More American children gunned down in school? Nothing new to see here, folks. Move on – and change the script.
Social and journalism media are stuck in reruns, worldwide, of the same stupid American snuff flick. Kids die, over and over, in their schools. Screens fill with bodies, distraught parents, crying survivors. It’s horrific. Hypnotic. Transfixing.
The latest case making “news” is last week’s slaughter of 17 kids in Florida. If anyone somehow missed it, statistics promise another soon: Florida was the 17th U.S. school shot up so far this year. And each time global mass media revels in America’s foul fetish for guns. Every new episode is the same death cult theme: blood spurts, pus seeps, and the audience groans with unseemly enthusiasm, “Ewww!” “Nooo!”
Stop it. Just. Stop.
It’s today’s normal, not “news,” that American schoolchildren are regularly murdered en masse – there’s no reason beyond macabre entertainment to watch endless reruns using the same script. It’s normal for American politicians to reject all solutions to the complex problems behind mass shootings. It’s normal, in the U.S., that its political system is owned by the National Rifle Association and other corporate lobbies that block political engagement. It’s normal that America’s only official response to each massacre is a clichéd mantra: “thoughts and prayers.” Let’s not pretend there’s any news value in any of this.
News, for the U.S., would be junking the awful script. Glimmers of change: the indictment last week of Russians, in the fight by America’s Justice Department to tackle foreign interference in America’s last election. Reportedly, Russian interference helped the latest “thoughts and prayers” president get elected, while fomenting the division, dissent and political distrust that destroys politics. And America’s courts are at last tackling gerrymandering – rigging electoral districts so politicians who work for change are almost certain to lose.
Those stories are “news.” The issues matter because the grotesque snuff flick produced in America’s schools is financed, produced and distributed by those who benefit from America’s broken political system, who prop up its partisan polarization, who fund campaigns against gun control which a majority claims to want. Only fixing the system will reduce the U.S. gun murder rate, some 25 times higher than other wealthy countries. (Americans don’t have to invent solutions: Scotland and Australia provide two of many global examples.)
But changing the macabre script requires voters to be informed and then, at minimum, to go vote. Too many are not, and don’t. Too many are spellbound by reruns of the snuff flick.
Stop it. Just, stop.
