The necessity of dissent

As soon as I saw that the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, had gained national attention for their outspoken and articulate statements on changing gun laws, I was waiting for the backlash to start.

Maybe I'm cynical.  A more optimistic person might have thought that people would say, "I'm glad these kids are getting involved and being vocal, even if I don't necessarily agree with what they're saying.  This kind of participation is what democracy is all about!"

A more optimistic person would have been wrong.

First there's Lucian Wintrich over at Gateway Pundit, a wildly pro-Trump site that despite its established "white Christians first" agenda was granted White House credentials over respected members of the mainstream media.  Wintrich noted that one of the students, David Hogg, was the son of a man who works for the FBI.  From there, he says, there's only one possible conclusion:

Hogg appears to have been coached on anti-Trump lines...  He seems articulate and highly skilled at setting a new anti-Conservative/anti-Trump narrative behind the recent school shooting...  Allow me to point out that this type of rapid media play is rare and, only comes from well-trained political operatives and MSM commentators...  Why would the child of an FBI agent be used as a pawn for anti-Trump rhetoric and anti-gun legislation?  Because the FBI is only looking to curb YOUR Constitutional rights and INCREASE their power.  We’ve seen similar moves by them many times over.  This is just another disgusting example of it.

The next to chime in was none other than Alex Jones, who under Trump has somehow recovered enough credibility to continue his blithering every day over at InfoWars.  Jones went even further than Wintrich, saying that the massacre itself was the fault of the Democrats:

Wow, we said the perfect false flag would be a white nationalist attacking a multicultural school as a way to make the leftists all look like victims and bring in gun control and a war on America’s recovery.  And now right on time what we’ve been warning of, their main card, the thing we said was imminent, appears with all the evidence.

But it wasn't just dubiously sane members of the far-right media that weighed in.  The latest to slam the survivors of the shooting was former Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia, who in an interview on CNN called the students "stooges for left-wing groups who have an agenda."

Alisyn Camerota, who was interviewing Kingston, responded in astonishment, "Jack, I’m sorry. I have to correct you.  I was down there.  I talked to these kids.  These kids were wildly motivated."  But Kingston refused to back down.  The day after the interview, he tweeted about the planned rallies for gun law reform: "O really?  'Students' are planning a nationwide rally?  Not left wing gun control activists using 17yr kids in the wake of a horrible tragedy?"

So let me get this straight.  Kids this age are allowed to use guns.  Only a year older, and they're not only allowed to purchase guns, they're allowed to vote, not to mention join the military and risk their safety and lives to protect this country.  But at the same time, no way could a young adult have a valid and well-thought-out reason for holding a belief.  If they disagree with the party line, it can't be because of a strongly-held and justified opinion.  And no way in hell should they be organizing a rally or speaking to media to make those opinions known.

If they're doing any of that, they must have been brainwashed, and are being used by the leftists for their own malignant purposes.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Speaking of responses, I have a great many of them, of which calling the likes of Wintrich, Jones, and Kingston a trio of goddamn hypocrites is the most succinct, and probably also the most printable.  But I'll add one more directed at them, and that's this: you better get out of the way, because these teenagers will not be silenced.  Your type has for years railed at teens as being unmotivated, lazy, and uninterested in participating in government.  I hope this shows you how wrong you are -- and perhaps, that your ignorant scorn has given these young people a voice that otherwise they might not have found.

To the teenagers themselves, I have a lot more to say.

Don't let the anger, doubt, and ridicule coming from people like this discourage you.  Any time you speak up, you will find that there are ones who will want to rob you of your right to express yourself, who will slander you and dismiss your opinions as worthless.  Speaking up is risky, but it's absolutely critical, and you will find that weathering the impotent fury of those who would deny you your voice will, in the long haul, be empowering.

To quote union leader Nicholas Klein, "First, they ignore you.  Then they ridicule you.  Then they fight you.  Then you win."

So don't give up.  You have started something, something big, and you have captured national attention, including the attention of people who disagree with you.  This is a good thing.  Speaking out can be scary, and there will be times you will regret doing it, feel that you haven't accomplished anything, that the odds against you are too great.  But there are a lot of people standing behind you who will happily add their voices to yours.

As American activist Maggie Kuhn put it: "Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes.  When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say."

Tragedy and inaction

So we here in the United States are watching the funerals of seventeen more innocent children and adults, mown down by an angry white-rights extremist, and already the jockeying is beginning either to (1) claim that this has nothing to do with guns, or (2) use the tragedy to gain political capital.

I don't intend to get deeply into the first, because anyone with the sense God gave gravel can see that the outcome would have been different had Nikolas Cruz, a young man who was investigated a year and a half ago on the suspicion of being a danger to himself and others, and who was the subject of an FBI tip a month ago, not had carte blanche for buying an AR-15.

I've made the point before, but it bears mention again.  No one is coming for your hunting rifles.  No one wants to prevent you from owning a handgun to defend your home.  This is about limiting access to semi-automatic rifles whose sole purpose, aside from target practice, is killing lots of people in a short amount of time.  This is about dethroning the NRA as the de facto God of Patriotic Americans.

That hasn't stopped this kind of bullshit, originally from the site Robertson Family Values, from making the rounds of social media:

Notwithstanding the point that I question the brains of anyone who treats the yahoos over at Duck Dynasty as if they were founts of eternal wisdom, if you really can't see the difference between the guns in the photograph and an AR-15, you're part of the problem.

But this brings me to my second point, which is that the ground hasn't even settled over the graves of the murdered, and already people are scrambling to use this tragedy to drive home whatever they already claimed.  The shooter was quickly identified as a white supremacist, and the radical group Republic of Florida has admitted that he trained with them -- and pictures surfaced of him wearing a "Make America Great Again" cap.  Of course, you can't link the two, people said.  In fact, because of Cruz's last name, I saw the response more than once that "he wasn't white, he was Hispanic."  Never mind the fact that he seemed to loathe all minorities, including Hispanics.  One of Cruz's former classmates, Josh Charo, said, "He would always talk about how he felt whites were a bit higher than everyone.  He’d be like, 'My people are over here industrializing the world and starting new things, while your people [meaning blacks and Latinos] are just taking up space.'"

But the racists weren't the only ones to weigh in.  Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren jumped into the fray, claiming that if we were just more religious, everything would be hunky-dory:

Evil will always be in this world.  And evil people will always find evil ways to do evil things.  The solution isn’t to start stripping away rights.  What we ought to do is make it easier for law enforcement to engage and evaluate individuals who exhibit warning signs, like making graphic threats online, or posting disturbing images.  You know, thoughts and prayers might seem laughable to some of you.  But maybe, just maybe, more Jesus, more God, more prayer and more compassion is what we are missing.

Neglecting, of course, that her idol Donald Trump signed a bill revoking an Obama-era rule that makes it harder for people with a history of violent mental illness to purchase a gun.  So the "thoughts and prayers" offered after every single mass murder are as empty as always, and Tomi Lahren is a goddamn hypocrite.

The hypocrisy didn't end with the commentators.  House Speaker Paul Ryan, in a move that was tone deaf to the point of being barely believable, had a fundraiser in Florida the day after the shooting.  (Yes, I know it was planned in advance.  Yes, I still think it was amazingly tone deaf to go through with it.)  A woman at the fundraiser confronted him about what he intended to do about gun violence.  His response:

This is not the time to jump to some conclusion not knowing the full facts.  We've got a lot more information we need to know...  This is one of those moments where we just need to step back and count our blessings.  We need to think less about taking sides and fighting each other politically and just pulling together.  This House and the whole country stands with the Parkland community.

I.e., more "thoughts and prayers," and otherwise, you can expect him to do fuck-all.

But of course, this wouldn't be complete without a commentary from the Emperor of Tone Deafness, Donald Trump himself, who tweeted yesterday morning, "Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter.  This is not acceptable.  They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — there is no collusion."

So to Trump, the murder of seventeen people in a high school -- like everything else in the world -- is about him and his image.

The one thing that gives me hope about all of this is the response of the survivors.  In an impassioned response to Trump's use of a meeting with law enforcement in Parkland after the shooting as a grinning, thumbs-up photo-op, Emma Gonzales, a student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, where the shooting occurred, said:

Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seated funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS.  They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence.  We call BS.  They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.  We call BS.  They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars.  We call BS.  No, they say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred.  We call BS.

Another survivor, Cameron Kasky, wrote:

We can't ignore the issues of gun control that this tragedy raises.  And so, I'm asking -- no, demanding -- we take action now. 

Why?  Because at the end of the day, the students at my school felt one shared experience -- our politicians abandoned us by failing to keep guns out of schools. 

But this time, my classmates and I are going to hold them to account.  This time we are going to pressure them to take action.  This time we are going to force them to spend more energy protecting human lives than unborn fetuses.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Kasky said:

Everything I’ve heard where we can’t do anything and it’s out of our hands and it’s inevitable, I think that’s a facade that the GOP is putting up.  After every shooting the NRA sends a memo saying ‘send your thoughts and prayers.’  This is the only country where this kind of thing happens...  There is a segment of this society that will shrug this off and send their thoughts and prayers but march for hours over a rainbow wedding cake.

Kasky added, "This is something that can be stopped and will be stopped."

It's sad that seventeen-year-olds are having to step up and take action because the fifty-year-olds are so much in the pockets of lobbyists that they'll jettison their responsibility and sacrifice their integrity rather than lose money.  But at least the teenagers are stepping up.

Which should worry the hell out of the likes of Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.  Because in a year or two, these kids will be voting.

And you better believe they're not going to forget this.

Huckabee, Fischer, and the politicization of tragedy

I, like many others, have spent the last twelve hours trying to figure out how to wrap my mind around what happened yesterday at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  A 20 year old man, almost certainly mentally ill, took the lives of 26 people, including his mother (one of the teachers at the school), the principal, the school psychologist, and twenty children between the ages of 5 and 10.  A tragedy of this magnitude is hard to comprehend; when I watched some of the video clips coming in from Newtown, when I listened to an emotional President Obama's voice cracking as he delivered his response to the nation, I could do nothing but sit there and cry helplessly myself.

Each of us deals with tragedy in our own way.  My (many) Christian friends on Facebook have posted comments that they are comforted by the thought that Jesus has gathered these children in.  My (also many) secular/non-religious friends have offered their thoughts and condolences to the bereaved family members of those innocent victims.  Members of both groups have voiced their renewed commitment to creating a loving, compassionate world, a world in which things like this don't happen ever again.  And at times like this, we are forced to revisit and question our laws regarding access to mental health care and gun control, which is right and proper.  We respond by comforting the grieving, giving solace to our own shock, and considering how to prevent such horrors in the future.

Well, at least most of us do.  Some of us respond by using the deaths of 26 innocent people to score political points. Consider former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's response: "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said in an interview on Fox News yesterday.  "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

I watched the clip of Huckabee's interview with my mouth hanging open a little.  And at first, I thought, "Why bother writing about this?  Huckabee is a sanctimonious twit.  You already knew that."  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn't just keep silent.

Do you really believe that, Mr. Huckabee?  Your god is that petty, that heartless, that bloodthirsty?  Your concept of the Lord of Lords is that he is sitting there on his throne in heaven, and he's thinking, "I'm just fed up with America's commitment to the separation of church and state.  Ever since they eliminated prayer in schools, I've been getting more and more pissed off.  Hey, I know!  I'll send a crazed gunman to shoot a bunch of kids!  Yeah, that's the ticket!"?

And I realized: no, of course he doesn't think that.  He's a shill.  He is shamelessly using the grief and outrage of others to gain political capital.  He's not alone; every time something like this happens, you hear others of his cloth -- people like Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh -- do precisely the same thing.  They don't even stop for a second to say, "Let's take a break from the politically-motivated finger-pointing.  Let's use this horror to incite us to do good.  Hug your kids, help the people around you, do what you can to make your own community a safe place.  There will be other times to push politics; now is a time to come together, put aside our differences, and remember our common commitment to a better world."  No.  Before the gunshots have even stopped, they've already started manipulating the situation to further their own ends.

If you think this sort of thing is unique to Huckabee, who had already established his reputation as a heartless asshole by responding the same way to the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado earlier this year, think again.  Take a look at this video if you can stand to,  in which American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer states that god could have stopped the shooter, but didn't because "god is not going to go where he's not wanted."  If kids were allowed to pray every day in schools, Fischer claims, the whole thing never would have happened.  I'm sickened by someone who would stoop this low, who would callously think, "Wow, now people will really see that I was right about religion in public schools!" and give a speech like this on the same damned day that the murders occurred.

The word "reprehensible" doesn't even begin to cover this sort of behavior.  I can only hope that the people who hear these men talking, religious and non-religious alike, will be repulsed by the cold, calculated politicization of what should be a cause for national mourning.  And I hope that enough of them -- and especially of the Christians to whom Huckabee and Fischer are attempting to pander -- will tell them to sit down and shut the hell up, and that they will get the message that anyone with an ounce of compassion would react to their shilling with nausea.