Surrendering Not

THIS TIME, thoughts and prayers are not enough. In truth, they never are, and never have been. So, please, spare us the sentiment. Something more, much more, is called for, and has been for decades. Something, perhaps, as fundamental as a complete reconstruction of American cutlure. It becomes tempting to surrender to despair, to acceptance of an American future bathed in blood. The arrow of time points in that direction, considering the violent American past and the violent American present. I had arrived home with a copy of the recently published book "American Schizm: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing Our Nation" by Seth David Radwell, and had begun to find it hopeful and interesting. Like most analysts, Radwell holds out hope, but warns us that the healing process will tke considerable time anad effort, and will not eventuate without sustained, concerted endeavor - by us all. Content with that, I turned on the radio, hoping to hear some baseball scores. What I heard instead was Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr talk about something besides basketball, admonishing the reporters that there are fifty United States Senators intent on doing nothing about mass murder in America other than extend thoughts and prayers. The reporters seemed to be taking notes, so hope flickered. The National Basketball Association is a progressive organization, its members fully aware of their unimportance professionally, fully aware of the association's social responsibilities. Kerr's team proceeded to play poorly. I decided to postpone the baseball scores in deference to a far more urgent matter. If mental illness is the root cause, we are doomed, by reason of collective societal insanity. A renewed, permanent ban on assault weapons and universal background checks would, as theorized, be a good start, and if mass murderers are reduced to knifing their victims, all the better. Best that we accept the reality that while none of us is immune to physical pathology, so it must be with mental illness. I still don't know last night's baseball scores, but of this I can be certain; they were delivered by sportscasters everywhere with thoughts and prayers, but little or nothing else. Having explored and discarded all other alternatives, we Americans are bound inevitably to do the right thing, as Sir Winston Churchill once said, only after having explored all other options; to exert sustained, concerted endeavor, by us all. Into the nightmare creeps what passes for conservatism in our disfunctinal body politic, with it its all too familair, cancerous conspiratorial nonsense, magnified and reiterated through social media and the far right culture which spreads like a cancer with every living day of Donald Trump's pathological influence. The shooter was an illegal immigrant. The shooter was transgender. And the usual trope; the shooter was a government patsy, a plant by some malicious appendage of the American government, intended to stoke support for gun control, for the abolition of the second amandment, and teh confiscation of guns from the dead bodies of right wing sycophants. What better way to fuel the fire of hatred of immigrants, brown skinned people, gays and transgenders, and government, so deeply embedded in America's pathology. No, we must never admit defeat, never surrender to the inevitability of mass murder in America. But we must do more, much more. A good place to start would be for us the American people to delete from our lives and politics the great cancerous disease which stubbornly refuses to wither away and die.