Two weeks have passed since the inspirational March for Life, 2018. On that day, Generation X put on a cultural masterpiece speaking eloquently and powerfully to “we the people.” My generation which roiled the 60s and 70s drew the line at 30, the new youth at 18 years of age. This policy had at least two noteworthy effects: It underscored and amplified adolescents’ voices , and it spoke emphatically to us, the adults, parents and authorities, to “we the people” who vote, we ,the legitimate source of democratic power ,entrusted with guiding society.
To this democratic audience, these youth spoke with the elemental passion of adolescence: deep feeling, idealism, the willingness to confront, and belief in power to change..If you watched , you felt the grief, the anger and frustration, the determination to do something. They soared with the jet fuel of authenticity, the inexorable power of the genuine.
And you heard the plaintive indictment: “You who vote, who make the decisions…you have failed to accomplish a fundamental agreement,- political, social, moral,- to protect us, your children, the shoots and buds of the human future .”
It’s actually nearly 3 weeks since this monumental National Elegy , and still the country is sputtering on; piecemeal bandaids have been applied here and there, even these are opposed as , for instance, in the current protest against Vermont’s 21 years of age restriction.
The absurdity of this Vermont sideshow is not unique; rather , it’s emblematic of our national paralysis : intellectually and politically, we have abandoned common sense. That is, notwithstanding the copious empirical evidence that restrictions lower gun violence, common sense alone tells us that forbidding guns to adolescents, that outlawing mass murder weapons, that forbidding gun purchase to domestic violence perpetrators, and conducting/funding rigorous background checks will prevent at least some massacres, some suicides, some homicides.
Granted, not all. Absolutism is not, however, the relevant criterion. “Some” is good enough when it comes to valuing every human being’s right to life and security. “Some” is good enough when it’s your child, your loved one, your neighbor. I suspect that the most zealous gun rights advocate would change his mind when his child , wife, friend,or mother is murdered by an unstable teenager with a weapon designed for mass killing.
Moderate reasonableness and primal common sense, fundamentals of intelligence, are inoperative,-our society fails to translate these human gifts to action, even in the face of life threatening dangers.
Then there’s the state of this Democracy wherein we find the same thwarted enfeeblement.By overwhelming majorities ,across the board, the American people favor reasonable gun controls. But to little avail.The nation is in a state of acute paralysis. In the face of serous challenge, its political institutions are non-effective. And ,as reflected in the prevailing public discourse, the mind of the people is confused and misguided by the faulty either-or thinking created by the corporate controlled mass media and permitted by the silencing ,marginalization, and cooptation of our educational institutions.
Truth is: neither commonsensical controls, nor untrammeled freedom are capable of dealing effectively with the escalating violence and the especially traumatic incidences of berserk massacres that blight our lives.
renagm 