Political inactivism

I'm not at a march today.  Would that I were, but farm life is like that.

There's a lot in this world that can point me towards despair.  Around here, a trip to the grocery store can do it--as I walked through the parking lot yesterday, I looked at the bumper stickers showing the political views, and by extension, the moral values of my neighbors.  There was the all too common "ORY GUN" logo.  There were all the NRA logos.  There was the "Protected by Smith & Wesson." There were the braggarts with "Molon labe" and III%.  There were salutes to the second amendment.  There was one truck that had, instead of a stick-figure family, a similarly arranged collection of semiautomatic rifles and handguns.  There was another that had a silhouette of an AR-15 captioned "BLACK RIFLES MATTER."

The unifying morality behind all of these stickers and mottoes is that these people believe that their personal right to end your life (if they feel it necessary) supersedes your right to live.  Those last two stickers really betray moral depravity, and make it explicit that they believe that their right to own weapons designed to kill humans is equal to or greater than other people's right to exist.  I mean, how do you charitably interpret them?  The owners of these stickers didn't seem to be motivated by a desire to hunt--a legitimate use for a single-action rifle.  They certainly didn't seem to want to be involved in a "well-regulated militia" intended to be the defense of a free state.  It seems almost entirely about the right to own weapons designed to kill others, to hold capital power over one's fellow human.

The most common sticker around here, though, is one with the date of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College.  Roseburg is not a big town, and I am not well connected, but I am two degrees of separation from somebody who was there.  Most of the town is similarly connected.  There's no shortage of evidence that if we wanted to make events like the UCC shootings rarer, if we wanted to make murders rarer, if we wanted to make suicides rarer, we would do our utmost to purge our society of all firearms (I'd be fine with a concession for single action hunting rifles).  But we want to have our cake and eat it too.  We want to believe that we are the responsible gun owners; that we are the bulwark between freedom and tyranny; that we are the good guy with the gun who will save the day; that if we just keep doing what we've been doing, only harder, things will get better.  This is not a mature, adult attitude.  Until we grow up, things will get worse, and I despair.

But--I watched some videos of today's rallies across the country, in which young people asked the "adults" to grow up.  The refreshing thing about youth is that sometimes they haven't learned to look politely away from truth, and they haven't learned that they shouldn't respect stupidity in a suit.  It is stupid to suggest that the solution to gun violence is more guns, and they don't hesitate to point that out.  So, I look at the kids, making politicians squirm with impolite truth, making us uncomfortable while waiting for an answer, asking us, "why?"...and I have a little, little hope.