KIDS MUST BE KILLED BY THE KKK?" You know. Right before the news cuts to an ad about something to do with Mesothelioma, or an accident lawyer. Since when you're in an 'aroused' state, you are easier to sell things to.
It's not a slogan. It's a valid and grisly question.
How many dead children is it acceptable for insane people to shoot dead with assault rifles before something is done?
Am I being insensitive and crass? Should I ask the question in nicer terms? Should I be more politically correct when it comes to discussing children being shot in the head/vital organs by some white supremacist with an AR-15 military assault rifle? Given that the situation has been allowed to continue, perhaps I should not give an eighth of a damn about the hurt feelings of a congressman or senator whose allegiances have already been bought by the NRA. You know. The people responsible for the lack of regulations that allowed the sale of those weapons to the dead children's murderers.
Being nice about it, or socially acceptable, doesn't seem to have helped the situation. The implication from those that offer their thoughts and prayers on a regular basis is that I should react in a socially acceptable manner to the concept of children shootings. Cos all that praying and thought has surely stopped these massacres, amirite? Sitting and pretending that's helping will end this national nightmare forevermore, won't it? I should just go on with my life, as though madmen, racists and nazis shooting children with assault rifles is now something that should be considered normal. And if I'M a bit upset about the idea that kids should have to set up gofundme sites to be able to afford bulletproof body armor for school, then suddenly I'M the asshole.
What is the reasonable response to a government who only pays lip service to thoughts and prayers for our children slain by domestic terrorists with a de-facto official sanction? Should I be expected to provide a reasonable response? Surely some form of response is demanded here. The corpses are piling up and the government is making it EASIER to get weapons like these. If the question is "How many dead kids does it take before you give a shit?", then we need to make them sickeningly aware of how many kids are being murdered. Essentially some litmus test that will cause a government creature to (A) decide they give a shit. Or (B), that they don't give a shit about the regular mass murder of our children in the public eye.
I propose we start throwing the corpses of our dead onto the steps of congress. Or we could just chuck em over the fence at the White House.
What we do is make or buy blank life-sized rag dolls of our murdered kids. And then start chaining them to the stone columns of national monuments. Or maybe we just chuck em over the fence at the White House. If you're lucky, you won't quite throw it hard or high enough and it gets stuck on the spikes so that the secret service has to climb up there and take them down.. There's a nice little bit of symbolism for you, one supposes.
We can paint the things with red dye where they were shot. We can write their names and their stories on the things. We can pin their portraits to the dolls' faces. Have their friends and aggrieved loved ones sign the dolls. Dress them in the clothes of our beloved slain. Make them not be faceless statistics that can be sanitized and ignored.
These were our children.
They were real. They mattered.
And let's not do something stupid with them. Like filling them full of blocks of gray clay with wired ticking alarm clocks attached. Let's not sew very anthrax-like sachets of flour into the things so that they exhale white powder when squeezed. The point is not to terrorize. The point is to put a palpable face and presence on the numbers they substitute for our murdered children. Let's not let them make US the terrorists. We've had our children slain. They don't get to make us the aggressors in the bargain.
And some of you out there may say, "What about just using babydolls? Or maybe we plant a flag on our congressman's front lawn or leave bouquets or funeral wreaths. Again, not the point. The idea is to make them aware of our loss. We make an example of the people who want to ignore that loss. We're not trotting out the corpses of our kids to get attention. We're trotting out effigies of our loved ones to focus attention on those who allowed this to happen. We show them how many of our children were murdered in a way that cannot be dismissed, sanitized or converted to a more socially ignore-able piece of symbolism. We show them the 'bodies'.
We assemble a march of survivors of these children slayings. We march them right up the Mall in Washington DC. And we leave them on the Capitol Building steps. If their security will let us, we bring them into the congressional gallery and drape them over our representatives' heads for C-Span to film. We can leave them piled on the pavement in front of the Washington Monument if they deny us access to our leaders. We leave them face up in the water in front of the Lincoln Memorial to drift and float. We literally leave a pile of bloody bodies for them to clean up.
What? Too much? We're supposed to be nice about this? Our kids are being shot to pieces, and we're supposed to be civil? They're suggesting we get our kids body armor and bulletproof backpacks for fucksake. As though kids on school lunches or parents on foodstamps can afford to buy a new set of body armor for GROWING kids every year. Our leaders are literally on the take and taking amounts of money large enough to have paid off the slain's student debt if they'd lived long enough. Sometimes in amounts that would have paid for the murdered child's college 5 times over.
Don't worry. I'm sure that congress-creature's stately home or very shiny luxury car was worth the blood spilled by our dead kids.
So. We ask the question. How many dead kids before we act?
We show the entire world how many dead kids we have already.
We ask again.
How many dead kids are acceptable before it becomes unacceptable?
And the moment any of our leaders suggest that even one is acceptable to preserve the freedom of insane domestic terrorists to enter our schools and slay our children with military grade assault weapons, they need to be removed from any form of representative government. This is the answer of a creature who wants to normalize the slaughter of children in the name of profit, and benefits only themselves and murderers. At this point, they are unfit to represent any of us. Because we already know the answer to this question.
There is no acceptable amount of dead children before action must be taken.
Say it again for the people in the cheap seats.
There is no amount of thoughts and prayers that are acceptable instead of action to prevent another children shooting.
There is no amount of sanitization or normalization that will erase the grief of the parents of slain children.
There is no acceptable amount of incompetence or feigned helplessness on the part of the government that was trusted to educate those kids without the possibility of their getting shot to death.
There is no acceptable amount of bribery money that makes not acting to stop the murder of children okay in the name bearing arms under the aegis of the oft misinterpreted 2nd amendment.
There is no acceptable loss when it comes to our children being shot.
There is no acceptable loss when it comes to our children being shot.
There is no acceptable loss when it comes to our children being shot.
How many times must this be repeated?
The horror is that it needs to be said at all.
