Spare Me The Maudlin Theatrics, Please

Spare Me The Maudlin Theatrics, Please

So, what do you want me to say about this, then? Another “mass shooting event” and this time, it was the police targeted. Now, my first question is: Will the media be true to truth and call this a “hate crime” or will this be gussied up in some apologetic poppycock engineered to absolve the reality from being held accountable?

Offhand, I think we’re going to miss a major point here in the rush to find fig leafs to cover up the truth and inanimate objects to assign blame to. I think we’re going to miss WHO trained the killer: The government. Yes, this man was a combat veteran. Therefore, as to who trained this guy to kill, that would be the government. As I have said here so many times my odometer has clicked over, you cannot teach violence as a solution to any problem and then expect this won’t one-day re-appear on your own doorstep. It would appear our government trained the wrong guy. Or, rather, he went and killed people the government didn’t order him to.

Again, when you justify the killing of other people based on the “They Are Not Us” philosophy, that is exactly the belief system people will take home and manifest into your society later. See, the only justifiable reason for killing another human being is immediate self-defense. Not “pre-emptive” hogwash or “regime change” or “liberating” people. Because when you say that killing people is getting people to do things you tell them to do by other means, then you should not be at all surprised when this blows up in your face. Literally.

Oh, sure, let’s blame the firearm. Why not? Because that’s easier than saying the government is teaching violence and even its own police agencies are not safe. It’s own military isn’t safe, either, as mass shooting events on U.S. military bases have shown. I’m going to go way out on the limb of controversy here. If the government holds fast to the idea that war is diplomacy by other means, guess what? Some of these mass murderers are saying that mass murder is social change by other means. This one evidently was saying that. So was the dude in Orlando.


Now, I am not excusing this violence. Far from it. Violence is wrong no matter who does it. Those cops were innocent people, killed because they were cops and because of their skin color also. But we cannot condemn violence when it manifests amongst us and then excuse it when the government does it to other people we don’t know or see overseas. If we are to be true to a morality worth calling one, we will condemn all violence. We won’t wave the flag and cheer on the slaughter of people because they’re led by some dude we don’t like. We also won’t celebrate that slaughter like we did here four days ago with Fourth of July.

One more time, this mass murderer was taught his skills by the United States government. Now we can see what has been done overseas in places like Afghanistan, isn’t that correct? Oh, but now we’re sad and angry? How so, America? Were you sad and angry when a bunch of U.S. military members got away with destroying a hospital in Afghanistan and killing a bunch of innocent people? And if they were actually prosecuted, all the Blood-Shine Patriots would have come crawling out from under rocks to scream about “patriotic troops being jailed for doing their jobs”. Doing their jobs. Indeed. Like this dude was trained to do?

Right, here we go again. More candle-light vigils. More prayers to some vague deity no one can name anymore because they don’t even know who this deity is. Or if there is one. But they’ll pray anyway because it looks pious on TV, am I right? Plus, the candles look cooler with tears and heads bowed. Excuse me, but where are the candle-light vigils for the millions of people this government has slaughtered over some blip on the foreign policy radar? Millions of people dead and they act like those lives were just a blip on the radar. And we’re so dang proud of it, we make movies glorifying it. But let us lose more than three and we act like we’ve just suffered a gross inhumanity. Yeah, well, maybe we should start valuing all human lives. Not just our own or those of our own little enclaves of asinine and laughable social groups.

Yes, they’ll say this guy doesn’t represent all (insert group here), am I right? But we don’t apply that same rule to others in other countries. If we have to kill a hundred innocent people to nail one “bad guy” in Yemen, then so be it. Wave the flag, cheer, light fireworks, grill hot dogs, have nifty furniture sales and buy lots of crap at the mall because it’s also on sale. Then when violence happens here, we act like we don’t know how this could possibly happen to us. Why it’s not fair! Spare me the maudlin theatrics. You sit there and watch movies where violence is celebrated, especially the violence the United States government wreaks across the globe. Gosh, American Sniper, you weren’t supposed to do that here! Do it over there, where you’re supposed to!

Right, candles, I’ll put them on the shopping list. But I wonder when we will finally see that you cannot teach this violence to an entire country and not expect violence. If you plant poison ivy in the yard, what, you don’t expect a bad rash? Having this government is like having a Water Moccasin in the yard, under the porch. Sooner or later, it bites the people in whose yard it lives. Tired of the violence? Then stop teaching it and celebrating it.


Jack Perry