IS NEWTOWN A WARNING OF SOMETHING WORSE?

For me, it is a down day. It seems personal. Why, why, why? Why did we have to wait until this happened before society reacted. We have had tragedy after tragedy. It no longer seems abnormal but seems like the norm. We have warning signs after warning signs and we set on our thumbs. It is not just guns tragedies; it is an educational crises, financial crisis, and governing crisis as well. We see our universities taken over by industrialists, in some cases with devastating effects to teaching, especially undergraduate teaching. We stood by, watched George W. Bush trash the economy, and did nothing until we had an outsized mortgage and banking crisis that crashed the economy. We knew arms manufactures used the support of a bunch of people with cowboy mentalities to saturate society with guns, really contaminate like a toxic waste, at the same time young minds were being educated in a culture of violence. We did nothing. This is happening while big businesses, radical organizations, even individuals are openly corrupting state and federal legislative bodies. We know about Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brother, and the Walton family. They are turning our democracy in to a plutocracy and we do nothing. We know the Supreme Court of the United States has turned corporations into people with all the associated effects. In addition, the Roberts’ Court has misread the second amendment, substituting the word ‘individual’ for ‘militia’, yet we accept that reading with out doing anything about it—except to bury 26 children, babies really, and adults. The tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut is more than just a warning sign about gun violence; it should stand as a strong reminder of a warning first stated by Benjamin Franklin so many years ago and paraphrased here; we have formed a democracy in Constitutional Hall but can you keep it.

Naomi Klein’s book, Shock Doctrine, addresses the issue of manufactured crises but now it seems time for her second book. When we cluster all of these social ill together, only a few have been mention, our culture seems to be in the process of spontaneously manufactured a social crisis worse that anything every generated by greed. We could have done something about all of these things but we didn’t. Why, why, why?