Guns and Money

The activist children of the most recent school shooting are learning a hard lesson about the reality of life in America today: nothing matters more than money. Not the safety of its citizens, not freedom from terror, not the lives of its children – nothing.

When the answer to gun violence is more guns; when the answer to nuclear proliferation is more nukes; when the answer to every medical condition known to humanity and some that are made up just to sell a pill is a pill – and then another five pills to address the side-effects of the first one – we are staring at the abyss of our own destruction.

All the lofty ideals spouted by politicians ring hollow if they sacrifice their people on the altar of greed. And while hypocrisy is hardly new to every human endeavor, especially not to politics, we have become more nakedly grasping, more openly avaricious, no longer even requiring the veneer of civility to mask the true motivation for our every act: money.

When polluters foul our water, and the EPA cheers them on; when our food supply is genetically modified and pumped full of chemicals beyond all recognition of its natural state and the USDA eagerly stamps its approval; when energy prices are shamelessly manipulated and old folks freeze every winter; when we’d rather bury a thousand children than stop the sale of one assault weapon – that's when we know exactly where we stand in the scheme of things.

We are commodities to be bought and sold and warehoused and downsized and marginalized and murdered when it is economically expedient to do so. The fact that in this current iteration of our lunacy, our politicians are so afraid of the NRA that they will fling the first shovelful of dirt on the graves of its victims, all the while refusing to enact even the most mundane of gun control laws, points to the brazenness of those with power and the will to use it --- they know that politicians will do anything to make a buck, and the bucks are flying even faster than the bullets.

The only bright spot in all this madness – aside from the courage and audacity of a bunch of school children speaking truth to power – is that within a few years, they’ll be able to vote.