Thursday, December 27, 2012

2ND AMENDMENT GANSTERISM



I originally wrote a December post on the Newtown, CT shooting, including an introductory link from the World Socialist Website; but when I pressed the preview button on Google, I got a prompt saying it had been published.  I subsequently looked at my blog and saw nothing.  As I’ve no idea how to retrieve anything out of the blogosphere, I’m rewriting my thoughts, subsequently updated.


At a recent gathering at my home at the Winter Solstice, conversation inevitably turned to our most recent school-shooting tragedy.  Someone had read an editorial in that Friday’s New York Times elaborating an opinion on Second Amendment rights.  I hadn’t known there was a conversation underway to repeal it.


And what was the reason for this amendment, he wondered, as he was particularly troubled by the use of the word ‘militia’.  I quickly jumped in, sensing an opportunity to connect my own personal dots on the subject.  The Constitution grants us the right to dissolve our governance if it improperly serves us, casts us into hopelessness and does not serve our wellbeing.  This undoubtedly was the reason for the use of that word.  How to assail the existing powers, however duly constituted, without arms?


Later I reflected on the growth of gun culture in the United States.  I’d recently been told by a colleague at my rehab program that guns are freely available, even placed on tables for sale at gun shows.  Then, in a 180 degree pivot that seems possible only in our culture, I heard in a television news announcement tonight that areas in some states are publishing information on the location of privately and legally held firearms, the disclosure of which was  not well received by all.


In evidence that the Civil War still stalks the political landscape in this country, there is a widespread affinity among some to display the Confederate flag.  Overcoming my repugnance, I now began to reflect upon the reactionary nature of this.  The rebel yell is alive today in the imagination of some who object to the indifference of American political life.  Into this sometimes also goes racial prejudice, jealousy in the workplace and a resentment of the openness of our immigration policies resulting in a concept of armed militias and a revolutionary resistance, however simplistic.


The missing ingredient in this stew of constitutionally allowable discontent is, simply, intellect.  The romance of bearing arms seems a reductio ad absurdum for the awesome undertaking of reconstituting government.  Among this subculture of discontented shooters, who would have the political imagination to forge a new constitution, a Bill of Rights?  I think my biggest single argument with American culture, besides its obsession with violence, is its discouragement of intellect.  In a clip I saw recently of the film Lincoln, he is arguing passionately for the phrase we hold these truths to be self evident.  Why would he be so emotionally moved by what we take to be a tautology?  Could it be because the power of his leadership lay in his ability to be moved by what is freely available to all, namely the simple use of logic and common sense?


We are then left with devastating explosions of murder/suicide.  The licentious availability of firearms coupled with the painful mental and emotional dislocations of American life from time to time produce monsters.  We can’t then just turn around and say the parents were oblivious, or our mental health system is deficient.  We lack wholesomeness in the way we conceive and think about our own governance.  Cynicism blunts intellect, and we all too frequently think not in threads of conversation, but in ideologies.  I’m not one to blindly salute authority, but perhaps before we resort to arms we should rethink our identity as Americans.