It should be shocking, but…

How many mass shootings have we had this year? Maybe three, four, five…and the year is a little more than half over. While the circumstances and locations may be completely distinct, the scene is all too familiar. Young men – I’m not sure if I’m aware of a mass shooting carried out by a woman, yet – who for whatever reason are suffering from some psychological issue that never gets addressed, somehow manage to stockpile a cache of weapons without anyone being the wiser. Sometimes the guns are bought from friends or illegally; sometimes they’re purchased (along with rounds and rounds of bullets) from the local Walmart. But somewhere along the line the dangerous thoughts and plans turn into a reality. I don’t know what that point of no return is. Maybe for some of these young men it was purchasing the gun. Maybe it was just deciding one day that they were going to go through with it. Maybe they didn’t actually make up their mind until the shooting actually began.

I read a very powerful book about the Columbine shooting by journalist Dave Cullen. Cullen attempted to get more to the heart of the who the two gunmen were, rather than just paint them as mass murderers. Certainly Cullen was sensitive to the fact that the town of Columbine still had to live with the losses they suffered that day, and so did not try and justify or explain their actions, but instead tried to understand at what point they had made the decision to go through with their plan to kill their classmates and destroy their school. To use the Columbine shooters as an example, it seemed that the two boys made this decision at vastly different times. Eric Harris seemed to make the decision long before Dylan Klebold did. Harris did most of the planning, and seemed to be determined to carry through with it from the beginning. Klebold, on the other hand, seemed much less hell bent on killing his classmates and suffering the consequences of those horrific acts. But whatever the timing, this plan went into action long before the events unfolded. So it begs the question, how many other people have plotted awful crimes of this nature, but simply didn’t follow through with it? What stopped them? What didn’t stop those that did follow through with it? What happened to those that felt that way at one time, but stopped before killing someone? Did they go on to lead “normal” lives? Are they still plotting? Or are the type of people who carry out these acts determined from start to finish to follow through on them?

These are the scary questions that I think we as a society need to answer. Because the reality is that there are people out there right this minute that are plotting the next Columbine, or the next Virginia Tech, or the next Oikos University, or the next Aurora, or the next Sikh temple. Whatever the motivation, they’re planning these attacks; so the question is how do we prevent it? For most that are planning, they will hopefully just give it up, and move on. But for those that are determined to carry out these acts, what can we as a society do?

I think the problem is that our society has gone off the rails, and these people are the unfortunate culmination of a society that embraces guns and violence as a cultural norm, while at the same time repressing individualism and open expression. People are told that to be stoic is good and that showing or expressing your emotions is bad. So we have bred multiple generations of pent-up, angry teenagers who feel that their only outlet to let society know how they feel is by killing someone. Add this to the fact that young men are returning from war with terrible PTSD, but are unable to receive the treatment they require, so instead of turning the gun on a crowded movie theater are all too often killing themselves.

The question of what to do is not an easy one to answer, but the fact is that an answer needs to be found. The issue of guns is part of it. The second amendment (in fact NO CONSTITUTION AMENDMENT) gives carte blanche to carry any type of weapon, anywhere, at any time. All of the amendments to the constitution have limitations; so limiting access to handguns, assault rifles, huge magazines, rocket launchers, landmines, tanks and nuclear weapons are all perfectly within the scope of the legislature (I guess unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise). But limiting access to certain types of weapons won’t do it alone; the problem is much larger than that. We need to allow our society as a whole to express their feelings in an open, non-judgmental way. It’s not unusual for young men to have homicidal fantasies, but when they’re being treated as freaks or murderers for expressing these fantasies with words or pictures (instead of violence), this turns them off to talking about how they’re feeling; which is something that might potentially prevent them from carrying it out. As with all generations before, we have a lot to learn, but the only way to learn about why people are feeling a certain way, or why people do certain things, is to listen to what they have to say.

I leave you with a quote from The Dark Knight that I think is apropos:

“Nobody panics when the expected people [get] killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds!! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.” ~ The Joker

Let's bring everyone back in...

American systems are broken. Our political system is broke. Our economic system is broken. Our judicial system is broke. Our educational system is broke. I’m not going to go into examples of how and why these systems are broken, but I think that while people may disagree over the levels of dysfunction in these institutions, most people would agree that they’re all messed up and headed in the wrong direction.
So, short of completely overhauling our system – which basically would be mean scrapping our constitution and re-writing it (not a bad idea, but a proposal fraught with its own issues of who to write it and how to change it) – what we need is to change the way the people in this country interact with their institutions; government and other.
One major change that would help connect people more to their political system – and in my opinion, thereby connect them more to all of the institutions in our lives – would be to create a compulsory voting system in this country. Compulsory (or mandatory) voting would be helpful, because not only would it push voting numbers up to more democratic levels (the mid-terms had a 37% voter participation rate – disgraceful), but would also re-engage citizens in the politics and political process. In addition, voter participation on the level that we’re seeing in the Australia (95%), which has a fine-based mandatory voting process, would help weed out extreme candidates, and stifle ascension of highly partisan groups such as the tea party from become major political forces.
Voting day can also be made a mandatory national holiday, so that citizens have no excuses for not turning out to vote, and companies have no excuses for remaining open. Mobile voting centers can be setup to aid elderly or infirmed voters with the process, and those who are absolutely unable to participate may get a waiver through an extensive process of unenrollment, that would need to be re-submitted for every election.
Voting should be compulsory for both local and national elections. The reason this is important is because if we have extremists in our local office, they become our experienced lawmakers, and therefore will tend to move onto the next level. Rick Santorum is a perfect example of this. Santorum is a highly-partisan, ultra-religious extremist, but because he has moved through the levels of politics using a hard Christian-conservative bloc as his base, he’s been able to make his way all the way into a primary fight for the Republican nomination as President of the United States. But Rick Santorum in no way reflects the general feelings or beliefs of even a large minority in this country. His base is small, but fierce; they always vote, and always get their friends to vote. And when no one else is voting, it’s the extremists on both sides that decide both our local and national elections.
The argument against compulsory voting is that it infringes upon our rights. Personally, I feel that this argument is flimsy. There are several things that the government – whether local or federal – requires us to do. We’re required to sign up for selective service. We’re required to pay taxes. We’re required to serve on juries. And there are always caveats to these laws and people who flout the system, but on the whole, the majority of people participate in these activities. In addition, each citizen should only be required to register and show up on Election Day, they have no requirement to vote for a specific candidate, or vote for any candidate at all. There should be options to either write in a person’s own selection, or to completely abstain and select something like “I do not wish to vote”. This would give people who have a moral (or religious) opposition to the voting or political process a chance to withhold their active participation. And for those who say that they don’t want to participate because the system is broken, what is a better way to change the system than participate. The system is what the system is, and if we can’t completely overhaul it, isn’t it better to be able to change it from within.
The arguments against compulsory voting are mainly hyperbolic, and have nothing to do with any real negative impacts on the political process or the country in general. Therefore, to reduce hyper-partisanship, increase voter participation and engagement, and restore democracy to our fragile and disintegrating institutions, it’s time to implement compulsory voting into our local and national electoral processes.

The United [Countries]...

Our country is divided. We're divided politically, religiously, geographically, racially, ethnically, culturally, spatially, and every other -lly that you can think of. We're a big country (relatively), with a large population spread out over a vast expanse of land. Our climates differ dramatically depending on where you are in the country, as does the language. And yet, we try to operate this [so-called] Democracy in a way that is supposed to be pleasing to most people. IMPOSSIBLE.
Look, while I don't like to consider myself a member of a party, my ideas are much more in line with Democrats than Republicans (I go further left than Dems, so I don't really consider myself one). I'm a progressive. But I do agree with Republicans, at least from the very broadest perspective, that our government is too big. I don't mean too big the way that they mean it. I think the purpose of our government - really the only purpose - should be to protect the citizens of this country, and provide laws and services to those in need. Certainly there are complicated rules and regulations that the government enforces because of interstate commerce, but Europe manages to work through that, despite the fact that they operate as several different autonomous nations.
Which brings me to my point. The united states of America (lower-cased for emphasis) aren't working. The umbrella that is our federal government is just not diverse and progressive enough to deal with the changing face of our vast country and the different regions within. The idea of 1,000 people representing nearly 400 million is absurd. Not to mention the fact that the majority of the members of congress are old white men, who are so out of touch with what is going on across this country that it's laughable to say they represent us at all. They're from a country where old white men rule, and they want to keep it that way. The uprising of women and minorities in this country is foreign to them, as are new ideas about relationships and protection of privacy and individual rights. They don't represent us anymore, and it's time we recognize that fact and move on.
Move on to breaking this country up into different countries. I'm not sure exactly how we should break it up, but whatever makes the most sense to the people in the regions, I suppose. If people in Oklahoma want God to rule their schools, their government, and their lives, who am I to say that they cannot. Call this a new Declaration of Independence. I don't agree with God controlling every of my life. But if people in an area want that, should our federal government really stop them? According to the constitution, yes. But if you think about it, the constitution doesn't really make that much sense anymore either. It was created when the population was small, and controlled by a homogenous white male population who thought that they were the only people that mattered in the country. Rights were not given to women and minorities, because the framers of the constitution didn't even think of them as citizens; they were just sort of...there.
It's time to face up to reality. Our country isn't getting any better. It's been getting worse for a while now, but we blindly hope that eventually it will move toward progression (...the arc of the universe...). But what has proven this. The election of a black man as president? We've seen the reaction to that election, and the thinly veiled vitriol spewed at this man in the name of "politics", but really in the name of racial discrimination. His election was a major move forward for progressives, but I think the reaction reveals more than the election did. Our country is being held back by strong forces of generational disagreement, and just a general different in perspectives on the world. I don't think money is the most important thing in the world, and our current governmental, social, and economic systems are built upon this fact. People are irrelevant in modern American society. Well I say FUCK modern American society, we don't need it anymore.
Let's break up these broken united states, and create individual, autonomous regional countries, whose governments more accurately reflect the zeitgeist of a particular area, and can govern more flexibly and smoothly. It's time. It's been time. We're fooling ourselves if we really believe that things are going to get better. Moderates in congress are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. The age of moderation, compromise, and cooperation are over. The halls of congress are now a battlefield, and neither side is winning or will win, but the tragedy is that the stalemate isn't only affecting the soldiers, it's affecting us all.

The state of the campaign...

The 2012 national presidential campaign has officially begun. It began last night with the president’s third State of the Union address. The president used language from his 2008 campaign, through the year-long healthcare debate, through the debt ceiling fight, as well as presented some new ideas that are blueprints for his 2012 campaign strategy.
It’s true that a lot of the president’s speech was overly hopeful and hyperbolic, and a lot of the “plans” he presented are never going to come to fruition. However, he is the president of the United States, and it is not only the duty of the president to try and make the country better, it is also the duty of the president to help citizens of this country have confidence that that is true. Republicans seem to be focused on how awful things are – the State of the Union rebuttal was a great example – and want to point fingers at whose fault it is, or who has been unable thus far to completely flip the economic downturn. It took more than a decade to cause the housing bubble and crash, to deregulate banks t the point where they could gamble with our savings and retirement, to deregulate industry to the point where they would re-form near monopolies and use lobbyists to push policies that protect them; the fact that it took a while to create these problems, it makes sense that it’s going to take longer than three years, two terms, or even a few terms to solve these problems.
The president’s administration has been imperfect to say the least. He’s let some people down. He’s continued some of the most appalling policies of the Bush administration. He’s been incredibly insular, when his stated desire early on was to stay open. He’s been dogged about working across the aisle, but has continued to do so even when his attempts were to his – and the country’s – detriment. However, his ideas still remain solid, and he remains an amazing campaigner who will no doubt excite the skeptics and those who feel betrayed.
A personal highlight I had during the debate last night showed that Obama is always so serious, and showed that the charismatic campaigner from 2008 is still there. He was making reference to outdated regulations, citing a particular regulation that considered milk to be oil, and therefore taxed dairy farmers up to $10,000 a year for containment. He goes on to say that with that regulation, it’s ‘worth crying over spilt milk’. He got crickets in the chamber, but the cheesy joke showed a different side of Obama than we’ve seen during his administration – the serious, somber, cerebral administrator.
The president will not officially begin campaigning until after a winner has been declared in the Republican primary, but his State of the Union address was an framework of legislation that he thinks will be successful in his next term, as well as issues he thinks will be politically advantageous in the upcoming election. His policies and campaign style are winners, he just needs to convince the American people of this.

The long, slow decline

So Congress finally passed a bill, and the president signed it into law (at the very last moment - our heroes), raising the debt ceiling and taking aim at deficit reduction. The only problem with this bill is that it's completely absurd and useless. Okay, fine, if Congress and the president want to give themselves slaps on the back for averting a downgrading of the nation's credit rating, setting a pretty low bar, then I guess they did succeed (or at least they tell us they succeeded) in doing so.
However, the fact that it seems like every single important bill that gets passed a) at the last minute, and b) after contentious partisan debate that essentially guts the bill of anything substantial, tells me a couple of things. The first is that the Republican party has made a huge mistake caving into their far-right tea party element, and due to the fact that they're scared about losing elections, they're allowing a small, vocal minority run their show. The second is that our government, and I used government mostly as a euphemism for Congress and the president, are incredibly myopic in their legislation, and are pushing the United States further and further over the brink toward become another former empire.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the United States is going to disappear, or become a third world country; I'm simply saying that the days of the United States as the sole global economic, social and military superpower are waning. Not only are there other countries that are on the fast-track to superpower status (e.g. China), but our legislators are passing laws (or not passing laws) that are not only not taking care of the problems that they are intended to take care of, but in many - and probably most circumstances - are actually making them worse.
Okay, so where does that put us. Well, we could sit around and lament the slow decline of our once great (or at least said to be once great) empire, or we could embrace the fact that our government is the reason for the decline, and use that as an impetus for changing not only the people in government, but the actual structure itself - I'd say it's aptly proven to be a failure. This could have two different effects; the first potential effect is that this could turn around our decline, and we could actual recover, and remain one among many superpowers, and have respect for the rest of the world, and not always be throwing our weight around.
Or, we could continue on the downward trajectory toward the middle, but end up being much happier for it. I was having a discussion the other day about the decline of the United States, and a friend of mine brought up a great point - countries that were former empires are actually happier in the middle of the global power structure rather than at the top. At the top you have to think about how to stay on top; you have to constantly worry about how your economy is going to effect the rest of the world, you have to get involved in skirmishes throughout the world so that you can "spread democracy" and "freedom", you have to make sure to continue to put out great music, movies, television and other media (like Jersey Shore, Dancing with the Stars, Lady Gaga, Transformers 3 and the New York Post). It's all such a big chore. I think that with a country like ours, which according to Sarah Palin is represented best by those in the middle of the country (although they only account for less than 30 percent of the total population), we would be happy to settle into the middle of the global hierarchy. Let's ease the pressure that has been building in this country, and not only face our fate, but embrace it. Let's continue to pass senseless laws that have no chance of success, and blame one another for all of the ails of society. It's worked up to this point in bringing us down, and I think that if we continue with the same veracity, or even ramp it up a bit, we could fall dramatically in the next couple of decades.

To quote one of my favorite movies (although not on my favorite movie list), Almost Famous.
Lester Bangs: What, are you like the star of your school?
William Miller: They hate me.
Lester Bangs: You'll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle.

We're 'them', and the rest of the world is William.