...AND NOT WITH SISSY PROMISES OF "THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS"
As
a spiritual theologian who has written at length on prayer and spirituality and
on the mystics and prophets who know something about prayer, I am sick and
tired of the insult that is hurled at prayer every time a politician stands up
to shed tears over gun violence in schools (or night clubs or concerts or
churches, etc. etc) while behind the scenes he is in bed with the NRA.
Yes,
I mean you, Governor Scott; Yes, you, Marco Rubio; Yes, Paul Ryan; Yes,
President Trump. Yes, Yes to all you sissies who as are as deceitful and
full of lies (such as “I love my children and grandchildren and fear for them
in school”) as you are of sentimental piety feigning as religion.
You
are sissies because you are afraid of losing your job and your status, i.e.
your next election, should you dare to have the courage (yes, the balls) to
stand up to the NRA.
(By the way, is it true that Putin & Co.
illegally funneled money through the NRA to help the Trump campaign[1]in the last election? We citizens would like Congress
to research that fact ASAP to help save what is left of our democracy.)
You
NRA puppet politicians, thanks to the investigative work of Bess Kalb[2] and
watchdog journalists and commentators at the L.A. Times[3], New York Times[4], Fortune[5], among others, the facts are out about where your first love
lies. It is not with children of America, nor with their parents and grandparents,
siblings and relatives, who are in mourning and will grieve the rest of their
lives for their young ones gunned down by American citizens armed with military
weapons altogether legally (thanks to you and your political priorities).
Let
us review the facts that Bess Kalb and these others have gathered--as opposed
to the sick, sentimental, religious pieties--around gun control in America
among our so-called political leaders who, being moral midgets and religious
hypocrites, think we citizens are so stupid that we are impressed by your
crocodile tears and pseudo-religious mutterings about “thoughts and prayers.”
Hypocritical
prayers are not prayers. They are lies.
Fact
# 1: Marco Rubio, senator from Florida, voted against banning assault weapons
and has received $3,303,355 from the NRA and holds a A+ rating in backing NRA
over the years.
Fact
#2: President Trump received $21,000,000 from NRA for his presidential
campaign.
Fact
# 3: Senator Rob Portman of Ohio received $3,061,941 from NRA.
Fact
# 4: The Republican Party headquarters received $17,385,437 from NRA in the
2015-1016 election cycle alone.
Fact
# 5: Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa received $3,124,273 from NRA.
Fact
# 6: Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina received $4,418,012 from NRA.
Etc,
etc, etc.
These
people and the many like them have blood of children on their hands. But
they do not stand alone by any means.
Each
Supreme Court judge who voted for Citizens United has the blood of these
children massacred in Florida (and the eight other school shootings[6] since Jan 1, 2018 and those before) on their hands too for
buttressing a system that reduces a so-called democracy to pay and play and
gives corporations like the NRA the right of personhood and along with it so
much more power over the choice of voting citizens.
The
ONE WAY to stop the killings is not just to blow the whistle on the hypocrisy
of these politicians and judges and their calling for “thoughts and prayers,”
insulting as that is to people who actually pray and think. The cause of
this pathological culture is obviously the gluttony for money and the power it
can buy in a so-called democracy that is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy
of the rich (and those who are desperate to serve the power holders to save
their political skins).
The
one solution to gun violence is a constitutional amendment that disavows money
in elections. We need public funding of our elections to send the NRA and
all other corporations slinking back to doing what they consider their jobs.
It’s time they quit making whores (not to insult sex workers, I apologize to
them) of our politicians. This means that Citizens United must be
repealed—and Yes, we must call out the Supreme Court judges led by Chief
Justice John Roberts for passing that abysmal legislation and see to it that
the NRA does not choose our judges in the future by buying off the politicians
who give them their positions.
Common
sense gun laws that render military weapons unavailable to non-military persons
and that are favored by an overwhelming number of Americans cannot happen until
the entire sick money-driven political system in America is dismantled in favor
of public funding that thereby eliminates the capital that is swamping voting.
According
to the brilliant study by historian Nancy MacLean, Democracy In Chains: The
Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, the goal of the
radical right (read NRA and Koch brothers, et al) is “to save capitalism from
democracy—permanently.” Theirs is “a quest to ensure the supremacy of
capital”[7] and this comes about not just by changing our politicians or
who rules and makes decisions but by changing the rules. Which is of
course where lawyers and courts and judges come in, abetted by legislators.
The sum total of this political movement and its “shrewd long game” --
which has been in progress for decades and is reaching a climax in today’s
version of the Republican Party -- is “a return to oligarchy”[8] where power is concentrated in the hands of the few.
Not government of the people, by the people and for the people, but
government of the few, by the few, for the few.
But
the few who are most financially powerful are not the only ones who can change
the rules. That is what a movement to add a constitutional amendment to
get money out of elections can also do. A movement of the many, those
many who still believe in or yearn for a government of, by and for the people.
One
hopeful sign emerging from the carnage in Florida school shooting is the wisdom
of the teenagers of the school who are calling on Congress to do something and
quit insulting their intelligence with appeals to so-called “thoughts and
prayers.”[9]. Let the young lead this crusade to dismantle money on our
politics! Let them lead the march to congressional offices and to the
social media—let the moral outrage of the young awaken the tired cynicism of
our fat politicians and cynical Supreme Court judges who are willing to sell
not only the young but whatever is left of our democracy down the drain for a
pat on the head from NRA and Koch brothers and their ilk.
The
young were leaders in that moral revolution called the Civil Rights movement.
They filled the jails; they manifested both courage and generosity for a
value that mattered. Let them lead this new moral revolution as well.
The
late monk Thomas Merton wrote over fifty years ago the following observation
about guns in America.
Man begins in zoology
He is the saddest animal
He drives a big red car
Called anxiety….
Whenever he goes to the phone
To call joy
He gets the wrong number
Therefore he likes weapons
He knows all guns
By their right names
He drives a big black Cadillac
It
is the lack of joy, the dominance of cynicism, the omnipresence of anxiety, the
scarcity of love and of meaning that ultimately leads us to love affairs with
guns and with death. This too is work that needs doing. Are there
politicians and would-be politicians out there who want to put love first?
Like the hero teachers did at the Florida high school in taking bullets
for their students?
Who
are willing to put biophilia before necrophilia? Life before death?
Love before hate? Joy before cynicism?
We
are waiting for you—not to lead but to follow the grass roots revolution that
is coming.
[7] Nancy MacLean, Democracy
In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (NY: Viking, 2917), xxxi.
[8] Ibid., xxviii, xxxii.
[9] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-high-school-students-stage-walkout-to-protest-gun-violence_us_5a87067be4b004fc3191a117
[10] 4 Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas
Merton (NY: New Directions, 1977), 624-626. Cited in Matthew
Fox, A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey (Novato,
Ca: New World Library, 2016), 178.
