Karma is a Bitch

Happy Fourth of July

Happy Fourth of July! It’s our annual American birthday party, the day when we observe the birth of our nation in the traditional manner – by shooting each other. Over the last few days, there have been a bunch of celebratory mass shootings: 4 shot in Fort Worth, 6 shot with 2 fatalities in Philadelphia, 9 shot in Wichita, 4 in the Bronx, and an astonishing 30 shot with 2 fatalities in Baltimore, Maryland. What better way to kick off the holiday?

At this point, there’s nothing anybody can say about gun violence that isn’t a cliché so I’m not even going to try. Instead, I just want to acknowledge the casualness of American shooting sprees. They happen pretty much every day, in cities and small towns across the nation. They’re as much a fact of life as the sports report. The only difference is that people get more upset about sports.

Maybe American gun violence is karmic payback for the founding of our country. Whatever your politics, the indisputable facts of America’s creation are a horror show of genocide, enslavement, and warfare. The Declaration of Independence, radical in its politics for the time, nevertheless left a lot of folks out of its noble sentiment that “all men are created equal.” Those “inalienable rights endowed by our Creator” were only inalienable if you happened to be the right race and sex. As for the Big Three: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” it’s hard to square them with our current bloodlust. Hard to pursue happiness when you got no life.

As for liberty, that word’s been so maligned it’s hard to know what it means anymore. What the hell is it? Whose liberty? To do what? When it comes to the Second Amendment, that liberty now extends to every swinging dick owning pretty much every weapon of war he so desires. At what point does the gun owner’s liberty to keep firearms on his person rub against my liberty to keep my person bullet-free? My pursuit of happiness is severely hampered by a perforated spleen.

John Adams, writing to his wife Abigail after our declaration of emancipation from Great Britain said, “[This day] ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” By that definition, every day in America is the Fourth of July. We’ve got the shows and games and sports. And boy howdy do we have the guns illuminating the fuck out of American skylines. The bells follow by a couple days to honor the dead.

What are we doing?

Why is the American bloodlust so profound and perverse that we allow ourselves to live in a state of siege and terror? You can wag your head and say, “Not me, ya big pussy. I don’t live in fear.” But you do. Every American does. Every American knows what it’s like to walk into a mall or a movie theater and do a quick scan for the emergency exits. Every American kid knows what it’s like to do an active shooter drill. Every American has to at least consider purchasing their own gun to protect themselves from their fellow Americans, even though all evidence shows that having a handgun in the house makes you more likely to die, not less. You can dress up in bravado and swagger all you want, but that’s living in a state of terror.

Terrorism isn’t the daily slaughter of innocents. It’s the persistent fear that such an event might occur. Terrorism isn’t designed to kill as many people as possible; it’s designed to make everybody feel vulnerable to an attack. How is that different from day-to-day life in the United States?

We’re so adolescent in our collective thinking that Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas tweeted: “I'm EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans.” Texas, as you probably don’t even remember because who can remember all the carnage, was the site of a mass shooting at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas this year in which nine people were killed. I hate that my country values boom-boom sticks more highly than its citizens.

The shootings all bleed together (pun intended). Over the next few days, as American grill, there’s going to be more mass shootings. Somebody’s going to get pissed at somebody or somebody’s going to act on a long-simmering grudge, or some Nazi is going to walk into a McDonalds or something. People are going to die for no reason this Fourth of July. They’re going to die the next day for no reason. And the day after that. People are going to get shot and survive, their lives forever altered. Families will go bankrupt trying to care for them. People will lose their independence this Independence Day. They will lose their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness. And the rest of us will continue to keep our heads down and our mouths shut because we’ve been too cowed by the PATRIOTS and FREEDOM LOVERS to do anything else. American gun culture is a perversion. It’s an obscenity. We’re feeding our children to Moloch because it feels good and it makes a small number of people very, very rich. Karma is a bitch.

Let’s pick up the pace, America.

P.S. As an aside, through the end of June this year, abut 9,000 Ukrainian civilians were killed in the war. If that pace continues, they will lose about 18-20k civilians this year. About 45,000 American civilians will die from gunfire in 2023.