What Should Otherwise Not Have To Be Said
What does the way in which we move our way around a debate reveal? If the above screen-capped strands serve as any indication, it is that some people are fine with maintaining a strange kind of sacrosanct bourgeois violence that does not recognize itself for what it is — it is a way of thinking that somehow seems to believe that a school shooter can do no wrong (and that — therefore — twenty years of school shootings are just a part of American life); that victims have no right to a name; and that the murder of a quarter of the female population is something we can relegate to a cocktail chatter smirk and shrug. It is the kind of talk more fit for Halloween masks than our own faces and strikes us as if an alien love child has left the pages of The Weekly World News, put on a suit and tie, and announced that it was running for office.
It also raises the question: what kind of society do we want? Do we want to live in a society where we feel like strangers to one another? Where more than one Cabinet secretary thinks they need armed guards and students must wear clear backpacks and be accompanied by ID badges? Do we want to take money from a program that —
… funds research and implementation of a wide range of evidence-based safety programs that range from bullying prevention to innovative approaches to school policing …
— and redirect it towards buying metal detectors and locks?
What kind of sports can we send towards these individuals to quell this strange and off-putting inchoate rage? What do we do with those born into a bourgeois life who have forgotten that there is a necessary metafictional element to a bourgeois life?
Or — given recent legislative developments (let alone certain proposals) — are we merely witnessing a group slowly begin to lose the debate?
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