Just a post

The furor has subsided. The list of responses far to the right on my Facebook page says the last comments to my post were registered six or seven hours ago. What drew all the ire has sunk into oblivion beneath more recent posts on my friends' home pages, even though the horror that prompted what I wrote lives on, as will the incalculable grief of the victims' families. 

An 18-year-old kid, bullied as a child for his stuttering, insanely took out his frustrations with an assault rifle, first on his grandmother, then for no humanly explainable reason on a classroom of fourth graders, murdered most all of them with a gun he'd purchased, legally recently, just a few days after his 18th birthday. 

You know the story. 

In our country, such mass shootings happen weekly. Unless the victims are your kids, or the madness happens in your neighborhood, the murder and the associated reactions have taken on the aura of ritual. "Thoughts and prayers" has become a sounding gong.  

And all of this, just a week after another 18-year-old kid with another assault rifle walked into a grocery story in an African-American neighborhood of Buffalo, NY, and killed ten people, most of them elderly.

We're all repulsed and depressed, sick about it, no matter your politics. So yesterday morning--look for yourself--I felt compelled to say something, anything (check out yesterday's blog post, if you don't regularly come around), because not saying anything is simply untenable. 

I'm sick and tired of recalcitrant Republicans--that's what I was feeling, so what I posted. . .well, read it for yourself at the top of the page. 

For out-of-towners, that list of names includes all the politicians who represent me in their various places, all of them Republicans. It seemed to me--and still does-- that if Connecticut's Chris Murphey can get just one Republican to admit it's time to sit down and talk, maybe we could somehow avert having to suffer yet another bloody horror next week or next month. Just talk. That's all. Just talk.

The tally of voices that responded is miniscule when compared with things that "go viral," but the various strands of argument went on for several hours, some of it heated. 

Here's what I'm thinking.

1) Of the 1800 friends FB says I have, there are many more liberals than conservatives. That's not surprising. We all tend to hang around with like-minds. I have zero desire to read Ted Cruz's blog or watch Fox. If comments and likes and smiles were tallied, I'm sure the the ratio would suggest that dozens more want change than don't.

2) Conservative arguments are really tired, worn, and unconvincing. The old "guns don't kill people, people do" is archaic, petrified. Both horrifying mass murders of the last two weeks would not have been possible had the killers wielded Bowie knives or even handguns. People kill people, but guns--assault rifles--kill many, many more.

3) Often enough, we don't understand each other. We talk past each other--conservatives more than libs--because minds are so deeply set in stone. We can't talk because we can't hear, and we can't hear because we won't hear.

4) Some progressives ideas are inescapably true. Why should we disallow those two 18-year-olds from buying a beer, but allow them to buy arms that have no use whatsoever other than to kill other human beings--and many of them at one time?

5) For completely opposite reasons, both Republicans, on Fox, and Democrats, on MSNBC, believe the Constitution of the United States of America is in grave danger, and see voting at the heart of things. Republicans (70% ) believe that the election of Joe Biden was rigged; therefore, we face a predicament we've never faced before--an illegitimate President running a false government. Democrats believe "the Big Lie" is a huge falsehood, an attempt on the part of Republicans to subvert what really happened in the 2020 election. 

Both sides believe America is at grave risk. 

I'd go just a step farther. I can't help but think that what's really at risk is democracy itself. When I read through the dozens and dozens of comments beneath my FB post, when I see the radical differences people, my friends, register, I can't help but believe the Dems and the Trumpsters share this belief surely: Democracy is vastly more fragile than most of us ever imagined. To believe that a people can run a government is an outrageous idea. It's just crazy. 

That's my takeaway from a single Facebook posting.

Oops. I was just interrupted by a flag telling me someone else had just responded. . .

By no means is it over. By no means.