Month: May 2022

In Dante’s Inferno, a Renaissance work of fiction that details nine circles of hell, the deepest one is not a burning pit.  Quite the contrary, it’s ice cold.  Think of the saying: She’s cold.  It means the person is pure evil; that person has no soul.

The pit of hell, the most desolate realm of evil, came to mind after debating this week yet again the issue of gun control.  At this point—after the mass shooting deaths in Uvalde coupled with the revelation that gunshot wounds are now the number one cause of death among children in the U.S.—I am ashamed of my country and my state.

This week’s mass shooting at an elementary school may not have occurred if Texas did not encourage 18-year-olds to buy military-style assault rifles—those weapons of war that spray bullets to kill many people in seconds flat. These are guns that blow bodies to bits.  That is the reason, if we’re being honest, the parents of the 19 dead schoolchildren were asked for DNA to identify mounds of bloody flesh.

Not left unnoticed, gun-loving Americans display little to no remorse, just like the typically young gunmen who commit these heinous bloodbaths.  I bet their eyes have never welled over any of the dozens of publicized shooting massacres which undeniably have increased since the federal assault rifle ban was lifted.  What an evil mistake.

That damn movie

Since Bonnie & Clyde, the movies were never the same.  And our culture followed suit.  Both became more violent and high-powered guns more glamourized and expected.  Dallas’ famous gangster couple drove state to state lickety-split carting shooting machines that were used to fight the first world war.  Oh for the days when the public used to debate handguns in 1980-81 when John Lennon then President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary James Brady were shot. In between those two eras, high-powered assault rifles were not easily obtained by the public and rarely used. We used to not have mass shootings. We only saw them in the movies.

The movies weren’t the only visuals that relied ever more on heavy artillery, blood and blasts to flesh and an obscene body count.  At the end of the 20^th century, video games came out with the premise to shoot as many ‘people’ as you can, and you win.  The ‘shooter’ games featured a gun to hold and red blood spurting from dead bodies on screen.  Boys loved playing them, their parents seeing no problem with developing killer instinct.

Then Columbine happened.

Oh how shocked our nation was as we watched on our TVs the surreal image of high school kids running from their school, hands held up in surrender less the cops take them for the assailants.

Since 1999 and Columbine, nothing has changed when it comes to mass shootings, at schools and everywhere else.  Mass shootings have only increased.

As we grappled with Columbine, psychologists told us ‘the brain thinks everything we see is real.’  So we ought to be careful what we watch and what we spend hours watching.  After the mass shooting, they told us the youth generation as well as American society has grown numb to gun culture and shooting deaths.  We are several generations now who’ve seen people get shot on TV shows and movies several times a week, perhaps hundreds of times a year.  The shooter video games also desensitize us so that we never stop and ask ourselves “What am I doing?” when we kill and kill and keep on killing in order to win a bloody game.

Let’s play Dysfunctional Family Feud!

The Uvalde school shooting brought out empathy in me, and I don’t even have children.  But it wasn’t hard at all to put myself in the place of a mother whose kid was shot to death at school or even the parents whose children are hospitalized with gunshot wounds.  The news and reality of a growing death toll was like a punch in the gut.  I opened my mouth in a silent cry, like a wailing mother.  The reality of what happened, what we’ve gone through vicariously time and again with no end in sight, brought tears to my eyes … because I know a parent who loses a child wants to die herself.

But in my world, others remained stoic. Unmoved. Glacial. Stiff upper lip.  I could hear their responses as to why no remorse: “We don’t even know those people.”  And … since Sandy Hook, “We don’t even know if that really happened.”  All mass shootings in the U.S. are real, not like Dante’s imagined Inferno.  Yet he knew something about evil being cold.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the Texas Governor and Legislature have yet to admit their extreme error in allowing teen-agers—notoriously irresponsible and unable to soberly think of the consequences beforehand—to purchase and own virtual Tommy guns.  Bonnie and Clyde weren’t much older when they brandished submachine guns into banks to steal other people’s money and shoot anyone who got in their way including law officers.

Shoot, a few days after the Uvalde elementary school massacre, the Lone Star State hosted the NRA convention, despite a couple of big-name music acts backing out and a tasteful change in plans to substitute a video address by Gov. Abbott instead of his scheduled live appearance.  Any date the NRA chose would be framed by a mass shooting, they’re so common.  At least pro-gunners were met with thousands of Americans who demanded responsible gun laws instead of irresponsible ones like here in Texas. 

In debates on gun control among people I know—practically everyone 2^nd Amendment spouters—I’ve been told that high-powered military-style assault rifles have been in use since the 19^th century and have been available to the public.  Horsefeathers.  Then I’m told, incredulously, the solution is more guns; if everyone had a high-powered assault rifle, there would be no more massacres.  Then I’m countered with what they think the real issue is: not military-style assault rifles or too many people with guns but mental illness.

Americans, please.

We have our share of crazies who hear and act on “KILL! KILL! KILL!”  But we don’t have any more sociopaths than we’ve always had before these military war rifles were easily available.  What we do have is lax gun laws, nonchalant cynical gun rights advocates, American greed, and the NRA mantra: The solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  They have the gall to declare classroom teachers should be armed with guns.  The American education system has come to this?  This would never have been allowed in the days of the wild west … unless the teacher was Belle Starr.

Folks in the NRA suggest instead of being ashamed of our great nation over all the senseless shooting massacres, Americans should just ‘deal with it.’  Times have changed, and we need to learn to live with many people having lots of guns and daily mass shootings at ‘soft targets’ and funerals and medical bills and lawsuits and reconstructive surgeries and physical therapy and counseling and opiate addictions and ruined lives and unhealed trauma and getting over it and moving on.  There ain’t no turning back the clock.  Ain’t no going back to the days of Bonnie and Clyde … er.

Oh, yes, I am wise, but it’s wisdom born of pain.

Yes, I’ve paid the price.  But look how much I gained.

If I have to, I can do anything.

I am strong.  I am invincible.  I am woman!

I may have been a decade old when abortion was legalized and therefore don’t remember much about it other than it used to be a legal option for girls ‘in trouble.’  But since then I’ve spent decades on the planet, all of them as a woman in America, sometimes watching documentaries with old news footage of the women’s marches in the 1960s and ’70s.  Looking back at the chauvinistic male responses, even by news reporters, to this day and age, seems to me when it comes to abortion, men haven’t changed one bit.  Condescending and sexist as ever and when they age, the loudest and most powerful among them turn into mean old coots.

Did you see how the DC legislators acted during a routine senate banking committee hearing?  They were listening to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and the old coots, of their own volition, brought up the issue of abortion—the most overemotional highly controversial subject.  They wanted to know if abortion were made illegal, what would be the economic impact on American life.  She told them economically it would be devastating to our country.  Their reaction was “How dare you, you Cold. Heartless. Bitch!”  [They really didn’t say that. But really they said that.]  And here’s the kicker, if she were a male economist, the congressmen wouldn’t have acted that way.  They wouldn’t have brought up the issue. But she was a woman, so.

Does it take an educated economist to point out an additional 800,000 babies born every year from now on would directly burden taxpayers and American families especially those headed by poor teen mothers?  What kind of idiots have been elected to Congress anyway?

Perhaps to counter the super-famous feminists of the 1970s (Steinem, Freidan, Abzug), since the 1980s to today anti-abortion leaders have always been men.  If only they’d get female leaders, women’s voices to speak up and spread the word against abortion.  But see, that’s just it.  Men have a need to go on and on about this most intimate women’s issue and legal right.  Men were the ones who bombed the women’s clinics where abortions took place and stalked and killed many doctors for performing abortions.  Why weren’t lots of women, many who also are pro-life and against abortion, shooting up clinics and killing doctors?

Cause for pause

If only we could hear from the tens of millions of teen-age boys and grown men who lost their chance at fatherhood due to abortion. 

What?  Shh. What’s that?

Nothing?

Not one cry or teardrop.  Well, not many and in public.  This is the usual male role in unintended pregnancy after sex.

Americans used to cuss the government for butting into their private lives.  They used to think the abortion debate could be resolved by a single-issue national vote and let the people decide: legal or illegal.

That’s how we talked in the olden days.

Have you listened to this nation lately?

This is a democratic country whereby no one trusts the other political party, where states like Texas throw away citizen votes, where people feel the need to train as ‘poll watchers,’ where election judges are intimidated to find more votes so Republicans win.

This latest drama about abortion becoming illegal nationwide—however truly the only issue I care about at this time, because I don’t believe abortion should be illegal—is to mask our most pressing problems.  In Texas, abortion blather covers up the real problem of our backwoods utility grid.  Just this weekend we were urged to turn ‘up’ our thermostats (say from 70 to 75)—because the Lone Star State’s electric grid cannot keep all homes and businesses cool.  And this is just the middle of May.  Our independent state grid failed us twice in the dead of winter, so.

When government can’t fix the most important problems—or any problem—emotional issues like abortion will keep our minds preoccupied.

OK, I’ll play.  Making abortion illegal even in cases of rape and incest is a sign of a sick society albeit typically Southern gothic.  One in four girls is sexually molested in this country; it just stands to reason that many of these young victims of crime end up pregnant, and they’re just kids.  Calling abortion murder, sending women and doctors to prison for abortion, making contraceptives illegal, and guaranteeing a fertilized egg and human fetus constitutional rights are rantings of deranged old coots.

In the old-fashioned battle over abortion, here’s a 21^st century idea: If we’re going to make abortion illegal again, the overlooked males involved in 800,000 annual unwanted pregnancies should be named criminals, too.  Our society has the means to find every single guy through DNA technology.  Jail time: one year.  Tack on another year for each additional unwanted pregnancy he commits in his lifetime.

I leave the conversation with this fact of modern life: so many Viagra commercials lately

…

I’ve been changed somehow.  I didn’t want to change, didn’t expect to change.  But change has been forced upon me.  I’m not numb, just sickened, politically sick to my stomach.  No, I know this feeling, at first debilitating and silent.  For months the feeling welled up from the pit of my being then almost needed to be thrown up.  It’s me experiencing anger.

It’s my apparent delayed reaction to how unreasonable Texas and now other states have gone in the Republicans’ effort to make abortion, regardless of any reason, illegal.  Texas should be ashamed of its additional ‘snoop’ clause, allowing anyone from anywhere to alert ‘authorities’ (lawyers) about the possibility of a female out here having an abortion and drag to court others guilty by association like public or private transit drivers.  What the hell is that all about?

The conservative right-wing effort abolishes the guaranteed privacy of female Americans from adolescent to adult, 12 or 50, 10 or 45, 15 or 40.  No exceptions for rape or incest.  That’s the reason for half of all abortions.

The self-proclaimed pro-lifers—the same ilk who shot and killed gynecologists, harassed and shamed pregnant females entering health centers, and bombed and burned down women’s clinics—took leave of their senses back in the 1980s.  But now … they’ve crossed into full-blown abnormal psychology likened to mass histrionics.  It is immoral that men like these are running our state governments, and nothing can be done about it.

Why play hardball with this issue?

Our Texas Legislators and Governor have placed all their eggs, pun unintended, in one basket for the almighty vote.  The one-issue voters.  This deeply divisive, emotional, religious and controversial issue brings in the ‘hallelujahs’ by loud-mouthed religious conservatives with plenty of stones to throw.  Sinless, are they?  Not in my book.  So unwilling to put their money where their mouths are, the conservative crowd is notoriously tight-fisted when it comes to tax dollars going to the births, hospitalizations, housing, feeding, healthcare, daycare and full education of babies born into poverty.   

Don’t be cruel

Ironic this was the number one song of the 1950s, the era to which the political Right has wanted to return America since Reagan.  Like the ’50s was the golden age of … what?  Whiteness?  That’s what it looked like to Baby Boomers raised on I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies.

They want us to forget about the ’60s, man!  They want us to pretend the pill and women’s liberation were never commonly touted among the middle class.  They think women ought to stay home and raise their babies, that daddies never go away …

Time has marched on, and we are a changed people: more open, rational, loving, accepting, diverse, inclusive, empathetic, understanding.  But Texas leaders don’t reflect that. No one wants to go back to the 1950s or even the 20^th century.  Yet accompanying my state’s drunken political power and mass insanity has come an ugliness and hatred I’ve never witnessed.  It’s comparable to the story in To Kill a Mockingbird.  That same furious vitriol but in the story against Black people, hated and downtrodden citizens living within the white characters’ Southern hometown.

But Texas’ hatred is bigger than race: This is hatred of women—half the U.S. population, actually more than 50 percent.

Today old white men dare think we’re just gonna go back in time with them to the simple days of the 1950s when women knew their place, were surely virgins before marriage, the double standard accepted, men wore the pants, wives smacked if out of line, abortion illegal and thousands of women dead every year because of it.

The BIG question about when life begins is a religious belief not a scientific fact.  Pregnancy in its earliest weeks is tissue, not a baby.  A third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage anyway, and even this tragedy has gained the cynical scrutiny of today’s empowered Republicans who’ve long suspected and now proclaim the cause to be not God’s but the woman’s.   

In their moral certitude, the conservative Right will tell us life begins at conception, and that’s that.  They’ll tell—I mean yell at—millions of girls and women they do not know or care about, “You’re gonna have that baby, you hear me?!,” the Southern way of ending an emotional argument.

Everybody hears them, from their lips to God’s ears.  We bear witness to the consummation of power lust producing the most chauvinist, self-important, self-righteous, arrogant, indignant, ruthless, merciless, regressive, irrational Texan-American leaders—all who history will rank alongside our state’s and nation’s list of notorious bigots, racists, sexists, liars, hypocrites, kooks, and creeps.