Opinion Editorials, June, 2016

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Orlando nightclub shooting scene, June 12, 2016

 
The latest mass tragedy has seen the usual shock, sadness and fear expressed by ordinary people, and the usual professional grieving, intellectual hypocrisy and moral disability by most of what passes for American leadership. While various political, professional and identity group spokespeople claim the tragedy as suffered by all but especially their own communities and seek both real and imagined sources of the horror unleashed at Orlando, the so-called war on terror that has murdered millions elsewhere and has repeatedly come home to America in brutal fashion still seems useful only in mostly ignorant rhetoric.
 
While the new antichrist for liberals, Trump, is charged with bigotry in calling for a ban on immigration of Muslims, he and his even narrower minded nationals of what some Islamic fundamentalists call the “satanic” forces of the USA go on killing Muslims on their native soil before they can ever think about escaping. Expressing compassion for immigrants who would not have to seek refuge if we weren’t destroying their homelands is like an exceptionally violent rapist offering sympathetic counsel to the victim of his brutality. Yet this mental disorder that would shame the label of schizophrenia is honorably practiced by hate labelers who commit massive hate crimes across the globe while claiming civilized, democratic and humanitarian labels for themselves.
 
 And attributing the Orlando murderer’s action to gay hatred, Latino hatred, woman hatred, violence worship, gun loving or overuse of anti-social media may all be at least partly true, but claiming that birth is a definite path to death is even more true but just as reductionist.
 
Whether this man was cruel to his wife, had a violent nature, hated gays or was himself gay might have played a role in his terrible deed had it occured in some social vacuum, but the material reality of this crime goes far beyond his possibly tortured psyche and ability to procure weapons in the american marketplace of madness and is only a small part of the story.
 
The much larger part is this:
 
American nationally sanctioned slaughter of millions of Muslim people in mass terrorist attacks that destroy nations in the Middle East and create hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the chaos is the root cause of why an occasional Muslim or small group of Muslims engage in mass slaughter of Americans in a terror attack in the USA. Their horrible retaliation does not come out of a social vacuum even if some wish to place it entirely on the backs of deranged individuals or minority identity groups taking vengeance on other minority identity groups.
 
Of course more than one billion Islamic people are not responsible for the actions taken by a relative handful driven to fanaticism, but Americans who profess superiority by virtue of being an exceptional nation of freedom loving people – in the words of all their leaders – but who act more like a master race of self chosen global rulers bear more responsibility for what is done in their name. And in truth far more given that relatively few rise in outcry after every slaughter performed by the USA or one of its client-lap dog regimes. For instance, no political speeches about the sanctity of life or mournful American candle-lit processions took place when more than 60 Afghan family members and friends at a wedding party were blown to bits by a U.S. drone several years ago, and that is only one loss of innocent life unacknowledged by mostly decent citizens only guilty of ignorance.
 
But if we advertise ourselves as a democratic people, all of us are ultimately responsible and in danger of paying a price for what only some of us really do. We can’t have it both ways.
 
The real message of the Orlando slaughter is not to sink even lower in a political debate already emanating from and in keeping with an increasingly popular subject of identitary reductionists in power and out; the toilet. Too many forget that Chelsea Manning is not deprived of lavatory freedom but has been thrown into a cell for thirty-five years because she, actually he at the time of the crime, informed fellow citizens as to just what a murderous crime was being perpetrated under this hate-label “war on terror”. In fact, Bradley became Chelsea while incarcerated in a lesson of just how insignificant gender is, whether fluid, solid or gaseous, in comparison to the much more significant truth of humanity.
 
Indulging in further ignorance that finds a difference between supporting mass murder in the middle east while opening arms to its victims, and closing those arms with as little thought as to why people might find it maddening to have their nations destroyed by Americans kept obsessed with alleged evils outside while their inside festers and decays can only make the decomposition faster and more deadly. This process is creating a political stench powerful enough to make much of the world and a significant part of the American electorate desperately gasp for breath.
 
The crackpot realism of lesser evilism that consciousness control substitutes for democracy in the USA is about to offer a choice for the 400 billionaires whose combined wealth exceeds that of more than 190 million Americans. Will they continue to have an employee leader at the White House who uses a Men’s Room while on the road, or will it be, historically we are told, a user of the Ladies Room? If we cannot confront the sordid and hypocritical nature of a political economic system that makes it more profitable to practice war and sell pet food than to practice peace and build housing, we will support continued murder and mayhem that threatens us all, so long as it is performed by members of the politically correct identity group.
 
Bradley Manning took conscious heroic action and as Chelsea is still paying the price in hopes that we would face the fact that the un-hyphenated human beings murdered, whether in Orlando, Beirut, Yemen, Palestine, New York or any of the countless other places where they have fallen, would not continue to die if we’d put a stop to the dreadful state of terror we have created. We owe it to all their memories, and all our future. Rest in Peace, Orlando victims, and Wake Up, America.
 
email: fpscott@gmail.com

Frank Scott writes  political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate:

 http://legalienate.blogspot.com
 
 

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