Washington, DC – We apparently have a death cult in America. When one participates in a Christian service, one hears many thanks for Jesus dying for our sins. Over and over, songs and sermons, prayers of thanksgiving. Crosses all over the place. I can’t remember hearing a prayer or hymn thanking Jesus for living thirty-some years to teach us how to live. I must have, of course, but the sheer volume of the death cult overwhelms the rest.
Blatherings about the sanctity of life seem to apply only to in-utero potential life. The babies and children who have the misfortune of being ex-utero just don’t seem to have much importance.
Another school shooting happened—this time in a small Christian school in Nashville. Three little kids were blown apart by massive bullets sent forth from weapons meant for use on the battlefield, where they are intended to blow apart adults. Three adults were killed as well. The police arrived very quickly, a mere ten or so minutes after they got a call about an “active shooter.” They killed the shooter, which, frankly, was appropriate as she was armed to the teeth. Of course, once that call went out, most of the victims were probably already dead.
We are hearing how unusual it is that the perpetrator was a female, an extremely rare event, although her age, 28, was pretty much in the range for this sort of madness. Women are more likely to be victims of violence rather than otherwise.
It’s a sad commentary that a very loud but relatively small segment of our society has aggressively prioritized unborn life but equally championed gun rights. The murder of the innocents has become horrifically common. Yet, denialism in the form of the habitual mental illness canard obfuscates the real issue. Americans are obsessed with guns. Either they love them or hate them but still are obsessed with them. The first three words of the Second Amendment are “A well regulated,” but regulation of any kind is rejected as some sort of Commie plot.
Our familiarity with the gruesome aspects of mass murder seems to have been woven into our fascination with death. American media is inundated with police shows where we increasingly see extreme violence interspersed with sweaty sex scenes and stupefyingly boring car chases.
It’s curious that since the Vietnam War, our government has prevented the filming of the bodies of the dead from the really unbelievable number of different war zones we seem to be involved in. The actuality of death is hidden. While we thank these destroyed people for their patriotism, we ensure that pictures of those boxes being offloaded at Dover are hidden.
I’ve seen lots of pictures and posters of aborted fetuses, but I’ve never seen a picture of the bodies of the children of Sandy Hook or Uvalde, or Parkland. Perhaps if we saw those sorts of photos, we might be able to get past the denial and recognize that our ex-utero children are being murdered or left traumatized. Perhaps we might get that having five-year-olds practice “active shooter” drills is sheer madness.
Sadly, I am afraid we have become so enamored with death that we just don’t want to change anything. The worship of the Second Amendment, with its absolutist interpretation, has divided this country. It would appear that so long as we protect “ babies” from the predations of the cruel, sinful, selfish women in whose bodies they live, letting babies who no longer reside in a woman’s body be blown to pieces is just the price we are willing to pay for the “freedom” to carry around the means to kill one another at will.
