The Divine Mr. M

"The truth is that this culture is insane. When Derrick asks his audiences, “Does anyone here believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?” — and he’s asked it for years, all around the country—no one says yes. That means that most people, or at least most people with a beating heart, have already done the math, added up the arrogance, sadism, stupidity, and denial, and reached the bottom line: a dead planet. Some of us carry that final sum like the weight of a corpse. For others, that conclusion turns the heart to a smoldering coal. But despair and rage have been declared unevolved and unclean, beneath the “spiritual warriors” who insist they will save the planet by “healing” themselves. How this activity will stop the release of carbon and the felling of forests is never actually explained. The answer lies vaguely between being the change we wish to see and a hundredth monkey of hope, a monkey that is frankly more Christmas pony than actual possibility.

Given that the culture of America is founded on individualism and awash in privilege, it’s no surprise that narcissism is the end result. The social upheavals of the 60s split along fault lines of responsibility and hedonism, of justice and selfishness, of sacrifice and entitlement. What we are left with is an alternative culture that offers workshops on our “scarcity consciousness,” as if poverty were a state of mind and not a structural support of capitalism. This culture leaves us ill-prepared to face the crisis of planetary biocide that greets us daily with its own grim dawn. The facts are not conducive to an open-hearted state of wonder. To confront the truth as adults, not as faux-children, requires an adult fortitude and courage, grounded in our adult responsibilities to the world. It requires those things because the situation is horrific and living with that knowledge will hurt. Meanwhile, I have been to workshops where global warming is treated as an opportunity for personal growth, and no one but me sees a problem with that." ~Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet Excerpt

~I went to check the numbers on school shootings in 2017 to make a point about the number of gun deaths in Chicago, about half of which are Drug War related. I was honestly surprised. 650 people were shot to death in Chicago in 2017, so let's say about 300 Drug War deaths. In Chicago.

Fifteen people died in 'school shootings' in 2017. That's right, fifteen...in the entire country.

Four of them where the shooters themselves. One was an estranged husband who there went to kill his ex wife and then shot himself. One was a random shooter who didn't manage to kill any students, but all his five off campus victims were listed anyway, so the real total is actually ten, but we'll stick with fifteen.

So school shootings are not the 'new normal', but Drug War killings most certainly are, because we do not even notice them. Maybe because they happen in poor Black and Brown neighborhoods, and not in the mostly White Middle Class suburbs.

See how easy racism is, kids? You can be racist without a second thought and feeling full of Moral High Purpose. God Bless America.