#NameTheDisease (Please?)

Is it just me? Occupy… Black Lives Matter… Bernie… Standing Rock… Me Too… Enough is Enough… Are these hashtag social movements taking on a ‘flavor-of-the-month’ quality? Quick — when was the last time you saw a story about BLM?

Of course, as I write, social media is all a-twitter over these amazing high school students from Florida demanding that politicians do something about recurrent mass shootings of our nation’s children. If Sandy Hook was not horrific enough to spark change, but the latest high school shooting is, then something has changed here. What could it be? What is it about the current political climate that accommodates intense national attention to be focused on a cause célèbre for a month or so, only to be pushed aside by the next?

For that matter, how is it that we focus so obsessively on Donald Trump’s tweets and legal predicaments while the people’s government is being steadily dismantled, our natural resources and public lands are being liquidated, and our economy is being ravaged to feed the coffers of the obscenely rich, without nary a peep in the press? It is too easy to blame the corporate-controlled press for this phenomenon. Of course, they enable it — but it seems that we all are enabling it with our own attitudes and addictions.

One common thread I see in our politics, press, and social media interactions is a seeming inability to see the forest for the trees — or, perhaps more to the point, the disease for the symptoms. In the case of mass shootings, we notice that AR-15 assault rifles have become the weapon of choice for mad men and boys intent on wreaking havoc and mayhem. And so the children, bless them, find themselves at the forefront of a social movement calling for the ban of AR-15’s. It is true, of course, that there is no defensible reason for any person to own an assault rifle, no more than there is for say owning an anti-aircraft missile or tactical nuclear weapon. But does anyone really believe that if Congress were to somehow ban assault weapons tomorrow, mass killings would stop here in America?

A fundamental question that never gets asked, but which we really need to answer, is whether or not mass shootings are the disease, or merely symptoms of a greater social disease? The distraught child pictured above is a trauma victim from Israel’s illegal war on the West Bank. Why would I choose such a child for an essay dealing with high school shootings in America? Let me ask those courageous students from Stoneman Douglas a related question: Why do you think our politicians would care about your safety if they are so callous about killing children in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, the West Bank, ad nauseum?

It is generally acknowledged today that “Do as I say, not as I do” is not a valid parenting strategy. If your parent is a chain-smoker, you are not going to take them seriously when they forbid you to smoke. Barack Obama was wonderful at expressing empathy and outrage in the wake of mass shootings like Sandy Hook and Charleston. Who could forget the emotional scene of him leading the congregation in Amazing Grace at the memorial service for the victims at the Mother Emanuel church? Or that time when Obama killed a 16 year old boy in Yemen?

Wait… what? You know, the boy who had the misfortune of being the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was taken out a few weeks earlier by a drone. Here is a man who keeps a “kill list” for drone attacks and considers innocent women and children that die at his hands “collateral damage” singing Amazing Grace and shedding tears when women and children are killed by weapons on our soil. Did any high school students march on D.C. for Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a lovely child born in Colorado? Or when his 8-year-old sister was shot, along with 9 other women and children, and left to bleed to death by American troops with assault rifles?

What is the disease here? Could it be that we glorify violence like no other country on Earth, and see mass killing as justifiable, even when it includes women and children, in pursuit of the doctrine of American Exceptionalism? Could that be the disease? The idea that, somehow, genocide, slavery, and dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations are justifiable means to the end of creating the American Dream?

Until we as a country grow up and acknowledge that the ends never justify the means, that it is never okay to kill women and children, and that violence on the scale of mass killing is an acceptable solution to our problems, we can expect confused boys and mentally unstable men to continue resorting to mayhem when their lives are in despair. Heck, we can even expect that a mentally unstable man with the emotional intelligence of a small boy who is already overseeing 7 wars left by his predecessor will resort to nuclear annihilation in response to personal slights and perceived threats.

We are not exceptional. Our children bleed just like children everywhere. We are in denial. Lets not wait until nuclear war become the next cause célèbre before admitting that the only thing exceptional about us is the level of mass violence and destruction that we have become capable of.

For our children’s sake. And for the sake of the children of the world.