In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields. ~John McCrae, In Flanders Fields

So, there was another mass shooting yesterday...another school shooting, at that.

Another angry asshole with a history of violent altercations, and a weapon.

According to what I read, the kid had serious anger management issues and had been expelled from school (the one he shot up, in fact) for fighting.

You know, that's a pretty major event in a young person's life. It seems like the kind of thing that should come up in a background check. It's certainly the sort of thing a determined H.R. person might find when checking references and stuff on a job application.

People keep talking about gun control, and while I agree that this is needed...and I say that as a gun owner and a former conservative...a simple solution that might help a little bit would be for us, as a society, to ask questions, to know one another better, to have a degree or moral courage that is greater than the degree of our addiction to money, and stop selling ammunition and weapons to angry, pinch-faced assholes.

But of course, people...certainly people who are heavily involved in American gun culture...don't want to bother to do anything like that on their own, much less have the guts to look somebody in the eye and tell them "You look like a nut, I'm not going to sell to you" or to say "Hey, kid, do your parents know you're buying this stuff?"

That's why we have to make laws about things. Why? because America, as a nation and Americans as a people all too often give precisely zero fucks about right and wrong...

But of course, we're very concerned with legality...because nobody wants to get sued or go to prison.

No, laws won't stop a determined person who wants to kill, just like a borderline-fascistic,racist culture that often maintains adversarial relations with its own communities being tolerated among municipal law-enforcement hasn't done one damned thing to stop crime...or prevent people of color from fighting for their rights, but I digress.

What laws...and rights...do is provide Society with recourse when bad things happen.

When the fucking Attorney General addresses a convention of law enforcement personnel about "Our Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement" that politicizes laws and undermines the rule of law.

What this new fad in "Conservative" harshness in law enforcement also doesn't address is agency, human nature, the fact that people will resist in whatever ways they can...whether those ways make sense to an outside observer or not...whether whatever they say or think they are resisting is actually the appropriate target or not. In this vein it's worth noting that young people often make bad decisions, not because they are bad people but because their brains and level of maturity are still developing. I'm sure that kid who shot those other kids said and may have actually thought he was fighting back against The Man or something something gazpacho...

Humans are inherently sinful, we kill each other over all types of dumb shit every day. That doesn't make it right, though.

Here's the thing:

I'm here to tell you, if a person has to use a big stick or a knife or a sharpened roll of pressed and dried newspaper (...one learns interesting stuff working with the occasional convicted felon...) to kill they aren't going to kill as many people. If a person has to try to run down people with a car, there's a lot of places people can safely take shelter. All I'm saying is, we need to come to grips with the fact that hey, maybe some people are angry, or crazy, or just plain malicious or too damned nuts to have access to firearms.

This seems fairly obvious.

(See, for reference, the picture posted above apparently by right-wing loony tune Alex Jones...and apparently liked by the person who operates the Twitter feed for where he bought it from. Think on that, take all the time you need...)

[...My guess would be that when we reach a point of sanity on this issue and make some kind of an effort to stop the killing while preserving people's Second Amendment rights it's probably going to be necessary to go through the sellers as well as the consumers with a fine-toothed comb, but I digress again...]

I am here to tell you, there are three things that people will always find a way to do...get high, have sex, and kill people. You can take away everything from a person and that is what they will become. You can have the strictest religious-dominated cultures in the world and that is what people will do. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is punishable by death and deeply frowned upon by the dominant arch-conservative Islamist culture and yet they still have gay people. Drug trafficking is punishable by death, but for the right price people take that risk every day. Murder is punishable by beheading over there...but people still kill...

And it's stuff like that, that people like Jeff Sessions don't understand.

Without Justice as an objective, law is all too often nothing more than the means by which the powerful force themselves on the powerless.

Let me give you an example; Me,

I grew up around guns, I've had my bolt-action Winchester .22 Rifle since I was nine. I wasn't allowed to handle it without an adult around until I was fifteen, almost sixteen (Deer season, and target-shooting in preparation for it, falls just a couple weeks before my birthday) when I had (as far as my Grandpa was concerned, at least) demonstrated enough maturity to do so...and in any case the only reasons I had were the occasional trip to the range or, when I got old enough, hunting season.

...And well past that age, my Grandparents and my Mom damn well knew what I was up to, and called me on it if I did anything that called my judgment into question.

Me being a typical young man, of course that happened a lot. Of course, I still got away with plenty of shit too. But ya know, that's part of the idea, you had to learn things back in the day or you just got caught faster.

It takes a village to raise a kid, parents, places of worship, schools...social fabric...and sometimes, it takes for all to be attentive to what people are doing in order to stop some kind of stupid shit.

People kept on me, made sure I did the right thing, had a job, kept my car up, paid my bills. Hell, my Mom still occasionally brings up that kind of stuff and I'm 44 years old.

Why can't we all keep on our government like that? Why do so many people get wrapped up in their own stupid bullshit that at least half the time, when people do try to hold their government officials to account...even within the government...it's about the wrong thing or over some political grudge or other?

As I have grown older, I have seen that social fabric fray. People often care more about their own shit...and things that may be massively unimportant in the grand scheme of things...than they do about bigger things that are happening all around them. The Cult Of Capitalism is doing its damnedest to keep us all excessively busy so that no one questions it.

Corporations, the NRA and Republicans care more about maintaining their profits than they do about the fact that 30,000 of us die each year from gun-related causes/

Politicians, popular culture and as of a couple days ago, the government care more about shaming the poor than they do about whether or not people have adequate food to eat. While we're at it, political pundits care more about whacked out conspiracy theories than they do about dead kids.

Think about that, take all the time you need.

Jesus said we were to care for the poor, and treat them with dignity. In all of the Abrahamic faiths this is a core belief. In Islam, it is a scriptural requirement and one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the stated core values of that religion. In Judaism, care for the poor is a Mitzvah, a command of G-d.

Most other religions seem to feel the same way, unless you're a Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal like this guy:

This Ugandan Pastor is literally walking on the backs of other human beings, for no better reason than they let him.

I'm not certain, but given what I know about the religious climate in Uganda I think it's a reasonable guess that this guy is a Pentecostal.

That form of Christianity is uniquely American, it started here with the Azusa Street Revival in California from 1906 to 1915. It's basically a synthesis of African Traditional Religion and Christianity...which helps to explain why this belief system has thrived in certain parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jesus did not walk on the backs of people. He did not claim to be so holy that He could not touch the ground.

Jesus also seems to have been against deliberate harm to children, but whatever. Who listens to anything that guy actually said, anymore?

Instead, we have people who in His name would deny food to the poor, sell them guns on credit so that they could shoot each other in the street or literally walk on their backs, given the chance.

Amen, come Lord Jesus, I'm getting sick as hell of your followers.

It's funny how so much of the religious bullshit that justifies the abuse of kids, terrible treatment of the poor and of women, various and assorted "Fuck you, I've got mine" beliefs either has to be inferred by interpretation, twisted beyond recognition or when all else fails, made up whole-cloth by people who believe in nothing more than their own selfishness.

But that's the world we live in now, and to a certain extent we always have.

The question, of course, is what are we going to do about it? Each and every last one of us is being asked this question, whether we realize it or not.

The heavens are silent. God is not going to save us, not this time, at least not that way. What we do, how we get out of this mess? That's on us.

But, we owe it to those who have gone before...and those who will come after us...to find the answer for ourselves and strive to implement it so that our nation and our world can get a little closer to living up to the promises we make. If we want a better nation, we have to be better citizens.

...And WE have to do that work ourselves.

The future is uncertain, there will be great change, and the irony is that much of this will have been wrought by those who were dead-set against there being any change at all.

But there is are three things I am certain of. Before this is over, Donald Trump will curse out his own enablers and followers. Like the members of any cult, they will fall at his feet and believe that it is they...not he...who are wrong...and I am absolutely certain that there will be a reckoning. I can't explain or imagine how, but I know it will come.

In a nation so dead-set on certainty...and on knowing or striving to determine what will happen...to those of us caught up in this time, the uncertainty going forward may be the worst judgment of all.