The American Public’s Willingness to Start Wars — which Only Our Military One Percent Has to Die for —  Parallels Our Moral Complacence in Not Taking on the Socially Insane U.S. Gun Lobby

© 2013 Peter Free

 

02 April 2013

 

 

If it is mostly always “other” people who are doing the dying, why should we care?

 

Congress’ very probably coming cowardly capitulation to the National Rifle Association, on such inoffensive ideas as effective background checks and prosecuting strawman gun buyers, morally offends me.  As does the voters’ obvious willingness to let both escape the consequences of turning their backs on the excess of violence in our excessively bloody culture.

 

In a medical sense, the NRA can arguably be excused.  It is an organization led by (and non-trivially populated with) people who are almost literally mentally ill with burgeoning fear, amorphously misdirected anger, belabored delusions of individual grandeur, and the inability to recognize that the preservation of American values requires more than simply having a gun on us at all times.

 

The American gun lobby has come to represent gun manufacturers and a tenacious group of intellectually and spiritually unconscious people, whose existential anxiety is assuaged by unwarranted feelings of personal strength through the bearing of arms.  It is a form of fear-based hubris.

 

Congress and the voting public, however, are not so easily let off the hook.

 

Most of us recognize that NRA and colleagues’ logic manifests a basic sickness of soul.  Yet, the majority of us ignore the insight.  It is less work to pretend that this pack of rabies-infested ferrets is not really gnawing away an appropriate sense of social moral proportion.

 

Insofar as it is:

 

(a) the military minority,

 

(b) random women and the inner city poor,

 

and

 

(c) “foreigners” who die each day —

 

the majority rest of us demonstrably do not care enough to do anything (at all) to stop it.

 

 

The moral? — A sanely healthy society would have gotten rid of our basically unrestricted Second Amendment a long time ago

 

If we ever want for a definition of cultural self-destructiveness, we need only look at ourselves.

 

Society and culture are, by definition, founded on the premise that the Whole has requirements that go beyond the desires of the individual.  That is a point increasingly lost on the bulk of Americans, who continue day to day in an unscripted parade of individually parallel unmindfulnesses.

 

The spiritually aware will recognize the reference.  The rest won’t.  Which almost laughably proves the point.